Beast of the Field

by Peter Jordan Drake

  "Someone'll come for us," someone said. "Anyone who's out there knows we're all in here."

  "Yeah," answered someone else. "If there's anyone who's out there."

  "There is," said Flora. "There is. He is out there. He will come for us."

  This was awkward, as was the silence that followed.

  "He will come," she said again. Despite the hard-soled footfalls on the floorboards of the barn above them—Sheriff Jake and others coming to let them out—they all still heard the tears in her voice this time, and began to understand something about the mayor’s daughter. "He's coming for us." She repeated it, softly, again, again and again. They had turned off their listening now, pulled their minds inward. Not one of them gave the slightest thought as to whom the “he” or the "us" were of which the girl spoke.

  Part III

  32.

  They drove as if their destination were the last good light of the last good day. Beside him Millie sat drained. She watched the dark countryside rush by the car without comment, without expression. Sterno began to miss the chatter. He filled the silence with cigarettes rolled with one hand, with a flask obscuring his view of the road every now and then as he tilted it up in front of his face. For all the silence, for all the darkness, his mind was alive with May the first.

  “It happened at that fishing cabin,” he said as they crossed the county line.

  A mile passed beneath them as they thought about this.

  “They took him and the buggy to the road after they were done, hung him up under the buggy, set the horse on its way home.” He was not mincing words with her because like Flora Greentree at the girls’ home, he wanted—needed—Millie angry, to fend off her other emotions. His plan now was to take her home, then go out to that cabin—if he could find it. Over four months had passed since Tommy was killed there, a long time; but there was always something to be found. Like the watch and the wallet in the tree stump: there is always something still happening where something happened.

  “What about everybody’s stories?” she asked. She was speaking without hope. “What about what everybody said at the sheriff’s office last Saturday? About Mr. Aaronson’s old car backfiring?”

  “You heard all that?”

  “I was at the window.”

  He looked at her sideways, smirking, but was soon enough serious again. “The only thing I heard of the backfire was from the mayor, Jonas Neuwald, and the sheriff. Now, Miss Greentree swears the sheriff had nothing to do with it. If that’s the case, then he’s telling the story as it was told to him. I’m sure everyone in town got the same story, and they would have no reason to doubt it, coming from their mayor and their only lawman.”

  Now it was her turn to think. Another mile gone beneath them. “So why’d he do it, Mr. Sterno?”

  It took a visit to the flask before he could muster and answer.

  “Hate,” was his answer.

  He let this suffice as long as it could. “Flora was with child, we know that. And an Irish baby. That’s not going to sit well with a member of the Klan. Not to mention the betrayal and treachery—as he sees it—by his daughter. Not to mention the sinful act—as he sees it—that got her that way. The man had lost a fortune. He had been humiliated by this oil company, in front of his own town. A lot of men can't handle humiliation like a man: they have to prove something to themselves and everyone else a thousand times over. There's also this—he might have known or guessed his daughter knew about what happened to those two oil men, and if she knew, he's going to figure Tommy knew. Hell, he might have even known that Tommy saw what happened to those oil men. We'll never know."

  "When I first met you, I hated your guts," Millie said.

  Sterno raised an eyebrow at her. She glanced at him, then returned her gaze to the countryside. "The way I went running after you, my dress flapping around in the wind. And you completely ignored us. It was goddamn embarrassing," she said quite softly, sensitive about it still. "I hated your Missouri guts for it."

  Ah, Sterno thought, she does understand. The power of humiliation, the darkness that comes from it.

  "I don’t no more though," she said.

  The corners of Sterno's lips curled upward. "'Any' more," he said.

  They drove nearly a mile more before she spoke again. “Mr. Sterno? There’s something else I gotta tell you.”

  She told him about the night of Valentine’s Day. She had been in the woods and saw something, men and cars. Tommy saw it too. If Tommy hadn’t been there, she told him, those men would’ve found her. Now, all these months later, she knew it was probably the mayor. That might have been the night he killed those men from the oil company.

  Millie said, “But, Mr. Sterno? I mean, him and Pa are old friends.”

  They drew nearer to Price. As they did, the silence in the car took on weight. Their eyes did not languish on the road or on the passing fields any longer, but darted around the sleeping town as they passed through it, the mayor’s mansion as they passed by it, and at the black ridge of wood off the bend in the road as Sterno stopped the car in front of it.

  “Right here,” he said, a finger pointing down to the ground beneath the car. “This is where they dressed him up like an accident.” He then pointed his finger at the jagged tree line across the field. “Over there. In those bootleggers' woods, that fishing cabin of theirs. That’s where they did it. That’s where you saw those men, right?”

  Millie stared into the woods. She had once followed her brother into those woods to spy on him and his lovey-dover, and she had done it without fear. Since that day behind the schoolhouse though, when Gomer Neuwald had threatened her, the woods had not been the same place to her. Not these woods, not any woods.

  “You’re going in there, aint you?”

  Sterno headed back to Donnan’s hay farm.

  “You ought not to,” she said.

  The farm house appeared as a tiny dim square a mile ahead of them. It grew larger, whiter, safer as they closed the distance.

  “They can do anything they want in there.”

  One light was lighted within the house—a lantern, it looked like, in the living room.

  “Please, Mr. Sterno. You’ll never find that cabin in the dark. Why don’t you wait till tomorrow?”

  They reached the twin elms.

  “You’re bound to find something in there you aint looking for.”

  Sterno pulled through the gate, stopped in front of the house. "Tonight, or maybe tomorrow when you wake up," he said, "you tell your ma everything you know. About the mayor, about Flora Greentree. You tell her everything. It's up to you now, partner. This part of the case rests in your hands. Then..." From his shirt pocket he brought out a note pad and a little pencil. He wrote a name and number upon the pad, a little note beneath that, tore off the sheet, handed it to her. He also handed her a few pages of notes he had already had ready to go—tight, tiny script reaching to the four corners of three full pieces of paper. "Take these, give them to your ma too. Then you have her call my friend in Topeka, Bill Major. Have her tell him everything too. They'll take care of that mayor for you."

  "You act like you aint coming back here."

  "I'm not coming back here," he stated plainly. "Not tonight. If I do or don’t find what I'm looking for in that fishing cabin, I'm going to start back tonight, stop and send a wire on the way. But I'll be around when we come back for him. A couple days. I promise you that. Go on, now.

  He added one more thing: "Partner," he said, "you did one hell of goddamn good job on this case."

  Even in the darkness of the car he could see her blush around her smile.

  A broad and tall shape appeared next to the car. Junior opened the door for Millie. She did not resist him as he pulled her from the car. He lifted her gently to his shoulder, held her there as a mother holds a toddler. Before disappearing into the house, he stooped down to peer into the car. “H-y,” he said.

  “You’re welcome,” Sterno said. “Now get that girl into h
er bed.”

  33.

  The wild dogs of those east woods had burrows they stole from badgers and raccoons when these storms swept over their territory. When the birds went silent or took to the sky, when that mineral smell came on the air, they knew it was time to get to work opening up a place to hide. In the rain after the tornado they squeezed back out of these holes, sniffing. The storm had taken the day's light with it, which suited them. They moved through the woods with their snouts to the ground until they located and gathered around the shaking, shining wet horse, still strapped to a buggy. The horse was strong, and smart, and their attempts at surrounding it, moving in on it, biting at it, brought them only pain and frustration. A few of the dogs climbed onto the buggy, but there was nothing there for them either. So they waited. They sat on their bellies with their tongues out, waiting in the bushes for the horse to tire.

  It was a long time before the men came. They smelled them before they heard their voices. They were coming back from deeper in the woods, dragging a body of meat by the legs. The white hoods they wore to hide their faces meant nothing to the dogs: from scent alone they knew these men well.

  "...I got him, I got him. Son of a bitch is heavier than he looks. Come on you, bastard!" said one of them. He put his boot hard into the ribs of the body they dragged. They pulled him by his legs, so that his head, arms and hands were jostled along the ground. The face on the body was covered in blood, the dogs noticed with their eyes and noses. His shirt was nearly torn off, displaying more gashes along his sides. The dogs closest to the scene recognized the smell of the fresh body, associated it with the freezing nights of last winter.

  A man walked behind him, older than the other two. He moved slowly as the two younger men in front of him pulled the body along the path.

  The one who carried the gun said, "That bastard mayor sure likes to give orders, don't he, Pa. Making us wait till midnight in that cabin till we can get to our business. We got houses too, don’t we? We got crops to check over."

  "Shut your mouth, boy. You aint got no goddamn crops."

  "He has a point, Pa," the one who comes to fill the jars said. "Just 'cause he doesn't want his hands dirty, or that white suit a his. Hell, it wasn't none of us who wanted Tommy dead. It wasn't none of our daughters he was poking."

  "You shut up too. You'll get your pay, like always. Remember, this is the man that allows you to run those bottles out of here. Besides, now Tommy's gone you can get after his scraps. That's what you want aint it?"

  The one who fills the jars was quiet now.

  They reached the buggy behind the horse; the younger men dropped the legs to the wet ground. "What about Uncle Jake? He in on this too? He's the one who really lets us run our stills."

  "You don't say a word about this to Jake. Not now, not ever. Jake is close with Donnan. We’re lucky for that storm—kept him busy enough, I reckon. In fact, we best be done with this business before he come around looking for us, or for him," he said, gesturing to the ground with one finger.

  The men were quiet for a minute. The dogs sniffed at the scent they threw. The horse smelled better.

  "What now Pa?"

  The old man moved past them now, his eyes cast through the trees towards the open fields. "Get him up in that buggy. Let's get him to the road."

  They hefted the meat to the back of the wagon, letting the legs dangle down. One of the men walked in front of the horse, leading it by its leather. A few of the hungrier dogs slinked behind the buggy as it passed from the trees to the field, the body's legs hanging off one side like strips of meat. The men stopped again just as the mud on the path met the road.

  "Get him down. Lay him down, feet towards the front, like that." He waited. "Now pour some of that corn on him."

  The one with the bad leg and the gun poured liquid from a jar over the front side of the body. He kicked it again, spraying wet dirt into his face. "You got to eat a peck of dirt before you die, aint that the old saying?" They all three chuckled at this. "I hope I aint too late." They chuckled some more. Took turns with the jar at their lips.

  The older man looked down at their body. "You get that watch yet?"

  "You, Gomer!" the other one said as the gun holder took two items from the jacket of the dead body—one item was black and held only papers, the other was shiny and hung from a shiny chain. He held it up in the night for all of them to see.

  “She was supposed to give that to me,” said the other one.

  "Abner wants it back," the older man said. He snapped the chain and pocketed the round part. "Here, take the chain. Gimme that cash too. Now get rid of that wallet."

  The younger one dragged his leg to an old stump, stuffed the items inside, returned to the buggy.

  "Now get his legs up in there, in the axel."

  "In the axel?"

  "Do it, boy."

  They did it. It took some effort.

  "He in there good? Check him, make sure."

  "What about this here bundle of letters from the cabin, Pa?"

  "Let me see them." The man flipped through the envelopes, quickly, then tossed them back to his son. "Them too, put ‘em in the buggy—there under the seat. We don't want anything lying around connecting us to this mess. Stick 'em in there good."

  The younger man reached over the side of the buggy. "Pa, why we leavin' his billfold here if we don't—"

  "Because if no one believes he was thrown in the storm, maybe they’ll believe it was bandits had a hand in this. Get the law sniffing after someone else. But I don't want this stuff anywhere near me. You hid 'em good, didn't you?"

  "Yep, I did."

  "Good. Now stand back." The older one stepped to the wagon. From his hip he drew a pistol. The dogs recognized that pistol too. He held the pistol up, fired three times as fast as he could. This sent even the hungriest dogs scurrying back to the trees. A few of them looked back to see they were not the only animals scared of guns, for that big horse was running faster than they were, though it was in the opposite direction.

  When the men had passed them on their back into the woods, however, the dogs set out again, followed the scent and the trail of human blood on the road. They followed the horse through farm roads and up and down the two-rutted automobile road, until it finally found its way home, and stopped in front of a farm house. The horse was tired now, and so they could get at that meat it had been dragging behind it without it kicking at them.

  34.

  Through the screen of her open bedroom window, Millie breathed in the still night air. She listened hard, her nose flattened against the mesh, but heard only the sawing of crickets, not a single thing else. It was a completely windless night. There was something happening out there, her partner might be in serious trouble, and all of a sudden there wasn't enough wind to turn a hanging leaf sideways. Millie paced from the window to her bedroom door, where she could hear the sleeping sounds of the family—Junior's creaky-tree tossing noises in his bed, Pa's steady breathing—then back to the window, where there wasn't enough wind to bend cigarette smoke. Tonight, when she needed it most, the wind had turned on her.

  On the windy nights, Millie could all but just walk out the front door knowing any noise she made would either be lost in the clatter or simply dismissed by Mother as the wind. Too bad for her, tonight was not one of those nights. Tonight there wasn't enough breeze to float a dandelion seed, much less escape the house.

  She went again to her bedroom door. She leaned her head out into the hallway, heard the spurts of snoring from Junior's room she had been waiting to hear. On her toes, boots in hand, she crept down the hall, went down the stairs with the pads of her feet right next to the wall, where the stairs creaked less, and floated through the darkness of the living room and kitchen to the back porch. Jumpy issued one sleepy bark at her as she ran to the barn. “Hush, goddamnit,” she whisper-hollered.

  She went past the bicycle to the tack room, took a bridle from the wall. “Good girl, that’s it. Tick-tick. Now hold sti
ll while I buckle this thing, we’re going to help Mr. Sterno nail these sonbitches that killed Tommy.” She led Sonnet quietly from the barn to the gate, leapt and pulled herself to the bare back of the horse Indian-style, then Millie squeezed her heels—the heels of Tommy’s boots this filly knew well—and they were gone.

  *

  There was no light for Charlie Sterno tonight. Above him, just before he ducked into the woods, the stars had seemed numerous enough, brilliant enough to offer at least a little bit of their own light in way of help, but starlight was just a trick. Then again, he thought, maybe tonight he was better off in the dark. He had his torch anyway, though the battery was going on him and he would have to use it wisely. He would get used to the darkness after a while. If he did or if he didn't, he still had to find that creek bed he saw on the Helmcamp woman's map.

  He had taken his car to just feet from the edge of the woods, ran it over some new saplings and young bushes, so that when he was in far enough, the vegetation sprang back to where it had been before the car had passed over it.

  Sterno found the ruts of an old road, a cow path. Any cow path is going to lead to water, he thought, so he followed it deeper into the woods. Not two steps into the trees and it was like no other world existed except for this one of darkness. Ten steps in and the beam of his torch faltered and faded quickly until it was gone. He swore, dropped the torch to the long grass beside the path, pressed on as a blind man.

  *

  Sonnet seemed to be flying through the darkness. That bit about finding Tommy’s killers had taken hold of her.

  Finally Millie saw the taillights of a car. When she reined Sonnet back, she listened over her huffing until she could hear the bubbly idling of its engine. She was glad to see Mr. Sterno's car, but something kept her from moving any closer to it. A thought struck her: if she were a Pinkerton man, snooping around someone else's property, she would not leave her car running, with its headlamps blazing, where God and anyone else who wanted to could see it. She left Sonnet grazing in a hay field by the side of the road, moved closer through these same weeds, giving the taillights a wide berth. There was no way to see either her or the horse in this dark; it was all a matter of staying quiet.