Beast of the Field
Page 25
From her crouching position in the weeds she saw the man standing in the beams of light from the headlamps. These headlamps did not belong to Mr. Sterno's car. It was not Mr. Sterno lit up in them.
The man had his back to the car. The back brim of his torn-up fedora shaded his head from view. A small rifle could be seen leveled across his body at hip level. She thought she recognized that gun, and when the man took off his hat to wipe off his brow, Millie saw that it was no man at all, but Gomer Neuwald. That gun was the one she had seen in the woods behind the schoolhouse. Gomer was watching someone return to the car along the tractor path.
"You saw right, Gomer," his brother said. Millie watched him stick a pistol into the back of his waistband. "That’s his car right over there in those bushes."
"The sumbitch is on our property. He got some minerals, aint he?" Gomer packed his cheek with tobacco.
Geshen scratched under his hat, looked back at the trees. "You think he can find that shed by himself?"
"Nawp," Gomer said through his juice. "And who gives a good goddamn if he does?"
Geshen turned to his brother with a mean look in his eye. He used his hands to shield his eyes from the headlamps. "Come on, you dunce. We better wake up the goddamn mayor."
She waited until the little pink dots on the back end of the car were no longer visible before starting to the woods. “You wait here,” she told Sonnet. “But if I don’t come out of these woods soon, you better go get Junior.”
*
A creek bed slowed Sterno’s pace to nearly a stop. The dips, climbs, rocks, twists and fallen trees did their best to keep him from getting his mayor, but he kept moving.
He tried to recall what he had seen on that map of Tess Helmcamp's. He remembered seeing the creek line. He felt dizzy in his head and he could bring no images, no information forth. There was a ringing in his ear that made thought nearly impossible. Perhaps he’d lost too much blood, or perhaps he’d drunk too much whisky. He remembered, barely, blurrily, the road and the Neuwald farm and how the creek ran north-south between them. He recalled seeing a small round pond on the map, and thought if someone had wanted to put up a sporting cabin, that pond was the place to do it.
At that moment a flash of light caught his eye. He reeled toward the light, because something about it reminded him of the dream. He stood blinking at the lights, waiting to see her, waiting to hear a river, but none of this happened. The light swung to the side, leaving his field of vision. He thought he heard an engine, moving on the road to the west. It was not a dream, but a car. The light had been headlamps and the car to which they were fastened was moving south, toward town.
This snapped his mind to attention. He quickened his pace, putting more faith in his instincts as he traversed the creek stones. After a few minutes he nearly fell on a small stack of rocks like the ones he had been tripping over for the last fifteen minutes, except these seemed to be stacked there by hand. He stretched his leg over. "Jesus—!"
When he was done falling he lay on his back. His jawbone wanted him dead all over again, but it was a sharp and cold pain screaming up at him from his leg that had him clinching his teeth now. He felt the pants, the ankle. His pants and his skin were both ripped open, and even in the black of night, he could see the inky blood on his fingers.
Both legs, now, he thought. Time for a cigarette, he thought.
He struck a match and in that first flare he saw around him the outline of a rim of land, jagged and grown over and riddled with sticks and rocks. Beyond this rim was black. A second match confirmed that he was in a crater of some sort. The pond. Those rocks he had been dancing with up there were the dam.
He rolled a sloppy and thick one, pulled out the loose strands from each end, struck another match. He smoked without hurrying. It was a good cigarette.
Now he could get back to work. Once standing, his head reached above the rim of the crater. Moving his feet he turned around three hundred and sixty degrees where he stood, eyes straining against the darkness. He saw it then, a square-shaped hole in the darkness. He struck a match and sent it flying in the direction of the shape, saw in the quick flare up of matchlight the front of a sagging fishing cabin.
For the moment, he remained in the bottom of the pond. This was in part because his ankles and jaw kept him from moving, but also because he had yet another, different feeling about the bottom of the pond. Maybe something he smelled. In darkness like this, he was almost totally running on feeling. He felt around on the ground until he found a stick, about a foot long with small wooden tines on one end. Around this end he wrapped his handkerchief. After a lengthy pull from his flask, he wetted the wadded handkerchief. He struck another match, put it to the cloth, and at last he had light.
Immediately, he knew there was something under this dirt. The weeds were much taller here than elsewhere. The humps and raises in the pond's bottom were not something a man would leave if he were digging out a pond. He moved his makeshift torch along the dirt. The humps of dirt were sloppy, wildly scratched-out holes, where some animals had been trying to dig up what was underneath. He went to one of these mounds, stuck the unlighted end of his torch into the ground, used it to loosen the dirt so he could feel around.
It took less time than he thought it would. His fingernails ran across something that was not dirt, not wood, but felt a little like both. He cleared away the earth around what he had found with one hand while with the other he brought his flame close to it. It was burned black, whatever it had been. Flakes and pieces of charred material came away in his hands. He dug a little deeper, until he discovered it was not earth he was digging into but the clothes of a man. A tweed suit, once.
35.
The wood loomed before Millie like a wall of black. She could not bring herself to take another step towards those trees. It was a familiar hard freeze in the pit of her belly and the tips of her fingers and every place in between, and she did not like it. Her partner was in there. She had to help. She had to get him out of there, and now she was frozen solid all over again. All of the sudden she couldn't move a muscle. She looked back toward Sonnet, wished she had brought her along. Maybe Sonnet and she together, two young girls instead of one, would have the strength to go into those woods.
Tommy’s words last spring still lingered in her memory. He had called her "Soldier," as he had used to do, but the words following this name her older brothers had given her, this title, this honor, for her erased all that name had ever meant to her. "You're too young and too pretty to be tangled up in all this ugliness." Too young, he had said. Too pretty. He had called her a little girl. More than just a "little girl," but "just a little girl."
Millie swore something had happened to her that day. Maybe she had become a little girl. She had broken off from him that day. To hell with him, she had thought in her anger. She had withdrawn to the house. She had thrust herself into her chores, her schoolwork, like a good little girl. Then, because of her anger, because no one was keeping an eye on him, her brother had gotten himself killed.
She was a girl, eleven years old at the time. She couldn't have saved him, could she? Just a little girl?
The woods, as black as the deepest, coldest canyon on the bottom of the sea, said Nawp. A little girl like you, trying to act tough in your brother's boots. You think because you don't take a bath, that makes you tough? You think cursing like a heathen make you tough enough for our world? Nawp, you're just a little girl. Let me tell you something, girlie, playing with dolls and cuddling chicks and memorizing cake recipes of your momma's aint a part of this world. Just you remember how you froze up when you was supposed to make that telephone call out to the mayor's—nearly got Mr. Sterno killed right there. Just you remember what that Gomer said to you that day behind the schoolhouse: These woods aint no place for you no more. These woods is a place for men and the stuff of men, not you—that's what he meant. So come on then, you think a pretty little girl like you can save a real man, a Pinkerton man, well, come on in a
nd try then, but don't muss your pretty little blonde hair on any of our branches, girlie, lest your momma have to give you a warm little bath and brush you out again.
"Shit-blasted son of a dirty..."
She heard some of the dogs skitter away in front of her as she tromped toward the trees. Better for them they did. Before she was completely gone inside the darkness, without her breaking stride, a little fist poked out and smacked the dry bark of one of those cottonwoods. And that was it, after that the little girl was gone.
*
Sterno scrounged around in the earth at the bottom of the pit long enough to establish there was at least one set of human remains there. This fact was confirmed when, as he dug, he grabbed the rib bone of a man like the handle of a suitcase. He had yanked it from the ground and studied it in the last light of his burning kerchief. He then held it to his chest to see if it fit, as though he were in the market for a new rib—it was a human bone, all right.
Maybe you ought to see if he's got a jawbone he'll sell you.
He replaced the rib bone where he had found it, for the investigating team. It was evidence. He had his evidence. At least there would be a trial for the missing McMurray men. At least he knew for sure this huge, friendly, son-of-a-bitch of a mayor was going to be put away. The McMurray men, however, were not the reason Sterno was in Hope County, and not the reason why he had to go into that fishing cabin, whether he liked it or not.
"Dangle," Sterno said to the sniffing sounds in the bush. He had smelled the shit- and sickness-stuck hair of the dogs before he had heard them, but now they were getting too close for his comfort. He undid his holster from around his smarting ankle, lifted it to his eyes in the scant light. The pistol was stained with blood too, but it would probably work if he needed it to work. There was no reason he could see that he would need it, unless one or two of these rat dogs got too hungry to think twice. He placed it on the ground next to him while he scratched and rubbed the area around his ankle wound.
When he was ready, he climbed from the pit but had to stop to rest through the pain. He checked to make sure he had his one match left. He thought if he wanted to see anything in or around that cabin, it would be a good idea to find something to burn. He decided on his sock. He slid off his shoe of the foot where the blood from his earlier venture into these woods had already dried, then pulled off his sock. He found another limb, wrapped its tip in the sock. Sprinkled it and his liver with whisky. Lit it. The sock started slow, but started. Sterno slid his bare foot back into the shoe, got back to work.
The door of the fishing cabin came open with a nudge. Inside were the rusted, burn-blasted remains of a still. A pallet was on the floor against the wall opposite the still, and next to this was a kerosene camp light, its wick gone, its glass in pieces. The cabin smelled like mold and dog and, just faintly, burnt mash. Sterno stood there for a moment. A shape at his foot emerged into his seeing, begged to be better illuminated. He crouched to one knee, picked it up. It had lost its shape and the dogs had been at it, but Sterno still recognized it as a trilby hat.
In the flickering light of his burning sock, Sterno scrutinized all sides of the hat. In a few of the torn seams were dirty brown stains. Blood.
The trilby went back to the earthen floor, placed there with care. Sterno then scooted it to rest in a corner, among other tatters, where it would seem inconsequential to anyone who was not a detective. Surely, he presumed, at least one of the Neuwald boys had been back here since May, and had dismissed the hat, or not seen it. Sterno felt good it would be there when he came back with the law. With that, he lost his last light; but in the dark he was satisfied with what he had found.
Except he was not in the dark.
Flame light danced through the seams of the cabin’s slatted walls. Sterno stood, moved to the doorway, looked out, his face striped in glowing orange.
Standing along the edge of the pond were four men. Under their torches, the brims of their hats made it hard to see who they were. This didn't matter though, because they all had the same white face.
*
When Millie first saw the torchlights she thought they were not moving. She then stopped walking and saw that the torches were edging slowly, carefully, through the dry trees. She stood against a tree, breathing hard, watching the path these lights picked through the shadows. She pressed on toward the cabin, but she had to move slowly for the dry underbrush.
After a few more steps she was forced to stop—the torches had stopped too. They were hanging there in the dark space between the ground and the low limbs, clustered together until they looked like a single flame. When they began to move again, they spread out into a wide half-circle.
They're at the pond.
She had no idea where to find Mr. Sterno. She didn't know if he was with them, if he had never made it to the cabin, or—who knows?—if he was asleep in his car; she had walked right past it without a glance inside. She looked but could see nothing but the flame from the torches. The voices of men came to her through the trees, then some laughter. She recognized it as Gomer Neuwald's laughter and a feeling caught in her belly: Gomer Neuwald laughed at things that were the opposite of funny. Her boots lifted from the dry leaves and weeds, came down a step toward the torches. Another step came, another and another, quiet as an Indian, until at last she could see the figures under the torchlight.
A few steps more and she saw the cloth masks. They were dirty and white and had sinkholes in them for eyes. This image had a strange effect on her. Her bellyflies swarmed up inside her. Their buzzing emanated from her chest to all parts of her body and fastened her to the side of a thick tree trunk. She was not frozen this time, not in fear; but the sight of those hatted, hooded, blank-faced creatures wielding fire made everything before her unreal, a story in a storybook, played out by actors in masks, doing nothing but delivering their lines like Tommy and his Shakespeare. So Millie unattached herself from the scene, put up an invisible wall between her and the players, and was obliged for now to be the audience.
"...Anymore like you who come this way..." she heard. It was the voice of Mayor Greentree, coming from behind one of those masks.
She heard a low mumbling voice. It was her partner, speaking through his swollen chin. She stretched to look for him but couldn't find him.
"Oh, them. Well, Mr. Sterno, you can bet we're not finished with your employers," the mayor said. "They'll be hearing from us too. Calling the law on us, in our own town. We'll see about that. This is a one hundred per cent American town, Mr. Sterno, and no pope-humping immigrants from Ireland are going to go over my head."
His “employers,” Millie thought. He’s talking about Mother and Pa.
Then came Gomer's yuk-yukking. Millie also heard the sniffs and slight movements of the wild dogs behind her, moving closer in the dark. She smelled them, they were so close, but they did not bother her; they too were there for the show.
"This is our home, Mr. Sterno. My home. This is our America—right here in Price, Kansas. Warshington doesn't decide our rules here. Nobody in Topeka makes our rules either, or anywhere else. It's me that makes the rules in Price. I make the rules, I enforce the rules. When I make a degree, I expect it to be followed. When it is not followed, I take care of those who don't follow it. Everything we do here, we do to uphold good, Christian, American values."
There was more mumbling from her partner. She heard the words "McMurray oil" in his mumbling, and "Tommy Donnan." With those words, the humming in her fingers, toes and skull began to recede. She was becoming real again. The figures in the firelight were becoming real too.
"That's right. Those potato-eating Okies know now too—they found out the hard way. The way you don't ever forget. As for poor Tommy, well, that boy answered to a law even greater than mine: God’s law. I was only the hired hand in that one. What is—are you laughing at me, Mr. Sterno? Gomer, bring him over here. Let me get a good look at this Pinkerton man from ol' Saint Louie, Missouri."
Her view
was obscured, but she could see a torch moving closer to the mayor. Finally, she saw her partner. His pants were torn, his jaw was swollen and gray and he had fresh blood coming from his forehead.
When the men spoke now, it was with quieter voices. She could not hear, so she dared her boots forward a few steps. She stopped suddenly when one of the masked men turned to her direction, torch raised above and before him. She made herself perfectly still behind a tree, hidden from all firelight. The man came towards her, so close that in his torchlight she could see his eyes. They didn't look human. He took another step closer, another. He dropped his torch to the ground, moved even closer, using his monster's eyes, she guessed, to see in the dark. Behind and around her, the dogs stood still with her. Nothing moved in the spray of shadow cast by the man's body. Behind the silhouette, the other men were still at work, speaking in low voices. At last, one of them spoke to the shadow above her.
"Jonas, goddamnit. You're going to burn down the whole county while you're over there watering the bushes!"
After a few more seconds of searching, the thing in the mask turned. Millie exhaled. He stomped on a little blaze that had spread from its discarded torch, picked up his torch again, rejoined the fun.
When she could see into the clearing again, what she saw was the masked men throwing a long coil of rope over the bough of one of the cottonwoods across the pond.