by Spain, Laura
“It’s not a virus,” Gary said. “It’s the corn.”
“How do you know?”
“The raccoons and mice eat the corn, and the foxes eat them.”
Twice that summer Gary stayed late in the fields, and the Sheriff found another abandoned truck and a path broken through the corn to another burned-out meth lab. This time he didn’t ask Gary to help find the driver. He didn’t find the next lab at first, because there wasn’t a truck to mark the path. Still the stench lingered into the hot days of August, so heavy that the Sheriff asked the State Police for an aerial reconnaissance.
All that day, there were sirens racing up and down the road outside the memorial. In the afternoon, just as I was finishing a tour, the Sheriff and his deputy drove into the parking lot. Gary met us beside the obelisk.
“We found another meth lab,” the Sheriff began. “And this time we have a body.”
Gary just looked at him.
“He was tied to a stake on some kind of vine, burned to death. We think someone lit a fire around the stake, and every time he tried to run away, the vine snapped him back.”
“Any witnesses?” I asked.
“The caretaker at Prophetstown heard somebody shouting a few nights ago, but he thought it was just some kids getting high.”
“We can’t just let this one go, Gary,” the Sheriff said. “And his friends won’t, either.”
I nearly asked him if Willy Louten was back in Lafayette but decided against it. The Sheriff could tell I was thinking about something.
“Tom, you be careful, too,” he said to me. “They don’t care who gets in the way.”
It was the most sensational killing in years, but he didn’t have any suspects, or at least any suspect he could connect to the crime. The State Police forensic unit spent several days sifting every piece of ash and dirt at the site, but there weren’t any leads. When the forensic people finally cleared the site, all the television stations in the Midwest sent crews to shoot the first burning at the stake in Indiana since the War of 1812. Although the commentators were demanding action, the Sheriff did not release all the details. For some reason he didn’t say anything about using an elastic vine to pull the victim back to the fire until he was so tired he collapsed.
That reminded me of something I had read, so I went back to the library. Karen caught her breath when she saw me, as if she were happy and terrified at the same time. She had heavy makeup over one eye to cover a bruise and looked like she hadn’t slept all summer.
“You shouldn’t come here,” she whispered.
“I just wanted to look something up.”
She glanced around, as if something terrible were waiting for me in the stacks. Suddenly I understood.
“Willy moved back in with you, didn’t he?”
“He comes by,” she said. “He never stays.”
So he was using her whenever he needed a woman.
“Just be careful,” she pleaded. “Somebody told him about you.”
“You’re divorced,” I said. “You don’t have to let him do this to you.”
She turned away, weeping.
“That’s not the way it is,” she said.
I found the book, C.C. Trowbridge’s Shawnese Traditions, his account of his interview of the Prophet in the 1830s, when he was an old man. Sure enough, Trowbridge reported that the Prophet had told him about Shawnee burning white men by tying them to a stake with a grape vine, then sitting back to watch. As I was returning it to the stacks, the Sheriff met me.
“Mind if I see that?” he asked.
“You and I are probably the first people to read this since they got it,” he said, leafing through it until he found the page. “Interesting. I think I’ll check it out.”
“Now you owe me one,” I said.
He looked at me as blankly as Gary had looked at him.
“The victim,” I said. “Did he have any connection to Willy Louton?”
“They were cell mates.”
The next day when Gary and I drove home from the memorial, two Sheriff’s cars and the State Police forensic van were parked in the drive.
“What’s going on?” I asked one of the deputies.
“We have a search warrant,” he said, showing me a paper.
“How long will you be here?”
“Until we finish.”
One of the forensic people stuck his head out of the shed and waved. It was the guy who had nearly gagged on the scalp. I turned to Gary.
“Let’s go for a ride,” he said.
“You’ll have to take your car,” the deputy said.
Behind him a deputy was dusting Gary’s truck for fingerprints. We got back into my car and started driving.
“Where to?” I said.
“Prophetstown.”
So we drove the few miles to the model farm and turned into the parking lot. Gary got out and pointed to a tree that had somehow survived in the middle of the corn field.
“The cemetery is in there about 80 yards,” he said. “Can you remember?”
“Gary, that damned corn all looks the same to me.”
“To the left of the tree,” he said.
“I can remember.”
“In the shed are six boards I prepared. You dig four feet down and put one on the bottom, two on each side, and one on top of me. If you hit stone, it’s over one of my people’s graves. Leave it. Dig in another place. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“On the shelf by the tools are two jars of paint. With the white you paint my face here,” he said, drawing three lines on each cheek. “And with the other you draw black circles around my eyes. After you have laid me in the ground, sprinkle some tobacco over me and fill it in.”
He looked at me intently, as if this were the most important part.
“And don’t let anyone see you do it.”
I remembered how Harrison’s militia had dug up the dead Shawnee and scalped them. When we returned to the house, the deputies and the forensic people were packing up. The Sheriff still wasn’t there.
“It’s all yours,” the deputy said. “Next time be a little more careful about the marijuana, Tom.”
Sometimes country law enforcement will cut you a break if they know you well enough. Or maybe they didn’t want an arrest to signal the wrong people that they had been there.
“I wonder what else they found,” I said after they were gone.
“Nothing.”
He was right. We didn’t see the Sheriff or the forensic people again.
* * * * *
We were hunting deer after the corn was harvested, or I should say Gary was doing the hunting with his bow, and I was following with my lever action Winchester 94. He would track the deer through the stubble to the trees on one of the farms where he protected the marijuana crop and signal me when it was my turn to move up for a shot. Suddenly he froze in mid stride, like a scout spotting an IED by the road. I dropped to one knee and waited. After several minutes he crept forward. A five point buck had stepped out of the trees and was looking at Gary with that intense, questioning stare they have just before they bolt. But he didn’t bolt. He just stood there, trembling. Gary walked right up to him and wrapped his arms around his neck and pressed his face against his, the way you would your sick brother. He was even talking to him, but I couldn’t understand the words.
Suddenly the buck shuddered and dropped his head. Gary stepped to the side just as the deer vomited blood and collapsed. Gary knelt beside him and stroked his neck until he died.
I knelt on the other side of the buck.
“This is . . .” he started to say, when the bullet caught him in the neck throwing him down over the deer.
I flattened myself on the ground waiting for the next shot, feeling his hot blood dripping down on my back. Something smacked into the deer, and then another shot hit Gary, rolling him off the animal beside me. I recognized the sound: it was an AR-15. I had heard the military version often enough, but never pointed rig
ht at me. Quickly I jacked a round into the chamber of my rifle. Against a semi automatic, I would only have one shot.
The longest and often the last moments of a man’s life are lying pinned down in the open, waiting for the shooter to shift position for the kill. He would have to move to one side or the other so the deer’s body wouldn’t block his shot. It was so quiet I could hear a car on the county road half a mile away.
Then I heard him moving to my right. I flattened myself in the dirt and sighted into the tree line. The brush moved and there he was, kneeling beside a tree, trying to find me with the telescopic sight. I fired once, and he toppled over backwards.
“You fucker!” a voice cried from my left, and a shot smacked into deer’s head.
I rolled backwards, jacked another round into the chamber, and stuck the barrel under the deer’s head for cover. Another bullet hit the carcass, and then I spotted him and fired.
“Shit!” he cried, breaking away into the trees before I could get in another shot.
A car started, but I waited several minutes to be sure the first one was dead before I moved. Then I broke from behind the deer and ran as fast as I could to the trees. Chest torn open, a bearded man in filthy jeans and a T shirt was lying on his back, staring stupidly at the sky. It happens so often like this. A lousy fighter catches a good man in the open and gets him. Maybe that’s what broke me at Ladamivar. It doesn’t really do any good to kill the shooter, either. Nothing ever brings back a friend.
I don’t carry a cell, because with Karen gone, there wasn’t anyone to call. So I ran back to my car and called the Sheriff from the house. For the next eight hours they questioned me about everything that happened that day, and why I thought someone would want to shoot Gary. I told them I didn’t know.
“Anything happen during the hunt you haven’t told us about?” the sheriff said.
I told them about the deer.
“That’s been happening to a lot of them,” he said. “The Wildlife Department is looking into it.”
Before they let me go home that night, they told me the name of the shooter. I had never heard of him.
“I didn’t think you would,” the Sheriff said.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“He got out of the penitentiary a few weeks ago.”
“While he was in the pen, did he know Willy Louton?”
“We’re working on that,” he said.
The next morning the reporters awakened me, wanting an interview about how I shot the murderer in self defense. A TV van was parked in the driveway and two more on the berm of the road. I told them I didn’t want to talk about it, but that made them even more insistent. So I went to my car and started backing out of the drive. They finally moved their van, but they followed me to the memorial. I had to spend the day in the office to get away from them.
I didn’t sit out on the porch that night. If they had killed Gary because he had tortured their friend, maybe they would come after me. But how did they learn about Gary? Had they seen or heard about the deputies searching the house? Only a few people even knew he was Shawnee, and there was only one way to connect him to the torture murder of the meth cooker. And then I knew.
As soon as I left work the next day, I drove to Lafayette to the library. It was Karen’s day off. Shawnese Traditions wasn’t in the stacks.
“A book like that can sit there for years and nobody ever looks at it,” Susan, the librarian at the desk told me. “Want to put a hold on it?”
With graying hair and reading glasses, Susan was Karen’s best friend and confidant.
“Can you tell me who has it? It’s probably someone I know.”
She checked the computer.
“You had it out, then the Sheriff, and then Karen.”
Susan looked at me with that expression women have when they know a relationship has gone terribly wrong.
“How’s she getting along?” I asked.
“Willy’s back,” was all she would say.
I thought later that I should have asked her not to tell Karen I was asking for the book, but I didn’t think she’d pay any attention to that sort of request. At the house there was a voice mail from an attorney in Lafayette wanting to talk to me. When I called him during my break the next day, he said Gary had named me his executor and sole heir. The house, the truck, even a pretty nice bank account went to me, and I should call the funeral home about the body as soon as the coroner released it.
“Gary didn’t want a funeral,” I said.
“That’s up to you,” he replied.
So I called the funeral home and told them not to embalm him.
“Any kind of service?” the funeral director asked.
“Just bring him back to the house.”
“You’re going to bury him there?”
“It’s what he wanted.”
So they brought the body in a biodegradable casket and dug a hole beside the garden.
“Want us to lower him in?” the director asked.
“I’ll take care of it.”
I waited until they were gone, took his body out of the casket, painted his face with three white lines on each cheek and black around the eyes, and wrapped him in a blanket in his truck bed. I hadn’t realized he was so light. Then I loaded the boards Gary had showed me and a shovel. The boards were so rough — as if he had hewn them out a tree trunk with an axe — that I had to put on a pair of heavy work gloves to carry them. When it was dark, I drove to Prophetstown.
The parking lot was empty. I pulled up to the edge of the field, and lifted the body out of the truck bed. Like a boney hand, the tree marking the Indian cemetery stood out against the night sky. I checked the direction with my Army compass and started into the corn.
It was the longest 80 yards in my life. The corn was so thick it felt like forcing my way through a plastic jungle. Leaves clawed across my face, and the stalks kept catching the body and turning us around, as if they were trying to keep us away. Rigor mortis had set in, so at first I could balance his body on my shoulder. As I went farther, the corpse started to bend, slowly folding down over me. His face touched my cheek, and I nearly gagged on the smell. Several times I got turned around and had to look at my compass. The last twenty yards I could hardly breathe. When I finally lowered him to the ground, he sat leaning against the corn, head back, like a ghoul waiting for the moon to rise.
I had to make two more trips with the boards and the shovel. With a path beaten through the corn, I moved quicker. When I reached the body, I almost expected it to be gone, resurrected like one of his ancestors reborn from the great sweathouse beside the sacred lake. He was still there, however, slumped back a little further, so that the white paint on his face reflected the rising moon. It was the noblest, most frightening thing I had ever seen.
I started hacking at the corn with the shovel to clear a place. Then I started to dig. One foot, two, and clunk! I hit something. What had he said? If you hit stone, it’s an Indian grave. Go to another place. So I went further into the corn, hacked another clearing, and started to dig. This time the plot was clear.
Sometime try to dig a four foot deep grave in the middle of an Indiana corn field without making any noise. The one thing I had forgotten was water. By the time I was two feet down, my mouth was parched and I was exhausted. I had to stop. For several minutes I sat on the side, panting. Then I stood up and started digging again.
Finally, I don’t know how long, it was finished. I placed a board on the bottom and two boards on each side. He was easier to carry now that the corn was down, like a child curled up in sleep. I laid him in the grave and sprinkled tobacco over him, just like he had told me.
“It’s not big enough for both of you, asshole” a voice behind me said. “You’re gonna have to dig another.”
I turned around and saw Willy Louton with an AR-15 in his hands, too far to get with the shovel before he fired. He had that same wild smirk as he had in the picture from before he went to prison.
; “You didn’t think you could fuck her and get away with it, did you?” he laughed. “You didn’t think she’d tell me everything?”
I just stared at him, hoping for the muzzle to waiver and have another chance to live.
“Maybe I’ll let you off easy,” he said, grinning. “I’ll just shoot you now and let them find you with your asshole dead friend.”
Slowly, smiling at me, he aimed at my face. Go for it, I thought, muscles tensing to throw the shovel. Suddenly he shuddered, shook his head, and swallowed like he was about to vomit.
“What the hell?” he coughed, dropping the AR-15 and sitting down hard.
I leapt forward with the shovel and knocked the weapon away from him. Like a dying animal, he leaned forward and pushed himself up on all fours, shuddering. For a few seconds he panted like the dying deer, and then he dropped his head, vomited blood and died.
I grabbed his weapon and knelt in the corn, listening for another killer. One minute, five minutes, nothing. I returned to the grave and laid the last plank over Gary. Then I filled it in and placed the top soil with the broken corn back on top, so it wouldn’t be too obvious someone had been digging. With the AR-15 across my back. I lifted Willy’s body onto my shoulders and carried him out of the field. His truck was in the parking lot beside my car.
I set him down on the running board and felt in his pockets for the keys. Then I propped him up in the passenger seat and drove him to a culvert about a mile away, turned the truck into the ditch, and got out, pulling him into the driver’s seat after me. I left the lights on and the motor running, so it would look like he had fallen asleep and run off the road. It felt like a lifetime running back to Prophetstown.
I was a mess. All my clothes and the work gloves were covered with Louton’s blood, so I stripped down in the parking lot and put everything in a trash bag in the truck bed. If you have ever driven a truck naked on an Indiana country road at night, you know how I felt. When I got back to the house, I burned my clothes and the gloves in the grill and spent half an hour in the shower. Then I went back to the charcoal, doused it with charcoal lighter, and burned it again. It was only when I was washing up that I remembered Gary’s coffin and the open grave in the garden. So I pushed the casket in and shoveled the dirt on top of it. I was so tired I didn’t care there was a pile of dirt left over. Another shower, a beer, a joint, and I dropped into bed.
