The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove

by Paul Zimmer

  Beast thinks about giving me a whack, too, but somehow calms himself. He points at Cyril’s drooping head. “He’s gonna look like he’s just been to the junior prom compared to the way he’ll look like if he doesn’t find that key! Where is it, frosty? Goddamn it! Start thinking fast.”

  “How is he going to think if you keep smashing him?” I snap, and continue to pat Cyril’s wound.

  “Grandma,” Balaclava says slowly, “you need to understand this very clearly. This is not patty-cake going on here. Your lover boy is in a very bad situation. It would be best if you just keep your trap shut tight or you are also going to end up as a very wilted old flower.”

  He pulls a chair up to where Cyril is sprawled on the couch and pokes his gun barrel under Cyril’s chin to push his head up. “Grandpa,” he says, “it is time for you to do some serious remembering. You better think where that key is soon or I will really bring the curtains down. You aren’t fucking with me, are you, geezer?” He pushes Cyril in the chest with his gun, but doesn’t strike him again.

  Cyril is slow in response. “I’m an old man. No matter what you do to me—I will forget things.” Beast is tapping the tip of his huge weapon in his palm and breathing hard. Finally Cyril says shakily. “You’ve got to let me look around this room. There are some places where I might have put it.”

  Balaclava reaches down and takes Cyril by the arm, and yanks him to his feet. Cyril teeters but manages to hold his footing. “Pops, you better look real careful. If I pull this trigger, everything goes. Remember that. Everything. You’ve got a lot riding on this.”

  Cyril begins a slow search, opening bedside table drawers, a small desk against the wall, the kitchen drawers. As he searches, he says to Balaclava, “I don’t know how we’re going to work this if I do find the key. You know a person has to sign in at the bank and show identification to get into a safe box. They’re not going to just let you go walking into their vault even if you have a key.”

  Balaclava thinks about this. He seems so frustrated I fear he is on the verge of just pulling his trigger and commencing the slaughter. But he says, his voice shaking with fury and impatience, “Then you’re going to have to make the trip with the key, gramps! Cash will be easier for me anyway. And I’ll just stay here with your delightful friend until you come back with the dough. That should make you move fast—thinking about all the dead bodies that are going to be here if you don’t get back here quick—especially granny’s here. I’m going to do her up real pretty. She’s got a smart mouth, and she’s already pissed me off.”

  “How much money are we talking about?” I try to intervene—to divert his cruel talk. I know nothing of Cyril’s award.

  “Fifty thousand big ones!” Balaclava snaps.

  I express true amazement. “That is a lot of money!” I am trying to shift emphasis and draw the beast’s attention away from his murderous thoughts. Saying that amount out loud seems to calm him for a moment. It reminds him that what he really wants is the money, not a lot of dead old bodies.

  Cyril is rattling things around in kitchen drawers now. He slams a cabinet door shut, and shuffles back into the room. His head is down, as if expecting still another blow. “I don’t think I will find the key here,” he admits slowly.

  Balaclava is turning the color of a cured ham. He’s going to explode. Quickly Cyril says, “But I remember where it is now.”

  “Where the hell would that be, you fucking mummy? Don’t try any more shit with me!”

  “The key is in the bookstore in Viroqua. The Brontë sisters have a locked cash box in the back of their store. I gave the key to them for safekeeping when I received the award. I knew if I kept it myself I would forget where I put it. The bookstore is right next door to the bank. It won’t take a minute more for me to go into the store tomorrow morning and get that key from them. They open at nine, too.”

  Balaclava is percolating again, but he manages to control himself. There’s too much at stake for him now—and he is beginning to realize this. If he starts shooting everybody, he’s only going to end up with dead bodies. He’s taken a big chance to come back to Soldiers Grove—and he wants that money in his hands. He is obviously a slow thinker, but he’s getting the idea. Cyril is nudging the beast’s nasty thoughts around an uneasy corner to this realization. But I am not sure what Cyril is up to with this bank box thing, and it worries me.

  “Okay,” Balaclava says finally. “No goddamned limousine ride then. All of us are going to take a ride to Viroqua in grandma’s blue Dodge tomorrow morning. I’ll be watching from the truck with her when you go into the store. If I see anything fishy, just the slightest hint of a trick—everything’s going to go down. This gun fires probably sixty bullets a minute. I’ve got two extra clips. I can do a whole lot of damage pretty quick. Half the town should be out on the streets by that time of the morning. I’ll take a lot of people with me, and your old lady here is going to go first. Just remember this. I’ll do it! I don’t care, got nothing better to do.” He sits down on the edge of the bed again, breathing hard.

  “Now, you best get your rest, old folks. It’s going be a long night, and there’s a lot coming up in the morning besides the sun.”

  Cyril and I lie down at each end of the long couch. Balaclava stays in the easy chair with his ultimate gun on his lap. Despite our exhaustion we cannot sleep. The night is agony, a few brief, tortured slips into menacing subconscious, only to awaken the next instant trembling. There are no words in the darkness. Balaclava allows us to make only a few necessary trips to the bathroom.

  My whole life does not pass before my eyes during these extreme hours, but I think of it in bits and pieces. I came to America from France to a farm in the quietude of the Wisconsin countryside, doing human things, cooking, being a wife, writing, reading, painting, listening and playing music, gardening. Tomorrow in these late hours of my life, there could be sudden, unthinkable violence—and many people, including gentle Cyril and I, might die. This is a lot to ponder in the long mysteries of an aged person’s night.

  Somehow, suddenly Cyril and I have been propelled to the very core of evil.

  CHAPTER 23

  Cyril

  By the time we reach the outskirts of Viroqua in the blue truck I still haven’t thought of what I am going to do when we reach the bookstore.

  Of course there is no spare key in the bookstore safe. I made all that up. When I was rummaging around in those drawers in my room, pretending to look for a key—I was really trying to find the sheriff’s warning device; but God save my miserable, disappearing mind—I could not find it! Even if I had—what would have happened if the sheriff had suddenly stormed into the room with his gun out, or had the place surrounded with loudspeakers and floodlights. We would all have been killed. Other innocent people would have died. Balaclava has the artillery. He doesn’t care.

  I made up the business about the bank-box key because I wanted to get the beast out of the home and away from all the residents he was threatening to massacre. I thought maybe I could figure something out before we reached the bookstore in Viroqua, but my head is void as we whisk through the familiar outskirts of town. I feel weak, but now I am going to have to do something.

  THE PROBLEM of getting the hulking Balaclava out of the rest home early in the morning without being noticed had made me shaky. I was terrified that if he were challenged in some way by the staff, he might go—as they say these days—ballistic, right then. But this did not turn out to be a problem. By arrangement, I went out the front door past the desk, acting as if I were going for a prebreakfast morning walk on the grounds. Then I slipped around to the locked side entrance and held the alarm clapper down as Louise and Balaclava eased out.

  Balaclava was goading us along as fast as we could hobble around the building. Just as we turned the corner and started shuffling toward the parking lot, there was the large figure of Danderman standing in the middle of the sidewalk, apparently out for his morning constitutional.

  Ho
sanna! I thought. Big and bad Danderman will now show his mettle. Brute on brute! But when Danderman saw the looming silhouette of Balaclava against the morning sun, he stopped and looked as if he’d gargled Liquid-Plumr. The ex-macho man, without a word or any sign of support for us, fell back and quickly skedaddled away on his crutch, almost going head first in his haste, toward the entrance of the home.

  I could see Balaclava consider shooting him down—he even had his big gun out. But if he started blowing people away now, he wouldn’t get my money. He was furious. “That son of a bitch might blab his mouth off as soon as he steps inside that building. Come on you corpses! Move your asses.”

  But he couldn’t shove us or we would fall down. Instead he jabbed us painfully with the butt of his gun. Louise and I shambled along as best we could to the blue Dodge in the parking lot, and, after we had managed to grope our slow way into the truck, with Balaclava bellowing at us, Louise drove us along the back row of cars out to the highway.

  Across the road from the home, Burkum’s Tap’s sign was dark, and there were no cars gassing up at the Mobil station. It was right there at one of those pumps that this whole thing started.

  The day was clear and the sun just slipping above a light ground fog to brighten the tops of the driftless hills around us. The world looked very soft and beautiful. But Louise and I were in a very hard place.

  AS WE drive into Viroqua I consider trying to tell a few lives to Balaclava—maybe an account of someone’s life of historic benevolence. What idiocy! No tale of compassion would ever move this fiend. No story has ever touched his strange, cold mind. He is not a man of stories. He is a man of death, not of lives. He doesn’t care. How did he get into my life?

  But I’ve got to do something. Everything is riding on me.

  When I was a lonely kid I read the whole Bible (a premium from the encyclopedia publisher) one summer. I remember an odd passage from Ecclesiastes, something about compassion. I often memorized things as the din of my parents’ butchery rose from the rooms below. As Louise drives into town, I recite Ecclesiastes: “For the Lord is full of compassion and mercy, long suffering, and very pitiful, and forgiveth sins, and saveth in time of affliction.” At least at this dire moment, this is the best I can do.

  Balaclava snarls like an attack dog. “What are you babbling at now, you garbage head? Shut your fucking trap!” He fingers his trigger, and I shut my fucking trap.

  But what am I going to do when we get to the bookstore? I think again about the little pistol strapped under my shirt, but there is no way I can fumble it out with my chicken claws before Balaclava blasts me. Louise is pulling the blue Dodge into a parking place across the street from the bookstore now, and I still don’t have a plan.

  “Move it, geezer!” Balaclava orders, and I pick up my two canes, turn the door handle and swing my skinny legs out. I’m so weakened with fear I almost tumble as my feet touch the pavement, but this is no time for falling down! I gain my bearings and totter my way across the street. My magnificent friend, my Louise, my one and only love, is still back there in the truck with Balaclava, and I am desolate beyond imagination. I will do something. Quite what, I don’t know yet.

  I see through the store window across the street that Emily Brontë has just switched the lights on in the store and is busy turning on her cash register. I mince across the pavement and she looks up as I enter the door.

  “Cyril!” she says. “What a nice surprise. What are you doing up so early?”

  I’m appalled with myself for having involved the Brontës in this thing. Shame, shame on me! Why hadn’t I just given Balaclava the money back at the home? Because, I remind myself, he would have slaughtered us all anyway.

  Emily is studying the bruises and cuts on my face. Before she can say something, “Emily,” I say. “Something’s happening. Don’t look out the window now,” I say emphatically, “but the beast man has his gun on Louise in the blue truck and he’s going to do something very bad if we don’t do this right.”

  Emily instinctively begins to lift her eyes to the window.

  “Don’t! Emily, for God’s sake, please, don’t look out the window! He’s watching. Act like everything is okay. He has the biggest gun in the world out there and he will blow us all away. Please do exactly as I tell you and maybe we can get through this thing. Go into your stockroom for a minute or two and come back out with something very small like a key in your hand. Put it into my hand. Don’t ask questions now. He’s watching. I mean it, Emily. Please, please, please just do as I say.”

  Emily has had her own moment with Balaclava, she sees my distress and recognizes the peril. She does as I ask, going through the open door into the back stockroom. “What’s he going to do?” she calls out from behind the shelves.

  “I don’t know. But I made up a story about having some money in a bank box, and told him I gave you the key to keep in your store safe for me.”

  “My God! What’s he going to do when he finds out it’s not here?”

  “Emily, I don’t know. If I had time to apologize to you I would do so on my knees; but I am going to try and keep things at a minimum and get him away from here before he blows his gourd. You better come out now with a paper clip or something, and put it in my hand. Try to look calm. Don’t look out the window!”

  Emily reappears. As she places the clip in my hand I can feel her tension rise. Of the Brontë sisters, Emily has the bad temper. “This is ridiculous, that man is a menace!” she exclaims. “We cannot just let him intimidate us like this. I’m going to dial 911.” She brings up the phone from behind the counter and starts dialing.

  “Emily, for God’s sake!” But she has already punched in the magical three digit number.

  I look out the window across the street. Balaclava has of course seen what is going on and is piling out of the car. He has started to rumble toward us, his monster repeater gun in his paw.

  Emily speaks urgently into the phone, “This is the Viroqua bookstore. Send help! We’re under attack.” She lets the phone dangle and watches the brute come toward us. “My God, look at him!” she says. “The ferocity!” She is remembering his petulant, brutal manner when he came into the store to ask for my whereabouts. Her face is crimson. “He’s like an evil alien. Where did he come from? Look at him!”

  “Emily, for God’s sake, get down!” I urge her, but she skitters back into her stockroom again and comes out with something in her hand, hidden along her arm—not a gun, but a small crowbar which the Brontës must use to open big boxes.

  It is absurd. I have never felt so helpless in my life. At that moment I know we are all doomed, and it is my fault.

  Do something, fool! I begin tearing my shirt front open and fumbling my own small gun out of its holster, expecting at any moment a blast and shatter of bullets and glass.

  Balaclava is close to us in the low rising light. He has been many places, done many awful things. He has his huge gun up. He is pointing with it. He doesn’t care. We’re finished.

  Then with the suddenness of a lightning snap, he is down on the ground, crying out, the big gun skittering out of his hands along the asphalt.

  CHAPTER 24

  Louise

  When Balaclava sees Emily take out the phone in the bookstore, he roars with fury and shoves past me out of the truck. I watch him begin to slowly advance across the street toward Cyril and Emily in the bookstore, hunched like a deadly mercenary with his weapon drawn. He is bellowing obscenities.

  My God, we are all going to die! I must try to do something. I have Heath’s pistol out of my handbag, press the pistol against my abdomen and pull the hammer back into place with my arthritic thumb. I almost fall face first onto the pavement as I open the truck door and step out, but gain my footing quickly.

  Balaclava is more than halfway across wide Main Street by now. I take a painful step toward him without my cane, stop, spread my legs and reach out to point my gun as Heath taught me years ago. What do I aim at? His head, his back, his le
gs? He must go down now! Quickly.

  I level my sight on the beast. Heath had told me, hold your breath, and squeeze the trigger slowly. Balaclava is almost to the bookstore door now as Cyril and Emily cower behind the window. I close one eye, aim at what I hope is the monster’s heart, and fire the gun. The recoil knocks me onto my bottom, but I feel no pain except for the sudden ringing in my ears.

  Balaclava is writhing on the ground, his weapon fallen from his hands.

  CHAPTER 25

  Cyril

  Balaclava falls on his face and his weapon tumbles from his hands. Has he tripped? Had a heart attack? He’s writhing in pain on the pavement. I have my own weapon out now, and find that I can scramble without my two canes; scooting like a hermit crab under a borrowed shell, I am out the door skipping and lurching over to where the monster is down.

  When I reach him I see his right shoulder bleeding profusely. Over by the blue Dodge Louise is sitting on the ground with her smoking pistol.

  Louise, my darling! My Belle Starr!

  But Balaclava is beginning to recover and he’s trying to reach out for his weapon. I’m going to have to give him another shot. I raise my gun, but as I do this I hear another noise, an incredible banshee shrieking, and Emily Brontë whooshes past me with her crowbar raised. She rears back and conks Balaclava’s head hard—and there is a sound like a punted football. But the beast is still moaning and reaching out, so Emily raises the bar and lets him have it again—right on his coconut. This time he remains still. She gives him still another whack just for good measure.

  A few days ago I had read in Louise’s new Brontë book, some of the last lines of poetry that Emily Brontë had written just before she died. I know this is an absurd time to think of this—but I am Cyril and, like Popeye, I yam what I am. I am remembering Emily’s last lines: “No coward soul is mine, / No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere . . .” Emily Brontë had once single-handedly beat the living snot out of a dog handler who had mistreated her animals. I mean, she smacked him around good.