Pickard County Atlas

by Chris Harding Thornton

  “Glenn.” Harley made a beeline for the cafeteria tray by the coffee maker. On a mug emblazoned I’D RATHER BE FISHING, a red-cheeked, pudgy man cast a makeshift pole. Glenn’s wife donated the cups, probably because they didn’t match her china. She could be particular. “You’re early. Where’s the cruiser?” The lot had been empty.

  Glenn Cox was a doughy man who waxed to a pink, high-gloss sheen when frustrated. He was clearly frustrated. At the shop, he said. Engine had a hiccup. His luck, it’d be the carburetor. He asked how Harley’s night went.

  “Mostly quiet.” Harley’s thumb ran up the edge of the thin phone book on his desk. The pages whispered like worn playing cards. He briefed Glenn on the night’s calls: a brush fire in Oakview Precinct, out by the time he got there; a complaint about an unmowed lawn; a stolen gas can down on the south edge of town. Probably misplaced.

  “Had a run-in with Paul Reddick,” he finally said.

  Glenn made a soft suck noise, tongue against teeth. “Tread light there.” He reached into his desk drawer for the Mylanta. “Guess they had a service out at Red Cedar. Would’ve been good to know—wasn’t even in the paper. Had to hear about it from Kirschner.”

  Bill Kirschner was caretaker at Red Cedar Cemetery. He had a sideline carving monuments. He likely did better business than anyone else in town, given nearly every young person left Madson the day after graduating. They had to. A town Madson’s size had about three dozen jobs, give or take, and if one opened, you could bet Kirschner was carving a headstone. Your best options were to be born lucky, inherit a cow-calf operation as the only child of parents not prone to longevity, or walk beans and detassel corn with junior high kids for two bucks a day while you waited for the school janitor to keel over. “Who died?”

  Glenn stilled in his seat to stare and look grave. “They filed the certificate. On Dell Junior. It was in the notices, you know—thing ran thirty days. Paperwork went through Friday.”

  Harley remembered Paul’s little dig about the department’s sleuthing expertise. The same needles that pricked the back of his neck hours before tingled again, but he didn’t let on to Glenn. “Last I read the notices, I saw I was getting sued for divorce. It’s a whole page of nobody’s damn business.”

  “Public servants ought to read the public notices, Harley.”

  “I’m hourly.”

  Glenn shook the antacid bottle and apparently didn’t care for the sound of it. He chucked it in the wastebasket with a thunk, then pulled out a fresh one. “Funeral with no body. Can you imagine?”

  “Not sure it’s much odder than a death certificate eighteen years late.” Harley knew it was a mistake from the beginning, letting the family go without filing a death in absentia. But it’d been Glenn’s dad’s call. He’d been sheriff back then. And he’d said it didn’t feel right, forcing the Reddicks to sign off on the boy’s death when the department couldn’t find the body, much less serve any kind of justice for the killing. Whatever the hell that would’ve been. Rollie went above and beyond with the load of buckshot.

  “Where’d you pull him over, anyway? Reddick.”

  “I didn’t. He was parked with some girl from Wilton. Over at my folks’ place. Said he’d lost something, was there looking for it.”

  Glenn went silent. He was picking and choosing what to say next. “Hell of a spot for you to run into each other.” He took a sip of antacid. “Were you checking the place out?”

  “No, Glenn, I was driving by.”

  “Wouldn’t blame you. Kids always up to no good in those empty houses.”

  “They’re bored. No harm in it.” Harley almost asked if Glenn hadn’t done the same thing when he was younger, then didn’t. Even if his dad hadn’t been sheriff before him, his mother was a notorious battle-axe, and then, well, then he had Miriam.

  Glenn was quiet again. Picking and choosing. “You can’t keep letting that kid get under your skin.”

  Harley slid open his desk drawer, flipped folder tabs, tried to let Glenn know he wasn’t the least bit concerned. But Paul being parked in the last place Harley cared to be wasn’t chance. Not when it came just days after the Reddicks held a funeral for a body the department never found. Whatever it was, it wasn’t chance, and it didn’t bode well. He pulled out a blank patrol activity report.

  Glenn was sweating, shining like a bulb. “Look. This thing between you two. Especially since the water—”

  “Don’t start.”

  “You tried to get him goddamn committed. Jesus H., Harley. Every town’s got some dumb, drunk kid who climbs the water tower, pulls a jackass stunt—”

  “That dumb, drunk kid’s on his way to prison or dead.” Harley checked his watch. He filled in the date on the form. The phone rang. Harley felt a flash of gratitude for the ring, then braced himself for the blunt bark of Otto Ziske. Nine out of ten, it was Otto Ziske.

  He picked up. It was Ziske. Today the old man called about his weekly Pickard Post-Gazette not showing. Gene, the Gazette’s owner, delivered it every Tuesday before dawn. Ziske railed on, voice like a mallet pounding a barrel, ringing in Harley’s ear. To make it stop, Harley interrupted to ask why he hadn’t just called Gene and asked for another. Why bother calling the sheriff’s office?

  “I did. I did call him. Know what that son of a bitch says?” Ziske stopped and waited.

  Harley shut his eyes. “Nope.”

  “Says, ‘I didn’t know better, I’d think you’re trying to get a second copy out of me for free.’” He waited again, apparently to let this sink in. “Now, what the hell is that?”

  “Well, Otto, my guess is a joke.”

  Across the room, Glenn managed to lighten a bit. He gave a bounce and titter at the mention of Otto’s name.

  “I don’t need no goddamn Jack Benny,” Ziske went on. “I need my paper. And if he’s gonna cast aspersions, I’m gonna press charges. He don’t have no trouble cashing the check.”

  “You know, we got a paper right here I can—”

  “I bet you do. I bet you do got one right there. You’re the law. Even Gene’s not stupid enough to steal from the law.”

  Harley rubbed his eyelashes with a thumb and forefinger, cleaned them of the sleep he wouldn’t get for another hour or two. He suggested they see what happened with the Thursday supplement. If the supplement didn’t show, somebody’d run the station’s copy out to him and they’d go from there.

  The old man huffed. Through his nose, it sounded like, a little flute note behind it. But he reluctantly agreed and hung up with a short, popping pair of clicks.

  “Otto want an APB put out?”

  “Says he wants charges pressed against Gene.”

  Glenn chuckled. “Hate to say it, but I’d expect an uptick in Ziske calls, now that he don’t have Christiansen to antagonize.”

  “End of an era,” Harley said.

  The two old men—Otto Ziske and Jack Christiansen—had parked at the counter of the Range every weekday seemingly since time began, a stool between them, cups of quarter coffee untouched. Folks called them Pershing and the Kaiser. Jack wore his WWI American Legion lapel pin on a freebie seed company hat, and Otto was half German. They were there four days ago when Jack dropped dead. “How’d you like that,” Ziske supposedly said. “Man survives a shot through the drumstick at Château-Thierry only to die of bad ham.” The hospital said it was a coronary.

  “Know what time Christiansen’s service is today?” Glenn asked.

  Harley shrugged and tossed him the paper. Glenn was quiet then. He flipped pages, stopped to read. Harley deciphered the night’s notes and jotted down a two-sentence account of the brush fire. He soaked in the quiet, which was too brief.

  “Think they filed so they’d feel right laying a headstone?” Glenn was still stuck on the Reddicks. “Wouldn’t think they had insurance on him.”

  “No, wouldn’t guess they did.”

  Glenn sucked his tongue against his teeth again and winced out, “That poor woman.”

 
The wince made Harley bristle. Glenn had a good heart, but there was only so much of it a person could take in one sitting.

  Glenn went silent a bit before saying, “I know you think we had a hand in it, how Paul Reddick turned out. But you—and Dad—hell. We all did all we could there. To find that boy.”

  “I know it,” Harley said.

  “Not like we could’ve done a damn thing different.”

  “I know it, Glenn.” Harley did know it. That was no doubt the worst of it.

  2

  THE DRY TOWELS PILED on the bed radiated heat. Pam worked the tips of her nails and tried to loosen a knot of frayed terry cloth that bound a dish towel to a bath towel. The box fan in the trailer window moved the morning air but didn’t cool it. Pam was being cooked. She was being cooked like those hobos her mother once told her had roasted in a freight car. Pam didn’t know what the difference was, when it came right down to it, between a trailer and a freight car. Wood paneling, maybe. Carpet. Freight cars were probably better built.

  The knot wouldn’t give, and a bead of sweat tickled the back of her knee. She clawed at it, then slapped the spot so hard it stung. She yanked the fabric. It hissed with a rip. She chucked the tangled mound at the fan, which slammed cockeyed into the screen, blades rattling. She yelled to Anna. Told her to put on her shoes. They were buying some new goddamn towels.

  Pam felt the hollow beneath each step down the hallway, the give under the burnt-orange shag and the avocado linoleum that never stayed clean, not because of the three-year-old who should’ve made a mess every ten minutes, but because of a twenty-four-year-old man going on two. From the cabinet closest to the fridge, she pulled down the green Tupperware container for flour and lifted out the bag. The bills lay scattered in the bottom. She counted them. Six tens, two fives, three ones. Lot rent was due in two weeks, and that was fifty. They’d need groceries and gas. Utilities came due the week after.

  She eyed the smaller, matching sugar bin at the back of the cabinet. She didn’t touch it, and she wouldn’t open it. She didn’t need to count what was in there.

  Right now, it was only ninety dollars, but if Rick’s scotch-swilling, snake-oil salesman of a dad, Dell Senior, came through on the double-wide he’d found, their share of the sale would go straight into that sugar bin. It’d go straight toward a down payment on a place with no axles. A place not parked up on cinder blocks like some beater car nobody ever bothered to fix. That money would go toward a house with the kind of sturdy foundation she never once thought about before living in a trailer.

  The familiar clatter of sheet metal drifted through the window screen. Rick’s work van rumbled up the road.

  Anna waited in the room’s entryway, quiet and wide-eyed with concern. That stare. Maybe it was nothing more than expectation, attentiveness whenever Pam yelled something snippy. But Pam swore she’d seen Anna stare like that at only one other thing: a wall cloud that’d once rolled in outside the kitchen window and colored the sky deep green, right before the tornado sirens wailed. Anna could stare at Pam with just enough alarm to make Pam alarmed. Not knowing what Anna saw or expected to see. Maybe for Pam to turn into a whirling torrent of baseball-sized hail.

  Aside from the stare, she was a three-year-old miniature of Rick. Same dark hair, same complexion that tanned beneath a light bulb, same short, soft nose, rounded at the tip.

  None of it was Pam. Dishwater-blond Pam turned pink in the shade and had a nose shaped like the rest of her, long and fairly sharp. Some said Anna had Pam’s eyes, since Rick’s were blue. But Pam’s were hazel. Anna’s eyes were the same deep brown as her grandpa Dell’s. Anna’s eyes were all Reddick.

  “Never mind,” Pam said.

  Outside, the van’s engine shuddered and choked into silence. Pam dropped the flour back in the bin, burped the lid, and shoved the canister onto the shelf. Tar-caked work boots clomped up the stairs, and the screen door whacked the jamb. The spring was broke. Or the chain. Something Rick said he’d replace or fix a year ago.

  “How’s my girls?” he said. Anna rushed excitedly to his side. He propped her on his hip.

  When he leaned in for a kiss, Pam tried not to breathe the roof sealant. All his work jeans were ruined with silver swaths of it. She asked why he was back already. “You need a shave,” she said.

  “Do I?” He nuzzled Anna. She squealed with a giggle. Paul hadn’t shown at their dad’s, Rick said. “Kid needs to get his shit together.” The two brothers always met at Dell Senior’s before work. Today, apparently, Paul called and said he’d be there about noon. Rick had coated some old lady’s roof north of Wilton by himself and had driven home for a bite to eat while it dried. He’d swing by and get Paul, go back to Wilton, and they’d finish it after he ate. “One more coat should do it. Tomorrow we start some single Dad picked up in Arnold.”

  A single in Arnold. Another bead of sweat tingled at the back of Pam’s knee, but she didn’t scratch it. The next job was supposed to be by Newman Grove. The double-wide. The next job was supposed to be the trailer that’d be a quick sell, with a decent profit this time. “Arnold,” she repeated.

  “West of Broken Bow about thirty miles. On 92.”

  She knew where goddamn Arnold was. She breathed, and the sealant stung her eyes. “What about the double-wide?”

  Rick gave Anna another nuzzle. She didn’t squeal. She burrowed her head into his collarbone. He squatted to set her down. “Tea ready?” He asked it so brightly not even a three-year-old would buy it. Anna was going through a tea party phase. Pam didn’t know where she’d picked it up. TV? They’d never had any tea around. Pam didn’t even know anyone who drank tea. Tea seemed like a drink for prim old ladies in white gloves and pillbox hats.

  Anna shook her head and bit her lip. When Rick squatted down to her height, the two of them were a pair of bookends. He was just darker from the sun and dirtier from work.

  “I’m pretty thirsty,” he said. Anna nodded and smiled at him before she took off down the hall.

  Rick rose with a grunt and a crunch of the knees. He grabbed a can of beer from the fridge, pulled the tab, and dropped it on the counter.

  Pam snatched up the tab and threw it in the trash below the sink. “Is he fronting you this time? To get to Arnold?”

  “Pam—” He said it on a high-pitched sigh that made her teeth itch. “The man gave us a place to live. I think he’s good for it.”

  She stopped and searched his face between the sweaty shags of hair pushed behind his ears. His skin was leathered and creased and pocked with pores. Everything about him was rugged and rough-edged but his eyes. Those were blue as pilot lights. She searched them for some sign, any sign, that he knew better. That he had the tiniest inkling of the shyster everybody else knew Dell Senior to be. All she saw was that Rick was growing a mustache. A Fu Manchu. There was something caught in it. A piece of scrambled egg, it looked like.

  “What?” he said at her stare.

  “Any word about the double-wide? About the bond, even?” A savings bond started the whole thing. Somebody’d bought it when Rick’s older brother, Dell Junior, was born. Dell Senior said it’d be worth enough by now to pay for the gravestone plus the place near Newman Grove.

  Rick’s mouth went tight. His eyes dropped to the linoleum, and he gave a frustrated, pressed-lipped huff. There was something he wasn’t saying.

  “What—did it sell? Before he could put in a bid?”

  His chin puckered into a pout. He rubbed beneath his nose, and the piece of scrambled egg fell loose to the floor. She didn’t know when he would’ve eaten scrambled eggs. Maybe it was carpet padding. “Face value,” he said. “Bank says the bond’s worth face value.”

  “For the love of Christ.” She felt the familiar, unwelcome quiver beneath her sternum. The shiver of a ghoulish laugh that broke out during fights and funerals. She swallowed it back. She looked past him, past the glow of the screen door, and eyed the hall to the bedroom where ratty towels waited to be ripped apart and put away.r />
  “Real nice place, that double-wide.” He leaned back against the counter and took a drink. “Something else’ll come along.”

  She wiped down the already clean sink. Her hand holding the dishcloth was numb.

  “We get by,” he said, voice exaggeratedly gruff and singsongy at the same time. Like he was Smokey the goddamn Bear. He reminded her they had more than some people had. Roof over their heads, health, Anna—

  “Don’t.” Pam shut her eyes. The glow of the sun through the screen door lit red behind her lids. Her jaw cramped with that damn smile that came whenever a smile was least warranted. If her mother told her some aunt had dropped dead, there that grin would be. Proof positive that Pam was a horrible person. She tightened her teeth and bit it back. “Do not.”

  “I’m only saying—”

  “You don’t have to.”

  He looked confused. Then he didn’t. “I wasn’t even talking about that.”

  “You’re never not talking about that.” Every time she tried to tell him they were in trouble, every time she tried to say what little they had was one minor inconvenience away from disaster, that they were one blown tire away from living in a cardboard box, he brought up Dell Junior. That she should be glad they didn’t have a dead, missing kid like his parents did.

  He gulped another drink. “What about your parents?”

  “What about my parents?” She searched his face again. Those pilot-light eyes could plead in a way that left her wrung out. They were doing it now. Pam wasn’t up for being wrung out.

  “If you think we need a cushion. I don’t know. A hundred for backup.”

  “What—ask Babe?”

  “She’s not that bad.” He must’ve heard how stupid it sounded. “What about your dad?”

  She didn’t answer. Her hands and feet throbbed, and the trailer air thickened. She squeezed past him and snatched her purse straps from the finial of a kitchen chair. “Jesus Christ,” she said.

  “Pam—”