Crimes in Southern Indiana (3 page)

Wire springs poked through the worn vinyl front seat like he imagined the mattress of a jail cell's bed would, pricking his conscience as he sat within his personal purgatory. His memories from that last day and every day since. Fingering the keys dangling from the ignition, so tired of the searching, of the running, he'd come to terms with his decision.
His only task now was waiting for the man. Glancing out his driver's side into the window of the Mauckport town marshal's office, he watched some woman carry on a conversation with what must have been Dispatch. But Deets didn't need Dispatch. Glancing down at the head shots, a shadow of a wanted man, rolled up and tied by twine in the passenger's seat, he needed the marshal, so he sat and waited
and let his mind wander.

It seemed long ago, but still so clear in his mind, the scene from that last day. That even with a pillow covering her waxy face, it didn't make it any easier. Not seeing her face. Not hearing her jumbled tones, which scratched his conscience like the rake of fingernails down a chalkboard. The pressure of her touch. He closed his eyes, still feeling the buckle of the
seat as he imagined her final expression. So permanent, so final.

Like a jolt of pick-me-up kettle coffee, it was the first thought Deets acknowledged every morning and pondered all day, till it tucked him into bed. Haunting his dreams with the tossing and turning of “How could I not have known?”

He must have driven for days afterward. Finding that first town in Tennessee that wasn't on the
map. So small the town paper was a single page, front and back with an obituaries column no bigger than a Bazooka Joe bubble gum comic strip. And it was here that Deets Merritt would try to begin anew, searching for his self, an identity. But even after finding a job, trying to start over, he discovered he couldn't outrun the shadow and guilt that haunted him. A decision that was nothing more than
a two-sided coin with fate on each side of the flip. A piece of his existence gone. Something he could never get back, only carry on his conscience. Life would never be easy again. The only time life is easy is childhood, but by the time a person realizes this, it's too damn late.

But still, he never gave up. Kept searching. And every new town meant another trade. Another new job. He'd worked
construction, framing and building houses. Flipped burgers at greasy-spoon diners in towns whose populations were less than the price of an oil change, towns so small if you blinked between the post office and the police station, you thought you'd made a wrong turn because of the town's sudden disappearance in the side mirror.

There wasn't a day that passed by that he didn't miss her. But he
didn't want to go back. He'd do it all over again even if the outcome would be the same.

Now, as he sat waiting in his '61 International Scout four-wheel drive, the sun lowered at the breech of the town's street. Dust was a Van Gogh landscape etched across his windshield, adding to the crawl of the oncoming evening. Discovering the darkness that was night.

He remembered how it all began. How
he'd bought the Scout its first year of production. His father had driven him into Indianapolis, from their small town of Corydon. He'd bought it with money he'd saved from his childhood, working his father's hog farm, then the money earned in his job at Keller's, the local furniture factory, manning the band saw to rip the wood that was honed into furniture. He'd seen more than his fair share of
fingers removed by that saw, never replaced.

So proud of his purchase, he'd cruised through town, and that's when he saw her walking along the town square that first time. He slowed down, pulled up beside her. Asked if she needed a lift. As she turned to him, her smile was misleading; her lips told him to eat shit. She'd not need another useless shade of man catering to her. She'd been married
once already, to a boozing pugilist who eventually ran off with a younger woman and several warrants. He'd left her not only paying for the divorce but several dozen or so debts, and the last mistake she wanted was a ride home from a strange man. Aft er that he'd framed her in his mind not by images but by her words, her simple yet harsh construction of language that she'd offered to him.

Her
words were honest.

He apologized and drove home, knowing he'd met his future wife.

Every day after work, with his face stained by sweat and sawdust peppered in his hair like lice, he'd see her walking. And every day he'd ask her if she needed a lift. He told her someone as easy on the eyes as she was shouldn't have to walk, let alone work. And she told him to mind his own, as he could find cleanliness
with a bit of bristle lathered by lye. And he laughed at the directness of her tongue.

But finally she broke down, and he gave her a ride. She gave her name: Elizabeth Slade. Like a felon ignoring the wanted posters hanging from the post office walls of a town, Deets threw caution to the wind, asked her out for lunch. She was hesitant at first. Then she accepted. They had coffee and apple pie
at Jocko's Diner on the corner of town, where she told him she worked at Arpac, the local poultry slaughterhouse, slicing the necks of chickens. He questioned how something so fragile with beauty could earn a wage doing something so violent. And she explained it was the only decent-paying job for a woman with cutlery skills.

One date led to another until he visited her parents to ask permission
to marry Mr. and Mrs. Slade's daughter. The Slades had not seen her this happy since she was a child, so they gave their blessing to Deets, as did his own parents, and he proposed. She moved in with him, living in the log cabin he'd built by hand from the ground up on some fifty acres. He told her he'd plenty of money. There was no need for her to work if she didn't want to. So she gave her notice
to Arpac, and they consummated their vows two weeks later.

In five years they had a bond that most marriages didn't share even after three kids and twenty years of loyalty. They'd no children, only the bliss they found in each other.

He'd work during the day, coming home some evenings to help her in the garden they planted every summer. Even with all the work she did—picking and breaking beans,
shucking ears of corn, digging potatoes and onions, all of the canning for winter—how her hands felt against his flesh. Soft as a baby deer's tongue, the warmth of innocence.

Her shoulder-length locks were like her eyes, stained like a walnut, and her flesh was colored by the sun as she worked in the garden, where she went barefoot in cut-off jeans and one of his old worn-out Hanes T-shirts tainted
by the heat from a day's worth of work.

Other evenings after work he hunted to keep their freezer full of meat. Used the double-barrel .12-gauge his granddad had left him. It had a firing pin that sometimes misfired on the right barrel. All one had to do was pull the hammer back and try again.

But it was that one evening he came into the cabin with several rabbits gutted and skinned, ready to
soak in salt-water, that he found her on the kitchen floor. Meeting her cheek's flesh with the back of his hand, he discovered her dampness from a fever. As if he had stepped into a hornets' nest, Deets was stung by a swelling panic as he phoned Dr. Brockman for a house call. Then he undressed Elizabeth and placed her in their bathtub. She didn't agree with standard medication nor the county hospital.
But she did agree with the old ways. It was how her parents raised her. Lye for soap to wash off the sawdust and sweat of the factory. A hot toddy sipped to break the mucus of a head or chest cold. Bacon for a bee sting until the stinger showed enough to be tweezed free from the flesh. Fresh-squeezed tomato pulp with canned pickle juice and a shot of Everclear to nurse a hangover. And if she
had a hound who'd not received his vaccination quick enough but instead acquired parvo, she'd end his suffering by placing the barrel of a gun to his skull to prepare him for burial. She'd helped her daddy do it more than once.

Deets had been raised by the same old ways. He crushed large squares of ice and packed them into the bath. He held warm Jell-O in a coffee cup to her lips to help keep
her hydrated and break the fever. The fever that would last longer than the labor of a child. Days, not hours.

At first he feared her brain would be damaged. He'd heard the stories his mother had told him as a child, men and women whose fevers weren't broken quickly enough, held for too long, their brains frying like the rabbits he coated with buttermilk to stick to the wheat flour, then placed
into a skillet of lard and fried to a crisp.

Once her fever broke, she was unable to remember names and faces, places and times. Her speech was slurred for a while, as though her jaws had been pistol-whipped by the butt of a .38.

But Brockman prescribed his vitamins and assured Deets that Elizabeth would recover. And as the days added up on the calendar, she gradually returned to being the same
woman he'd married some years before.

But what he later told himself was that he shouldn't have trusted him with her. Shouldn't have trusted Brockman with his wife. But he had.

 

The woman talking to Dispatch came out onto the sidewalk, wobbled to a pace, disappeared down past the Dollar Store, around the corner past the bank. But the marshal hadn't shown up. He was what Deets's daddy would
have referred to as so poke-ass he was probably late for his own conception.

But he'd wait. One thing Deets had was time. He'd passed through so many towns he couldn't remember if this was his tenth town or his twentieth job. They were all the same. What he could remember were the four characteristics that built a small town: a post office, a sheriff or marshal's station, a bank, and a graveyard.
He'd always check the post office, pulling the wanted posters of a man who haunted him, collecting them from each and every town. An identity that wouldn't let him forget. That wouldn't let him start over.

By day he'd pass the bank, the marshal's station, and at night he'd walk the graveyards, wondering how the dead had passed. By accident, sickness, or the hands of their loved ones, their kin.

He'd been down as far south as Greenville, Alabama. Traveled back through Dayton, Tennessee. Manchester, Milan, and Dyersburg. Crossed over into Poplar Bluff and Garwood, Missouri. But he'd backtracked over the years through Illinois, Indiana, and back into Kentucky. Through Owensboro, Elizabethtown, Bardstown, Mount Sterling, traveling into the polarization of the hills. Traveling to Morehead,
then back into Pine Ridge, Campton, Jackson, Hazard. And Whitesburg, where everybody knew your kin's family tree, fished with dynamite, and hunted with a double-barrel .12-gauge. Your daddy either owned a lot of land or worked a coal mine in a surrounding county like Harlan that paid well. You always attended church on Sunday, and no matter how much you did or didn't contribute to the offering plate,
it was a place where people lived a simple and straightforward life. And it was here that Deets realized he'd traveled so long he'd forgotten who he was, and what he was running from.

From town to town some had heard the story. Had read it in the papers if they could read or heard it on the television if they owned one with an antenna. Had seen the features of the young man he once was, clean-shaven
and baby-faced, now covered by age, the look of tires run on back-road gravel, blanketed by remorse and regret that had left his features thick with the shadows of barbed-wire whisker and uneven locks of hair. His mane, coarse as a horse's tail, braided down his spine. The person on those posters on the passenger's seat and the man who collected them were two identities with the same torment.

Deets sat fighting the tears of memory. He wiped snot on his flannel sleeve with one hand while the other pulled a fresh Pall Mall from his pack, then placed it unlit onto his lips as he thought. He should have seen it, acknowledged its presence. Her love was a cripple fighting frostbite. As her feeling was permanently lost, all he could do was watch, because there was no cure for frostbite.

He should have noted her appetite disappearing along with the meals she no longer prepared, the garden she no longer kept, beans no longer broken, corn no longer shucked, potatoes no longer dug.

Everything gone to waste. Spoiled. She said she felt too weak. Said she was too tired or she lost track of time. That daylight was too short.

That's what she'd told him after that first discovery of her
slip on the kitchen floor and the fever that followed. And as they lay in bed at night while he ran his hands over her warm outline, tracing her beauty, her words exchanged with his, how she'd maybe try tomorrow, she just needed her rest, to lie with him, to lie with this shade of skin. This man. Her husband.

But then he came home from the factory one evening, found her feeling weak on the couch,
as she'd discovered another slip. A jarring of her brain. She'd crawled to the phone and called Brockman, who said it was probably her blood sugar. But after that more stumbles followed as her balance was no better than a square dancer with a crooked limb or a clubfoot. She'd lost her posture, her rhythm, and her balance when moving across the cabin's hardwood floor, no longer recognizing the
upright position.

Deets trusted Brockman; so did Elizabeth. But then came her confusion and uncontrolled outbursts of emotion. She believed one of her ears was bigger than the other. She asked him to look. To compare. To see what she'd seen in the bathroom mirror every morning. During simple conversations she'd cry inconsolably about the beauty of the day or how the outside air felt against her
features, dried the tears that shadowed her cheek line. He'd see nothing, and like her, he understood even less.

And the visits from Brockman and his vitamin treatments began to add up. They had become similar to visits from the Reaper—your soul was the toll and all you could do was wait.

Finally Deets had lost his trust in Brockman and his vitamin treatments. He forced Elizabeth into his Scout,
made a trip to the county hospital, where he explained her fever, her stumbles and tumbles, along with her confusion over the ear and her emotional outbursts. They admitted her. Took X-rays. Ran blood tests. Discovered an imbalance in her mind that was so far beyond treatable it was incurable. Her mind had fermented into soil that enriched a tiny crop of malignant ginseng spreading and rooting
in her brain.