Crimes in Southern Indiana (6 page)

Dee Dee kept screaming for Wayne to stop. Brady was without form. Wayne had crossed over to that other way of being. He unsheathed his knife, pressed the edge to cartilage, and removed Brady's ear. That's when he felt four
tiny prongs of steel open a muscle in his back.

Dee Dee had stabbed him with a fork. Rage took over Wayne's instincts and he backed her into the sink. Her lips pleaded while her eyes watered. “Please, please. I sorry, I sorry.” Wayne grabbed her by the throat, squeezed and squeezed as he swam in the memory of men. Locations mapped out in his mind. Coordinates for caves and villages. A man bound,
blindfolded, sweating with the shrieks of an innocent female. The tearing of clothing and her foreign voice.

Dee Dee went limp. He'd choked her out. He'd never killed a female, nor would he. He let her drop to the floor, loaded Brady in the truck with the two does. Gathering the dead, that's what they'd called it in the mountains. Piling them, sometimes for burial, other times for burning. He
grabbed the Old Forester from the floorboard of the Ford, not knowing where he was going or what he'd do, just driving and drinking the whiskey until everything went black and he found himself on Wyandotte Road pressing the gas instead of the brake. Meeting the elms head-on with the Need still whittling through his insides.

Now a county K9 unit's dog barked, echoed through the woods from which
Wayne had just run. Lights opened the darkness, showing Wyandotte Road in the distance. A spotlight prismed between trees in the woods. Wayne's mule-kicking heart returned. He stood up. Ran for the dim light at the hill's bottom where an old shack sat. From behind, growling teeth ripped tendon and ligament, worked up and into his hamstring. Pain was unrecognized as Wayne stumbled; he and the dog
rolled down the hill with the 30-30 strapped to his back. Leaves sounded like paper sacks smashing over and over, limbs gave and scraped, until Wayne and the dog leveled out on the hazed dew beneath the humming quartz of the old shack's yard along Highway 62.

Squeezing the canine tight to his wiry frame, Wayne smothered the dog's attack like a vise being tightened around its muscles and bones.
Pinched the fur of the shepherd's neck between shoulder and ear. While unsheathing his blade with his right hand, he smothered the animal's snapping jaws, parted fur beneath the neck, forced the knife up into the canine's brain.

Four legs attached to a mound of down lay silent as he removed its left ear and smuggled it into his fatigues.

The conservation officer's and the K9's Expeditions braked
to a stop on Wyandotte Road. Moon's spotlight shone upon the wet grass, showing the man who stood in his gray T-shirt and desert camo stained by animal and human blood. Arms and face were chiseled like ice, hard and cold. His blade sparked in the light. Reds and blues danced in the darkness behind K9 Officer Sparks and Moon, who'd stepped from the truck. They were within forty feet of Wayne when
Moon drew his .40-caliber H&K and recognized him. He'd hunted with Dennis, the boy's father, and Wayne before he left for the war several years ago. He couldn't remember the details, just as he couldn't believe he was the one who'd murdered Brady, and he hollered, “Drop the knife, Wayne.”

Sparks shone his Maglite down at his canine in the distance. The dog wasn't moving.

“Crazy bastard killed
Johnny Cash.” Moon kept his H&K on Wayne. Pleaded. “Don't make me do it, Wayne.”

Wayne sized up the distance. He'd picked men off in simulations at this range before. He fought the rush of knowing he was in danger, could be killed. Dropped the knife. But that thought pushed him and he turned his back. Half limped, then ran. Felt an explosion nick his left shoulder as he crossed Highway 62. Heard
a man yell, “He cut off my Johnny Cash's damn ear!”

Several more rounds exploded, but Wayne felt nothing as he leaped over the guardrail on the other side of 62, falling down into the steep darkness of the hillside. Tree limbs and briars jabbed his body with welts and the faces flared up in his mind again, men in villages. Restrained.

Wayne splashed into the deep current he'd inner-tubed down
as a kid. Hit the flat rock bottom. Pushed to the surface. Gasped. Floated down the river on his back like a leaf from a tree, ignoring his splintered insides. His bruised and bloody outsides. Knowing he was only six miles or less from his home, remembering how all his wrongs started with a man. A farmer similar to his father, dressed in fraying brown and gray rags, with stalactite beard.

The
U.S. soldiers in Wayne's eight-man unit believed that this man and the men that sat bound against a dirt wall were Taliban, pretending to be farmers, passing information about soldiers and their whereabouts when they were seen crossing the valley below the village.

The farmer begged, told them he was not Taliban. Three of the soldiers called him a liar. Spat on him, made an example for the others
to heed. Sliced his elbow flexers and doused him with fuel they'd siphoned from a rusted generator. They did this in front of his wife and daughter.

Wayne argued this wasn't gathering intel.

But it was the five soldiers dragging the females into the back room of the mud structure and the screams that came in foreign tongues with the ripping of garments that forced Wayne over the edge.

He'd
rushed over the dirt floor, through a doorway, only to find one soldier laughing, holding women at gunpoint, inciting them to scream. The other two soldiers held down a younger female and one soldier stood up, dropping his gear and unbuttoning his fatigues.

Wayne grabbed the soldier's shoulder and tugged. The man faced him and said, “You'll get your turn,” and started to turn back to the female.
Wayne grabbed him and the soldier turned with his grab, spun into him. Drove his shoulder into Wayne's stomach. Pushed him into the wall. Knocked the wind from him. Head-butted Wayne's face. Panting, he called Wayne all kinds of motherfuckers. Wayne felt the warm flow from his busted nose and lips. Listened to the farmer in the other room scream to the smell of his own skin igniting. Wayne reacted.

He woke up with a blade in one hand, 9 mm in the other, a pile of left ears in his lap. The Need in his brain. Every man in his unit, one less ear and matching bullet holes in their heads. The Afghan was burned beyond help. The women horrified, in shock. The rest of the men in the village were rattled by fear but among the living, keeping their distance, looking at him with curdled awe and fear.
He helped bury the farmer and burn the seven soldiers he'd murdered, scattering their remains along the valley.

Wayne went rogue. Knowing the U.S. routes in and out of the mountains, he began ambushing his own. He'd been trained by the elite, knew how the Taliban gathered intel. Slow disembowelment. Promises of food, of one's release to get the information, then the beheading. Methods preserved
from medieval times. Condoned by holy men. He killed the bad along with the good. Fighting a war within himself for six months in the mountains. Living in that village with those farmers. Trying to make sense of what he was doing. Of what he'd become. Until he realized none of it made sense. But it was too late.

It's what happened when a southern Indiana farm boy scored high on the ASVAB test
before entering the military. Could wield a blade better than a Filipino knife fighter. Shoot dead center for the length of cornfields. Had stand-up skills like Ali before the draft. Could track better than a bloodhound. Wayne wanted to serve his country, use his God-given abilities. Unfortunately, God had other plans.

Now, the river carried Wayne down through the dark valley and he remembered
when the United States raided the village, found him, wanted to know what he was doing there, where the others were.

They isolated him for two years. Wanted to know what happened over there in the mountains. He told them he couldn't recollect. He spoke with doctors every day. Told them of his rage, the shaking of the earth. The dead he'd seen, the dead he'd created. They medicated him, ran question
after question, test after test. They evaluated him as no longer psychologically capable of carrying out his duties and discharged him with a small pension.

Wayne floated atop the warm drift, reached for the roots of a washed-out tree, held on, knowing it didn't matter where or how far the river carried him 'cause the Need would always be inside him, waiting.

With his back to Christi, Bishop stood knee-deep in the bone-stiffening current of the Blue River, clenching his fist around his fishing pole. Christi ran her flower-petal fingertips down his neck again. Instead of jerking from her this time he swatted her away.

“Why you doin' that?” she asked.

“Done told you we gotta quit each other.”

“But you came like you
have all summer.”

Christi lived a mile up the road from the river, walking distance. Bishop and she held a childhood crush that went from flirting to an affair.

“I came to fish, to tell you to quit callin' the house, showin' up unannounced. We're first cousins. Let's leave it at that.”

On wobbly balance Christi dropped her fishing rod, forced her lips against Bishop's ruggedly aged warmth.
Then she took a breath and pleaded, “Don't do this.” He was silent. She continued: “I'll kill her for you. I will. No more Melinda. Just Christi and Bishop.”

Her words pulsed a threat within Bishop's forty-plus years of understanding right from wrong. If anyone ever found out about Christi and him, they'd be forsaken by their families, their community. He'd have to use something more than words
to end it, because thus far they hadn't sunk into her understanding.

Bishop dropped his pole, exploded his catcher's-mitt palms against Christi's ears. She gulped a scream. His fingers spread into her thick hair of black edged with pine needles of gray. He kicked her balance from beneath her. Guided her under the current and straddled her chest. Christi's legs splashed. Bishop's hands swallowed
her clawing hands, which had sorted mail from eight to five Monday through Friday at the post office for twenty years. Pinned them to her throat. Watched bubbles explode into lost breath beneath the cold water, telling himself he'd no other choice, she wouldn't listen.

He heard a vehicle barreling down the gravel road from the valley above. Christi's fight slowed just as the sound of the vehicle
did. That damn steering squeak rang familiar, but Bishop could not place it as it meshed with the uneven rhythm that thudded and pulsed within his head. The vehicle sounds disappeared. Bishop kept Christi pressed into the flat river rock with madness chewing through his bloodstream.

A door slammed. But his hearing played tricks with the rushing sounds of his insides and the flowing river in which
he sat, and he couldn't place its direction. He heard boots kicking gravel, the snapping of weeds and twigs. He froze, glanced up along the bank, but couldn't locate the source of these noises, nervousness maturing in his ears and the static sounds bouncing off the river's surface.

When the cold current had numbed his grip to an ache and she was passive, he stood with her body floating to the
surface. Her pits caught on his damp shins. He saw no movement along the weeded valley road above. He must have imagined the noises. Dragged her to the riverbank. Pulled a tin of Miller High Life from the six-pack that lay along the river's edge. Popped it open. Downed it, wondering what to do with her body.

He smashed the beer tin and opened another. Took a long hard sip, closed his eyes, shook
his head, and laughed. Feeling the sensation from taking a life climb through his veins.

Standing over her, he couldn't say she'd drowned, as he took in the cellophane gaze of her open eyes. The shock that filed down her chalk white cheekbones. The bruises already forming like ink smudges around her neck and wrists. The dampness of her flower-print dress with two shapes lying beneath like perfect
snowballs. He told himself, “Beautiful even in death.”

Bishop stood remembering how his father and he had fished this area since he could string a pole and bait a hook. Remembering all of the largemouth bass, hand-size bluegill, and channel cat they'd caught. He pulled a smoke that wasn't wet from his shirt pocket. Along with a dry Ohio Blue Tip match. Knelt down, flicked a flame. Pulled a coal
with his lungs while his eyes followed the current downstream. Exhaling the smoke, it came to him like a vision from his Maker: a pit so deep that even darkness was lost, an unmarked grave for Christi.

He walked up the dirt trail of boot prints that separated the wilted weeds littered with fish bones and rusted beer tins to the gravel of the road where he'd parked his rusted Chevy. He looked
down the valley in both directions, saw no hint of a vehicle parked along either side. Started to walk down a ways but stopped. He'd no time to waste.

He opened his truck door, pulled the burlap sacks from behind the truck's seat that he used for keeping the coons, rabbits, or squirrels he shot during hunting season. Grabbed the rusted log chain. Pulled a pair of pliers from the glove box. A
length of barbed wire from the floorboard. He looked up and down the road once more, stood silently. A breeze scratched his face, knocked a few loose limbs to the ground from the surrounding trees with leaves turning the shade of pumpkins while his heart punched his eardrums. No one around but him. Back down along the riverbank he filled the burlap sacks with flat flint and limestone. Tied them shut.
Forced them beneath Christi's damp dress. Remembering how her skin smelled of apple cider. He coiled the wire around her frame, thinking of the way her shapes bounced and rubbed against his chest in the front seat of his truck, and twisted it tight to her flour-tinted pigment with pliers. The barbs broke her skin open, formed tiny rivers of red, coating her beauty. He reinforced the weight with
the rusted log chain he wrapped around her, connecting the hooked ends into each other. He dragged her stiff frame downstream like a small johnboat until he got to the fishing hole from his youth, where Bishop remembered his father telling him, as they stood knee-deep staring into the dark green hole that melded into black, that if someone ever wanted to hide something, this would be the place.

He wiped the wet that sprouted from his forehead, looked at her locks of hair spreading with the sound of the river rushing her dress up her thighs, which he'd run his hands up just yesterday while she unbuckled his belt, their mouths meeting, and he blinked, but her dead eyes did not, they stabbed through him. Tightened around his heart with all of their memories together. When he died, he thought,
he'd be judged for what he'd done. And when that time came he'd say, “I felt I'd no other choice.” He hoped he'd be forgiven.

He pushed her into the thick blackness. Dived in, guiding her sinking body, the cold water lockjawing his bones, burning his bends and pivots. All the way to the bottom, where his hands felt, pushed, and tucked her away beneath a smooth cliff of river rock. A space made
for a human outline. With eyes closed he pushed her body until he felt rock meet his shoulders and face, both arms extended into the unknown void.

He surfaced with his mind aching for air, lungs tight and fast expanding. Feeling as though he were breathing through a tractor's brake line.

Bishop sat on the bank of river sand and scattered flint, clothes dripping in the evening sun. His teeth
chattering. Telling himself he had to protect his family from being shamed by his wrongs.

Somewhere up on the road he heard the slamming of a vehicle's door. And the faint cranking of an engine disappearing down the distance of the valley.

 

Food steamed on the hickory-grained table. Bishop was out of the river stink of his wet clothes, fresh from the shower, spooning baked cabbage. Grabbing
a buttered ear of corn. Then forking two fried pork chops onto his plate, wondering if his wife, Melinda, was waiting for him to confess his sins. What he'd been doing all summer after working at the furniture factory. What he'd ended today. The body he'd hidden on the river bottom.

“Run into Fenton while you was wade fishin'?”

“No, why would I?”

Melinda stood next to the stove, twisted the
burner knob, and ignited the blue gas flame. Knelt down with a Lucky Strike between her lips and inhaled. Her hazel eyes looked into Bishop's blue ones. He thought maybe she could see the dead female's soul floating within the glare of his sight.

“He's supposed to go fishin' this evening down on Blue River.”

“Didn't see sight nor hair one, ain't no tellin' where that boy went fishin'. If he
even went. Probably out drinkin' with that Beckhart boy again.”

“You're one to talk, you been drinkin' again.”

“So I had me a few, I'm forty-four, not twenty and breakin' laws.”

“It's the third time this week, used to be on the weekend.”

“Why don't you worry about that boy and where he's at? I ain't bailin' his ass out of jail again.”

“He should be home anytime, ain't like he'd miss a meal
his mother cooked.”

As she spoke, they heard their son's truck pull up outside, the wheels skidding, the steering squeak as he pulled to a stop.

 

The screen door opened and slammed. Fenton stomped into the kitchen with his rusted brown layers of hair peeled back over his head. A face like Bishop's when he was younger. Sanded to a smooth pale-wood finish. Only Bishop's now bore the age of
untreated graying lumber; sanding it would only make it age quicker.

“Told you he'd not miss his mother's cookin'.”

But her words were lost as Bishop's fork rattled against the ceramic of his plate and his chair scooted backwards, making the wooden leg bottoms scream across the linoleum as he fake-coughed and barreled to the front door. He was up in Fenton's face, straight-eyeing him, twitching
with anger. The madness Bishop had discovered at the Blue River grew into a swarm of bees being disrupted from nurturing their nest of honey. “Where you been, boy?” Bishop growled.

Silence, then: “Drivin'.”

“Out with that Beckhart boy again, don't you work no more?”

Fenton shuffle-danced around his father, insolently staring back into Bishop's eyes, and his boots trailed mud across the scuffed
linoleum to the sink. Melinda shook her head. Fenton turned on the water and began lathering the bar of soap in his quaking hands. He'd watched his father wring many a chicken's neck, shoot rabbit and squirrel. Divide their white bellies with a blade in one hand while the fingers of his other hooked and ripped out their purple and opal guts. He'd done the same with bass and bluegill. Forms of
life taken to place meat in the freezer or on the table. He crimped his eyes shut, knowing he'd never seen his father take the life of a person until today. And driving the back roads of the county for the past hour, he tried to make sense of what his eyes had watched his father do, murder Christi.

Between the Formica counter and the pearl fridge, Fenton said, “I was off from baggin' groceries
today. So I went drivin' around the county.”

Bishop spoke before he thought and asked, “Where at around the county?”

Fenton hung the towel back on its hanger, imagining how cold that water must have been, blanketing those forty-year-old bones. Watching from the dying weeds had stiffened his own into a totem pole of panic. He turned and stared at this man he'd called “Father” for twenty years,
wondering what drove him to kill his own. A disagreement? Money? He couldn't see that, he'd never witnessed a cross word between them. Always laughing and cutting up. Christi was the only female he knew that drank beer, fished, and even went hunting.

At that moment Fenton told Bishop, “I's down around Blue River, stopped to see you—”

And Bishop saw it in Fenton's eyes, fear of what he'd seen
his father do, and he raised his voice and said, “Around Blue River? Been out drinkin' and drivin' again, ain't you?”

Melinda stood blank, paralyzed by the tension in the air, closing in and suffocating each of them, and she demanded, “Fenton, you gonna answer your father?”

Not believing the reaction from his mother and father, Fenton stood confused by his own name. His lips formed an expression
as though he'd eaten a spoiled piece of fruit that had rotted his insides. And Fenton tried to finish, said, “I seen you down in Blue River dragging…”

Stepping closer to Fenton, Bishop focused on the bottle of Early Times behind him on the counter, cut him off again, louder, with “Boy, you are sick, comin' in here liquored up 'fore the sun has even set, ain't learned your lesson yet, have you.”

Fenton tried to speak again. “I seen what you did…”

Hard and rough as droughty earth, Bishop's palm drew blood from Fenton's mouth. Bishop pinned Fenton against the counter. Ashes and tobacco dispersed as Melinda dropped her remaining cigarette to the linoleum. Bishop reached over behind Fenton to the counter. Grabbed the Early Times. Pushed it to Fenton's face.

“You seen what I did, been nice
if you'd helped me.”

Melinda shrieked, “Seen what? What'd you see, Fenton?”

“Seen his father bust his ass is what, damn catfish jerked my ass off balance. Near busted my head open. I tole you why I's piss-and-pour wet when I come home. 'Course our boy here was too busy nippin' the bottle to come help his old man.”

Bishop inhaled the air from Fenton's busted lip, smirked, and said, “I can smell
it on you strong as fresh-spread manure on a field.”

And he could. Fenton had tossed down a few skunk beers he'd hidden beneath his seat, trying to calm his nerves after what he'd witnessed his father do. And quick as a copperhead's fangs delivering venom to its prey, Bishop balled his left hand into Fenton's T-shirt. Swung him around in a broken circle and into the kitchen table, which scooted
across the linoleum along with steaming food and plates. Melinda screamed, “No! Stop!” Fenton came quickly from the table. Met Bishop's backhand. Fear pushed him out the screen door. Blood warm like bacon grease dripped from his nose. He stepped to the gravel-mortared surface of the sidewalk. Barefooted, Bishop followed behind, cursing, “Run, you spineless son of a bitch, run.”

How much had his
lazy useless drunk of a son seen, heard?