Shy (33 page)

With a tsk, Frank bent and retrieved his dad’s suit from the rubble. It had been removed from the garment bag it usually hung in, and it took Frank a while to locate the trousers that went with the jacket. When he had them both together, he arranged them neatly on a wooden hanger and carried them out into the living room. One of us would have to run it back to town.

I did my bit by finding a shirt and tie I thought would go nicely with the suit and carried them into the living room as well. I wasn’t sure about shoes. Do dead men wear shoes to the grave? Just in case they did, I went back and found a pair of black dress shoes and a pair of black socks to go with them.

That was about all we could do as far as Joe’s burial ensemble went. Now we still had the mystery of figuring out what had happened to Pedro and Stanley. Where the hell were they?

Frank and I spread out. He took the rest of the house, and I ran out the back door calling Pedro’s name. Personally, I didn’t give a rat’s ass where Stanley was, but I was seriously worried about my dog.

I found all the other farm dogs lounging around the backyard, but Pedro wasn’t humping any of them. I checked inside the washhouse on the off chance that Stanley was perhaps getting it on with a passing sheepherder since they are notorious for fucking assholes, and Stanley was certainly one of those, but that didn’t pan out either. The washhouse was empty.

I was standing by the back gate, trying to decide where to search next, when Frank stuck his head through the kitchen window behind me.

“Did you hear that?” he asked in a hushed voice.

I hadn’t heard anything. “No. What was it?”

“Sounded like Pedro.” Frank pulled his head back through the kitchen window and two seconds later he was standing beside me by the gate. He cocked his head to the side. “Listen,” he said.

I listened.

And off in the distance, somewhere out behind the barn I thought it was, I heard what sounded like a coloratura hitting a slightly off-kilter high C and sustaining it long enough to collapse a lung. The eerie note just went on and on and on. It was so creepy and so high-pitched that at first it didn’t quite register on the human ear. Like a car alarm twenty blocks over.

But this was no car alarm. It was Pedro, all right. And he was in trouble.

Frank and I flung ourselves through the back gate and took off running. As we ran, Pedro’s eerie cry grew louder and louder, until we burst around the east corner of the barn and plowed right into Samson’s fence. We pulled up short in a cloud of dust, sweating like field hands. It was too damn hot to be running around like that.

At this range, Pedro’s creepy cries made the hair on the back of my sweaty neck do a cakewalk. It was like the keening wail of a banshee swooping across the Scottish moors. Or fingernails on a blackboard. Take your pick.

But where was it coming from?

At first glance, Samson’s pen seemed to be empty. There was nothing there but the hog trough, the half-carcass of the rusted out ’52 Chevy pickup perched on its ass off in the distance, a couple of mudholes, and about two tons of pig poop scattered about. Samson’s bowels seemed to be in fine fettle, even if he was crazy.

Then the wailing stopped, and a tiny trembling face peeked up through the busted-out side window of the derelict truck. It was Pedro. His eyes were as big as golf balls in his little apple-shaped head. When he saw me, he let out a yip.

“Good Lord,” I gasped. “What the hell is he doing in there?”

I started to climb over the fence to go fetch the little guy, but Frank pulled me back. “Are you crazy?” he hissed. “Where’s Samson?”

And then we heard the other sound. It was sort of a wet, snuffling, guttural, chomping sound. The sound you might imagine a hippopotamus would make while it was eating a truckload of watermelons.

“What’s that?” I whispered.

“I don’t think I want to know,” Frank whispered back.

While I watched, Pedro dropped down onto the truck seat and disappeared from the window. Then he popped up on the other side of the cab, and I saw the back of his head as he peered through that window in the opposite direction. A second later, he disappeared again.

The next thing I knew, Pedro was flying through the window on our side of that rusty old truck like he had been shot from a cannon. It was a pretty good drop, so he landed hard. He did a couple of somersaults when he hit the ground, but he didn’t bother wasting his breath yipping or whining about it, he just took off running like Jesse Owens once he regained his footing. He headed straight for us, his tiny ears flapping in his jet stream, his tail tucked under his butt like it always did when he was having a bad day, and I figured this would certainly qualify as one of
those
.

Pedro was no more than twenty feet from the truck when Satan himself came tearing around the front fender and shot out after him like a freight train. It wasn’t really Satan, of course. It was Samson. But I’d be hard-pressed to explain to you the actual difference.

Samson, for all his singleness of purpose, was no match for Pedro when it came to speed. Pedro was across that pen, sailing through the fence like a bolt of lightning, and leaping into my arms before Samson got all of his fourteen hundred pounds of lard moving in the same direction. But when he did, it was an awesome sight.

Samson hit the fence behind Pedro like a test car plowing into a brick wall. The impact of it knocked Frank and me on our asses, but it did even more than that to Samson. This time apparently, when he hit the fence, he hit it a smidgeon too hard. Even Samson’s iron skull couldn’t properly absorb the shock of the collision.

Samson’s piggy eyes crossed, a slightly confused expression befuddled his ugly face, and he keeled over onto his side like Fatty Arbuckle doing a pratfall off the side of a building.
Whump!

Frank and I pulled ourselves to our feet and warily approached the fence while Pedro growled and trembled and peed in my arms. I was so stunned, I didn’t even mind.

It wasn’t until we were really sure that Samson was out for the count that we leaned across the fence and looked down at him lying there.

Then we recoiled.

“Oh God,” Frank said, looking over at me.

“Oh God,” I echoed, looking back at him.

“Yip,” Pedro commented, looking up at both of us as if he knew it all along.

Then the three of us looked back over the fence at Samson’s gigantic head lying there in the dust.

His snout and jowls were smeared with blood, but we could tell it wasn’t his.

In fact, the blood wasn’t really what shocked us at all.

What shocked us from the tops of our heads all the way down to the soles of our feet was that pathetic orange shoe string dangling from Samson’s tusk.

F
OR
the second time in two days, the Cadillac hearse from Simmons Funeral Home was parked outside the house. This time there was a squad car parked next to it that belonged to the County Sheriff.

“A waste of gas,” Simmons was saying to whoever felt like listening. “I could have pedaled out here on my bicycle with a bucket on my arm to carry away the remains. That hog pretty much ate most of it. Biggest damn pig I ever saw in my life. Mean fucker too. Oughtta be shot.”

Simmons had the good sense to look embarrassed when he realized Frank was listening. He mumbled an apology and shuffled off shaking his head. I wasn’t sure if he was apologizing for saying Samson should be shot or for commenting on the fact that there wasn’t enough left of Stanley to fill more than two or three burritos.

The County Sheriff wasn’t so easy to get rid of. He was talking to Frank and me with a slightly bemused expression on his face and not even bothering to take any notes. I had an unsettling hunch that he wasn’t believing everything we said, and frankly, I couldn’t say I blamed him.

“
Why
did you say you think your brother was dumb enough to climb into that pen with that monster?” The sheriff had his hand up under his baseball cap scratching his scalp. He seemed to do that a lot when he was trying to think.

Frank scooted a couple of mud clods across the ground with the toe of his shoe. I could tell he wasn’t comfortable with this line of questioning. Who would be? “Well—my dad sort of played a prank on my brother, and well—it ate him.”

“Singular prank,” the sheriff said.

“You bet,” I said, and the sheriff looked at me like now would be a pretty good time for me to shut the hell up. So I did.

“So you’re saying what we have here is a homicide.” The sheriff pondered what he had just said, and I could see he wasn’t buying that either.

I couldn’t resist. “A hogicide,” I corrected him.

“More like a dickicide,” Frank said, and the two of us started laughing. And in the middle of our laughter, while the sheriff was looking at us like we were crazy, Frank stopped laughing and started crying. Needless to say, emotions were running high, and a lot of those emotions were bumping heads with each other. Creep or not, Stanley
was
Frank’s brother. But Lord, what a ridiculous way to go. It was a confusing situation all around.

Frank sucked in a deep breath and tried to pull himself together long enough to explain things once again to the sheriff in the best and simplest way he knew how. “Look, Sheriff. It’s like this. Before Pop died, he drew up a map for Stanley because he knew Stanley was all fired up about the will and he wanted to know what he was getting when Dad passed away. The bogus map, which was really just a practical joke on my dad’s part, said the will was stashed in the glove box of that old pickup truck over there, so my brother decided to go and get it.”

“And you know this how?” the Sheriff asked, looking askance at Frank like he had never seen anything quite like Frank in his life.

“We found the map in Pop’s bedroom while we were waiting for you to get here.”

“I see,” the Sheriff said. “And by the way, son. I’m sorry about your dad. He was a good man.”

“Thank you,” Frank said.

With that out of the way, the sheriff looked over at Pedro who was still hunkered down in the crook of my arm, shaking like a leaf. “And where does the Chihuahua come into all this?” he asked, reaching out to give Pedro a commiserating pat on the head. Pedro snapped and snarled and growled with such insane fury that the sheriff did a little yip of his own and yanked his hand back in the nick of time. Pedro was in no mood for commiserating. He’d had a rough day.

Frank was still laughing and crying at the same time. I reached out a hand to steady him, and the sheriff gave me a funny look, like maybe he was wondering if I was one of those queer boys he had read so much about. If he’d have asked me, I would have told him and broadened his horizons.

“Well,” Frank said. “We think my brother used the Chihuahua as a diversion to keep Samson, that’s the hog, occupied. He threw the dog out into the pen and Samson took off after it. While Samson was chasing Pedro, that’s the Chihuahua, who escaped the hog by jumping through the broken window into the truck, Stanley, that’s my brother, climbed over the fence and took off for the truck, that’s the Chevy, so as to snatch the will while the hog was busy chasing the dog. Guess he didn’t make it.”

“Guess not,” the sheriff agreed, looking a little dizzy after Frank’s long-winded explanation. He gazed over at Pedro yet again, but this time he kept his hands to himself. Smart man. Two worry lines formed between his eyes. “That was a damn mean thing for your brother to do, throwing that little dog in there like that.”

Frank’s tears were finally drying up. He sucked a little snot back up his nose and said, “You’d have to know my brother, Sheriff. He wasn’t—well, let’s just say, he—”

I chimed in. “The man was a dick, Sheriff. There’s no other way to say it.”

And the sheriff looked at Pedro one last time. “Lord, son, you might be right.”

Frank gave his head a sad little shake. “Plus Stanley had been drinking all night. I’m sure Pop didn’t mean for things to turn out the way they did. How was he to know that Stanley would be dumb enough and drunk enough and greedy enough to actually follow that silly map?”

“I guess greed does funny things to people,” the sheriff said.

“Exactly,” Frank agreed.

“And Samson was just doing what Samson does,” I tossed into the pile. “No sense shooting the messenger. Or the pig.”

The three of us looked over at Samson, and Samson gave us a grunt when he saw us all staring at him. He had woken up about fifteen minutes earlier. It might have been my imagination, but I thought Samson looked like he had a bellyache. I couldn’t imagine why.

“That sure is one hell of a hog,” the sheriff said, scratching his scalp.

And with that astute observation, the questioning by law enforcement pretty much petered out.

Chapter 17

W
ELL
, it was one hell of a double funeral. Everyone said so. Most of the county turned out, of course. Double funerals don’t come along every day of the week, and in Indiana you take what entertainment you can get. It was a bit sad to see Stanley’s tiny pewter urn parked next to his father’s monstrous oak-and-bronze coffin in the Slumber Room of Simmons Funeral Home, but there wasn’t much of Stanley left to put on display. A coffin for him would have been a ridiculous extravagance. His little dollop of remains would have been rolling around inside it for all eternity like a dead mouse in a fifty-gallon drum.