But since he had come this distance, he drove down Montag’s driveway anyhow, meeting several large dogs keen to shuck him from the Tercel and rip his bowels out. A whistle slowed them, and out of copious yard junk appeared big old Darvin dressed in bathing trunks and a tie-dyed undershirt and sloppily brandishing an assault rifle.
Fanta called out over the dogs, “Hey, Darv. Hot enough for ya?”
“Shush up, knuckleheads. ’Lo, there, Grape. Yeah, sure enough, if she gets any hotter, I’m gonna have to take some stuff off that I’d better oughta leave on.”
Fanta said, “Well, lemme get off your property before that happens.”
He turned the Tercel around with both old men grinning.
* * *
Strike two became Kent Sutherland with his fresh DUI conviction and his brace of unvaccinated, homeschooled children. No one was at home at the end of a long dirt driveway in Town of Daisy. But Sutherland’s affairs looked generally tidy and spoke of adaptation, especially the robust-looking alpaca herd blinking from a shady hillside. When Wisconsin became Central America, Sutherland would be ready. Adding to this, the potted flowers and whimsical doodads meant, Here lives a happy woman. If a man’s woman was happy, to Fanta’s way of thinking as he popped his Walker, the apocalypse was not nigh.
As he drove on, Moody Blues in his cassette deck, “Story in Your Eyes” whirling from his old speakers, he asked himself: Why do people rant?
He had tossed himself a setup question, a softball. A ranter himself, he knew why. Costumed in righteous outrage, a rant expressed pain and fear, isolation with these feelings, cries for help. When a man ranted, he asked you to rant with him. When a man ranted, he showed you a wound. He wanted the salve of sympathy, the first aid of agreement.
These were decent turns of phrase, Fanta thought. A man who sent a ranting letter to the editor was looking for a hug. He craved the embrace of, That is so true. Every week, the newspaper came out, the whole community widened its arms to listen, and the man felt better. Nothing changed, of course. But he could keep ranting, writing, sending, imagining, and feeling better—until the newspaper disappeared.
So that explained the rage and blame well enough. But Fanta had a strong hunch that FROM HELL HOLLOW would be a more complex sort of cat. The letter he had selected for special focus—crimped half-open atop the file folder on the Tercel’s passenger seat—could have been dictated by John Milton to his obedient daughter, the great blind poet raving and hacking through thickets of metaphor to find his visionary Paradise Lost. Some men groomed their madness, Fanta decided. Definitely not Darvin Montag or Kent Sutherland. But some men built an altar to their big idea and sacrificed themselves.
He aimed a squinting glance at FROM HELL HOLLOW’s letter, its penmanship so large and childishly precise that he could review bits of the screed as he steered his wonky old Tercel. The letter had been sent four months ago, just after Babette Rickreiner had bought the Broadcaster and banned opinions. Hence Fanta had just opened it today. In his poetic style, FROM HELL HOLLOW voiced remarkable claims.
I am afflicted with the plagues of our Mother. In putrefaction’s fever I see the path and the purpose of my full decay. My flaming out will light the world. Allegory? Watch me.
These were not the words of some unread, light beer–swilling soybean farmer. He should discount Wally Rumpf right now, Fanta advised himself while turning onto Rumpf Hollow Road. But his journalist’s habit was to work the process. Experience had taught him that he never knew until he knew.
He spied Wally Rumpf. Way out across his field the man balanced eight feet off the ground atop the back wheel of his spray tractor, taking a piss into pesticide-saturated soybeans. Drifting over the field with the sour scent of dimethoate, lethal to bees, came country music, our great collective head-in-the-sand. So now Fanta knew: FROM HELL HOLLOW was not Wally Rumpf. He turned his key and headed back for the high ground of the highway.
He had progressed this far when the Farmstead Volunteer Fire Department’s Pumper #2 screamed past the other way. Helpless before his instincts, the old newspaperman turned around and chased the fire truck.
* * *
Minutes later, Fanta had composed another mock headline.
Meat Beats Heat
A cattle truck full of steers had broken down on the side of the highway. The poor doomed steaks-to-be had been roasting to death, prematurely, until the VFD had arrived to strafe the perforated trailer with Pumper 2’s full power, wetting the steers as they stamped and bellowed and for their inscrutable reasons started mounting one another. As Fanta rolled down his window he amended his headline.
Meat Beats Heat, Meat
Over the dozen onlookers settled a torrid mist of atomized manure. While Fanta held his breath and watched, an old white pickup, northbound, slowed as if to rubberneck. He was admiring the truck, an International Harvester, sixties vintage—a version of the last truck he ever drove, traded it for a VW after coming home, always wanted another—when the heavy vehicle jerked to a squeaky stop right beside him and he understood that the driver meant not to look at the wet steers but apparently to glower purposefully at him, the editor.
This kind of thing happened. “Disgruntled Reader Shoots Messenger.” Was she vaguely familiar? Through her open window she fixed him with an especially bitter glare: knit brow, fevered cheeks, damp forehead, wild blond-gray hair twisted in a braid down her back, a faint twitch of calculation in her aqua eyes, a wrinkle in her chapped lips. Braless cleavage descended through the stretched neck of a soiled men’s undershirt. Her hands were work-gnarled, her forearms scratched and veined.
Fanta was about to say hello when from beyond came a harsh splat. The fire hose had turned on again. The steers bellowed and assaulted one another. Manure mist descended. Did she give him a nod? A heifer clambers up, he recited, feeling her baleful inspection. Nighthawk goes out, horses trail back to the barn. Good words by Gary Snyder. Spider gleams in his new web. He had renewed his intent to greet her when the woman hit the gas and the white truck rumbled away, showing him a license plate too muddy to read and a rusty oil drum wobbling in the bed.
Well?
Ruined Scribbler Follows Hunch
Fanta U-turned on the highway, bumped over the pumper truck’s thick hose, and floored the Tercel up to its full-out putter, racing to catch up.
CHAPTER 10
The ambulance bearing Gabriel Goodgolly took the rough driveway slowly. The EMTs had left the gimlet right where it had been inserted, its corkscrew shaft jammed into uncertain tissues of the old man’s chest.
Sheriff Kick, two deputies, and three EMTs had carefully tilted the outhouse sideways off its base. In the grass beside it lay the items recovered from the pit: a .22 rifle, the six Busch Light cans and their torn carton that had been in the yard, and a square-bladed trenching shovel, the one she had seen standing up in fresh dirt behind the barn. Someone had rearranged the scene.
“Photograph it all. Then rinse it off as best you can and take it into evidence.”
Deputy Luck, pale and gulping breaths behind her germ mask, answered, “Yes, ma’am.”
“Not ‘ma’am,’ please. Call me ‘sheriff.’ There’s a water pump. Maybe you can find a hose.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The sheriff gazed across the scorched farmyard. Patched trousers, gray undershirts, heavy dresses, shapeless bloomers, and narrow strips of soiled fabric hung limply from the clothesline. An open stretch of cord showed where something had been removed. A clean dress, probably. Patience Goodgolly had vanished.
“Schwem, go with Roads and help Bender recover the buggy.”
“I’m on it.”
She called him back.
“Did you see anybody on Liberty Hill after I sent you this way?”
“Negative.”
“An old white truck?”
“Negative.”
She stripped her gloves and mask and dropped them into the pit. The re-staging of the crime scene had happened
quickly, between the time she had run to call for help and when Schwem had arrived. How much time had passed? Twenty or thirty minutes? Had Patience Goodgolly fooled her by playing possum? Where had she gone? And how had she gone there?
The sheriff had no way to judge the normalcy of what she saw inside the house, the startling severity of the kitchen and the sitting room, shabbiness and tidiness bluntly intertwined. She had known Amish all her life but never been invited inside a home. What had Schwem said about this family? They converted to Amish. Or tried to. She gave herself a tour. In a bedroom she found two single beds with bedding, each with a wooden chair at the foot, each with an electric lamp on a wooden nightstand at the head, and a rag rug along the plank floor between.
Electricity. That wasn’t Amish. Or was electricity OK if it came from solar? Down in Crawford County where she grew up, the bishop had been famously strict—and infamously known to bend his own strictures to make himself comfortable. The juicy hint of hypocrisy among the English back then had been the rumor that Bishop Hershberger entertained Amish maidens in his backyard Jacuzzi.
But if she hoped to uncover scandalous secrets inside the Goodgolly home, her inspection disappointed. She cataloged exactly three minor oddities: a half-knit garment for a baby, a 1992 Florida license plate hung on a nail, and a full Mason jar of buttermilk in an icebox.
None of these pointed to anything. She saw no other evidence of a baby. The girl had not walked barefoot to Florida in the last thirty minutes. Buttermilk was out of fashion but still commonplace on farms. Sheriff Kick photographed the license plate—turquoise-and-red, OHGEOMY1, Palm Beach County, hung next to a crucifix—and moved her search to the barn.
What to make of the animatronic shotgun? Security? Guarding something? For sure it was not the weapon that had put two clean .22 holes in the man found in the ditch. Deciding to leave it for now, she moved around the apparatus into the workshop behind. The gimlet came from here. Several similar hung with other traditional hand tools on the barn wall above a workbench. Arrayed on the bench were the partly assembled bare bones of a solar panel. The barn floor was dirt. One of three livestock stalls contained a semi-fresh horse turd and dark smears on the door and sidewalls that could have been dried blood. But as a former farm girl, she knew there could be many explanations for blood in a barn. Outside, the entire south-facing roof flashed with homemade collection panels.
When she cornered behind the barn, a bony Holstein lumbered toward her from behind barbed wire, the cow’s swollen udder showing that she needed to be milked. Beyond the animal, a disused tractor road trailed away into tall late summer weeds. A few hundred yards off, the meander of box elders meant a creek flowed there. A steep bluff towered beyond. Nothing else to see.
The sheriff climbed between loose strands of barbed wire and let the desperate cow butt her ungently in the chest. It was a hard thing, the way life just went on indifferently in the aftermath of horrible crimes. She knelt and milked the cow onto the sun-scalded clover beneath her udder. As happened lately at odd moments, Taylor came to mind—her troubled little boy, what he needed she just couldn’t figure out. Around a month ago he had begun dressing differently, compulsively overdressing for a little boy, if she had to put a negative label on it. He would no longer expose his bare legs in a pair of shorts. He always wore his brown hat with Cabela’s in gold script. He kept on his little Levi’s jean jacket in the heat, and his little work boots, and he coasted about silently, enigmatically, wincing at the world like some minidesperado.
Squeezing teats by old muscle memory, she asked herself again when this all had begun. And why? She and Harley had mostly found it cute until one July morning Amos Glick had picked up Taylor hitchhiking for real out on Pederson Road. “I was pretending,” he had claimed.
She sighed and gave the cow her done-slap. Life went on.
And on.
She did not need more of it.
She bumped her Charger back out Goodgolly’s driveway. When she reached Liberty Hill Road, she called Denise.
“Be on the lookout for an older model white pickup.”
“Is that all we have on it?”
“I didn’t see it well.”
“Ten-four,” Denise said. “BOLO on an old white pickup. Meanwhile, hon, four other items for your attention.”
“Is that all?”
“Well… for now.”
“Go ahead.”
“Somebody’s been putting bowls of water out on Main Street for dogs. Some lady from Madison stepped in one outside the antiques store. She turned her ankle and wants to file charges.”
“And?”
“Permission to bribe her with free tickets to Rodeo Days?”
“Granted.”
“Secondly, a complaint call about campaign activity on county time and property. Guilty party is a Kick supporter. Just FYI.”
“Vigdis Torkelson? At the library?”
“Yup. Homemade button. I’m With Heidi Kick-Ass.”
“I like it. Who complained?”
“Well, how can I explain?” Denise answered. “OK, how do you sink a submarine full of blondes?”
“Um… tell me.”
“You knock on the submarine door.”
“Oh. So you mean it was Becky Rilke-Rickreiner?”
“Bitch wasn’t even in the library. She was just walking past with her kids on the way to the pool. She had to make a special trip inside to read the button.”
The sheriff sighed. “Are any of these items important?”
“Numbers three and four are keepers,” Denise said. “Three, Dr. Kleekamp submitted fingerprints, and CrimeNet sent back four machine-matches needing human review, which could take a couple of days.”
“Are there mug shots?”
“Yes. And our guy looks like he—Hang on,” Denise interrupted herself. “Just sec.”
She disappeared for the time it took the sheriff to drive alongside and then over Spring Coulee Creek. She normally saw fishermen but not lately. She had heard that for the first time in her life the water had become too warm for trout. So did they die? Or where did they go? Denise came back.
“Our victim looks like he could be one of them. You’ll see from the mug shots when you get here.”
Sheriff Kick hesitated. Another mile south, she would turn off the highway to go home. She could see the intersection through thermic waves wriggling up from the asphalt. She glanced at the Charger’s clock: already after four P.M.
“Denise, I need to stop by home. Harley’s out of town, his mom is helping out, and I need to check on the kids.”
“You can do that here,” Denise said.
“What?”
“Item number four is your ma-in-law just showed up here looking for you. The kids are in the van. I guess they’re waiting for you.”
Her heart sank. Lately, the moment anything went wrong on Belle’s watch, the erratic old woman loaded them up and brought them to their mom the sheriff as if to say: Here, look at what you’ve done.
Denise said, “I guess there was some trouble with Taylor at the pool.”
CHAPTER 11
For several miles, with “Gypsy” by the Moody Blues haunting the air from the Tercel’s dashboard cassette player, Fanta followed the white pickup at a ticklish distance, heading north toward Farmstead. He stipulated aloud over a chugging chord bridge that he was probably chasing a farm wife on a run to Piggly Wiggly. Oh, well. He was “retired.”
But just outside the town limits, the woman hit her brakes and cranked the heavy truck due east onto a private right-of-way with signs that read: POWER CORRIDOR—AUTHORIZED VEHICLES ONLY.
Fanta followed onto narrow gravel, casting the Tercel’s shadow ahead. As the truck hammered beneath high-voltage wires and their towering supports, the leveling rays of early evening shone hard upon its dusty rear window and the corroded oil drum in its box. Its side mirrors glinted. But he was staying well enough back, Fanta hoped. He took his time, losing her in a thick deciduous blur, fo
llowing her dust cloud more than her truck itself. He stole glances at the letter.
It’s the deer prions. The bacillus knocked the door down for the Chronic Wasters to go horizontal. Not much time left for me.
Trailing the white truck through the hot, buzzing forest, thick with mosquitoes and ticks, hung with mummy shrouds of the moth worm, Fanta realized that FROM HELL HOLLOW was referring to “horizontal transfer.” He was talking about animal infections going sideways, infecting humans. A vet gets kennel cough. An equestrian gets equine encephalitis. That kind of thing. Exceedingly rare and fundamentally terrifying. Not rats carrying a human disease. Not at all. Humans getting a rat disease, the body undefended.
He shuddered. Lyme disease and a pig valve were all the horizontal action he could handle.
He had to watch the “road” through the power corridor. Primitive at best, it made for rough going, sharply up and down over washboards and deep ruts, around fallen trees and rocks, but somehow the rusty-jointed old Tercel successfully crossed three coulees in the transcendent style of the heavy wires overhead and emerged backlit, dusty-windowed, and leaking strains of symphonic rock onto a county road and then into the bygone hamlet of Mastodon.
Burn slowly the candle of life…
So went the lyric now, the next track.
My flaming out will light the world…
This was what FROM HELL HOLLOW had promised.
The white truck coasted into the lot of Mastodon’s ancient American Legion post and stopped.
Fanta, having nervous fun now, ducked the Tercel into the driveway of one of Mastodon’s three remaining houses, a dumpy little prefab with its curtains shut. He snugged up beside a long-haul rig parked on the yard along with epic quantities of dog shit and one of Rickreiner’s BARRY HER signs, plus two new ones: FREE FRANK and VICTIM’S MATTER. Good God. These referred to county board member Frank Truss, Town of Sumac, a bona fide wife-beater who deserved his night in jail and much more—and of course there should be no apostrophe on the wholly illegitimate word victim.
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