He had just preheated the oven when the phone rang.
"So, what did he say?" Typical Ollie Olafson. No greeting, just business.
"He thinks you wrecked Marvin," Scovill said, leaning against the kitchen sink.
"Well, shit," Ollie said. "I had nothing to do with that."
"You were pretty mad about that sale," Scovill said.
"So?"
"And you had a few Wild Turkeys that night, as I recall. So did Craig."
"Never mind that," Ollie said. "So how are you going to build your case against Lindstrom?"
Scovill paused, holding the old rotary phone receiver away from his ear as if it had offended him.
"I thought we drank on this," Scovill said. "I wear the badge."
<><><>
"Lenny, you up?" Scovill bellowed into his telephone, drinking coffee from a chipped cup and looking at the chicken coop through his kitchen window.
A sigh. "Yeah sheriff, I'm up."
Scovill knew that his deputy, Lenny was stroking his beard and fumbling through the cans of beer on his nightstand in search of a pack of cigarettes. The sound of tumbling of empty aluminum confirmed this.
"Long night?"
"Aren't they all, boss?"
"I need you to do me a favor today, if you can," Scovill said. Lenny knew that the phrase "I need you to do me a favor" was Scovill-speak for "here are your orders"
"Sure, boss," Lenny said, flicking his Bic. "What's the word?"
"I need you to go over to the college today and make sure the fire system is working."
"Huh?"
"Just go test it. Around ten or so. For about two hours."
"Oh," Lenny chuckled. "On and offs for two hours? Admin building only?"
"Yup. I suspect it isn't in good workin' order."
"You got it," Lenny said.
"And if you get any static, call me. But keep your six shooter in your holster."
Scovill hung up, put on his gun belt and trudged out to feed the chickens before he got on with his law enforcement duties.
<><><>
The Heartland Care Home of Goss City was pleasant enough, if you could forget that it was the last stop for the people who lived there. It was a place where the residents died slowly, while their caregivers died just a little slower, toiling daily to make the last weeks of the residents’ lives a tiny bit better.
Scovill's uncle Wilf died at Heartland. The man survived D-Day and fifty-plus years of mind-numbing work on a hog farm, living every day for "Schlitz O'Clock," only to check out from an infected bedsore.
Scovill had taken great pleasure in busting John D. Getty, the former administrator, for cooking the books at the home. He normally never would have bothered--everybody had to make a living some way or another, and Medicare fraud wasn't really Scovill's bailiwick, but Getty had let Scovill's uncle rot away without proper wound care. That elicited a few calls to the state, then the feds--and Scovill got to slap the cuffs on Getty in the lobby to the surprise of the residents and the whispered approval of the staff.
The new administrator was Yvonne Robinson, a curvy bleached blonde of thirty-five with a penchant for press-on nails and crowns formed by Aqua Net and the ministrations of a fat, plastic Goody comb.
"Yvonne," Scovill said, ignoring the smell of shit and antiseptic that dominated the lobby, which was decorated with garish dollar store Jesus prints, plastic flowers and wallpaper from the Me Decade.
"Sheriff," she said, striding across the lobby to greet him. "To what do we owe the--"
"Looking to talk to Marvin."
Yvonne's round face crumpled into a mask of impatience. "Well, sheriff, you know…" Her voice lowered, and she rested her long-nailed fingers lightly on his forearm. "Mr. Hansen can't speak, you know, not really."
"Yup," he said. "But his wife can. She's here. Saw Lanie's Chrysler outside."
"Well, of course, he's in hall B, room twelve," she said, pointing the way, her long fingernail nearly poking a nurse's assistant in the eye as she passed. "Sorry, Virginia."
Scovill tipped his hat. "Thank you."
"Any time."
"How's John doing in El Reno?" Her predecessor was doing his stretch at the camp for white collar offenders outside the federal prison in El Reno, Oklahoma.
Yvonne smirked. "He's just fine, by all accounts. You know John D. He always finds a way to thrive."
"When's he out?"
Her eyes rolled up and to the right. "He has about another fourteen months."
"Good." Scovill nodded and turned to hall B, tipping his hat to an ancient woman in a wheelchair who called out "Hello, Marshall Dillon."
"Miss Kitty, good day to you."
<><><>
Lanie Hansen's gaze did not waver from her husband's bedside when Scovill knocked gently on the doorjamb beside a whiteboard that read "Mr. Marvin Hansen's Room" in blue marker. Hansen was a “bed baby” – a resident unable to tend to any of his own body functions – and this was marked in a discreet code in small print below his name.
"Lanie, it's Morgan Scovill."
She held her husband Marvin's hand. His face was never quite right after the wreck; one of his eyes was out of kilter, and a nasty, jagged scar ran the length of his scalp. Hair never re-grew very well on that side of his scalp; it just made an ugly trail from his cheek, over his forehead and behind his right ear.
"Come to pay your respects to Marvin?" she said, her eyes on Marvin's soulless eyes, staring at two differing, fixed points.
Scovill removed his hat and walked to the other side of the bed. "Hello, Marvin." His voice was a whisper.
"He can hear you, so speak up," Lanie said. She was a handsome woman of sixty, though since Marvin's accident she had stopped dyeing her hair, using makeup or wearing anything other than simple denim blouses over denim work pants and boots. She looked like she was going out to tend her flowerbeds any minute now. Scovill's dad had often said that Lanie Hansen was the prettiest girl in Cross in her day. That day was clearly behind her.
"Lanie," he said, clearing his throat. She continued to hold Marvin's hand and look at his tortured face. "Did those new fellas in town--the ones who bought your house--did they ever, well, uh…"
Lanie's eyes remained on Marvin. "Did they what, sheriff? Offer us peanuts for our house after we refused the first few offers? Did they run Marvin off the road and ruin our lives?" Her voice was steely, as if she practiced that very utterance for weeks.
"That's, um, all I needed to know."
Her eyes worked from Marvin's face, across his limp body and up to Morgan Scovill's chest. "What's that?" she pointed at his star.
Scovill looked at her finger, tracing it to her gaze at his right upper chest. "My badge."
"When your daddy wore that badge, nothing like this would have ever happened. Your daddy protected us."
Her eyes fell away, back to her husband's face, never once meeting Morgan's.
Marvin Hansen's left cheek twitched a moment; he murmured something unintelligible and fell back into his trance.
Scovill wordlessly, quietly, edged away from the bed to the door.
"Lanie, I'll make 'em pay," he said in the doorway, his voice faltering.
"Get out, Morgan."
<><><>
"Sheriff, that guy Lindstrom is madder than Craig was that time you locked him in the shitter with that skunk," Lenny roared into the phone over the sound of the fire alarm. "He never did know it was you but boy was he mad."
"What's Lindstrom saying?"
"His face is all red and after about half an hour he walked up to me and said he wanted me to tell you that this was bush league bullshit and this was strike two."
"Strike two? What was strike one?" he wondered aloud.
"Huh? Sorry, hard to hear ya over the bells," Lenny said. "Then he went in his office for a while, then about twenty minutes ago he left with that Dick guy. You want me to stop?"
"Give it another half hour. Talk to you later," Scovill hung up his
car phone as he sat in the parking lot of Heartland Care. He looked ahead a moment, through the windshield and past the shirtwaist style building with its distinctive hub-and-spoke design.
The phone rang again. "Scovill," he said, his eyes still on the building.
"Morg, it's Ollie. Where are we on all this shit?"
"I'm gonna bury this guy."
"Well that's more like it," he laughed. "What's your next move?"
"That's my call, Mister Mayor," he said. "Anything else you need?"
"Not a thing."
"Then do me the courtesy of staying out of it--you and Craig--and let me deal with it. It may take some time."
"Understood. It's your badge. Just as long as our new friend understands who runs this town."
Scovill grunted and hung up, turned the key and pointed his truck at Cross Township. He eased it out of the parking lot with care so as not to let the roar of his engine disturb the Heartland residents.
<><><>
A month later, the Indian summer had yielded to fall’s invasion. This being Nebraska, fall was a deceptive flurry of leaves and cold breezes for a couple of weeks before giving way to a wintry mix of ice and snow.
"Hey sheriff," Derek Krall said, smiling his used-card dealer's smile in the Cross Town Café downtown.
"Krall," he said, nodding as the librarian pulled up a chair.
"Hear we got a new guy on board? Trevathan brought him in to make up for some of that dead wood Lindstrom fired last semester."
"Uh huh," Scovill said, drinking his coffee and looking straight ahead.
Krall leaned in, conspiratorially. "Ollie, uhmmm, thinks he could be useful in irritating Jackie boy."
Scovill harrumphed, looking away.
"Ollie thinks you ought to go by and introduce yourself. Maybe scare the shit out of him a little. Throw him off balance. But get a feel for him. See if he may be useful."
Scovill nodded.
"He's in faculty housing. His name's Pilate. Like in the Bible? John Pilate. Maybe you ought to go pay him a visit."
"Get away from me."
Krall smiled and wordlessly rose from his seat.
Scovill put his coffee cup down, pondering what to say to his wife when she got home from Grand Island with her father's body--her coming home, him heading for Grif Nathaniel's mortuary.
It would be a few more hours yet, and he dreaded the empty house and the waiting.
Jack Lindstrom and Dick Shefler walked into the diner. Scovill stood, hands hitched on his belt.
Lindstrom's ears were red from the cold, his eyes dead and boring into Scovill.
"Sheriff," he said. "Cold out there."
"Going to get colder," Scovill said.
Shefler, as was his way, hung back and smiled as if he were a spectator to two long lost friends he did not know chatting.
"I hear it's going to be a long winter," Lindstrom said. "I hope we make it to spring."
"We're not all going to make it," Scovill said. "We're not all supposed to."
Lindstrom looked at Scovill a moment, as if restraining himself from responding the way he truly wished to. Instead, he said, "If you'll excuse me, I have to meet with some community leaders about my Cross College expansion campaign. We're growing every day, you know. Going to turn this place around."
"Buy any new houses lately?"
Lindstrom ignored the crack and walked away, he and Shefler converging on a table of city fathers, making jokes about the cold and shaking hands.
Scovill shrugged into his down jacket, dropped a dollar on the counter and walked out to his truck. He would make a stop at faculty housing before he went home to wait for his grieving wife.
Keep An Eye Out
His body was exhausted from the trembling. Just lying there, trembling.
He lay there for an eternity of three days, if he had not lost count. His head was positioned where he fell at the bottom of the shell crater. The back of his head was submerged in a pool of muddy, bloody water that threatened to drown him as blood from the dead NVA soldier lying across him trickled into the filthy muck beneath them both.
His legs were tucked under the NVA soldier's body, out of sight. He had barely moved them since his M-16 blew up in his face during the firefight. His weapon, his friend--his offense and defense--had turned on him, shattering his eye socket and knocking him unconscious.
The next thing he remembered was hearing the muffled calls of "Di di! di di mao!" from the Charlies. His face throbbed, and he couldn't see out of his right eye. Through the left, he saw blurry shapes of Charlies on the edge of the field, picking through the smoldering chaos, bayoneting wounded G.I.s and stripping grenades and ammunition from the bodies.
His body trembled so much he thought he would freeze to death in the tropical heat.
Shock and fear.
His legs were numb, his body weak and his options deathly limited. His rifle was a ruined wreck; the only thing within reach was the body of the dead North Vietnamese solder.
The NVA soldier's throat was half gone, his eyes wide and staring lifelessly, impassively at Private First Class Peter Trevathan.
PFC Trevathan, who only had one good eye to look back with now and perhaps had a few minutes before one of his crater-mate's buddies would amble over and gut him with a bayonet, had one last idea. A last ditch idea in a ditch.
Trevathan inhaled deeply, gagging on the smell of rot, gasoline and gun smoke. He tested his arms for strength. His right shoulder had some shrapnel in it, from the hot, dirty M16 exploding in his face.
Thanks a lot, Colt, and fuck you Bob McNamara for not issuing a goddamned cleaning kit for the fucking worthless cocksucking useless thing.
He could move both arms, though, however painfully, and he took one more look towards the soldiers heading his way.
Now or never.
Trevathan reached over, his shoulder crying out in agony as he grabbed the Vietnamese soldier by his bloody shirtsleeve and pulled him over as if he were a reluctant date in the backseat at the drive-in.
Ever so slowly, he moved the dead body over on top of him. Trevathan stopped as he heard the soldiers approaching closer, talking amongst themselves. He heard the groan of a fellow G.I. getting stabbed a few yards away.
Trevathan lay still, willing his ruse to either succeed or be found out; either way was fine, just let it happen quickly. He was racked with pain, dying for water and angry. Angry at the Vietnamese who slaughtered his buddies, angry at the Army and their shitty low-bid weapons, angry at that son of a bitch LBJ and epically pissed that he was now blind in one eye.
Most of all, he was pissed at himself for falling for it. He believed the Domino Theory. He took it all in and swallowed the fear-mongering like it was Wheaties at breakfast. If America didn't stop them in Vietnam, the Reds would be in Hawaii by 1970, you bet. Maybe even take over South America. We had to keep them penned in--far away from the USA.
Only halfway through boot camp did it occur to him that the Commies were only 90 miles off the tip of Florida already. (A tow-headed peckerwood from Oklahoma brought that bit of wisdom to his attention. A fucking Okie knew that? And I didn't?) Why weren't we invading Cuba (again)? Why were American soldiers and sailors and Marines and airmen flying halfway around the world to kill people we never even heard of?
Now, six months in-country he would never get the chance to tell LBJ that he was a fucking Texas-sized idiot. He'd never get home to his wife and make faces at her cooking again. He'd never get to read all those wonderful books he adored. Teach school.
Never.
The shadow of a soldier fell upon Trevathan and his grisly shield. Though Trevathan couldn't see a thing, he knew Charlie was deciding whether or not he needed to investigate this particular mortar crater more closely.
Trevathan froze, shallowing his breath in an imitation of the grave.
The soldier hovering over Trevathan said something unintelligible under his breath and started to climb down into the crater.
&
nbsp; Trevathan's heart sank; he was finished. Never.
He felt the soldier pat the body of his dead comrade. It would be mere seconds before he rolled him off Trevathan and rammed a bloody bayonet into his chest.
It's been a lovely fucking life.
"Di di!" called a voice from a few yards away. The soldier slung his AK-47 over his shoulder and pulled the dead man's arm, intending to reach into his front pocket. He exposed Trevathan's ruined face. Trevathan did not move as the sunlight bathed him, his good eye contracting painfully under his eyelid.
"Dụ má!" he NVA soldier shouted, reaching for his knife, his face a mask of surprise, anger and fear.
"Fuck you," Trevathan croaked, raising a trembling middle finger as his last defiant act.
The soldier raised the bayonet two feet in the air, preparing to strike, then stopped with a look of surprise that shattered his scowl, and fell over. Trevathan realized he had just heard a rifle shot.
A veritable hailstorm of small arms fire obliterated the peace of the battlefield cemetery. Trevathan had little energy to move, but in spite of the pain and fatigue found himself rising up on his left elbow and reaching for the now-dead soldier's AK-47.
Before his hand connected with the machine gun's stock, a heavy weight fell upon him.
"Stay down, gung ho," the American G.I. said, snapping off three rounds before rolling off Trevathan and kicking the bodies of the two dead NVA to the edge of the crater, forming human sandbags from their bodies for protection.
Trevathan mouthed, "Okay."
A face with a bushy mustache, friendly eyes and flecks of blood on his cheeks filled his field of vision. "You ain't never gonna be pretty again, but I'm getting you outta here. You with me?"
Trevathan nodded.
The soldier gently pulled him out of the bloody puddle and helped him sit more comfortably on the edge of the crater. He read the name on Trevathan's dog tags. "Trevartan? Trevuhthan? Hell if I can pronounce that," he said, laughing. "How's about I call you Trev? Unless you really want to be called Peter?"
"Trev," he mouthed. "Water?"
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