by April Smith
“Ho ho ho, little boy!” said Santa.
Willie eyed him suspiciously. “You’re not Santa.”
“Is that so?”
Willie frowned. “You’re wearing Grandpa’s shoes!”
Lance smiled to himself and said a blessing for his dad, to let him know that he was here with them, at the blue house, where he would be pleased to see tradition carried on. On the front door was the same wreath with a gingham ribbon they bought every year from the same lady at the farmers’ market. He pushed the door open and the sweet pressures of the holiday fell on him like gifts from a closet. He had to call his sister in Portland, and he still hadn’t bought something nice for Wendy. The moment he entered, Willie jumped all over him, begging to go out to the ranch and go sledding. Lance told his son it was Christmas for the caretakers, too, but they could go the next day, and besides, guests were coming for dinner.
“What about Santa Claus: The Movie?” Willie demanded. “You said we could see it.”
“That, too,” Lance promised. “You have a whole week off from school.”
—
LaSalle had begun to prepare. A phone book supplied the address for the Kusek law office on West Boulevard. Several times he took the bus to scope out the scene at different times of day. He walked around the blue house and saw there was an alley. He observed that the garage door didn’t have a handle. That meant he’d have to somehow get in through the front door. It was a rich neighborhood, and he concluded this Kusek must have a lot of cash lying around, enough for LaSalle to get out from under Honeybee.
Things had been going downhill. Uphill or downhill, depending on how much crack cocaine LaSalle could get his hands on. Honeybee often made the north-south run along the interstates with a kilo hidden inside a panel of his truck, but he kept a stash at home. LaSalle had found his drug of choice. It was like a hydrogen bomb in his brain raining Halloween candy.
LaSalle was high when he bopped over to the hardware store. He examined several types of rope and engaged with the clerk for quite a while, boasting loudly about his tree-climbing techniques. After that, he still needed more supplies—chloroform, handcuffs. To finance the mission, he pawned the stereo set in the living room. Honeybee wouldn’t care when he found out a soldier for America had wasted the Commies.
On Christmas Eve, LaSalle was again high, and making a real pest of himself. Honeybee was smoking a joint and trying to watch The Twilight Zone marathon while LaSalle was describing how their enemies were going to be taken care of by the ThunderCats.
“Shut the fuck up!” Honeybee roared. “I’m sick of your rants. I told you weeks ago to get the hell out.”
“I’m trying.”
“Doing what? You are out of here tomorrow, I don’t give a shit how.”
“Just chill,” LaSalle told him, taking a hit. “I’m good now.”
“Yeah, that’s you being good. Fuckin’ nuts.” Honeybee stared at the TV. “Do me a favor and die.”
LaSalle sniggered at the joke. No way his buddy really meant it, and even if he did, he’d get the picture soon enough. Derek LaSalle left the bungalow and took the bus to West Boulevard for the final time. He was so fried from coke and weed that with all his planning, he went to the wrong address on West Boulevard, a brick-and-stucco Tudor English. He realized his mistake when he saw a different name on the bell. It was too late. A woman surrounded with a bunch of kids in Christmas pajamas opened the door with a smile.
LaSalle put on his charming face. “I have a delivery for Mr. Kusek,” he said, holding up his plastic bag filled with supplies.
“I’m afraid you have the wrong house.”
“Oh.”
The lady cocked her head at his disheveled looks, but took pity on a young man trying to make a buck on Christmas Eve. “You’ll want the little blue house, two blocks down.”
“Sorry to bother you, ma’am.”
“That’s all right.”
The lady closed the door but stopped to wonder. She didn’t remember seeing a car. She hadn’t seen this delivery boy before, and he looked a bit scruffy. After arguing with herself while the kids went crazy begging to unwrap gifts, she decided to go ahead and call the Kuseks and give them a heads-up, but the line was busy.
It was cold. LaSalle hurried along the deserted sidewalk and crossed the street. Then he saw a sign on the lawn, KUSEK & KUSEK—LAW OFFICES, and the blue house behind it, just like the lady said. He was confident and shining. The worst was behind him. He was here. He rang the bell.
Lance Kusek opened the door and stared at the young man on his porch—big, possibly homeless. Lance felt none of the compassion of his neighbor up the street. The guy was a drifter looking for a handout.
“Mr. Kusek!” announced LaSalle. “I have a package for you.”
In the kitchen, Wendy was talking on the phone to her mom in Illinois. She put Willie on to say Merry Christmas to his grandma and then hung up. Immediately the phone rang again. Wendy was flustered. She had guests arriving in twenty minutes. She picked up the receiver.
Poised in the doorway with the freezing wind at his back and the warm room with a fire blazing before him, LaSalle had struck a moment of perfect balance on the threshold of two realms. Inside it smelled like freedom, like being up in the spruce. Ahead of him were swirling bursts of color—colors he couldn’t name. Behind him was darkness.
“Who are you?” Lance asked, gazing in wonder at the stranger. As if he already knew.
As if he knew that past and present had come together, face-to-face.
The stranger whipped a gun out of a plastic bag, grabbed Lance by the shirt, turned him around and stuck the barrel in his back. Willie bounded out of the kitchen followed by Wendy.
“That was the lady in the brick house up the street,” Wendy began, but her voice tightened when she saw her husband’s white face and the terrifying person behind him.
“We’re going to help this gentleman out,” Lance said slowly and meaningfully. “Do whatever he says.”
“Y-yes, of course,” Wendy stuttered. For a split second she almost told Willie to run, but her husband’s eyes said, No.
LaSalle’s mind had entered a featureless void like when he was up there in the intergalactic distance between branches, but at the same time inside the infinitesimal space between each pine needle, a shape-shifting vacuum that ordinary humans couldn’t survive. There was a boy. He didn’t know there would be a boy, but he was into it now, he could be identified, so the soldier pushed the gun deeper into the man’s back and kicked the door shut behind them. It seemed to close without sound. He ordered the man and boy to lie on the floor. The man offered cash money and the soldier said, “Yes, everything you’ve got. Credit cards, too.” The man said, “Guests are coming at seven thirty.” A clock said 7:10. The woman stood still. She was wearing a dress. She was ordered to lie facedown next to her husband and son. The soldier tied their hands behind their backs. The room smelled sickly sweet, like cinnamon. It was becoming hot. The soldier took his equipment from the bag and soaked a special rag he’d brought in chloroform. He pressed the rag against each person’s nose until they shut up talking. The clock said 7:20. The soldier searched for a weapon. He opened a broom closet and found a clothing iron. He went back to the three figures and began to hit the father’s skull with the point of the iron, four or five times. Then he beat the lady in the dress with it, and then the boy. But the lady was still scratching with her fingers, so he went into the kitchen and picked up a small, thin knife, the kind you’d use to cut meat off a bone. He went back into the dining room and saw that it was wildly splashed with blood. His shoes picked up blood, and when he knelt to stab them in their brains, the knee of his pants got soaked with blood. The woman had stopped breathing, but a distant alarm had begun to sound in his mind. He was exiting the void and hearing the wail of self-preservation. The guests would be there any minute. He took the man’s wallet from his pocket and pulled out credit cards. Then he turned out the lights. In his
panic, he couldn’t locate the back door. He ran blindly through the darkened house, tracking blood. Finally he found the stairs to the basement, groped his way down and out another door. He hit fresh air. He ran through the backyard. A giant shape was lurking in the shadows. He ducked sideways like a deer, but it was only a canoe turned upside down to protect a pile of firewood.
—
None of the guests could get inside. The doors were locked, the lights out. Someone went to the next house to call the Kuseks, but there was no answer. The guests went around the side and peeked through the dining room windows. By the light of a fire blazing in the hearth, they saw three bodies on the floor. The police arrived and determined that the father and son were still alive.
Derek LaSalle realized he couldn’t take the bus because his clothes were covered with blood. He had started to walk in the direction of Honeybee’s house when he remembered that he’d left the handcuffs behind with his fingerprints all over them. He turned around and jogged back to West Boulevard, but by the time he got to the blue house there were lots of people and cop cars, and the snowy streets were alive with dizzying red lights, so he kept on walking. It was damn cold and starting to rain. As he wandered off alone, the streets grew quiet and deserted, with more elaborate decorations, people going nuts with light-up snowmen, that kind of crap, their fancy snowmobiles loaded onto trucks and campers parked in driveways. The wind was blowing right through him and he became desperate to find shelter. The thought arose that nobody would be checking their camper on Christmas Eve. After several tries, he pulled on the door of a Winnebago and found it unlocked. It was nice inside, and in back there was a big long seat where he could sleep.
—
Special Agent Robert Dolan arrived in Rapid City just before midnight on Christmas Eve. He’d received the call for assistance from the local police on a possible multiple homicide at nine p.m. and driven from Pierre in blustery snow at seventy miles an hour. Following in a separate van were assistant detectives and a sketch artist. When they got to West Boulevard, the two surviving victims had been taken to the hospital and were receiving medical care. Police vehicles and a coroner’s van blocked the street. Yellow tape surrounded the house. Inside, a brief conversation with the coroner affirmed the female had been killed by blunt force trauma and the weapon had been a steam iron.
Dolan crouched in the doorway and surveyed the dining room. It looked surreal, but all crime scenes had that weirdness. Normal and not at all normal at the same time. He saw the well-appointed house of an upper-middle-class family. The fire had burned down and the lights were on while a photographer documented everything. Dolan took note of the blood splatter sprayed across the walls, meaning an attack of great force. An earnest young sheriff’s deputy was posted near the body. She was facedown with hands bound behind her back. The dress across her legs looked untouched; no obvious indication of sexual attack, but that would be confirmed by the autopsy. He crouched down and peered at the knots. Double loops. Unusual. He took a cheap pocket magnifier from his jacket pocket. There was no grit in the fibers. The edges were cut, not frayed. The rope looked new. He directed the deputy to check the garage and workshop for similar material. When he reported none, Dolan asked if there was a hardware store in town.
“Yes, sir.”
“Call the guy.”
At two in the morning, Jarvey Bennet, the sixty-five-year-old owner of Bennet’s Hardware, was unlocking the front door and turning on the lights. Dolan was there with another detective.
“A kid was in here the other day. Knew exactly what he wanted. One-eighth braided polyethylene.” He led the detective to the spools of line. “This one here.”
To Dolan’s naked eye, it looked exactly like the one at the crime scene. “Did he say why he wanted it?”
“Said he was a tree trimmer.”
Agent Dolan asked the hardware store owner to come over to the sheriff’s office and talk to the police artist.
“I’ll tell you, it was a Christmas I’ll never forget,” Bennet said later.
—
Honeybee hadn’t moved from the couch where he’d passed out the night before. On Christmas morning the TV was still playing and the local news was on. He was smoking a joint and waiting for the basketball game when Derek LaSalle appeared on the screen. He thought he was hallucinating. He punched up the sound. It was a police sketch of LaSalle, all right, implicated in a murder at the Kusek residence over on West Boulevard.
Honeybee reeled into the kitchen to get a beer and saw the cereal box had been dumped out all over the counter and the Glock was gone.
“He took my gun!”
If that lunatic had used it to kill someone, it would all come back to Honeybee. No matter what, the kid had been living here, the doo-doo was about to hit the fan. Honeybee did a quick sweep of the house for drugs and called the cops. Next thing he knew, TV vans were pulling up and cameras were in his face.
—
When the owner of the Winnebago, forty-one-year-old car mechanic Emmet Johnson, came out of the house to get the camper warmed up, he didn’t notice the brownish smear on the door, too wrapped up in dreading the drive over icy roads to his in-laws’ in Gillette for the holidays. He sat in the driver’s seat for several minutes with the engine running before going into the back, where he found cans of food opened up and empty beer bottles scattered around, the suitcases they’d packed for the trip opened and rifled through. His good jacket was missing. He stiffened with rage. Someone had been in here and had the gall to leave a note. It was carefully written on a brown paper bag with one of his daughter’s markers. “I am sorry for what I done. I am the person you are looking for. I am the only one. Do not blame anyone else.” When he carried the thing inside, his wife had the TV on, and it was playing the same news over and over about the Christmas Eve massacre that occurred just blocks away. Johnson notified the police, but they’d already been called to the Kaiserhof Kafe, where a disheveled man wearing a new hunting jacket had told the bartender that he’d “killed a hotshot in the Communist Party.” A waitress recognized him as a regular with a radical group called the New Pioneers. LaSalle was arrested in the restaurant without incident.
—
One year later, Derek LaSalle received the death sentence, later commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In a jailhouse interview for a TV documentary on psychotic killers, he was unconcerned about having murdered three people.
Asked if he felt remorse, LaSalle replied, “I don’t feel much of anything.”
His emerald eyes with the strange shine to them roved around the cell, never once looking at the interviewer.
“I wish I could cry,” he said, “like I used to.”
MERCY MEDICAL CENTER
DECEMBER 26, 1985
11:00 P.M.
Lance Kusek suffered a stroke caused by swelling of the brain and went into cardiac arrest. He died at 8:46 p.m. His sister, Jo Kusek, was present.
The vigil outside the hospital for his son had grown to several hundred. Candles were still burning. Flowers were laid at the entryway. Notes of condolence were slipped into the chain link bordering the snow-covered grass. Someone brought a guitar and people prayed together.
Three hours later, Willie Kusek died of his injuries. It took just forty-eight hours for the boy to join his parents.
TEN YEARS LATER
PEACE
The old cowboy is bent against the sky. Bowlegged and half crippled, he hops along slowly, one leg dragging. After a lifetime of riding bulls and wrangling horses, his body is broken in a hundred ways. His spirit, too. He’s no longer a seeker of trophies. His outlook on life has hardened around one thing: the land on which he was born and raised. The rest is a waste of effort.
Scotty Roy, age eighty-two, slides down the hill on worn boot heels, arms flailing to keep his balance. Those watching from below know not to offer help. He prides himself on still running cattle on the open plain. Such as it is. In his youth, at this tim
e of year, the prairie would have been opening to summer with banks of magenta bee balm flowers against yellow bristlegrass, delicate Indian ricegrass, sage-colored wild rye, and swaying tussocks of orchard grass among lush miles of natural forage. Few now living could picture it.
Jo Kusek is the first to step forward and embrace Scotty Roy. She feels she has a right. He’s as old as her dad would have been, and was “Uncle Scotty” to her brother. She’s emotional; he is shy, but true. Stops, grips her arms, and looks her in the eye to say how sorry he’s been all these years for having left Lance without a good-bye. He’d gone off without a word to the boy, then was too ashamed to make it to the funeral. Jo tells him that she understands.
When Dutch and Doris passed, Scotty said the hell with it on the deal with Monsanto. Just couldn’t stomach it. When Lance and his family were murdered, Jo turned the Lucky Clover Ranch over to caretakers. Now they’d come back to make peace and heal the land.
Scotty shakes hands with Jo’s husband, Warren, an easygoing, clean-cut, and straightforward fellow. The cowboy’s knees crackle out loud as he squats down to say hello to their six-year-old daughter, Nicole, and baby, Alice. The girls are tired because they’ve driven three days from Portland, but when Scotty promises fireworks, Nicole perks right up.
Warren carries the baby in the backpack and Jo takes Nicole by the hand. They follow Scotty over the hill. The wind is dry and searing. The low, constant wail gives Jo a chill, even though the July day is sunny and warm. The former missile site is a quarter mile from the Roys’ house. After all that hoopla, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was negotiated in 1991 and the missiles decommissioned. Nuclear warheads were pulled out, leaving a thousand empty holes. That same year, the Soviet Union collapsed, and all that remained of the Cold War in western South Dakota, and everything that came with it, was the wind.