Prairie Gothic

by J. M. Hayes

  “Kinda reminds you of that street in Amsterdam, doesn’t it,” the visitor from Oz observed. “Whores on display. Only these are ladies of the morning, and they aren’t selling a substitute for love, they’re eager buyers. They’ll settle for anything that resembles affection.”

  The fifth door to the right of the elevator was closed and empty. Mrs. Martin did the honors without a knock. She swung it open on a cramped room into which a few pieces of ornate furniture had been stuffed.

  “We encourage the families to let residents use their own furniture,” Mr. Deffenbach explained. “It helps them feel at home.”

  The room felt anything but home-like. Temporary storage, maybe, which, English decided, many families, as well as the management, probably considered it to be.

  Alice Burton was sitting in a rocker nearly hidden behind a dresser so out of proportion for the small room that it blocked half of the only window. She didn’t look like an Alzheimer’s patient. She was clean and well groomed, her hair only lightly peppered with gray. She was wearing corduroys and boots below a hand-knitted sweater with a gold pin. She held a baby swaddled in a thick blanket.

  “Let me do this, it’ll be easier.” Dorothy ducked past Mrs. Martin.

  “The Sheriff’s here, Alice. He’s come to take this baby back to her rightful mother. You understand why that’s got to be.”

  Alice Burton did seem to understand. She looked at the bundled form sadly for a moment, then delivered it to Dorothy without complaint.

  “You see,” Lucille Martin began, then faltered as the tiny woman began peeling back the blanket. No one would make a doll in quite such a pasty shade of gray.

  “Sweet Jesus!” Deffenbach exclaimed.

  “Sure don’t smell sweet, and there’s no indication he’ll rise from the dead. I’d guess this ain’t him.” Dorothy passed the dead infant to the sheriff’s open arms.

  ***

  It was a small skull. Until he reached down and picked it up, Mad Dog let himself hope he was wrong and this wasn’t human. When he touched it all doubts vanished. He had one of those moments he couldn’t explain. It made him believe in himself again. He was, in fact, a natural born Cheyenne shaman.

  What he felt was kinship. He was related to this tiny orb of weathered bone. They were both Cheyenne. He didn’t know how he knew, but he was sure.

  He held the skull up and looked at it as if he might recognize its features. It didn’t work. It remained only vacant bone, but bone that had once been one of his people.

  So much for Tommie Irons’ uninterrupted journey to the happy hunting grounds. Englishman was going to have to know about this, and once he came to this place, finding Tommie was a virtual certainty. Unless…Mad Dog considered the apparent age of the skull again. Maybe, if this were some prehistoric Cheyenne, he could just replant it.

  “Where did you find this, Hailey?”

  The wolf didn’t make any Lassie-like efforts to lead him where he wanted to go. She just wagged her tail and danced around as if she expected him to toss the skull and involve her in a game of catch. Her games of catch, however, involved darting to within inches of his grasp and then tearing away, holding whatever prize she was currently using to tempt him into trying to catch her. Trying was the key word.

  Mad Dog opened one of the big Velcro pouches in his jacket. The skull was small enough to fit inside. Discovering where Hailey had found it shouldn’t be hard. He was Cheyenne, after all. Well, one-quarter Cheyenne, or, if Englishman’s wife’s genealogical researches were correct, more like one-sixteenth, that quarter being broken into equal parts Cheyenne, Sans Arc, Buffalo Soldier, and Mexican cowboy. Not that his heritage was necessary. Backtracking her through the snow in the sloughs should be simple. There would be no other wolf tracks.

  ***

  Benteen County, Kansas lay smack in the middle of the Bible belt. Fundamentalist Christians were common. Those with liberal interpretations of the holy book—Episcopalians, say—tended to be viewed with suspicion. Non-Christians, like born-again-Cheyenne Mad Dog, were considered aberrations. They were suffered because this was a free nation, tolerant of other views, so long as they were insignificant enough to be crushed the moment they threatened. You couldn’t drive out of Buffalo Springs’ city limits without encountering a pro-life billboard. Many citizens might send contributions in support of Planned Parenthood, but they didn’t mention it over a cup of coffee at Bertha’s Cafe, especially not when steak knives were part of the place settings.

  The sheriff accepted the sad little bundle with a doubly heavy heart. He mourned this small innocent, whose life had ended almost before it began, and he mourned for the community as well. Buffalo Springs wouldn’t rest until someone paid for this. God help the mother, he thought, unless there proved to be a simple explanation for how her child came to be here instead of up the street at Klausen’s Funeral Parlor.

  “Two dead bodies?” the sheriff inquired of Mr. Deffenbach and Mrs. Martin. “One that should be here and isn’t, and one that shouldn’t be and is? Your security is worse than you imagined.”

  “I’ll get you the name and address of the man on the front desk last night,” Mrs. Martin offered, shifting blame. Deffenbach just directed his horrified stare at the infant and trailed along as they headed back toward the elevator.

  “I’ll need Doc Jones over here right away. Then I’ll want that name, and a chat with anybody else who knows anything about this.”

  The women of the morning quietly watched them pass. Dorothy of the ruby tennies trailed along, silent now, looking faintly ashamed of the way she’d behaved.

  Mrs. Martin hurried ahead to punch for the elevator. Surprisingly, it opened almost immediately.

  “Freeze!” a voice shouted from inside. Everyone did pretty much the opposite. A .357 magnum poked cautiously into the hall. “Which of you is the phantom snowballer? Fess up.”

  “Wynn?” The sheriff’s voice hovered somewhere between outrage and astonishment. “Put that gun away!”

  Before the deputy could obey, the door hissed shut. Wynn frantically pulled his hand back inside. His hand made it, but the .357 stayed behind.

  ***

  Hailey hadn’t chosen her path with Mad Dog’s convenience in mind. Still, he hadn’t been up in the cottonwoods long enough for her to have ranged far. He went around the thick stands of undergrowth that she’d cut through. Her path was easy to pick up again on the other side. She’d come from downstream of the dam that held Tommie Irons’ pond.

  Sometime over the years, the pond had filled to overflowing. Gradually, it must have built its own spillway. The soaked earth suffered years of freezing and baking. The spillway eroded its way toward the pond. Recently, a fresh chunk of earth had tumbled into the stream. That’s where the footprints led and, when Mad Dog clambered up onto the side of the dam to examine the icy avalanche from above, he saw more bones protruding, both from the wall of earth that remained and in the debris that had fallen.

  Tommie Irons’ dam really was a burial mound. Mad Dog suddenly remembered that Tommie had been specific about where he wanted his own bones placed—at the other end of the dam, about as far as you could get from where these were.

  Mad Dog dropped to his belly and leaned over the edge. Hailey sat by his side, proudly sharing her find. The bones had taken on the texture of the earth that held them. Mixed with bits of ice and snow, they were hard to make out. One thing was immediately clear, though. Most were far too large to go with the skull Hailey had brought him.

  There was something else down there among the earth and bones. It was a splash of color that didn’t belong in a January Kansas landscape. Mad Dog reached and brushed at it. It came loose and he snagged it with his gloved hand before it could fall into the breach.

  It was plastic, a battered ID card. Mad Dog could barely make it out without his reading glasses. There was a picture and part of the name that faded away toward the end. HORNB was all that remained.

  The picture was of a you
ng man with dark hair and smiling lips. It could be an old shot of County Supervisor Ezekiel Hornbaker, only this face had a broad, flat nose that appeared to have encountered a determined fist. Mad Dog was sure Supervisor Hornbaker’s nose had never looked like this.

  ***

  Doc Jones arrived in his aging Buick station wagon that doubled as ambulance or hearse, depending on circumstances. It was beige, speckled with mud, not unlike the streaks of tired snow that remained between the elms on the lawn in front of the Sunshine Towers Retirement Home.

  The sheriff met his old friend on the sidewalk. The wind reminded him just how cold it was. Doc slumped into his heavy overcoat, his droopy, hound-dog face looking even sadder than usual.

  “Morning, Sheriff.” Doc extended his hand. “As coroner, I get to come over here all too often, but never after an infant before. What’s up?”

  The sheriff escorted him to the entry and through its first set of doors. In the space between inner and outer doors, the cold was only a threat, not an adversary.

  “I don’t know much yet, Doc. What I do is pretty bizarre.”

  “I assume you’re keeping me from getting somewhere warm for a reason.” Doc gestured to where a small crowd filled the lobby and stared at them with an intensity normally reserved by residents here for a few soap operas or the odd global tragedy.

  “Everybody in the county is going to know about this before dark. I’d just as soon not share more than I have to.”

  Doc nodded and snuggled a little deeper into his coat.

  “Tommie Irons died last night,” the sheriff told him.

  “Not a surprise. The cancer was all through him. So you’ve got two bodies for me?”

  The sheriff sighed. “Tommie’s not here. Apparently Mad Dog’s been coming to see him. They’ve been sharing their indigenousness, or something. I guess Tommie decided he wanted a traditional Choctaw burial and persuaded Mad Dog to help. Some of the residents called Mad Dog and smuggled him in this morning. Damned if I know where my brother or the body have got to.”

  Doc’s droopy mouth straightened into a half smile. “Sorry, Sheriff, that’s partly my fault. I persuaded Mad Dog to come talk to Tommie about Native American religious notions. The old man wasn’t going easy and I thought…No, hell, I should have thought. Your brother always carries things to their illogical extremes. But what’s that got to do with a dead baby?”

  “After Mad Dog left with Tommie, some of the seniors went for an early morning stroll. Alice Burton was one of them. You know about her?”

  “She’s not one of my patients, but yeah. I know. She’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but she’s not as far gone as her family seems to want to think. This got something to do with that doll they gave her?”

  “I guess she took the doll along. Nobody noticed anything until after they got back. Somewhere, she seems to have traded plastic for the real thing.”

  “And I assume they didn’t traipse through any nurseries. You’re thinking this child was abandoned?”

  “Shortly after birth from the look of things. Part of the umbilical cord is still attached. I’m hoping this kid belongs to someone who was just passing through town.”

  “I can appreciate that sentiment,” Doc said.

  “We may end up with a lynch-mob reaction to this. Can you suggest any likely candidates for the baby’s mother?”

  “Half the teenage girls in this county. We don’t teach our kids sex education. We don’t offer much recreation. The nearest Planned Parenthood office is halfway across the state. Having a ‘premature’ kid six months or less after the wedding is pretty much the norm around here.”

  “I meant specifically.”

  Doc turned his face away from the crowd in the lobby. “You know I don’t do abortions, Sheriff. Not because I don’t believe they’re occasionally a better option, but because if I did, even an occasional secret one, word would get out and I couldn’t live here anymore. Literally. You and I could list a dozen people in this county who would seriously consider shooting me if they believed I was killing unborn babies. So, I’d have to say no in answer to your question. No one’s come to me for a solution to an unwanted pregnancy, and even if they had, I’d never admit it. I took an oath. If anyone told me something like that, I couldn’t reveal it.”

  “Sorry, Doc. The possibilities of this thing scare me as much as they do you. I was thinking of myself more as coming to someone’s rescue rather than leading a rush to punish.”

  “I know.” A shiver ran up Doc’s spine that the sheriff didn’t think came from the cold. “Let’s take a look. I’m coroner here and I’ll share with you anything I learn from performing my duty. What you do then is between you and the law, or you and your conscience.”

  The sheriff couldn’t recall ever seeing Doc so obviously upset. Neither of them knew a thing about this baby yet, and already both of them were as skittish as a pair of taxpayers facing IRS audits.

  He opened the inner doors and shooed people aside. They pushed through to the hall that led to the cafeteria and offices and headed for the one where Deputy Wynn stood guard, one hand hiding his empty holster. The sheriff had locked his deputy’s .357 in the glove box of his truck and wasn’t sure he would return it.

  “Mornin’, Doc,” Wynn said.

  “If there’s a disaster, I can always count on you being there, can’t I, Deputy?”

  Doc really was in a mood. If there was one man in the county who was never unkind to those who meant no harm, it was Doc Jones. Wynn didn’t seem to notice the insult. He just opened the door to the nurse’s office, then followed them inside.

  “Ah, damn!” Doc muttered softly. He peeled away the blanket that swaddled the infant with a touch so gentle it seemed he must believe the potential for suffering survived beyond death.

  The room felt too small for three adults and a dead baby, though not for want of square footage. All of Kansas was too small for the blend of horror and tragic innocence the tiny corpse represented.

  “At least we can rule out the Golds and the Eisenbergs,” Wynn said.

  The sheriff was surprised. Not that either family had been high on his list, but he thought it was going to be tough to narrow down suspects.

  “Why’s that?” Doc asked, his tone equally tinged with doubt.

  “You didn’t notice?” Wynn was clearly shocked, and, from the flush that suddenly spread over his face, maybe a little embarrassed.

  “Notice what?”

  “His pee pee. Look at his pee pee,” Wynn said. “Boy sure ain’t Jewish.”

  ***

  Bertha’s Cafe was jammed. All the booths along the windows were occupied and the excess had spilled over to flood the seats at the counter. People milled around, waiting in the remaining floor space, making a mockery of the capacity sign the fire marshal had tacked up by the front door. Bertha delivered monstrous platters of bacon and eggs and home fries, and brimming mugs of coffee strong enough to wake Sleeping Beauty. Buffalo Springs wasn’t ready to trade large doses of cholesterol and caffeine for bran muffins and juice just yet.

  County Supervisors Bontrager and Hornbaker were nursing their coffee and discussing the outrage of Mad Dog making off with Tommie Irons’ corpse. Irons was Ezekiel Hornbaker’s brother-in-law. The supervisors were occupying a booth Bertha could make better use of. That’s why she asked them about the baby.

  “What baby?” they replied.

  Bontrager was a big man in the dairy cattle industry. He raised registered Holsteins on a couple of sections a few miles north of town. He’d been handsome when he was younger. Now, in his early seventies, he just looked weathered and maybe a little beaten down by the losses he’d been taking on his tech stocks.

  Zeke Hornbaker was taller and maybe five years younger than Bontrager, but he looked younger still. He didn’t farm. The family had inherited money, and Zeke, to hear him tell it, was a successful investor in the commodities market. His boots and western-style suit were custom made and helped him l
ook fit and young, as did regular applications of hair coloring.

  “That dead baby they found over at the Sunshine Home this morning. Folks have been talking about it since I opened. I figured two government officials, such as yourselves, would know everything. Or should.”

  Parties at several adjacent tables turned to listen to Hornbaker’s response. “You sure about this, Bertha?”

  “It’s true,” a farmer in a pair of clean, starched bib-overalls at the counter replied. “I dropped the wife off there to visit her mother a bit ago. They say it was a newborn that somebody just disposed of. Threw away. Englishman and Wynn were over there investigating. You didn’t know about it?” The tone of that last part seemed faintly accusatory and was met by a general grumbling from Bertha’s clientele.

  “Maybe you should check in at the courthouse?” Bertha suggested. There was enough nodding to indicate a chorus of Amens might have been heard had this been a gathering of those seeking sustenance for the soul instead of the flesh.

  “Maybe we should,” Bontrager agreed, uncertainly.

  “No maybe about it,” Hornbaker replied, wadding up his napkin and climbing to his feet. “If a baby has been murdered in Buffalo Springs, I personally will not rest until the guilty party is caught and punished.” His statement had the ring of a campaign promise. Hornbaker and Bontrager grabbed their coats off the rack and headed for the door, trailing a few loyal political followers and leaving some badly needed table space.

  “Gertie and Abe Yoder, party of five,” Bertha called. She grabbed a stack of dirty dishes with one arm while she swiped a gray cloth across the formica, leaving it smelling of antiseptic and covered by a film the Yoder children could draw in while their parents studied a menu that changed about as often as Kansas gave its electoral votes to a Democrat.

  ***

  Doc Jones had taken the baby to Klausen’s Funeral Parlor, where one of the back rooms made do for official Benteen County Coroner’s business. Wynn Some, still unenlightened about circumcision, had been sent to retrieve the cruiser, keeping his eyes open for the doll that Alice Burton had presumably traded for the real thing on the way. His eager efforts to make a report about his pursuit of the phantom snowballer also remained on hold. His shift was over and he was off duty. The sheriff needed help, but it was clear things would go smoother without Wynn.