The money was all there.
Martha Blue Kettle led Jim Doe out to their 1963 cat-eyed Chevrolet truck. He sat by the door, for the window. She sat in the middle, by her husband. Jim Doe let the air from the window rush into him, and wasn’t at all sure if the Blue Kettles were helping him escape or if they’d just bought him.
The next three days felt like more. Jim Doe’s chest was on fire. He was staying in Wallace Blue Kettle’s old room—he still remembered the name, from the plaque—in a trailer that had just been moved, it looked like.
Martha brought him cups of water and pieces of ice and changed his sheets while he was still in bed somehow, and the Indian thing she did to make him better was give him Tylenol for his fever, TheraFlu for everything else. They read the directions together, trying to get the maximum dose.
At night with his eyes closed he could see her and Blue Kettle again at the cemetery, the water stringing down through their grey hair, their eyes somewhere behind that hair, and he would almost wake screaming. Because the longhair was there with them, smiling his wolf smile across at Jim Doe. No, smiling his wolf smile at Jim Doe moments before Jim Doe had even known he was there. It made it worse somehow, to have been watched like that.
“Why are you doing this?” Jim Doe asked Martha on the third day, when he could.
She shrugged, chewing on her lip, and looked out the window.
Blue Kettle was in the door behind her, leaning on the jamb.
Later that day, he came back, stood in the far corner of the room.
“You shouldn’t be here, should you?” he said.
“Here?” Jim Doe said, looking around.
Blue Kettle smiled. “Alive,” he said.
Jim Doe shook his head. No, he shouldn’t be. He should be with his sister.
Blue Kettle nodded. Like he agreed. “But he didn’t take you, either,” he said.
“He?” Jim Doe said
“Tin Man,” Blue Kettle said.
Jim Doe cocked his head over, didn’t follow.
“Because he doesn’t have a heart,” Blue Kettle said. “Who else would take children away from their parents?”
Jim Doe said it in his head: Tin Man.
“Just an old Indian story,” Blue Kettle said. “Something about a lion, too. One guy made out of old rags.”
He was smiling.
Jim Doe closed his eyes.
“And Dorothy,” he said.
When he looked up again, Blue Kettle was gone.
The following morning, he was at the window in his blanket when Martha walked in with oatmeal. The glass of water beside the bowl was the glass that had come in the oatmeal container.
“What are they doing out there?” Jim Doe asked her.
She stood beside him.
A boy of maybe fourteen was setting rocks down on the coals of a fire he’d started three hours ago. In a pit.
“You want to get better, don’t you?” Martha said.
Four hours later, Blue Kettle waved to him in the window, telling him to come down. Jim Doe did. He came up to Blue Kettle’s nose, maybe. They were standing in front of a lodge half-buried in the ground. It was covered in old sleeping bags and deerskins and something with more hair, even, under the rest. Something older. Blue Kettle slung Jim Doe’s blanket off his shoulders, onto the lodge, then peeled his own shirt off, stepped out of his boots. Looked to Jim Doe.
“You can take your pants off or not,” he said. “Fuck if I care.”
He took his off, and stepped through the flap.
Jim Doe stood alone in the stomped-down grass for a few breaths, then, suddenly unsure where he was anymore—Lydia? Kansas? the twentieth century?—he stepped out of his jeans, into the lodge.
It was black in there like ink. And thick. And there were more people in there than just Blue Kettle and himself. The shapes of other old men glistened when the boy outside hooked the flap open, spooned another hot rock in. Blue Kettle had the water in a tall, plastic pitcher. There was a tin ladle in it. He used the ladle to drip water onto the rock. It hissed. One of the old men coughed and coughed. And then the tin ladle made the rounds, from right to left. Before the old men drank, they splashed some on the ground. Someone put a bundle of cedar or sage or something on the hot rock. Jim Doe held his mouth close to the ground, just to breathe. Four times he thought he couldn’t take it anymore, and four times, he did. On the fifth, though, he pushed open the flap, rolled out, into a pair of jeans. Maybe his own.
The boy was leaning on his forked stick.
“Pretty damn hot, yeah?” he said.
Jim Doe coughed, the outside air like ice in his lungs.
The boy shrugged, said that this was when they stuck the thermometer up his ass, like a turkey in the oven. “Indian Thanksgiving,” he said.
Jim Doe was looking at Martha in the window, though.
“You’re leaving now, aren’t you?” the boy said, behind him.
Jim Doe nodded.
The boy shrugged again. “They said you were,” he said. “That it was time.”
“I don’t know—” Jim Doe started. “How should I thank them?”
The boy smiled, straightened his arm into his loose pocket.
“Take this off their hands,” he said. “They don’t know what to do with it.”
It was a set of keys braided onto a piece of leather. Pontiac. The round one for the trunk was broken off.
The boy hooked his chin at the barn up by the road, then wouldn’t look at Jim Doe anymore. Just the rocks, the earth around them baked dry, cracking open.
Jim Doe walked to the barn.
In it, golden with hay dust, was the LeMans.
The key fit.
Jim Doe started it.
In a steel thermos on the passenger seat was chicken soup. It was still hot. There was a twist of tobacco hanging from the rearview by a red string. Like an air freshener.
Jim Doe touched it, set it spinning, then backed out, to the edge of the house almost. He leaned out the window to the boy.
“Which way was he going?” he said.
“Who?”
“The other one.”
“To hell if he don’t change his ways,” the boy said, smiling with his eyes, and Jim Doe pulled away, into Kansas, or wherever he was. He needed a shower, after the sweat. But it felt good, too. Clean.
He thumbed through Agnes’s envelope as he drove. All that was missing was three-ninety from the seventeen hundred. For bail. Which he was now jumping. He hesitated at the blacktop—north, or south—and then turned right. North. Into the clouds.
Part II
FOURTEEN10 April 1999, Lincoln, Nebraska
He would be on the monitors for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The tape was recording at extended play. The morgue was stainless steel. A funhouse. The cameras were new. This was their test.
The one over the door looked out onto the parking lot.
It caught the 1981 Bonneville Brougham rolling in, headlights off, driver’s side door already open, the sole of a shoe skimming the gravel top of the asphalt. And then he stood up on the other side of it, the Indian who’d done Tom, letting his eyes adjust. It was military almost: using the car’s body to shield him. But then he walked around it, with purpose. In his hand was a bat. His face was painted. His shirt read HYSTERIA.
He looked up to the camera and smiled, then the round end of the bat was at the lens. It just nudged it—the camera—over, to the trees. It was on an actuator, though, had only been still because he’d been moving. When he was inside and there was no more movement, it continued its cycle, sweeping from one side of the parking lot to the other.
And then it was the Reception Area.
The camera here was behind the bulletproof glass.
The station was empty, the graveyard shift mopping up in back.
The Indian hitched the narrow handle of the bat through the long handle of the door, reached through the reception window, buzzed himself in.
He was
smiling.
At the edge of the first hall camera’s frame, he met the first attendant. A Ronald Sepps. Ronald Sepps dropped the clipboard he’d been leading with, and flattened himself against the wall. For a moment it looked like that was going to do it—that all the Indian wanted was to get by—but then, a half-step past Ronald Sepps, he spun on his heel and drove the butt of the bat handle into the attendant’s midsection. Ronald Sepps folded around it, his glasses arcing out across the tile. It was slick and shiny, the tile. The bat was wooden.
When Ronald Sepps was down, the Indian hit him again.
For eight blind seconds, then, he was moving along the hall, from Entry Hall Cam 1a to Entry Hall Cam 2a. It was what the security company had labeled them with masking tape. The monitors had cost too much, though. All the cameras just fed into the video recording unit in the ceiling. It wasn’t real-time protection, wasn’t really for intruders at all, but for the morgue attendants. Because of alleged impropriety with the dead.
The Indian pulled Attendant Marcy Stonecipher into Entry Hall Cam 2a’s field of view by the hair. She was bleeding from the face. Later it would be a skull fracture, reconstructive surgery, therapy.
All the doors in the hall of the morgue were steel, with glass windows, wire buried in the glass like circuitry. The Indian passed each—going to cameras 3a and 1b—and shattered them inward as he passed. In slow motion, the arc the tip of his wooden bat left was traced perfectly by his hair, following the motion.
There were no more attendants until the last room. And then it was all of them. This was the one room without a smoke detector. Iris Caine, Buddy Colbert, and T. Elliot Mase were all mopping in there, over and over. The floor was like ice. They called it the Cooler. On the wall behind them was a bank of body-sized drawers. Buddy “Bud’ Colbert’s cigarette hissed to the floor. The cameras didn’t get sound, but still, Maines could tell it hissed, with the Indian standing in the door, his bat held low and bloody.
Iris Caine said something then, and the Indian slung his hair over his left shoulder, looked at her. They were at opposite sides of the Cool Cam 3.
Maybe she asked why his face was painted, or what he was doing here, or that now somebody was going to watch this tape, see them smoking around all these people who couldn’t get cancer anymore. Or maybe she explained why they all smoked: the smell, the idea of the smell, of particles rising off the dead, invading your body through the tympanum mucosa high up in the nostril. Or maybe she just said her first please. To get it over with.
The Indian held his bat out and she stepped forward, and he tapped her once on the head, getting the spacing down, then put his shoulder into it.
Buddy Colbert leaned on his mop and watched her fall.
T. Elliot Mase slammed himself back into the drawers, scrabbled on the countertop for something, anything: a saw that glinted in the fluorescents.
He used it like a hay hook in a horror movie, windmilling high over his shoulder, the tip trailing the ceiling, bringing flakes of white down after it. The Indian caught the blade on his bat. It hardly bit. He flung it away, used the handle end of the bat like the flat cap of a bo stick, right to T. Elliot Mase’s chin. Mase crashed back. Buddy Colbert was running by now, pushing his mop bucket over behind him. The Indian nodded, let him run, let the water wash over his feet, and then he closed the door, wedged a chair under it, and started opening drawers.
The children were in the third and fourth up, on the end.
The camera was right on the Indian. He closed his eyes, his lips moving in apology, in song, then cradled them out, set them on the floor. Applied the bundle of sage or marijuana or jimsonweed or whatever it was. He moved like they were moving with him, too, or like he thought they were. Maines could only tell after watching it four or five times, but once you saw, it was unmistakable.
When the Indian looked up to the camera again, his tears were black.
He lifted the girl onto a gurney, the boy onto a coffin trolley, then rolled them back down the cameras, to the front desk, and buzzed himself out. The Bonneville Brougham was parked angled slightly away from the outside camera, but, frozen and enhanced, the trunk the Indian set John and Jane Doe into already had a John and Jane Doe. They were black and staring.
“He’s goddamn getting them somewhere,” McKirkle said, pushing away from the small television.
McKirkle leaned over to spit into a plant he’d pulled over, said it again—“six hours,” how much they’d missed this by—and then the Bonneville Brougham pulled away, still no lights, and in its wake Buddy Colbert rose, still holding his mop, and looked up to the camera, and the only statement he had for the responding officer was that Indians were mad again, it looked like. And that the Lincoln morgue needed better security.
FIFTEEN16 April 1999, Pawnee City, Nebraska
Jim Doe woke to the sound of a door shutting. He was on the side of the road, close enough that the big trucks still rattled his dash. He had been making himself sleep, making himself wait for the gas station in Pawnee City to wake. The pump would take a card, but he was paying cash. But now there was a woman at his window, looking in, her hair dark around her narrow face, grey at the edges.
He blinked, she remained, and he said his sister’s name before he could stop himself, in his head.
It wasn’t her, though. Two years older than Jim Doe wasn’t old enough to go grey. And anyway, she was Indian, wouldn’t go grey until after everybody else.
Behind her, strung out on the road, was her caravan. Ragged trucks with antennae sprouting out at odd angles, compact cars thick with laundry. A twenty-six foot Airstream camper with TAMBOURINE SKY stenciled on it in vivid blue, propane tanks clustered at the nose. Stormchasers.
Jim Doe stood, steadying himself up with the roof of the LeMans. It left dry crumbs of vinyl on his hand. He held his palm open and the crumbs lifted away.
The woman was looking at him like she was trying to recognize him, remember him. She was hard, angular, not born to this land but part of it now.
“You’re that one everybody’s looking for,” she said.
“I’m the one looking,” Jim Doe corrected.
She stared at him like she wanted to believe this.
“Just wanted to see if you were alive,” she said, finally.
Jim Doe looked at his car, sitting at a slant in the ditch like it had just thawed out of some big drift.
“Yeah, well,” he said.
She stared at him, studying him. There was still sleep in her eyes too, in her breath. She shrugged, started to say something, didn’t, then just looked past him at the LeMans, like she had some advice to give him about it. Some warning about that particular model. But then she kept it to herself, turned, left. The people in her gypsy train were ragged and roped with veins, had been living on potato chips and hope for too long, it looked like.
Jim Doe watched them pass then turned around and peed into the tall grass of the ditch. It steamed. He closed his eyes. A horse was watching him.
“Tambourine Sky?” he said to the horse.
The horse just stared.
Under the front seat of the LeMans was a bulky .44 revolver. He’d had to pay extra for it, because he didn’t want the man behind the glass counter at the pawnshop to run his license. Or ask any questions. So they’d done it person to person, instead of shop to customer. There was no tax. Four hundred dollars on the counter. That was South Dakota, Rapid City, when he’d decided he could get ahead of the longhair, maybe. The news reports told him he hadn’t, so now it was Nebraska again.
He sat back down behind the wheel and pulled his new hat on, snugged it down. It was pawnshop also, a lucky find, a close enough fit, but it smelled like somebody else’s sweat, too.
Still, for twelve dollars, right?
Jim Doe rubbed his nose with the side of his hand and studied the horizon. There was a system building to the east. He’d watched it two nights ago on a motel television, signed in under a different name, more cash on the counter. T
he weatherman’s color-enhanced image of it had it cycling slow, and wide. One of the bad ones. The good ones. The small animals knew already.
Jim Doe pulled the hat lower, woke again to the same woman knocking on his glass. It was late afternoon now. Her caravan was pointed south, and she had a canvas fishing hat clamped onto her head, held down with her left hand. And somebody standing to her right, about even with the LeMans’ trunk. A man.
“So’s it broke?” she was saying, about the LeMans.
“It’s a Pontiac,” Jim Doe said, sitting up in the seat, craning to see who was with her now.
Sheriff Debs. In uniform. Thoroughly sunglassed.
Jim Doe squinted, checked his mental map: this was Nebraska. Not Kansas. Definitely not Garden City.
“Then it’s you, right?” the woman was saying.
Jim Doe squinted, tried to catch up.
“Who’s broke,” she filled in.
He smiled, rubbed his whole face with his palm.
“What’s he doing here?” he finally got out.
Debs heard, peered over, a toothpick chocked at the corner of his mouth.
“More like what are you doing?” he said.
“You know him?” Jim Doe said to the woman.
“Me and Sherry go back, you could say,” Debs said, pinching his slacks up so he could squat down to the LeMans’ window, get level with Jim Doe. And also keep him from stepping out.
“But this is Nebraska,” Jim Doe said.
“I told you,” Debs said. “You’re not the only fool after him.”
“The—the longhair?”
“Other one.”
“Tin Man.”
“Tin-what?”
Jim Doe shook his head no, nothing.
One of the trucks in the caravan was honking.
“So . . . so she calls you whenever there’s action?” Jim Doe said, about the woman, the storm.
“I’ve helped her out of a ditch or two,” Debs said. “So is this a stakeout? You hot on a trail? Got an informant there?”
The horse.
“He knows some stuff,” Jim Doe said.
“Like that you’re driving evidence around?”
“He’s already in a Bonneville, right?” Jim Doe said back.
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