Stories About Corn

by Ri, Xesin

  “She called the police? 9-1-1?” asked Officer Smith.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey,” Officer Smith said into his radio. With his earpiece in, the officer was the only one who could hear what was being said in response. Officer Smith continued the seemingly one-sided talk. “Right, was there a Loretta Dean who called in anything about a kid falling or anything out here?” The officer waited a moment looking up at the ceiling light, thinking and listening. “No, Loretta Dean. D-E-A-N, Loretta. Should have called just a few minutes ago. I’m at the location now.” The officer listened again. On the second floor, Chuck looked around the kitchen and noticed for the first time that things were out-of-place. “No, I came out here because there was a suspicious activities call. Someone called about a man with a flashlight and possibly a weapon running out into the fields away from this location. The man was responding to a young man who fell from a wind turbine. The man’s name is Chuck Dean. His wife, who he says made a call from their house here, to 9-1-1, is Loretta Dean.” Chuck listened and grew more and more concerned. The pictures of their wedding day were gone. “Okay, Mr. Dean?” called the officer. “Mr. Dean?”

  Chuck walked to the top of the stairs and sat down.

  “We were just married, a little more than a year ago.”

  “Is something wrong, sir? Where is your wife, Mr. Dean?”

  “All our pictures are gone. Other than the curtains she picked out—“

  Chuck got up and went quickly down the stairs. Officer Smith drew back from the fast moving Mr. Dean. “Sir?” he called out.

  “She’s gone. Her pictures. Her computer,” he said from his small downstairs office. Chuck raced across from one room to the other. “It’s gone. It’s all gone.”

  “Sir, try and tell me, slowly, what is happening? Or what you think is happening?”

  Chuck rushed past the officer and opened the door to the garage. His car, his blue Toyota pick-up, was sitting right where he left it this afternoon after work. Loretta’s gray Honda Civic was gone.

  “Sir, please, try and explain. Where is your wife? Where do you think she is?”

  “She’s not here. Her car, our pictures; I left my wallet and the picture was ripped out, our wedding picture; but my computer is still here.”

  “Are you saying she left?”

  “Yes, yes!” cried Chuck. “You need to put out a—a thing for her car. You need to look for it. It is a silver Honda Civic. Her name is Loretta. She is about five foot ten or so. Her hair was braided when I saw her last, and it is dark brown, not quite black. She has a few freckles on her face and forearms. She doesn’t like the heat. She is very nervous. You have to find her, Officer!”

  “She is missing? Why do you think that?”

  “Because she’s robbed me,” said Chuck. His eyes were wide open and Officer Smith wasn’t sure what to say.

  Another officer tapped the window on the storm door.

  “Gary,” said the officer from outside, “what’s going on?” Chuck could see two very tense people. “These are the parents of Jake Knews.”

  “James, would you do me a favor. This is Mr. Dean. He seems to be having a problem finding his wife. Have him explain it to you.”

  “You don’t understand!” yelled Chuck running up the stairs into his kitchen.

  “James—go talk to him. I think he thinks his wife ran off on him, robbed him too. I’ll tell the Knews what I know.”

  Officer James T. Reingold walked up the stairs holding his radio with one hand and keeping his other hand on his hip. He found Chuck Dean tossing open drawers. “What is it you are looking for?”

  “My fucking keys! Damnit to hell! She took my keys!”

  “Sir, if I am going to be able to help, you need to calm down. Now, take it easy. Yelling and screaming profanity isn’t going to get anything done.”

  Chuck looked at the officer and then continued the search for his keys. After a moment, he spoke again. “I work for the A double D corporation. I’m an ADD man.”

  “You work for Add.”

  “No, I work for A-D-D. We aren’t supposed to call it Add. We have been working closely with the federal government and some state governments on a massive—agreement—that would allow—“ Chuck Dean stopped and ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m going to be in big trouble—not like she’ll be in—but, I’m ruined.”

  Chuck Dean slumped down onto his couch and held his head in his hands. Officer Reingold looked down at the man with a hard and severe look reserved for these ADD Corporation folks.

  “Do you think she stole sensitive A-D-D information?”

  “I thought—ha, she thought I was threatening her. She was talking about the Knews kid being in the street so much—oh my. She was talking about how he watched everyone, all their comings-and-goings. I told her that people in small communities, like this one, mostly ADD people, find out what people do sooner or later. That thieves are found out because people talk.”

  “What do you do for A-D-D Corp., Mr. Dean?”

  “Sir, take my word for it, I work for ADD; and I need to look for my wife in a silver-gray two thousand eight Honda Civic. I think the first two in the license plate were ‘D’ and ‘X.’ I don’t remember the rest. You have to find her. You have to stop her. You absolutely must find her and stop her.”

  Officer Reingold had questions and plenty of concern about any ADD man asking for help.

  “Give me a moment. I need to talk to my supervisor.”

  Chuck sat back on his couch. No one was coming to kill him. No real danger was down the road. He was simply ruined. He and only he would take the fall. The leak was in his own home. Simple thoughts, simple questions, and simple solutions would lead to his being labeled incompetent by his bosses. Then they would wonder why they hired him in the first place. Finally, they would fire him. His name, however, would be in the papers, on the internet, and right on the tip of every industry insider’s tongue. The man who married the multi-billion dollar leak. They would ask of each other: “How didn’t he know?” “He must have known,” “He had to have known!”

  “Sir,” said Officer Reingold returning, “I was just putting out the alert when a call came in about a Civic down the road from here.”

  “Oh my God! You found her?”

  “No, sir. Seems the car was torched, sir. Fire department just got there. If you would like to ride with me, I can take you to it.”

  “My wife?”

  “The car is still burning, sir. Very hot, sir. Fire department will be staying back until they know the fuel is cool, safe or burned out.”

  The officer went outside and Chuck followed. He stopped and took the house key he had hidden in a flowerpot and locked the door to his home.

  The officer let Chuck sit in the front seat. They rode in silence just a few miles down the road. For Chuck, it seemed as if he were a policeman on the hunt since if his wife did rob him then she was a criminal; then again, he didn’t want to believe that. There simply was no other explanation of her behavior. To his left the officer seemed to be growing more and more reticent about something.

  The glow of the fire, the spinning lights of the fire trucks and the ambulance, and the men trying to spray water and foam around the car to make a sort of barrier so that other cars in the lot wouldn’t catch all made quite a spectacle. The tin roof above a portion of the lot was only fifty-feet by fifty-feet, but its purpose in the getaway was simple: satellites and planes have difficulties with rooves.

  “Do you think this place has security cameras?”

  “No,” said Officer Reingold. “We come out here a lot to deal with rowdy kids shooting up the lot next door with pellet guns. Common problem at junk yards.”

  “My wife is not here.”

  “Not if what you seem to be suggesting is true; no, sir, I would not think she would be here if she were doing what you suggest.”

  Chuck Dean leaned forward in the car and held his head in his hands.

  Officer Reingol
d said nothing as he stared at the back of the A-D-D man’s head.

  “I’m just not that smart. I played with fire—not literally—I just took a gamble. Those were sensitive company files, sir. But I loved her too. Or, um, something like that. Better than one year. I bet you see this stuff sometimes. I probably look like a huge idiot.”

  “I see lots of idiots; you don’t seem any worse.”

  Chuck laughed.

  “Was any of this sensitive A-D-D information criminal in nature?”

  “No. No. It was actually about a series of laws that will go into effect next year, but it was all time-sensitive stuff. Only a few people knew about it.”

  “The lawmakers must know about it if they’ve passed it.”

  “They didn’t read it. They were told to pass it by party leaders. Criticism will be crushed, smothered, and ignored. It was all worked out.”

  Officer Reingold looked at the burning car. He wondered if he had passed the Civic on the way to the call.

  “Sir, are you suggesting—“

  “Are you kidding?” yelled the man. “It’s ADD! You know how it is. Don’t think you matter. Don’t think any one person matters! Bullshit! Take me home; she’s not here.”

  Officer Reingold put his car into reverse and pulled out of the lot, away from the fire trucks and the old cars and the lights.

  He drove Mr. Dean back home where the man got more and more agitated as the car got closer and closer to his property.

  “I’m done. I’m totally done,” said Mr. Dean.

  James looked over at him when he stopped the car. “You are home, Mr. Dean.”

  Mr. Dean stepped from the car. “You’ve seen people lost. Never coming back. You think that’s what’s going to happen here? I’ll never see her again?”

  “Maybe, tough to know. Why don’t you come by the station tomorrow when you are feeling a little more talkative?”

  “What’s it like to lose someone forever? Do you know?”

  The officer flicked the dog tags that hung from his rearview mirror. “Yes, lost my brother last month. It’s something that feels unique to you and you alone, yet every single person on earth goes through that pain some time or another.”

  “Sorry about your brother.”

  “Sorry about your finding out about your wife.”

  Mr. Dean closed the door, walked up to his house, unlocked the door and stepped inside.

  James watched the lights come on in the house. He waited to see if anything odd happened. Nothing did…for fifteen minutes.

  James sighed as a call came over the radio. It was time to go.

  James pulled out and drove off. He hated hot nights in the late fall and winter, weird calls on those sorts of nights.

  Early-December

  Details, Details, Details…

  “How were your pancakes?” asked the waitress.

  “Good,” answered Al Duncan.

  “Anything else I can get you?”

  She stood in front of him wearing her pale brown waitress uniform, which was simply a once brown dress with a clean white collar that came down and overlapped itself into a sharp V at the center of her chest that was matched up with sensible black shoes and a nametag that read, “Dora.”

  “Would you like anything else?” she repeated, annoyed she had to ask twice.

  She was black. She sounded like she was from the South Side of Chicago. She seemed tough as nails, despite her job and the dress she wore as a uniform. Probably the sort of woman who would, without hesitation, jump on a dine-n-dash patron or have some harsh words for a patron who stiffed her on a tip.

  “No. How many times have you gotten into a fight in a parking lot?” Al didn’t know what else to ask; too many YouTube videos he supposed.

  “What?” asked Dora. “Fight in a parking lot?”

  “You’re from the South Side, aren’t you?”

  She laughed. “I guess there aren’t a lot of colored girls out here, are there?”

  He loved the way she said ‘colored girls’ like it was last century. It only made her seem all the more exotic. She belonged in an old black-and-white movie.

  “So, I was thinking it, you thinking it?” Al looked at her. He knew the look on his own face. He knew he was talking and acting like a playing-for-fun guy.

  “You are a funny guy, aren’t you?”

  “I’m headed west to my brother’s home in Wyoming. I’ve got a long way to go. But I’m sure I’ll be through Illinois sometime soon. Just doing a little work for my brother out there in Wyoming for awhile.”

  “You work on farms?”

  “You can tell?”

  “Same as you seeing me as black.”

  Al smiled; she was quick. “Yeah, I do. But I know an awful lot about horses and other animals too. Out there, I’m goin’ to be helping my brother with some of his cattle. I work, Miss; I ‘m not just a wild drifter.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll see what I think after you give me that tip.”

  “Twelve dollars for my food and drink gets you a three dollar tip.” Al Duncan pulled out a fifty and laid it on the table letting Dora see the other bills in the wallet. “Now that that is done, how about we go do something or you let me call you later once I’m in Nebraska and lonely.”

  “Why? What happens in Nebraska?”

  “Two things. First, Nebraska is Nebraska. Even if you know someone, it’s hard to find them because Nebraska is so big and so empty. Second, there are very few colored girls in Nebraska diners.”

  Dora smirked and cocked her head to one side.

  “C’mon, Dora, you’ve been doing this awhile. Don’t you see enough tired faces coming from way, way down the road? I’ll just be a friendly one that next trip through here.”

  Dora stood there. She was studying him. Al had got her going alright.

  He tried her again. “I’ve got a job. I’m divorced. It was as amicable as a divorce can be. I work for both local private farmers and some of the bigger corporate farms that are getting into the h. h. corn energy market, which will be even bigger business here in Illinois and other states real soon. I’d give you my card, but I don’t have one because I am no salesman. I’m not rich or flashy or any of that. I like movies: action and adventures. I think that sums up what I’d say if this were a dating situation. How about you tell me about you now? Then I’ll know whether this is a good idea or not.”

  Dora said nothing.

  “Alright, Dora,” said Al. “I understand. You see a lot of people come through here. Safer to—“

  “My name isn’t Dora,” she said dropping her head a moment. “My name is Frizza.”

  “Frizza? Really?”

  “Yeah, my mom thought my hair looked all frizzy when I was born. Frizza didn’t just stick as a nickname, it became my legal name.”

  “She was right. Your hair is quite wild. I love it.”

  Al Duncan reached up and touched her hair real slow.

  “You know what?” said Frizza pulling away from Al’s touch. “No. No. I don’t think so. Thanks, but no thanks,” she said picking up the bill and the enormous tip.

  She cleaned the table in a few swipes with a practiced skill she’d long ago learned.

  She was gone before Al knew what to try next.

  He stood up, waited a moment, saw she wasn’t coming back and sat down again. He drank the last little bit of his coffee.

  Al sighed. It was going to be just as long a trip as he’d feared.

  He got up and left.

  The door of the little local restaurant slowly swung shut behind him.

  He’d waited too long, and just like better than fourteen thousand days before this one, the day was rapidly turning to night.

  The sun still hung over flat, empty Illinois farm fields. Beyond those, out to the west, were more fields and then the mighty Mississippi, then Iowa and miles and miles and miles until his brother in Wyoming.

  His old Chevy truck was parked near the restaurant. It was packed with all his stu
ff. His gas mileage wouldn’t be very good as the eight cylinders pulled in air and gas and pop-pop-popped across the plains. In no time, his brown pick-up would be out of Illinois and never return. In Nebraska, he would get rid of the truck and buy another at some random dealership. Then, in Wyoming, he would get new plates and have his brother sell that truck sometime a few days after he started down south towards New Mexico by train or bus until he got to where his sister lived in Albuquerque. His sister didn’t have her name on anything, and she was a vault when it came to police and others that might be looking for him. That meant his wife wouldn’t be getting anything, and once she realized Al wasn’t coming home or going back to her, she was not going to be happy.

  Al thought again about the silo and tried to decide what Synad would do once he knew that Al Duncan was suddenly gone. Everything had gone so wrong, all-wrong, even before the explosion. He should have never trusted Sheriff Douglas. Now, scanning behind himself as he neared his truck he worried about the whole parking lot. He held his hands down at his sides trying to pretend that he had more than one gun on himself and was ready for anything.

  Simply having the gun on his person was still illegal in Illinois, but going to jail or paying a fine was better than being dead had been the simple conclusion he’d come to when he tried to decide whether or not to bring it with him. He’d just have to be extra careful, like walking on top of the grain pack. He didn’t want to pull a Plaxico, but maybe, there was a chance of pulling a Homer. Both thoughts made him smile.

  A man was smoking near the door to the restaurant. Al looked at the man for a moment before opening his truck. The man simply smoked his cigarette and regarded Al Duncan for a moment when he noticed Al’s staring at him.

  The man walked off. Al watched him, but the man was far too conspicuous with his cigarette to be anyone to be nervous about.

  Al got into his truck and looked into each mirror to be sure they were all in the same places as he’d left them.