Stories About Corn

by Ri, Xesin

  “Not so hot to melt your tag, eh?” said Ray to the picture.

  He left the first file open, but he pushed it off to the left corner of his desk and looked at the Iowa State Police file.

  There were some hot pictures of Mrs. Loretta Dean in swimwear. He got so distracted by them that, when he checked himself, he started looking out his windows to see if police were about to breach the target thanks to the oldest diversion in the book.

  But it was nice and quiet—and still.

  Why the FBI left pictures of Raewyn wearing wild-style pink and black bikinis, a few pictures more of her in a more elegant black bikini, and one of her in an electric blue one-piece stretched tight over her ass made him think that they knew he knew she wasn’t just Loretta Dean. But that didn’t fit into whatever they were trying to do.

  He tried to decide on whether he would be doing himself a danger by scanning the photos for his own private keeping. He decided it wouldn’t look very good if things did go to the wayside.

  “Better to have Peg do it,” he concluded.

  “Peg, would you come in here, please.”

  He took the six swimwear photos and handed them to Peg.

  “Scan those and put them on a disc. Give it a password. How about—FourthWife? Capital f. Capital w. One word. Sound good?”

  “Is this what the FBI was doing here, giving you some new soft-core voyeur porn? I thought I was going to get a new job.”

  “What was that? Voyeur? Why did you think that?”

  “Mr. Synad, look at this woman. She doesn’t seem to know she’s having her picture taken.”

  Ray looked. Peg was right. The pictures were attractive, but Raewyn certainly didn’t seem to be posing or acting like someone told her to ignore the camera. She looked like she had no idea she was the star of the camera’s eye.

  “Is she wearing a wedding ring in any of these?”

  Peg and Ray looked for the ring.

  “Right there,” said Peg pointing at Raewyn’s ringed finger.

  “That’s weird. Her own husband took pictures of her without her knowing.”

  “On more than one day,” added Peg.

  “Scan those, Peg. Take a good look at them. See if you see anything else.”

  Peg took the photos and went out of Ray’s office to the scanner just around the corner from her desk.

  Ray tried to settle down and look at the report from Iowa. There was a lot of useless information. Hot night. New house. Husband was visibly disturbed by losing his wife. ADD files may have been stolen. Husband’s name was Charles “Chuck” Dean. His wife, the missing person, was named Loretta Dean. The reporting officer was an Officer Reingold.

  Ray stared at the two names. He looked at the dates. The Iowa incident was a month after the events on his Illinois farm. Could it be the same man? A relative? Father, brother, sister, cousin? The picture left in the other file had to have been left to make sure he didn’t miss the name and its possible significance.

  Two leads. The FBI knew something. They were leading him. They wanted him to know something.

  Was he being played?

  He’d definitely found his spike. What he hadn’t thought was that he would hesitate to pull himself up off the cliff he’d been on.

  Peg came back in. “Do you want me to call Mr. Orr and tell him your meeting with the FBI went short?”

  “No. In fact, I don’t want you to use your computer or call anyone for fifteen minutes. And, for thirty minutes after, just make personal calls or something. Nothing business related.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want anything happening. I want silence for a little while, unplug the phone and delete all messages at the end of forty-five minutes and go home. Also, you don’t say anything to anyone about this meeting. Not even its length. That includes Jack.”

  “Who would ask?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sir, I noticed that those pictures look like they were taken at two different swimming pools, if that helps.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it will.”

  Peg left his office and shut the door as she did.

  Ray kept looking over the reports looking for something else, anything else.

  Late-June

  One Tough Day

  “I hate June,” said Officer Reingold, alone in his patrol car.

  He sat waiting for another traffic light to turn green.

  The day was hot. His car was hot. And his brother’s dog tag flashed in the glaring sun; it swung back and forth from the rearview mirror, hanging by its metal bead chain.

  A car pealed its tires to his right. The car was a small but powerful Subaru Impreza with a suped-up engine. The kid at the wheel looked over with wide eyes as the smoke passed over the front of his blue sedan.

  The kid was clearly dumb and hadn’t even seen the cop just two lanes over.

  Heads turned to look at what the officer would do from each of the cars between the kid’s car and James’s patrol car.

  Officer J. T. Reingold stared at him with two angry eyes. It was the same damn kid he’d given a ticket to just last week. Something like Barry or Larry was the kid’s name. Didn’t have a job. Didn’t care about tickets. Probably smoked pot. Was, without doubt, a heavy drinker at only nineteen. Other drugs were an unknown. Family life was probably wild and undisciplined. And the kid was a bad driver and a terrible liar. James remembered thinking the kid had better pray to develop a silver tongue if he was going to survive his life.

  Officer J. T. Reingold, sitting at the light, sitting in his uniform, sitting in his marked patrol car, staring at the kid, seeing the green light the other way turn yellow and then red decided to stretch out his arm and give the kid something to think about, a police officer’s outstretched middle finger. The kid’s eyes grew even wider and his mouth dropped open. James flipped on his lights and siren and then jammed the throttle to the floor for a full burnout when the left turn arrow lit up green. And back the way he had come, he went, as he slid around the median smoking his tires and leaving the intersection and the kid behind.

  “James, James,” came the voice of Hazel, the police dispatcher, over the radio.

  “Yeah,” he said, thinking he’d definitely get reprimanded when citizens called in the bizarre scene they just saw.

  “James, there are some scattered reports near the downtown area of a man walking around causing some type of disturbance. Description is varied—possibly a forty year old male, Caucasian, between six-foot to six-foot six. Weight might be between two forty and three hundred. Clothing: may be wearing a light-colored t-shirt with some type of beer logo on it, and khaki pants with grey running sneakers. The suspect might be talking lewdly or throwing things over a fence near the Dover Park area.”

  “Alright, I’ll swing over and see if I can’t get a bead on him.”

  “Sure thing, hon. By the way, were you expecting anything in the mail?”

  “Nothing in particular, why?”

  “You got a great big envelope from someone in Illinois.”

  “Really, well, that’s something. Keep it safe for me, would you?”

  “Sure thing, hon.”

  “Thanks, Hazel.”

  James rolled the patrol car into another U-turn back towards the downtown area. It wasn’t Des Moines or St. Louis, but Urs was very much alive.

  Despite America selling off its manufacturing industries; giving away its factories; pretending there were certain jobs that were beneath the American people; and stagnating its own economy because of a bizarre desire to get everyone their own home, Urs’s downtown had remained vibrant in these last few years. Set between two colleges, kids were always driving through on their way home or to visit a friend at the other college. Thanks to this and a little city planning, the roads and the big box stores had all been set up in such a way that visitors traveling through had to pass the downtown area driving through the sea of “sale” signs for inexpensive “vintage” clothing, old records, VHS
tapes, DVDs, Blu-ray discs, video games, and comics and other collectables that made a college dorm room cool. A young dude would say that he had just picked up an original Playstation and gotten Metal Gear Solid. A young miss could say she had found the dress: washed it, hemmed it, and added a this or a that to alter it, if she were so inclined to do that sort of thing. On the weekends, there weren’t just the college kids running around. Students often found that they could congregate with teachers, friends, and even the local farmers and hired help. People would often congratulate the people of Urs for their wonderful town with such an open spirit and for the fact that they were some of the most sociable people in all of Iowa. Some of the bars didn’t even play music because people said, “it ruins the mood.” Attempts were made at bringing in cookie-cutter sports bars and franchises that popped up like all fast food restaurants do. The locals went, at first, but they didn’t like the loud noise. They didn’t like the strange games. They didn’t like the managers coming in from and being trained in other places outside of Iowa, let alone Urs. They didn’t like the windows tinted so dark that you couldn’t see your town or your friends, just outside the window, enjoying the town, the night, and the heart of the early spring. And so the locals got bored and went back to smaller bars with smaller, older televisions placed high and out of the way, just in case there was a good high school football game on that night. As it was said by one local, “I just want cheap, cold beer. I’ll do the rest.” Urs had a few small parks with a few small areas to rest and relax too. It was near these, unexpectedly, that most problems the town had could be found. Someone would have one too many, usually a college kid, and he would start out towards a park and not get there. He would wander streets, maybe with some friends; he or they would make noise or even commit some petty vandalism. And if they got to the park then the problems were even greater. Fights were common. Vomiting into the duck ponds was seen. Even a full-blown assault on some random person or group of persons happened from time-to-time.

  All that was what Officer J. T. Reingold imagined as he drove around the middle of the day looking for this man causing the disturbance. Each face held a certain toughness today that was unlikely in late-June. The weather was hot since he had started his patrol; and there was a new wind blowing into town, and with it came the wave of humid heat, low clouds, and a pretty decent chance of rain. But, of course, Officer J. T. Reingold knew this. He checked the weather every day. He could talk about clouds just as well as any farmer or meteorologist could. He knew what to look for in the sky or feel in the air that suggested a storm. He knew the science, and he spent so much time outside as a kid playing baseball or detasseling corn at his uncle’s that he could tell the weather sometimes days off. But these clouds weren’t supposed to mass into anything too much, yet they were doing just that. The humid air foretold of a heavy storm and lightning and thunder, maybe even hail. Maybe this man he was looking for had felt the weather shift too. Maybe he knew rains were coming, and the wind that would sweep over the crops and run headlong into the town with smells and dust from the west. Unfortunately, there was a man fitting the description of the disturbance maker sitting on a street corner’s curb drinking the same brand of beer as his t-shirt announced to be “AMAAAAZING!”

  “Coors, huh?” asked Officer Reingold when he walked up to the man.

  The man didn’t respond. He stared up with two good eyes beneath two thick black eyebrows at a billboard across the street.

  James had seen the billboard of the goat surfing into Manhattan on a pile of money. It was a bank ad that let people know that even a goat could make it big with the right financial firm behind their dreams. To James, it sure didn’t seem a good way to let people know your bank was run by boring mathematical types who only made prudent decisions.

  The man opened another beer. He had most of a twenty-four pack left. It looked like the beers were still very cold.

  James thought he knew the face, and then he did know the face. It was Randy Cass.

  “Oh, hey Randy. I didn’t recognize you with that mustache. So are you up to your old ways again, harassing the pretty girls again?” James smiled brightly at old randy Randy. “I thought you and Pastor Handover had gotten an arrangement for work. Shouldn’t you be working right now?”

  Randy didn’t speak. He just continued to drink.

  James walked a few steps away. “Hazel? Hazel?” he said into his radio.

  “Yep, right here, Officer.”

  “Hazel, I’ve got Randy Cass out here. Could you get Pastor Handover out here to pick him up?”

  “Yeah, I’ll see if I can get him out there for you.”

  Randy continued drinking his beer.

  “Could you slow down there? If the college kids see you out here, they are going to tell me how unfair I am—letting you drink in public n’ all.”

  “Thor.”

  “What?”

  “That’s your middle name. Officer James Thor Reingold.”

  “Yep, I guess it is. How’d you find that out?”

  “I read it in the papers. I read all the stuff about you and your brother.”

  Randy gulped down the last of his current beer and put it with the other empties inside a plastic bag he was carrying; and easy-as-easy, Randy pulled another full can from the still mostly full 24-can box.

  “I don’t believe what they wrote. Pastor Handover said the same. We all talked about it. I don’t believe it one bit.”

  “You don’t believe anything anyone tells you, Randy. One of the nice things about being you, remember? We’ve had that discussion. When we first met, eight years back—not too far from here, remember?”

  “Yes. That was a bad day. This is a tough day.

  “Pastor Handover agree,” continued Randy, jumping his thoughts, “but your brother was smart. It is odd what they wrote. You two were never like Mary. Mary is impulsive. Pastor Handover has said that to me before too.”

  “Randy, I need to ask you a question. Do you think you can handle a tough question without the pastor here yet?”

  “I think so. I am pretty tough.”

  “Are you off your medication?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Okay. Slow down with the beer then.”

  James spoke to Hazel again. “Hey, Hazel?”

  “Yup, hon. What ya got?”

  “Randy is off his medication, could you let Officer Ryan and Officer Peterson know, especially if they are in the area?”

  “Right away, hon.”

  “Great. And is Pastor Handover on his way.”

  “On his way.”

  “Great. Over.”

  Randy sipped his beer. James was never so glad to see someone nursing a beer.

  “You wouldn’t talk like that in front of me if I were on your medication.”

  “It’s your medication, Randy. I just take vitamins and a few pain pills for my flat feet.”

  Randy smiled up at James, but he didn’t laugh.

  Even for Randy, off his meds, this behavior was strange.

  “Randy, how did you get here? On this curb. Where did you walk from?”

  “I walked down the street.”

  “I believe that. Hot day isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you go back to the church? Why didn’t you go there where your bed is?”

  “I didn’t want to sleep there tonight.”

  “Where were you going to sleep?”

  “In the cemetery.”

  Randy sipped more of his beer.

  James looked down the road to see if the pastor’s car was visible yet, but there was nothing.

  “Are you going there to hide?” tried James.

  “No, I was going to go and sleep.”

  James, suddenly, was aware of the people on the street, the cars passing, the first tiny drops of rain, the humid heat that dried them in an instant, and the fact that Randy’s right eye was drooping down, down, down.

  James slapped away the beer from Ran
dy’s hand.

  “What did you take?”

  “Just something to help me sleep soundly tonight.”

  “Shit!”

  “I’ll ask your brother just what really happened there in the third silo,” said Randy heavily slurring.

  And like that Randy leaned back and the stroke was awful to watch.

  “Hazel! Hazel!”

  “Yes, hon. I’m here.”

  “Get an ambulance to Big Box Way and Fourth Street, right now. I think Randy’s having a stroke.”

  “I’ll get you one now.”

  “Thanks.”

  Randy was just slack on one side and firm like a statue on the other. The muscles felt bizarre as anything he’d ever touched in his life.

  Officer Ryan’s car pulled up an instant later.

  “What’s happening?” asked Officer Ryan, a little out of breath.

  “Man, I think he’s having a stroke. He was talking to me, and then his eye began to droop down. He’s breathing fine, but he’s not saying anything.”

  “Whoa. Got an ambulance on the way?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hazel?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s the time on that ambulance?” asked Officer Ryan.

  “Four minutes out, Officer Ryan.”

  “Okay.”

  Randy was still breathing. One of the beers rolled away and then stopped on the flat sidewalk between Officer Ryan and Officer Reingold who held onto Randy as half his body jerked.

  Pastor Handover pulled up.

  “My, my. What happened?” asked Pastor Handover.

  “Pastor,” said James leaving Officer Ryan to watch over Randy. “Has Randy had any new medicines or anything, asked for any special medicines?”

  “Um, I don’t think he has. He asked to let him off his medication. And there are no stipulations that he must be on it, so I—“