KIA

by Thomas Holland

  Kel slowly vented the carbonation from his drink, careful to keep it from overflowing. They were turning to leave when the clerk closed her cash register and spoke for the first time. She had a low-pitched, erratic voice that reminded everyone who knew her of two sticks of dry wood being rubbed together. It was as if her throat were about to catch fire. She also had industrial-sized breasts that looked more architectural than biological.

  “Bait shop? Y’all talking about Eddie Tenkiller?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Deveroux responded. Both men halted and turned back to face the counter. “You know him?”

  “Sure do. Not well, of course; Tenkillers are sort of a private bunch, but I know ’em as good as any around here, I suppose.”

  “Hard man to get to know?” Kel asked.

  “You bet. They come by here for ice sometimes. You know, when they run low. That’s mostly during bass or crappie tournaments and all. They’ll come by, load up that old truck of theirs with five-pound bags of crushed ice, and be on their way. Won’t say but five words the whole dang time.”

  “They?” Kel asked. “Is there a Mrs. Tenkiller?”

  “Hardly.”

  Kel didn’t respond but waited for some elaboration.

  “Just them two old skinny-assed bachelors. For the longest time, people ’round here used to think they was funny,” the woman responded.

  “Funny?”

  “Yeah. You know. Funny.”

  “Funny?”

  “I think she means gay,” Deveroux clarified, stepping into the conversation. He was unsuccessfully gnawing at the plastic wrapper of his Slim Jim trying to initiate a tear.

  Kel watched him momentarily before turning back to the woman behind the counter.

  “That’s right,” the woman answered, “’Course that was more in the beginning. Don’t nobody think that now. Ain’t queer. Just real private folks, is all.”

  “Is that right?” Kel answered. He was bobbing his head slowly like one of those toy drinking birds. “Ahh, Miss…”

  “Tawnny Lynn. With two Ns.”

  “Two Ns?” Deveroux asked.

  “Yeah. Two in Tawnny and two in Lynn. That’s four Ns, if you add them all up.”

  “It certainly is.”

  “Tawnny Lynn,” Kel jumped in before Deveroux could say anything else. “Right pretty name. Well, Miss Tawnny Lynn, we only met with Mr. Tenkiller. Ed Tenkiller. Eddie. You keep sayin’ they; who’s the other part of this they? If you don’t mind us askin’?”

  “Tommy.”

  “With two Ms?” Deveroux asked.

  Kel lasered him a look.

  “Yup.”

  “Tommy got hisself a last name?” Kel continued.

  “Tenkiller.” Her voice conveyed a forced patience that suggested she thought she was covering a matter of common knowledge. She had long ago come to the conclusion that most people from out of town tended to be somewhat slow-witted, and so far these two hadn’t unseated that belief.

  “Tommy Tenkiller?” Kel clarified.

  “Quite a ring to it,” Deveroux mumbled. “Two Ts.” He’d stopped shaking his head and now had the plastic wrapper of the Slim Jim clamped tightly in his mouth and was pulling on it like a bird tugging on a worm, but his eyes were on Tawnny Lynn.

  “That be a relative, I’m guessin’. This Mr. Tommy Tenkiller fella?” Kel ignored Deveroux. His interest was growing.

  “Cousin.” Tawnny Lynn nodded and pulled her round face into the same tight knot that her ninth-grade geometry teacher had become so familiar with. She couldn’t help but wonder if her two customers weren’t more than uncommonly thick.

  “You from around here, ma’am?” Kel continued.

  “Sure am. Whole life. Up to now, that is.”

  “Looks like a great place to grow up. Great place to raise a family, I’d figure.” Kel paused to let the sediment of that comment settle before continuing. “The Tenkiller family, they from around here too?”

  “Not originally. From over near Bartlesville, I think. Think they’s Osage or Pawnee or some such something. Don’t really know for sure. I’m part Cherokee myself—on my daddy’s side. See my high cheekbones?”

  “Really? Ahh…why yes, ahhh—”

  “Ever heard of the Trail of Tears. That was my daddy’s people.”

  “That right? Ummm, when they move here? The Tenkillers. Any idea?”

  “I dunno, maybe…well, now you would have to go and ask me, wouldn’t you? Ahh, well, I guess I don’t know for sure.” Tawnny Lynn cocked her head as if she had a marble in her skull and was trying to get it to roll from one side to the other. It apparently worked, because she soon answered, “Before I was born. Maybe thirty, thirty-five years ago. That’d be my guess. My brothers, they used to buy nightcrawlers off them boys when they first opened their business. That’s all t’was at first, big ol’ nightcrawlers and lukewarm three-two beer.”

  “Thirty-five years.” Kel bit his lip and worked it around. “What’s the cousin like? Tommy?”

  Tawnny Lynn shrugged and began straightening a display of herbal energy boosters on the counter. The sign had a jagged lightning bolt and said they were guaranteed to boost vitality and stamina and were endorsed by long-haul truckers. She hummed as she thought through her answer. “Lot like Eddie only more so, I’d say. Quiet. Real quiet. Older. Don’t really see Tommy all so much. It’s usually Eddie that comes by here, but Tommy’s in the truck with him sometimes. He don’t usually get out none.”

  “What’s he look like?” Kel pressed. “You know, I mean…”

  She scrunched her face again. “Y’all sure are interested in the Tenkillers.”

  Kel smiled but didn’t respond.

  “What’s Tommy look like?” Tawnny Lynn refreshed the question in her own mind. “Well, Indian. You know? He looks like Eddie, only about ten years older. Hair’s starting to turn gray. Maybe a bit taller, maybe not. You seldom see him outside the house, and then only in the truck. Little bit of a gimp. Like he’s got arthritis or a rock in his shoe.”

  Kel took a sip of his drink and looked over to Deveroux, who’d been watching the conversation closely. Kel looked back at Tawnny Lynn and smiled. “Well, thank you, ma’am. Appreciate the conversation.” He took another sip and turned to Deveroux. “Say, you about ready there, partner?”

  “Sure am,” he replied, and then he nodded at Tawnny Lynn as well and tapped the brim of his ballcap in an exaggerated manner. “Ma’am.”

  “Shit,” Kel said as soon as they were outside. “Goddamn, Shuck, if we don’t look like two monkeys tryin’ to fuck a football. What did you make of all that?”

  They had parted and flowed around the hood of the vehicle. Deveroux stopped and leaned on the hood, looking over it at Kel as he shoved the rest of the Slim Jim into his mouth. His cheek bulged. “I thought you told me the Tenkiller family tree had pretty much died out. Sure doesn’t sound that way.” He swallowed and wiped his greasy hands on his thighs before continuing. “Suppose she knows what’s she’s talkin’ about?”

  Kel paused by the passenger door and looked back at the convenience store. “You bet.”

  CHAPTER 42

  Warrensburg, Missouri

  MONDAY, APRIL 21, 2008

  Lynn Fox had no desire to finish last. He never had, until last year, and he didn’t intend to make it a habit. His whole life had involved winning, first at Little League and then as a starting pitcher for the Rice Owls three of his four years. Even when the team sucked, his personal stats were always those of a winner. Even in the two years that he served as an unpaid graduate coaching assistant at Texas while he struggled with his Ph.D., he’d been associated with success on the playing field. Always success. Never failure. At least until last year.

  It didn’t matter that it was an interdepartmental softball league or that his team was made up of overweight sociologists and a bighaired secretary whose bra size easily eclipsed her IQ by an order of magnitude. It could just as easily have been the Wor
ld Series as far as he was concerned; he was the coach and manager and starting pitcher and overall driving force. He had always been a winner, never a loser, and that was why they were going to start practice early this year—like it or not. They were not going one-and-thirteen again this year.

  Despite the predictable grumbling, Monday mornings from eight-thirty to ten had proven to be a time when almost everyone was free to practice. One professor had class on Mondays from eight-thirty until nine-thirty, and two older graduate students were likewise unavailable, but everyone else professed to being free. Lynn Fox knew better, however, than to expect everyone to show. Most would weasel some lame excuse, and that was acceptable this early in the season, just as long as enough showed up to put together a practice.

  He arrived early to get set up and noticed the older, red Ford Escort in the parking lot. He didn’t recognize it, but then he also didn’t know all of the new players who’d added their names to the sign-up list outside his office, many of them graduate students new to the program. There were even a couple of undergrads who’d changed majors. From what he could tell, no one was in the car, and he saw nobody on the field as he opened his trunk and removed the old army duffel bag that held the department’s thirty-some-year-old collection of mismatched bats and balls. It wasn’t until he started walking toward the visiting dugout, the duffel bag clunking against the ground as it dragged behind him, that he saw the other person stretched out on one of the lower bleacher seats, either asleep or passed out, he didn’t know which. On the seat immediately in front was a paper bag from which the neck of a clear-glass bottle protruded, suggesting that if the person was simply napping, he was doing so with some distilled help.

  Lynn Fox shook his head as he set the duffel bag in the dugout and glanced quickly at the sleeping body. He wasn’t sure what his duty was. He wasn’t a prude, and he’d certainly woken up in someone’s lawn covered with dew and vomit more than once in his student career, but that was the point—he wasn’t a student anymore. As of two months ago he was a tenured associate professor, and he felt some nagging sense of pedagogical duty to wake the boy up and get him steered in the direction of home, and coffee, and a shower, or at least a proper bed.

  “Aw, crap,” he muttered to himself, decision made. He tossed his orange Texas Longhorns cap on the concrete bench in the dugout and started over to the bleachers. That’s when he realized that something didn’t look quite right. The student was lying on his left side, facing away from the field, and wore a dark-blue canvas jacket with the collar turned up high for warmth, or so he’d thought from the dugout. But something was odd; out of proportion.

  Lynn Fox was reaching out to shake the boy’s ankle when he finally realized what looked so strange.

  The boy’s head was missing.

  CHAPTER 43

  Onapa, Oklahoma

  MONDAY, APRIL 21, 2008

  “Could be a simple explanation.” Shuck Deveroux had finished his Slim Jim, but not before wedging a knot of fatty sinew tightly between some porcelain bridgework on his upper right premolars. He’d cracked one of the teeth the previous year when one of his sons had given him some hard candy to chew. Ever since it had been a veritable mousetrap for snagging pieces of food. He worked the area over with his tongue and made intermittent sucking noises in a vain attempt to dislodge the meat. His eyes drifted off the road just long enough to catch Kel’s eye. He continued their conversation. “I mean, Tenkiller might have all sorts of cousins that you don’t know about. My mama’s always sendin’ me newspaper weddin’ announcements for some far-flung shirttail kin that I’ve never heard of, and I’m almost forty-seven years old. The way my mama reckons kin, I might even be one of Tenkiller’s cousins.”

  “That’s not the case here,” Kel answered.

  “How you so sure? Maybe y’all’s records aren’t as complete as you think. No offense, but I work for the federal government, too. Sometimes we’re not as efficient—”

  “Maybe so,” Kel cut him short. “Probably aren’t, but it’s not just my records that say so.”

  Deveroux was driving with his left hand and levering his right index finger into his mouth in support of his tongue. The sucking noises grew louder as the remnant Slim Jim proved increasingly intransigent. “Then whose?” Deveroux mumbled.

  Deveroux had goosed the truck up to seventy-five, and the road noise made it difficult to hear. Kel was able to anticipate the question even with the mumbled delivery. “Our genealogist’s, that’s whose,” he answered. “You gotta remember, we’ve been tryin’ to find a suitable DNA reference sample for Tenkiller for some time.”

  There was a short pause while Deveroux continued to work his tooth, then he responded. “So what are you sayin’? Jimmy Tenkiller’s dead. KIA, remember?”

  “Presumed KIA. Body Not Recovered. Presumed. With a big, goddamn capital P, and that rhymes with T, and that stands for Trouble.”

  “Still…”

  “Still nothin’. A presumptive findin’ of death is just that, a presumptive findin’. It’s administrative by definition. Didn’t you tell me that even Fick told you he had problems with it?”

  “Yeah,” Deveroux answered, “but not because he thought Tenkiller was sellin’ nightcrawlers in Onapa, Oklahoma. He had problems with it because he thought Tenkiller’d deserted; he wasn’t sayin’ that he didn’t think he was dead.”

  “Is that what he told you? Did he tell you that he thought Tenkiller was dead?”

  Deveroux knotted his face again. “No, but.” He reached down and turned the headlights on. Dusk was settling in and the temperature was starting to fall. He looked quickly back at Kel. “You really think so? You think it could be Jimmy Tenkiller?”

  “I do. You heard her back there. Eddie Tenkiller’s cousin looks just like him but older and gimped-up. He’d be what…seventy-one, two. And she said he walked like he had a rock in his shoe. Or maybe a screw in his ankle.”

  Deveroux looked in his rearview mirror and flicked on his turn signal.

  Kel looked up to see the off-ramp of an approaching overpass. “Whoa, time-out, partner. Where you headed?”

  “Back to Onapa,” Deveroux replied. The tone suggested that the answer should have been obvious to even the most casual observer. “I think we need to talk with them Tenkiller boys, don’t you?”

  “You mean the same Tenkiller who just an hour ago asked us to leave his bait store? That Tenkiller?”

  “We can start with him?”

  “Oh, can we? Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s the small talk that he has trouble with. I suspect if we approach him direct and say, ‘Hey, there, Eddie, we want to talk to that no-count, deserter brother of yours who ran a murderous black market business in Vietnam and who’s been livin’ illegally in the U.S., selling leeches and crawdads for the past thirty-odd years’; we just approach him that way and he’ll come out of his shell and just open up to us like a damn ray of sunshine.”

  “You got a better idea? I was doin’ it mostly for you. Until you show me a definite connection to two dead Vietnamese gentlemen, Jimmy Tenkiller’s still more your case than mine. What do you want to do?”

  Kel looked back out the windshield and thought before answering. “Can’t say I know, but I can say that goin’ back there right now is a mistake. We need some more information before we try and crack that nut again.”

  “Like?”

  “Like…like, I don’t know. Like a photo of Jimmy Tenkiller would be nice. Wouldn’t you like to have a photo to show around? Maybe see if Miss Tawnny Lynn can ID Jimmy Tenkiller as Tommy the Gimp. That would help.”

  “You got any photos?”

  “Maybe,” Kel answered. “Not with me, but we might in our files back at the lab. I don’t remember offhand; sometimes we do, sometimes not. If he was listed as a deserter, we probably don’t have much in the way of photos. The army casualty office in Washington can probably get one if someone asks nicely; the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis is another option.
They take a while, but…”

  “How about fingerprints?”

  “How about them?”

  “Just thinkin’ that if we found a smooth surface that he’d touched—”

  “Nope. We don’t have them. If he were a pilot, we might have a footprint card, but unless he’s runnin’ around barefoot on a sheet of glass, even that wouldn’t help. Nope, we don’t have any fingerprint cards.”

  “Maybe the FBI does?” Deveroux suggested.

  “Seriously doubt it. They would’ve at one time, but my understandin’ is that they destroyed all the Vietnam-era fingerprints six or seven years after a person was declared dead, and everyone from that war’s now classified as dead. Deserters are another matter, but Tenkiller’s not a deserter in the eyes of the army anymore. He’s dead too. Officially. So…”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  “On the road, that’s where. On the interstate headed east. My suggestion is we head back to Nashville. You…we can make a few phone calls, and I can get started lookin’ at that case you wanted me to. I suspect the medical examiner isn’t goin’ to want and hold on to that body much longer. I’m surprised the family hasn’t demanded it be buried already.”

  “They have. Rather forcefully, I understand, but ultimately,” Deveroux said, “it’s a Fed case. The ME’s agreed to do some work with it, but he’ll get buried when I okay the release—which I haven’t. Now, havin’ thumped my chest sufficiently to demonstrate that I’m the alpha male, I’ll admit that I’d like to cut him loose as soon as I can. No point waitin’ for it to get uglier than it already is.”

  “Well, then, let’s head back over to Tennessee and get started. If Jimmy Tenkiller is alive and fishin’ in Onapa, Oklahoma, after all these years, I doubt he’ll start runnin’ again. I mean, where the hell would he go? Can’t find a much smaller hole than Onapa. No, we’ll have time to come back.”

  Before Deveroux could answer, the “Chicken Dance” song started playing from his shirt pocket. He sighed.