Bad Axe County

by John Galligan

  72

  “I call the vote,” interjected Bob Check. “Gosh darn it, you folks are gonna jaw about this all day while the sheriff’s got work to do. I can’t believe you’d even think about accepting her resignation. It never bothered most of you when Gibbs made mistakes, wrecked cars, blew county money, hurt people that didn’t need to be hurt, made his own rules. Listen to yourselves. I call the gosh darn vote.”

  By voice, yays and nays, the verdict wasn’t clear, so Marge Joss polled the supervisors. The sheriff watched carefully. She had five clear supporters. Another five rejected her resignation because they wanted the inquiry to proceed and perhaps to skewer her officially. That left only seven who purely wanted her gone, against ten who at least for the moment did not. She was on thin ice. But it was a technical win.

  Olaf the Handsome was pacing the hallway when she stepped out.

  “Back in open session,” she informed him. “The personnel discussion is over.”

  He studied her face. She must have looked as drained as she felt.

  “So you’re finished?”

  She could read what he thought. She guessed he and District Attorney Sipple had done different math.

  “No. I’m still your boss. Ten to seven.”

  Yttri looked away and began to scratch at his mustache. One of his thumbs nervously tapped the folder in his other hand.

  “Wow . . . I didn’t . . .”

  Sipple came out of the restroom, the kind of old gentleman who still dried his hands on his personal handkerchief. He never even looked at her. He took Yttri at the elbow and turned him toward the boardroom door.

  She was several steps down the hall toward to her office when Yttri called after her.

  “Hey, uh, Heidi?” Then, “I’m sorry, but . . .”

  She turned and saw him raise his folder. He was submitting his nomination papers, she realized. He followed Sipple back into the boardroom.

  * * *

  Olaf the Usurper. This was what Denise began calling him when she heard. They met in the sheriff’s office. Given her exhaustive knowledge of the coulee region and the men in it, Denise had winnowed her list of suspects down to seven names. The guy Denise knew in Crawford County, an ex-deputy, had confirmed that Sheriff Skog had looked into two of her winnowed seven and found alibis that held up. That left five.

  “So, my criteria,” Denise said. “One, he had to have worked for your dad at any time, or done significant business with the farm, such as an equipment service contract or veterinary work or milk pickup. Two, he was in the region at the time. Three, he had to have, as you say, zombie potential, a drug background, a criminal record, mental instability, violent behavior, all of the above. Four, either he gave Skog an unchecked alibi at the time, or Skog never asked. Criteria number five: the asshole couldn’t give me an alibi that checked out.”

  Denise had paused and scratched her frizzy head.

  “I know you think there needs to be some element of resentment toward your family, Heidi. But I’m not sure. Think of Bishops Coulee. Isn’t that part of what set you off? Horst Zimmer used to live across the highway from the couple that he killed. No history of conflict. He went to their wedding. He was just high as fuck and needed money to stay that way. Your guy was just smarter, or maybe not quite so high, and he gave himself a better chance to get away with what he did. So here are your five: Vernon Eckert, Wesley Thibodaux, Jerrold Mickelson—”

  “Denise, stop. I know I can’t believe Ripp, but . . .”

  Her phone was slippery as she fumbled it from behind her badge. The display seemed fickle beneath her fingers. At last she got the recording to play. Prove it, her voice was demanding of Baron Ripp. Prove what you’re telling me. She remembered Ripp sprawled on his hospital bed like Hugh Hefner, or so he seemed to think, as his voice rasped from the phone’s speaker.

  Hell, you know how it is, Dairy Queen, hauling stock, petrified cow shit stuck on everything. My trailer always got to be a goddamn mess. So me and this fella that was laughing at your Shakespeare cattle later, we was sitting there at Mudcat’s about five or six cocktails in—this is the same day your folks was shot—and I already said no I won’t buy your little toy pistol for a hundred bucks, go to Mertz, you’ll see, Mertz won’t give you more than fifty. But I tell you what, I said, I will take a look at that pressure washer. See, darlin’, according to him he had also just acquired himself a brand-new Briggs and Stratton, three thousand psi, gas engine, four hundred bucks new, and he wanted a hundred for that too . . .

  She paused the recording.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Denise said. “ ‘Three thousand psi.’ Where have we heard that before? Violates my parts just hearing it, like it’s supposed to.”

  “But he’s full of shit, see? Because my dad never owned a pressure washer. If the farm was bankrupt and he was freaking out about money, I don’t know why he would buy one either. Or why anybody would bother to steal one, if one existed.”

  “But it makes a weird lie for that same reason, doesn’t it? And remember the big haul at Bishops Coulee: two lives, for an Xbox, a toaster, and a chainsaw? Isn’t that the other thing that set you off? Actually, a nice new pressure washer is exactly the kind of thing a meth head would grab and try to turn into quick money. And sure enough, Ripp was interested in buying one on the cheap.”

  “But we didn’t have one. He’s a good liar, more likely. But listen.”

  I said I’d come by his place the next day, take a look, see if we could make a deal. I get there, his place down over the Crawford border, thinking I’m about to get me a bargain on a pressure washer, hose all that cow pucky off my truck. But guess what. The sonofabitch says too late, he already sold it to his Amish neighbor down the road . . .

  The sheriff heard her voice say, Give me his name.

  Amos Zook.

  Not the buyer. The seller. His name.

  Hah. Jerrold the marshmallow. But this was before he blew himself up. Jerrold Mickelson.

  “See? So easy to say,” she told Denise, “because it just so happens that he’s dead and can’t deny it. So is Amos Zook, probably dead. He was ancient, if I remember. Not to mention: would the Amish even use a pressure washer?”

  Still, against her own logic, she was suddenly overcome by a surge of hope that it was Mickelson. She had seen him, shot by Angus Beavers, his brains curdling in a pool of gas. If it was him, he was dead—and it was over. Suddenly she felt like she would weep. Denise was reaching out, gathering in her shaking body.

  “Ripp is lying, Denise. I know it. He’s playing with me.”

  “Hon, I know what you mean. I do. But I’m going to check it out.”

  * * *

  At the end of the long fourth day, she took her time driving home, twelve miles out to their rented farmhouse, through a beautiful April evening. This had been the sunshiny warm day when spring had popped in the hollows. White and purple phlox had opened their first buds on the flanks of sunward ditches. Warblers flitted in the green-tipped brush, chasing insects. Last week’s flood was down, the streams scoured and rearranged but running clear. She saw trout fishermen gearing up at the bridges.

  When Denise called, she said, “Call you right back,” and pulled over at the bridge where Spring Hollow Branch went under Pederson Road. She needed a few deep breaths. A guy in half-mast waders waddled toward her with his gear-laden vest creaking and chiming. She vaguely knew him as a former classmate of Harley’s, now a fishing guide. People called him Chub. “I wasn’t urinating off the bridge, Sheriff, I swear. I was just—”

  She put a hand up to stop him. “Good luck out there.”

  When she called back, Denise asked, “Are you sitting down, Heidi?”

  She put her butt against the cool iron bridge rail. She gazed into a ripening sunset over a ridge of leafing hardwoods. The stream scrolled out, a thread of reflected gold within green pasture grass. “More or less. Hit me.”

  “Number one, your dad did own a pressure washer. He bought one from True
Value in Gays Mills on credit, July 8, 2004, the day before he and your mom died. Dick Krueger, manager there, remembers him being pretty ticked off because he had to wash down his milk room, based on a new FDA rule made for big producers.”

  Nervously gnawing at her lip, she admitted that she did remember this general complaint by her dad: money he had to spend based on things the bigger guys did wrong.

  Denise said, “I don’t think he ever even took the tags off or cracked the owner’s manual. His receipt must have been with it. Then later everything got auctioned off. Am I right?”

  “Except the older cows that went to Sunnyfield.”

  Ripp had claimed he trucked them there, Mickelson on the receiving end reciting their faggot Shakespeare names as they came down the ramp, according to Ripp. Now her pulse raced. An awful memory cycled back. The farmhand herding in a snowstorm who had hit her dad’s old bull Samson in the face with a shovel and got his ass fired—was that Mickelson? She recalled the guy’s pale cold eyes and his smirking, tobacco-crusted mouth. Mickelson had lost his face. But those eyes . . .

  “Right,” she told Denise. “Everything else got auctioned.”

  “OK. Everything except cows. That’s important, because, number two, I checked with Dairyland Auction Service. They went back in their records and there was no pressure washer on the auction manifest. So it disappeared before the estate was settled. Most likely it disappeared about five minutes after your parents died. As in, it was stolen. Now, number three, I had to connect the washer to who stole it. We got lucky, Heidi. Amos Zook is alive.”

  She felt tears rush to the brims of her eyes.

  “Sweet old man, ninety-some years old,” Denise said. “I asked and he gladly showed it to me. It’s gas powered, like all their sawmill stuff, so it’s OK by Amish rules. His family still uses a Briggs and Stratton three-thousand-psi pressure washer that he bought in the summer of 2004 for a hundred bucks. Heidi, guess who from?”

  “Oh, my God . . .”

  “Ripp wasn’t lying to you. Zook bought your dad’s pressure washer from Jerrold Mickelson. And that zombie is dead, Heidi.”

  As she put the phone away, her eyes finally spilled. In colors made even more vivid by tears, she watched a hawk circle in blue sky over emerald pasture. She followed the progress of fishermen up the glittering stream. By old habit, sometimes a day counter but always a head counter, she tallied, one by one as they appeared, a herd of barn-bound black-and-white Holsteins, twenty-three strong as they crested a green rise in the distance.

  73

  Bob Check was waiting at the Pederson place, visiting with Belle Kick on the porch while the kids played with a litter of new kittens.

  “I’ve got all the signatures,” he said, raising a folder to wave good-bye to Harley’s mom, who had wasted no time getting in her car, heading off for happy hour somewhere. “See you later, Belle.”

  As the dust of the sheriff’s mother-in-law settled on the driveway, Supervisor Check said, “It’s now or never, Sheriff.” He extracted the nomination paper and a pen, laid them on the rickety homemade table between porch chairs. “The deadline to file is noon tomorrow.”

  “You want a beer, Bob?”

  “Does a one-legged duck swim in circles? Heck.”

  She handed him one of Harley’s Leinenkugel’s. She sat down where Harley’s mom had sat, surprised to feel that Belle Kick had left behind some warmth in the chair.

  “I’m sorry, Bob. I’m almost there. But I don’t know yet.”

  “Olaf Yttri filed at the board meeting today.”

  “That I do know.”

  “We certified him as a candidate. You’d be the challenger now. I guess I don’t understand why he did that, when you tried to resign and we wouldn’t let you.”

  They sat quietly.

  “Well, yeah, so anyhow,” she said eventually, “Harley’s still at baseball practice. The diamond’s finally dry. I guess we should wait until he’s here.”

  Bob Check held his beer in the hand that missed two fingers. He raised it and took an old-man sip, one teaspoon, and set the bottle back on the porch floor. She wasn’t sure what she was really waiting for. Not for Harley’s permission or support, which she had.

  “Is it OK if we hold off just a few more minutes, Bob?”

  “He goes late, huh?”

  “He loves what he does.”

  “I can sit here until the cows come home.”

  The expression sent her back. The poor doomed cows that Mickelson had once named as they staggered off his truck, the killer laughing at her family’s ways: Cordelia, Cleopatra, Desdemona, Queen Mab, Rosalind, Juliet, Mistress Quickly . . .

  The kids romped with the kittens. Four kittens, three kids, no fighting. The mother cat sprawled proudly in the explosive spring grass, bowled over by her own full teats. The sheriff and Supervisor Check watched without comment. The sun slipped over the wooded ridge at the west end of the old Pederson farm. Slowly, the sky blushed deep red. Interim Sheriff Heidi Kick watched as, with inexorable grace, everything close by slipped into warm and easy evening shadows. This moment was it, what she waited for, the soft ending of a long, hard recollection.

  She reached for Bob Check’s paper and his pen.

  EPILOGUE

  Crawford County, Wisconsin

  Night, July 9, 2004

  After the horrifying, unbelievable news, while her Dairy Queen chaperone, Mrs. Wisnewski, drives her home, Heidi White’s entire world is no. And never.

  A thousand kinds of no and never, across two hundred miles of landscape, and it might be an insane time to think about geography, but what she notices, what she feels for the first time, is that the coulee region where she comes from is in all ways below the rest of the state. She sees that she is from wilder, from poorer, from lower elevation. What looks like uphill from inside the coulees is downhill from out. What she knows as hillsides and bluffs, as sky-closing towers of densely forested land, these are eroded slopes cut from the prairie, and trips down the coulees are trips down toward the raw core of the earth. No wonder this is where the caves are, where the snakes are, where the wild trout live, where the Indians ran to hide and die. She returns shattered to a home place that is so much deeper than she thought.

  As if she feels this too, Mrs. Wisnewski rides the brake. On the straightaway into Boaz a milk truck blasts around, its horn blaring over the elderly chaperone’s tremulous words.

  “Stay with me and Mr. Wisnewski. You can’t go home now.”

  “No.”

  “Sweetheart—”

  “No.”

  “I just can’t take you home. We’ll go to our place, we’re just outside Soldiers Grove, we’ve got all kinds of room, and we’ll talk to Mr. Wisnewski, and then maybe later he will—”

  “I said no. Never.”

  “I know how hard this is.”

  “You don’t know. And you don’t know what happened either. You’re just repeating whatever bullshit lies you heard.”

  “It was Sheriff Skog himself who informed me, Miss White.”

  “No. Take me home.”

  She closes her ears and her mind. Being from lower, poorer, wilder, from deeper, she finally understands all the hoopla about her being the statewide Dairy Queen. People are surprised. But to her it means that her mom and dad were even stronger than she ever thought, were even more worthy of her love and admiration, must have worked even harder and more bravely and more stubbornly than she ever imagined in order to raise her on a farm because they believed that was the best they had to give. Her dad would never do what they are saying. No, they are wrong. Mrs. Wisnewski is lying. Sheriff Skog is lying. It didn’t happen. No.

  An hour later, installed in a sterile bedroom with a bathroom attached at the rear of the Wisnewskis’ house, with no clothes on her back but the yellow gown she traveled to the reception in, she turns on the shower and goes out the window.

  * * *

  Later she will clock the journey with a trip odometer, drunk-d
riving her dad’s Ford pickup that she inherited. So established, that terrible night, first of many, she walks 13.92 miles home. She understands the Wisnewskis would have called the Crawford County sheriff’s office, and maybe the old couple is out looking too, so she travels some in roadside ditches but mostly cross-country, just how Blackhawk fled two hundred years before, except in a shredding yellow gown and spikes with the heels snapped off, over fences and through cornfields, across private property and empty roads. This is not, will never be, a story she will ever tell anyone, not even the man she will come to love, because this is the secret core of herself that she carries forward from that day on: shattered, enraged, denying, bleeding, crying, screaming, plunging through hostile darkness toward a vision of what used to be, a journey that will never end.

  The farm is still a crime scene when she gets there. From the crest of the south pasture, through fireflies from sixty acres away, she sees lights that don’t belong. Red and blue, strobing, scorching the side of their white barn. She has shed, miles ago, the gown and the slip and the panty hose and the shoes. She crosses Cress Creek in bare feet, bra, and panties. She is bruised and bleeding in a hundred different places. On the near side of the creek she finds the cattle, unmilked, bunched in a corner of the fence. Every cow points its nose toward the barn except Ophelia, the bell cow. Ophelia stands watch at the back of the herd, facing the darkness that now produces not a coyote or a wolf or some other cattle demon but a shattered version of her bovine heart’s beloved, Heidi the Milkmaid, Heidi the Dairy Queen, and the cow trots toward her, snuffling and moaning and butting, then licking her chest and her arm.

  “I know. I know,” Heidi tells her, trying not to sob for the cow’s sake. “But they’re all lying. He never did that. Go on, get the girls. I’ll take care of you.”