Crimes in Southern Indiana

by Frank Bill

  Tires skidded to a stop. Moon stepped into the dust of headlights, saw the human form laid out on the road.

  “Shit!”

  Moon’s fingers met Fisher’s neck. He’d a racing pulse. Wetness spat from his forehead. Moon keyed his radio. “Earleen?”

  “Go ’head, Moon.”

  “Got an officer down. Still breathing. ’Bout one mile up from 62 on Wyandotte Road. Get an ambulance ASAP!”

  “It’s on its way.”

  Fisher’s right shoulder had a railroad-spike-sized opening. Shot from four to six feet, Moon guessed. Fisher’s mouth spewed over like Alka-Seltzer and down into the neck of his county browns. Moon thought Fisher’s left shoulder looked as though some son of a bitch had opened it with a small stick of dynamite. Close-quarter shot. Then he noticed all the dampness where his left ear used to be.

  “Son of a bitch! You hold on, Fish.”

  Moon turned around with his hand on his .40-caliber H&K. Shone his Maglite into the woods. Nothing. He searched inside the Ford. A near-empty case of Milwaukee’s Best on the passenger’s side floor. An empty bottle of Old Forester. A large black canister on the duct-taped seat: a spotlight. A Ziploc spilled over the dash with traces of crushed crystal. It was meth. Moon thought to himself, Brady ain’t no damn tweaker.

  He shone his light on the blue tarp that covered the bed of Brady Basham’s truck. Pulled it back. Fresh venison engulfed him as he saw three outlines. It was early October, deer season wasn’t even in and he had two doe, poached and gutted. And one human: a dead friend. Moon pursed his lips, keyed his radio. “Earleen?”

  “Go ’head, Moon.”

  “On top of the downed officer we got two poached doe and a fatality. Brady Basham has been murdered.”

  “I’ll radio a county unit.”

  Moon studied the contours of Brady’s pigment, rough as worn rawhide. He’d slate-colored hair that matted into claws and his eyes were beaten into slits. Brady had flattened cartilage in place of his nose and, like Fisher, was missing his left ear.

  One thing was certain, Brady wasn’t the one who wrecked his Ford Courier.

  Moon could hardly swallow, looking at his dead fishing buddy, and he asked, “What kind of hell did you find tonight, Brady?” Knowing he was deader than the catfish they’d carved and boiled the skins from over many a late night, sipping whiskey in his kitchen, telling stories of women and passing hunting secrets and myths, Moon pressed two fingers to Brady’s neck, wondering how warm his body was. Removing his fingers, Moon believed Brady had been killed within the last hour.

  Whoever the son of a bitch was that killed him was on foot. Which direction? Moon guessed downhill: easier travel. Moon had just missed him.

  Moon keyed his mic once more. “Earleen?”

  “Go ’head.”

  “Wake up Detective Mitchell and County Coroner Owen. Also, radio Sparks, tell ’im to bring his canine. My guess is the suspect is on foot. Armed and dangerous. And send a county unit to Brady’s home. He’s a daughter stayin’ with him. Let’s hope she’s still breathin’.”

  Moon flashed his Maglite to check on Fisher. Noticed the glitter of brass beside him. Kneeled down. Warm shell casing from a 30-30. Presumably the caliber that bored out Fisher’s shoulders.

  Lungs burned and leaves crumbled beneath each step. Wayne’s eyes adjusted to the night with the 30-30 strapped across his back, dodging standing trees. Jumping over the fallen trees. He heard sirens, dropped down behind a rotted tree trunk. Watched the red-orange wail of an ambulance and the blue-red screams of two cruisers following behind it, their lights strobing along the trees up Wyandotte Road.

  Wayne’s heart beat like a mule kicked, hard. He sat catching his breath, remembering the rapping of bone on his camper’s door. Opening it to Brady, who stood out in Wayne’s father’s hay field, a can of Milwaukee’s Best dripping cold in his hand. Wanted to go spotlighting, poach a few deer.

  Wayne told him, “Sure.”

  Brady asked, “Could yuh bring that 30-30? All I got packed is a .22.”

  Wayne grabbed a box of shells and the rifle that lay by his mattress of tangy sheets.

  Brady took a sip of his beer, said, “Got a fresh case, and a untapped fifth of whiskey.”

  Wayne had been up for days. His eyes looked rimmed by bruises. He was trying to numb the Need, chasing amphetamines with bourbon, chain-smoking cigarettes. Every time his high started to taper off, visions came stalking with grunts and shrieks. He’d chopped line after line, inhaled the moist talcum burn that seared his brain, and castrated all feeling of dread and murder.

  Coming out of his camper, he heard a screen door slam in the distance, saw a man with age step from the sandstone house Wayne had grown up in. His father, Dennis, let Wayne stay out in the camper they’d used when he was younger, camping out, hunting and fishing. Wayne hadn’t slept in the house since coming home from overseas. Since the passing of his mother, Dellma. He never got to grieve, to say goodbye, but he missed their talks when things went bad, her telling him it’d be okay. Everything always worked out. He missed the flannel sheets and hand-sewn quilts, the stews and roasts from the meat he and his father had slain, mixed with fresh vegetables his mother had picked from the garden and canned. All the scents and textures. The woman brought comfort to his and his father’s lives, their home. But Wayne had buried all of that in the Afghan mountains forever.

  Dennis’s hair fanned over his head the shade of a turtle-dove. He stood in Dickies work trousers and a white Hanes tucked in at the waist and asked, “Goin’ out?”

  He was a Vietnam vet. He understood his son’s ways of dealing with what he’d seen and done.

  Wayne told him, “I be late.”

  His father nodded his head, said, “Keep safe.” As if he knew that someday the shit would no longer stir, it would be spilled. Wayne saw it in his father’s movements. The shuffling of feet with unjudging stares, his hands shoved into the pockets of his faded blue work trousers, it was worry for when his son snapped. Dennis didn’t know everything but some he did. Seeing the jungles of Vietnam, he’d taken in a lot of his own bad. Told Wayne therapy might help, though he never had it in his day. No one respected soldiers back when he served. He was expected to come home, pretend nothing had happened, drink himself back into the person he was before he left.

  Wayne asked his father, “Would therapy help those that switched sides?”

  His father never asked what he meant by that, but he said, “War’s a confusing way to solve a country’s problems. Not everyone wants our way of being, but when Uncle Sam gets involved, no one has a choice.”

  Wayne waved to his father. Dennis waved back and went into the house. Wayne had the last of the meth in his pocket and his 30-30 in hand. Brady never could see to drive after dark, even before Wayne left for the military when he and Brady used to go catfishing down on the Blue River at night, so Wayne took the wheel. They’d cruised the winding back roads down around the old mill that had been burned down years back by kids. Farm fields ran for hundreds and hundreds of acres. All the timber, green, wildlife, and quiet one could want.

  Brady’s brittle arm had held the spotlight over the harvested stalks that lay chopped and dried about the soil as they passed slowly. Until light reflected eyes scavenging for dropped ears of feed corn. Wayne placed the shifter in neutral, pressed the emergency brake, grabbed his rifle, leaned over the idling hood as the engine missed and adrenaline stoked his tendons and shots opened the night.

  The first deer dropped. A hollow shell fell from the rifle, rolled down the hood. Another explosion chewed the night and a second deer dropped.

  Wayne had field-dressed each, using his blade to cut from the ass to the sternum. Missing the stomach, then using his hand to dig up into the chest cavity, cutting out the esophagus, and the heart and intestines poured out along with the euphoria that coursed through Wayne.

  Wayne had driven back to Brady’s graying cabin to quarter the deer meat. Brady’s daughter, Dee
Dee, had come out to the Ford. She’d prepared a late-night breakfast. Inside, Wayne sat at the kitchen table uninterested in nourishment, telling Brady they needed to take to the meat before it spoiled. Brady waved his worry away, said they’d time to share a bottle of Boone’s Farm, what he referred to as Kool-Aid with a kick.

  Dee Dee began to flirt with Wayne, tickling his neck with her long nails painted the color of a tongue. Wayne tried to ignore her leaning in front of him while setting a bowl of white gravy down, a tray of towel-covered biscuits and a platter of bacon. Her brown eyes staring, shoulder-length hair black as burned wood. Her shirt loose with toffee-colored cleavage dangling.

  Brady’s hand wrapped around her arm and he jerked her from the table. Dishes clanged and broke on the pine floor. Brady raised his free hand and Dee Dee begged, “Daddy, no!”

  The Need from the mountain villages painted Wayne’s insides black as ink. Alcohol and drugs had mutated into wrath. Wayne grabbed Brady’s wrist from behind, didn’t let the old man strike his daughter, spun him around face-to-face. Brady released Dee Dee. She fell back, watched Wayne hook his fist into Brady’s left kidney. Wayne felt the pressure in his bloodstream rising and his ears popped. He seared Brady’s vision with his fist and pancaked his nose. Then he dug his hand around Brady’s turkey neck, squeezed. Bones gave way like a number-two pencil.

  Dee Dee kept screaming for Wayne to stop. Brady was without form. Wayne had crossed over to that other way of being. He unsheathed his knife, pressed the edge to cartilage, and removed Brady’s ear. That’s when he felt four tiny prongs of steel open a muscle in his back.

  Dee Dee had stabbed him with a fork. Rage took over Wayne’s instincts and he backed her into the sink. Her lips pleaded while her eyes watered. “Please, please. I sorry, I sorry.” Wayne grabbed her by the throat, squeezed and squeezed as he swam in the memory of men. Locations mapped out in his mind. Coordinates for caves and villages. A man bound, blindfolded, sweating with the shrieks of an innocent female. The tearing of clothing and her foreign voice.

  Dee Dee went limp. He’d choked her out. He’d never killed a female, nor would he. He let her drop to the floor, loaded Brady in the truck with the two does. Gathering the dead, that’s what they’d called it in the mountains. Piling them, sometimes for burial, other times for burning. He grabbed the Old Forester from the floorboard of the Ford, not knowing where he was going or what he’d do, just driving and drinking the whiskey until everything went black and he found himself on Wyandotte Road pressing the gas instead of the brake. Meeting the elms head-on with the Need still whittling through his insides.

  Now a county K9 unit’s dog barked, echoed through the woods from which Wayne had just run. Lights opened the darkness, showing Wyandotte Road in the distance. A spotlight prismed between trees in the woods. Wayne’s mule-kicking heart returned. He stood up. Ran for the dim light at the hill’s bottom where an old shack sat. From behind, growling teeth ripped tendon and ligament, worked up and into his hamstring. Pain was unrecognized as Wayne stumbled; he and the dog rolled down the hill with the 30-30 strapped to his back. Leaves sounded like paper sacks smashing over and over, limbs gave and scraped, until Wayne and the dog leveled out on the hazed dew beneath the humming quartz of the old shack’s yard along Highway 62.

  Squeezing the canine tight to his wiry frame, Wayne smothered the dog’s attack like a vise being tightened around its muscles and bones. Pinched the fur of the shepherd’s neck between shoulder and ear. While unsheathing his blade with his right hand, he smothered the animal’s snapping jaws, parted fur beneath the neck, forced the knife up into the canine’s brain.

  Four legs attached to a mound of down lay silent as he removed its left ear and smuggled it into his fatigues.

  The conservation officer’s and the K9’s Expeditions braked to a stop on Wyandotte Road. Moon’s spotlight shone upon the wet grass, showing the man who stood in his gray T-shirt and desert camo stained by animal and human blood. Arms and face were chiseled like ice, hard and cold. His blade sparked in the light. Reds and blues danced in the darkness behind K9 Officer Sparks and Moon, who’d stepped from the truck. They were within forty feet of Wayne when Moon drew his .40-caliber H&K and recognized him. He’d hunted with Dennis, the boy’s father, and Wayne before he left for the war several years ago. He couldn’t remember the details, just as he couldn’t believe he was the one who’d murdered Brady, and he hollered, “Drop the knife, Wayne.”

  Sparks shone his Maglite down at his canine in the distance. The dog wasn’t moving.

  “Crazy bastard killed Johnny Cash.” Moon kept his H&K on Wayne. Pleaded. “Don’t make me do it, Wayne.”

  Wayne sized up the distance. He’d picked men off in simulations at this range before. He fought the rush of knowing he was in danger, could be killed. Dropped the knife. But that thought pushed him and he turned his back. Half limped, then ran. Felt an explosion nick his left shoulder as he crossed Highway 62. Heard a man yell, “He cut off my Johnny Cash’s damn ear!”

  Several more rounds exploded, but Wayne felt nothing as he leaped over the guardrail on the other side of 62, falling down into the steep darkness of the hillside. Tree limbs and briars jabbed his body with welts and the faces flared up in his mind again, men in villages. Restrained.

  Wayne splashed into the deep current he’d inner-tubed down as a kid. Hit the flat rock bottom. Pushed to the surface. Gasped. Floated down the river on his back like a leaf from a tree, ignoring his splintered insides. His bruised and bloody outsides. Knowing he was only six miles or less from his home, remembering how all his wrongs started with a man. A farmer similar to his father, dressed in fraying brown and gray rags, with stalactite beard.

  The U.S. soldiers in Wayne’s eight-man unit believed that this man and the men that sat bound against a dirt wall were Taliban, pretending to be farmers, passing information about soldiers and their whereabouts when they were seen crossing the valley below the village.

  The farmer begged, told them he was not Taliban. Three of the soldiers called him a liar. Spat on him, made an example for the others to heed. Sliced his elbow flexers and doused him with fuel they’d siphoned from a rusted generator. They did this in front of his wife and daughter.

  Wayne argued this wasn’t gathering intel.

  But it was the five soldiers dragging the females into the back room of the mud structure and the screams that came in foreign tongues with the ripping of garments that forced Wayne over the edge.

  He’d rushed over the dirt floor, through a doorway, only to find one soldier laughing, holding women at gunpoint, inciting them to scream. The other two soldiers held down a younger female and one soldier stood up, dropping his gear and unbuttoning his fatigues.

  Wayne grabbed the soldier’s shoulder and tugged. The man faced him and said, “You’ll get your turn,” and started to turn back to the female. Wayne grabbed him and the soldier turned with his grab, spun into him. Drove his shoulder into Wayne’s stomach. Pushed him into the wall. Knocked the wind from him. Head-butted Wayne’s face. Panting, he called Wayne all kinds of motherfuckers. Wayne felt the warm flow from his busted nose and lips. Listened to the farmer in the other room scream to the smell of his own skin igniting. Wayne reacted.

  He woke up with a blade in one hand, 9 mm in the other, a pile of left ears in his lap. The Need in his brain. Every man in his unit, one less ear and matching bullet holes in their heads. The Afghan was burned beyond help. The women horrified, in shock. The rest of the men in the village were rattled by fear but among the living, keeping their distance, looking at him with curdled awe and fear. He helped bury the farmer and burn the seven soldiers he’d murdered, scattering their remains along the valley.

  Wayne went rogue. Knowing the U.S. routes in and out of the mountains, he began ambushing his own. He’d been trained by the elite, knew how the Taliban gathered intel. Slow disembowelment. Promises of food, of one’s release to get the information, then the beheading. Methods preserved from mediev
al times. Condoned by holy men. He killed the bad along with the good. Fighting a war within himself for six months in the mountains. Living in that village with those farmers. Trying to make sense of what he was doing. Of what he’d become. Until he realized none of it made sense. But it was too late.

  It’s what happened when a southern Indiana farm boy scored high on the ASVAB test before entering the military. Could wield a blade better than a Filipino knife fighter. Shoot dead center for the length of cornfields. Had stand-up skills like Ali before the draft. Could track better than a bloodhound. Wayne wanted to serve his country, use his God-given abilities. Unfortunately, God had other plans.

  Now, the river carried Wayne down through the dark valley and he remembered when the United States raided the village, found him, wanted to know what he was doing there, where the others were.

  They isolated him for two years. Wanted to know what happened over there in the mountains. He told them he couldn’t recollect. He spoke with doctors every day. Told them of his rage, the shaking of the earth. The dead he’d seen, the dead he’d created. They medicated him, ran question after question, test after test. They evaluated him as no longer psychologically capable of carrying out his duties and discharged him with a small pension.

  Wayne floated atop the warm drift, reached for the roots of a washed-out tree, held on, knowing it didn’t matter where or how far the river carried him ’cause the Need would always be inside him, waiting.

  Beautiful Even in Death

  With his back to Christi, Bishop stood knee-deep in the bone-stiffening current of the Blue River, clenching his fist around his fishing pole. Christi ran her flower-petal fingertips down his neck again. Instead of jerking from her this time he swatted her away.