Crimes in Southern Indiana

by Frank Bill

  “You all right?”

  “I’m okay. I got Abby and Avis.”

  “Where’s Jacque?”

  “Out in the backyard. I heard shooting. Men screaming.”

  “You stay put. Don’t open that door till I come back.”

  Out the back door and into the yard, bright quartz lights lit up the lifeless outlines of the beaten, bloody, and aged gladiators. Billy ID’d them as Medford’s grease-wired cronies.

  Swartz was spread out on the ground with his neck gaping. Mangled. Dark wounds up and down his outline mirroring Toad’s. Pine Box Willie’s frame sat smoking where the field met the grassy yard. Billy nudged the two dead curs with the toe of his boot. Each had their ribs parted by bullet holes. He shook his head.

  “Damn waste of two good hounds.”

  Billy hadn’t ID’d Medford, Orange Peel, or Jacque. He scanned the field’s edge. The yard. Boots caught his eyes at the edge of the quartz light. He approached the boots and saw they were attached to a smoldering frame. The scent of another ignited by fuel: Jacque.

  Billy knelt down over him. Wrapped two fingers to the pulse of Jacque’s greasy black wrist, chewed by buckshot and flame. What Billy felt was barely a beat. Fighting tears for a man he’d known his whole life, his gut knotted up like twine. Bubbled. Boiled over. He vomited on Jacque. Caused his flesh to sizzle.

  Billy wiped the yellow bile from his lips onto his sleeve. Pulled and keyed the radio from his side. “Donna, we got a bloodbath out here at Jacque Bocart’s farm. Bocart’s been grilled. Barely breathing. There are three dead. I repeat, one barely breathing. Three dead. Gonna need an ambulance. Whatever reserve unit—”

  An empty sawed-off swung like a ball bat at the back of Billy’s skull. Combat boots stepped fast from behind the tree. The silhouette blended into the field. Disappeared into the September night. Billy lay on the cold earth and Donna repeated, “Billy? Billy? Billy?”

  It had been ten years since the long potholed drive colored red and blue with the lights of reserve units. The ambulance and state police. While the girl, her grandmother, and mother watched from the basement window. Then they rushed up the stairs and into the unknown madness of bloodshed that decorated the backyard.

  It had been ten years since Jacque had been released from the hospital’s burn unit to Harrison County Corrections. Since the state had offered him a plea bargain in return for the story of what had provoked the loss of life on his property. And who had disfigured him. He told them he had no recollection of that night or the events that unfolded. He served time but passed away before his sentence was fulfilled.

  It had been ten years since Billy Hines had been forced out as town marshal and replaced by one of Elmo Sig’s lawless deputies. Who turned a blind eye for cash from a father and son who were transporting meth throughout the poverty-stricken county’s veins and the surrounding counties’ arteries.

  But now, seated in the rusted Chevy four-by-four, the girl nodded at the aged outline seated next to her and whispered, “It’s time.” She stepped from the Chevy with her hair pulled tight into a ponytail, the .45 gripped in the gunpowder-burned palm of her right hand. The busted soles of her boots cut through the knee-high weeds. Across the chewed-back-road pavement. The outline sat in the four-by-four, watching her walk through the gate of the rusted fence that housed the skeletal remains of vehicles decorating acres of red clay. To the outline she appeared like a king cobra with her stitched soft ball shoulders, V-shaped back, and hourglass waist beneath the full moon’s glow.

  She stopped in front of the rusted tin building. Listened to the sound of an air-powered drill zipping lug nuts from axles. The smell of motor oil and gasoline fueled the blood-lust that had been circulating throughout her frame for the past ten years. She stood remembering all of the times the aged outline had picked her up from her great-uncle’s. Then he and she’d park across the road at the abandoned farm and sit studying the father and son.

  Placing her eye to the crack of light in the tin door, she watched the son with a pearl-white eye. A head of blackish gray hair. Oily and stringy. He zipped the air drill and she remembered the ten fingers. How they had forced bruises up and down her ceramic skin as she pleaded, “STOP!”

  Behind the son sat the father on a bucket, gray strands braided down to the chain of his leather wallet. He’d stretched-taffy arms, pitted and ripped by buckshot. Lifting a coffin nail to his lips.

  The girl thumbed the hammer of the .45-caliber Colt. Then the safety. He thought he’d gotten away with what he’d done ten years ago. He’d been questioned. Had an alibi. Then he was forgotten when her grandfather wouldn’t talk.

  But when the girl swung the tin door open none of that would matter. Because she was carrying on the wisdom. And watching from the four-by-four, Billy Hines could forgive himself and her grandfather could rest in peace after his granddaughter pulled the trigger, just as he had that night ten years ago, until the clip was empty.

  Trespassing Between Heaven and Hell

  Everything exploded like flashbulbs across the top of an old Polaroid camera in Everett’s mind as he stood scrubbing the red from within the cracks of his hand’s life line. Beneath his thick black-rimmed glasses, he squeezed his blood-sprayed eyes closed and fought the voices of the dead. Remembering his headlights cutting holes through the darkness above the gravel, rounding the wall of trees that lined each side of the road dividing the land on one side from the river on the other. And the frail outline of color attached to a small frame that thudded and disappeared beneath the truck.

  Tires locked up over the gravel, Hank Williams blaring “I Dreamed About Mama Last Night” from his truck’s cassette player. He opened the door, inhaling the dust that polluted the night. Tossed his empty can of Pabst Blue Ribbon into the bushes.

  Behind his truck, he kneeled. Palmed the neck that was trading warmth for cold. Time turned back in his mind to a war he had served in overseas and the screams of a man in his platoon, Private Dubious, whose words echoed throughout his head: “Stop the pain! Stop the fucking pain!” He couldn’t separate the voices and the memories from his everyday living.

  He took in the shape of the boy on the road glowing red with the truck’s taillights. Everett had more than a few beers in him. He wasn’t about to go to jail because someone couldn’t keep an eye on their own. Letting the boy run rampant in the valley on everyone’s land. Land that people had worked to pay for, take care of. He shoveled his arms beneath the boy’s body. Carried it to the riverbank, listened to the water’s current. Thought of how the boy’s mother was a pox on his valley with her on-again off-again lifestyle of drugs and jail time. The home she lived in had once been a well-maintained white wood-sided cottage with blue shutters. A shiny tin roof. The previous owner gave it a fresh coat of paint every spring. The shutters were now rotted frames outlining the cardboard that had replaced the broken glass.

  Everett told himself he wasn’t going to jail, to lose what time he had left. He’d already lost enough.

  An explosion rang through his mind and out of his ears. He could smell the smoke, feel the flecks of hot earth pelt his face, and that vision of Private Dubious was no more.

  Everett heaved the boy’s outline into the sludge below him. Listened to the splashing of the body. He started to turn to the idling engine but noticed a stringer of fish lying in the gravel, picked them up knowing they belonged to the boy, threw them into the bed of his truck. Got in. Grabbed a cold beer from his cooler on the floor. Put his truck in drive.

  At home, Everett rinsed the powdered Clorox from his hands. It had started out white but turned a pink foam. He shut off the steaming water. Grabbed a towel from the stove. Thought of the war he’d served in. The men he’d watched die.

  Deputy Sheriff Pat Daniels stood shaking his head, watching the boy being pulled from the green river. He wondered why God sometimes took the simple and innocent, let unexplained evils of the world live on.

  The boy’s body resembled an overcast da
y, with lost milky eyes and violet lips, as they loaded him onto the gurney.

  The night before, Pat had been working late at the station when dispatch connected him with Stace Anderson. She had filed a missing persons on her boy, Matthew. He hadn’t come home from fishing. Said she’d walked the valley road looking for him, asking every neighbor with a house light on if they’d seen him. No one had.

  At first, Pat thought the boy had been wade fishing. Fallen in. Drowned. But after County Coroner Owen and Detective Mitchell took in the details of major trauma, the broken ribs and femur, they concluded it wasn’t a drowning but instead foul play.

  “We gotta keep a short leash on this, Pat.”

  “I aim to keep this hound in her pen. Media gets ahold of this, it’ll get ugly.”

  “How the Galloway interviews go?”

  When Pat first arrived on the scene he’d interviewed Needle Galloway and his son Beady. They’d been crappie fishing after church that morning when they came upon the body.

  “They’re innocent as the Virgin Mary.”

  “You ready to break the news to the mother?”

  “If Chaplain Pip ever gets here.”

  “Surprised the mother ain’t down here wondering what we’re up to. You say she just lives up the road?”

  “About a mile and a half in the widow Ruth’s old place. I take it you ain’t heard much about the mother?”

  “Don’t know a thing, this is your neck of the woods. Why?”

  “She’s in and out of jail and rehab. One time she skipped from the hospital after a meth lab exploded into a house fire.”

  “The one down off of Lickford Road a while back?”

  “That’d be the one. When she was caught the judge gave her community service and probation.”

  “Figures. Well, I done contacted the sheriff, let him know it looks like foul play. Think she could’ve killed the boy?”

  “If I had to guess I’d say no. Aside from being a meth addict she did try to be a good mother.”

  “What about insurance money?”

  “Gal like that, can’t hold a job any longer than she can stay clean, she’s lucky if she can keep her light bill paid.”

  “What about the father?”

  “Nelson, he ain’t been the same since Stace got hooked on that shit. Went back on the sauce, divorced her. To be honest, that boy was all he had left.”

  “See how she reacts when you give her the news.”

  “What’s your theory on the boy’s death?”

  “He’s hit by a vehicle sometime last night and for whatever reason someone decided to dump him in the river.”

  “Well, Stace’d be lucky if she could hold a Whopper from Burger King with two hands. Let alone carry a body.”

  “Telling me she’s frail?”

  “Frail would describe her as muscular. Last time I seen her she was POW thin.”

  “What about a boyfriend?”

  “None that I know of.”

  “Don’t your brother live down this way?”

  “Yeah, but I ain’t been down here to visit since he near cut Sheldon’s ear off.”

  “I heard ’bout that.”

  “Lord God, shoulda seen the blood. Look like he had a bird wing sproutin’ from his head.”

  “Lucky Sheldon didn’t press charges.”

  “Lucky’s ass, if the county prosecutor got wind of it he’d be in jail.”

  “Seems hard to talk to sometimes when I see him in town.”

  “More like all the time, why I don’t visit much, he’s gotten worse.”

  “Probably like being a cop, see some bad shit that stays with you no matter how much time passes.”

  Everett emptied his beer. Visited a time before. Remembering the words from Preston’s lips when he shook a cigarette from his pack that morning. He remembered how the cigarette was dry. Unbroken. How Preston’s stubble complexion was mapped by the heat of the jungle with beads of moisture. How the platoon stood in early morning silence, everyone keeping watch. Preston’s green helmet tilted on his head; his eyes looked itchy with hay fever but it was from a lack of sleep. He sparked a match, brought an orange heat to the cigarette’s end and said, “If it ain’t wet, it ain’t broken.”

  Preston led the men through the stillness, cigarette smoke clouding into the air above, when the explosion of gunfire dropped everyone to the ground for cover. Only Preston dropped because he’d found his end.

  “Ready for another Pabst, Everett?”

  Everett came back to the now, blinking. Followed the folds of flesh up Poe’s neck to his worn leather jawline, his parched lips with a hint of chalk-white spittle in the corners.

  “A what?”

  “Pabst? You want another one or you switching back to Natural Light?”

  “Give me another Pabst, tired of drinkin’ that deer piss.”

  Poe was a lanky man with faded rebel flags and green skulls that used to be black tattooed up and down each arm. He spoke with a smoker’s cough as he bartended at the Leavenworth Tavern, a local bar that sat down along the Ohio River. A place Everett drove to be alone with himself and this hell that had plagued his mind for thirty-some years.

  Behind Everett, Nelson Anderson sat off in the far corner with his cherry-stained eyes staring out the tinted glass window, sulking over the wife that left him for meth addiction some time ago.

  Nelson and Everett were the only regulars until the entrance door opened, flamed the bar with sunlight. Everett watched the dark figure’s reflection approach in the barroom mirror in front of him. The figure sat down on the stool beside him.

  “There was a mess of police and an ambulance down your way, Everett.”

  “So what are you tellin’ me, Merritt, that maybe I should take the long way home?”

  Merritt had served in the Marines during the Vietnam War, never saw any action, but guarded an ammo dump off the coast of Puerto Rico. He frequented the tavern several times a week just as he did the valley of Blue River Village, where Everett lived. He gave Merritt permission to fish across from his place down on the river. In return Merritt allowed Everett to hunt, day or night, on the wooded farmland his family had left him after passing.

  Poe opened the chrome cooler, pulled out cans of Budweiser and Pabst. Popped them open. Sat one in front of Everett. The other in front of Merritt.

  “Shit, don’t keep us in suspense, what’s going on?”

  “All I heard is Needle and Beady Galloway was fishing this morning. Found a boy’s body in the river.”

  There was the scraping of a chair across the floor. Then the voice of Nelson Anderson. “You say a boy’s body?”

  Merritt had gotten his first swallow of Budweiser. He turned to Nelson’s already reddened whiskers with recessed eyes the color of an eggplant. He fought back the bubbles. A numbness expanded up and down Merritt’s spine. He’d not noticed Nelson when he entered.

  “That’s just what I heard from Virgil MacCullum.”

  Poe added, “He is the only boy in the village.”

  Setting his Budweiser back on the bar, Merritt inhaled smoke from his Camel. Watched Nelson rush out of the bar like a kamikaze pilot.

  Merritt shook his head.

  “Shit, didn’t even see Nelson when I come in here or I’d have maybe thought before I started yappin’ my jaws. His ex–old lady lives down by you, Everett, with that boy of theirs.”

  Everett watched Merritt pull the Camel from his lips, the smoke trailing like a smoldering fire, deliberate and ghostly. Everett pushed his thick black-framed glasses up his nose, exhaled. “They found the boy.” He turned his head oddly and in a sad raspy tone mumbled, “Now everthing’s wet and broken.”

  Merritt turned to Everett, wondering what he meant. He was acting more strange than normal. “What you mean, wet and broken?”

  Everett shook his head, began palming his forehead, saying, “No, no! Ain’t none of your concern.”

  Merritt looked to Poe, back at Everett. “Concern? You ain�
�t makin’ much sense, Everett.” In Everett’s mind, he was back in the jungle, where he hunkered down, explosions zipping past. Earth rumbling with mortar fire. Preston laid out, his skull peeled open and scattered. And Everett felt that same way now as he did then. The fear of the world around him becoming unbalanced.

  Confusion wrinkled Merritt’s cheeks into his eyes.

  “Everett, you okay?”

  Everett snapped back to the haze of the bar, waved his right hand up into the air.

  Everett glanced at the grain of the bar, his sweating drink, glanced beside him, and said, “That boy was slow as an inchworm. Everyone in the valley warned his doped-up mother about his running loose up and down the road, fishing from our property. It was a matter of time.”

  Merritt and Poe glanced at each other and Poe said, “What are you trying to say, Everett?”

  “That woman and boy have been a problem in the valley since Nelson sent her ass afoul.”

  Poe cleared his throat. Said, “Being kinda harsh, ain’t you?”

  Everett looked at Poe and said, “Harsh is when you’s tryin’ to stop your buddy from bleedin’ only it don’t matter ’cause he’s already dead.”

  Pip never showed. Pat had to break the news to Stace, alone. She sat on a love seat decorated with cigarette burns and cat hair. She’d a muskrat mien, tear-swollen eyes and a body gouged by scabs. She caught her breath and asked, “Why’d a person run over an innocent child?” She paused, lost in an unfilled blank, ran her chicken-bone arm over her sunken complexion and said, “Toss them into the river just like they’s a piece of trash.”

  Pat sat on the ratty sofa, trying to ignore the waft of unchanged cat litter, the stubbed-out smokes lining ashtrays, empty plastic cola bottles on their sides, and food-smeared dishes. All he could muster was “They’s evils in people that make little if any sense, and trying to figure them out does a person little to no good.”

  Beside him the door swung open. Pat was ready to draw his pistol. Nelson swarmed in with light warming the house’s stale interior of wrecked living. His lips moving, saying, “I heard what happened. Is it true?” Stace never stood, sat cradling herself. Raised her head up and down. Nelson dropped down beside her, wrapped his arms around what little was left of her. He reeked of booze. If a spark hit the air, the room would ignite. Pat ignored it. He leaned forward with his elbows digging through his khakis and into his knees, told Nelson, “Matthew’s found early this morning.”