by Angel Colon
And she didn't turn around. Not to acknowledge him, not to say a word to thank him, just stood there, one hand on her chin, her elbow supported by the other hand stretched across her body. If she turned, she could've seen it coming. But, then again, he told himself, if she had turned, he would have pried out the old nail with his fingers and used the ball peen on the new nail. He could've. That thought didn't make him a cold blooded murderer. That thought made it her fault.
Tonight, he'd find out if he could sleep with that thought.
He woke up in the back room on the rocking chair. At first he thought he had cat-napped for an hour, but the morning sun was angling at the grey wooden planks of the back fence. He knew it was between five and six, based on the sunlight. He looked for his cigarette and found it on the floor, a black trail of burnt paint capped with a half-melted filter.
He opened the door to the kitchen and braced for the smell, but there wasn't one except for the smell of shit. He knew that not everyone evacuated their bowels when they died, but Susan did. He chuckled that Susan, who put on such a classy air to everyone, would leave the world with a shit in her pants. He chuckled, but that was dangerous. Whatever had taken him over yesterday—the anger, the bitterness, that red raging haze that put his hand on a skull bashing tool…that was gone.
He expected her to smell. He wanted it, wanted her death to torment him. But as he walked into the living room, she was lying on the floor. The only blemishes being the red-purple pooling of blood that followed gravity in her bare outstretched arm, and the congealed rusty-red splotch where the hammer landed. A fly or two were zipping about, but that was it.
He stepped over her—not to his favorite spot (now empty of beer), but onto the floor. He lay by her side, stared into her wide-open, constricted eyes. He held her cold hand, stiff with rigor mortis. No tears came to him.
When he originally put the portrait on the wall, he'd used the wrong nail.
It was a cheap nail. If the wrong hammer caused her murder, the wrong nail spelled out his guilt. When she wanted to put the portrait up, she had him go down to the basement to get a nail. He had good nails, but they were under a box. Not a heavy box, not buried at the bottom. Just under a box. So he grabbed the cheap nail, and the portrait fell every week.
Her nagging, his laziness. Her lavish shopping sprees, the thousands he spent restoring the Fury. Her showing Beth off like a social token, his taking baby Beth to the market for all the women to fawn on. Her waking him up and accusing him of sleeping on the job…
The truth of that accusation. He was lost in eyes that couldn't hold a gaze. He thought of moving her body, to the basement or in a rug to the tool shed, but why? It was her house too. She had just as much a reason to be there as he did.
He let her hand go and got up, dusting off his robe. He smoked a cigarette in the La-Z-Boy, against the reaming Susan would give him if she could. After all, he couldn't blame her for being herself anymore. How couldn't she forgive him? He turned on the Weather Channel. A dazzling beauty with wild, piercing eyes stood before a map of the country, pointing to what looked like a big green comma running across the Midwest, with the yellows and oranges of heavy rain in the center.
The weather reports calmed him. The weather had motives, but they were logical, even if the weathermen couldn't understand them. Motives, it had—means and opportunities. Yet every death was the perfect crime. You could never hold the rain and the wind to a mahogany table while a black robe presided to referee humanity's case against it. Twelve meteorologists wouldn't go into a room and decide its fate.
He got up and navigated his way to the kitchen to inspect his supplies. He had enough food for a few days, at least until the smell drove him out. He went into the bedroom and opened the carton of Pall Malls. Four packs left. He might have to leave on Tuesday to get more cigarettes. He knew there'd be no way he could keep from chain-smoking. Doris would call. Irene would call repeatedly if he didn't answer. He'd call in sick tonight, but the next? The night after that?
He brought the cigarettes and the two cases of beer he had left and plopped them by the La-Z-Boy. He lit up and cracked open a can, letting the carbonation burn his throat when he tried to down it like the day before. Still, he finished it in a few bender slugs and reached for another. He drank, smoked, and watched more weather on TV.
He was good and drunk when the portrait behind him came off the shitty nail, the edge bouncing off the back of his head. He heard the glass crack and he jumped up, rubbing his head against the sting, though by that time, his drunkenness had made it a pointless gesture. He saw that the glass had cracked along the center, separating Susan from him, bisecting Beth.
He was too drunk for irony. He went downstairs to get a nail. He reached for the shit nails, but stopped. The nails were like little accusing fingers. He grunted and went over to move the box that sat atop the good nails. Fishing them out, he saw the rosary that Susan made him put there above his tool rack. It was near the claw hammer, so he grabbed them both.
He pounded two good nails in the stud and re-hung the portrait. He sat back down, still clutching the rosary. He wasn't raised religious, didn't wonder about God. Not that he did or didn't believe—he just never cared. He figured if there was a God, Susan's devout Catholicism would get him a pass too. He glanced over at Susan's corpse on the floor, then at the crucifix on the rosary and tossed it toward her. It draped across her slumped shoulder.
Around six o'clock, the phone rang. Irene. He let it go to voicemail. She was pleasant leaving the first message. By nine o'clock, both she and Doris had called several times and Irene was getting desperate to talk to Susan. He thought of answering, telling them both that Susan spent the day resting. But at nine-thirty, he yanked the cord out of the wall.
He watched the late network news and was still up by the time it went to the test pattern and static. He spent those deep morning hours smoking, accusing Susan of making him do it, forgiving her, blaming himself, forgiving himself, and blaming the ball-peen hammer before the cycle repeated itself. He was sober by the time the sun crested the tree line across the street at five a.m.
He got up and hit the bathroom. Another shave, another shower, and back into the same bathrobe, no underwear—naked, free. Then he heard what he expected to hear last night; a knock on the door.
A familiar knock, one he used to give years before.
He got to the living room and he could see the New Rhodes PD cruiser in the driveway. Irene must've called. He ran his fingers through his hair, rubbed his face and tied the sash of his bathrobe.
He took one last look at Susan before he opened the door.
Prairie Color
by Tom See
When I opened my eyes I saw the movement of a person, but it was really just a shirt drying on the line. Just Burt's old blue denim. So I closed my eyes, but I was aware now of the sun inside my eyelids. I could not resume my nap. All napped out I was, and just being lazy.
Again I thought I saw something in motion and that made me get up. My back cracked, but there was another sound on top of that I thought were…footsteps in the grass beyond the barn?
I walked over and the barn door was slid open. Things were quiet inside. I heard the friendly cat meowing from somewhere in the barn and the other, unsociable cat running across the hayloft above.
Action I could feel but not see made me turn back to the door. It could have been a bird or a long shadow from an angle I couldn't figure, but something had passed the door.
I walked back along the grass and I saw an Indian. He was just standing by the house. Burt wasn't home. Nobody was on the farm but me. The Indian seemed to know it. He was just staring out at the dam—listening to the ducks, but thinking about something else. He was tall and kind of heavy. I walked up to him. He didn't turn until I was almost to him.
"Where's Burt?" He said it plain.
"You a friend of his?" I asked him. He looked around, not impatient, but wanting answers, not questions.
"When will he be back?"
I told him it'd be a couple hours yet.
He looked like he was ready to park it and wait for Burt on the porch. I said I had work to do. He looked like he didn't believe me. He might've seen me lying in the grass. Then he just walked off. He walked to his truck, which I hadn't heard even pull in and had just noticed parked in front of Burt's bucket loader. He drove off and I figured I'd better get my ass to work.
Burt was dead only a few weeks later, and everyone assumed that if it hadn't been his own doing, then it might have been his ex-wife and her boyfriend had something to do with it. No one ever asked about the Indian and I never said anything about him. I didn't think any more of it. At the time, I was more worried the Indian'd tell Burt he'd seen me slacking instead of working.
That weekend, we branded four-or-so hundred calves at Burt's place. There were twenty or thirty people on hand. Most I didn't know, having only been staying there a month or so. I'd come from Illinois for the work. I was living in one of Burt's old trailers by the creek. He wasn't the worst man I ever worked under—he was pretty good, actually. He just couldn't get along with people it seemed like when it counted most. Take his family. He had five or six kids and he seemed disappointed in each, all for disparate reasons. And that was a usual kind of thing I saw in guys like Burt. Same as I heard guys like him always say they never wanted any kids, and they were always the kind had a shitload of them.
I was wrassling all that day, partnered up with one of Burt's sons. Burt was holding the brand, and his neighbor, Cooney, was cutting nuts. We branded some of Cooney's calves too, later on. The day went slow, and it was hot and there was no wind. And that was before this guy named Jake Shiner showed up. Turned out that the calves all belonged to Jake, and Burt had agreed to help Jake out, letting him run them up to his place.
Jake wasn't really much of a rancher. He owned a big company that did something or other, but he had all these cows he didn't know what to do with as kind of a hobby. By God, Burt told Jake he didn't even have to come by that day. Burt said he'd take care of the whole damn thing.
But Jake showed up anyway. He just got out of his pickup and wandered over, pushing his way through the cows. They were all standing on the other side of the pen crying for their calves. Jake climbed the fence and came over to where I was. That was when I could see he was carrying some sort of a sword. I thought it was one of his toys he'd just brought to show the boys.
Well, we just kept going. Cooney cut the nuts off a calf I was holding down and Burt stuck him with a brand. Another guy and a woman I didn't know were vaccinating. When they were done sticking him, we just let the calf go and he got up and kind of stood there in a daze like they do sometimes before they make their way back to the rest.
That was when Jake came up behind the calf and pulled his sword. Just swung it and sliced the left ear clean off that calf. The calf sorta jumped and went running back into the fray. I looked at Burt, who didn't say anything. He simply went back to pull another brand from the fire.
Jake kind of wandered around the pen. Everyone else just looked at him and, as they usually did, looked at Burt for what they should do.
Another set of guys were trying to get hold of a calf, and Jake took his sword to that one, swung it, and slashed off another ear. Then he wandered back to the lot of them—just starting swinging that sword like a scythe. Nicked one calf in the ass, cut off half another's tail. He saw one that had got covered in shit standing under another cow's ass, and he pulled up the hilt and bopped it right on the head.
Cooney turned to Burt and asked, "He been drinking?"
"I don't believe he has," answered Burt.
With that, Burt turned to a guy must have known Jake better than Burt did. Burt told him if he didn't get Jake the hell gone, he was gonna put a rope around him and drag him out to a draw and leave him there. Well, this guy and another convinced Jake to yield the fucking sword and everyone went back to what they were doing.
The next thing you heard were shotgun blasts and what you saw was this Jake Shiner, having renounced swashbuckling, now standing next to his pickup just blowing shells into the air. The cows were shook up. He was reloading when Burt finally started over there. A couple guys could see it was gonna get bad once Burt went directly at Jake. They jumped ahead of him and took the shotgun away from Jake and pretty much got him out of there.
The rest of the day went okay, but Burt didn't say much or even crack a joke or two like I was used to hearing from him. After we were done, everyone got to drinking, staying kind of quiet, except the few who had shown up after Jake had already left and knew nothing about it.
Jean Louise, who was Burt's ex but who still came around sometimes, was hanging around drinking beer with her boyfriend Harry—who was this little guy who used to have a ranch, but lost it when his mother willed it to her son-in-law instead of him.
Jean Louise was bullshitting, talking about somebody (I don't remember who), who'd had this string of shitty luck—having her son, her brother, her uncle, and another uncle's wife all die on them in the last six weeks. Three of the four had been suicides. Well, she went on about suicides then and how many there had been around these parts and everyone in that little circle kinda clammed up, maybe a few of them having thought recently about retiring early themselves.
I guess she was sensing the pallor she'd laid on the crowd, so she tried to rouse them all telling this story about Burt. How one time when she was still living on the ranch—though already sleeping in the downstairs bedroom with him in the upstairs one—she was waked one night by a gunshot from within. She ran upstairs, thinking Burt had blown his head off. When she got there, she knocked the door open and found Burt in his undies hanging out the window shooting at this raccoon the size of a German shepherd. As big as that bastard was, she said, he couldn't hit the damn thing. Everyone kinda laughed and Burt took it, grinning, saying he'd just woke up and his eyes were still all blurry. All he remembered, he said, was the thing laughing as it ran off into the dawn.
Jean Louise kept bullshitting and some of the guys hung around listening to it. It seemed to me like they felt obliged, like she was the gal of the house, which she wasn't. Not anymore.
I peeled off to do some of my chores and I found Burt already at feeding his cows, relieved, it seemed, to get away from the rest. He drank his beer and had brought another one with him. Then he was drinking that one when he started talking about Jake Shiner and how Jake had a brother was even crazier than him. His name was Lee, and Lee fucking hated Indians. He'd go out of his way to fuck with any Indian anytime he could.
Why, by God, Burt said, just the other day, Lee was in town picking up some groceries and he seen this Indian coming out of the store. No one else was around, and when Lee looked at the clock, he realized he had a bit of time to kill. So he turned the car around and he drove back down the street, jumped the curb and ran over the goddamn Indian. He pulled ahead, stopping far enough away to see the Indian in his mirror, and saw the guy was getting up—he was messed up, but good enough he could limp away. So Lee put the car in reverse and hit the gas and backed over him, making sure he broke the Indian's other goddamn leg. When Lee drove past the guy, he could see he was still alive, but good and fucked up. Then Lee just took off.
Burt told me shit like that happened to Indians around here, and you'd never see it in the news or read it in the paper. You just won't hear about it, he said, and the cops don't follow up on shit like that. The tribal police wouldn't touch that shit, with a white man fucking up an Indian like that. They just wouldn't go near it. They'd stick to the shit that was Indian-on-Indian.
We kept drinking in the barn, and Burt showed me a fridge in there that was full of beer so we wouldn't have to go back out to the house again. So we wouldn't have to see any more of Jean Louise or her boyfriend—who Burt laughed about losing his ranch, being so shitty to his own mother she'd rather leave it to a stranger than him.
That's when Burt told me
he thought Jean Louise came around still, bringing herself and the kids by to make sure Burt still kept them in mind to put in his will. It was something she'd kept asking him about, especially lately. Burt said he did have one but declined to mention who was in it. I've spoken before about this conversation I had with him, and his concern over his ex-wife's interest in the ranch—his suspicion of her wanting it…to be able to control it after he was gone.
I never said anything about that Indian before, the one I seen at the ranch the day before we branded Jake Shiner's calves. I've never said before—that a week after the branding—I was up in Dewey and I saw Burt at the Dewey City Bar with that same goddamn Indian who'd snuck up on the ranch the day I was there alone. They were at a table with a third guy standing over them, but I couldn't see him. I didn't stay to look. I was only there looking for a girl I had been seeing. Truthfully, I'd heard a rumor she was staying with another dude up in Arvin. I only peeked my head in the bar to see if she was there, which she wasn't. So I just went on my jealous way.
It was two days after that, I think, when I heard that Lee Shiner was missing. When they went to his house, they found blood over everything—spat across the front door and windows with a trail leading outside. They eventually found him face down in the creek nearby with a big hole where a shotgun had blown out his chest. But I only heard that from some people in town.
The way it was reported was that Lee Shiner was a suicide. Open and shut. I never heard a suicide going down like that. You could've filed it under what Burt was talking about, how things around here don't make the news. Well, this one had to make the news, since Lee was known around town—but there wasn't any way that a man commits a suicide like that. It didn't make even a little bit of sense. They never mentioned the bloody door and the trails of blood coming out of the house. Most people only knew about the part where he was face down in the creek.