Murder on the Red River

by Marcie R. Rendon

  “Just a young girl and two little ones, one’s just a baby,” he said to his partner. Cash could tell from their voices they were still standing. Dang, she could use a smoke.

  “So, Mrs. Day Dodge, you know this man?”

  Josie must have nodded yes ’cause the next question was, “And he was your husband?” Cash could almost hear her nod yes.

  “Do you have any idea who would have hurt him?”

  “He just went down there to drive grain truck so we could have some money this winter. How’d he die?”

  “Someone stabbed him. We aim to find out who. Who’d he go down there with?”

  “No one. He hitched down that way from Bemidj-town a few weeks ago.”

  “Did he send you any money? Any letters?”

  “No.”

  “Alright, Mrs. Day Dodge. I think we should just head back into Bemidji, Carl. Maybe if we ask around in the bars over that way, we can get a better picture of who he went down there with.”

  “I told you he went by himself, hitched out of Bemidj-.” Cash could hear the silent rage in Josie’s voice.

  “Sure. Don’t suppose you have a phone, you’d be able to call us if you remembered something or decided you wanted to talk to us?”

  Cash brushed the baby’s hair straight up and imagined the cold rage in the mother’s eyes. She didn’t hear Josie give a response, but heard the screen door shut and the sound of shoes on the gravel, followed by two car doors closing and the engine starting.

  Cash sat on the bed and looked at the baby and into the other girl’s eyes. They hadn’t said a word to each other yet. They listened to Josie open and shut cabinet doors. Sounded like a glass and a heavier glass object being set hard on the counter. Cash heard liquor run. The girl looked at Cash and her eyes changed from curious to sad. Cash put the baby back in the swing and stood up. She looked back at the girl to see if she was coming. The little girl just gently pushed the baby in the swing back and forth, the slump of her shoulders telling Cash what she would see when she walked out into the kitchen.

  Josie sat at the table. A bottle of Jim Beam and a Kerr jelly jar half-filled with amber liquor sat in front of her.

  Cash said, “Ah, man, don’t do that.”

  “Go to hell,” said Josie. “Just go to hell.” She took a drink, shut her eyes as the liquid went down her throat.

  “What about your kids?” asked Cash.

  “What about ’em?”

  “They lost their dad. Don’t need to lose you too.”

  Josie took another drink. “Like I said, go to hell.” At that point, she dropped her head on crossed arms on the table and broke into deep sobs. She looked up at Cash. “What the hell am I going to do?” she asked. “We have seven kids. Seven.”

  Cash sat down on the chair where she had sat before and lit up a cigarette. Smoked through the sobs. Josie’s shoulders shook. The girl peeked back around the corner of the hallway.

  “Seven kids and each other, that’s all we had. Just each other, that’s all we had.” More sobs. Cash stubbed out her cigarette and got up and poured herself some lukewarm coffee. Ate another chunk of smoked fish and frybread. Drank another bit of coffee. Lit another cigarette. Josie lifted her head and motioned with her chin at Cash’s cigarette.

  Cash pulled one out and lit it for her. Put it into Josie’s shaking hands. Her fingers were long and the nails shaped. Artist’s hands, Cash thought. Or maybe just a mother’s hands.

  “Anyone you want me to go get?”

  Josie shook her head no. “The other kids’ll be back before dark. I’ll send the two older ones down the road to their aunties.”

  Took another drink of whiskey, emptying the jelly glass. “Haven’t touched this stuff since the Fourth of July. He played baseball the whole weekend. Tournament over in Bemidj-.”

  More sobs. “Hey, why’ntcha go. I gotta pull myself together here before the kids get home. Send them down to my sisters. She’ll come down here with them. You go ahead and go. I don’t know what the hell you’re doing here anyways.”

  Cash stood up. Wondered what to say. Finally she said, “The sheriff asked me to drive up. Thought I could break it easy to you. Give you a little heads up before those two got here. I’m driving back down today. Once I find out more about what happened, I’ll come back up.”

  Tears streamed down Josie’s face. Between hiccupped sobs, she said, “Can you make sure they send him up here all in one piece? None of that stuff they put in them white folks in place of blood. Send him back to me the way the Creator sent him here?”

  “Sure. I’ll tell Wheaton, that’s the sheriff. I’ll tell him that’s what you want. He’s good people. He’ll make sure the county listens.”

  Josie looked around like she was seeing her own kitchen for the first time. Poured more whiskey into the glass.

  Cash said, “Whyn’tcha go a little easy on that until the kids get your sister over here.”

  “Sure.” She took another drink, wiped her nose and eyes on a corner of her shirt. “Sure.”

  Cash looked at Josie, then at the little girl standing in the hallway. She walked over to her and knelt down. Held her at her shoulders, her skinny little-girl shoulders, and looked in her deep black eyes. “My name is Cash. Can you say that?”

  The little girl shook her head yes.

  “I want you to remember my name and tell your brother and sisters that Cash was here with your mom and will come back, ok? Your mama’s having a hard time right now. It’s going to be a hard time for a long time. You understand?”

  Again the girl nodded yes.

  “Cash. That’s me. I gotta go. You go back in there with your baby and watch her, huh? Just go on now. Wait with the baby till your auntie gets here, ok?”

  Once again the girl nodded and turned. Cash heard the bedsprings creak as she crawled back up on the bed. She walked over to the kitchen table and dropped the cigarette pack on the table, figured there were about seven smokes left.

  “I gotta go. Take it easy on that stuff. Your kids are gonna need you too, you know. And I’ll tell Wheaton what you asked about his body not being messed with. Gigawabamin.”

  She left the house, going down the weathered steps. Before she got to the Ranchero, she heard the jelly glass hit the wall inside the house and Josie wail with all her heart.

  Cash got into her truck. It crossed her mind that she could go and try to find Josie’s sister, but Cash knew that things sometimes just had to be the way they were. So when she got to the main road she turned right and fished around in the ashtray until she found a half-smoked butt. She pushed in the cigarette lighter and shifted into fourth.

  When the lighter popped out, she held the bright orange coils to the cigarette, inhaled deeply, the smoke burning her lungs in a way a fresh cigarette didn’t. She drove in silence southwest away from the reservation. She was tired but she guessed it probably wasn’t even noon yet. The federal guys would be over in Bemidji, getting silence from Indians on bar stools. She may as well head back to Wheaton and let him know that yes, the dead man was a Red Laker. She probably wouldn’t tell him that he had seven children. But she would tell him his wife wanted the body back whole, not cut up or embalmed like white folks did to their folks.

  In the first town she came to, she stopped at a gas station, filled the truck and bought a pack of Marlboros. Once she hit the highway she drove seventy, only letting up on the gas to coast through the small farming towns along the road. Traffic was nonexistent, just the occasional pickup truck headed into town.

  Cash drove straight to the Valley. Farmers were out plowing their fields, turning golden stubble down into the earth and turning up the rich soil that made the Red River Valley the breadbasket of the world. While wheat was still a favored crop, it was mostly potatoes and sugar beets feeding the world now. Some farmers were beginning to put in soybeans, hoping to get rich off them. Cash didn’t know about that. Corn, wheat, oats, and, of course, the sugar beets and potatoes were what she had grown u
p knowing. Fields and electric poles whizzed by.

  Cigarette after cigarette got her into Ada—the county seat—about three in the afternoon. Wheaton’s cop car sat outside the jail. A slight breeze furled and unfurled both the Minnesota and the American flags flying to the left of the jailhouse door. Every time Cash walked into the building, the smells, the granite floor underfoot, the clacking of the clerk typing, all sent her back to when she was three years old, being carried into the jail by Wheaton. Today was no different.

  Even though she was nineteen, walking into the courthouse still made Cash nervous for other reasons. She had been here many times with the social worker, who was always so disappointed in Cash because none of the families she placed her with seemed to work out. The social worker carried a big black purse that matched her big black Buick and Cash always felt like she, Cash, was just more dead weight in that big old purse.

  She was still supposed to have had a social worker until she was eighteen, but with only one to the county and Cash staying out of trouble, going to school and working fulltime, the county had let her slide. By the time Cash was seventeen, she was living on her own in an apartment in Fargo. She’d been smoking since she was eleven, drinking too, but quiet-like, staying out of trouble.

  Cash supposed Wheaton had something to do with the social worker leaving her alone. He was, in fact, the one who had gotten her an apartment in Fargo after he found her sitting in an August wheat field in the cab of a foster father’s truck—long after the combines had quit for the night and all you could hear were crickets chirping and cars driving on gravel roads three miles away and lone dogs letting out a single bark. She was chain-smoking and shivering, even though the night was as hot at midnight as some summer days were at noon. Her face was tear-stained and she held a jackknife in her right hand.

  Wheaton could see where she had thought about cutting the skin on her left wrist. He had taken the jackknife first and then, without a word, had helped her out of the truck cab and into his car. That was her second and last night in jail. Once again he had made her a bed on the wooden bench in the jail waiting room. Cash had just laid down, faced the wall and gone to sleep.

  In the morning, Wheaton gave her a mug of hot coffee, black, and a jelly-filled Bismarck pastry. When she was done, he motioned with a slight tilt of his head for her to come outside with him. He had driven her into Fargo and talked the landlord into renting an apartment to his niece who needed a place ’cause his sister had died.

  Cash entered the county jail and walked to the sheriff’s door. She leaned against the door jamb. Wheaton had the black phone to his ear and was sitting at his clerk’s wooden desk. From there, he could see the two jail cells, both of which were empty this afternoon, and the familiar wooden bench. He motioned for Cash to have a chair next to the desk. Held up an open palm—hang on a second.

  Cash picked up the morning Fargo Forum and scanned the headlines. More body counts out of Viet Nam. She flipped to the funnies in the back.

  From Wheaton’s end of the phone conversation, Cash gathered that somewhere on the east side of the county someone had siphoned some gas from someone else’s machinery fuel tank. Kids out driving the backroads late at night tended to know which farmers kept gasoline on their farms to fill their machinery. And which farmers didn’t have German shepherds who barked.

  Wheaton suggested to the farmer’s wife that they put a padlock on the gas hose.

  He hung up. “How you doin’, Cash?”

  “Been up to Red Lake and back.”

  “Oh yeah? Kinda figured you had headed up that way when you didn’t come back into town. Find out anything?”

  “His wife would like his body brought to her without anything done to it. No cutting out of anything or filling it with that fluid white folks put in their dead one’s bodies.”

  “She say why?”

  “Come on, Wheaton, you know as well as me those traditional folks back on the reservation don’t like their dead bodies messed with. The whole body has to go on the journey. Up at Red Lake, most of the folks are still buried in those little houses they build above ground. I’ve only seen one or two places over at White Earth where they still do that. I told her you’d make sure he wasn’t messed with.”

  “I’ll go over to the county hospital in a bit. Make sure they leave him alone. What else did you find out?”

  “Those fed guys got there about forty-five minutes after I did. Showed her a picture. It was her husband all right. Day Dodge. She said folks called him Tony O after the Twins player.”

  “Baseball player, huh?”

  “Guess so.”

  “What’d the feds say?”

  “Nothin’ much. I stayed outta the way. They showed her the picture. It was him. They said they were going to go ask around in the bars in Bemidji to see who came down here with him even though she had just told them he hitchhiked here by himself to make some money for the winter driving grain truck.”

  “Guess I can start asking around at the wheat farms then.”

  “Yeah.”

  “May as well get started. Not much going on here.”

  Wheaton stood up and went to the coat rack in the corner by the door. Put his official sheriff’s hat on and his brown wool sheriff’s jacket. From an inside pocket, he pulled out ten dollars in cash. He handed it to her.

  “For gas and cigarette money. Anything else you see or hear you think I should know about? Those feds will spend about two days over in Bemidji, got a federal travel account. Will take them a while to decide they need to head back this way. I’d rather we figure this one out on our own. Haven’t had a murder here since that migrant fight a couple years back. You see anything else?”

  “Nah. I was just looking to see where he was from. I could go to the hospital with you, see the body.”

  “Alrighty. Let’s go.”

  “I’ll follow you. I want to head back to Fargo from there. Still in the clothes I wore yesterday.”

  They walked out together. Got in their respective vehicles and drove the two blocks over to the county hospital.

  There were four brick buildings in Ada—the bank, the jail, which was also the county courthouse, the school and the county hospital. Cash and Wheaton went around to the back, where the county’s one ambulance was parked. They entered through a service door to a green corridor. The smell of alcohol and antiseptic hit their noses.

  With each step, Wheaton’s shoes made a sharp sound on the linoleum floor. Cash’s tennis shoes were as muffled as the nurses silently padding through the hallway. One of them waved at Wheaton. In a town this small, everyone pretty much knew everyone else.

  They turned a corner and went down marble stairs into the bowels of the hospital to the morgue. Wheaton pushed a button. It rang a doorbell behind a closed glass door. Cash could see sinks and metal tables on wheels. They heard footsteps coming down the stairs behind them.

  Dr. Felix, the sole general practitioner for the county—and baby doctor and mortician—came walking up to them, slightly out of breath. He smelled of stale cigarette smoke and rubbing alcohol. “Sorry.” He reached out to shake Wheaton’s hand, ignoring Cash. He had nicotine stains between the pointer and middle finger of his right hand. Cash hoped he never had to operate on her.

  “S’pose you’re here to see the dead Indian? Come on in. The feds came by before they headed up north. I got the body back here in the freezer. Haven’t heard anything from a family. Could be months before anyone even notices him missing. You know how these Indians are. Follow the checks and the bottle.”

  “Just show us the body,” Wheaton interrupted him.

  “Ah, sorry, Cash, didn’t mean no offense to your people.”

  Like hell, thought Cash. In that moment she decided to die in another county. Any other county.

  Doc Felix led them into the walk-in cooler. It reminded Cash of the egg cooler at the farm of one of the foster parents. That cooler was built into a corner of the chicken barn. The farmer stored the eggs
there after Cash and the other foster kid woke up at five each morning to pack the 10,000 eggs that rolled in on conveyor belts. It was a dirty job. Next to pig shit, chicken shit must be the worst smell in the world. They would pack the eggs onto two-and-a-half-dozen flats, stack those flats twelve high, put twenty-four flats in one rectangle box and then put that box in the cooler.

  Cash would be done by 6:30. She would try to wash the chicken-shit smell off her body before catching the bus the three miles into town for school. That was one in a long line of many foster homes she was more than happy to leave.

  This cooler smelled like old people’s flesh covered over with a healthy dose of antiseptic alcohol. Christ, she needed a cigarette. There were three bodies in the cooler, each on wheeled, metal tables. All were covered with sheets. The doc flipped back the sheet to look at the head of each body. “Grant Gunderson. Old Man Perley.” He muttered before flipping back the sheet on a musty, dark-colored man.

  “Here’s your injun, Wheaton.” Cash saw Wheaton’s body stiffen, adding another half-inch to his six-foot frame.

  “Show some respect for the dead, Doc. We know his last name is Day Dodge. Goes by the nickname of Tony O. You could put that on the paperwork, alright?”

  “Sure thing, Sheriff.” Not the least bit contrite.

  “You want to go put that on the paperwork.” A statement from Wheaton, not really a question. Doc Felix left the room.

  Wheaton and Cash stood looking at the body. Tony O was probably six feet. Black hair. Cash hoped to god Wheaton didn’t decide to pull the sheet down farther. Being this close to death in a freezer was not her idea of a good time.

  “What you think, Cash?”

  “I think we need to get out of here.”

  “Yeah. Too cold and dead. They must have his clothes someplace, don’t you think?”

  “Yep. Let’s go ask to see them.”

  Wheaton held the door open for Cash. The basement room now felt warm compared to the chill of it when they first came. She rubbed her forearms through her jean jacket, trying to wipe the cold away.

  “I need to take a look at his belongings,” Wheaton told the doctor.