He pushed away from his desk and walked over to a metal filing cabinet against a green-tiled wall. He opened the third drawer down and took hold of a paper bag, the red Piggly Wiggly logo on its side. He brought it back and set it on his desk.
“Not much in there,” he said, picking through the stack of papers he had been working on. “Wrangler jeans, cotton work shirt—would guess from Sears Roebuck—wool socks, Red Wing work boots. Pack of Camels in the front shirt pocket. About thirty cents in change in the jean pocket. No billfold. And he was hanging loose.”
A hint of a smile reached the doc’s eyes and faded quickly when he met Wheaton’s hard glare. “Just meant he wasn’t wearing any underwear,” he muttered, looking back down at the paperwork.
Cash reached over and opened the Piggly Wiggly bag. A draft of sorrow climbed up out it and swirled around her. In that moment she saw a group of Indian men laughing, wearing field clothes, leaning back on their heels. Two white men were standing off at a tree line. Cash just made out the shadow of a rifle before the paper bag was yanked from her hands and the doc said loudly, “Hey, come on now, I gotta keep this clean for the feds. Don’t be con-tam-in-ate-ing the evidence!”
Cash turned and walked out. She heard Wheaton say to the doc, “Don’t be cutting up Mr. Day Dodge. You leave his body intact and none of that embalming fluid either. You hear me?” His voice turned as hard as Cash ever heard him talk. “Don’t mess with this one, you hear me?”
Wheaton was behind her as they walked up the basement stairs, down the linoleum hallway and out into the fall sunlight.
Cash stopped by the Ranchero to light up. Wheaton stood in front of her. After awhile, he said, “Sorry.”
“Wasn’t your fault.” Cash breathed out smoke. “Just remember, if I die, for the love of god, don’t bring me to this godforsaken place.”
“Me either, alright?” Wheaton stuck out his hand for a deal shake. Cash took his big hand in both of hers and shook it. “When I opened that bag, I got the smell of death and two white guys watching a group of Indians. I gotta get back into Fargo. Need a change of clothes and to sleep in my own bed.”
“You go do that. I’ll talk to the farmers and see what I can find out. Figure that the day after tomorrow the feds will be back. Hope to know something before they do. You take care.”
After Wheaton left, Cash rested against the car, enjoying the sun after the cold morgue. She finished her cigarette and smushed it out on the pavement, got into the Ranchero and headed south out of town. Driving seventy all the way. Who was going to stop her? Wheaton? She laughed and turned on the country station. Waylon Jennings was wailing as she pulled into Fargo.
She parked in front of her apartment and locked her truck. She didn’t want to take her rifle upstairs in broad daylight. She climbed the stairs. The apartment smelled stale, like beer and cigarettes. She opened a couple windows to air out the place while she ran hot water into the clawfoot bathtub. She went into the bathroom, spun her hair up into a loop and hooked a pencil through it to hold it up on top of her head. She undressed, dropping all her clothes in a heap on the floor.
She stood there naked for a minute looking at the bath water that had already steamed over the mirror. There were parts of the bathroom floor where the linoleum had worn off or some previous tenant had ripped it up. When she walked across the floor, it creaked. There was a moment, every time, just before she stepped into the tub, that she wondered if the whole tub—filled with she didn’t know how many gallons of water and her hundred and twenty pounds—might just sink through the floor and there she would be, downstairs in the appliance store, a bare-assed Indian sitting in between washers, dryers and refrigerators.
She slid down into the steaming water, leaned back against the cold porcelain of the tub, enjoying the cold relief which soon warmed to her skin. She tried to remember the name of the foster mother who had banished her from the bathroom in their house. Cash had tracked chickenshit on the living room carpet. Not only did she have to scrub the carpet, by hand, on her hands and knees, two times in fact, but the foster mother—screaming at the top of her lungs, swatting her all the while with a wet dishrag—told her she could never use the indoor bathroom again. For the rest of her stay there, Cash had washed up in the barn sink, the same sink she used to wash the chickenshit off the eggs each morning before packing them in cartons for delivery to the egg plant in Moorhead.
What the living room carpet had to do with the bathroom Cash had never figured out. But having her own bathtub, that no one could run her out of, was a privilege she cherished. She lay that way for about twenty minutes, replaying the events of the past few days behind her closed eyelids—standing out in the field where they had found Tony O, the pool game in Red Lake Falls, the visit to Josie’s house, the feds, the morgue.
When the water turned lukewarm, she grabbed a washrag off the edge of the tub, lathered her body, rinsed and climbed out. She wrapped a towel around herself and scooped the pile of clothes up off the floor.
She walked out into the living room/bedroom and tossed the clothes in a basket that sat in the corner. Tomorrow she’d walk across the street and do her laundry, she thought. She dried herself off and crawled between the sheets of her bed. She got back out, opened the bottom dresser drawer and found a clean set of sheets. She changed the sheets, threw the dirty ones in the laundry basket and snuggled back in bed. She reached over and grabbed her alarm clock off the top of the dresser and set it for half an hour. She lay down and fell right asleep.
When the alarm went off, she reached out and hit the off button. She stretched and yawned, pulling a couple long strands of hair off her lips and from across her cheeks. She jumped out of bed and rummaged in the dresser drawers for clean undies, socks and a bra. With her underclothes on, she looked over the pile of clean jeans and shirts that were hung semi-neatly across the back of the overstuffed chair that served as her closet.
She made herself a pot of coffee, thunking the two-day-old grounds into the wastebasket. For a moment she stood looking down at the cars moving through town, then opened the small fridge that stood in a corner of the room. Half a dozen eggs. Four slices of bread in a plastic bag. No butter. Someday she would have to go to the store. She took out an egg and two pieces of bread. The frying pan still had some butter in it from the last eggs she’d fried. This would work.
She made herself a semi-scrambled egg. When it was cooked, she put it between the two slices of bread with a dash of salt and plenty of pepper. By then her coffee was done and she sat down at the painted-white, chipped table and ate her dinner.
It was just a little before seven o’clock. Still light out. Plenty of time to drive down to Halstad and shoot a couple of games in Mickey’s bar.
There were two bars in Halstad. Both sat right across from each other on Main Street. Only Mickey’s had a pool table. Maybe she would go over to Arnie’s first. Arnie thought his bar was high-class because he had a brand new jukebox and had cleared out the pool table to make room for a little dance floor. Cash supposed that on weekends the farmers brought their wives into town for a little flash. A respite from cooking three squares a day and breeding tow-headed farmhands. God save her from that life.
Cash laughed. She was the wrong color to live that dream. Arnie had rooms above his bar where maybe Tony O had stayed. All she had to do was have a couple drinks at the bar and she would be able to overhear any talk among the men. A reconnaissance mission.
As a little kid she had been her brother’s scout in their many games of cowboys and Indians and remembered when he came home from school all excited about the new word he had learned—reconnaissance. A fancy word for scout or spy. He dressed Cash in black and sent her to spy on the neighbors down the road. The two of them crawled on their bellies through a corn field and swiped old man Johnson’s food from his lunch bucket.
Later, in foster homes, she would do her own reconnaissance. She would sneak up under the kitchen window and listen to the social worker’
s conversations with the foster mother. She’d know ahead of time if she needed to start packing.
Cash brushed the crumbs off the table and into the sink thinking that—yep—after a reconnaissance to Arnie’s, she could go to Mickey’s and shoot a few games before heading back to Fargo.
Before Cash got into her pickup she checked behind the seat. The .22 was still there. She swung down Main Street, parked in front of the Casbah. She ran in and went straight to the cigarette machine at the back of the bar. The regulars were already there. She nodded at them as she walked back out. One of the pool players hollered after her, “You too good for us, Cash? See you got on clean jeans and shirt. Someone’s getting lucky tonight, huh?”
“Yeah, you,” hollered back Cash. “You get to keep the table till your beers kick in.”
Laughter followed her out to the Ranchero. She headed north on Highway 75.
The song was back in her head. Sun-drenched wheat fields. Healing rays of god’s love. She turned on the radio hoping to find a song to replace it, dialed in Oklahoma City. Pure country. Suicide music, as they called it in high school.
Back when she still went to high school in the country, she would ride around in an old Mercury with a bunch of boys. She forgot what year it was, but it had a back window that rolled down. It was the coolest ride in the county. It was Clyde Johnson’s car. He worked summers building grain bins. Cash never knew if it was his idea or maybe his dad’s. That family was always coming up with money-making business endeavors.
The grain bin business was Clyde’s. The richest junior in the county. Even had his own work crew in the summertime. One of the first things he bought with his grain bin money was a fake ID. He would drive over to Ulen, where no one knew him and bring back a couple of cases of beer on the weekend.
None of the white girls were friends with Cash so she drank with the boys, was thought of as one of them. Their church-going families, including the Catholics, understood their sons drinking with a squaw, but they better not date one. It would have disgraced their sorry families if one of their sons had dared to ask her to prom. But drinking? Why not? That’s what Indians did, right?
Cash thought about all this as she drove north. There was about a mile of fields between the road and the river. Huge oak trees and cottonwoods followed the river down the Valley parallel to the road. The sun dropping to the west turned the field stubble to gold. Some wheat fields waved in the gentle breeze waiting for the swath of the combines. Some of the richer farmers were running three combines in tandem down a field with a string of five, six trucks waiting at the end to be loaded up with the grain. The gold of the fields brought the song refrain back into her mind. Healing rays of god’s love.
She turned the radio up full blast as Charlie Pride found his way to San Antone. She lit a cigarette and cruised through Perley, then Hendrum. Just outside of Hendrum, she could see the Halstad water tower at the four-mile corner that would have taken her east, back to Ada. As a small child, riding around with her drunk mother, the water tower had been the thing to drive towards from either direction on the prairie. As long as she and her siblings could get her mother pointed in that direction, there was some hope of getting home.
Cash pulled into Halstad, stopping first at the liquor store to get a six-pack to keep the eggs and bread in her refrigerator company. The clerk pretended he didn’t know her and asked to see her ID. “Can’t be too sure,” he said. “All these kids are getting fake ID’s. Going over to Bismarck, some of them. I know you’re living in Fargo,” he said, admitting he actually knew who she was. Hell, everyone in the county knew who she was. The older ones had known her mother, the others had watched Cash make her way through just about every foster home in the county. Most of the men knew her by name and sight from field work. The clerk continued, “But I get suspicious of these young punks driving cars with Minnesota plates and a North Dakota ID.”
Cash thanked him and carried the bag out, put it in the cab of the Ranchero and tossed her blanket on top of it. She drove past the Drive-Inn and headfirst into a parking spot by Mickey’s. On Mickey’s side of the street, grass grew up between the cracks of the sidewalk. She locked up the truck but walked across the street to Arnie’s. Over here on Arnie’s side, the parked cars and trucks were a little newer and grass didn’t grow on the sidewalk.
There were two concrete steps leading up into the bar. The new jukebox had Ray Price singing For the Good Times as a young farm couple waltzed on the makeshift dance floor. Cash stepped herself up on to a barstool. The bartender walked over, white bar rag tossed over his shoulder, looked at her.
“Budweiser.”
He put the bottle and a glass down on the bar. She motioned that she didn’t need the glass and took a swig from the bottle. She turned around on the barstool so she was facing the dance floor and booths against the east wall. There were six booths. Two of them had couples in them, sitting tight and cozy and drinking beer. One other booth had a pack of cigarettes, a pitcher of beer and a couple glasses on the table.
To her left were some young guys she didn’t recognize. Probably from the Dakota side of the river, come over looking for a Minnesota girlfriend.
To her right was a cluster of older men, the wheat chaff still in the creases of their jeans and work boots. They were talking. Cash caught a few phrases here and there. Found him dead. Dead injun. Stabbed.
“He was one of the drivers at Soren’s last week. Quiet like all of them.” Cash strained in to hear.
“Until they get a few drinks in them,” another voice added. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of the men elbow the speaker and tilt his head in her direction, just slightly. They turned away and she couldn’t hear them anymore. Cash sat and sipped and the lovers waltzed through Conway Twitty.
Into her second beer and another cigarette, the bar door opened and a young man walked in. He scanned the bar. When he saw Cash, he tried to appear casual as he walked up to the men at her right. They greeted him. When one of them called him John, he gave the guy a look that said quiet without a word spoke.
Cash kept sipping, smoking and watching the dancers. But her peripheral vision was sharp and she took in all the nuances of the group of men to her right. The young guy said, “I gotta go. Naw, the other guys are busy.”
Cash wondered who the other guys were, though she had a hunch she already knew. Maybe not their names, but she knew who they were. The young guy walked out without ordering a beer. Clearly he had been scoping out the joint for someone else. Over the music on the jukebox, she heard an engine rev up and a vehicle drive west on Main.
She finished her beer and got down off the barstool. She waved a hand at the bartender and went outside. It was just getting dark. In the distance, she could hear kids hollering down at the school playground. Their mothers would be calling them home soon. Or, if they were well-behaved, they would head home on their own the darker it got.
Cash walked across the street to Mickey’s. It was pointless to follow the young guy even though she could still taste and see the dust lingering in the air telling her which direction he had driven. That handful of men at the south end of Arnie’s bar knew she sometimes worked with Wheaton, so no doubt they were rubbernecking out the bar window behind the Grain Belt sign to see just where she was going. May as well shoot a couple games of pool. If the vehicle came back into town, she would hear it or see the headlights through Mickey’s windows. Since they had driven west, there were only so many places they could go along the river.
Cash shot a couple games. Drank a couple beers. Smoked a lot of cigarettes. On the third game, she lost on purpose, shrugged and said, “Guess my game is off tonight. Gonna head back to Fargo, I think.”
A couple of the guys who she had been working with for years waved goodbye. One of Svenson’s sons tipped his beer bottle and said, “See you in the fields.” On the way out, Cash stopped in the bathroom. Everything was dark oak and white porcelain. Reminded her of a horror movie. She did her business an
d headed out to the truck. She checked to see if the rifle was still there. It was.
She coasted back out of the parking spot without turning on the ignition or her headlights. No sense giving the guys over at Arnie’s any idea of what she was up to if she could help it. She kept the headlights off until she was headed south of the bar and around the corner. She circled the block, turned left and headed toward the river.
Instead of turning down the gravel road that would take her back to the field where Tony O had been thrown, she kept driving west almost to the river bridge. Just before the bridge, she turned north on the gravel road that led to the Bjork farm. Trees lined the river but to the east were flat fields with the occasional stand of trees that marked a farmstead. Some had the new yard lights. Most didn’t.
At night, with no moon, Cash couldn’t see much. At the driveway to the Bjork farm, she turned her headlights off. Anyone watching would think she had turned into the farmstead. Instead she slowed to a crawl, moving in second gear past the Bjork’s, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dark.
After a couple minutes, she could make out the lane ahead, the fall grass in the ditch a feathery fringe against the edge of the sandy gravel road. She had been on the road before and knew that it led directly to a wheat field. She could walk across that and arrive directly at where Tony O’s body had been thrown out.
She reached the end of the gravel road, put the truck in park and killed the engine. She rolled down the window and listened. Sound carried long distances across the Valley. There were crickets and dogs and the occasional mosquito buzz. She could hear the animals in the Bjork barn moving, making soft animal sounds, almost like humans getting ready for bed. A car turned off the pavement in town onto a gravel road. There were no headlights on this side of town so it must have been someone going the other direction.
And then she heard men’s voices coming across the fields in front of her. A cough. More voices. She looked toward where the voices were coming from. She had been right. Their truck was parked in almost the same spot she had parked the Ranchero when she found Wheaton and the feds looking at Tony O’s body.
Murder on the Red River Page 6