Murder on the Red River

by Marcie R. Rendon

  “Yeah, but I just turned them all in today. I think I actually have to start school before they hand me over any money.”

  Wheaton laughed. They walked outside. He unlocked the car door for her. She slid in and pushed in the cigarette lighter. “Wonder where old Felix is?”

  “Maybe he actually had some doctoring to do.”

  When they got back to the jail, the clerk Diane was in. Cash said hi and sat down on a chair by the main desk to be closer to the ashtray. Wheaton gave her a handful of sheets of lined paper with his notes. Cash read and smoked. The notes didn’t tell her much more than what she already knew—or didn’t know—except for the fact that the Wang farm appeared to be where the guys involved worked.

  After about a half hour of reading, she stood up, stretched and said, “I think I should drive out to Wang’s and see about a job.”

  “Let’s go get a bite to eat at the Drive-Inn first,” Wheaton suggested, pushing back from his desk in the other room. He had been sitting in there with his door open while Cash was reading. “I’ll buy. When’s the last time you ate?”

  “Went to Shari’s Kitchen. Last night or the night before.”

  “Well, come on, let me get you a hamburger.”

  Wheaton drove the seventeen miles from Ada to Halstad so they could eat at the Drive-Inn, the only place to get a decent hamburger in the county. They pulled into one of the slots and waited for the waitress to come out and take their order. Wheaton rolled down his window when she came back with two burgers and fries in baskets on a metal tray that hooked over the door through the open window. They ate in silence, one or the other occasionally making a comment about the weather. When did Wheaton think beet harvest would start? And these had to be the best french fries in the Valley.

  When they were done eating, Wheaton drove Cash back to her Ranchero. “Take care,” Wheaton said.

  Cash headed west of town to the Wang farmstead. It was a warm August day. Interestingly, it wasn’t as humid this close to Ada as it was just seventeen miles closer to the river. The air smelled of harvest. Wheat, oats, some late alfalfa. The short growing season this far north meant that some fields were already plowed under. As she drove past the Johnson farm, someone was spreading cow manure on an 80-acre square. It added a whole new smell to the air.

  Cash could see the Wang farm up ahead. Everything about the farmstead said prosperity. The barn and outbuildings were painted a shiny white. The three-story farmhouse, though older, was painted the same white, making it look stately as opposed to just old. A quarter-acre vegetable garden was laid out behind the house.

  Cash could see asparagus gone to fern and the season’s leftover rows of sweet corn. A couple of kids’ bikes lay on the front lawn. Cash drove down the gravel driveway, past the house, and parked at the outbuilding that served as Chester Wang’s office.

  She got out of the truck and walked up to the door, pulling the screen door open and walking in. There was a desk, piled with papers and a black rotary phone sitting on it. The floor was linoleum and there was an electric fan running, sitting slightly off-center from the doorway, pulling some breeze in. It all spoke of money, lending credence to the statement that the Red River Valley was the breadbasket of the world.

  Cash heard the screen door open behind her. She turned as Chester walked in. He was a short stocky man, with a mustache that reminded Cash of one of the Three Stooges.

  “Cash!” he exclaimed, holding out his right hand to shake hers. “You here to sign up for beet harvest?”

  Cash shook his hand. Unlike most farmers’ calloused work hands, his hand was smooth like a banker’s. Cash had to restrain herself from shaking with the eerie goose bumps that ran through her body at his touch. He was dressed like a farmer: work jeans, plaid shirt, Red Wing boots, but everything was just a little too new, a little too unworked in. Cash suspected he had been sitting in his house, probably watching some afternoon TV with his wife and had come out when he saw her truck pull up.

  “Thought I’d see if you could use anyone on the graveyard shift,” Cash said.

  “That I always need,” Chester said. “I don’t know about hiring on a girl though. Nighttimes get a little rough.”

  “I can handle myself.”

  “I would hate to have something happen.” The look in his eyes belied his overly sincere tone.

  “I can deal with it. It’ll keep me out of the bars and off the pool table,” Cash said. “Besides, seems like your hired hands have had a bit more trouble lately than any I’ve ever had as a girl working here in the fields.”

  “It’s a shame, isn’t it? You got a point there alright,” said Chester. “First that Indian from up at Red Lake and now that young boy from the Dakotas. Hope to heck Wheaton, or those feds that been coming around, find out who’s behind this craziness. Speaking of which, a young woman like you, even if you are an Indian, shouldn’t be hanging out in bars all the time like you do. Driving all over by yourself alone in that truck of yours. Folks talk, you know.”

  “Well, if you hire me, they’ll have a little less to talk about for awhile,” smiled Cash, while in her head she wanted to kick him in the balls the way the Day Dodge kid had kicked her ankle.

  “Got a point there.”

  “When do you think you’ll start up?” asked Cash.

  “Few weeks at least. How’ll I get a hold of you?”

  “You can just leave word with Wheaton. I’d have to drive one of your trucks, you know.”

  “We can work that out. Just show up a bit early each night to gas up.”

  “Alright.” Cash started to leave. At the door she turned and said, “So both those men worked for you?”

  “Yes, they did. A lot of praying the wife and I have been doing. Hoping that this mess gets cleaned up soon. Don’t need this kind of trouble hanging over our place here.”

  “You think I need to watch out for anyone in particular?” Cash asked.

  “Now, girl, I really don’t think it is any of the men I hired on. Probably some drifter, going through on the train or maybe one of them migrants stayed behind and is rolling men instead of working a decent day’s work.”

  “Ok, just thought I’d ask.”

  She sat for a minute in her truck. She could see Chester watching her from behind the screen door. She backed around and drove out to the main road. In the rearview mirror, she saw him walk to his house. She turned and headed towards Ada. What the hell? It was a big county when you thought about it. There were probably fifty small towns that the men could go drink in, with as many drugstore counters for them to get a quick meal at. Cash pulled over to the side of the road. Quieted her mind. Lost herself in the white clouds drifting overhead. Lost herself in the soft breeze that floated over the wheat fields still standing, shimmering in the afternoon sun. She lost track of time, lost track of her thoughts.

  A grain truck rumbling towards her, dust billowing up behind it, brought her out of her reverie. All her instincts told her to keep driving, drive straight out of the county and keep going. But as the truck driver passed, she raised a hand in a wave, as was the custom here in farm country. Everyone was a neighbor, at least in church speak. They would gossip and lie and sleep with each other’s wives—and apparently kill each other—but neighborliness was the standard they measured themselves against.

  She had some time before it made sense to show up in the bars over in Halstad, so she stopped at the Woolworth’s Five and Dime in Ada and bought shampoo and hand soap. The way the two store clerks watched her got on her nerves. Keeping their eyes on an Indian woman when it should be those blond Sorenson kids they should be watching. When she went up to the register to pay, the two clerks talked to each other as if she weren’t there, all the while ringing up her purchases and taking her money, dropping her change into her hand without touching her skin. Cash looked at the clerk and asked, “Is that a spider crawling on your shoulder?”

  The woman frantically started brushing away at her shoulder, asking the other
woman, “Where is it? Get it off me.” Cash walked out smiling.

  Cash left Ada and drove west towards Halstad. The flat river plain was broken only by clumps of trees that marked farmsteads, the wavy line of trees in front of her marking the Red River’s meandering path north. In her rearview mirror, the highway was a straight ribbon going back towards Ada.

  She got into Halstad way too early to go to either bar, so she stopped at the Drive-Inn and had a repeat of the lunch she and Wheaton had had earlier. There was still a lot of time before the men started leaving the fields and coming into the bars. Cash went to Lucky’s Fuel and waited while some high school kid, too small to be out on the football field, put fuel in the truck, checked the oil and washed her windshields. Cash thanked him and drove north out of town.

  In a mile she reached the road that ran east and west along the big ditch, the ditch where the young man had been killed. Had been forced to quit living, she thought. She turned down the road and pulled over at the spot where Wheaton’s notes had indicated the murder happened. She walked down into the ditch where the grass had been trampled, both by the body, which had lain there, and then the various folks who had come by to deal with the body, Wheaton being one of them.

  Cash couldn’t really get a feel or a picture of what had happened. All she felt was an all-encompassing wave of sadness. She wondered who the young man’s family was, would they grieve the same way Josie did? And now how Josie’s children grieved her.

  Cash had been alone for so long, she didn’t quite grasp what she supposed were normal feelings when you loved someone, when you cared for someone. She would feel bad if something happened to Wheaton. Yeah, that’s true.

  She heard tires on gravel coming down the road. She walked up out of the ditch.

  Coming down the road was a dark blue pickup truck. Two men in it. The driver slammed on the brakes so that Cash was eye level with his elbow pointing out the truck window. Their truck was between Cash and her truck. There was a nagging feeling in Cash’s gut that made her wish this wasn’t true.

  “What you doin’ this far off the reservation?” the driver wanted to know.

  Cash looked at him. He was wearing a blue work shirt, rolled up just past his elbows. Where the collar of his shirt was open, his throat was sunburnt red. His short hair, combed straight back, wasn’t quite blond. Standing as she was at the edge of the road, still on the ditch slope, she couldn’t see the second man.

  “I drive truck, same as most folks around here,” Cash said.

  “That so? Doesn’t look like you’re working too hard today.”

  Cash lied. “I come out along this ditch and set gopher traps. This here is Chester Wang’s field and he pays me thirty-nine cents for each pair of gopher feet I bring him.”

  The guy turned to the other man sitting in the truck. “Did you hear that?! Indians have gone from trapping beaver to trapping gophers. And they got little girls doing it now. The men are all big chiefs, driving grain truck and all. Well, well.”

  Turning to face Cash out the window, he said, “You better be careful. We heard there was a dead injun just about a quarter of a mile over and then one of the boys from the Dakotas ended up in the ditch just a bit from where you’re standing. That long hair of yours might just get caught in one of your traps and it would be a shame to have all that hair wrapped around your neck and no way for you to get out. And far enough out of town so that no one would hear you scream.”

  Both men started laughing.

  Cash stepped up on the gravel and started to walk behind their truck to get to hers.

  They were right. No one in town would hear her if they decided to be crazy.

  More laughter. “Aw, we didn’t mean to scare you. Come on back and talk to us.”

  Cash walked around the back end of their pickup and over to the passenger side of her Ranchero. She wasn’t going to get trapped between the two trucks, that was for damn sure.

  She crawled in on the passenger side, digging her keys out of her pocket as she got in. She put the keys in the ignition, clutch and brake in, shifted into reverse, eased up on both pedals and backed around the end of their truck. She turned the wheel a hard left, threw the gears into first and took off, rapidly shifting into second, third and fourth. When the dust settled behind her, she saw that they were still sitting in their truck on the road where she had left them.

  She downshifted. Without stopping, she took the corner that led her back into town. When she got there, she turned over her right shoulder and looked back. With flat field all the way across, she could see their truck still sitting there.

  Huh, she thought. She wondered if anyone saw anything the night before. There was a block of houses on the north side of town. Bedroom windows faced the open field. She drove down the block, made a U-turn and cruised back.

  A group of girls, somewhere between the ages of eleven and fourteen, came running around the corner of one of the houses. They were town girls. Wearing plaid shorts and white sleeveless blouses. Cash guessed they were probably the future cheerleaders of the town. Cash pulled over and got out.

  “Hey, Kathy,” she hollered to the one girl whose name she knew. The group stopped, saw it was Cash and stood, some of them leaning hands on thighs, catching their breath.

  Kathy waved at Cash and said something to her friends that Cash couldn’t make out. Cash had been working the fields for so many years. As the only young Indian woman doing so, everyone seemed to know who she was, even if she didn’t know them. But she knew Kathy because she often sat behind the counter in the bakery in town while her mother worked the cash register. They shared a love of jelly-filled bismarcks.

  “Hi, Cash,” she said. “What are you doing in town?”

  “Thought I’d shoot a few games of pool tonight. Maybe swing a partner or two around on Arnie’s new dance floor.”

  The kids laughed and poked each other. Shooting pool and dancing were exotic activities for town kids whose lives revolved around Vacation Bible School in the summer and the high school football and basketball teams once school started.

  Cash went and walked behind the house the kids had come running around. They followed her like ducklings chasing their mother. Cash stood looking at the truck sitting a mile away on the gravel road. One of the kids said, “Hey, that’s where they found that guy’s body. Someone killed him, choked him like wringing a chicken’s neck is what my dad said.”

  “And they killed that Indian guy right over there,” chimed in another kid, pointing a little more northwest than where the truck sat.

  “Do you think those are the killers, back to make sure they didn’t leave any clues?” From the mouths of babes, thought Cash as a cold chill ran from the base of her spine to the edge of her back hairline. The thought had never occurred to her minutes ago when those two had driven up on her.

  “Look, they’re leaving,” one of the younger girls said, pointing.

  A bigger girl grabbed her arm and pushed it down, saying, “Knock it off, you want them to know we saw them? I’m getting out of here.” She took off around the building with the flock of kids following her. Cash watched the truck turn north at the crossroads and then she went to find the kids.

  They were sitting on Kathy’s front porch when she rounded the corner, chatting excitedly about were they brave enough to walk over to the ditch, see if there were any clues. Some of the girls wanted to stay back, ’cause it was a man’s job. Some of the girls said the others could go if they wanted to. Cash leaned against the step railing and asked, “Is that the first time you all saw that truck over there?”

  One little girl said, “There were all kinds of cars and trucks and the Sheriff’s car over there when they found the body.”

  “Our mom wouldn’t let us go look. She told us to go inside and watch TV, like it was Saturday or something. There are no cartoons on during the week.”

  “The night before last, Susan slept over,” Kathy said, “and we climbed out our bedroom window and were laying
in the grass behind the house. We saw a car or truck over there, didn’t we?” she asked, turning to a young girl who wore plaid shorts and a cotton blouse that matched.

  “Yeah,” said Susan. “We thought it was high school kids. Sometimes they go over there to…you know…” The girls giggled. “But we could hear men’s voices. At one point they were yelling at each other.”

  “But we couldn’t hear what they were saying.”

  “Do you think it was a truck like the one that was just out there?” asked Cash, although she was pretty certain of the answer even if they weren’t.

  “I don’t know,” said Kathy. “About that time my dad came home and he went into my room to say goodnight to me and we got caught out here. He hollered at us to get our butts back in the house.”

  “They were still parked out there at around midnight,” Kathy remembered, “’cause we snuck out to the kitchen to get some of her mom’s brownies and when we were looking out the kitchen window, we saw their taillights go off and on a couple times.”

  “Well, kids, you better listen to your parents and stay close to home until Wheaton gets this straightened out. Your parents would be bawling for a year and a day if something happened to one of you.”

  “Not mine,” piped up the one little girl. “My dad said that next year at the county fair he’s gonna send me off to live with the carnies. He’s had enough of me, he says.”

  “Me too!”

  “Yeah, you look like a circus kid.”

  A series of friendly taunts. The younger kids were once again chasing each other around the yard. Cash waved at Kathy and walked back to her truck. She sat in the warm August air, lit a cigarette and recalled the ice that had crept up her back when the kid had said, “Maybe they were back making sure they hadn’t left any clues.” She shivered with the thought.

  She flicked the cigarette out into the street, started up the truck and drove to Mickey’s. She ordered a Coke and played herself at the pool table. She and the bartender chatted back and forth about the weather, crops, Bucky cheating on his wife, the price of wheat down on the Grain Exchange…he behind the bar smoking and reading the Fargo Forum, she practicing her bank shots.