In Western Counties

by Nickolas Butler

  Aida shook her head. “You don’t get it. By all rights, I ought to have him already. Pulled over and in cuffs.” She shrugged off Bethany’s grip. Decades of untarnished service to lose her pistol this close to retirement; Aida was livid, scared. “I’ll get backup. More cops.”

  “They won’t care,” Bethany said stiffly.

  “What do you mean?” Aida said, exasperated. “What do you mean, they won’t care?”

  “They’re all in on it too,” Bethany said, blood everywhere, drying black. “The whole town’s in on it. Your buddy in the car that day, I bet.”

  “Impossible,” Aida said. “This is serious. Abuse of animals, gambling, racketeering.”

  Bethany was shaking her head. “They just think they’re animals.” She wiped her eyes. “I’ve seen it. The way they throw their dogs away afterward. Check the creek. Check the ditches. You’ll see. Just walking the road near our house I’ve collected eighty collars. Eighty.”

  Aida was quiet.

  “They don’t care about your gun, Officer Battle,” said Bethany. She reached into the pocket of her denim skirt and produced Aida’s card, held it up. “All they want to do is bet money on dogs. Now, can you take me to the hospital?”

  She knows my name. She has my card. “I can’t do that,” said Aida. “The hospital will make me file a report. I can’t lie.”

  “Then I’ll take myself,” Bethany said. “Won’t be the first time.” She wiped the counter off, the dried spots of blood. Her manager’s car was now idling in the parking lot, where he sat, eating fast food from a greasy bag. He had just pulled up.

  Aida moved toward the door, stunned. She stopped in the doorway and said, “I’m sorry, Brittany. I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to help you.”

  “It’s Bethany,” the young woman said, “and you forgot your dog food.”

  Aida waved her hand in the air, crawled into her cruiser, and felt the lightness of her belt and holster. Pulling away from the pet store, she reached for the radio to alert other cars of the assault, but then paused. She tried to remember what color the truck was that Kruk had been driving. Had it been red? Black? She pulled onto the road and drove quickly in the direction she thought he had gone, but the road led rapidly out of town and onto the prairie. Ahead of her, nothing but flat fields and trains delineating the horizon. She exited the road, driving onto a gravel track that she knew led to the train tracks. She watched a freight train rush by her patrol vehicle, the graffitied cars a blur before her. She rolled down her window and sucked in the air. What just happened? What just happened?

  Back at the station she walked in, went to her desk, and found Lombard in her spot, on the telephone, talking to his wife.

  “Took you long enough,” Sergeant Doty said. “Where’s the dog chow? The kibble and bits?” He scoffed, examined the box scores of a crumpled newspaper.

  “What’s the deal?” she asked the room. The men shrugged, rolled their eyes, kept hitting their keyboards. Lombard hung up.

  “What the hell?” she asked him.

  He threw his hands in the air. “What do you want, Battle?” he asked. “You forget where your damn desk is?” The men in the office liked to tease her about her memory. She was always losing things: her hat, reports, her coffee mug. They said she was getting old.

  “My desk back,” she said.

  “This is my desk,” he said.

  She opened the top right drawer, where she stored a package of tampons, though she was past the age of needing them. They were not there. She reached across his crotch to the top left drawer, where she kept two packages of Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 pencils, all deftly sharpened. The drawer was a tangle of rubber bands over a layer of glossy fantasy football magazines.

  “Hey!” Lombard said. “Quit snooping! That’s my shit!” He slammed the drawer shut.

  She stormed out of the office and the men roared with laughter. In the locker room she splashed cold water on her face, let her hair fall loose, breathed deeply. She went to her locker and opened it to an avalanche of Titleist golf balls, all bouncing around the room loudly. She was startled, confused, her mind reeling. Did I leave that young girl back there? Why didn’t I help her? Why didn’t I recognize her or that man?

  Just then her colleagues came into the locker room, a sheet cake in the lieutenant’s hands ablaze with candles. They sang loudly to her, “Auld Lang Syne” and “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” bottles of beer already open in their thick hands. She smiled, beaten and confused, and holding back her own hair, blew out the candles as she was expected to.

  “We’ll miss you,” the lieutenant said, his hand on her shoulder.

  “I guess you didn’t even need the dog food,” she said over him to the K9 unit. They grinned like wolves.

  “One other thing,” she said to the lieutenant later in the evening, pulling him close and whispering, “I lost my pistol. Twenty-five years on patrol, and I lose my pistol going to the pet store on a prank.” She shook her head. “How much paperwork does that earn me?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Eat your cake. In a few months you won’t need it anyway.” Then, “Lord, Aida. That memory of yours. Must be some rust on that steel trap of yours, huh?”

  She shook her head.

  She ate the cake and drank beer with the other highway patrolmen. Then, protocol be damned, they broke into a box of cigars and the room began to fill with thick, dank smoke. Her eyes reddened as she looked over the room and wondered which among these men took their thrills from watching the slaughter of dogs. There was a fog accumulating inside her head and it frightened her. She had become a cop to protect people, but lately … she was weak, easily duped, so confused. Her memory failing her.

  Driving home that evening early, she narrowly missed several deer on the roads. Inside her house she made a mug of instant coffee, stirring the fine particles of coffee into the boiling water. Within the useless chicken wire of her garden, two fawns were chewing on her lettuce plants and she saw rabbits among the radishes and carrot tops. She had misgivings about retirement. She knew she needed to see a doctor, but was afraid of the notion of a brain scan, scared to think of her body entering the pounding tube of a CAT scan. She feared Alzheimer’s even more. She lived alone and wondered if her isolation was responsible for the broken connections inside her head. She was always forgetting things, many things. Everything. Not long ago she’d left the prowler in her driveway overnight, idling, lights on, until the gas tank ran empty. The next morning she had to pour a gallon of gasoline from a jerry can into the tank, gas meant for the lawn mower but enough to get her back into town. Other things too: She had forgotten the lieutenant’s name, had handed a speeding ticket to a waitress instead of her money, wore tennis shoes to work three mornings in a row. It was Lombard who gently pointed to her feet.

  She thought of Bethany and realized in that moment at her kitchen sink, looking out into the growing shadows of the gloaming, that the reason why the young woman had not pressed her to arrest the man was that she wanted him killed or dealt with in different terms. And what good could possibly come from involving the police, the same men she knew were complicit in his crimes? And then, just as suddenly, Aida recognized the scars on her face. They were not from any kind of blade. They were the scars of a face bitten by a dog, maybe many dogs. The kind of scars she saw most frequently on the dirty faces of neglected young children.

  She moved into her den, set a record on the turntable, poured a glass of bourbon, and listened to Dave Brubeck for several hours, unnerved and ashamed. Over and over she listened to that record, flipping it almost like a pancake every time the needle signaled her to do so, almost as if hypnotized. Bethany was all alone in the world. Twice she had failed to help the woman. Inside her lonely house Aida felt like an inadequate guardian; she felt afraid, cradled the bourbon and ran her fingers through her hair. Then some time in the middle of the night, with coyotes sounding out in the fields beyond her windows, she listened to the record wobb
le as it spun without music, the needle swimming out over the record’s dark and grooveless center. She sat that way until dawn, blurry. The turntable scratching, the needle a single claw.

  * * *

  Bethany called from the pet store one week into Aida’s retirement. She wanted to meet somewhere discreet. She had been living at a roadside motel for several months, her money now almost gone. There had been hail forecast for that day, tornadoes sighted already in western counties.

  She told Aida then how the dogs had taken her face, how she escaped the farm, how she could not quit her job because she needed the money, how her manager could no longer look her in the eyes, how the procedure to save her face had amounted now to a mountain of debt that she knew she could not pay off. How the pain of her stitched-together visage made it impossible to sleep on a bed, her face on a pillow. How she slept in chairs at night and dreamed of dead dogs and teeth wrapping around her skull, like a softball.

  They met the next day at the café beside the highway. That morning Aida had gone to a gun show in Red Wing and bought a new pistol in order to reclaim her old one. Aida had pieced together Bethany’s situation on a legal pad; she had taken notes with a pencil. Kept underlining: BETHANY, PIT BULLS, BARN, FACE. She underlined BETHANY until the graphite broke, ripped a jagged hole right through the paper. Fingering the hole where the name had just been, she could no longer remember what had been there. “Started with a B,” she said, “started with a B.”

  * * *

  They came to the barn on the first night of every new moon, when the night was entirely black and the animals less susceptible to the moon’s weird whims. The barn held about two hundred people packed in tight, elbow to elbow, belt buckle to belt buckle, most of them parking their asses on a set of old wooden bleachers Kruk had bought from a high school remodeling their gymnasium.

  Aida watched as her old colleagues came through the barn doors, already drunk, carrying handles of cheap liquor, their fists full of fragrant cigars. Then the parade of politicians, schoolteachers, attorneys, and businessmen. Kruk greeted them all at the door, writing their bets in a book, and taking their money.

  The newcomers came up the driveway with their headlights blazing, the veterans navigated in darkness, the stars overhead crisp and clearly visible and the two tracks of the driveway familiar. She watched them file into the barn from her vantage in the farmhouse, the metal of the pistol cold and real against the pale skin of her lower back where the muzzle nestled beneath the elastic of her panties. The night was alive with dogs.

  Most of the fights lasted only minutes; she could construct in her head the inside of the barn through the cheers and jeers of the men assembled: the initial prefight rumblings, then the off-leash fervor, the tenacious encouragements and insults, and finally the agonized pleadings and overjoyed exclamations. The sound of money changing hands was there too, in the night air, like the quaking of old aspen leaves. In between fights she spied the men leaving the barn, pissing into the darkness, the cherries of their cigarettes and cigars briefly illuminating their drunk faces. She watched as some owners carried their dogs out of the barn like dead children, kissing them. Others kicked the dying creatures and carcasses out into the near night, the light of the barn in their fading eyes. She watched a man piss on a beaten, bleating dog. At times it was difficult to separate the sounds of men from those of the dogs. Worst was the sound of stomping boots on the wooden bleachers. It caused the hair to stand up on her neck.

  She whispered to herself, “Stay together now, girl.”

  The final match lasted what must have been an hour, the voices of the men growing low and hoarse with the protracted battle. She watched the spectators emerge into the night, vomiting, their hands on the sides of the barn. Others left, their tires spinning gravel into the air.

  “He’s fighting blind,” she heard one man say. “Got no eyes left.”

  The match ended near dawn, the sky bruising blue and yellow. The men left, some with their dogs. She went into the closet beside the old mattress and shut the folding doors, waited for him to come up the stairs, his boots heavy. She tried to breathe evenly. Downstairs, a door opened. She waited for the sounds of canine claws on the old wood, but there was nothing, just the noise of a bottle being extracted from the refrigerator, a cap popped off. She would have been found by now if there had been dogs, would’ve had to act first. She sighed in relief. Finally he came up.

  He removed his shirt, his back and chest marred with crude tattoos. He sat heavily on the bed, yawned, scratched at his whiskers, and slowly pulled off his boots and socks. He was asleep inside a minute. She eased the folding doors open, the gun already drawn, then moved across the room, aiming for his face. He snored, his lips moving. She stood beside him, so close that she could smell the sweat and blood on him. Then she whipped him with the pistol across the face, gouged the bridge of his nose. He sucked air and howled. She edged back. Outside, dogs barked inside a dark barn.

  “On your feet,” she said, taking a half step backward.

  He looked at her, smiled. “I thought you were retired.” Moving his neck forward, he spat blood at her boots. “Surprised you remembered how to get out here …”

  She fired a bullet at the floor, the room suddenly smelling of gunpowder and smoke, her ears ringing with the blast. “Don’t fuck with me,” she said. “On the floor.” She indicated with the smoking barrel of her pistol.

  He crept to the floor and lay down, eyes never leaving her. She handcuffed him, grabbed his hair, and slammed his face into the wood.

  “You got it right this time!” he said. “What is it? Alzheimer’s? I see it, you know. See it in your eyes. They’re all glassy. You’re losing it more and more, ain’t you?”

  “What happened to her?” she asked, shaking her head. High on adrenaline and at the same time oddly drowsy, she felt wobbly. It was still dark in the room, just the ambient light of the stars.

  “I told her not to show fear,” he said. “She couldn’t do it. She wasn’t strong enough. They’ll smell it on a person. I smell it on you.”

  “We’ll go for a walk,” she said. “You can tell me then.”

  They walked out of the house, over the field toward the creek. He tripped on the cornstalks, falling down. “Look, lady, I don’t know what happened,” he said. “Best bet is, she didn’t realize they’d come into the house after a fight. Maybe their muzzles were torn open. Maybe they were raw, angry. I expect she tripped over them in the night, on her way to the bathroom. Honestly, I don’t know. I mean, I dropped her off outside the hospital.” He shrugged. “I told her not to be afraid. Where’d she go anyway? Haven’t seen her face in a while. Not since I stole your gun. You remember that, don’t you?”

  Aida whipped him again. They were close to the creek. She heard the sucking and whoosh of the water around tree roots and fallen trunks. He stopped at the bank. In the water she saw a strange pyramid of rocks. “Get in there,” she said.

  “The hell I will,” he said. “I’ll drown.”

  “Get.”

  He stumbled into the water but kept his footing. Never broke down, never wept or begged. He stood in the middle of the narrow creek, arms behind him, blood trickling into his mouth.

  “Where’s the money?” she asked.

  He spat into the creek and the blood went away.

  “Last chance,” she said, pulling the hammer back.

  “In the freezer,” he said. “Some more underneath a floorboard up in my bedroom.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You count it.”

  She shot him twice then, and his body spun backward into the creek. She watched him drift away until his body became entangled in an old fence line cutting through the creek along with all the other debris: ragged plastic bags, branches, cornstalks. She watched as the water broke against him, pushing him farther down into the murk. Then she went back to the house.

  Inside, she stacked the money from the freezer on the kitc
hen table. It was rubber-banded into thick wads and wrapped in Saran. Her old service piece was in the freezer too, next to Ziploc bags full of rhubarb, sweet corn, and tomatoes. And a deed to the house, signed over to him by an Ione Miller. She set these things on the table and went upstairs.

  She opened the folding doors and the mattress fell down onto the floor. Only the way it fell did not sound right. A single hundred-dollar bill floated through the air, falling to the floor like an expired leaf. She looked at the mattress more closely. There was an incision in the side and she saw that the mattress was stuffed with cash, bonds. This money wasn’t his, Aida thought. The dates on some of the bills were from the 1920s. She counted the cash as she extracted it from the musty old pad. Ninety thousand dollars. In the closet, beneath a floorboard, fifty thousand more. She went down the stairs with the money heaped in her arms, stuffed into pillowcases. She carried everything out to her truck, looking over her shoulder toward the field and the creek. There was barking inside the barn. She locked the doors to the truck and moved toward the giant red building. Dawn had come.

  Inside, one dog yet barely alive, entrails hanging from his belly to the dirty floor, and chained to an old cow stanchion trembling with fear. Aida came to it, her hands on its sides gently. She freed the dog, but it only leaned into her. She carried it back to the truck, its eyes searching. She drove down the driveway, her eyes on the rearview mirror. She looked back at the gravel path before her. An Escalade had just turned into the driveway and was moving toward her. It pulled to the shoulder, and she saw the driver roll down his window. She recognized him as a pharmacist. Saw his breath in the early morning cool.

  “Officer Battle,” he said, looking embarrassed. He saw the dog beside her in the truck, the pile of money. “Didn’t know you fought dogs.”

  “Wilson,” she said, “you have any morphine on you?” His name came effortlessly, from some fathoms deep inside her. She let the words come up.

  He startled. “He in bad shape?”