“Didn’t know where the keys were myself till I looked for them today. Unless they wanted a challenge, guess they walked through the door.”
Harley jotted notes to look occupied.
“Not worth the paper and ink.” June tightened the knobs on the drawer before shutting it.
Glenn said if she didn’t mind, he’d take a look around. She shrugged, and Glenn left them standing in the bedroom. Harley’s pen scratched the paper. He felt her stare.
He supposed he should say something. “I’m sorry about Jack,” he said. He’d known Jack in passing, mainly from the diner.
She gave another thin smile. “Yeah, me too.” She brushed her hand across the lip of wood not covered by the dresser top’s doily. She checked her fingertips for dust and wiped them on her housecoat. “Jensen,” she said, like she was trying to change the subject and place the name.
His jaw set. The muscles there rose beneath his thick sideburns like a pair of stones.
Was he one of Hans Jensen’s boys? she wondered aloud. No, he said. No, they were cousins. He concentrated on his pen. He wrote the word underwear.
There was a spot of silence while she acted the part, pretended to be piecing things together, drawing limbs on a family tree. Then he felt her hand lightly grip his elbow. His shoulders stiffened.
Behind the lenses of her horn-rims, those rheumy eyes looked like they might’ve been watching a puppy drown. He took a soundless, steadying breath through his nose and stuck the notepad in his back pocket. He reminded himself it was probably simpler for her today to muse on somebody else’s tragedy than deal with her own. He gave her hand a pat. A silent reassurance that this, too, would pass, even if it likely wouldn’t. “It’s all right,” he said. “Long time ago.”
Glenn stood at the room’s threshold again. “Senseless,” he proclaimed the break-in. “Just senseless.”
The woman gave Harley’s arm another soft squeeze. His nostrils fluttered.
“Well,” she said, like she was winding up a phone conversation. “Guess somebody needed some holey underwear.”
When the men were in the car, she gave a single wave from the porch, a swat like shooing a fly. She turned and went inside.
Glenn took off his hat. All that was left of his hair was an apron of salt-and-pepper bristles. He daubed the bare skin above with a hankie. “I can’t figure why the hell, much less who.”
“Could’ve owed Ziske a cup of coffee,” Harley said, trying to lighten his own mood as much as Glenn’s.
Glenn gave a one-beat laugh. “Petty crime. Ziske fits the bill on petty.”
“Not too stealthy, though.” Harley slid the key in the ignition.
“Can you imagine?” Glenn brightened. “Kaiser helmet and all, wheezing up the lawn and back with that walker?” He chuckled. “Glad bags full of Jack’s clothes?”
In the rearview, Harley eyed the locust trees, the unpruned elderberry bushes that hid all but the shingled roof and stovepipe chimney of Virginia Reddick’s. He was staring there when he turned the key.
Glenn braced a hand on the dashboard and huffed to strain around, see what Harley was looking at. “Don’t go jumping straight to the weirdo,” he said. “Could’ve been anybody.”
Harley slid the cruiser into drive. “Wasn’t,” he said.
Glenn settled back in the seat as the Fury pulled away. “Know she got caught burning trash naked?”
“June Christiansen?” For a flash, Harley imagined what might’ve been beneath the pink housecoat. He tried to think of anything else.
“Virginia Reddick. Dad was still sheriff, right after Neiderbaugh started garbage collection. Folks on the edge of town were still burning their trash. Hell, Liebig was doing it on Fifth and Spruce. You want to see somebody have a conniption—Liebig at that council meeting. Heard cusses I didn’t know there were.”
“She was naked?” Harley pictured Paul dangling upside down that night at the water tower. He pushed that image from his head, too.
Glenn nodded. “Dell Senior called, few days before he moved out. Dad didn’t have the heart to deal with it.” When Harley lit a cigarette, Glenn cranked open the wing window on his side. “Dad never got over that, you know. Never finding the boy. So he sent me down there.”
“What’d you do about it?”
“Got her covered with a blanket. Had her in the cruiser—Dell Senior wanted her thrown in the drunk tank till a racket come from the house. Bickering. One of those ‘give it here’ deals between brothers. Dell said forget it. Leave her. Boys need a mother, even if theirs is a crackpot.”
“He’s something else.”
“Yeah, piece of work. But he’d just lost a boy.”
Harley avoided looking at the field past Glenn’s window. It spread to the highway bordering the old Lucas place. He’d scoured every inch of that field when they’d searched for the body. “Find out why she was naked?”
Glenn looked at him, baffled. “What good reason would she have, burning trash naked?” He scooted in his seat to hold his head out the window like a traveling dog. “No, just moved the burn barrel. To the far side of the house. You want to keep that thing outside?”
Harley took a drag as they rolled onto the paved road at the alley’s end. Though he’d just lit it, he let the cigarette fall to the pavement as a courtesy.
* * *
HARLEY USUALLY WAITED till dark for patrol, when the air was a little cooler. But if Paul really had lost something at the home place, it’d be easier to spot with some daylight left. Who knew? Maybe Paul was up to something halfway normal for once, trafficking in stolen property or drugs. Maybe he hadn’t been getting a blow job solely to kill time lying in wait. Harley wasn’t prone to that brand of optimism, but in this case he’d entertain it.
He sped past the house to turn and park around back, where nobody would see the cruiser. The gravel of County Road K kicked up a cloud of dust between a rise of high yellow grass and the windbreak growing untended. He made a right on the old Schleswig-Holstein road, two worn ruts running along the back property line. Harley saw the road had been newly named “15” by a green reflective tag screwed to a T-bar.
He turned and drove down the backyard slope. When he got out, he waded through the knee-high grass toward the front, passing a pile of rotted, splintered wood that was once a buckboard wagon. It’d been there, piled by the windbreak, as long as he could remember.
In front, he passed the house to check the barn, sliding open one of the double doors Braasch should’ve secured, though there was nothing in there to steal. There was nothing outside to steal, either, that Harley could see. He threaded his boot through the grass where Reddick had done the same the night before. He saw nothing pitched from a window to avoid arrest.
As long as he was here, he’d make sure Loren Braasch at least had the sense to keep the house locked up. Harley went around back and mounted the two short steps to the entrance they’d used. The front door, his folks had joked, was for visitors and vagabonds.
He gripped the brass knob. The head-level panes were sheathed in a cloudy film, but he didn’t care to look in anyway. He turned the knob. The wood pulled inward from the jamb like the door was eager to open itself. He yanked it back, till it latched.
The first thought he had made his face flush. For an instant he’d wondered if this was Paul’s whole purpose the night before, bringing Harley back to the last place he wanted to be. To crawl under his skin, like Glenn said. After all, that was what Paul did. Got people to do idiot things like it’d been their idea all along. He’d done it to the Sawyer kid, the Ferguson girl, and likely as not the Wagner boy who stole the snowmobile. He’d tried it with Harley that night at the water tower. But Paul wasn’t subtle. He went for lost limbs and crushed heads. Blaming Paul for standing here was letting him get under Harley’s skin solely out of fear that he could. Harley wouldn’t give Paul that much credit.
Harley turned and descended the steps. If he thought of it, tomorrow morning he’d ca
ll and tell Loren Braasch to get the place locked up.
On the way to the cruiser, he spotted his folks’ old burn barrel and stopped. He pictured Virginia Reddick naked in the glow of flames and the empty drawer and closet at Jack Christiansen’s, just three doors down from her house. Nakedness and clothes, the death declaration for Dell Junior and Paul showing up out here—if all of it was connected, Harley didn’t want to guess how.
Beneath the buzz of the cicadas, he took a breath and looked past the burn barrel at the old root cellar’s upright door. From the side, a person could see the clay slope that led into the earth. But if you stood straight in front, as he often had as a kid, you could catch it at just the right angle. At just the right angle, it looked like a portal into something else. Something beyond the grass, beyond the hill, beyond the pile of splintered buckboard wagon and the dying windbreak.
5
AT TWO O’CLOCK THAT WEDNESDAY MORNING, Pam sat in the Nova. Her big brass P key chain hung down from the steering column and grazed against her knee every few minutes. She’d slap it, thinking it was a bug. Past the windshield, the lamppost spread white haze and zigzagging moth shadows over the trailer siding.
The bills from the sugar container lay scattered in loose wads at the top of her purse. Some came from the last job she’d worked, at the Snack Shack in Madson, till she’d gone into labor. The rest was from birthdays, Christmases. Fives Dad slipped into cards when Babe wasn’t looking. Three months ago, there’d been twenty-five dollars more. Three months before that, there’d been a hundred and forty.
At that rate, even if she could suck it up and stick it out, learn to live with broken screen doors and the hollow beneath the plywood floor and the dead foot skin curled around the heat register, that ninety dollars would be gone well before Anna was old enough to go to preschool. It’d all be gone before Pam could get a job and keep them out of the hole.
And even then, Reddicks would be Reddicks. And she’d still be chained to them and all their morbid problems. Even the most morbid Reddick of them all, Virginia, had the sense to cut ties and disappear.
The gas pedal brushed the ball of her foot. She’d left her shoes on the counter when she’d grabbed the money. If she went back in, she might wake Rick and Anna.
She didn’t need the shoes. They were fifty-cent drugstore sandals. She could pick up new ones later that morning.
Pam squeezed her eyes shut, as if that might insulate the sleeping world around her from the choke and rumble of the motor. She turned the key. The engine roared. Still in park, she punched the gas and the idle hummed low. She pulled out. Bare foot on the brake, she watched the trailer windows, made sure a drape didn’t slide over and gape with the darkness inside. Nothing. Of course not. Nothing ever woke him up, anyway. Not so long as he had that damn box fan going in the window.
Pam gunned it down Whitmore, past trailers with names like Ambassador and Silvercrest and Prestige. Rick rattled them off like classic cars. “That one there’s a ’72 Shangri-la,” he’d say, and she’d eye the skirting, the corrugated sheet metal that hid the piles of cinder blocks propping the trailer above the dirt. Shangri-la, her ass.
She took the gravel county roads to the north of Madson, where buildings grew sparse and the hills were carved into wide terraces of corn, dried to straw-yellow. When she saw her parents’ lamppost, she cut the headlights and pulled alongside the fuel tanks. Babe always bitched about the tanks being at the end of the drive. She’d nagged at Dad to move them closer to the house for years, probably so she could be ready with a shotgun if anyone tried to pull what Pam was about to. But fifteen gallons would get her three, four hours away. In three, four hours it’d be dawn, and the stations would open so she could refill.
Not wanting to take a chance on the high idle again, Pam kept the car running. As she stepped onto the gravel, the sharp granite shards dug into her feet. She closed the door enough to turn the dome light off and walked slowly, carefully to the tank. She snatched up the nozzle, went to the fuel cap, and listened. No creak sounded from the screen door’s spring. Babe didn’t holler up from the house. When Pam pulled the lever, she listened again, this time for the flow. The tank gurgled, and the hose went silent. She tried it again. Nothing came. She pulled out the nozzle and whipped the tube in case something was stuck in it, in case something inside needed to be jarred loose. Then she listened again, this time for the pump of Babe’s twelve-gauge. Pam wondered if her mother would fire a warning shot or just take her out.
She squeezed the nozzle lever once more. Not a sound. The tank was drained.
Pam drooped the slack hose over the gauge, got back in the car, and sank down in the seat. She pulled the door softly till it clicked. After she shifted into drive, she coasted, her toes too numb to press the pedal.
At the far end of the county road, Pam sat, calves shivering below the knees, till the numbness gave way to a surging, useless energy. The drive out here left her with a sixteenth of a tank. At best. She could make it as far as Madson, as far as the gas station, and wait. But Rick was headed to Arnold in the morning. And the first place he went before out-of-town jobs was always that gas station, right when it opened.
There was nowhere to go but back. Back to that sweltering, ramshackle, wood-paneled can. Back to that broken storm door and those shitty towels and Anna’s stare of perpetual alarm. Back to Rick and his torn-up jeans and his dead foot skin.
Gripping the wheel and gritting her teeth, she stifled a scream from her gut. It came out long and grainy, an oscillating grunt. She flipped on the lights and gunned the Nova, fishtailing through the intersection.
She sped down gravel roads, made turns too fast, pounded over a mile-long stretch washboarded from a heavy rain that must’ve fallen months ago, until she tasted the dust thick on her tongue and her body felt the weight of adrenaline wearing off.
The Nova slowed to a stop at the highway, on the lip of “the Bowl,” a low plain rimmed by hills. She made a right and looked for what was left of the Lucas drive. She’d parked there in high school. They all had. They’d come there to smoke cigarettes and drink beers pilfered from parents’ fridges. That and scare the shit out of each other with the Dell Junior deal, wondering where his body was in proximity to their own. He’d died not far off, somewhere in the valley between the Lucas place and old man Ziske’s, just north.
She needed to breathe. She needed to get out of the car and breathe.
She pulled into the weeds, parked, and walked to the back of the Nova. She sat on its sloped trunk and eyed the darkness across the way. On the other side of the Bowl was the blind intersection and the Jensen house. The place was so overgrown, she might never have known it was there. But of course Babe told her about it. Babe was just dark.
In the Oldsmobile, between snaps of cinnamon Dentyne, between crooning along to Jim Reeves songs, her mother dropped matter-of-fact bits, haphazard bombs about dismemberment by farm implements, grisly murders, child molestations, suicides. Women who dropped dead and blew up because, as Babe pointed out, “A body bloats in the heat.”
Pam had been big enough then, her toes brushed the mammoth car’s carpet. “See that house over there?” Babe began. “Jensens lived there—God. When was that? Late thirties? In ’38, it happened. He farmed, Pete. Marge kept house.” She said they’d gone to the Lutheran church in town, had two kids, a boy and a girl. The girl was a grade or two below Babe, the boy younger.
When she’d finished the preamble, she said, “Close to dinnertime, Pete was out in the field, kids were in the yard doing something or other. Marge finished cooking, set the table, laid out the bowls and plates and silverware. Then she went and blew her head off with Pete’s shotgun. Right there in the kitchen.”
The cinnamon Dentyne snapped. Pam flinched. And the anecdote, if you could even call it that, settled like an oily dust coating the inside of the Oldsmobile.
Pam finally asked, more to move the air than anything, how come.
“Oh, I don’t know,
” she said in that low, gruff, what-kind-of-a-jackass-asks-that-kind-of-question voice. “Why the hell does anybody go and blow their head off with a shotgun?” Then she’d crooned again between chews of Dentyne, sung along to “I’m Beginning to Forget You.” Until the whistle part. “Do the whistle part,” she’d told Pam.
Babe ruined her. You start out a kindergarten-age kid on a steady diet of housewives who blow their heads off with shotguns or knock down their husbands with pickup trucks and line the wheels up just right with their necks and run them over—who was that, a Pooley? A Pooley. You rear a kid on that kind of shit, it’s no wonder they’re skittish when it comes to marriage and having babies. Or folding goddamn towels, for that matter.
Pam flung herself back against the window. She shut her eyes. She listened for the Wakonda at the bottom of the Bowl, thinly bubbling through its slice in the earth.
Instead, a drier sound rose. The static of tires on gravel. Pam lifted her head, looked for any cars across the way. There was nothing. But the grinding continued, breaking up, each rock’s pop and clang beneath rubber and wheel well more distinct. A pair of headlights shot down the county road through a cloud of dust. They were aimed toward the blind intersection with the highway.
Pam slid from the trunk and headed for the car door, taking as few steps as possible on the rocky path. She got in, started the engine, and looked back toward the lights. They’d already turned and crossed the rusted bridge. She put the Nova in reverse and backed out as the other car flew across the plain, headlamps a strobe through the corn tassels. She pulled out, and it sped up. Then it put on the cherries. A cop. Pam righted her wheels and pulled onto the shoulder.
The cruiser made a looping U-turn across the empty highway to pull in behind her. She cut the engine and watched her side mirror as a tall, broad-shouldered figure, a black silhouette against the star- and moonlit blue of the highway, unfolded like a jackknife from the car.
When he reached the driver’s-side window, his flashlight cast a glow across her legs. A thread from her cutoffs tickled her leg. “You one of Red’s girls?” he asked.
Pickard County Atlas Page 5