Beast of the Field (17 page)

23.

It came across the wire from Dodge City, then from Hays, then from Hutchinson and Wichita:  a series of thunderstorms heading east.  Big ones.  It was the first day of May, the season of weather—the people of Hope County knew the storms would be coming sooner or later.  They knew also that knowing they’re coming didn’t stop their coming, and when the storms came they took something with them every time.  Some their early corn and some whole fields of winter wheat.  Some their homes.  Some their cars, their barn roofs, their fences, their oldest trees and some their livestock.  If it were a bad storm or your luck was bad, it would be a loved one lost.

The lovers knew nothing of the thunderstorms until the first and smaller of them hit the town.  Tommy was almost finished packing. He’d bricked over the bottom of the trunk with his favorite volumes,
then covered the books with folded sweaters and tweeds, then his lighter shirts and pants for the coming summer.  These hands-on tasks allowed him to corral his excitement and his fear into something more graspable.  While his hands worked in the now, his mind could stray to his future with his bride-to-be—no longer a lover’s dream but a real future that was only waiting on them to get there—without disappearing into it.  Still, from time to time
his fancies won over his fingers, and with a bowtie dangling from a slightly opened hand or a pencil hovering over a pad, his gaze would float away and a grin would lift his face and he too would then seem to lift from the ground.   

By the thin sharp hands of the silver timepiece given to him by his true love, it was after three o’clock in the afternoon of May 1 when he left on Sonnet for town to collect small debts owed him—gambling debts, racing losses, back pay—because at four o'clock on Saturdays, all business came to a stop and the lovers would need the money.

He had just collected twenty-five dollars from Mr. Fleming and was standing inside the bay doors of Fleming Lumber when a crack of thunder directly overhead rattled the building's frame.  He heard dirt spray up against the west and south walls.  The smell of the coming storm came strong.  A quick look outside showed him trees and bushes bending under that first blast of wind, then straightening.  He unhitched Sonnet, took Elm Street.  He gauged the heavy purple clouds, the wind and the first tiny drops of rain and figured he could still make it home if he had to ask it of Sonnet. 

He was checking the watch from his lover when the Model T appeared from behind Ruede's furniture store, two shops in front of him.  It was Geshen Neuwald’s Model T.  Sonnet saw it first, blew from her nose, planted all four hooves into the dirt.  Inside the car, Geshen had his eyes fixed on Tommy.  Behind Tommy, Gomer Neuwald's Chevrolet pulled out too, boxing him and his horse there between the two cars, Ruede's on his right and the jail on his left.  Tommy knew better than to dismount.

Gomer got out of his car, then Geshen his.  Tommy thought Geshen was smiling when he stepped out, so he too smiled.  Then he knew he’d made a mistake.  That was not a smile on his face.

"Geshen," Tommy said with a nod.

He received no answer.

"Gomer."

No answer here, either.

“That’s a real nice watch you got there,” Geshen said.  "I think somehow you’ve got my watch by accident.  Now come down off
a that animal."

Tommy looked about him, noticed the .22 rifle in the hands of Gomer Neuwald.  He carried it like an extra limb to make up for the bad one on which he was forced to limp.  In spite of being directly in front of the jail, he didn't see the sheriff anywhere, and was relieved.  It was just the two brothers, which was something.  If one of the brothers wasn’t Gomer and his twitchy trigger finger, Tommy could dig into Sonnet and leap right away from there. "You’re mistaken, Gesh," Tommy said cheerily as he got down from the saddle.  “A good friend gave this to me.”

Geshen only looked at him.  "I know who gave it to you," he said.  “And I know who she stole it from.”

Gomer must have seen them at the schoolhouse after all, Tommy thought.  Well, he was bound to find out sooner or later, wasn’t he?  This day was bound to come, and now here it is and it’s too late to do anything about it.  It’s May 1 and in just hours he and Flora will make their escape.  There was nothing Geshen could do to stop them now.

"We're in love," he said.  "I don’t care who knows about it. I love her and she loves me and there’s nothing you or anyone can do to me to change that."

"Hum," Geshen said.  "You don't think so, do you? 
'Nothing?'  Is that what you think?"

"She doesn’t belong to you, Geshen,"

"You want I should give him one, Gesh?"

Before Tommy could react, the butt of Gomer’s rifle went into Tommy's side, dropping him to his knees. 

Tommy stood up again, faced Geshen.  Geshen closed the distance between them to speak over the wind.  He said, "Your flitty Shakespeare drivel aint gonna work in the street, you mick, son-of-bitch.  I aint no young girl, so easily fooled."

"I didn't fool anyone.  She loves me."

This got him another one, in the same spot as the first one, but this time Tommy stayed standing. 

“She doesn’t love you, Geshen,” Tommy said.  “She was lonely, with Junior away at the war.  If anybody ‘stole’ her, it was you. 
From a soldier fighting in the war, too.”

Geshen punched Tommy in the mouth, bringing blood to his chin and shirt.  "I’ll show you, talking to me that way.  Do you know who you’re talking to, you, Pope-humping, mick son of a—"

"She never loved you, Geshen.  She never loved you."

This got him another from Gomer, again with the butt of the rifle, this time in the back, leaving Tommy with his face in the dirt.  The rain was coming in bigger drops now, knocking up little blossoms of dust in front of Tommy's eyes.

Geshen squatted on his hams, spoke to Tommy in something as close to a whisper as he could in the noise of the coming storm.  "You been sneaking around my woods like the cabbage-eating vermin you are.  You been sweet-talking my girl, poisoning her ears with this Shakespeare-Valentino con artist routine a yours.  You even got her fooled into thinking someone like her could love a hump of shit like you.  Well let me tell you, it stops right here.  You won't see her again.  You will never talk to her again.  In fact, it's probably best for you, Tommy Boy, if you just start thinking about relocating to a new town, disappearing from Price altogether."

Tommy couldn't resist.  He lifted himself from the ground, slapping his trilby on his thigh. 
Smiling.  "That's a damned good idea, Geshen.  A damned fine idea.  In fact, I think today is a great day for disappearing from this town altogether."

Geshen was nowhere near as dull as his brother, and as soon as these words left his lips, Tommy wished to have them back.  Geshen stood, his eyebrows pulled in in thought.  He then looked to his brother, who was still oblivious.

“Go to her house, Gomer,” he said.  “Don’t let her go anywhere.  I’m going for the mayor.”

24.

Sterno had been jolted by the unfamiliar thoughts and emotions that had shot through him in the rush of seconds as he ran from those bullets.  They were not of the past, but of the future, of a life still possible. 
A daughter, full of pith-and-vinegar, full of life, with blonde hair, maybe, maybe not, and beautiful blue-green eyes.  And a woman, a wife, a warmth stirred up from the cold inside him.  A reason to smile right here where a man  was not meant to smile.  He had wanted to stay alive, to
be
alive, for some reason.

A woman.
 

On the road back to town these thoughts resurfaced in him for examination.  It was with shame, but also with excitement that he confronted them.  Five years was a long time.  Elizabeth would want him to be happy.  She would want him to smile here, now, and then smile with her later.  Wouldn’t she?  The thought brought him shame and anger, surprise, and more shame.  He shook the thought from his mind. 

Sterno now gunned the gas of his Ford.  He worked to keep his mind empty, but his body seemed to have a mind of its own.  It had a mind to take him safely to town, into the hotel, getting him that bath and shave, that change of clothes he needed so badly.  All his body’s mind could think about in the die-down after the rush flying lead was being close to that woman.

Instead, limping, head reeling, it only made it as far as the first chair he saw in the lobby, where he sat throbbing from many parts of his person while Rosie the Indian girl refilled coffee
for him six times.  After each time she filled his cup, she stood straight and without a sound studied his face.  His clothes.  His bleeding ankle.

"I'm okay," he said to her at one point.

"Rough night," he mumbled, trying to smile, at another point.

"Do you have aspirin?" he asked her finally.  This was what she had been waiting for.  She vanished and re-appeared with a tin of Bayer.  She left him there with his pills, stood quietly by the front desk.  After a few minutes Tess Helmcamp emerged from the kitchen.  Rosie pointed to Sterno but said nothing.

Tess thanked her and crossed the lobby, but stopped short of his chair, shaking her head.  “Charlie Sterno, what have they done to your handsome face.”  She took in the rest of him, still hovering there between sympathy and disapproval.  She bent over with a hanky she had wetted from a glass of water.  “For Pete’s sake,” she said as she dabbed at his face.  “Well, no time for a bath now.  Come with me.  He’s been waiting for you.”

*

He followed her to and through the kitchen, where he noted the Indian women worked muted and gloomy.  Tess turned to him as they were about to open the cellar door, said, “Don’t say a word about me finding you in the lobby, he’s been down there waiting for you all morning, and he’s cranky.  Oh, and walk very quietly, he hates the way everyone clomps around.  These poor girls are scared to death of him.”

She opened the door, but before they descended the stairs she turned to him one more time, whispered, “Just so you know, I’ll be
needing at least two cigarettes when we’re done down here.”

Finally they soft-footed down the stairs.
  There were already four kerosene lanterns flickering in the cellar, their gassy fumes collecting thickly under the ceiling.  Two of the lanterns were on the clapboard table on which Sterno had studied his map.  She turned the flame up on these, motioned with her hand to the gray stone wall on the far side of the table.  “Mr. Sterno, this is my father, Herbert Price.  Dad, Charlie Sterno, the Pinkerton man.”

Sterno could just make out the man in the dim gas glow.  Even in the wooden chair he needed a cane to stay upright.  His skin and scant strands of hair were the same cold, dry color as the stone blocks behind him, the only differing feature the smoothness of the stone.  He wore a yellowing shirt the same tone as the kerosene light and dark pants too big for him.  Tess turned up the kerosene on the lantern right next to him, bringing the long, falling, grooved face into light.  His eyes were like frosted glass but when he strained he could see around him.

“Never cared much for Pinkertons,” he said after smacking his lips.  “Rode with one on a silver coach in Colorado, from Durango to Denver and back.  Can’t tell you his name.  He was some asshole, I can tell you that.”

“There’re more than a handful of them I don’t care for myself,” Sterno said, straining to sound intelligible for his jaw.

“Hum, I suspect they don’t care for you either then.”

“You suspect right.”

“Dad, please.  He’s a busy man.”

“Busy sitting in the lobby for an hour sipping my coffee.”

“Dad.”

“What happened to your face, young man?  One of your Pinkerton buddies? 
A rough bunch of assholes, those Pinkertons.  Saw them working the coal strikes in Colorado.  They aint got morals, most of ‘em, no better than those Baldwin-Felts thugs.”

“I don’t work strikes,” Sterno said.

“Speak up, young man!  I can barely understand a word you’re saying, with that jaw all swole up!”

“Dad!” she barked at him.  She composed herself, said to Sterno.  “I told Dad you were in town about Tommy Donnan’s murder.  He asked to see you.”

“What?  What’s that?” the old man said.

“I told him,” she said in a near-whisper, addressing both Sterno and her father though facing Sterno, “you didn’t think it was an accident.”

“You’re damn straight, it wasn’t an accident!” Mr. Price said.

“I
knew
you could hear me, you old grouser.”

Sterno watched them go back and forth.  He wasn’t sure yet why he was here.  If he was here to ask questions or answer them.  He didn’t know what there was to learn from a blind man in the dark.

The old man cleared his throat, smacked his lips.  “So you’re here to find out about Braun Donnan’s boy.  Tommy Donnan, the buggy racer.  Boy, that was a real shame.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Died in that tornado last spring.   A young man, still.”

Sterno didn’t answer this yet.  For the old man, this was answer enough.  “I’m glad you’re here, young man.”  Every sentence the old man spoke stood by itself, bridged to the one
following it with the loud snort in his throat and the smacking of his lips.  “So if you don’t think he got thrown, then tell me what you do think happened to that boy.  You’ve been here two days now, is it?  That’s enough time for even a Pinkerton to come up with something.”

Sterno told him that in the beginning he had been sure it was an accident.  He then thought it was a random crime, done by drifters or highwaymen.  He told him about Dr. Rosenszeig’s photos, about the blood on the road, dry and red the morning after rain storm, which was impossible if the
blood had been spilled while it was still raining, and he told him about the location of the blood, halfway between the farms of the Neuwalds and the Donnans.  There were stories that didn’t match, as well, he told him, though he didn’t tell him which stories, or from whom they came.  Throughout, in fact, he tried to stay vague; he’d learned that the only thing you can trust in these hayseed towns is that there is no one you can trust.

“But why,” the old man asked.  “Why would anyone kill Tommy?  He was a good boy, far as I knew.   A little loose with his pecker, but that don’t make him a bad boy.” 

Sterno shook his head at this thought.  “I’m actually starting to wonder if there wasn’t a woman involved,” he said.

“A woman,” Mr. Price said.  He too thought for a moment.  “You’re talking about the mayor’s girl, then. 
Florella.  She’s the only gal around here worth killing or dying for.  She went around with that Geshen Neuwald, for a time.”

“I haven’t met her yet,” Sterno said.  “Apparently she is at that college in Wichita.”

“Well, young man, wherever she is, whatever she’s doing, she’s a ripe peach, I’ll tell you that.”

“For Pete’s sake, Dad.”

“A real looker.  Hell, every man in town’s been in love with her at some point.  She never loved any of them back, though.  Too busy loving Jesus while she was growing up.  Her folks sent her to the Lutheran school over across the county line, where the boys are all light in their loafers, that’s what I hear.  Wouldn’t let any of the boys around here near her except that Neuwald boy.  Being cousins was never good enough reason around here to stop pitching woo at a girl.  Come to think of it, Tessie, wasn’t her and the other Donnan boy sweet on each other for a while?”

“
You old hen.  I swear, would you like me to fetch your needles so you can work while you talk?”

Cousins, Sterno thought.

“Aw, you pipe down,” he said smacking.  Then to Sterno:  “What about him?  The other brother.  That big boy, the football player.  He had it for that Greentree girl most his life, since the first day she set a foot in town.  Followed her around everywhere she went.  If I remember right, they were sweethearts.”

Tess Helmcamp said, “My goodness, I forgot all about those two.  He was so cute, so shy and nice.  He didn’t really follow her, I would say—it was more like he was just always around her, protecting her.”  She added, dreamily, dramatically
,  “Sometimes that’s all a girl needs.”

“Boy could play football, I’ll tell you that.  You know it was him that busted up his pa’s leg, not
no conveyor belt accident.  Not too many folks know that.”

“You don’t know that either, Dad.”

“The boy’s rubber band snapped while his pa was gutting a porker, went berserk on the senior.  It was only dumb luck he didn’t kill him right then and there, his own pa.”

It was quiet for a time
.  Sterno rolled two cigarettes, lit them with one match, handed the second to Tess, who took it like she were dying of thirst.  While he rolled and then smoked, Sterno was thinking about Junior.  Was having his lifelong obsession taken from him by his brother enough for the rubber band to snap again? 

After a minute, the old man started giving his lips a good smacking.  It turned out he was just getting started.

“So, young man, who did that to your jaw?”

“Your constable,” he said.  

“Jake did that, did he?  A tough son-of-a-bitch, that Jake.  You look like you can handle yourself, Charlie Sterno—you get a few in on him?”

He shook his head. 
“Never got the chance.  He didn’t like me doing his job.  He swears up and down this was an accident.  Anyone who says otherwise is a liar—I don’t like being called a liar.”

“Accident, my eye.
  There aint no accidents in Price, Kansas, not since that son-of-a-bitch mayor and his boys come in.  If Jake says it’s an accident, it’s because someone told him it was an accident, so he believes it like religion.  Jake got all his brains in his knuckles.”

Mayor and his boys?
 
Mayor
?

“Dad doesn’t like the Neuwalds very much.  When Abner moved here with his mother, wife and little girl, Dad was suspicious.  Dad is suspicious of everything.  He still doesn’t like that I’ve hired Indian girls to work in the kitchen.”

“Those squaws’ll cook anything they find in a pig trough and call it chicken, are you listening to me?”

“Dad.”

“Alright, alright.  Where was I?”

“Son-of-a-bitch mayor and his boys,” Sterno said.

“Oh yeah.  Of course, by ‘boys’ I mean those droopy-drawered palookas he calls cousins.  They’re
cousins
,” Mr. Price said, a vile word to him.  “Him and those Neuwalds, cousins.  And they show up smiling and spitting in the dirt as soon as we get a rail line, still stinking of Missouri, the whole bunch.  Now they wanted to get nice and comfy in Price…
my
daddy’s own town, and I didn’t like it.  I knew right off they were after all the town offices, told everyone I knew.  No one believed me.”

“They did believe you, Dad.  They just didn’t mind.”

“Didn’t mind.  Now he’s bamboozled their land from them so he could get rich on oil, did they mind then?  Now the banks are going to take their farms and there aint thing one they can do about it do they mind?  After he started wearing them white robes and burning crosses out in the woods, did they mind then?  How about when the annex was burned down, and the Catholic church?”

The mayor in white robes and crosses, Sterno thought.  What is going on here?

“Alright, Dad.  We don’t know if that has anything to do with anything.”

The old man pressed his cane into the floor, stood up on it, hobbled over to the table clearing his throat.  Closer, in better light, what Sterno saw was a serious man with a still-fresh flame burning behind those milky eyes. 

“Let me tell you a story, Charlie Sterno.  This is why I brought you down here.  I’m here to tell you, this town aint a stranger to murder.  Get us some whisky, Tessie.”

She had it close by, brought and poured three glasses before she sat on the bottom stair, settling into a long story, it looked.  The old man sipped his whisky like it was boiling, five or six quick sips in a row.  Then he was ready.