Crimes in Southern Indiana (10 page)

Moisture heated the back of his neck. Dripped from his brow. He pushed the
sheet from the entrance. Followed the hallway carpet back to the kitchen. Stepped over Cooley, out the screen door. The mid-morning heat stole his breath as his hands tremored. He pulled a flask from his back pocket. Twisted the cap, took a hard slug of Wild Turkey that ignited his insides.

Men of his state had watched the world bleed its own too many times to feel pity. He'd seen half-strung
eyes, beaten faces, and limbs removed. Enough pain to make anyone believe in hell. This Connie, what she'd done to Cooley reaffirmed that hell's existence. Reminded him too much of what his own mother had been capable of.

Sliding the flask back into his pocket he walked toward his orange International Scout, knowing he needed names. Addresses. To go back and wait. Watch Lazarus. To find where
Connie and Willie could have gone, catch them all together. Of course, people this malevolent didn't keep close company for long.

From the distance, a salvage-yard-ready Pinto bounced down the dirt drive, pulled to a stop. Stepping from the Pinto was a female in cutoff s that used to be white, with her ass cheeks peeking out, blowing kisses as she turned to close the car door. She'd a cinnamon-striped
tube top that held the shapes of two ripened tomatoes ready to be handpicked. Her waving locks matched the spots on her face, the color of rust, while her leech lips smacked the sugar of the Bazooka Joe bubble gum. She swayed barefooted toward Kurt, speaking in an unsure tongue. “Connie around?”

Making a deviant blush, Kurt's eyes trip-wired her with “No. Wouldn't know where she and Willie might
be, would you?”

“Who are you?”

“An acquaintance.”

“I ain't heard from her in better than two weeks. Thought I'd come by. Make sure that drunk hadn't beat her black as a milk snake again.”

Her river-green eyes glanced down to his crotch. Moved up to the .38. Her eyes got confused as she met his.

Before the female could exhale, Bonfire had a fist full of her rusted locks twisted in one hand.
The thumb of his other clicked the hammer of the .38, the barrel bruising her cheek.

“Didn't catch your name, sugar.”

“B-B-B-Barbra Jean.”

He could smell the trash she'd been burning in a steel drum wafting from her body, topped off with a hint of panic.

“Well, Barbra Jean, I need names of any acquaintances of Connie. Someplace she and Willie might hole up.”

“Only person Connie ever spoke
of was her older step-brother.”

“Does he got a name?”

“Lazarus.”

 

After removing the cloth wrapped around Pine Box's palms, anger flared from Lazarus's lips.

“So, little man, was that spent-liver Indian the one who used your palms for ashtrays?”

A single cigarette dangled from the corner of Lazarus's mouth. Smoke twined into the bacon-grease air of the trailer. He'd been lying low in town,
waiting until the heat was off his back. They'd been eye-fucking him for a few weeks. Connie and Willie stayed at the trailer he rented from Buck Shields on a five-acre plot out in nowhere land. No one knew about it.

Pine Box sat at the Formica table taking in the oozing pink of his palm. With tiny marble-size indentions scattered about it. A cornmeal crust infected the corners of his eyes, which
were dirty streams identical to those of his uncle, who slammed his fist on the kitchen table's cracked surface.

“You gonna answer me or play Anne Frank all damn day?”

“Anne who?”

“Dammit, Pine Box, answer me?”

The boy bit his lip and sighed. Said, “Ever time Cooley got to drinkin' and Mama was out earnin' her way he'd get some kinda yellow-jacket meanness in him. Wanna play chicken. I wasn't
scared. I played.”

From the kitchen's gas stove Connie stood braless in a worn wifebeater and Kentucky blue nylon shorts, saying, “Well, that Indian's ten kinds of stink now, sugar.” Stubbing his cigarette out, Lazarus shook his head of shoe-polish-slick locks. Rubbed his chin, wanting to be a part of Pine Box's life before it was too late. Living hours away, Connie and Cooley hadn't been giving
the boy any history. Didn't even know who Anne Frank was. Probably didn't know his namesake. And Lazarus asked, “Connie ever tell you how your name came about?”

Behind Lazarus, Connie's hand quivered. She stabbed crisp strips of bacon from the cast-iron skillet to a paper plate. Remembered how her stepdaddy couldn't keep his hands off her. Made her stepbrothers move out into the barn when her
Claymation features thinned out into a shapely woman. She never wanted Pine Box to know anything of her past. How he was conceived. Almost killed and named. Anger charred her face and words combusted from her lips. “Lazarus, shut your damn mouth!”

Lazarus remembered his daddy. The man who'd offered a lot of love in the form of pain. A year ago he'd passed. Liver cancer. Left his insurance policy
to Lazarus. He used some of the money to purchase the nipple-pink Cadillac. What was left he gambled away. He hated that bastard. Growing up out in that barn, he felt a lot of rage for him. That rage returned when he'd seen Pine Box weeks ago. He held Connie responsible. Feeling as though he were being cheated, letting some half-breed raise Willie.

“Done about fucked us on the car job. Should
have let me out, made sure that man was dead.”

“That man was redder than canned tomatoes. Hazard County police told you he can't remember shit. Laid up in a hospital. All we's waiting on is the insurance check. Besides, you the one who went and parked the car on his property.”

Lazarus's hands dampened. The road where they'd parked the car looked like a place people went to get their fuck on,
nothing for miles. How was he supposed to know that Attwood was some wealthy landowner? Shit, he wasn't from Hazard, Kentucky. He was from New Amsterdam, Indiana. Three hours away.

He seared a stare at Connie, thought of squeezing her complexion from bone-pale to the same shade of red that pumped through her black heart. Pay her back triple for what she'd let that Indian do to Pine Box. Then
a bullfrog belch pushed from Pine Box's mouth.

“Where my name come from, Uncle Lazarus?”

Fuck her, he thought. This was his kid too. It was time the boy knew about his history.

“Your granddaddy Dodson said you came not out of love but out of sickness. When you was born he fetched your wrinkled ass up. Put you in a burlap sack. Took off down the road in his beat-to-shit Ford.”

Unsteady, not
wanting Pine Box to hear the story, Connie flipped the blue-orange gas flame off. Yelled, “Dammit, Lazarus, shut your friggin' mouth!”

“His name has got meaning. It's his birthright to know.” Glancing at Pine Box, he continued, “Connie, she took off after your granddaddy. Running barefoot down the gravel drive. Followed him all the way down to the creek. Now picture that burlap sack you was in
being tossed from the Ford as it crossed a one-lane bridge. Smacking against the current of the creek. The weeping whine of you, the just-born child getting his first swimming lesson. Connie waded in. Thinking she'd have to build a pine box to bury you in. Pulled you from that sack. You coughed creek water and cried. That's the story Connie always told. How you wasn't born. You was salvaged. And
she named you Pine Box Willie: the just-born burlap baby.”

Remembering that day, how she'd cradled him while telling the tale to others in the town at the Silver Dollar Tavern. Getting hitched on whiskey shots, pain jarred and split her insides. Hardened her grip around the cast-iron skillet's handle. To pick up. Bust over Lazarus's skull.

Then the trailer's door burst open.

Lazarus stood up
hollering into the outdoor light, which created a silhouetted shape in the doorway. “Who the—”

The silhouette interrupted with “Lazarus?”

“Yeah?”

“Compliments of Mr. Attwood.”

Orange gunfire opened the sticky trailer air. Parted Lazarus's right knee, then his left, like two eggs against pavement. Lazarus dropped backwards, screaming. Pinned the table down on Pine Box's legs. Connie screamed,
came at the silhouette with the skillet of popping grease. Her nose met the butt of the .38. Her eyes stung with liquid. Blood creased her lips and her knees punched the floor. The skillet dropped. Bacon grease splattered. The man smiled. Aimed the nickel-plated .38 at Connie's face.

“You're rough company, girl.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Bonfire Kurt. Work for Mr. Attwood. Man's property you
parked that Cadillac on. Vandalized. Man you left for dead.”

Pine Box clinched his eyes. Squirmed and pushed to get from under the table that Lazarus deadweighted down, bleeding like a bastard.

“Picked the most vindictive man in all of Hazard, Kentucky. Way I figured, Lazarus and you dumped the Cadillac. Willie destroyed it. Lazarus reported it stolen. Now you and he expect to split the insurance.”

Losing feeling to cold, Lazarus screamed, “Fuck you!”

Kurt glanced over his shoulder, smirked, said, “No, fuck you!”

Connie asked, “How you know who we are?”

“A personal contact, little recon, and some Barbra Jean.”

“Barbra…? What'd you do to her?”

“Not near what you did to Mr. Cooley. I paid you a visit over in Illinois. She showed up. Gave me some answers.”

Connie spat. “You son of a bitch!”

Five fingers clasped into Connie's hair. Pulled her to her feet while the .38's heated barrel singed her temple. She twisted her neck into his forearm. Dug her teeth into his shrapnel skin. Took a blood sample. He yelled. His trigger finger twitched. Gunfire quartered skin and bone across the trailer's kitchen. His knees buckled with her weight. He lowered the mess that was once her to the kitchen's
floor.

Willie stood behind Bonfire with waterlogged eyes looking down at the motionless red mess.

“Mama?”

Bonfire bent his knees to standing. Turned to Willie, whose taffy-pink palm reached for Bonfire's hand that held the .38, pressed his forehead into the heated barrel. His clouded eyes dug through Bonfire.

“I ain't scared.”

Blood pumped from the chewed opening of Bonfire's forearm, coating
the pistol as he lowered it. He looked at Willie, thought of the man who took him from his mother.

“No you ain't, boy, no you ain't.”

Through fogged vision, Lazarus watched Bonfire's empty hand open, palm up. Offering Willie another choice.

J. W. Duke was choking down his fifth cup of kettle coffee, nursing a hangover, when his wife, Margaret, came through the kitchen door, screaming as if her skin had been pressed through a cheese grater. “J.W.? J.W.?”

His head was swelled up with a fever of pain from the bottle of Old Grand-Dad he'd sucked down the night before. He wrinkled one eye small, viewed her
through the one opened wide. “Woman, what the hell are you hollering about?”

Tense, she tells him, “It's Blondie, she's—”

J.W. cut her off. “She's what?”

He hadn't seen her this keyed up since she got the bad news from her doctor about not being able to bring a child into the world. She fired her fury off. “J.W., she's gone!”

People need to understand the severity of the situation. Blondie
was a purebred mountain cur. A dog some use to hunt and track bear out west. Being a coon hunter, J.W. had an idea that if a cur could hunt bear out west, why not train it to hunt coons in southern Indiana? Raccoons. See, in southern Indiana coon hunting is as prosperous as Sunday hymns to a Baptist. The meat from a large coon could feed a man a few times and a single hide would bring twenty-five
to thirty dollars. To J. W. Duke coon hunting was the damn gospel.

J.W. created a champion bloodline. A top-notch coon-hound. Made all those blueticks, redbones, and treeing Walkers look like some Mississippi mutts.

He took a nice chunk of his monthly disability pension from the U.S. Marine Corps for being half deaf in one ear, for being too close in proximity to someone trespassing over a land
mine in a rice field back in '68. That was eight years ago. Now he was twentyeight, had invested that chunk of money into this hound.

J.W. and his hunting buddy, Combs, a man living off an inheritance, drove all the way to Colorado. J.W. had pick of the litter. Paid the breeder cash. Brought the golden cur pup home. He raised her as though she were from his own flesh, like teaching a child to
speak, to use their limbs to walk and nourish themselves. He taught Blondie to strike the right scent, tree the correct animal.

He trained her just like his daddy taught him. His daddy was the connoisseur for coon hunting before his choice of permanence. A .38 to the rear of his neck. He'd gotten the depression bug after J.W. left for the Vietnam War and his mother became eaten up with the cancer.

Daddy Duke knew a canine's family bloodline. Which bitch was to be bred with which stud to produce the best hound for hunting. J.W. became the only certified trainer and breeder of mountain curs all through southern Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

And when J.W. returned home from the war, he met and married Margaret. Soon after, she wanted a child. They had tried and tried until they couldn't
stand the sight of each other. Her insides wouldn't take what he was offering. The doctor called it a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces that didn't mesh.

She'd cursed God for how he'd made her. Told J.W. she'd do anything to change how her insides were. Margaret had become so eaten up with it that J.W. couldn't mention it without her tearing up.

But Margaret warmed up to Blondie like a combine
picking corn. One was invented for the purpose of cultivating the other. She took to those big brown eyes and that short velvet coat the color of a cold lager beer. Blondie became their baby girl. Margaret helped J.W. train her. She bathed and brushed Blondie from the pup stages into the adult stages. Took her on her morning walks. Late-evening fetching trials of a ball with a coon hide hidden
inside. And even took her into town when running errands, the truck window down, Blondie's head taking in the passing wind with ears flopping like a flag. She taught her the commands: Stay. Sic it. Get 'im, girl. And on those zero nights of winter Margaret brought Blondie into the house, left her to rest at the foot of the bed or next to the wood heat of the Buck Stove.

They took her to coon-hunting
contests. Never shy, Margaret mingled with other hunters who knew J.W. and his daddy. A lot of hunters came by the house with good intentions, wanting to breed a hound with their Blondie or wanting J.W. to train one of theirs. They'd pay top dollar. But his daddy taught him not to go training just any man's hound.

Now J.W. is out the door, Margaret following behind, asking, “Where the hell you
going?”

He tells her, “To the barn to investigate the situation.”

And distraught, she's asking, “What about going to town, getting Mac?”

J.W. cuts her off. “He'll be around sometime this morning, supposed to go fishin' on up over the damn hill with him and Duncan.”

“You never mentioned anything 'bout it to me.”

“Woman, they's plenty I don't mention to you, and for damn good reason.”

Up
by the barn, J.W. examines Blondie's run. A circle of gravel J.W. laid that looked like a small horse track so she could trot. Keep the cushions of her paws tough. Cut down on the mud. In the center of the run the soil is damp from a late-night rain shower. Her collage of paw prints leads all around her doghouse, full of fresh cedar chips, to help to keep fleas and ticks at bay. Her chains are unbroken.
No dog collar, meaning she's been unleashed by someone.

And J.W. shouts, “Shit!” Telling himself it was only a matter of time before they got her, because he knows some shady son of a bitch has been stealing folk's top-of-the-bloodline hounds for months. And from southern Indiana all through Kentucky and Tennessee this thief will reap top dollar from the right proprietor. All a man's got to do
is glance through the ads in the back of a
Full Cry
or
American Cooner
. Find a buyer. That's why J.W. hated to train or breed hounds for just any man. Greed.

As he kneels down, his lip starts twitching, eyes an acidic overcast. J.W. put a lot of time and money into that hound. A ten-pound bag of Ol' Roy or Alpo dog food doesn't come cheap week after week. Let alone catching a coon, trying not
to get one of his limbs ripped off. They get kind of pissed when you catch them, take them out of their habitat, put them in a steel-mesh roll cage, similar to a hamster's wheel only it's a cage, so the dog can sniff the coon. Get familiar with its scent. While the coon runs, it rolls the cage. The dog chases it around. That shit takes time. Coming home from the war to a dead daddy, all J.W. had
was what his daddy taught him, how to train a hound.

Scaling the terrain of Blondie's run. Surveying the situation. Any overlooked details of sunken paw prints. Prints leading away in another direction. Nothing. Just a lot of loose gravel.

Then, an imprint on the outer edge of the run. Still kneeling down. Lip twitch doubling on the nerves. J.W. knows imprints. Tracked many animals as a young
man with a hound at his side. Carried the skill overseas to the war. Foreign soil. Jungle trails of Vietnam. A recon tunnel rat. J.W. and a shepherd hound tagged as Merck One-Eight, distinguishing boots from sandals. Learned mud was mud regardless of continent. It became his specialty. Two of them tracking the Vietcong to their underground supply tunnels in Cu Chi. Smoking their Commie asses out.

Standing off to the side, Margaret asks, “What is it, J.W.?”

On the inner edge of the run there's another imprint. Imprints don't lie. It's not his or hers and it ain't canine. Ignoring Margaret, J.W. inhales slowly and deeply. He takes in the details. Boot, size twelve. Not ours. Overpriced Red Wing. No comfort. No support. He knows it and knows it well. Those details make the bad boil over.
And all that bad in there from the war doesn't simmer down. It's like a strong case of chicken pox or poison ivy, has to run its course.

Something clicks in his brain.

And the worry in Margaret's voice insisting, “J.W., I ain't asking you again, the hell is it?”

Taking a Lucky Strike from his black-and-brown-checkered flannel's breast pocket to his anger-twitched lip. His thumbnail to an Ohio
Blue Tip. A match that strikes a flame on any surface. J.W. firing up the unfiltered smoke into his lungs and saying, “Woman, we got ourselves one greedy stain of a shit heel.”

Going into the white-brick milk house that's attached to the ocean-blue barn, about the size of a spare bedroom, glancing at the shovels, axes, mulls, sledgehammers, corn knives, and machetes. J.W. doesn't want to chop
the man's ass up like cornmeal. Just facilitate consequences for actions, payback for thieving his hound. Grabbing a can of leaded fuel, the fox traps, the type of trap that if a man were to step in, he'd never walk a straight line again. Let alone limp one. He'd attain to be a stutter-stepping son of a bitch for stealing a man's dog.

Putting everything in the rusted rear of his orange International
Harvester Scout. Going into the house. Straight to his bedroom closet. Pulling his chipped military green metal box down off the top shelf. Opening it, taking out his Springfield Armory .45-caliber Colt. The same model he used overseas to decide a man's permanence. Has a recoil that can dislocate a common man's shoulder.

Pulling the slide, shelling a piece of brass filled with gunpowder and lead
into the chamber, Margaret coming into the room and telling him, “Quit acting the fool. Just go find Mac, let him handle this.”

Pushing the .45 down the back of his worn-for-hard-work dungarees, looking into her face. She's calm as a clear blue sky. But not J.W.; when he's hopped up this high on hate, any pleas from the opposition are like the Vietnam jungles. Foreign. Telling Margaret, “Done
told you he'd be here this morning to fish. 'Sides, the only fool will be the man I'm paying an unexpected visit to.”

Margaret looking on, fed up. “Guess all that orange you ate over there done fried that brain of yours to plumb crazy.”

Outside, J.W. is placing his .45 in the Scout's glove box when Marty MacCullum pulls up. Locks up the brakes of his cruiser, throwing gravel from the driveway.

His laugh insane and high-pitched, he sounds like an untamed rodent shrieking from a large leather sack. Mac greets him, “Where the hell you going so damn early? Thought you, me, and Duncan's goin' fishin'?”

J.W.'s lip twitches with a distaste for wasted words and he tells him, “Something personal's come up.”

Marty, everyone calls him Mac for short, is Mauckport's town marshal. Not a town clown
or county mountie. An odd man who keeps odd hours, with a twisted sense of humor and a taste for the brew. He's older but like J.W. he's got a dark section of mind that others have no business trespassing on.

He and J.W. use the three hundred acres of private property that J.W.'s daddy left him in his will after making a mess of his mental state. They hunt and toss back brews, shoot the shit
while treeing coons into the midnight hour at least once a week, and they fish on down along the Ohio River every so often because a good portion of J.W.'s property borders it.

With wild eyes hidden behind mirrored specs, pushed tight over his scarred pits of a cracked-clay face, spitting some Red Man chew, Mac throws back a tin-can swallow of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Savors it with the filthy sound
effects of a lip-pounding pucker and asks, “Anything I can help with, J.W.?”

J.W. tells him, “Like I said, it's personal.”

Mac says, “Well then, want one for the road? It's last one and ice-sickle cold.”

J.W.'s mind is boiling and he starts to mention Blondie, but it's got to be his way and he says, “Better not.”

While J.W. fires up the Scout, Mac throws back another swallow and laughs, passes
on that shady sense of humor and says, “You ain't gone cold turkey on the brew during morning hours, have you, J.W.? Having them withdrawals? Corner your lips about to jab your eyeball out of its socket.”

Closing his eyes, J.W. shakes his head. His brain rattles in his eardrum like loose buckshot. This conversation's holding him up. Blondie could be headed to another state by now.

Mac throws
back another swallow. Savoring that tin-can taste, Mac says, “You're going mute on me, J.W. If this ‘something' got you all worked up, maybe I should come along. Help out a friend.”

J.W. comes clean, tells Mac, “I might've found the person been stealing the hounds, but if I'm wrong there's no sense in you coming along, making a scene.”

Mac mashes the tin. Tosses it onto the floorboard of his
cruiser. Pops his last Pabst open, glances toward the barn, looks back at J.W., and says, “Well, I be damn, no wonder you's all worked up. You trained many of them dogs that got stole. A man might look the other way so a friend could have a debriefing with the thief. Guess I best radio Duncan, see when he's comin' down to fish. Says he's gonna meet us in his boat.”

J.W. tells Mac, “Appreciate
it.” And he offers, “There's two cases of Pabst in the house's fridge. Help yourself.”

Laughing, Mac continues, “Here I thought you'd gone retard on me, son, that eye flaring up. See you in a bit.”

J.W. puts the Scout into drive. His lip twitching into his eye, he glances at Mac, nods. Stamps the gas. Pelts Mac's cruiser with loose gravel.

 

Everything a man survives in life is a lesson.
Some lessons are taken, others are given. What J.W. learned from the war carries over to everyday life. Men lie. Men die. And one thing J. W. Duke can't tolerate is lies. Trying to swallow why this leech of a man would go cross on him, reasoning says he's been living off that family money too long. An inheritance from his deceased doctor daddy. He's a few years older than J.W. but never had to work
a day in his life. Inherited everything he's got. And what he's gotten is greedy from never having to work for anything. Thinks he's entitled. Decided to steal J.W.'s hound and prosper from it.

Parking the Scout. Getting out. Tucking the .45 down the back of his dungarees, grabbing the can of fuel. Slinging the traps over his shoulder.

He should have paid more attention to all the times he went
coon hunting with Combs. Always using J.W.'s hound. Driving his truck. Drinking his Pabst Blue Ribbon. Son of a bitch never packed his own lunch, always shared his bologna sandwich with the freeloading prick. Combs would laugh, call it a poor man's steak sandwich, while they listened to the bawl of the hound striking the trail. Then the echo through the valley of trees when the dog treed the coon.
Then came the long walk through the woods, up and down the gullies and hills, deciphering the direction of the barking. Lugging a .22 rifle, battery clipped on his side to power the hunting light attached to his head like a caver's. Most hunters hoped their dog had struck the right trail, hadn't run a squirrel or possum up a tree. Those types of hunters didn't know the old ways to break a hound
like J.W.'s daddy had taught him.