Crimes in Southern Indiana (15 page)

The room was off balance. Her body felt brittle. Her heart beat in rapid thuds. She had a shortness
of breath, as if the room were without air. Her head reeled as her legs twitched across the cold wood. She knelt down with the room tilting and spinning. Dug through what she believed to be her clothing. Her hands struggled with her panties, skirt, shirt, socks, jacket, and shoes. Her whole body quaked as she got dressed. She felt the warm tears climbing down her face.

She looked for a window,
some form of escape, but found nothing. Just the thirteen-inch television that sat on the dresser next to the door. And a flash of memory lit up her mind, the smell of a used diaper in her face and a voice laughing. “She might show you a few things, Lester.”

She closed her eyes, pressed her palms into her face, and wiped the tears. Her arms tensed and shook with the hurt of this memory. She paused,
tried to keep herself together, and listened to the words outside the bedroom, speaking about her as if her existence were the lowest link on the chain of life. Why, she asked herself, why had they done this to her?

She'd heard something about Melvin going to Kenny's to use the phone. She wondered who Kenny was. Then she heard footsteps. A door opening. Closing. Then a slamming screen door. Feet
shuffling about in the kitchen. Then silence. The slamming of a car door somewhere. Then a loud engine came to life and slowly became more and more distant.

When the bedroom's doorknob turned, she panicked, not knowing who it was or what she'd do. Weak and lightheaded, she grabbed the only thing she could, the thirteeninch black-and-white television. She struggled to raise it above her head.

Ina exploded the television over Cecil's skull. Lester was right behind him, wedged in between not wanting to get caught and unsure about killing Ina. He felt a pinch of relief when Cecil tumbled to the floor. Until Ina came at him like a starved leper in search of food, screaming, “Why'd you do this to me?”

The fingers on both of her hands spread wide. Flashes sparked in her head as she pushed
Lester backwards across the kitchen. She remembered him giving her coffee at the bar. Then the blackout. When her eyes opened back up, she stood in the room, everything slanting and twirling as hands tugged at her clothing. Unable to fight, she felt weightless as a palm pushed her backwards and she stumbled onto the mattress.

And now Ina pushed Lester and screamed, “Answer me! Why?” Lester lost
his footing and his skull met the kitchen countertop's edge. By the time he hit the mildewed floor, his mind and all his motor skills were heated peanut butter. He was blinking in and out, and Ina began stomping him, remembering the tree-bark hands groping her breasts, wrenching her wrists above her head, followed by the grunts that hammered through her mind as her eyes focused on that thirteen-inch
television.

Lester's frame twitched as if he were getting an electric shock. Ina's chest burned and throbbed as her air began to disappear, she thought she was having a heart attack. Pictures, tastes, and smells played over and over in her head, and Ina stopped kicking him.

Lester lay on the kitchen floor, a limp pile of blood and pale skin sheathing bone. Ina breathed hard as she struggled
out the kitchen door. Anger and revulsion carried her into the yellow-and-orange-leaf-coated yard. The air was cold and Ina's heart pounded as she crumpled across the leaves and recognized her truck in the drive. The door was unlocked. The keys were in the ignition. She had started the vehicle, not knowing where she was, when Cecil exploded through the screen door, screaming like drunk trailer trash
with a severed tongue. Seeing him, Ina slammed the Cruiser into drive, her heart contracting in her temples. She cut the wheel toward him as he stumbled toward the Toyota, his face blotted red like a melting candle, the fragments of the television's glass separating his features. Ina clipped him with the front fender and dropped him to the ground. She cut the wheel again, driving through the yard,
slinging mud and leaves through the air to coat Cecil's twitching body.

Ina kept the gas pedal floored down the driveway of mud and potholes. The seat thudded beneath her. When she saw blacktop, she twisted the wheel to the right, tires barking onto the back road pavement.

Ina thought about the words spoken by Lester and his brothers as they discussed her like she was just a piece of meat. An
animal to be slaughtered and forgotten. She felt the soreness from within, remembering more and more. She'd been raped repeatedly. She thought about the vows she'd broken, causing all of this. And tears saturated her cheeks.

Her chest ached and her vision fogged as she sped down the unknown back road that rushed beneath her truck's tires. Until all at once she thought to herself, This must be
what it's like to drown.

Her heart pounded less. Her lungs tightened. She began to gasp for air. She clutched the wheel and kept the accelerator to the floor as her head began to blur. Her every breath was pain. Her chest was getting heavier and heavier, like her foot on the gas. Then the cold aching sweat trembled her body all the way down through her arms and legs, meeting her hands and feet.
Her front tire hit a ditch. Then the large oak tree she'd not even seen coming head-on at eighty-some miles per hour stopped her Cruiser. She shattered through the windshield and flew out into the woods that enclosed her.

 

The steam of Moon's coffee cup fed the air in his kitchen as he asked Detective Mitchell, “No trace of her body?”

“Just her Cruiser smashed into that oak tree. Any reason
for her being way down in Orange County?”

“None that I know of.”

“You say you had an argument the night before?”

“Right.”

“And you came home late after the shooting of Rusty Yates and Ina wasn't home?”

“Right. I figured she was visiting her friend, Myrtle. I started drinking to blow off some steam. Then I found this letter. She quit me.”

Detective Mitchell studied the letter. Looked back
at Moon. “Sorry, Moon.”

Moon exhaled. “It don't make any damn sense why a person would take Ina from where she wrecked.”

“Foul play.”

“You mean she could've seen something she wasn't supposed to.”

“Look, all county and state police know is she flew through the windshield when she hit that tree. Landed out in the woods. They found where she landed and some boot prints.”

“And nothing else?”

“Nothing.”

Disgust lined the burger grease that coated Carol's skin and mixed with the pain that arced through her wrists and ankles, pooled into blisters from waiting tables at Jocko's Diner. She told her husband, “Bellmont, you gotta do it tonight. Between pulling doubles and hearing that old spindle's words day after day, I cain't take much more.”

Aft er ten years of employment
Bellmont had lost his job at the Brown & Williamson tobacco plant. Drained Carol and his savings, had to sell their home and move to her father's thousand-acre hog farm. They rested their heads in the old cabin her father had built next to him when his mother was ailing. And now, like his wife's, every muscle in Bellmont's body spasmed with ache, from his daily laboring on that farm, working for
his father-in-law. Today he'd dug fence-post holes for a new hog pen. And Carol's disdain made the physical pain that much worse. “Maybe if we sold your car we could take that money, wager on some fights down at the tavern, win enough to stretch things out a few weeks more.”

Pink flushed over Carol's cheeks and she said, “You want to sell my Iroc? That's your solution? What's next, the clothes
off our backs, shoes from our feet? You just want to wait for him to die? Hope he just falls over? That ain't never gonna happen.”

Bellmont ran a hand through his corroded mane, knowing Carol was right, they couldn't keep going down this road of scratching and scraping to get by. Eating what she brought home from Jocko's every evening, washing it down with a few paper sacks of his Budweiser or
her Pabst. He said, “Carol, we gotta make sure our ducks are lined. We're talkin' about takin' a person's life.”

Carol's back rang stiff with hurt as she rolled her blue eyes and said, “What about our life? Don't we figure into the picture?”

Fault-line cracks seamed Bellmont's forehead and he said, “Of course we do, baby, I just want us to have one together, not you visitin' me in the pokey
on weekends.”

A bead of moisture driveled from Carol's sparrow shade of hair, bit her eye with the lunch special from Jocko's, fried tenderloin, mashed potatoes with white gravy, flaking roll with butter, and the choice of greens or corn. She blinked it away, felt her threadworm lips crook with a caustic taste. “Don't baby me. You the one come up with this plan from all your daddy's folklore.
And you been puttin' it off for months.”

Isaiah McGill, Bellmont's daddy, had sketched words into his son's mind when he was a boy maturing into a man. Stories of horse dealers, fortune-tellers, bootleggers, gypsies, boxers, and wrestlers of eighteenth-century Ireland congregating once a year, bartering steins of whiskey until the unrest turned unruly and fists were traded and bodies were bruised
and the Donnybrook was born.

Bellmont was going to build the Donnybrook in the backwoods of southern Indiana. Use the soil, rock, and trees of his father-in-law's land. Do it by hand and word of mouth. He'd update his daddy's stories to the present day. Only it wouldn't be just one day, it would be a three-day bare-knuckle tournament held once a year. Out among other farmers, fishermen, factory
workers, and hunters. Where working-class men still held a grasp on life. The farm had plenty of acreage for expanding, building more than one pit to fight in. Barns to be turned into sleeping quarters and training areas. Best of all, it was secluded. The problem was they needed money and the farm.

“I can't just run over and wring that fucker's neck, we have to make it look like he did it to
himself.”

The folklore from Bellmont streamed through Carol's mind as it had every day since he told her the stories. Giving her hope for a life devoid of struggle. And when Bellmont turned his back, stepped into the nicked hallway toward the bathroom to take a piss, steps creaked across the pine floor behind him. Hearing this, he half-turned into the clawing nails of Carol. His rhythm of thought
was sheared from his mind. Carol's hands worked at his thorny cheeks. Scraped flesh like it was plowed soil. His footing slipped and, before he knew it, his head and back slammed onto the hallway floor. Carol straddled Bellmont and he gasped, “The hell is gone wrong with your brainpan?”

On top of Bellmont, the folklore in Carol's mind turned to tears, washed down her cheeks and highlighted the
corners of her mouth, and she cried, “Tired of this scratchin' to see another day while that smug son of a bitch judges us like we spend our days takin' handouts. You promised me you'd do it.”

Bellmont wheezed. He'd lost the wind from his lungs. He pushed one hand beneath Carol's chin, held her jarring profile and the glare of her desperation, with his other he grabbed and calmed her tilling
hands, and said, “It'll be okay, baby, it'll be okay.”

Only one thing could coax Carol when she was this worked up. She twisted a hand free, lifted her weight from Bellmont, reached and tugged at the zipper of his jeans.

Bellmont rocked Carol up, trying to get from beneath her, rattled her head into the wall. “Shit!” she screamed and guided herself to standing. Before he could say he was sorry,
she was rubbing her head, mascara running like watercolors from her eyes, and she yelled, “Damn you!”

Bellmont sat on the hallway floor, watched Carol stomp into the kitchen, grab her car keys. She turned and stared at him, said, “Can't keep doing this, you got to do it
tonight
!”

Bellmont stood up as he watched her walk away, knowing he couldn't put it off any longer. Listening to the cabin's
front door slam shut, the V8 of Carol's Iroc-Z rumble to life, tires spinning gravel against the cabin, Bellmont knew she needed time to simmer down, knew where Carol was headed, but he had no road map for the territory he was about to cross.

 

The past months had created one scar after the next. Bellmont and Carol had planned on having a child before he lost his job. Then, one month after moving
to the farm, Carol found her mother, Aggie, laid out in the farmhouse's bathroom. Her three-pack-a-day habit had brought on a fit of coughing. Aggie lost her balance. She fell backwards. Mainlined the toilet's porcelain.

Carol's father, Jonathan, was a spiteful drunkard who had talked down to her since she'd gotten in trouble for drinking and driving long ago. Called her a spoiled whore for
hanging at the tavern, lounging with the locals, and wrecking a few cars. Even after Carol cleaned her act up, met and married Bellmont, he never gave her any respect.

Before the accident, Aggie confided in Bellmont and Carol about the will and trust, how the farm had belonged to her family, not Jonathan's, and it would be passed on to Bellmont and Carol after Jonathan and she were dead.

And
that's what fed Carol's imagination after her passing, after Bellmont told her about the Donnybrook. About how to get it started. The money to back it, a place to have it, the farm and its timber. Something her father would never support. Now, after months of planning, Bellmont was trying to wade the rapids a bit longer. Put off their chance at a better existence.

She fishtailed the Iroc to a
stop between two '78 Fords in the gravel lot of the Leavenworth Tavern, shifted into park, thinking to herself how Bellmont could want to sell her wheels. He'd do the deed tonight if she had to tie the knot her damn self. But first she needed a sip of something stout to calm her down while she took in a good fight.

Carol clumped across the gravel lot to the rear of the tavern. Local coon hunters,
farmers, and dopers gathered around the fifteen-by-fifteen depression in the ground. Sloshing beers and bourbon, they haggled and exchanged money with a man who had a pencil behind his ear, a notepad in his hand. His hair plastered across his head like Ricky Ricardo. Black-rimmed glasses arched over a fiery habanero nose with broken vessels. His moniker was Hemple. He took bets on the bare-knuckle
boxing matches held every other Friday night at the tavern. These were the places Bellmont and she would scout for the unbeaten, the new blood. They'd find them in the backwoods dives where creased bills would pass from one hand to the next, wagering on fists clattering bone until there was a victor.

Bellmont and she planned to contract a small stable of fighters, offer them a place to stay and
train, feed them, travel with them to other fights. Raising the fighting purses with each unbeaten fighter, driving the bets to higher marks. Build the fighters up over the first year, spread the word about her and Bellmont's first ever Donnybrook.

Hemple nodded to Carol, and his busted woofer tone questioned her with “Where's Bellmont?”

“At the farm, spent from diggin' fence line all damn day.”

Hemple pursed his lips, asked, “Wanna drop a dime on the next fight?”

“Who's favored?”

“Ali Squires.”

An unbeaten bare-knuckle fighter.

“Who's he fightin'?”

“Some piece of marrow goes by Angus. Has had five scrapes, never been beat.”

“Where's this Angus?”

“Standin' over yonder with that colored fella.”

A black man stood with a towel tossed over the right shoulder of his thermal shirt with
sleeves cut off. He whispered into the ear of a confident-faced man. He'd pallid shoulders, with lean punctures of fiber shielding his chest, arms, and abs, and several names tossed across his frame in Gothic script. Carol observed the conqueror of man: Chainsaw Angus.

She questioned Hemple, “Shit's up with the John Henry about his fighter's body?”

“They the five men he beat into a state of
stillborn. Can't even sound out the alphabet no more.”

Carol smirked with thoughts of a future prospect once her daddy was out of the frame. She pulled soiled clumps of ones and fives from her hip pocket, tips from work, wanting to wash the grit from her tongue. The guilt of what Bellmont and she had planned, what he had been putting off. But this was all the green she had.

Fuck it! I'll get
some glass-eyed horn dog to procure me a drink, she thought, and handed the wad of bills to Hemple.

“Put it all on that Angus fella.”

Beside her a voice said, “Little girl takin' a big gamble.”

She turned to the ungodly shadow of Mule Furgison. He was crowd control for the disorderly. Six-six, two hundred fifty pounds. The beast was cured and carved from pure spruce hardwood. Vaseline blond
hair, one eye green, the other brown, his silverback mitts hanging down to his waist, his right hand resting against the ASP baton encased at his side for backup if needed, or just a little extra hurt.

Carol ran a flirting finger up the navy blue T-shirt that covered his feed-sack chest and said, “This little girl wouldn't mind a swallow to wash down the blood that's 'bout to be lost.”

 

With
the sun setting behind him, Bellmont knocked on his father-in-law's marred screen door. Took a deep breath, knowing he had to eliminate one man's belligerent abuse to hock a better life for Carol and himself. But that didn't make the thought of it any easier to accept.

A gruff voice from inside hollered, “Down here, dammit!”

Bellmont walked into the kitchen, through the dining area to the basement
door. Infirmity tugged from within.

Carol's fingernails had swelled Bellmont's cheeks. When he got down the basement steps, his father-in-law shouted with laughter. “Shit happen to you?”

Beneath the graying rafters, Jonathan sat in a chair honed from hickory as he did every evening. Several rusted hooks hung overhead where he strung up his deer, let them bleed out, then skinned and quartered
them next to the table where he sat. He wore overalls and a white T-shirt wrung with five days' worth of outdoor labor around the collar and beneath the pits.

Bellmont fingered one of the swells that tracked down his face.

“Carol and me had us a disagreement.”

“Guess she showed you who's wearin' the rompers of the family.”

Bellmont had busted his ass for Jonathan since moving to the farm.
The old bastard was always pressing buttons. Carol was right, his degradation wouldn't be missed.

“She had her a fit was all.”

Jonathan grabbed the glass of hoppy liquid that sweated next to eight empty brown bottles. Tilted it to his lips. Emptied the glass. Reached down to a faded old red cooler, lifted the lid. Ice clacked as he removed another bottle, laid it on the table. Smirked and said,
“Think Carol'd mind if you natured yourself a swill?”

Bellmont pulled his keys from his pocket. Thumbed the attached Falls City bottle opener, said, “Carol ain't the boss of me. Angle me one from your pink cooler there.”

Jonathan hesitated, grabbed a beer from the ice, tossed it hard to Bellmont, and said, “My cooler might be pink, but no man should ever have to placate that kinda ass stompin'
from a female.”

Popping the cap from the bottle, Bellmont teetered on busting it across the old man's dead-leaf tint. But he didn't wanna show signs of a confrontation, understanding how he'd go about making the scene appear self-inflicted. He said, “She didn't stomp my ass.”

Jonathan opened his beer. Filled his empty glass, said, “Carol's mother, Aggie, she tried that shit on me once. Stood
over the stove boilin' tea one evening after I'd bailed Carol out of jail for another DUI. Cursed me for callin' my daughter a sheet-swappin' tramp. I says to her, ‘Don't think I won't come over and slap the hem from your skirt, make your skin flame and itch.' She tossed that pan of boilin' tea onto me. Near sheared the hide from my bone. I winged the kettle right back at the heifer, creased her
chin. She never laid a cross word again' me after that.”

Bellmont said, “Maybe you shouldn't have talked about your own blood in such a tone.”

Jonathan hollered, “Aggie needed to hear the truth. Little rip had a fake ID 'fore she was legal, just to go to the tavern, bat them fawn eyes and throw that hip to ever' man with a beer tab.”