Crimes in Southern Indiana (7 page)

Bishop twisted the lid from the bottle of bourbon. With a Walker hound's bite he clamped down on Fenton's shoulder, spun him around.

“You wanna drink, then have at it.”

Bishop flung bourbon into Fenton's bloodied face, stinging his nose and lips.

From the kitchen, Melinda yelled, “Stop!” Bishop raised his voice, told her, “Stay out of it.”

The madness
from the Blue River ripped through Bishop's body. He punched Fenton off the sidewalk. In his mind Fenton was no longer his kin, he was like Christi, a threat to his everyday existence. He'd remove his tongue or even kill him if that's what it took.

Bishop clamped his left hand onto Fenton's throat. Slammed him against an elm tree within the yard. Fenton's face boiled red. Air punched up from
his lungs, rushed from his broken lips.

Bishop turned the bottle upside down with his right, parted Fenton's lips with his left, emptied the bourbon down Fenton's blinking eyes and spitting mouth.

“Like that, boy? Wanna drink, come home disrespecting me, get your mother all upset. I'll teach you.”

“Stop, you bastard.”

Bishop dropped the bottle. Pulled his Case XX knife from his pocket. Thumbed
the single blade, which had skinned and gutted many a coon, squirrel, and rabbit.

“Say ahhh, boy!”

Fenton's hands channel-locked around Bishop's soup-bone wrist while he glanced down at the ground. He saw Bishop's bare feet and he stomped.

Bishop cursed, “Bastard.” Dropped the knife. Stepped backwards, lifting his feet as if standing on molten lead. Fenton followed him like a pig wallowing
in shit. Stomping his feet. Drove a fist underneath Bishop's jaw. Teeth gritted and chipped down onto tongue. Bishop spat blood thicker than brown gravy. Fenton grabbed the empty bottle of Early Times. Exploded it across Bishop's face. Dropped him to the ground. Where he hunched on all fours, shaking his head and spitting blood.

Confusion and anger pumped Fenton's heart. He raised his boot into
Bishop's ribs. Watched the red spit from his mouth. Fenton thought of the truck he'd parked down from the Blue River at the old barn used by Rudy Sawheaver for sheltering his hay. Then he'd walked down to surprise his father but instead he got the surprise. Seeing Bishop knee-deep in the green river, the surfaced body between his father's legs.

Hidden by the dying weeds, Fenton watched Bishop
drag the body to the riverbank. Taking in glimpses of the pale female's flesh, the flower-print dress, drenched locks the color of soot that clung to her face. His vision blinked and pieced together glimpses of their cousin Christi.

Fenton kept driving his boot into Bishop's ribs. The veins in the side of Bishop's neck grew as thick as earthworms discovered beneath rotted wood. He raised a hand
to his throat. His face swarmed into a fire barrel of red. He heaved and gasped. Fenton remembered Bishop dragging Christi's body down the river current until he lost sight of him. Fenton stood within those weeds frozen by panic.

Bishop twisted his graying madness up at Fenton, who'd raised his knee. He drove his boot down into Bishop's face, dropped down and knelt beside him, put his mouth to
his father's ear and said, “You tell me the truth of why you murdered Christi, tell me.”

Bishop's outline was granulated rock, spread out facedown without movement. Blood drew a puddle around the shape of his skull onto the earth. Fenton touched his father's neck, got a pulse but no answers.

From behind him the wooden screen door slammed. A hard thud met the rear of Fenton's skull. Vibrated
a black pain throughout. Taking away his sight and kneeling posture. Dropped him to the earth beside his father. It was the butt of a .12-gauge held by his mother, Melinda, who stood questioning what her only child had done.

 

“It's been over a week and that cousin of your father's is still missin'.”

“She's in Blue River somewhere, you'd not even known she was missin' I hadn't told you.”

“Boy, we drug that river for two miles up one direction and two miles down the other. Through every bend and split they is. Ain't found shit.”

“I watched my father load her body with rock, wrap her with a log chain, and drag her down the river.”

“I don't buy that, them two never held a cross sentence to one another. If anyone killed you-all's cousin I believe it was you.”

“Why would I kill her?

“Got me. Lust, money. Maybe she seen you do something you wasn't supposed to be doin'.”

“Like what?”

“Guess we'll never know 'cause she ain't nowhere to ask. All I know is when we brought you in, you was whiskey-soaked belligerence. Deputies found some empty beer cans on your truck's floor. Pack of smokes under the seat, same brand we found down along the riverbank.”

“Told you, my father poured
the whiskey on me.”

“Whiskey or beer, don't matter, you had both in you and on you. Your mother's sayin' you come home actin' strange, little drunk. Says that you provoked Bishop into a fight.”

“Provoked him? She's crazy, it was self-defense.”

“Fenton, my question is if you watched Bishop drag Christi down the river, why didn't you try to stop him? Or come to me?”

“Told you I was in shock,
didn't know what to do. 'Sides, all you've ever done is give me a hard way.”

“Son, I give you the same respect as you give me.”

Fenton stood with steel bars tarnished by the stink of slobbering drunks and wife beaters before him, dressed down in faded black and white county stripes. A bunk attached to the wall. The smell of piss from a toilet behind him.

On the other side stood Sheriff Koons
in county khakis. Island of gray hair wrapping around the rear of his head, matching handlebar mustache. He'd time lines pouched across his cheekbones. He looked into Fenton's tired baby blues, told him, “Let me tell you somethin', Fenton, I've know'd Bishop for as long as people have driven automobiles in Harrison County. He's a hardworkin' son of a bitch. You, on the other hand, got caught drinkin'
with that Beckhart boy a time or two and recently tore up the BP gas station's bathroom. Got combative with my deputy. Add that to beatin' your father into an incurable polio patient. You're a loose cannon. Your words mean about as much to me as a champion racehorse with splintered joints and a bum hip. They's useless. That's why you're bein' charged with attempted murder.”

Koon's words dissolved
before entering Fenton's ears as he turned away. Uncaring of the charges against him, Fenton fell back on the mattress that felt like concrete. Cold and hard. He wondered what Bishop had done with Christi's body.

With the phone in his hand and a dial tone on the line, Stanley's still waking up. Between each ring he's somewhere amid being dragged by a tractor-trailer and a billionaire becoming a street vagrant.

When the doctor's “suck-retary” questions what the appointment is for, Stanley tells her anxiety. Depression. Maybe even shock. Take your pick. Stanley wonders why a patient
cannot call his doctor and say, I just feel like shit today.

Suck-retary is what he and his wife, Earleen, refer to as the relationship between the doctor and his secretary.

On the phone, the suck-retary is asking if he has seen the doctor for these symptoms before?

“In his office,” he says, “several weeks ago.”

Pressing the phone between ear and shoulder, Stanley looks in the bathroom mirror.
The corners of his eyes are crusted black punctures. His strings of melted-rubber-like hair push east and west. To think he made fun of people like this when he was younger.

The suck-retary says, “Did he tell you to come back for a follow-up visit?”

Well, he didn't call to talk. Sometimes Stanley doesn't comprehend these people, places, and things. All of these nouns. He doesn't know their definitions.

“Yes,” he tells her.

“Name?”

“Stanley, Stanley Franks.”

“Date of birth?”

“February sixth, 1970.”

“And you're at 337 Kennedy Drive?”

“That's correct.”

“Tomorrow, around ten a.m.? That work for you?” she says.

“No, it won't, I need one today.”

“Sorry. Dr. Towell is booked for today.”

Muffled, he hears her say it's the bipolar.

“What the hell is bipolar?” he yells. “I'm not bi anything,
curious or sexual. I'm a homo sapien. A straight white male.”

Now she's explaining. “This condition,” she calls it.

“Oh, I see, so you think I'm a recluse? A nut bag.”

Now she's apologizing, saying, “I wasn't implying that you were a nut bag, Mr. Franks.”

“Yes, you did imply that I'm one card shy of a full deck. Look, lady, I don't think I like you very much.”

“Well, maybe we can squeeze
you in today, Mr. Franks.”

“Today?”

“Yes, sir. How about two hours from now?”

“I'll be there.”

Thumbing the talk button on the phone to off, Stanley thinks, The things a person must do to get an appointment with his doctor. The next thing you know, he'll end up in some asylum or self-help circle walking around with a Barney bib around his neck, drooling. Plastered on his back will be a name
tag: Loser.

Walking through the house, he thinks, the thing about his wife, she's never around anymore. Either she's gone to work before he wakes up or he's in bed asleep before she gets home. Leaving a Post-it for her, he writes, “Earleen, went to the doctor's office. Be home later. Stanley.”

 

Signing in at the front desk, Stanley explains that he's not bipolar or any other type
of transgender. Then, in the waiting area, seated next to him, an old raisin of a female says her sphincter muscle has been rebuilt three times. Looking at her he says, “Your asshole has been rebuilt three times?”

“Yes,” she says, “my sphincter muscle.”

Her face resembles brownies, with enough lipstick and eyeliner to restock Revlon. Her hair has been colored so many times it looks like a safety
hazard. He says, “Isn't there a limit or are you giving birth?”

Her rainbow eyelids almost separate from her eyes as she mumbles something and gets up to sit somewhere out of his sight.

There's the weigh-in, checking the blood pressure, and taking the temperature. He's lost weight. No fever, but his blood pressure is a little high.

 

In a small, boxlike waiting room, with a steel sink and
an examining table, he feels as if he's in a prison cell. A quarantine for the sick. Beneath the closed door, outside in the hallway shadows run in and out of the light. Half sentences double as conversation between voices he does not recognize. If only they could close their damn mouths, he thinks. Instead he closes his eyes, grits his teeth, and paces the checkered floor.

When Dr. Towell enters
the room Stanley's in such a state, he imagines wrapping his hands around Dr. Towell's neck.

With miniature white scabs flaking his thinning hair, Dr. Towell says, “How are we today, Stanley?” Stanley questions Dr. Towell's ability, asking questions like this. He's in his doctor's office. He is the doctor.

“Since the accident,” he says, “not so good.”

Gesturing for him to sit down, the doctor
says, “What's wrong?”

Staring at Dr. Towell's unibrow, Stanley tells him, “All I think about are people giving me the finger. I even dream about a severed arm dressed in an Armani suit chasing me around the hallways at work. Trying to force me into an elevator. Then I wake up flipping myself off, calling myself a sorry-ass prick.”

“How long has this been going on?” the doctor asks.

“Ever since
my last visit several weeks ago on the dreams, but sometimes at work, if a phone rings my heart skips a beat. Coworkers try to speak with me and I snap, ‘Who gave you permission to speak?' I just want everyone to be quiet.”

Like right now, the nursing staff, walking up and down the hallway, he wants to tell them to shut their damn mouths. Only he doesn't tell Dr. Towell this.

Dr. Towell says,
“So you're back to working?”

“Yeah.”

“Even after I wrote you off for six weeks?”

Growing irritated, Stanley says, “Yeah.”

Dr. Towell rolls something around in his mind and says, “Have you been in an elevator since the accident?”

“No,” Stanley says, “I use the stairs every day. I passed a petition around at work so people wouldn't use the damn elevator.”

“Did it work?”

“No, it didn't work.
These people I work with are so insensitive to my recovery. They're a bunch of lobbyists for the button-pushing generation. I really thought everything would be okay, so I went back to work. I thought I was bigger than all of this.”

“Completely understandable,” he says, “but these things take time. What you are experiencing is PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. A medical condition caused by
witnessing a horrific event.”

“Great,” Stanley says, “I'm a freak of nonreproductive tissue.”

“No,” Towell says, chuckling, “you're having a rough time.”

“Sure I am, it's not every day that a person dreams about a severed limb chasing them around their place of work.”

“I'm gonna up your dosage on the Zoloft. And recommend a good psychiatrist. I'll contact him today, have him contact me after
your first consultation, discuss what alternate medications he'd like to prescribe, if that's okay with you?”

What choice does he have, Stanley asks himself, and says, “Great, now I'm a science project for the medical community. I mean, you're upping my dosage, I've already got the upset stomach, dry mouth, indigestion, and agitation. Are you trying to make me better or worse?”

Stanley believes
a person has to question these things or else he'll end up toothless, sucking up Coronas in Tijuana with a guy named Valdez, no memory of how he got there.

“They're only temporary,” Towell says.

“That's what you told me about the headaches on my last visit.”

“You still having headaches?”

“No.”

“Well, you may not experience any of the side effects. Also, try to get some exercise. It'll help
reduce the stress.”

Shaking Towell's hand and exiting into the hallway with the loud-speaking staff, all Stanley can think about is stabbing a pencil in someone's eye to reduce the stress.

 

Going back several months ago, Stanley watched his reflection split in half. The chrome doors parted, one atom segregated into two parts. A man was halfway through the open elevator doors when they started
to close. He panicked and stepped backwards, his arm pinned between the doors as the elevator started going up. The man jerked at his arm, couldn't get it free. Stanley stood inside the elevator. The elevator moving up, up, up. Next thing Stanley knew, he had the man's arm in his grip, pushing, while his other hand pulled at the door, trying to open it, the man screaming.

No, he's yelling, “Do
something.” With his arm caught between the elevator doors. He's on the outside looking in.

Stanley, grasping the arm with one hand, begins pushing buttons with the other, and the man's pulling his arm, yelling, “You little prick, what are you gonna do?”

A bell is ringing, a signal for the emergency stop, only it doesn't stop. Nothing works.

Stanley screams, “I didn't invent the fuckin' elevator!”

The man gives Stanley the finger. Flipping him the bird. Stanley's pushing his arm, thinking, It's not doing any good.

“You son of a bitch,” the man says. “LET GO.” Something in Stanley changed in those moments. Something clicked off while something else clicked on. And Stanley thought, This man, he's an unappreciative knuckle sandwich. The wedge a person can't pick out of his or her ass. Stanley
releases the man's arm completely, tries to pry the doors open with both hands, and through the crack of the doors, the man's face is a soaked candy apple and he's still floating Stanley the bird. The elevator's jerking as it inches up, up, up, and the more he pries the doors, the tighter they get. Kneeling down, he can see the man on his tiptoes. And the man is yelling, “You prick!”

The last
thing Stanley remembered about that day, on the next floor up, in the elevator, aside from wanting to go home, was the open doors and a lot of red. The kind of red a person would find in a slaughterhouse after butchering a cow or a pig. And he thought someone at the Red Cross could have used it. All the red.

Everything Stanley thought about or looked at after that became fragmented. Turned upside
down. Something came loose in his head. Everything was foreign.

Looking at the man on the gurney with his eyes shut, Stanley told him, “You gotta weigh out the benefits, the positives. Without the limb you weigh a little less. Free parking, a larger bathroom stall reserved for you in public places. Even a special license plate.”

The man said nothing.

Stanley's wife always told him a person
has to turn a negative into a positive. But after that she wasn't around very much. She wasn't what you'd call a supportive partner.

It wasn't Stanley's fault. Aft er an investigation into what went wrong, the state's elevator inspector discovered faulty wiring to the sensors that kept the doors from closing and the contacts that kept the elevator from going up when the doors were open.

 

Outside Stanley's house, the grass is a dark tripping hazard sticking to the rubber soles of his Adidas. Inside the house, all of Earleen's clothes are missing. Closets are bare. Her mirrored vanity empty of cosmetics. Walking behind a self-propelled Lawn-Boy mower, somehow Stanley's misplaced his memory. His wife, she didn't even leave a Post-it. That's normal. Common courtesy. Let a person, especially
a spouse, know where you are going. How long you will be gone.

Walking behind the mower, more and more lights from the surrounding homes are being turned on. What Stanley refers to as Nosy Neighbors. He's trying to mow his lawn; he's engrossed in responsibility. Recovery. A doctor's recommendation, it's called exercise, maybe they should try it sometime instead of watching it.

Rounding the garage,
to his left, he can see outlines moving behind the curtains of Brent's home. Brent Wallace and his wife, Vickie, are the neighbors a person drinks beer and cooks out with on the weekends. Always talking about their son, Stevie, who enjoys playing with purses and pretending he's a girl. They call it a phase.

Behind Stanley, the Connleys are peeking out of their double-pane windows. They have a
child named Kip. He always misses the first step off their deck, falling face-first onto the ground. Then he cries like a wimp.

What they all have in common is they're nosy bastards. They're all in this together, trying to drive Stanley crazy. He thinks they should mind their own business. Or help find his wife. What he could do is call his mother-in-law. But that would be a bad idea considering
she's six feet under. Then his father-in-law would really have an excuse to hate him. In-laws and their grudges.

Brent's standing on his back porch, one big silhouette with a bright light behind him. At least Stanley thinks its Brent. He's yelling something, but Stanley can't make out the words. Can't he see Stanley's busy? His voice can't propel a twenty-inch-cut mower.

Stanley wonders what
Brent's thinking. He's got work to do. Problems to solve. A wife to find. And behind Brent come more neighbors in nightclothes, holding flashlights. Their lips moving and their faces crunched up in anger.