Later that night, he awoke in a panic, his fat heart quivering in its ribbed cage like a trapped and frightened animal. According to the clock on the nightstand, he had been asleep less than an hour. He started to roll over, but then lurched out of bed and stumbled to the window, jerked the curtain open. Thank God, the station wagon was still sitting in the parking lot. “You dumb bastard,” he said to himself. Pulling on his pants, he walked across the gravel to the car in his bare feet and unlocked the door. A mass of thick clouds hovered over him. He took the six rolls of film from the dash and carried them back to the room, stuffed them inside his shoes. He’d completely forgotten about them, a clear violation of his Rule #7. Sandy muttered something in her sleep about scarecrows or some such shit. Going back to the open doorway, Carl lit another of her cigarettes and stood looking out into the night. As he cursed himself for being so careless, the clouds shifted, revealing a small patch of stars off to the east. He squinted through the cigarette smoke and started to count them, but then he stopped and closed the door. One more number, one more sign, that wouldn’t change a goddamn thing tonight.
13
THREE MEN WERE SITTING AT A TABLE drinking beer when Bodecker entered the Tecumseh Lounge. The dark room lit up with sunlight for a brief moment, casting the sheriff’s long shadow across the floor. Then the door swung shut behind him and everything settled into gloom again. A Patsy Cline song came to a sad, quavering end on the jukebox. None of the men said a word as the sheriff walked past them toward the bar. One was a car thief and another a wife beater. They’d both spent time in his jail, waxed his cruiser on several occasions. Though he didn’t know the third man, he figured it was just a matter of time.
Bodecker sat down on a stool and waited for Juanita to finish frying a hamburger on the greasy grill. He recalled that she had served him his first whiskey in this bar not so many years ago. He’d chased after the feeling he’d gotten that night for the next seven years, but never found it again. He reached in his pocket for one of the candies, then decided to hold off. She laid the sandwich on a paper plate along with a few potato chips she scooped out of a metal lard bucket and a long pale pickle she forked from a dirty glass jar. Carrying the plate to the table, she set it down in front of the car thief. Bodecker heard one of the men say something about covering up the pool table before somebody got sick. Another one laughed and he felt his face begin to burn. “You quit that,” Juanita said in a low voice.
She went to the register and made the car thief’s change and took it back to him. “These tater chips are stale,” he told her.
“Then don’t eat ’em,” she said.
“Now, darling,” the wife beater said, “that ain’t no way to be.”
Ignoring him, Juanita lit a cigarette and walked down to the end of the bar where Bodecker sat. “Hey, stranger,” she said, “what can I get—”
“—and by God if her ass didn’t drop open like a lunch bucket,” one of the men said loudly just then, and the table erupted into laughter.
Juanita shook her head. “Can I borrow your gun?” she said to Bodecker. “Those bastards been in here since I opened up this morning.”
He watched them in the long mirror that ran behind the bar. The car thief was giggling like a schoolgirl while the wife beater mashed the potato chips on the table with his fist. The third man was leaned back in his chair with a bored expression on his face, cleaning his fingernails with a matchstick. “I could run ’em out if you want,” Bodecker said.
“Nah, that’s okay,” she said. “They’d just come back later wanting to give me some more grief.” She blew smoke out of the side of her mouth and half smiled. She hoped her boy wasn’t in trouble again. The last time, she’d had to borrow two weeks’ pay to get him out of jail, all over five record albums he’d stuck down his pants at the Woolworth’s. Merle Haggard or Porter Wagoner, that would have been bad enough, but Gerry and the Pacemakers? Herman’s Hermits? The Zombies? Thank God his father was dead, that’s all she could say. “So what can I do you for?”
Bodecker gazed for a moment at the bottles lined up behind the bar. “You got any coffee?”
“Just instant,” she said. “Don’t get many coffee drinkers in here.”
He made a face. “That stuff hurts my stomach,” he said. “How about a Seven-Up?”
After Juanita set the bottle of pop down in front of him, Bodecker lit a cigarette and said, “So Sandy ain’t come in yet, huh?”
“Ha,” Juanita said. “I wish. She’s been gone over two weeks now.”
“What? She quit?”
“No, nothing like that,” the barmaid said. “She’s on vacation.”
“Again?”
“I don’t know how they do it,” Juanita said, lightening up, relieved that his visit didn’t seem to have anything to do with her son. “I don’t reckon they stay any place fancy, but I barely make enough here to pay the rent on that ol’ trailer I live in. And you know damn well Carl ain’t paying for none of it.”
Bodecker took a sip of the pop and thought again about the phone call. So it probably was true, but if Sandy’s been tricking for over a year, like the bitch said, why in the hell hadn’t he heard about it before now? Maybe it was a good thing he had taken the pledge. The whiskey had evidently started turning his brain to mush. Then he glanced over at the pool table and considered other things he might have been careless about the past few months. A sudden cold chill swept over him. He had to swallow several times to keep the 7-Up from coming back up. “When she coming back?” he asked.
“She told Leroy she’d be home by the end of this week. I sure hope so. The tight ass won’t hire no extra help.”
“You got any idea where they were going?”
“It’s hard to tell about that girl,” Juanita said with a shrug. “She was talking about Virginia Beach, but I just can’t picture Carl sunning himself by some ocean for two weeks, can you?”
Bodecker shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I can’t picture that sonofabitch doing anything.” Then he stood up and laid a dollar on the bar. “Look,” he said, “when she gets back, tell her I need to talk to her, okay?”
“Sure, Lee, I’ll do that,” the barmaid said.
After he walked out the door, one of the men yelled, “Hey, Juanita, have you heard what Hen Matthews been saying about that big-headed bastard?”
14
A CAR DOOR SLAMMED in the parking lot. Carl opened his eyes, looked across the room at the flowers and fruit on the wall. The clock said it was still early morning, but he was already covered in sweat. He got out of bed and went to the bathroom, emptied his bladder. He didn’t comb his hair or brush his teeth or wash his face. He dressed in the same clothes he’d worn for the past week, his purple shirt, a baggy pair of shiny, gray suit pants. Sticking the film canisters in his pockets, he sat on the edge of a chair and put his shoes on. He thought about waking Sandy up so they could get a move on, but then decided to let her rest. They’d slept in the car the past three nights. He figured he owed her that, and besides, they were going home anyway. No reason to hurry now.
While he waited for her to wake up, Carl chewed on a cigar and took the army boy’s wad of money out of his pocket. As he counted it again, he remembered a time the year before when they were cutting across the lower end of Minnesota. They were clinging to their last three dollars when the radiator on this ’49 Chevy coupe they were traveling in that summer blew a hole. He managed to temporarily seal the leak with a can of black pepper he carried for just such an emergency, a trick he’d heard about at a truck stop one time. They found a hick gas station a mile or so off the highway before it busted open again, ended up spending the bigger part of a day waiting around while some grease monkey with a pack of Red Man hanging out of his back pocket kept promising to fix it as soon as he finished a tune-up his boss wanted done yesterday. “Won’t be long now, mister,” he told Carl every fifteen fucking minutes. Sandy didn’t help matters any. She parked her ass on a bench right outsid
e the garage door and filed her nails and teased the poor bastard with glimpses of her pink underwear until he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind, she had him so tore up.
Carl finally threw up his hands in disgust and got the rolls of film out of the glove box and locked himself in the restroom behind the station. He sat for several hours in that stinking sweatbox thumbing through a pile of ragged detective magazines stacked on the damp floor next to the filthy, crusted commode. Every once in a while, he heard the little bell ring around front, announcing another gas customer. A brown cockroach crawled sluggishly up the wall. He lit one of his dog dicks, thinking that might help move his bowels, but his insides were like cement. The best he could do was dribble a little blood now and then. His fat thighs grew numb. At one point, someone pounded on the door, but he wasn’t about to give up his seat just so some no-good sonofabitch could wash his dainty hands.
He was about to wipe his bloody ass when he came across the article in a soggy copy of True Crime. He settled back down on the commode, flicked the ash off his cigar. The detective being interviewed in the story said that two male bodies had been found, one stuffed in a culvert near Red Cloud, Nebraska, and the other nailed to the floor of a shed on an abandoned farm outside Seneca, Kansas. “We’re talking within a hundred miles of each other,” the detective pointed out. Carl looked at the date on the cover of the magazine: November 1964. Hell, the story was already nine months old. He read the three pages over carefully five times. Though he refused to offer any specifics, the detective suggested there was a good chance the two murders were connected because of the nature of the crimes. So, judging from the condition of the remains, we’re looking at the summer of 1963, thereabouts anyway, he said. “Well, at least you got the year right,” Carl muttered to himself. That was their third time out, when they got those two. One was a runaway husband hoping to find a new beginning in Alaska and the other a tramp they’d seen scrounging for something to eat in a trash can behind a veterinarian’s office. Those spikes had made for a damn good picture. There’d been a coffee can full of them right inside the door of the shed, like the Devil had set them there knowing that Carl was going to show up some day.
He cleaned himself off and wiped his sweaty hands on his pants. He tore the story out of the magazine and folded it, stuck the pages in his wallet. Whistling a little tune, he wet his comb in the sink and slicked back his thin, graying hair, squeezed a couple of whore bumps on his face. He found the grease monkey talking to Sandy in a low voice inside the garage. He had one skinny leg pressed up against hers. “Jesus Christ, it’s about time,” she said, when she looked up and saw him.
Ignoring her, Carl asked the mechanic, “Did you get it fixed?”
The man stepped away from Sandy, nervously stuck his greasy hands in the pockets of his coveralls. “I think so,” he said. “I filled her up with water, and she’s holdin’ so far.”
“What else did you fill up?” Carl said, eyeing him suspiciously.
“Nothing, not a thing, mister.”
“Did you let it run awhile?”
“We ran it for ten minutes,” Sandy said. “While you was back there in the can doing whatever you was doing.”
“All right,” Carl said. “What we owe you?”
The mechanic scratched his head, pulled out his pack of chew. “Oh, I don’t know. Does five bucks sound all right?”
“Five bucks?” Carl said. “Hell, man, the way you been playing around with my ol’ lady? She’s gonna be sore for a week. I’ll be damn lucky if you didn’t knock her up.”
“Four?” the mechanic said.
“Listen to this shit,” Carl said. “You like to take advantage, don’t you?” He glanced over at Sandy and she winked. “Okay, you throw in a couple of bottles of cold pop, I’ll give you two dollars, but that’s my final offer. My wife ain’t just some cheap whore.”
It was late in the evening by the time they drove out of there, and they slept in the car that night along a quiet country road. They shared a can of potted meat, using Carl’s penknife for a spoon; and then Sandy climbed over the backseat and said good night. A short while later, just as he was starting to nod off in the front, a sharp spasm shot through Carl’s guts and he fumbled for the door handle. Bolting from the car, he climbed over a drainage ditch that ran alongside the road. He jerked his pants down just in time, emptied a week’s worth of nerves and junk into the weeds while holding on to the trunk of a pawpaw tree. After he cleaned himself off with some dead leaves, he stood outside the car in the moonlight and read the magazine story one more time. Then he took his lighter out and set it aflame. He decided not to mention it to Sandy. Sometimes she had a big mouth, and he didn’t like to worry about what he might have to do to it on down the road.
15
THE DAY AFTER TALKING TO THE BARMAID at the Tecumseh, Bodecker drove over to the apartment where his sister and her husband lived on the east side of town. For the most part, he didn’t give a damn how Sandy carried on her sorry life, but she wasn’t going to peddle her snatch in Ross County, not as long as he was sheriff. Fucking around on Carl was one thing—hell, he couldn’t blame her for that—but working it for money was something else entirely. Although Hen Matthews would try to shame him with dirt like that come election time, Bodecker was worried about it for other reasons. People are like dogs: once they start digging, they don’t want to stop. First, it would just be that the sheriff had a whore for a sister, but eventually someone would find out about his dealings with Tater Brown; and after that, all the bribes and other shit that had piled up since he had first pinned on a badge. Looking back on it, he should have busted that thieving, pimp sonofabitch when he had a chance. A big arrest like that might have nearly wiped his slate clean. But he’d let his greed get the best of him, and now he was stuck in it for the long haul.
Parked in front of the shabby duplex, he watched a flatbed truck bulging with cattle turn into the stockyards across the street. The tangy smell of manure hung heavy in the hot August air. The old beater Sandy had hauled him home in that last night before he took the pledge was nowhere to be seen, but he got out of the cruiser anyway. He was pretty certain it had been a station wagon. He walked around the side of the house and climbed the rickety stairs that led to their door on the second floor. At the top was a little landing that Sandy called the patio. A sack of garbage lay overturned in one corner, green flies crawling over egg shells and coffee grounds and wadded-up hamburger wrappers. Next to the wooden railing sat a padded kitchen chair and underneath it a coffee can half full of cigar butts. Carl and Sandy were worse than the coloreds up on White Heaven and the holler trash out in Knockemstiff, he thought, the way the two of them lived. God, how he hated slobs. The prisoners in the county jail took turns washing his cruiser every morning; the creases in his khaki pants were as sharp as knives. He kicked an empty Dinty Moore can out of the way and knocked on the door, but nobody answered.
As he started to leave, he heard a sliver of music coming from somewhere close by. Looking over the railing, he saw a chubby woman in a flowered swimsuit lying on a yellow blanket in the yard next door. The rusted frames and parts of old motorcycles were scattered around her in the tall grass. Her brown hair was pinned on top of her head, and she held a tiny transistor radio in her hand. She was slathered with baby oil, shiny as a new penny in the bright sun. He watched as she twisted the dial around searching for another station, heard the faint twang of some hillbilly song about heartbreak. Then she set the radio on the edge of the blanket and closed her eyes. Her slick belly rose and fell. She turned over, then raised her head and glanced around. Satisfied that no one was watching, she undid the top of the bathing suit. After a moment’s hesitation, she reached down and tugged the lower half up to reveal three or four inches of the white cheeks of her ass.
Bodecker lit a cigarette and started back down the stairs. He imagined his brother-in-law sitting out here in the sun sweating buckets and trying to get his eyes full. It was easy enough to do
, the way the woman lay spread out there for anybody to see. Taking pictures seemed to be the only thing that Carl thought about, and Bodecker wondered if he ever took any of the neighbor without her knowing it. Though he wasn’t sure, he figured there was a law against shit like that. And if there wasn’t, there sure as hell ought to be.
16
BY THE TIME THEY LEFT THE SUNDOWNER, it was noon. Sandy had woken up at eleven, then spent an hour in the bathroom getting ready. She was only twenty-five, but her brown hair was already beginning to show traces of gray. Carl worried about her teeth, which had always been her best feature. They were stained an ugly yellow from all the cigarettes. He’d noticed, too, that her breath was bad all the time now, regardless of how many mints she consumed. Something was starting to rot inside her mouth, he was sure of it. Once they got back home, he needed to get her to a dentist. He hated to think of the expense, but a nice smile was an important part of his photographs, providing a needed contrast to all the pain and suffering. Though he’d tried time and time again, Carl had yet to get one of the models to fake even a little smirk once he took the gun out and started on them. “Girl, I know sometimes it’s hard, but I need you to look happy if these are gonna turn out good,” he told Sandy, whenever he’d done something to one of the men that upset her. “Just think of that Mona Lisa picture. Pretend you’re her hanging up on the wall in that museum.”
They hadn’t driven but a few miles when Sandy braked suddenly and pulled into a little diner called the Tiptop. It was shaped somewhat like a wigwam and painted different shades of red and green. The parking lot was nearly full. “What the hell are you doing?” Carl said.