Beast of the Field (25 page)

35.

The wood loomed before Millie like a wall of black.  She could not bring herself to take another step towards those trees.  It was a familiar hard freeze in the pit of her belly and the tips of her fingers and every place in between, and she did not like it.  Her partner was in there.  She had to help.  She had to get him out of there, and now she was frozen solid all over again.  All of the sudden she couldn't move a muscle.  She looked back toward Sonnet, wished she had brought her along.  Maybe Sonnet and she together, two young girls instead of one, would have the strength to go into those woods.

Tommy’s words last spring still lingered in her memory.  He had called her "Soldier," as he had used to do, but the words following this name her older brothers had given her, this title, this honor, for her erased
all that name had ever meant to her.  "You're too young and too pretty to be tangled up in all this ugliness."  Too young, he had said.  Too pretty.  He had called her a little girl.  More than just a "little girl," but "just a little girl." 

Millie swore something had happened to her that day.  Maybe she had become a little girl.  She had broken off from him that day.  To hell with him, she had thought in her anger.  She had withdrawn to the house. She had thrust herself into her chores, her schoolwork, like a good little girl.  Then, because of her anger, because no one was keeping an eye on him, her brother had gotten himself killed.

She was a girl, eleven years old at the time.  She couldn't have saved him, could she?  Just a little girl?

The woods, as black as the deepest, coldest canyon on the bottom of the sea, said Nawp.
  A little girl like you, trying to act tough in your brother's boots.  You think because you don't take a bath, that makes you tough?  You think cursing like a heathen make you tough enough for our world?   Nawp, you're just a little girl.  Let me tell you something, girlie, playing with dolls and cuddling chicks and memorizing cake recipes of your momma's aint a part of this world.  Just you remember how you froze up when you was supposed to make that telephone call out to the mayor's—nearly got Mr. Sterno killed right there.  Just you remember what that Gomer said to you that day behind the schoolhouse:  These woods aint no place for you no more.  These woods is a place for men and the stuff of men, not you—that's what he meant.  So come on then, you think a pretty little girl like you can save a real man, a Pinkerton man, well, come on in and try then, but don't muss your pretty little blonde hair on any of our branches, girlie, lest your momma have to give you a warm little bath and brush you out again.

"Shit-blasted son of a dirty..."

She heard some of the dogs skitter away in front of her as she tromped toward the trees.  Better for them they did.  Before she was completely gone inside the darkness, without her breaking stride, a little fist poked out and smacked the dry bark of one of those cottonwoods.  And that was it, after that the little girl was gone. 

*

Sterno scrounged around in the earth at the bottom of the pit long enough to establish there was at least one set of human remains there.  This fact was confirmed when, as he dug, he grabbed the rib bone of a man like the handle of a suitcase.  He had yanked it from the ground and studied it in the last light of his burning kerchief.  He then held it to his chest to see if it fit, as though he were in the market for a new rib—it was a human bone, all right.

Maybe you ought to see if he's got a jawbone he'll sell you. 

He replaced the rib bone where he had found it, for the investigating team.  It was evidence.  He had his evidence.  At least there would be a trial for the missing McMurray men.  At least he knew for sure this huge, friendly, son-of-a-bitch of a mayor was going to be put away.  The McMurray men, however, were not the reason Sterno was in Hope County, and not the reason why he had to go into that fishing cabin, whether he liked it or not.

"Dangle," Sterno said to the sniffing sounds in the bush.  He had smelled the shit- and sickness-stuck hair of the dogs before he had heard them, but now they were getting too close for his comfort.  He undid his holster from around his smarting ankle, lifted it to his eyes in the scant light.  The pistol was stained with blood too, but it would probably work if he needed it to work.  There was no reason he could see that he would need it, unless one or two of these rat dogs got too hungry to think twice.  He placed it on the ground next to him while he scratched and rubbed the area around his ankle wound. 

When he was ready, he climbed from the pit but had to stop to rest through the pain.  He checked to make sure he had his one match left.  He thought if he wanted to see anything in or around that cabin, it would be a good idea to find something to burn.  He decided on his sock.  He slid off his shoe of the foot where the blood from his earlier venture into these woods had already dried, then pulled off his sock.  He found another limb, wrapped its tip in the sock.  Sprinkled it and his liver with whisky.  Lit it.  The sock started slow, but started.  Sterno slid his bare foot back into the shoe, got back to work.

The door of the fishing cabin came open with a nudge.  Inside were the rusted, burn-blasted remains of a still.  A pallet was on the floor against the wall opposite the still, and next to this was a kerosene camp light, its wick gone,
its glass in pieces.  The cabin smelled like mold and dog and, just faintly, burnt mash.  Sterno stood there for a moment.  A shape at his foot emerged into his seeing, begged to be better illuminated.  He crouched to one knee, picked it up.  It had lost its shape and the dogs had been at it, but Sterno still recognized it as a trilby hat.

In the flickering light of his burning sock, Sterno scrutinized all sides of the hat.  In a few of the torn seams were dirty brown stains. 
Blood.

The trilby went back to the earthen floor, placed there with care.  Sterno then scooted it to rest in a corner, among other tatters, where it would seem inconsequential to anyone who was not a detective.  Surely, he presumed, at least one of the Neuwald boys had been back here since May, and had dismissed the hat, or not seen it.  Sterno felt good it would be there when he came back with the law.  With that, he lost his last light; but in the dark he was satisfied with what he had found.

Except he was not in the dark. 

Flame light danced through the seams of the cabin’s slatted walls.  Sterno stood, moved to the doorway, looked out, his face striped in glowing orange. 

Standing along the edge of the pond were four men.  Under their torches, the brims of their hats made it hard to see who they were.  This didn't matter though, because they all had the same white face.

*

When Millie first saw the torchlights she thought they were not moving.  She then stopped walking and saw that the torches were edging slowly, carefully, through the dry trees.  She stood against a tree, breathing hard, watching the path these lights picked through the shadows.  She pressed on toward the cabin, but she had to move slowly for the dry underbrush. 

After a few more steps she was forced to stop—the torches had stopped too.  They were hanging there in the dark space between the ground and the low limbs, clustered together until they looked like a single flame.  When they began to move again, they spread out into a wide half-circle.

They're at the pond.

She had no idea where to find Mr. Sterno.  She didn't know if he was with them, if he had never made it to the cabin, or—who knows?—if he was asleep in his car; she had walked right past it without a glance inside.  She looked but could see nothing but the flame from the torches.  The voices of men came to her through the trees, then some laughter.  She recognized it as Gomer Neuwald's laughter and a feeling caught in her belly:  Gomer Neuwald laughed at things that were the opposite of funny.  Her boots lifted from the dry leaves and weeds, came down a step toward the torches.  Another step came, another and another, quiet as an Indian, until at last she could see the figures under the torchlight.   

A few steps more and she saw the cloth masks.  They were dirty and white and had sinkholes in them for eyes.  This image had a strange effect on her.  Her bellyflies swarmed up inside her.  Their buzzing emanated from her chest to all parts of her body and fastened her to the side of a thick tree trunk.  She was not frozen this time, not in fear; but the sight of those hatted, hooded, blank-faced creatures wielding fire made everything before her unreal, a story in a storybook, played out by actors in masks, doing nothing but delivering their lines like Tommy
and his Shakespeare.  So Millie unattached herself from the scene, put up an invisible wall between her and the players, and was obliged for now to be the audience.

"...Anymore like you who come this way..." she heard.  It was the voice of Mayor Greentree, coming from behind one of those masks.

She heard a low mumbling voice.  It was her partner, speaking through his swollen chin.  She stretched to look for him but couldn't find him.

"Oh, them.
  Well, Mr. Sterno, you can bet we're not finished with your employers," the mayor said.  "They'll be hearing from us too.  Calling the law on us, in our own town.  We'll see about that.  This is a one hundred per cent American town, Mr. Sterno, and no pope-humping immigrants from Ireland are going to go over my head."

His “employers,” Millie thought.  He’s talking about Mother and Pa.

Then came Gomer's yuk-yukking.  Millie also heard the sniffs and slight movements of the wild dogs behind her, moving closer in the dark.  She smelled them, they were so close, but they did not bother her; they too were there for the show. 

"This is our home, Mr. Sterno.
  My
home.  This is
our
America—right here in Price, Kansas.  Warshington doesn't decide our rules here.  Nobody in Topeka makes our rules either, or anywhere else.  It's me that makes the rules in Price.  I make the rules, I enforce the rules.  When I make a degree, I expect it to be followed.  When it is not followed, I take care of those who don't follow it.  Everything we do here, we do to uphold good, Christian, American values."

There was more mumbling from her partner.  She heard the words "McMurray oil" in his mumbling, and "Tommy Donnan."  With those words, the humming in her fingers, toes and skull began to recede.  She was becoming real again.  The figures in the firelight were becoming real too.

"That's right.  Those potato-eating Okies know now too—they found out the hard way.  The way you don't ever forget.  As for poor Tommy, well, that boy answered to a law even greater than mine:  God’s law.  I was only the hired hand in that one.  What is—are you laughing at me, Mr. Sterno?  Gomer, bring him over here.  Let me get a good look at this Pinkerton man from ol' Saint Louie, Missouri."

Her view was obscured, but she could see a torch moving closer to the mayor.  Finally, she saw her partner.  His pants were torn, his jaw was swollen and gray and he had fresh blood coming from his forehead.

When the men spoke now, it was with quieter voices.  She could not hear, so she dared her boots forward a few steps.  She stopped suddenly when one of the masked men turned to her direction, torch raised above and before him.   She made herself perfectly still behind a tree, hidden from all firelight.  The man came towards her, so close that in his torchlight she could see his eyes.  They didn't look human.  He took another step closer, another.  He dropped his torch to the ground, moved even closer, using his monster's eyes, she guessed, to see in the dark.  Behind and around her, the dogs stood still with her.  Nothing moved in the spray of shadow cast by the man's body.  Behind the silhouette, the other men were still at work, speaking in low voices.  At last, one of them spoke to the shadow above her.

"Jonas, goddamnit.
  You're going to burn down the whole county while you're over there watering the bushes!"

After a few more seconds of searching, the thing in the mask turned.  Millie exhaled.  He stomped on a little blaze that had spread from its discarded torch, picked up his torch again, rejoined the fun.

When she could see into the clearing again, what she saw was the masked men throwing a long coil of rope over the bough of one of the cottonwoods across the pond.

Millie was raised on a farm.  She knew the many uses for rope.  She had seen it used to hang porkers in the smokehouse, pull cars from the mud and bind bales when the twine had run out.  She had seen her brother pull a full-grown cow down to her flank with it, then use the same rope to tie her hinds to her fores to her neck and leave enough hemp dangling so she could be dragged.  In a hundred years, she would have never expected—even as it uncoiled on its arching flight over the bough, its neat little loop falling down to bounce in the air next to Mr. Sterno's head—to see a length of rope used the way these men used it. 

36.

Charlie Sterno saw the four men with their torches and his one thought was of Millie.  She would have followed him no matter what Junior or her parents would have done to stop her.  She would be in these woods somewhere, probably close, maybe right here with him.  He had to call to her.  She had to get out of these woods.

He stepped from the fishing cabin before they could see he had been in there, stepped over to make it seem as though he had come from around the back of it.  He didn't want them wondering if there was any reason to go in there to tidy up.  That bloody trilby was their ticket to the big house, and Sterno wanted it left alone.  He came out of the cabin searching the trees around the clearing for the girl, but beyond the trunks of the trees closest to the torchlit pit there was just darkness.  He made to call out to her.  It was his jaw that stopped him—pain like a gunshot—and in this second of quiet reeling, reason tried to work on him. 

Maybe calling to her would only get her caught. 

Damn it.  She was only a girl.  He never should have brought her into this.

But then something else occurred to him.  He looked at the torches, in the glow they cast he saw guns.  These fellows weren't here to give him a going away present.  There was a good chance he would not be going anywhere tonight.  If this was the case, Millie would be the only way this case gets closed. It was her case now.  His job was to get this son of a bitch Greentree talking.

The four men were standing tall underneath their flames.  Sterno shot a quick thought to his .38, resting in the leaves in the bottom of the dry pond.  It may as well have been in Timbuktu.  One of the men carried a rifle Sterno knew from when he had bought his whisky.  Gomer came for Sterno.  He approached him at the ready, just sure Sterno was going to either make a break for it or come at him swinging.  When he was close enough he jabbed Sterno in the forehead with its butt.  Sterno dropped to one knee, got back up, stood straight on his feet, warm blood pouring down his face.  He did not run.  Did not fight.  Did not beg.  He did speak, however.  He wiped the blood so he could see.  He addressed the big man, who he knew was the mayor.

"Something tells me those boys down there in the bottom of that pond are going to get some company tonight," Sterno said.  He talked as clearly as he could, stretching open his tight jaw.  Pain didn't matter to him anymore.

The eyes behind the mask were creased:  the mayor was smiling.  "Well, I like this spot, Mr. Sterno.  Secluded.  Peaceful.  No one comes this way, not ever.  Well, sometimes…I do like to take my friends here sometimes.  My real good friends."  He lowered his flame to indicate the bones under the bottom of the crater.  "Like those boys from Oklahoma."  He then looked squarely at Sterno.  "Like you.  Like any more like you who come this way."

"The Donnans will be wondering where I've gone to.  They did hire me to complete a job. 
Even paid me half up front."

The mayor said something about how the Donnans would be hearing from them too.  It was a clear threat.  Sterno's mind went to Millie.  He wanted to call to her now more than ever.  She needed to get out of there, get home.

If you call to her, everything's lost.  She knows this too.  Why do you think she's being quiet?

The mayor was filling up with air now.  He claimed to not have to answer to anyone's rules but his own.  He claimed America as his own place, to make it how he liked it, according to his own rules.  He went on and on about this, a real stump speech.   Sterno knew better.  That letter he had given to Millie earlier tonight had already set into motion a process of real rules.  This man would find out who really makes the rules in America. 

"I guess I'm going to find out about your rules, aren't I," Sterno said.  "Just like those men from McMurray oil found out.  And I guess Tommy Donnan found out about your rules too, didn't he?"  The mayor answered him but he was not paying attention.  His ears were on the trees.  He’d heard something.  Wild dogs, maybe.  Maybe not. 

Then something else stole his focus away from Millie, from the mayor, from everything else:  the thick coil of rope draped around one of the men's
shoulder.  He had only just now noticed it.

So it's going to be the hemp. 
A one hundred per cent American lynching.  Never would have thought it would be like this.  Life is full of surprises, aint it Charlie?

Sterno laughed at this thought despite the pang of dread in his chest.  The mayor stopped speaking in mid-sentence.  He ordered Gomer to bring Sterno to him for a look.  Gomer took one of Sterno's arms in his hand, led him around the edge of the pond to stand next to the mayor.  They stood underneath a large cottonwood. 

"Well, well, what do you say Jonas?  That brother of yours might be a little soft in the spine, but he still has a good right hook," said the mayor as he looked over Sterno's face.

But Jonas Neuwald wasn't listening.  He too had heard something in the woods, and had separated from them, walked towards the trees with his torch high.  He moved slowly, searching the trees in front of him.  He lowered his torch to the ground next to his boot, continued toward the woods treading softly.  He’d heard her too.

Sterno could take down Gomer, get the rifle, get the other brother in the gut with it, at this range.  That would change things.  That would give Millie enough time to make a break. 

With some prodding from Greentree, however, Jonas Neuwald retrieved his light and rejoined them.  Sterno sighed, listened,
heard nothing from the trees.

The men had gone quiet in their killing business.  They spoke only when there was some instruction like this to give, or a question to ask, and this they did in whispers.  They kept their heads turned to the ground.  They did not look him in the eye.  Sterno stood still, let them do their work.  They bound his hands but left his legs free.  Sterno had seen this before: these night-riding yokels who got a thrill from watching a man—or a boy—kick his last seconds of life away.

Sterno’s mind grew suddenly calm in this lull of conversation and wandered to a bright river.  He looked across but saw nothing there.  Had the dream been a lie?  Where was she?  Was she trying to tell him something?  Was
this
place a place where a man can smile, this dark place full of evil men?  It isn’t all evil men, Charlie.  There’s Tess, who could love you, who could make you smile.  There’s Millie.  Is this what was keeping him from crossing that river?  Maybe these two persons were real-life symbols of what could have been if she, if they, hadn’t died that morning.  Maybe he should fight them now—right now—take that rifle and at least die fighting.

But his detective heart—black and shriveled as it was—was thinking about the case, about giving these boys in masks the same treatment they were about to give him.

That girl is in these woods, he told himself.  She’s watching.  Send her a message somehow.  Give her some time to get out of here; if she doesn’t heed it, that’s her worry.  At least then you’ve done your job, instead of just giving up.  These boys are heading to her pa's farm when they're done here.  Not only is her life in danger, but so is her home, her family, and don’t forget about your case.

Alright to hell with it, he replied to himself.  A fight it is.

There’s
the old Charlie.

His bare foot came up between the legs of the mayor, who had been standing proudly and confidently over his quarry, but was now doubled-over in clinched pain.  It had been a good kick, fast, hard and true to its target and the crunching feeling against his toes had felt to Sterno like an Oriental massage.

“You kike son-of-a-
bitch
!  Get him
still
!”

When one of the other masked men came near enough, Sterno spat in his face,
then kicked him in the stomach.  But that would be the last round for Charlie Sterno.  Gomer Neuwald laughed his idiot laugh before getting Sterno in the stomach with the stock of his rifle.  Sterno went dizzy again, he fell limp against the scratchy rope.  That was it.  He was crossing quickly now to a bright place, and he liked it.  He thought he heard a river, or maybe smelled it.  Sunshine was shining through the dark of night.  A quiet was settling into him, becoming comfortable there.  He decided he was not going to fight, curse, spit or try to kick anymore.  He was not going to feel any anger.  No, not nothing, he felt almost happy.  He was going to her at last.

It turned out his thoughts did come back to Millie Donnan one last time, however.

When his feet came off the ground he choked up mustard in the back of his throat.  That sandwich he had never wanted, but had had no choice but to eat.  You’re going to like this girl, he thought to her, wherever she was waiting for him.  And this thought brought him some amusement, so that when Charlie Sterno closed his eyes and crossed to that place where a man smiles, he did it with a smirk.