Crimes in Southern Indiana Page 13

  Old Testament Wisdom

  If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.

  And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life,

  Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,

  Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

  —Exodus 21: 22–25

  In ten years bruises would heal externally. Not internally. Knuckles would flatten from not wearing hand wraps or bag gloves. Scabs would become scars from beating the same green army bag that a man hung from a dusty basement rafter for the girl. But now the girl sat within the darkness, glancing out the bug-spattered windshield at the rusted tin building across the road. While those same knuckles double-checked the bullet-filled clip of the .45-caliber Colt.

  The man who’d hung the green army bag was the one who’d raised her. Taught her how to twist punches into the bag with her hips at an early age. Taught her how to sight, load, and shoot a gun. The man taught her about Old Testament wisdom. It was something that the outline seated next to her in the darkness had never been accepted into before that week in late September. That was when the man who’d raised her had his flesh go from sun-beaten leather to a melted one-gallon plastic milk container. Aft er his wounds healed and he was released from the hospital, he had time to serve.

  Her family lost everything. They moved in with her great-uncle. But during that week, men were beaten and disfigured while others lost their lives. And this is how it all started. Ten years ago with a touch.

  Jacque’s heart pumped blood black like a dead opossum bloated by the sun on back-road pavement when Abby rolled up her sleeves. Bruises fingerprinted the buttermilk flesh of her arms.

  His flat-knuckled fist vibrated the table. His eyes were a Case XX carving into Abby’s.

  “Who did this?”

  Abby’s upper lip quivered as she sat with the memory of hands marring her skin. Of panting breath scented like hog manure warming the side of her neck. Lips pleading, “STOP!” She sat with that memory ingrained behind her moss-green eyes as they bubbled with the fear that it was her fault. Chewed fingernails pushed her fudge-colored locks over her ear and she said, “Hersey did it. I’m sorry, Grandpa Bocart. He said it was a game. I didn’t mean to—”

  Anna May grasped Abby’s shoulders from behind as Jacque bent forward, holding Abby’s hands within the grit of his trembling lifeline.

  “You got nothing to be sorry for.”

  Jacque inhaled the secondhand smoke from his daughter Avis’s coffin nail. His mind exploded with buckshot, imagining Abby’s stolen innocence. Avis sat at the kitchen table, rolling her fogged-over eyes within the oval shapes of running mascara as if to say “the hell you looking at?”

  Reminded of how many times he’d warned Avis about taking Abby around to Medford Malone’s salvage yard, Jacque released Abby’s cotton hands. Stood and turned to Avis. No words. Just his flat-knuckled fist planted into her remorseless features, knocking her against the wall. She exploded, “Son of a bitch!”

  Jacque scalded back, “That’s for taking my granddaughter around that crankhead and his deviant son while you get blasted on that shit!”

  He knelt back down to Abby, knowing he had to ask what he didn’t want to know. Anna May felt Abby shaking from what she’d just witnessed and told her, “It’s okay, Abby, Grandpa’s just angry at who did this.”

  Jacque’s gray slits burned an unrecognized fear through Abby, charcoaled her insides as he gritted his teeth. “What did he do to you?”

  Hersey didn’ t hear the black-primered no-muffler Chevy S10 roar into the gravel lot. He just sat at the Leavenworth Tavern. Lean and wired like an electric fence. Poe the bartender served him another Jack and Coke. Johnny Cash blared from the jukebox with “Folsom Prison Blues.” Hersey had his back to the entrance. Karl Bean sat scented like a peeled onion on one side of him, sprinkling salt into a Falls City beer. Bubble-lipped Ty Wilkerson sat on the other, sipping an Old Style. And like everyone else in the Leavenworth Tavern, they were two simple names associated with the wisdom of the land; they knew when to mind their own.

  Stale cigarette smoke accompanied Jacque as he walked through the entrance to the bar, stepped to the stool where his left hand gripped Hersey’s right shoulder. Jacque offered no words. Just four fingers digging into lean tissue. His thumb guiding the turning around. His unflinching gray eyes burrowing into Hersey, who was all piss and vinegar, spouting, “Who the hell—”

  Ty and Karl grabbed their beers. Swiveled their stools. Work boots met the scuffed hardwood floor and they separated like cockroaches, smelling the onslaught that was about to paint the bar’s interior.

  Jacque’s right hand slapped Hersey’s lips into his yellow teeth, drawing first blood down his peach-pitted chin. Ty stood a few stools down, watching and chugging his Old Style with his right work boot tapping to the strum of Johnny Cash’s voice. Bobbing his head. Watching Hersey’s features part from Jacque’s flow of violence. Jacque drove his left fist down onto Hersey’s nose, dissipating the cartilage. Then pounded Hersey’s left eye into an olive-textured slit. Hersey grunted. Pleaded with pain. Jacque spun him around on his stool to face the bar. Dug both hands into the rear of Hersey’s oil-thick tresses. Ricocheted his face off the sticky stains and cigarette burns.

  Karl stood at the other end of the bar in his work-worn bibs, grinding his bare gums. Watched Jacque Bocart exit the Leavenworth Tavern the same way he’d entered: without a word. Karl walked over to where Hersey lay whimpering. The ruby fluid of his insides dripped from the bar. Decorated the hardwood. His face blistered with abrasions. His teeth were a shattered windshield, scattered about his mouth in red-white shards. Karl shook his head. Behind the bar Poe talked on the phone to an operator about needing an ambulance. Ty walked over and said, “God almighty,” then chugged his Old Style. Karl said, “I didn’t see anything, did you?”

  And Ty replied, “Not a damn thing.”

  Jacque came through the kitchen door and onto the porch when he heard the cruiser’s engine humming to a halt. Behind him in the house, Anna May, Abby, and Avis sat at the kitchen table eating a late supper. Jacque stood with his tight salt-and-pepper stubble and leathery face hidden beneath the shadow of his worn John Deere cap, watching the outline step from the cruiser.

  Billy Hines, the town marshal, dabbed his forehead with a sour-scented hanky and said, “Evening, Jacque.”

  “Evening, Billy.”

  “Hate to show up unannounced, but Medford Malone’s boy Hersey got hisself beat into stewed meat earlier today at the tavern. Seen you cruising out of town about the time I got the call. Thought I’d stop by. See if you seen anything?”

  “Just a gas pump. Needed gas in the truck.”

  “So you didn’t stop at the tavern?”

  “Can’t say that I did. Why? Don’t you got no witnesses?”

  “Funny you’d ask that, ’cause Poe, Karl, nor Ty seen a thing even though Poe called it in while the others sat feeding their livers. Last thing Hersey remembers was sipping his Jack and Coke. Least that’s what I think he stuttered.”

  Jacque laughed to himself, knowing that regardless of who had been in the tavern when he touched Hersey they’d not breathe a word to Hines. They kept their mouths shut when a conflict occurred between families. Let them settle it with scorn.

  “Maybe he touched someone so they touched him back.”

  “You mean an eye for an eye. Tooth for a tooth.”

  “Old Testament wisdom.”

  “Why you say that, Jacque?”

  “I know how young men are at that age. Do things without any regard to backlash. We were young once. Ignored the doctrines of existence.”

  Marshal Hines leaned back against his cruiser’s hood and fished a coffin nail from his shirt pocket. Flicked a flame and puc
kered a thick breath of smoke. Blew it from his nose, knowing Jacque was hiding something. He had kept a stone face when Hines told him what had happened. Didn’t even try to act surprised. Hines said, “We was damn good friends, Jacque.”

  “Until you decided to become Johnny Law.”

  “It’s just a job. And right now that job is finding out who did this to Hersey and why, before Medford does. ’Cause Medford is a copperhead with his tail tied to a stake right now. Unable to escape; pissed off. If you know something, I suggest you cough it up.”

  Before going back into the house, Jacque told Hines with a smirk, “I hear anything on the party line or otherwise, I know how to get in touch.”

  Rusted ringer washers. Gas stoves. Dry rotted tires and busted television sets decorated the flat rock hollows. The country yards of rusted trailers and broken-down farmhouses with abandoned red clay tractors. Vehicles on cinder blocks. It was the poor man’s fairy tale of rural survival. Hines could smell the survival’s waste like the sweat that his pores excreted as he sped down the valley road.

  He’d been born and raised here. Knew Jacque was a farmer with blood relations to the Hill Clan. That Medford ran a junkyard-salvage and held court with the Evans family. He knew each man wasn’t to be crossed. He’d run with each of them. They’d once accepted him as their own, until he became an officer who would not be bribed. Then town marshal. They’d considered him an outsider for nearly eighteen years. He knew the small population of families within Leavenworth were so tight with one another that when one of them pissed, another’s eyes blinked.

  They had their own wisdom when dealing with one another that excluded the law he was paid to enforce. He knew something had gone cross with Jacque and Medford. But with no one talking, all he could do was wait for that wisdom to rear its ugly head.

  Oil-stained fingers decorated with skull rings grasped one of several mason jars from a worn rucksack. Each jar was a mixture of gasoline, orange juice, powdered laundry detergent, and black gunpowder. Capped with a wick drilled into the golden lid. It was Medford’s personal firebomb cocktail. He and his clan of crankheads had parked at the end of an old logging trail on Jacque Bocart’s property. Tracked uphill damn near a mile. Bearing gifts. Sawed-off shotguns with the safety off. Fingers on the trigger. Buckshot in the chamber. Medford replayed how Hersey appeared in that hospital bed three days ago, eyes sewing-thread thin, outlined by the color of his meth-mouth complexion. Lips fragmented by ruts. Jagged marrow lined his gums like he’d tried to huff a stick of dynamite. But when he stuttered into Medford’s ear he sounded like a drunk who had Frenched a running chain saw. “J-J-J-Jacque B-B-Bocart d-d-did th-th-this t-t-to me-e-e, D-D-D-Daddy.”

  Medford’s black-braided hemp hair bounced against his spine as damp briars and weeds painted his scuffed combat boots. His four crankheads, Swartz, Orange Peel, Pine Box Willie, and Toad followed behind with a full moon guiding them through the night.

  They made it to the edge of a cornfield lined by three strands of braided barbed wire circling ceramic insulators connected to posts. Up on a hill beyond the fields Medford could see the kitchen lights of the old farmhouse. Swartz pulled a pair of rubber-insulated wire snips from his rucksack. Everyone watched the electric current flame blue as he severed the braided wire.

  The men spread out like the wingspan of a vulture homing in on its prey. Started into the maze of cricket-chirping vegetation. A quarter of the way in, the thick-gummed scent of cannabis burned their nostrils like cayenne pepper. Orange Peel and Pine Box Willie stepped toward the thick scent. Reached with their free hands. Medford huffed, “Wait, might be booby-trapped!”

  The tempered steel of a long-spring trap bit into the marrow of Orange Peel’s ankle. He screamed forward all the way to the ground. His index finger jerked. Buckshot from his .12-gauge peppered the darkness of vegetation. Silenced his pain.

  Pine Box Willie stepped down onto a two-by-six of rusted sixteen-penny nails that replaced the soles of his boots. Heated the insides of his socks with blood. He dropped his .12 gauge. Fell backwards. Medford reacted fast. Dropped his sawed-off pump. Hefted Pine Box’s outline while spitting, “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  Medford rode Pine Box to the ground in a bear hug from behind. Glanced over his shaved skull at Swartz in the September moonlight, who whispered to Pine Box, “This is gonna hurt.” Swartz ripped the board from Pine Box Willie’s foot.

  Jacque knew he could have killed Hersey if not for Abby telling him, “But I got away from him, Grandpa. I punched him just like you taught me on the bag.” He touched Hersey back. Gave him a beating. An eye for an eye.

  But even after three days everything still infected Jacque’s mind. He sat at the kitchen table taking in the bruises that fingerprinted the length of Abby’s arm, as she guided the red crayon into the empty space between the black outlines within the coloring book. Dock Boggs’s banjo on the radio picked out the tune of “Oh, Death.” Avis sat opposite Jacque, chain-smoking, her pencil frame tinted by chigger bites. A head of unwashed maple-colored hair and mushroomed features. Jacque shook his head. He knew what his only child had caused to her own and it bothered her not one damn bit.

  The phone rang and Jacque stood up from the table, stepped to the wall where it hung, and answered, “Yeah?”

  It was his brother-in-law Blaze, all excited. “Orange Peel’s little brother told Cross-Eyed Chucky that Medford and his crew are haulin’ ass over to your place, Jacque.”

  “Tonight?”

  “As we speak. They’re comin’ for you ’cause of what you did to Hersey.”

  Jacque eyed the locked-and-loaded 30-30 over his kitchen door. The cabinet drawer that held one of his pistols, a loaded Smith & Wesson 9 mm.

  “It’ll be their funeral.”

  Anna May came into the kitchen from the dining room, a hornet’s nest of hair wrapped upon her head, knowing whoever was phoning this late had bad news.

  And Blaze rattled, “Need me over there?”

  The light above the stove blinked once. Twice. And didn’t stop. Jacque knew they were either cutting the north side of the barbed electric fence or they were using a barrier to get over it. He knew they were coming.

  “They’re here. I’ll call when I’m done. You can help with getting rid of their remains.”

  He slammed the phone down. Grabbed his 30-30 from above the kitchen door. Pulled his 9 mm from the cabinet drawer, tucked it down his worn dungarees. Told Anna May, “Medford’s here. Grab the sixteen-gauge from above the living room door. Get a box of shells. Take Abby and Avis to the basement. Lock the door. Don’t unlock it until I come back. Anyone else comes, fill them with buckshot.”

  Shaking, Anna May asked, “What about Billy? We can call him.”

  Glancing at Abby, Jacque told Anna May, “This don’t concern Billy. Now get the shotgun and get downstairs.”

  Jacque stepped out the back door and into the yard. Followed the shadow of a tree’s leafy branches for cover. Stepped over the roots. Turned. Pressed his back against the jagged bark of the trunk. Stared out into the distance. Watching and listening for any sign of Medford and his crew. Then a shotgun blast sounded from his acreage of cornstalks, followed by a familiar voice.

  Jacque faced the direction from which the gunshot and cursing sounded. Smiled and kneeled to the damp ground. His heart pulsed in his fingertips as he thumbed the hammer of his 30-30 back. Fingered the trigger and scanned the edge of the field along with four other eyes.

  Hell came quick as a flame igniting dry pasture. Pine Box Willie came jack-legged limping. Set off the motion lights that hung from the phone poles at the corners of the field. Jacque parted the silence of the night with an explosion of gunfire that lit up Pine Box Willie’s side with an erupting flame. Jacque had hit the rucksack storing Medford’s firebomb cocktail. Pine Box Willie was a human torch screaming for his life. Jacque extinguished an empty shell. Rifled another round into Pine Box Willie. He dropped to the ground. Rolled around like electricity trappe
d in a hamster wheel, his pleas smoldering like the flames that had ignited his body.

  Swartz, Toad, and Medford erupted from the field with Civil War battle cries, pumping buckshot that nicked Jacque’s left shoulder, forcing him to drop his 30-30 to the earth. Son of a bitch.

  From the outer edges of darkness, behind the security lights, two cave-black cur hounds with vocal cords severed so they’d be unheard by trespassers came like a whisper in hell. Clamping tines into the marrow of Swartz’s and Toad’s calves. Stealing their wind. Sawed-offs were dropped. The curs rode Swartz and Toad into the ground, fighting and screaming. Worked their way up to their necks, making their vocal cords equal with the curs’.

  Jacque stepped from the light with a soiled left shoulder. Sprayed lead had nicked and dug into the old leather above his right eyebrow. He blinked blood. Drew his 9 mm. Aimed at Medford, whose boots tossed up earth behind him as he pulled his Walther P38 9 mm handgun from his belt line. In his other hand the firebomb cocktail. And each man came forward, fighting the recoil of the trigger pull until their clips were empty.

  Anna May locked the basement door. Followed the wooden steps to the bottom. Pulled the old rotary phone from the wall and dialed 911. Then the shooting started. Her heart exploded. She thumbed the safety of the 16-gauge into the unsafe position. And waited.

  Into the house with firearm drawn, lights above the stove like hazard lights, Marshal Hines’s voice bounced throughout the house with rushed breathing.

  “Anna May? It’s Billy Hines.”

  At the top of the steps. Behind the locked basement door she hid the trembling in her tone. “I’m here.”