Crimes in Southern Indiana Read online

  Her words were honest.

  He apologized and drove home, knowing he’d met his future wife.

  Every day after work, with his face stained by sweat and sawdust peppered in his hair like lice, he’d see her walking. And every day he’d ask her if she needed a lift. He told her someone as easy on the eyes as she was shouldn’t have to walk, let alone work. And she told him to mind his own, as he could find cleanliness with a bit of bristle lathered by lye. And he laughed at the directness of her tongue.

  But finally she broke down, and he gave her a ride. She gave her name: Elizabeth Slade. Like a felon ignoring the wanted posters hanging from the post office walls of a town, Deets threw caution to the wind, asked her out for lunch. She was hesitant at first. Then she accepted. They had coffee and apple pie at Jocko’s Diner on the corner of town, where she told him she worked at Arpac, the local poultry slaughterhouse, slicing the necks of chickens. He questioned how something so fragile with beauty could earn a wage doing something so violent. And she explained it was the only decent-paying job for a woman with cutlery skills.

  One date led to another until he visited her parents to ask permission to marry Mr. and Mrs. Slade’s daughter. The Slades had not seen her this happy since she was a child, so they gave their blessing to Deets, as did his own parents, and he proposed. She moved in with him, living in the log cabin he’d built by hand from the ground up on some fifty acres. He told her he’d plenty of money. There was no need for her to work if she didn’t want to. So she gave her notice to Arpac, and they consummated their vows two weeks later.

  In five years they had a bond that most marriages didn’t share even after three kids and twenty years of loyalty. They’d no children, only the bliss they found in each other.

  He’d work during the day, coming home some evenings to help her in the garden they planted every summer. Even with all the work she did—picking and breaking beans, shucking ears of corn, digging potatoes and onions, all of the canning for winter—how her hands felt against his flesh. Soft as a baby deer’s tongue, the warmth of innocence.

  Her shoulder-length locks were like her eyes, stained like a walnut, and her flesh was colored by the sun as she worked in the garden, where she went barefoot in cut-off jeans and one of his old worn-out Hanes T-shirts tainted by the heat from a day’s worth of work.

  Other evenings after work he hunted to keep their freezer full of meat. Used the double-barrel .12-gauge his granddad had left him. It had a firing pin that sometimes misfired on the right barrel. All one had to do was pull the hammer back and try again.

  But it was that one evening he came into the cabin with several rabbits gutted and skinned, ready to soak in salt-water, that he found her on the kitchen floor. Meeting her cheek’s flesh with the back of his hand, he discovered her dampness from a fever. As if he had stepped into a hornets’ nest, Deets was stung by a swelling panic as he phoned Dr. Brockman for a house call. Then he undressed Elizabeth and placed her in their bathtub. She didn’t agree with standard medication nor the county hospital. But she did agree with the old ways. It was how her parents raised her. Lye for soap to wash off the sawdust and sweat of the factory. A hot toddy sipped to break the mucus of a head or chest cold. Bacon for a bee sting until the stinger showed enough to be tweezed free from the flesh. Fresh-squeezed tomato pulp with canned pickle juice and a shot of Everclear to nurse a hangover. And if she had a hound who’d not received his vaccination quick enough but instead acquired parvo, she’d end his suffering by placing the barrel of a gun to his skull to prepare him for burial. She’d helped her daddy do it more than once.

  Deets had been raised by the same old ways. He crushed large squares of ice and packed them into the bath. He held warm Jell-O in a coffee cup to her lips to help keep her hydrated and break the fever. The fever that would last longer than the labor of a child. Days, not hours.

  At first he feared her brain would be damaged. He’d heard the stories his mother had told him as a child, men and women whose fevers weren’t broken quickly enough, held for too long, their brains frying like the rabbits he coated with buttermilk to stick to the wheat flour, then placed into a skillet of lard and fried to a crisp.

  Once her fever broke, she was unable to remember names and faces, places and times. Her speech was slurred for a while, as though her jaws had been pistol-whipped by the butt of a .38.

  But Brockman prescribed his vitamins and assured Deets that Elizabeth would recover. And as the days added up on the calendar, she gradually returned to being the same woman he’d married some years before.

  But what he later told himself was that he shouldn’t have trusted him with her. Shouldn’t have trusted Brockman with his wife. But he had.

  The woman talking to Dispatch came out onto the sidewalk, wobbled to a pace, disappeared down past the Dollar Store, around the corner past the bank. But the marshal hadn’t shown up. He was what Deets’s daddy would have referred to as so poke-ass he was probably late for his own conception.

  But he’d wait. One thing Deets had was time. He’d passed through so many towns he couldn’t remember if this was his tenth town or his twentieth job. They were all the same. What he could remember were the four characteristics that built a small town: a post office, a sheriff or marshal’s station, a bank, and a graveyard. He’d always check the post office, pulling the wanted posters of a man who haunted him, collecting them from each and every town. An identity that wouldn’t let him forget. That wouldn’t let him start over.

  By day he’d pass the bank, the marshal’s station, and at night he’d walk the graveyards, wondering how the dead had passed. By accident, sickness, or the hands of their loved ones, their kin.

  He’d been down as far south as Greenville, Alabama. Traveled back through Dayton, Tennessee. Manchester, Milan, and Dyersburg. Crossed over into Poplar Bluff and Garwood, Missouri. But he’d backtracked over the years through Illinois, Indiana, and back into Kentucky. Through Owensboro, Elizabethtown, Bardstown, Mount Sterling, traveling into the polarization of the hills. Traveling to Morehead, then back into Pine Ridge, Campton, Jackson, Hazard. And Whitesburg, where everybody knew your kin’s family tree, fished with dynamite, and hunted with a double-barrel .12-gauge. Your daddy either owned a lot of land or worked a coal mine in a surrounding county like Harlan that paid well. You always attended church on Sunday, and no matter how much you did or didn’t contribute to the offering plate, it was a place where people lived a simple and straightforward life. And it was here that Deets realized he’d traveled so long he’d forgotten who he was, and what he was running from.

  From town to town some had heard the story. Had read it in the papers if they could read or heard it on the television if they owned one with an antenna. Had seen the features of the young man he once was, clean-shaven and baby-faced, now covered by age, the look of tires run on back-road gravel, blanketed by remorse and regret that had left his features thick with the shadows of barbed-wire whisker and uneven locks of hair. His mane, coarse as a horse’s tail, braided down his spine. The person on those posters on the passenger’s seat and the man who collected them were two identities with the same torment.

  Deets sat fighting the tears of memory. He wiped snot on his flannel sleeve with one hand while the other pulled a fresh Pall Mall from his pack, then placed it unlit onto his lips as he thought. He should have seen it, acknowledged its presence. Her love was a cripple fighting frostbite. As her feeling was permanently lost, all he could do was watch, because there was no cure for frostbite.

  He should have noted her appetite disappearing along with the meals she no longer prepared, the garden she no longer kept, beans no longer broken, corn no longer shucked, potatoes no longer dug.

  Everything gone to waste. Spoiled. She said she felt too weak. Said she was too tired or she lost track of time. That daylight was too short.

  That’s what she’d told him after that first discovery of her slip on the kitchen floor and the fever that followed. And as they la
y in bed at night while he ran his hands over her warm outline, tracing her beauty, her words exchanged with his, how she’d maybe try tomorrow, she just needed her rest, to lie with him, to lie with this shade of skin. This man. Her husband.

  But then he came home from the factory one evening, found her feeling weak on the couch, as she’d discovered another slip. A jarring of her brain. She’d crawled to the phone and called Brockman, who said it was probably her blood sugar. But after that more stumbles followed as her balance was no better than a square dancer with a crooked limb or a clubfoot. She’d lost her posture, her rhythm, and her balance when moving across the cabin’s hardwood floor, no longer recognizing the upright position.

  Deets trusted Brockman; so did Elizabeth. But then came her confusion and uncontrolled outbursts of emotion. She believed one of her ears was bigger than the other. She asked him to look. To compare. To see what she’d seen in the bathroom mirror every morning. During simple conversations she’d cry inconsolably about the beauty of the day or how the outside air felt against her features, dried the tears that shadowed her cheek line. He’d see nothing, and like her, he understood even less.

  And the visits from Brockman and his vitamin treatments began to add up. They had become similar to visits from the Reaper—your soul was the toll and all you could do was wait.

  Finally Deets had lost his trust in Brockman and his vitamin treatments. He forced Elizabeth into his Scout, made a trip to the county hospital, where he explained her fever, her stumbles and tumbles, along with her confusion over the ear and her emotional outbursts. They admitted her. Took X-rays. Ran blood tests. Discovered an imbalance in her mind that was so far beyond treatable it was incurable. Her mind had fermented into soil that enriched a tiny crop of malignant ginseng spreading and rooting in her brain.

  Aft erward Deets asked himself what he had done, trusting Brockman, waiting too long, putting it off. He blamed himself.

  What she had would deteriorate her to a plot of loose earth in six months or less. And it began tearing her numbers from the calendar, stealing what days she had left, taking with it the bond they once shared. He’d come home from work trying to comfort her, wanting to lie with her in bed, feel the warmth of her outline next to his. Wanting to bathe her and cook and feed her. He hoped for a miracle, but she’d given up on what he couldn’t let go of. She’d mumble pleas, telling him she was like a hound with parvo, she was suffering, she’d lost her quality of life and needed to be put down. It was a choice a husband didn’t want to hear about, let alone carry out.

  Now, seated in his Scout, he remembered that scent as he flicked his Zippo lighter. It was that familiar sparking of the flint, so identical, coaling his Pall Mall. Only that day, entering the home, it was like a Zippo that wouldn’t light. That flint being flicked over and over without any fuel. No butane, just the spark of sulfur. He remembered coming home early, wanting to surprise her with flowers. And there sat Dr. Brockman’s Cadillac in the driveway. With a sprinter’s heart, Deets dropped the flowers, entered their home. The slamming of the wooden screen door, hinges squeaking, needing oil, drowned out the loud blast, leaving only that aftereffect in the air. A scent that he followed through their home into the bedroom. He found Brockman sitting in a chair next to their bed, blocking his view of Elizabeth. He grabbed the doctor’s shoulder, spun him around, revealing what he hadn’t noticed at first, that what had stained the walls had stained the bed. It was the stain of what was missing—part of his wife, who was somehow still alive, her hands fumbling with the doctor’s hand as if playing a clarinet, the hand that had either helped her hold the double-barrel .12-gauge to her mouth or tried to stop her from pulling the trigger that had taken the right side of her jaw. Had they planned this? Or like Deets, had the doctor walked in on the attempt?

  Weak, her hands trembled and slid, from her failed attempt to end the suffering. Her suicide. Something Deets would never accept.

  She grunted, gargling and blowing bubbles, as her thumbs tried to push the hammer back on that misfiring pin on the right side. Adrenaline took over, and Deets lost control of his temper, unleashed a fit of rage that led to both of his hands becoming a vise around the old doctor’s windpipe. Brockman lost his grip on the shotgun as Deets squeezed until he had the doctor on the floor, slamming his skull to the hardwood surface, screaming, “What have you done, what have you done?”

  And by the time he’d realized what he’d done, the old doctor was limp in his grip but his wife was still alive, trying to produce syllables with her split tongue and chipped teeth, her complexion half removed. And seeing all of this, he’d no other choice.

  That discomforting warmth of a memory, of that final day, was what accompanied Deets, haunted him in every town and every motel room or rented farmhouse’s bed. He could strip the sentiments, but still the guilt of his actions was there. Rooted in his mind. An incurable disease still pricking his conscience after all the time passed, all the distance traveled. What he missed most were her words, which once formed her outline next to his. That warmth of completion, now gone.

  Watching the marshal enter the station, Deets stubbed out the cigarette in the Scout’s ashtray and grabbed from the passenger seat the head shots of a wanted man. The history that wouldn’t allow him to run or hide anymore.

  With the scent of fresh-brewed coffee and a hint of Old Forester thick in the marshal’s office, Deets threw the head shots onto the desk. Sipping his coffee, the marshal smacked his lips, savoring the caffeine and bourbon with a late-night smile, and asked Deets, “Whatcha got there?” He removed the twine, unrolling the head shots, the wanted posters that Deets had collected from all the small-town post offices over the years.

  Deets told the marshal, just up Highway 135, five years ago in the small town of Corydon, a husband walked into his home, walked in on another man helping to hold a shotgun for the husband’s ailing wife. What he believed was the unfinished suicide of his wife. The name of the man who held the gun was Dr. Brockman. And in a fit of rage, the husband murdered the doctor with his bare hands. The husband was then left with his wife, whose face had been partially removed on her right side, as one of the shotgun’s barrels had misfired. The husband didn’t murder his wife, but he’d no choice with his wife’s mutilated profile. She had reinforced her pain rather than eliminating it. And swallowing the lump in his throat, the husband placed a pillow over her face, hiding what was left of her, and helped her hold the shotgun, helped her push the hammer back, felt the trembling of her hand atop his, guiding his hand to the trigger, hooking it. He turned his head away from her, feeling her trembling and pressing his finger until his shoulder buckled and her trembling ended. The wife destroyed the tiny ginseng root in her brain that didn’t offer energy but robbed her of it. The husband buried his wife in the garden that she once grew, but left the doctor limp and lifeless on the bedroom floor. He then packed up and ran away from what he had done. The partner he’d lost. Traveled from one small town to the next, searching for the identity of Deets Merritt. The surname of a deceased man he’d come across in a small Tennessee town’s obituaries. He couldn’t forget who he really was, Scoot McCutchen, the wanted man whose head shots the marshal was holding.

  The marshal, whom everyone in the town of Mauckport called “Mac,” took several deep breaths and laid the head shots back on his desk, pulled a Lucky Strike from his pack, lit it with a match, and blew smoke, muttering to Scoot, “After all these damn years of running, you gotta trot in here and turn yourself in.”

  Mac looked Scoot dead in his eyes and told him, “Guilt’s a heavy package for a man to carry. It’s wrapped by all the wrongs a man’ll do, which are really lessons he learns by living life so he don’t do them no more.” He told Scoot he knew his story. Had the wanted posters. The all-points bulletins. Had read in the papers about how his wife’s body was exhumed. How the authorities contacted her parents, Scoot’s in-laws, so they could identify what they thought was Elizabeth. Aft erward they placed her back the
same way they found her. It was how her family believed. The old ways. Made from the earth, returned to the earth. And they placed a stone over her mound. But he didn’t know where they had buried the doctor, only that they auctioned his car, seeing as how he had no next of kin.

  The marshal then spoke about the letter left behind by the wife.

  Scoot said, “A letter?”

  In all the places he’d been, all the stories he’d overheard in passing through towns and truck stops, he’d never heard about any damn letter.

  Nodding, the marshal told him there was a letter detailing how she’d hinted to her husband but knew he wouldn’t do it for her, put her down like a hound with parvo, put her out of her misery. How she’d decided to try and do it her damn self or that she might ask her doctor to help her do it. He told Scoot he knew, because he knew how much he loved his own wife, loved her more than the beauty that God and nature creates and destroys, more than the two kids he and his wife brought into this world, one by one, to carry on their bloodline. Now, if his wife had gone through what Scoot’s did, Lord, what with all of that suffering, knowing every damn day was a countdown to her last, he’d want to make the most of it, not cut ’er short. So to come home, see some man helping her to kill herself, well, he’d have done the same damn thing, maybe worse.

  What the marshal wanted was to break the oath he’d sworn to uphold. To hold the head shots over the trash can next to his desk, fire a match, light a corner of the head shots, and tell Scoot that as long as he was the marshal Scoot’s identity was safe with him. Right or wrong, the man had suffered enough. But he knew that was no option for Scoot.

  To Scoot the letter made little difference now as he emptied his pockets and the marshal led him to a holding cell, locked him in behind the steel bars. He didn’t feel the springs of the cell’s mattress, but he felt the guilt he’d carried over the passing years dissipate as he awaited his punishment, his penance.