Crimes in Southern Indiana Page 7

  “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.

  The Accident

  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 r
eally 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.

  They probably want to borrow Stanley’s new mower. Carl, he lives across the street. He’s the reason Stanley bought a new mower. Aft er Carl borrowed his old mower, he didn’t check the oil and burned the mower up. Blew it up, actually. Then Carl borrowed the weed eater. Ran the choke full throttle. Sounded similar to Leatherface sawing up a corpse in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Caught it on fire. Smoked the entire neighborhood. Just because a person’s deaf doesn’t mean they’re dumb. The entire neighborhood smelled the smoke. Someone even called the fire department. A week later Carl fell asleep smoking a cigarette and burned his back porch down.

  Now if a person lives in this neighborhood they are considered a “high risk” on their homeowner’s insurance policy. That Carl, he’s a son of a bitch.

  To Stanley, Brent looks like an enormous firefly leading his swarm of other fireflies with their big Maglites, walking from their yards to Stanley’s.

  Stanley doesn’t have time for small talk, his wife is missing and he has a yard to mow. Things to do. To figure out.

  Brent steps away from the pack, starts shining his Maglite in Stanley’s eyes. The mower is idling and Stanley thinks, He’s wasting my time.
The light must be a halogen, all Stanley can see is a silhouette. His outline.

  “Hey,” Stanley says, “if you want to help, follow me with the light so I can see better.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” Brent asks.

  Stanley shakes his head, thinking, This Brent is one guy you do not want as your charades partner. And Stanley says, “Well, I’m not testing my allergies. What does it look like, I’m mowing my lawn.”

  “Stanley,” Brent says, “it’s two in the morning and people are trying to sleep.”

  “Oh, I see, now everybody else’s life is more important than mine.”

  Distancing himself from Brent and the other neighbors, the mower still running, one step is no longer a step, it’s a slip. A fall. With his foot under the mower what he experiences is one swipe of pain followed by a feeling of stupefaction. With the operator-presence control bar tied down so he doesn’t have to hold it all the time and the drive-control lever in the downward position, the lawn mower proceeds forward. Mowing the lawn without Stanley. It’s on autopilot.

  Looking down at his foot, everything is blue, green, and yellow spots surrounded by black mass. Brent, standing above him—at least he thinks it’s Brent—blinding Stanley with the Maglite.

  Stanley says, “Get that damn light out of my face.”

  His ass is wet with dew, he’s blinking his eyes trying to see the severed pieces of his shoe. His toes cut, not off but close to it. His foot is wet and warm. Brent is touching Stanley’s shoulder and he says, “Stay calm.”

  Stanley says, “I’m fine, just quit touching me.”

  Stanley can hear the mower in another yard. Mowing someone else’s lawn. And to think he was nearly finished.

  “Are you all right?” Brent asks.

  Stanley tells him, “Aside from maybe losing my toes and not knowing where my wife is at, sure, I enjoy sitting here like a gimp. Spending quality time with my nosy neighbors.”