Beast of the Field (4 page)

6. 

Sterno left the Mayor at a breakfast table, left the darkness of the hotel lobby for hard sun and hard wind of the late morning.  He started at one end of Main Street, followed it until it ended, crossed the street, came down the other sidewalk.  It was midday Saturday, and the carts, pickups and flat trucks were packing up to leave town for the farms.  Main Street, a bricked road, was the only non-dirt road in the town, as far as Sterno could tell.  The town itself was a tiny grid of four or five east-to-west streets and four to five north-to-south streets, sliced off through the north-east corner by the state road and through the southeast corner by the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad line.  A small and ornate station from the boom days of passenger travel sat next to the tracks alongside a grain elevator twenty times its size.   Tall shade trees stood in front of tall houses on the residential lanes, while on the parallel streets of Main and Elm ladies' boutiques, a bakery, a restaurant, a brown-bricked grocer, a hardware store, a drug store, a post office, a land office and a farm agency mingled with a blacksmith shop, a sawmill, horse stables and a Ford garage and filling station.  The oversized Old Price Hotel, with its powder-blue bricks and tall windows, was the town's second largest structure, next only to a naked wood barn on the edge of town that could house two of the hotels.   Telephone and telegraph wires ran thick and black with the oaks along the street, in spans and stacks numerous enough to cast the walks in shade.  At the east end of Main, where the shops left off and the fields started, there was a new looking wooden billboard with the words "Welcome Home To Price, Kansas – A One Hundred Per Cent American Town!" 

The citizens of Price were of a handsome and hale Christian stock, same as he'd seen in many of these of former frontier towns.  They seemed thrifty and resourceful.  Many of them seemed to have completed at least eighth grade.  Their stores held magazines and newspapers from all over the country, which in one case, in the general store, were opened by one patron and read to whomever happened to be in or near the store.  They had opinions of President Harding, Babe Ruth and Gloria Swanson.  They spoke well enough—most of them—and were knowledgeable of events happening in the world around them and had opinions on these too.  The one thing about which they each and all seemed completely ignorant and had no opinion whatsoever was what happened in their own town on the night of May 1, 1922.

"We didn't see a thing," said a lumber dealer, Fleming.  He was speaking for the men in suspenders and hats who leaned on various pieces of furniture and stacks of lumber in the corner of his warehouse, where he kept a desk.  "Ask around, mister.  Nobody saw a thing.  Believe you me, we all talked about it, we all asked about it.  We was every one of us either in our own cellars or in the town cellar at the dance barn.  Ask around and you'll see, no one saw a thing."

Sterno did just that, and it was the same story every time.  We were in the cellar.  We were waiting out the storm.  We couldn't possibly have seen a thing.

The only one of them who saw anything at all was a man named Huber, the owner of the local Ford garage, a large man with ears and a nose like red cauliflower, ruined by the sun, most likely, before he learned a trade that brought him indoors.  "Yessir, I saw Tommy.  Hell, I's probably the last person to see him alive.  Boy was it ever raining.  Wind blowing to beat the band."

"This was outside, then. 
Outside the barn."

"Yessir.
   Me and my boy were pushing that old Packard of Stu Aaronson's into the barn.  The old man was all up in a panic about that old piece-of-shit car."

"I was told it backfired, and scared the horse.  Did you hear a
backfire."

"A backfire?
  You mean from the car?"  Huber stared off through the window of his filling station.  Thinking back took some of the power of his voice from him.  "Hell…maybe.  It was running, I remember that.  We had the engine idling, but the gears weren't working, so's me and the boy had to push it.  It might of backfired.  Hell, Mister, it's hard to tell—I don't think I can rightly say.  When a twister comes to town, that twister is the only thing in town."

"Did it appear to you he had been drinking?"

Huber chuckled and wiped a bead of froth from his lip.  "Hell, mister," he said.

Sterno sighed at this comment, thought of defense lawyers standing over these half-drunk, in-the-dark townsfolk of Price, Kansas.  It was enough to cause him to give up, turn around and go home; but he had one more question for Mr. Huber, thus far his sole witness to the events.  "Which way was Tommy heading when you saw him leave?"

"'Which way?'  Mister.  Whered'ya think he was going, berry picking?  That boy took off up the road, the highway, I mean.  He was going home.  He was keeping that family together, you know.  With the old man all gimpy from that machine accident and the other brother half-gone from the war."

This was the extent of the eyewitness accounts of the evening of May 1, 1922, just over four months ago.  Other than this it was the same everywhere he went:  There was a twister, mister.  We
was in the dark, mister.  We didn’t see a thing, mister.

And Charlie Sterno was getting thirsty.

*

Now in his car, Sterno followed Main Street.  It ran east of town,
then curved to the north.  At the end of the curve Sterno saw the big barn they call the "dance barn," where the people of Hope County gathered to celebrate harvest, the thaw, whatever else there was to be happy about around here.  The barn was among the biggest he had ever seen.  A crew of workers was on the roof, replacing shingles lost in the storm last May, Sterno guessed.  Sterno left his car running about a hundred feet from the barn, walked to the barn and slid open one of the giant bay doors to peer into the darkness inside.  Nothing to see, really.  Mostly, he wanted to get close to his thoughts.

Good Christ, those photos, Sterno thought, squinting into the distance.  The doctor had been wrong:  Sterno had never seen anything like them. 

His readyrolls were gone, so he opened a new pouch of tobacco, rolled and smoked a cigarette while he strolled back to his car.  He leaned against the back fender, smoking.  Something was bugging him, but he couldn’t get in front of him.

Every minute or so he would raise his head from the ground to squint at a passing wagon or a car on the road.  When he had finished his cigarette he flicked the butt away.

Something about those pictures.  Or maybe that “sheriff” of theirs.  Something didn’t feel right. 

He got back into his car.  Where the highroad ended and the country road began, driving became hard work.  He came out of the ruts and nearly went off the road twice, once from the wind, once from the road.  Surely, there were enough bumps in this road to send a fellow off his wagon, a
drunk fellow, driving through a storm wind.

He turned into Donnan's gate.  The Model T jumped and coughed to a stop in front of the barn.  He rolled his shoulders, stretched off the drive while Jumpy howled at him from the porch.  The men were in the field; he watched
Junior slap a mule hard enough to put air under its hind hooves.  Mrs. Donnan was the middle of the garden rows, behind the house on the other side of the men.  The girl was nowhere to be seen.

Sterno felt a nudge at the lower part of his rear end.  He turned to find Jumpy sniffing at him, tail waving behind him like an arm.  He moved a hand over the dog’s head, pushed him away.  He rolled and lit a cigarette, staring at a huge mound of rock sticking four feet out of the ground in the middle of the field south of the
house .

“That’s the God Rock,” she said, startling him.  The voice was coming from inside the barn, but Sterno couldn’t see the girl.  “We call it the God Rock because Mother says God put that rock in the middle of that field for a reason, so Pa might as well forget about moving it or blowing it out of there and get used to plowing around it.”

The tall, heavy bay door slid open enough to show her face.  She used a shoulder to open the door a few more feet, led a brown-black filly out by the halter.  She was a natural with the horse.  It followed her to a fenced field next to the barn.  She slapped its hind end and sent it lunging out into the grass.

“So what’s the reason?” Sterno asked. 
“For the rock.”

She stared at him, shaking her head slightly.  “There aint no goddamn reason for the rock, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.  Are you gonna keep smoking your tobacco or are you gonna start chewin’ it like everyone else?”  

Sterno finished his cigarette, flicked it into the air to be pulled away in sparking embers by the wind of the high sun.

“Hellfire!
  You gonna to burn the whole state down!”

“Don’t you have some chores or something to do, young lady?”

“Horseshit,” she said.  She was pushing at the bay door again, and did so with some anger.  "You gonna to help me or aint ya?"

"With what?"

"Pulling this buggy out for you to get a good look at it.  What'd you think I meant?"

Sterno stood behind her, pushed with her until the barn door was opened all the way.  Two black speckled hens leapt, squawked, fluttered out at their feet.  The girl was inside with one side of the singletree in her hand before the second chicken had hit the ground.  She pulled at it as though she fully intended to roll the buggy out by herself.

"They’re all full of shit, I tell you.  Every goddamned one of them.  High-piled, stinking horseshit, if you ask me."

“Who’s that?”

“Everyone,” she said, answering another stupid question.

Sterno knew now whose face he had seen at the window to the sheriff’s office. 
A born snoop, just like himself.  "Here," he said.  He took the other side of the singletree and like this the buggy rolled out into the sunlight.  Millie panted in silence next to him.

"Even the mayor?"

"The mayor’s just the mayor, Mr. Sterno.  He don't know any better than to think what all those rednecks at that garage tell him to think."

"You think that?"

"That's far enough, now drop it.  Yes, I do think that.  Hell, you met him, the man's too dang nice to be smart."

This made Sterno bark once in laughter.  It had been so long that he didn't even recognize the sound of it.  The scowl on her upturned face cut off the merriment.

"Now lookit here, mister.  Lookit this buggy.  Lookit it good.  You tell me, can a grown man—which is what Tommy was, by the way, not some 'boy' like that no-star sheriff kept saying—tell me how a grown man can fall off the front side of a buggy and get caught up in it the way we found Tommy.  Did you go see Doc Rozen-zeeg's photos, or didn't ya?”

“I saw them.”

“Then you saw there’s no goddamn way for anyone to get hung up in a buggy that way, the way they say.  Even if you’re the clumsiest sonbitch’t ever put an ass in the seat of a buggy—and Tommy wasn’t that, not even close.  So go ahead,” she said, motioning to the buggy.  “Take your time."

The buggy was beat up a good bit.  The canopy was gone from the metal frame, likely a result of the storm, the seat was falling off its brace and some of the buckboard slats had come off the sides of the bed.  Sterno got on his haunches and studied the front axle of the buggy.  He had to admit, it would be a tight fit. 

"That Doctor Rosenzweig thinks he grabbed on to that reach bar there running to the back and hooked his legs over the axle."

"He didn't grab
no reach bar.  He didn’t have no grease or no marks on his hands.  Did you think of that?"

Sterno sighed:  he hadn’t.

He walked around the buggy, then hiked up a foot to the long step and lifted himself into the car.  The girl watched him quietly.  He leaned over the dash rail, so far over he had to hook the back of his shoe under the seat to keep from falling.  From this angle Sterno was just inches from the spring bars that ran between the carriage deck and the axle.  A pretty damn difficult feat of acrobatics, he thought.  Drunk or no, and at full speed. 

The girl read his mind again.  "I told you it's impossible."

He leapt down from the buggy.  "Not ‘impossible.’  Here," he said, handing Millie his fedora.  She put it directly onto her head and tipped it back, still squinting up one eye under the sun at him.  He got down on the dirt under the buggy, slid himself around so that his head faced the rear of the wagon and his toes the front.  The body of the buggy was three feet off the ground.  Lots a room for a man to hang in without bumping himself on the road.

He grabbed the center reach bar like a baseball bat.  Keeping only the bottoms of his feet still in contact with the dirt, he pulled himself to the bar and held himself there as long as he could: just under two minutes.

"How about that?" he mumbled to himself.

"How about what?"
Millie Donnan said.

"Nothing."

Two minutes is plenty of time for a man to unspook his own animal, he thought.  Now come on, Charlie.  You get a case in front of you and you all of the sudden don't want to be a detective.  Well good, go home and mope around the office some more.  Crack the seal off another bottle.