Plains Crazy Page 6

  Heather English was a major Trekkie. For as long as she could remember, she had followed the adventures of the Star Trek crews who boldly went where no one had gone before. When the character Seven of Nine appeared on Star Trek Voyager about the same time a second Heather came into her life, the answer to their name problem became immediately clear. It didn’t hurt that Seven of Nine was sexy and dangerous, qualities both Heathers secretly craved. Heather English became One of Two, or One, for short. She got to be One because she was the first Heather in the English household and the person who came up with the solution. Two hadn’t objected. She was glad to have a place to live and people who wanted her to live with them.

  “Anybody else up?” One asked, still rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. Like most teens, they were heavy sleepers when they had the chance. This morning, on their last weekend at home between spring semester and summer school, it had saved them from discovering that sex, especially three times before breakfast, wasn’t something exclusively reserved for their generation.

  Her sister, Two, was picking out her wardrobe for the day—a western shirt, silver and turquoise jewelry, and a pair of tight jeans to tuck in her boots. There was a guy who would be home from KU this weekend whom Heather knew Two would enjoy pleasing with her selections—or teasing, depending on her mood.

  “You kidding?” Two asked, glancing at the clock. “When was the last time Judy slept until ten?” She called their parents Judy and Englishman. One was still in the habit of using Mom and Dad. “And Englishman was going in early for Buffalo Springs Day. I’m sure he’s been at work for hours.”

  “I don’t think Mom’s home,” One observed. She was gathering her own outfit. Having grown up a country girl, she was less comfortable looking the part. She went with shorts and sneakers and one of those bare midriff blouses that were so popular with the guys. She wasn’t dressing for anyone special, but lots of boys she’d dated, or wanted to date, would be home for the celebration.

  “Mom would have roused us at least an hour ago.” She padded across the carpet to the hall door, opened it, and did what teenagers usually do when they want something. “Mom?” she shouted. The house remained quiet.

  She went down the hall. Two followed right behind her, both girls carrying their clothes instead of wearing them. They slept in super-sized tee shirts, One’s bearing a Blue Dragon logo, Two’s advertising a seed company. “Anybody home?” One called.

  Nobody was.

  “I wonder if Mom left us breakfast.” Judy had done so regularly while they were in high school and had continued the habit when they came home from college for weekends and holidays. As far as Judy was concerned, they were still kids—too young for most of the things they wanted to do. Heather and her sister had become passionate advocates of their independence, except when it came to preparing meals.

  One started down the stairs toward the living room. Two left her clothing in a pile beside the banister across from the bathroom and followed. Squirming into tight jeans was best dealt with after breakfast.

  “What this?” One had just spotted the suitcases by the door.

  “Looks like someone’s going on a trip,” Two said. “You suppose it’s us?”

  She joined her sister and examined the unfamiliar luggage. Their parents hadn’t been anywhere requiring suitcases in years. “Jeez,” Two said. “I know they fight and Judy threatens to kick him out from time to time, but I never thought she’d kick him out far enough to need this.”

  “Ohmygod!” One said, looking at the passport. “I didn’t even know Dad had one of these. He hasn’t been out of the country since he was in Vietnam.”

  “I’ll bet Judy’s been making him renew it,” Two said. “You know how much she wants to travel.”

  “But why would he be going now?”

  Two shook her head. “And more important, why wouldn’t someone have told us?”

  ***

  Why stick a deposit inside a big duct-taped envelope? Then, when it didn’t fit into the slot to the deposit box, leave it there so anyone who came along could swipe it? Judy didn’t get much time to puzzle over these questions. The lock on the front door to the bank clicked behind her.

  It was a glorious day outside, middle seventies, light breeze, popcorn clouds drifting across a sky almost as blue as Englishman’s eyes. Inside, it was cold and dry. They were running the air conditioning, filtering out all those spring scents, sanitizing it. Inside, she decided, it smelled like money.

  The teller took her time getting back to her window after unlocking the door. She was paying more attention to a piece of paper she was reading than to Judy.

  Judy knew the teller, though not well. The woman’s daughter had been a problem student and Judy had been forced to call the teller and her husband in on several occasions in search of help or clues. The clues were obvious. Denial appeared to have been a dominant gene in both parents.

  Judy couldn’t remember her name at the moment and it didn’t matter. The woman must have remembered her, though, and decided, in this minor role reversal in which she was in charge, to make Judy pay for those visits to the vice principal’s office. She forced Judy to stand and wait in front of her counter for a few extra moments as she reread that sheet of paper over and over again.

  “Here,” Judy finally said. When the woman looked up, Judy handed her the duct-taped envelope. If this was someone’s deposit, she needed to pass it along for proper handling. “Do you know what this is?”

  The woman’s eyes got big. Maybe some elderly farmer who had spent too many years inhaling insecticides and herbicides preferred to make his deposits this way. Silly, because the result looked like something illegal—a packet of drugs, or even a letter bomb. Only this was Buffalo Springs. There were plenty of screwballs here, but none of them screwy enough to stuff drugs or a bomb in the bank’s night deposit. She felt sure of that because Mad Dog was her brother-in-law. She didn’t have to look far for an example.

  “What do you want?” The teller wasn’t even pretending to be polite. Okay, Judy already had plenty of things to be testy about this morning. She was ready to give as good as she got.

  “Money, of course.”

  “Of course,” the woman agreed. She opened her cash drawer and began pulling out a stack of bills.

  “I only want hundreds,” Judy told her. “Fifty of them.”

  “Yes,” the woman said. She reached into another compartment and pulled out a stack of hundred dollar bills and handed it to Judy without counting them. “Here, take them and go.”

  Judy wasn’t sure there was $5000 there. She picked up the stack and began counting. There was more than $5000. She stopped when she got to fifty and pushed the rest back. “Mistake like that could ruin your day,” Judy told her. Rude was one thing, incompetent, something else. “Let me speak to the manager.”

  There was a little hall behind the tellers’ counter off which several offices opened.

  “Yes, I’ll go get Mr. Brown for you,” the woman said, and practically ran into it.

  Judy waited. She had worked way too hard to put that money away. Then this rude bitch wasn’t even capable of counting it accurately. Come to think of it, she hadn’t asked Judy to sign a withdrawal slip or provided a receipt for the transaction. The woman disappeared through a door at the end of the hall and slammed it behind her.

  Judy was steaming by now. And the woman hadn’t taken the duct-taped envelope either. It was just sitting there, on the counter, along with a couple of stacks of bills. Judy didn’t want to cost the woman her job, but there was simply no excuse for behavior like this. She stood and drummed her fingers on the counter top and waited for Mr. Brown. And waited. And waited some more.

  After a couple of minutes, she’d had it. She would tell Englishman about this. Get him to take care of it. Or Deputy Parker, maybe, since she didn’t want Englishman investigating more weird behavior today. She leaned over the counter and stuffed the extra cash into the open teller’s drawer. She wasn
’t sure whether she got the bills in the right slots, but at least they would be out of sight if someone else wandered in while the teller’s window was unattended. She dropped the envelope in there too. If it was full of cash, it shouldn’t be left lying about.

  She slammed the drawer closed, stuffed her fifty one-hundred-dollar bills into her fanny pack, paused to glare up at the little camera that recorded every transaction in the Benteen County Farmers & Merchants Bank, and stomped out.

  The street was, surprise, empty. She got on her bike and started burning off her anger in an effort to calm down enough for her next errand. She was half a block short of Main when the bank did an imitation of Mount St. Helens. She almost crashed getting the bike stopped and turning around to see what had exploded. Clouds of smoke belched from the bank and filled the sky with something that looked like dry leaves, rectangular dry leaves—the greenback variety.

  ***

  The sheriff thought Bud Stone looked like he belonged in one of those lodges in that circle out on the prairie. The man had the cheekbones for it, and the complexion. His skin was weathered and wrinkled, but every wrinkle had probably been earned mastering an environment just like this one. His dark eyes seemed to see through the trucks and trailers and RVs, through the artificial windrows and fence lines beyond, even past the occasional distant elevator right back to a short-grass prairie filled with the great herds—a place he and those lodges belonged.

  Stone had changed into blue jeans and a light cotton shirt with a western cut in a bright floral pattern. His boots had pointed toes, but no fancy stitching. He wore a baseball cap with an embroidered patch that read LUCKY STAR CASINO, and his gray braids hung neatly over both shoulders. He sat in a picnic chair under an awning beside one of the RVs and sipped a cup of coffee. The sheriff took the chair next to him.

  “Mr. Stone,” the sheriff said. “My deputy tells me you have a rotten alibi or a twisted sense of humor.”

  “Don’t have much of either. Do I need them?”

  Stone hadn’t turned to look at him. He just continued to stare across the pasture into infinity. Or maybe he was trying to avoid looking at the stuffed buffalo, now leaning casually against the side of a semi trailer a few feet away.

  “Alibis are always handy when there’s been a murder. But you’re hardly alone if you don’t have one. Not many here do. As for a sense of humor, seems to me it’d be hard to survive without one.”

  The sheriff tried a smile on the old man and got no response. “So, Deputy Wynn says you were with one of your grandfathers when Michael Ramsey died?”

  “Yes.”

  The sheriff waited, letting the silence lengthen. He was in a hurry, but he sensed that his time constraints didn’t mean a thing to Stone.

  “That’s what I told that deputy. He didn’t understand how that could be, since my grandfather died more than a century ago.”

  “In a dream,” the sheriff said. He remembered how Mad Dog would put it. “Your spirit left your body and traveled to be with him?”

  The old man finally turned and looked at the sheriff. “You aren’t like your deputy. Are you a person?”

  Through Mad Dog, the sheriff knew Cheyenne believed only those who had existed as the original people when the world began could be people again. People had spirits. They were recognizable by their deeds. The spirits of people were reborn, over and over. The rest of the world’s teeming population weren’t people, they were just meat. It wasn’t a world view he was completely comfortable with, whether he qualified as a person or not.

  “Yeah, I’m a person. So’s my deputy,” the sheriff said. “Just not a very alert one. I’m not always alert either, but now and then I hear what someone tells me. And, if you mean am I Tsistsistas, then the answer is barely.”

  “Ahh,” Stone said, something coming to life in the depths of his eyes. “You are the Mad Dog’s Englishman.”

  Normally, the sheriff would have explained his dislike for that nickname, and asked the old man not to use it. But, somehow, on this man’s lips it sounded more like a compliment. “You know about my brother and me?”

  “I have heard that there are men here who may be distant relatives. One of them might wish to serve the spirit world. That is part of the reason I came. My people, we decided, if PBS was going to do this, one of us needed to see that they did it…” He paused for a moment, looking for the right word. “…with respect,” he continued, having, the sheriff thought, found exactly the one he wanted.

  “Your brother has come to Oklahoma to try to make contact with me, or one of the other old men. I am afraid we avoided him. There are many who seek wisdom for the wrong reasons. They are not people. Among the Tsistsistas, some are willing to sell our secrets, even when they don’t really know them. The ones who do that, they are not people either. We encounter real people in search of truths so seldom. In your brother’s case, we may have been wrong. Or so my grandfather tells me.”

  “Mad Dog will be delighted to speak with you. And I’d love to be there to listen. But right now, I’ve got a murder to investigate.”

  The old man nodded. “I see. You have not chosen to serve the spirit world. At least not yet.”

  The sheriff allowed himself a self-conscious laugh. “My brother has had some astounding insights. He’s told me things that turned out to be accurate, and there’s no rational way to explain how he could know them. But he’s the natural-born shaman in our family, not me. Philosophically, I’m…Well, I don’t know what I am. Undecided, I suppose. But I’m sheriff of this county and we have a dead body. What I’m serving right now is the law. And what I need are answers. Who wanted to kill Michael Ramsey? And why?”

  “Before you find answers, sometimes you must first ask the right questions.”

  The sheriff shook his head. This was like talking to Mad Dog when he was doing his Zen Cheyenne thing.

  Bud Stone smiled at the sheriff’s confusion. Maybe he had a sense of humor after all.

  “I do not think anyone wanted to kill Michael Ramsey,” Stone said. “That is what my grandfather was explaining before I was called back to this time and place.”

  Despite the source, the concept was uncomfortably similar to the one the sheriff had already begun to consider. Mad Dog had been the target. Michael Ramsey was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The sheriff opened his mouth to ask Bud Stone if “Who might want to kill Mad Dog?” was the right question when his cell phone chirped.

  “English,” he said into the receiver.

  And just like that, the question changed.

  Why would a terrorist pick on Buffalo Springs?

  ***

  “Two words,” Jud Haines said. “Eminent domain.”

  Chairman Wynn pushed his chair back from his desk and shook his head. “Hold on now,” he said. Those two words could lose him the next election.

  “Damn right, hold on,” Supervisor Finfrock said. He leaned forward until he was on the edge of his seat, a worn leather sofa beneath the chairman’s windows. “Folks vote Republican in Benteen County, not because they’re conservative, though they are. It’s more because they’re libertarians, even if they don’t know it. We go and seize somebody’s land, even Mad Dog’s, there’ll be new faces on the board after the next election and they won’t be ours.”

  “Yeah,” the chairman agreed. “Take Mad Dog’s land today, what’s to keep you from coming after mine next? That’s what they’ll think.”

  “We’re talking a special case here,” Haines argued, pacing in front of the chairman’s desk and swiping his blond mop out of his eyes. “I mean, let’s face it. Mad Dog’s the only one standing in the way of this wind farm. He’s the reason the other two land owners haven’t agreed to sell yet. They’re sure we’ll never get Mad Dog’s land. Without it, our land isn’t contiguous and we got no wind farm.”

  “Wind blows the same damn speed everywhere in this county,” Finfrock said. Craig Finfrock was a short, muscular man with a flat nose he claimed was the re
sult of an undistinguished boxing career. He owned the Bisonte Bar and Buffalo Springs’ only liquor store. This might be Carrie Nation country, but decades after she wielded her ax it remained a profitable business. The chairman had watched it make Finfrock a wealthy man.

  “Look here, Finfrock,” Jud Haines said. “Where else in this county are you going to find ten sections that line up east to west and aren’t already controlled by one or two families? I mean, think about it. We don’t put this together, somebody else will. One of those corporate farmers gets to thinking on this before we get the contract signed, they can go around us. Hook themselves up with Windreapers, or one of them other firms, and put this thing in themselves. Then, those of us who’ve invested in the Benteen Energy Coop can kiss our front money goodbye.”

  “Persuasive argument,” Finfrock admitted. He was one of the larger investors. “But I still don’t like this. Surely Mad Dog can be persuaded. I mean, he’s a damn conservationist, right?”

  “A conservationist? With oil wells on his property?” Haines scoffed. “Give me a break. And you’ve heard him criticize the president and the war in Iraq. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mad Dog was involved with OPEC or one of them other Communist fronts.”

  The chairman leaned forward and rubbed his chin. The tone of this conversation troubled him. “Mad Dog is a lot of things,” he said, “pain in the ass being one of them, but he’s no Communist.”

  “Islamisist, then,” Haines countered. “Pretty much the same thing. Didn’t you tell me Mad Dog claimed to be a Negro once? Spent time advocating Black power?”

  “Yes, but…” The chairman had to admit it was so. Then Mad Dog had traded Black power for Rastafarianism, then the new-age crystal thing. And, of course, there was his hippie period and the grape boycott and…

  “There you go,” Haines asserted. “Black power—Black Muslim, most likely. And this Cheyenne thing. Hell, it’s probably a sham. He might be planning to strike at his neighbors with a suicide bomb or some such, now that our beloved U S of A is involved in a holy crusade against satanic Islam. I’ll bet we could seize his land through the Patriot Act.”