Yellow Medicine Read online

  Dr. Hulk hadn’t screwed my wife. He hardly ever screwed his own. But all his bullshit had flicked a switch in me.

  “So, my wife? And all these others? You proud of that?”

  “Prou’? Who needs prou’ when you’ve got grateful pussy?”

  I clucked my tongue, caught his eyes in the rearview. They widened some.

  “Naughty boy,” I said. “Stupid, too. You don’t tell a man with a gun that you fucked his wife. I don’t think we can let this be.”

  The turnoff to Cottonwood was in the headlights, but I slid off onto the shoulder, the anti-locks clacking against my foot as the tires glided on the iced-over pavement. The Hulk looked green indeed. Sickly, even. And suddenly goddamned sober.

  He said, “No, the turn’s up there.”

  “Get out.”

  “You can’t do that. I can’t walk home in this condition.”

  “Who said you’re walking home?” I opened the door and stepped into the wind and snow, my feet sliding on the glassy ice, snow that had melted during the day and frozen again after sunset. Even in my departmental jacket, the wind bit like snakes. Hulka’s jacket was probably hanging in Rome’s office. That’s why this was so much fun.

  He leaned away from me when I opened his door, but was still too loopy to resist, especially with the cuffs on. I pulled him out while he yelled at me, “What the hell do you think…Outrage! I’m going to sue….no, press charges! Jesus, Billy, c’mon, stop fucking around!”

  I hauled him behind the car, then pressed my knee against the back of his. He turned to spaghetti. I eased him down until he was kneeling. I wanted him to see the cruiser. Exhaust poured out of the tailpipe. I stepped around him and leaned against the trunk. That’s when his breath went short.

  Pulled my pistol lazily, let it hang at my side. I didn’t slide my finger over the trigger, played fair. I said, “Anything else you want to tell me about my wife before I do this?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I let out a long sigh, watched it turn to vapor, and stared across the cornfield. “After you, I’ll need to confront my wife, too. Then there’s your wife.”

  “Listen, I swear I never touched your wife. That was the booze talking. I promise. Please, just take me home now. I won’t even file a complaint.”

  “Sounded to me like you were serious. I want to know what else you two did. It’ll be easier to take care of her if I’ve got a clear mental picture.”

  “Billy, for God’s sakes, look at me. Look at me!”

  I looked at him.

  His face was chaotic. “I never touched your wife. I don’t even know who she is. I was very wrong to say that, and I apologize. I’m an asshole. I’m so sorry.”

  “Really.” I nodded. “You sure about that? How would you know which one was mine? After all, if you’re fucking everyone else’s wives, how would you know?”

  Hulka inched toward me on his knees, hit a slick patch that sent his knees flailing wide like a gymnast. He fell onto his stomach, craned his neck. “There’s been a few, not all of them. Jesus, forgive me. Oh God. You can’t be in my business without making a few mistakes. I’ll never do it again. I swear.”

  I lifted my gun, squinted, centered my aim on his forehead. “I don’t believe you.”

  He started to cry. Barely able to understand him, but I figured out: “I don’t want to die I don’t want to die please don’t I’ll change I’ll change I never expected it to be like this.”

  “How many wives? Currently, I mean.”

  “Two.”

  I slipped my finger over the trigger.

  “No! Shit! Two, two! I mean it! Only two!”

  That was the part I’d been waiting for. None of the bluster. I wanted the real deal. Crouched before the crying, freezing doctor, I said, “So tell me, Doctor Hulka, who are the two married women you are currently committing adultery with, and who are their husbands?”

  He told me as if I were his best friend. I was surprised. One was the wife of a very wealthy man whose family owned half of Marshall—made his money in frozen foods. The other was the wife of a college professor. I didn’t know the women, but imagined they must be very different from one another. Interesting choices. He babbled on a bit more and I let him have as much rope as he wanted. This type of info was what helped build my rep so quickly here, so far away from home, barely any friends or allies.

  In the distance were headlights coming fast. Should’ve paid more attention to the road. I hoped I could get Hulka off the pavement before the driver saw us. I tucked away the gun and stepped behind the doctor, helped him up.

  “Sorry about all that, Doc. Sometimes I just lose my temper, you know? Especially when I feel my chain’s been jerked. You were jerking my chain, right?”

  He nodded, or maybe he was just shivering. I didn’t care. He was on shaky ground those four steps back to the cruiser, nearly falling into the backseat. The headlights were right on us now, and the electric company truck swept by, creating a vortex of snow and wind that stung my eyes. I closed the back door, got into the driver’s seat, cranked the engine.

  I rolled up to the Cottonwood turn, got up to speed. Silence from the backseat except for Hulka’s wheezing.

  “Remember to let me know which street it is. Hard to see in this snow.” I caught a whiff of something sharp, sniffed the air to make sure. “Doctor, did you piss your pants?”

  He said, in the most pathetic voice I’d ever heard, “I’m sorry sir.”

  Like I said, being feared was a wonderful thing.

  FOUR

  Well past two in the morning, I couldn’t sleep. I sat in the den of my river valley home, which reminded me of a hunting lodge, and drank an Australian Cabernet, my third glass since getting home just after midnight. Pretty soon I was on the phone to Mobile, my ex-in-laws house, convincing myself I was calling to talk to my son Ham. If I hadn’t been drinking I would’ve known better. Problem was that I drank so I wouldn’t have to know better.

  Three rings. Then a woman’s voice, Ginny’s mom. “Billy.”

  Must’ve glanced at the caller ID. Or she knew I’d be the only asshole calling this late. “Sorry it’s late. I truly am. Re…really.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Wanna talk to Ham. Maybe Savannah, too.”

  “They’re asleep, Billy. You don’t want me to wake them up.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I am sorry. I wish…I wish it wasn’t like this.” It just kept coming, my brain unable to roadblock my mouth.

  Her husband’s voice rose in the background. “Is that him again? Let me talk.”

  Ginny’s mom whispered a brush-off , then said to me, “You can’t keep doing this. You know when they’re awake. You know the rules. And you can’t talk to them when you’re drinking.” Always so level and calm when she spoke to me. She never showed emotion, and that pissed me off even more. I don’t know what I wanted, though. Maybe I was ashamed. Maybe I just liked fucking around with their grandparents’ “rules”.

  Don’t take the bait. “Yeah? They’re my kids. I should be able to talk…you know…whenever, and however.”

  She didn’t even let me finish the rant. “Goodnight, Billy.”

  She hung up. But as I started to pull the phone away from my ear, I heard some background noise. Someone had picked up another extension down there.

  “Ginny?” I said.

  A short exhalation, and then she clicked off. I knew it was her. One day she would talk to me like we used to, like normal people do. After all, I would probably be in worse shape if it hadn’t been for Ginny’s help after the divorce. Maybe it was all a test, a temporary thing. I needed to show her I could change, could be a good dad. This job was my one shot towards earning her trust again. And goddamn it if I wasn’t blowing it a little more each day.

  The TV news scrolled info across the bottom of the screen and weather to the side, but I had muted it while on the phone. Closed captioning added to the mess. The wood stove was st
oked and burning, one of the little extras I liked about the place. The house was pretty run down, had flooded twice, and was always damp. It needed work. I bought the four acres for a pretty good price, thinking I would turn it into something special. Nearly a year and half later I still lived out of boxes and suitcases, unable to feel comfortable although I didn’t have much choice. I was lucky to get the job, and grateful, but I hated Minnesotans and hated the goddamn wind.

  The howling started on one end of the house and caught every crack and hole on its way across, a real zombie chorus that made it hard to sleep. Not that I was sleeping. Most nights I drank wine and stared out the windows into my frozen front yard, the twisty dirt driveway cutting through to the tree-lined county highway, until I passed out, trying to pinpoint the moment my life turned to shit.

  *

  When Katrina hit, she washed away half our home. We’d been somewhat prepared, stowing our important papers and treasures in a storage shed or the attic, but no one knew just how devastating the storm would be for Gulfport. We found out the storage shed flooded, too. All I had left was a damaged police cruiser, a .45, a 12-gauge shotgun, my wife Ginny, and my kids Ham and Savannah. It took twelve hours to drive them over to her parents’ house, only eighty miles east. After that, it was back to work helping my fellow citizens. We needed power and gas, clean water and ice, clean-up crews with chainsaws and backhoes, roofers and building contractors.

  Imagine this: thousands homeless, left with nothing, in the late August Mississippi sun. You had to know the right people or pay the right price to get higher on the list. It didn’t seem fair. I took matters into my own hands. I directed power trucks to places most needed. I stopped incoming supply trucks and took a portion to deliver on my own to those who couldn’t make it to the pick-up points. Knocked open a door at a department store so people could get new shoes, clothes, diapers.

  Being the Good Samaritan had a price, costing me time and effort, some out-of-pocket expenses. I didn’t think it was unethical to ask for reimbursement from those I helped. Or upfront payments if the need was dire enough. After all, they thought of me as a savior for the moment, their personal hand of justice.

  What got me in trouble was the other side of things—when you play Robin Hood, one side always gets shafted, a little less gold in the saddlebags and an arrow in the thigh, and that’s the side with muscle. In my case, it wasn’t so much the federal government or the old money families. In order to get what we needed I had to cross the upper-middle class, not rich enough to get a jump start but certainly spoiled on their creature comforts.

  Well, fuck ‘em.

  Cops got paid jack-shit and we put our lives on the line every night. An embarrassment. If I hadn’t played the angles and taken some moonlighting gigs as “security”, my family would’ve probably dipped into food stamp range. Not on my watch.

  After the storm, they were on their cell phones bitching at their insurance companies: “Look, we know there are people out there with greater needs, but the sooner we’re taken care of, the sooner we can get back to work and help them.” So said the bankers, general practitioners, pizza franchise owners, beauty shops owners, pawn shop owners, car lot general managers, on and on…

  The people I was helping? Hourly wage-earning blackjack dealers and cocktail waitresses out of work since the casinos—huge floating barges because our lawmakers thought gambling on land was morally reprehensible, but had no problem taking the tax revenues if the goddamn things were on the gulf—had broken from their moorings, washed across the highway, crushed buildings and cars along the way, while flooding out slot machines and gaming tables. Mighty lucky debris, we’d call it.

  Again: fuck ‘em. They say that to us and we say it to them and the liberals and the media tell the republicans they shouldn’t say it to those poor folks in New Orleans (but by ignoring the Mississippi Coast the liberals and the media are saying it to we of the gambling-addicted Redneck Rivera anyway) who’ve been fucked for years and ignored by the same liberals and media-types who were now complaining that everyone else was saying Fuck ‘em.

  In other words, I messed with the wrong people. I got pulled in on an IAD complaint. In the wake of the storm surge, plenty of officers were glad to rat me out in order to help out their own shitty living conditions. I was strung up as an example of corruption, an example of the “good” police filtering their own ranks to protect and serve. Third page news (the hurricane would dominate the first two for months). A scapegoat, a whipping boy, a martyr. Yeah, a martyr to those cops I didn’t squeal on, the ones who knew they owed me their livelihoods even though most couldn’t spill my name fast enough.

  My options sucked. Roll over on my fellow cops? Not on your life. Private security? True, there were plenty of jobs since so many people had disappeared—they didn’t even want to salvage their belongings. Easier to start over, be new people. Yeah, I could see standing in front of the same store I’d helped loot only weeks earlier, this time hired to shoot anyone who tried to do it again.

  With Ginny sticking to the divorce plans, I knew my life on the Coast would never be the same. I was born and raised there, knew too many people who knew Ginny and me, who knew what I did. I’m sure her parents pushed a little, too. I remember sitting in their living room while Ginny lashed at me. She paced while they sat on the edge of the couch cushions, staring me down, all holy roller condescension. They didn’t even own a TV, real hard-liners.

  “Tell me the truth. This is what you did? Took advantage? Stole? That’s what you did?”

  If the Old Testament Prophets hadn’t been watching I would’ve felt stronger, able to twist it my way. Shade the truth. I wasn’t like those cops in New Orleans who fled, taking their squad cars and abandoning their duties. Not like I was preying on citizens—they wanted my help.

  I said to Ginny, “You’ve got to believe me—”

  “ ‘Thou art snared with the words of thy mouth.’ Proverbs,” her father said.

  “—that everything I did was for good of those people.”

  She said, “You took their money. You were like some mafia.”

  “No, please, they gave me gifts. I couldn’t turn that down. It was for you, for us.”

  Ginny’s father butted in again, still as a statue but loud as a walrus. “ ‘For the good that I would I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do.’ Romans.”

  I lifted my head. “Got anything in there about forgiveness? About sacred vows between man and wife?”

  The man’s face was a storm. He wanted to lose his temper. I knew he had trouble with that before his first heart attack, even slapped Ginny’s mother around a bit. I would never do that to my wife, so the holier-than-thou shit got to me.

  Waited him out. He looked at his daughter and said, “ ‘If the unbeliever departs, let him depart. The wife is not under bondage in such cases.’ First Corinthians.” Then to me, “God’s patient but he ain’t stupid, boy.”

  I stood. “Well I’m not leaving. This is between Ginny and me. We’ll work it out.”

  “No,” Ginny said. “Not this time.”

  I couldn’t see my kids—they were supposed to be playing in the back bedroom—but I sensed my son listening at the door, opening it a crack. He’d make a fine detective one day, join the police same as me. Make his father proud. At that moment, though, he was probably confused, and if I had stuck around for visitation weekends, he’d grow resentful after being filled with his mom’s anger towards me and his grandparents’ pious lies.

  And yet, even with the pain of the divorce, the anger between Ginny and myself, it was she who presented me with my second chance. Her family had moved south from Sioux Falls, South Dakota because of her father’s transfer when Ginny was fifteen. Her brother was five years older than her and already a junior at Iowa State in Criminal Justice, so he stayed behind. I came along another ten years after that, met Ginny and whirled her up in romance, asked her to marry me. I’d only met the brother, Graham, a few times. See
med like a decent guy—quiet, nice Christian leanings. Married with kids, loving it. He also seemed a bit of a stiff board. But, hey, he was just my brother-in-law and I only had to see him every couple of years. I didn’t mind watching the game with him or shooting the shit on the phone before Ginny picked up.

  After a respectable run of years as a deputy in Yellow Medicine County, he got himself elected sheriff. Not all that grand of a job—babysit the citizens of a rural farming county, occasionally deal with stray shots and rumored meth labs. Cozy, except for the snow and wind. A boring job for a boring man who didn’t mind the boredom.

  The ink hadn’t even dried on the papers before Ginny called him, pled my case, and got me hired. I didn’t hear it from her. There I was, sitting in a hotel room without power, staring at the gun in my lap, when Graham rang and offered me a job.

  “I believe in second chances, and believe it or not, my sister still believes in you.” he said.

  “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. If she still believed in me, I’d be home with her and the kids right now.”

  “You know it’s not that easy. Listen, this is a one time offer. Lots of people in your position don’t get this handed to them on a silver plate.”

  I took a deep breath, did all my thinking in as long as it took to exhale. “Okay, all right. Yeah, I think I want to.”

  Minnesota. A new start out on the frozen plains. My purgatory.

  *

  The bottle of wine nearly drained, I was drifting in and out of dreams, one about my wife and kids in a plane crash. They walked away unharmed. Maybe I was dreaming it because the TV news was droning on about a crash in Russia. The internal blending with the external, none of it making sense. I slapped my cheeks and shook the sleep away, ready to go climb in bed under heavy quilts to make up for the drafty bedroom and lousy heating system.