IN THE HOUR BEFORE DAWN, Harley checked one last homestead for chain-smoking squatters drinking Cutty Sark from gallon jugs. The Knudsen place sat tucked beneath the ridge of the county oil, right alongside the highway a mile from town. The Penkes owned the land and used the outbuildings for storage. They kept the yard well lit, so trespassers were unlikely. Then again, if the trespasser was Paul, Harley supposed he was nothing if not bold.
Harley listened. He couldn’t shake the sense there’d been someone lingering just out of sight all night. He replayed the sounds: brushing grass, cracking twigs, the low hum of an engine. All he heard now was silence. It should’ve settled his nerves, probably, but it didn’t. He’d been wired since Glenn called, more wired by the burn barrel fire. Then there’d been what happened with Pam Reinhardt. That had him tightly wound in a way he hadn’t counted on.
Under the white glow of the lamppost, the brooder house was sealed up, door dead-bolted. The horse barn was unlocked and mostly empty. The stalls were stripped out. A round-rung ladder at the back led to a partial loft. Harley climbed a few steps, far enough to see two moldy bales and a generator.
At the bigger hay barn, he nudged the double doors aside to see the chrome trim of a bulbous winged Plymouth Savoy, mid-fifties. The plates were out of date, still stamped THE BEEF STATE, and the tag in the bottom right corner was from ’60. He wondered where and when and why Penke had picked it up. Aside from the car, the barn held broken odds and ends. A pair of old tire pumps, a collection of rusted window screens.
He slid the doors shut and crossed the yard to the porch. He climbed the steps and tried the knob. Locked. Around back, above thick foundation stones, the door was stairless and closed, too high for anyone’s reach.
HARLEY WAITED AT the station till dawn, when the Post-Gazette’s Thursday supplement thunked against the portable siding. He snatched it up and headed to Ziske’s.
Ziske’s spread lay between the county oil and the home place, its drive off the old Schleswig-Holstein, right across the road from the Old German Cemetery and the Jipp place. Maybe he’d heard or seen something notable the last few days. Lord knew he called the station enough when he hadn’t.
The gravel drive sank toward Ziske’s house and outbuildings, which were tucked between a pair of hills turned gold with parched grass.
The concrete steps and stoop sagged into the earth, sloping away from the front door. Harley leaned and peered through the latched screen. At the back of the house, a kitchen radio blared some tinny, manic accordion tune. He called Ziske’s name twice before the thing shut off.
The old man scooted to the door, cursing his walker under his breath. He flipped the hook and turned his back. “You’re early, paperboy.”
“Figure you been up two hours already.”
“Two, three. I got coffee.”
“I can’t stay long.” Harley held the paper out as Ziske turned his back.
“You got time for a cup of coffee.” He scooted down the hall.
Harley had never seen Ziske without his cowboy hat and now wished to hell he’d put it back on. The groove from the hat band was deep enough it surely never filled in, and what was left of the old man’s hair ran in snaking white trails over the humps and bumps of his head. Where scalp showed through, it was tough to say where age spot ended and his regular color began.
Ziske poured Harley a cup of coffee that looked like tea. That was no doubt how the old folks drank it all day long. What they called coffee was a hue barely darker than rusty pipes.
Harley dropped the supplement on the table. “There. Now it doesn’t show up, Gene won’t think you’re running a scam.”
Ziske grunted and used his walker for balance as he sat. He told Harley to pull up a chair.
“Seen anybody around the Jipp place, last few nights?” Harley sat down. “Anybody in a red pickup?”
“Think I see that far? Hell. Jipps’ is past the cemetery. My view that way’s a cottonwood and some gravestones.”
“There’s a comfort.”
“Some days,” Ziske said. “Heard the fire truck up there, whichever night it was. Ask me, Logemann’s the one burnt that place. So’s he could plant a few more rows where it’s tough enough keeping switchgrass.” Lonny Logemann was a thorn in the old man’s side primarily due to shared proximity. He owned everything on the north half section beside the cemetery. “Son of a bitch—waiting on me to die. Watch. He’ll take out another loan, snatch this place up, lose it to the bank. Damn drunk.”
“Lonny called in the fire. Doubt he set it.”
Ziske gave a hard breath. An irritated concession.
“Know if he’s done any roofing? Him or Braasch? Somebody left a bucket of sealant in the burn barrel next door. Caught fire last night.”
“Sealant? Hell, even Logemann’s not dumb enough to have a flat roof.”
“Haven’t heard or seen anything over that way, either, then?”
“Can barely hear or see me. About time for a stroke of my own.” Ziske took a sip from his dainty china cup. It was a cup his wife, were she living, likely would’ve saved for weekly card games or Thanksgiving dinners. “You the one found Doris Luschen?”
Harley said he was. That it was too bad.
“Getting old’s too damn bad.” Ziske pointed at the wall, to a wedding portrait. “Wife’s first cousin.”
Harley recognized the old Lutheran church. Ziske’s wedding party crammed in the narrow room, women in front of the men, everybody scowling like it was the reading of a will. Doris was the exception. She was all teeth. So much teeth, she may not have been able to cover them. She might’ve had no choice but to smile.
“Thick hips,” Ziske said. “Made up for them horse teeth. When’s the service?” He prodded the paper at him with a thick, arched finger. “See if it’s in there yet. Betty said last night. You know, my girl Betty’s still an old maid. Too old to bear any honyocks, but she can keep house. Wouldn’t kill you to get somebody to keep house.”
While Harley paged through what was mostly classified ads, he pictured Betty Ziske’s thick brown bulb of a permanent, her broad stomach tented under the frills and lace of a wedding gown. Then he pictured what Pam’s midsection must look like. Long and pale, he thought. With the slightest mound of a belly between the hips.
“Think I’m pulling your leg?” Ziske demanded.
“Suspect you’re not.”
“You got to be, what, fifty?”
“Forty-seven.”
“Fifty years old. Waiting to figure out what you want? Don’t nobody know. Better that way. Don’t get it, don’t care. If you knew it and got it, you’d just want something else.” Ziske plucked a pair of shears from a catchall basket on the table. He slid them across the tabletop. “Clip it out for me,” he said, meaning the obituary. “Hear where they had a funeral for the boy?”
“I heard, yeah.” The scissors were for hair, Harley thought. Or something medical. Something too delicate for his grip. He spotted Doris’s obituary. “Full notice to come,” it said. There was no picture for the newsprint to bleach faceless, but he imagined one anyway: Doris leaned back against an old Mercury, squint-smiling in the sun, evaporating. He read the birth date, August 23, 1893. She’d died a month shy of her eighty-fifth birthday. She’d been a year younger than his mother. She’d had him late, his mother.
“Kirschner says he cut a stone for him. Pink granite.”
“Guess it’s something.”
“Says he was here, at least.” Ziske smoothed his hands across the tabletop. The surface was gouged and worn with dips like old butcher block. “I rattled him, you know. Rollie. That morning.”
“Rollie was rattled a long time before that.” The old man had always felt partly responsible. He’d hired Rollie after buying the Lucases’ eighty acres and securing the full southeast quarter section. Rollie’d stayed in the vacant house in exchange for work around the place. The morning it happened, Ziske drove a pickup bed of dirt down to an old caved-in cellar. There’d been two on the Lucas spread, a sturdy one up by the house and a collapsed one a good hundred yards off. Likely left over from a sod house nobody remembered. Rollie planned to fill it that day and was there waiting. He didn’t notice Ziske coming, so the old man tapped the horn. Startled him. But everything startled him. Ziske blaming himself for what happened was as useful as blaming Dell Junior, who was guilty of no more than exploring, sifting for arrowheads and buffalo bones in the powdery blowouts. Ziske blaming himself was as useful as blaming Rollie, for that matter. He’d had no more control over his reaction than a backhoe would’ve.
“Suppose he’s washed out to sea by now,” Ziske said. That was what they’d settled on, that Rollie chucked Dell Junior in the Wakonda. There’d been a smear of blood on the pickup’s side, a pool of it in the fill dirt, a fresh set of tracks running to and from the direction of the creek. But they’d dredged it for miles. They’d settled on the Wakonda because they’d needed to settle.
Harley finished making a jagged-edged mess of Doris’s obituary. He slid it across the table. “Wouldn’t have pegged you for a scrapbooker.”
“What time’s the service? Can’t read the print.”
“If you can’t read the print, what the hell do you care if it comes or not?”
“I pay for the damn thing.”
“The supplement’s free,” Harley said as he scanned the last paragraph. “Ten-thirty. Tomorrow at Zion.”
“Quick turnaround.” Ziske sounded impressed for once. “Planting her up the road with the rest of them, I guess. Start up that way now, I’ll make it by the time she does.” He meant the Old German graveyard. “Ain’t been up there since the fire. Can’t imagine it, Jipp place gone. Granted, house was ramshackle the day it was built. Tell you what I regret—mowing down the Lucases’. Ole Braasch could build a hell of a house.”
Ziske must’ve been getting dotty. “Ole Braasch built the Jensen place,” Harley corrected him.
The old man scowled, then barked, “I know what goddamn places Ole Braasch built. Lucas hired him. Built Lucas the same place as your folks’. Same barn, same all of it. Right down to the nail for the outhouse paper. Might’ve only knew the one floor plan, Ole, but he could build it. Your folks’ place over there sitting empty—goddamn waste.”
Harley studied Ziske’s milky blue irises beneath his wild brows, trying to read if he was hinting at what June Christiansen had been, the day before last. But no. Ziske wasn’t one for allusion. If he had something to say, you couldn’t pay him not to say it.
“Wish to hell I hadn’t mowed that place over,” he said again. “Should’ve razed this one instead.”
“You did what you had to.”
“Did what was easy. Easier knocking it down than shampooing Rollie’s brains out of the rug.” As soon as he’d said it, Ziske stiffened and winced. “Ah, hell.”
“None taken.”
Ziske took a last swig of coffee. Harley used it as an excuse to stand, pour the old man another, and head out. Ziske took a sip and shook his head, looking disgusted. “Ramshackle or not,” he said, “burning down them houses is like spitting on graves. Most them places, built by folks didn’t have a pot to piss in. If they did, they wouldn’t have landed here. Old houses is all that’s left of them.” He was staring at the old wedding picture on the wall again. “Indians were smart, you know. Knew it weren’t no good for more than grazing out here. Or hunts. Seen arrowheads, up in that north pasture when the rain cut it up. What was it, eight years ago, we had all that rain?”
Give or take, Harley said. He told the old man he needed to go.
Ziske waved by way of raising the cup like a toast. “I’m still pressing charges, that supplement don’t come.”
“Imagine you’ll try if it does,” Harley said and waved as he headed out.