Kill 'Em With Kindness, page 3
Chief nodded and grabbed a bottle from the desk drawer. It was a fresh fifth of Hennessy whiskey. Chief opened the bottle and took a long swallow. He offered Nick the bottle and Nick shook his hands in response, the clanking metal logic enough for Chief to withdraw the offer. The big man tipped the bottle back, drained a quarter of the whiskey before stopping to catch his breath.
He took another long drink. “Daddy’s juice,” Chief said to no one. “Time you leave her?”
“Saw her inside and left. I don’t really know. I made it home just after two, so I guess it was right around one, like I said.”
“Walk home?”
“Yeah. What’s this about? She okay?”
“I don’t know. She look okay to you?” Chief said.
“Beat to shit by somebody,” Nick said.
“Car wreck, night before last. She claims.” Chief smiled. “Her car look wrecked to you?”
Nick shook his head.
“I’m not worried about the night before last though. I want to know about last night. You know what happened though, right?”
“I don’t,” Nick said.
“Don’t what?”
“Know what this is about.” Nick shook his hands, rattling the metal cuffs against the chair. “Is this necessary? How about taking these fucking cuffs off?”
“You like rape?”
“Hell you talking about?”
“You like rape? Yes or no?”
“No.”
“Ha. So you consider it more of a chore?”
Nick shook his head, exasperated by the game Chief was playing. “I don’t like rape and I didn’t rape anyone.” He shook his hands against the cuffs again.
Chief kept smiling as he pulled opened the laptop on his desk and spun the computer around. The screen was littered with various documents and file folders, much like the analog desktop in front of him. The video player window came to life and Nick watched. He saw Kimmy sitting in the same chair he was in now. She was crying. She wasn’t in cuffs.
“He brought me home. I thought it was, I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t even realize who it was until it was happening.” The sobbing girl on-screen lost it, sobbing into her tissue before reining it in enough to go on. “I was so fucking out of it. I thought he was just being friendly. Ha. Friendly. Who needs friends, right?” She let out a flat laugh and sniffled into the tissue. “He opened the door for me. I was pretty out of it, but I remember I dropped the keys and he opened the door for me. I didn’t even hear him follow me in. Then I was on my back. I told him no, but he laughed and said ‘this is happening. Best just go along for the ride.’”
“And then what did he do?” Chief’s voice said, tinny and off-screen.
Real Chief nodded from behind the laptop, looked at Nick with an amused grin. “You like this show?”
“He raped me,” Kimmy said. “He slapped me around a little, then Nick Gillis raped me.”
Off-screen Chief asked another question. “You know him? Before he offered you a ride?”
“Seen him in the bar,” she sniffed, then no further answer but crying. And it was convincing. You could almost see her in that hallway while Nick put his fists to her, his boots, his cock.
Chief came around the back of the desk and blocked the view of the monitor with his giant frame as he closed the laptop. “So there we are,” he said. He grinned and showed Nick the shining silver handcuff key.
“I didn’t do it. That girl is lying.”
Chief didn’t seem to hear him. “Let’s find you a bed,” the big man said.
Nick spent the rest of twenty-four hours in a holding cell before Chief freed him and pushed him out the front door of the station with no explanation. He didn’t need to give one. Nick saw clearly as Chad’s black jacked-up Ford truck rumbled idly on the opposite side of the street.
As Nick descended the station house stairs to the sidewalk, the tinted window lowered.
Chad flashed a shit-eating grin, stuck his head out the window.
“Choices, huh? Ha!”
FIVE
NICK BRACED HIMSELF in the bed of the truck as Chad took sharp corners on gravel roads. Inside the cab were Chad, Erik, Russell, and the dogs. Acne-pocked Erik looked out the back window, laughing as he watched Nick bounce and slide. Nick wedged himself against the gate and the side, sure to spill out into the country night should the tailgate give. He tried not to think about that as he watched the dust fly up red behind them in the taillights.
Chad drove south out of town and cut east into the small borough of Jessup, an unincorporated village of about fifteen hundred people. Up ahead, the red flash of every county emergency unit within ten miles was easily overpowered by the sun. Chad slowed as they approached.
“Damn shame,” Nick heard Russell say as the truck slowed and weaved around the scene, through a front yard, and honked to clear a crowd of gawkers. Many of the onlookers were crying as their church burned to the ground. The heat and light lapped at them like a tongue.
“Damn shame it didn’t happen when it was supposed to,” Erik said.
Nick caught Chad’s eye in the rearview. “Everything happens for a reason,” Chad said. “We’ve got ourselves a bona fide expert with us tonight!”
They continued east in the truck, picking up speed as the smooth rural pave job cleared ahead of them, a straight shot to nothing. Nick lost his ball cap in an eighty-mile-per-hour wind gust and watched as it shrunk into the darkness, gone. He eyed a screwdriver wedged in the grooves of the bed liner near his feet. Usually he’d have a blade in his boot but Chief had neglected to return it with the rest of his personals, or had lifted it for himself. It was a nice blade, double action switch and sharp as hell. And as tempting as the screwdriver was, it wouldn’t be much use against the three men and the dogs.
Chad’s truck came to a hard sliding stop in front of the Porter Farm sign. Painted below the name was a black and white milk cow, crude but quaint.
“Out,” Chad said over his shoulder. Nick climbed from the back of the truck while Chad, Russell, and the dogs jumped out of the cab. Erik slid over in the front seat and took Chad’s place behind the wheel. He drove off back the way they came, leaving them to the country quiet.
Nick followed the remaining men and beasts. No one spoke. The only sound was the soft patter of secret footsteps. Even the dogs seemed to control the force of their gait, slinking softly on giant paws.
Past the house, each of them crawled through the horizontal beams of a metal gate. It was painted white and glossy smooth and the porch light from the back of the house was reflected down the entire length of its reach. Beyond the gate was a two-track farm road and another gate, this one a wooden interruption in the miles of electrified wire that surrounded fifty acres of Porter farmland. And over that fence and into the graze land, cows and the smell of manure. Nick soon realized that avoiding the piles of shit in the dark was a futile pursuit. They walked through the herd, quiet except for the wet slosh of shoes in shit. Deeper into the herd they bumped cows out of the way, some of whom complied while others stood stupidly wondering nothing, impossible to move.
“Tell me what you learned in vet school,” Chad said.
“Wasn’t vet school. Agriculture.”
“You ever feel for a calf?”
“No,” Nick said.
Chad stopped dead and his hounds turned and flanked him at the ready. He gave Nick his empty eye again, the one that could either smile or bite.
“I’ve seen it done, though,” Nick said.
Chad smiled. “Good enough for me!” Russell joined in his laughter and tossed Nick a large container of petroleum jelly. And before he could mount a protest, pointless as it might be, Nick found himself up to his shoulder in cow snatch.
“Ever read McMurtry?” Chad asked. “Last Picture Show?”
“No,” Nick choked. He didn’t feel like discussing literature. “I don’t feel anything up here.”
“It’s alright. One of ’em is bound to be carrying,” Chad said. “Book was weird to me,” he continued. “Like how nonchalant these farm boys were about raping a cow, taking turns holding it down and swapping out so each one gets his sloppy seconds. Or thirds. It’s weird, right?”
Nick thought the whole fucking thing here was weird. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s pretty weird. But maybe not if you’re a farmer. Ag frat at State got suspended my first year there. They were making their pledges assfuck a goat.” Nick gagged on the smell of cow taint. “Jesus Christ, there isn’t anything up there.” Nick pulled his arm hard against the sucking slurp of the cow’s twat. It came free and he stumbled back, hit the ground and fell into a steaming pile of fresh shit. More laughter as Nick got to his feet. He followed as they looked for another candidate.
“He said they’d be fat,” Chad said.
“They all look fat,” Nick said, holding his breath.
“Erik probably does have a better eye for it, the specific condition we need.”
“Why isn’t he here then?”
“Because he’s at the pickup, and he didn’t want to stick his arm inside a cow tonight.” Chad pointed to a fat animal with a large black spot that looked like the state of Florida. “That one.”
Again Nick slid his petroleum jellied arm inside the cow’s vaginal cavity and up through the cervix to fumble and feel for a calf. The pressure stimulated the colon and a fresh load of manure was dumped steaming over his shoulder.
“All right,” Nick said in a voice that betrayed his desire to puke. “Fucking finally. Yes. There is a calf in here.”
“Good enough,” Chad said. “Get yourself out of there or I’m going to think you like it.”
Chad threw a loop of rope around the cow’s neck and it followed without much trouble. Nick did the same as the cow, stinking just the same, pulled by his own invisible lead. They walked for a long time in silence and every sound of the bucolic night came to sing songs of babbling water and crickets and horny leopard frogs. The air was a sweet and sour mix of honeysuckle and cow taint as Nick’s soggy arm burned cold in the cooling night.
Russell snipped the wire fence at the end of the property and the crew stepped into a creek bed. They followed the flow further south, splashing in the shallow water. Nick looked up through the tangled nest of thin branches that sliced apart the sky and moon overhead. He listened to the footsteps. After a time everyone fell into rhythm, predictable and hypnotic.
They reached the cement tunnel that ran the creek underneath Twenty-Fourth Ave, and as the men and beasts began to climb the bank up to the road, the lights of the waiting truck flamed alive. Nick raised a hand to his brow and looked under the light as Erik appeared in front of the vehicle and stood waiting for the lead at the top of the hill.
“Fire out?” Chad called from below.
“Ha. Nah. They’ll be tied up all night I’m sure.”
At the back of the truck was a long grated metal ramp. The cow moved well until it hit the metal incline, then its cloven hooves recoiled as if the ramp were on fire. The men pulled, each grabbing a handful of the heifer and forcing her. She began to grunt and whine, stamping her feet and snorting. She calmed herself as the men loosened their grip and soon stood still, unbothered. Unbothered until the men expected her to take that first step onto the ramp again.
“The slope up the creek bed is steeper than this!” Russell pulled hard on the rope. “Anybody got a fucking club? Beat this bitch up there.” Russell looked around. “For real, find me a hammer or something. Get the tire iron out of the truck.”
“That isn’t going to work,” Nick heard himself say. His voice was slightly mocking. “She doesn’t know what the hell this is. Only knows grass and dirt, not metal.”
“So what the fuck should we do, Farmer Cunt? You gonna stick your hand back up there, make her go that way?” Erik chuckled, but Chad was silent, waited for Nick to show how much he really knew.
“Got a blade?” Nick asked. One of them had to. He’d feel better if he had it in his hand. Russell and Erik looked to Chad. Chad pulled his knife from his pocket and tossed it to Nick, who snapped it open and used the sharp tip to put a hole in the shoulder of his shirt. He stretched the hole with his finger until it ripped and he pulled the sleeve free. “Ruined anyway,” he said as the rest looked on. Even the dogs seemed curious.
Nick draped the sleeves over the cow’s eyes.
“That’s not going to do shit,” Russell said. “She can’t even see it.”
“He’s right,” Chad said. “That Claire Danes movie said the same thing. That one where she’s that retarded farmer. What’s her name, Nick?”
“Temple Grandin.”
Chad nodded and smiled Nick’s way. His proud smile slipped away as his gaze found his lesser children. “You idiots know that?”
“Let’s fucking see if it works before you start slinging the hurtfuls,” Russell said.
Blind, she went up the ramp peacefully, without incident. Chad drove more carefully than before, now that he was toting a thirteen-hundred-pound pregnant heifer in the back of his truck. Nick didn’t have to worry about being thrown out at high speeds any longer, but the cow shat and farted continuously, making him wonder which was preferable. Probably the cow. He was covered in shit already anyway.
Nick sat in the remains of the filth he’d landed in and tried to look from the outside in on his new situation. He cursed Hobo silently, but it did little to absolve him from his share of responsibility. He’d interfered. If he’d only let Kimmy beat that girl to death with the cue ball. If he’d been home when Hobo came by, he’d still be within the safety of his ignorance. But none of that was the case. And now he was here, waiting for whatever was next.
Chad turned south out of gravel and onto the smooth, fresh pavement of Riley Road. The truck picked up speed. The road dipped over a long chain of hills and Nick felt his stomach float with every drop. The stop signs they flew past were nothing but blood-red warnings to be ignored.
Nick looked over his shoulder, watched the road flee beneath them. They were miles away from the church, but the sky above it still burned bright for the Lord, lit the sky as purple as a screaming bruise.
The stolen flatboat ferry floated slowly down the Grand River. The cow stood still in the center of the barge. At its front hooves was a large plastic tub full of grass and straw. The cow chewed and looked around easily, as if this event was the most normal thing in the world. The dogs sat calmly behind Chad, who stood at the bow, watching the night. Erik was playing with his phone at the stern, while Russell sat in the captain’s chair, piloting the boat.
“Let’s talk a bit, Nick.”
Nick stepped to the bow and joined Chad. The dogs looked intently at Nick but didn’t stir. Chad lit a cigarette and offered the pack to Nick. Nick took one of the cigarettes and lit it off Chad’s waiting lighter.
“You know Kimmy? I mean, before you drove her home.”
“No. I’ve seen her in Nate’s and all. But no. I never knew her before.”
“She was in a sad way before she met me. She’s a beauty, right? I mean, when her face isn’t all beat to shit, she’s a looker, yeah? Say ‘no’ you’re either a fag or a fag liar.”
“She’s a pretty girl.”
“Shit. Pretty. Girl’s a fucking knockout.” There was a chuckle at the back of the boat. Chad turned, smiled. “You like that, Erik?” He faced out over the water again. “So you didn’t know her but you gave her a ride. You do that a lot?”
“No.”
“So why her?” Chad said.
Nick wasn’t sure why. Or what Chad expected him to say. “I didn’t want to see her get in a wreck. Or kill somebody. I lost my wife a while back.”
“Smoking the exhaust pipe, right?”
Nick looked out over the black water, wished there were more to see.
Chad smiled at Nick, as if he took joy in needling him. “Lost my old man the same way,” Chad said. “Not the car. Hung himself in the woods behind out house. Law on his heels. I’m the one who found him.”
Nick looked at Chad, but Chad was looking out over the water. He no longer wore the satisfied grin. “Scary how quick you can get over something like that.”
Nick remained silent but he didn’t deny it. He remembered the relief that had been mixed up in his grief, the feeling he’d tried to deny was there. But it had been and eventually Nick realized that the relief was all that had been there. Hard as it was to admit, his new life was just something to get used to, like an unfamiliar car or a set of clothes that needed to be worn in. One day they felt a part of you. And when they did feel a part of you, it was as if they’d never felt any other way.
“Easy for me to say,” Chad said, pulling a tall boy Miller from his jacket pocket. He handed it to Nick and retrieved another for himself. “My old man was a miserable prick. Drunk. Mean.” He cracked his beer and took a long pull. “But you lost a kid.”
Nick nodded. “I did.”
They sat in silence. Chad drained his can and tossed it into the river. “We used to have goats when I was a kid. My dad had a friend and they dealt some weed. They were tight. I’d have called him Uncle Jim if he’d been the type. One night I go down to the barn because I had to feed the goats. They were little pygmy things. They were nice enough but I didn’t have a use for them. But I had to feed them and I’d forgotten and I had to go out late. It was dark and the light was on in the little barn shed where we kept the goats at night. The light was always on so I didn’t think anything. But when I went in I saw Jim with his dick in the female of our pair. He—Ha!—He’s wearing this pair of muck boots went up to his thighs, and he’s got this poor goat’s back legs in the boots with his, holding her still and steady while he got her, got her goatie style I guess.” Chad stopped talking and grabbed another beer from the foam cooler on the deck behind them, tossed one to Nick.
“I was dumbstruck,” Chad said. “And Jim doesn’t see me right away but he feels me and he turns toward me, still stuck with the goat and this goat is licking its black eyes. And you know what it looked like? Its face? Like it was the most normal thing in the world. And Jim is looking at me and then past me and his face melts from this look of, I don’t know, transcendent satisfaction, and I’m saying it fell away to a look of horror. I thought the look was for me, for me finding him there, but I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Dad.
