No one said, no one thought it: the killer’s in the grave, he's ours now. A
quarter century in the past prison people strapped him to a gurney and
administered lethal injection. Word of his last meal leaked afterwards…pork
chops, macaroni and cheese, Dutch apple pie, chewed slowly to delay the
inevitable. Beforehand he’d agreed to a chaplain but when the chaplain arrived
he waved the man away. Apocryphal the man’s dismissive greeting, upon first
sight of this goodie-goodie with his bible: You the executioner or the
priest? Always had trouble telling the difference.
Some families were there, people who’d been named in the
newspapers. The newspapers called them survivors. A well-lit room, a gurney. A needle and cannula. The children in the families were left home with friends
and grandparents. Sisters and brothers and mothers and fathers and stepfathers
and husbands and wives and best friends and in some cases cousins. The viewing
room was no larger than a control room in a recording studio but twenty-two
people, most of them standing, crowded to watch, shoulder to shoulder, warm
against each other. The rest could be reported but out of respect for the dead
will remain private. If it’s to be told, let the families tell it—as it should
be.
There
had been a burial. Some had made efforts to force cremation of the man’s
remains, but the man had secured means and support, his one request besides the
final meal. He didn’t want to be burned dead. He didn’t want to be ashes. He
wanted to be put to ground in a definite place, but what place would have him?
Connections had been made through the chaplain a year in advance of the
execution date, a site had been secured, arrangements for private burial
post-execution. The headstone would be unmarked; no dates or name. A cemetery
agreed to work with the prison so long as it never made the papers. A grave,
then, next to others like it. People who were no longer people, having come to
the end of their bodies. Once or twice a year some graves welcomed visitors and
flowers were left to die.
Psychological
profile: Reactive Attachment Disorder. Dark Triad, one
pop psych pundit had speculated once on an evening news program. Machiavellianism,
Psychopathy, Narcissism.
Twelve people over a period
of ten years.
Thirty-four and a half when
arrested.
Facts and improvisations
from fact. Assessments and opinions. The man’s childhood, the man’s parents,
his father’s alcoholism. The man’s dyslexia, early difficulties at school,
failed socialization. The man’s work on a farm as a teenager. His cruelty to
domestic animals. His arrests at ages thirteen and fifteen for stalking an
eighth-grader and stealing a townie’s car. His arrest at sixteen for indecent
exposure, masturbating in bushes across the street from a McDonald's. The man dropping out of school same year
as the third arrest, his leaving home without even an argument. On the wander
over a decade after, picking up work in places where reputations didn’t exist.
In Texas joined a crew of itinerants. Migrant harvesters. Six-month treks,
fifteen hundred miles from southern Oklahoma to Canada, Kansas to South Dakota
every summer. One of dozens of such operations. North up U.S. Route 83, the
harvest trail. People to greet again in every town. Farmers to get reacquainted
with each year. Every expedition involving a reshuffling of crew members. An
ex-con from North Dakota. A high school junior from Austin. College accounting
major from Oklahoma City. Addicts in recovery with buck knives in their boots.
Vets from any number of useless involvements overseas. Each year a crew of
eight, run by an operations manager. The news could recall, and does, the
manager’s name, though the manager would rather that wasn’t mentioned. His wife
the crew’s cook, her too. Combines, hoppers, semis with trailers to transport
equipment from job to job. The man first worked as a grain truck operator, then
graduated to riding a combine. He was quick, a hard worker. He didn’t talk much
and that’s part of what made him quick. Every year for seven years he showed up
at the crew call on the manager’s farm, ate barbeque chicken, threw horseshoes,
shook hands with people who’d signed on for the upcoming harvest. The manager
couldn’t say where he lived or what he did during the winter months, the off
months. He would call weeks ahead of the usual departure date and sign on. He
was a young man and he needed the work and even, a rare thing, seemed to like
it. He didn’t fight and he didn’t drink and if he had any instincts for
indiscretion, he kept discreet about them. People might ask questions about how
he’d been but his answers were short and generic. He would laugh at jokes,
there was nothing odd about him, far as the manager or manager’s wife could tell.
Where did he catch the
time? the manager asked himself, years later, on camera. Not one or two but
five news crews had driven their trucks out to his farm, parked in the drive
and yard, blocking his pickup. Foolishly, as he’d later admit, he had walked out
to meet them. He had spoken his mind, expressed shock and talked awkwardly in
tangles about his own ignorance of the situation. No, he hadn’t known. To
repeat, for emphasis: hell no. Do you know this work? Only days off are when it
rains. That or when the dew’s heavy. If so, have to wait until sun and wind dry
the wheat to a certain moisture content, about fifteen percent. Which in the
summer is rarely if never. We’re up before dawn. We drive, get set up, start
around 10AM then go until 10, 11 at night. Do that all day, you’re done. Do it
days and weeks and months, you’re not up for much but sleep and eating. It’s
understood. Everyone who signs on, knows. Then the comment that he regretted
most, which was circulated for weeks on television and in news magazines and
the papers: He was among the better I’ve ever had. He was the kind of employee
you wanted. Dependable.
There hadn’t been time
during the summer but there had been time during winter. The off months when
members of a crew would take their earnings from half a year's work and return
to whatever lives they had, wherever they had them. This one? He came from
nowhere. His home was the cab of a combine. December, January, February, March,
unknown to anyone, went on the wander like ragweed pollen. It wasn’t
like anyone asked. The manager and manager’s wife claimed they first learned
along with most everyone else, when those missing months turned to reportage.
The man’s photo, his face become an ugly meme. The capture in a motel outside
Grand Rapids, a stolen truck with Nevada plates. Scared, they said. Eight
springs and summers and autumns sharing company with someone they would have
never wanted to know, had they known him. Late April every year he came back to
town, rolled up the long drive to the farmhouse, white fencing either side,
stepped to the porch and knocked on the door and asked for the manager to put
his name in the pool for another summer. Lanky, unshaven, baseball cap,
toothpick or bottom lip pooched with chaw, rambler’s mud caked to steel-toed
boots, a nudie shirt with pearl buttons two sizes too small. That soft voice of
his moved through conversation with ducked head and winced shoulders. Never
much for looking a person in the eye nor for handshakes. The stories were
nowhere for the longest while, then suddenly they were all the time everywhere.
The name they called him not the name he went by.
He was shy, they assumed.
Not much for talking. He didn’t waste people’s time trying to be a personality.
The stories informed them
of the rest. Towns unconnected to each other, trailer parks, apartment
complexes. The man they knew then didn’t know circling back hundreds of miles
on an off-season to revisit a farmhouse, a parking lot outside some penny-ante
Kansas roadhouse. Notebook in jacket pocket (admitted as evidence).
Deliberately sloppy cursive notes with names and addresses lit upon months
prior on the work route. None regular contacts on the manager's contract
schedule, annual fields to harvest. Never that close to the job though the job
was once a year. A house two properties over, a town one town over, people who
lived in the area. In the winter months there were disappearances and the
authorities, first the small authorities then the larger, FBI for the last
five, had mapped the spots and tracked the dates and failed to assign a
pattern. Around those parts people’s lives were bad television, not much
happened. Folks made a long-standing tradition of learned helplessness. So
wrote a pulp biographer after the story became a trial and the trial a verdict,
the verdict a long rot in death row ending fourteen years later as a quiet
hateful execution. Twenty-two people behind glass, watching. When the
pentobarbital was put to vein, one embittered sister spat at the glass. It was
like spitting at her own reflection.
It was April, a month of
rain. The man become body, the body become memory, as it had been for the
twelve and their loved ones. No one said: now there, the end is past, time to
double back to the beginning.
The roadside ditches, heavy waves of grass. The
rusty twists of barbed wire skipping post to post. The quiet places, in-between
places, where people favor speed because the land is so slow.
Like dew, the story said. Like dew the details grow here of their own accord, don’t
settle. One morning here on this blade or stem, another on that one. The story laid
claim to all of it because none of it was certain. It was not subtle. It did
not observe the privacy of the bereaved nor the dignity of victims. It was as
comprehensive and wide-ranging as the places it described and derived from.
There were roads, the story explained, it was their nature to wander. There
were drivers through every hour of the day and night, who followed. The cars
pulled onto gravel roads, stopped next to dust-covered mailboxes. Bills, junk
mail, the story explained, never letters. Such was the feel of this fabled
territory: that a hand opened a mail box in full knowledge no letter would ever
arrive, even if necessary enough or desperate enough to be written.
Into the past the story predicted: there will have been many places gathered
into one place, many people lost and then found, then shaped into a man.
Somewhere twenty years gone someone will stand to watch trash burning on the
furthest edge of unimportant property. The fire will darken and feather into
ash pages of a newspaper. A headline withered into smoke and breathable air.
The story will generalize. It will speculate without conscience or fear of
reprisal. It will gather opinions about such places and its people and will
cite research and data. From one corner of the story someone will say, “There's
as many names for nowhere as there are unwanted children.” From another, names
themselves will be forthcoming: Mapleton and Storm Lake and Muscatine. Lone
Tree and Le Mars. Curlew and Emmetsburg and Kanauha.
There will be fields between towns, fields where no towns exist.
Here, the story will say. Here’s where people end and their stories begin. It
rains a while. Clouds pass. A dog digs in the shade. Yearless places where
death walks blindfolded laying hands on nearly everything. Rats and mice and
grasshoppers. Sparrows and wrens and screech owls, apex predators down to
perpetual prey. Hawk and rabbit, rattlesnake and squirrel. These and more, the
story will tell, I honor and devour. I’m the land and what's more, its
anthology of fates.
I am the flyover zone, the passenger at the window seat.
I am snow falling unobserved and the furrow that brightens where it settles.
None will say: I am a story now. None will have to. It will be the story’s
work, to become their thoughts, their arguments, hot takes, gossip, reverence
for the awful. “There was a man,” it will begin. “In the summer months he
worked, in the winter months he wandered.” The tone mythic and moody. Dates and
places. Court-admitted evidence and hearsay. Everything more atmosphere for the
story. Tales of old that bring the worst that can happen into human form, to
describe its ways and habits, the inscriptive arc of its cruelty.
Here she is, a West Virginia woman on the crew four summers. Her name’s Shayna.
She left Huntington to put distance between herself and her drug connections. A
cousin worked for Central Texas Farm Credit, an accountant. The good cousin,
the solid cousin, come stay with me she said. Shayna in town two months
sleeping on the cousin’s couch, keeping her antsiness at bay, fingernails
chewed to slits, brain screaming for dopamine. Central Texas Farm Credit, what
do they do? she asked at the table over dinner. We, the cousin said, as if it
were family. We finance operating expenses and equipment purchases. It’s real
money. All the contract operations need us to get over. New combines and a
wheat head cost 500K or more. Each crop has its head, so figure it. Corn heads,
stripper heads, sunflower heads. Then there’s the rest of the machinery, be it
Kenworths, Peterbuilts, tractors, Kinze carts, service trucks, RVs. There’s
licensing stuff to consider or the DOT and FMCSA will come calling. When a crew
gets back after a long haul they’ll trade those combines in for newer ones.
Without us nothing floats and nothing gets harvested. It was early spring and
operations managers were calling, setting up appointments to talk loans. Put a
word in? Shayna asked. The cousin was hesitant but did so. An upstanding
married Christian crew boss whose wife travelled with him, third generation
migrant harvester, always paid on time and always called her mam. That’s how,
the story says, trailing away from focus on this woman come all the way from
her troubles to work four solid summers on a harvest. She could look after
herself and did. She drove semis and evenings ate pork and beans with the rest
of the crew and didn’t spread herself too thin with friendliness. She kept distance
and kept an eye on others. She carried herself with an edge that discouraged
impropriety.
Now then, the story says, there’s a character. There’s a character and
beginnings of a subplot. The character connected to other characters, minor players
in this narrative’s infancy. One among them will separate, go off on his own,
gather more unto himself and grow larger. He will grow larger and the others
will be forced to grow larger with him. Of each it will ask, What say you? A
microphone for each face, interrogators. For the longest while millions will
have no awareness then in a day’s time and a week’s, several months and a year,
each will have a name and face that breaks into a stylized fame that won’t
leave them. Some may hide, some may try to shake it. Nothing about them is
personal anymore, the story will explain, for they’re expressions of a larger
purpose, they’re characters. When they shave in the morning, hairs tapped off
that razor are public property.
Here’s someone else, he stands in a gravel parking lot. He smokes a cigarette,
it’s dark. One of five available people on offer. Call him Dustin or Haitham or
Miguel or John-Boy or Hollis. Each could be this man now available for
imagining. It’s five years after the arrest, ten years after the execution. The
timeline here, in this moment, him standing here, a mess of twists and turns:
it lays there at his feet like so much utility cord. There’s a cell phone in
his hand, a flip phone. He’s smoking and texting or smoking and scrolling
through old numbers, deleting connections to old acquaintances gone fallow.
Here’s one: his old boss. The op manager of Jasper Custom Harvesting. Here’s
another, the old boss’ wife Sissy. Both, he deletes both. How long had he been
carrying them around, having forgotten? He flips the phone closed, pockets it,
takes another drag. The sky above dark and clear, crisp with negative space,
doing its solid best impersonating eternity. He pauses, caught by something.
He’s remembered. How can he be sure of it without consulting the phone? Digs
back into pocket, holds it. Years must’ve passed since he’d slipped it into
pocket because the design’s changed, the technology. Not a flip phone, a smart
phone, tap the screen, it brightens. Six-digit code entered and an icon tapped,
a search window opens. To free both hands, he flicks the cigarette a few feet
away onto gravel. Taps letters and taps search and a list of old articles
arrives pre-ranked and sorted by frequency of visits. Clicks on one, his name
highlighted in the language. The article tells him who he was and where he’d
been, who he’d known and for what purpose, how he’d worked alongside certain
people and especially a certain man. The man had become unknown before becoming
known, had taken twelve people into a vanished place before walking out of a
Grand Rapids motel room with an ice bucket. There federal officers had arrested
him. What did this have to do with him, freshly without cigarette, standing on
gravel, holding a phone that consolidated all human history and threaded it, at
the tap of a search icon, through a digital wormhole? He clicks the back
button, scrolls. Hundreds. Maybe a thousand more? Articles and posts and
videos, each with a different stranger who had his name to speak, without his approval
or knowledge. He hocks, he spits, a high arc past the drive into the grass and
its dark. It’s October, cold out. His breath makes wordless speech bubbles and
this reminds him: better to disguise that with another cigarette. Smoke a
serviceable camouflage for the breath leaving you.
There then. There’s another, the story says. How many more like him? Fewer than
enough, far short of plenty. Each mention of him another version of him. The
story told then retold then hovered over as buzzards of punditry and analysis
circle and plot a landing. There is a family, there are sympathies to extend.
There is graphic documentation, torture and rape and suffocation and
dismemberment. There are sympathies blending with graphic documentation, there
are curses and wept expressions of spite smoothed and folded into permissible
instances of voyeurism. There are birth dates, yearbook photos, gravesites
available for location by Google search. There are murders entering common
currency as stories. There is a man who never had one worth telling
or knowing, then caught, indicted, brought to justice on a gurney. There were
courtroom sketches and old police sketches. There were half attempts to portray
a whole with fits and starts, after the families walked to their cars and drove
home, asphalt of the parking lot shiny with rain recently come and gone, gates
parting where people stand on either side of the road, holding signs and
placards with names shared by the living and faces cremated or buried. Each
were found, none were brought home.
Six hundred and fifty miles from a girl sitting
on her bed, in her room. A thousand miles from a woman rinsing dishes at a
kitchen sink. Thirty-two from a trailer where an uncle deals out another hand
of rummy to his wife and daughter across the counter. Six or seven thousand
from a thirty-year-old scrolling on their phone on a morning commute on the subway.
Two hundred miles from an ex-cop casting another line on a lake that freezes
solid each long winter, so must be restocked each spring, fish dropped live
from helicopter or airplane. Half a mile from two kids throwing rocks at a dead
rattlesnake gathering flies on the shoulder of a country road.
Sixty
paces from a three-hundred-year-old acorn tree. Twelve paces from a crawfish mound on the soggy side of a culvert. A hundred to a hundred-ten paces, depending
on the person, their height, the length of their stride, from a thorn bush
where a flannel shirt had once been found. The bush lining a ditch, the ditch
dividing one field from another. One year soybeans were grown on one side, corn
on the other.
Forty
paces from the nearest live cricket, two from the nearest silent one.
A
scuff of earth, an unmarked patch of ground all paces walk towards and from which all miles wander. Something found here once. Something anonymous without visitors. It’s quiet. It’s beyond care or concern. It was buried a while then
wasn’t. Here it came to rest. Here it didn’t. The circle at the end of the line. The line that divides. The circle that doesn't.
