David Ohle - The Devil in Kansas

In a police station, the officer on duty eats tamales at his desk. Vickie enters, breathless.

“Can I help you, lady?”

“I wanna report a murder…maybe two.”

“One or two murders? And you wanna report them?”

“Yes. Maybe more than two.”

“Okay, have a seat over there. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

Vickie waits nervously. In a small office at the end of a hall, an officer reads the Weekly World News . A radio on his desk is tuned to a talk show. Someone says, “Status symbols like cars, expensive clothes, luxurious homes, and swimming pools often confuse visitors to the United States. Most Arabs, Latins and Africans, for example, are accustomed to a two-class system in which privilege exists only when accompanied by wealth. Classes are polarized and there are just two: rich and poor. Because the United States economy operates on the basis of a mass market, blue-collar workers, miners, farmers, even people on welfare, own goods that represent great wealth elsewhere. In terms of hours of work, the cost for such luxuries here is low. Understandably, the man from Ecuador, for example, assumes that the owner of a car in the United States is rich, but…”

The officer switches to a C&W station. Johnny Cash sings, “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”

Ray, he’s on probation. They make him wear one of those “house arrest” things, where they put a little ankle bracelet on you that tells them where you are all the time. And, of course, they cancelled his wife’s policy. So he’s flat broke again. He just cuts the lawn all the time now. It never stops, the sound of that mower. They told him they might give him a piss test at any time, and that he couldn’t drink at all, not even a beer. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Ray offed himself this winter when the grass dies. And my daddy, he works for the post office now. He got his old friend Wayne’s job after Wayne died. They said Wayne had eye cancer. I never knew you could get cancer in the eye. Is there anything in your whole body you can’t get cancer of? Can you get cancer of the heart?

Vickie moved out, of course, considering all the shit that happened. Her and Daddy are in the process of getting divorced. She’s working down at the Tamale House, which used to be the Squat ‘n’ Gobble. She’s been going with that moron, Walter, the meat cutter. Compared to him, Daddy was a real bright light.

Mickey marches up the street in summer postal gear, delivering mail to those houses that aren’t abandoned, burned out or boarded up. He too wears an electronic device around the ankle. Stray dogs growl at him as he passes. He has his pepper spray in hand. One dog leaps at him, but he squirts it in the eyes and the dog runs off whining.

The newly-remodeled Squat ‘n’ Gobble, now called the Casa de Tamal, features a busy drive-thru. Vickie works the window, bagging bundles of tamales and passing them into cars.

Walter drives up in his meat truck. On the radio, Ricky Nelson sings “Garden Party.”

“Hey, Baby. Gimme three bundles and a Big Gulp Coke. How you doing?”

“I feel good.”

“Wanna go out tonight? It’s Friday.”

“Where to?”

“Let’s rent a movie and go over to my place.”

“Okay.” Vickie hands him his order. “What about The Treasure of the Sierra Madre ?”

The driver of the next car in line blows the horn.

“Ummm, yeah. Or maybe Night of the Living Dead . We’ll stay up late, till we fall asleep.”

Other horns blow.

In Myra’s trailer, at the dining table, she pecks furiously at her laptop. She fills her cup with strong coffee, adds lots of sugar. On a shelf behind her are multiple copies of her novel, Deathcraft . At least six cats sleep around or scratch the sofa.

One of the bedroom doors opens and out steps Lorraine, tucking in her Animal Control shirt, then combing back her short hair. She kisses Myra on the cheek. “What about lunch?”

“Perfect. I gotta be downtown for my book signing anyway.”

“We’re on, then. The tamale place?”

“Around twelve fifteen.”

In Lorna and Junior’s room, the sound of a ventilator in the background blends with the soft yak of the Shopping Channel. Lorna, fat and pregnant, sits trancelike in a chair, eating a cream-filled doughnut, drinking a diet Mr. Pibb, watching the Shopping Channel.

Me? I’m too pregnant to work or anything, so I just stay home and take care of poor Junior.

Junior lies in a vegetative state, hooked to a ventilator and a feeding tube.

Lorna finishes the last bit of doughnut, turns her attention to the Shopping Channel as its hucksters offer bargains on cheap jewelry.

A buffalo camp, Kansas prairie, 1873. Canvas tents and several mule-drawn wagons define the camp’s edges. One wagon’s bed is filled with bleached buffalo bones, another’s with pelts, yet another serves as a chuck wagon. Near an Indian tepee, a bit removed from the camp proper, buffalo tongues cure over a smoldering buffalo chip fire. One of the hunters rubs buffalo fat between his palms, then works the oil into his hair before combing it.

Six Toes, a Kiowa woman, stretches out a pelt, hair side down, pegs it to the ground for drying, then rubs it with buffalo brains to cleanse it. She’s not happy in this work. Bow String, her male counterpart, skins a buffalo. Stone-faced and impassive, the picture of suppressed rage. When a grasshopper crawls across his face, even as it moves over his open eye, he suppresses any movement, not a flinch, not a twitch, not a blink.

Howard Dewey mounts a dark brown mare. Over his long buffalo hide jacket he wears a looped belt holding forty or fifty sizeable cartridges and a skinning knife. He carries a.50 caliber Sharps rifle. Beneath his sweat-darkened ten gallon hat, below his menacing eyes and rum-blossom nose, a gold tooth glimmers in the sun.

The horse saunters over to Bow String and Six Toes. Dewey spits tobacco so close to Six Toes, a few drops splash her. Then his horse pisses so close to Bow String, some of it splashes on him. “A thousand pardons, Mr. Bow String and Miss Six Toes.” He tosses them a coin each. “Hey, squaw, you really got six toes?” Six Toes continues with her chores. “Show me them toes. Hurry up.” He throws her another coin. She removes her moccasin and splays her toes. “Well, skin me alive. Wiggle ‘em fer me.” She wiggles all six for him. “One, two, three, four, five, six. There they are. Damned if I ain’t seen everything now…. Well, you two git back to work.”

Bow String and Six Toes watch Dewey ride out of the camp. Bow String says, “When the white man is gone, the Great Spirit will be satisfied.”

The open prairie, buffalo grazing. Numbering in the thousands, the animals face into a brisk wind and feed at a leisurely pace among dozens of their own dead, some of which have been skinned and left to the scavengers. Picked-clean bones litter the landscape. Among them are hundreds of prairie dog towns, the prairie dogs standing alert in their mounds. A muffled, distant, almost inaudible gunshot rings out. One of the buffalo falls. The others titter and snort, but remain calm. The prairie dogs disappear into their holes. Another distant shot, another buffalo falls. Again, the rest of the animals startle but return quickly to a calm state.