“No... And if there were, we would have seen him around town,” Skinner said. “Not much way you wouldn’t get seen.”
“Then the whole town is, mentally, above average?” Jenkins asked.
“I didn’t say that. We’ve got some unusual people. Daria McCain is eighty years old now, and when she was in her seventies, she decided she’d spent her whole life as a man when, in fact, she was really a woman in a man’s body. She got people to start callingher Daria—she used to be Darrell—and she wears a dress and everything. Other than that, though, she seems normal enough. Holland appointed her to the fire commission. I can promise you, Daria didn’t go running through any backyards. After the big change of mind, she didn’t bother to stay in shape. She’s really... soft and willowy.”
Jenkins said, “Did she...” He made a scissors-cutting motion with his fingers.
“No, she never got anything cut off, far as I know.”
“And that would be the... oddest... of the Wheatfield residents?” Virgil asked.
“We’ve got the usual collection of old men shouting at clouds, but nobody who’s obviously nuts,” Skinner said. “If I had to pick a name, I would have picked Larry Van Den Berg. He always struck me as over-tense, but he got along okay for a long time... You know, before...”
Jenkins said to Virgil, “Motive.”
“Gotta be money,” Virgil said.
“Didn’t I already say that about a hundred times?” Skinner asked.
Wardell Holland stepped through the curtain. He had a letter in his hand, and he said, “You guys won’t believe this.”
20
As Virgil was driving Shrake through the night to the hospital in Fairmont, the woman who had swastikas tattooed on her earlobes was sitting in Jim Button’s Nazi kitchen with her hair pulled up over the top of her head in two horns, held in place by two fat, blue rubber bands. She said, “Ow!... Ow!... Ouch!... Goddamnit, ow!... Hey!... Ouch!...”
Another woman was working on her with a sewing machine needle and a puddle of black ballpoint pen ink, converting the two tiny swastikas to black squares. The Nazi earlobe woman, Marie York, had been offered a waitress job in an Albert Lea bowling alley. She’d worn big, gold-plated earrings to the job interview to hide the swastikas but knew the truth would come out sooner or later, so she was having them obliterated.
When Button accused her of anti–National Socialist treachery, she’d said, “I’ve got to eat. I’m not giving up this career opportunity.”
When the tattoo lady had shown up, Button retreated to the dining area to sulk: the fact was, the wheels were coming offMinnesota’s National Socialist wagon. Nobody would hire them, and they didn’t have a whole lot of salable skills, other than the ability to lift heavy weights and/or make methamphetamine out of Energizer lithium batteries, Sudafed, and farm fertilizer.
Recently, they couldn’t afford either the batteries or the Sudafed, and when they’d tried to steal anhydrous ammonia from a farmer’s wheeled fertilizer tank, they’d managed to break the handle off the spout, and the ammonia had run down the farmer’s driveway and stunk up the whole neighborhood. Also, they’d damn near gassed themselves to death, suffered some spotty burns on their hands and arms, and, in the end, had only come away with one two-liter Pepsi bottle of the stuff.
At this point, they were living off their individual SNAP cards, which would not allow them to buy either alcohol or tobacco, and which, realistically, could have been a good thing, because if SNAP did allow it, that’s probably all they’d buy. The cards also wouldn’t allow them to buy any hot food or food that could be eaten at the store.
The only thing left was nutritious crap like hamburger and noodles that they had to cook themselves, and if they hadn’t found a convenience store that would take their SNAP card in return for nothing, giving them half back in cash, they’d probably all be kicking the nicotine habit right now.
Button lit up one of his last five Marlboros and put on his thinking cap, and as the tattoo lady was finishing up with Marie, and he finished up a half sack of Cheez-Its, he went back in the kitchen, and said, “I’ve had my thinking cap on.”
The tattoo lady said, “That can’t be good.”
“Listen, that state cop Flowers is still here, and he hasn’t figured out a goddamn thing. There’s three people dead and two moreshot. They gotta be desperate. The other thing is, Skinner and Holland were making a fortune in that store until the priest closed the church, right? Am I right about that?”
The tattoo lady said to Marie, “Put that Neosporin on your lobes every two hours, and keep doing it until you run out. I’m gonna get out of here before Jim tells you his plan. I want nothing to do with it.”
“You don’t even know what it is,” Button said.
“And I plan to keep it that way,” the tattoo lady said. “I don’t want to be no accomplice.”
—
She left, and Marie asked, “You want Sylvia to hear this, whatever it is?”
“Yeah, because she knows how to write good. We’ll have to tell Raleigh, too, because it could get complicated, and I might need his help. But it’s gonna bail us out, babe. We’ll be in tall fuckin’ clover when we pull this off, and there’s not a fuckin’ thing illegal about it.”
“That’s a change,” Marie said. “Am I right thinking that even if it’s legal, it’s still stupid?”
Button bared his teeth at her. “We don’t need that kind of defeatist thinking.”
