turned on the radio and sat down at the small table in her makeshift kitchen to drink her morning coffee. The window overlooked the Northern Pacific Railroad tracks. If she leaned a little forward and to the left, she supposed she could catch a glimpse of the corner of the Casbah. But her attention was caught by the radio announcer talking about a body that was found in a stubble-field thirty miles north of the FM area off Highway 75.
The announcer was saying that Sheriff Wheaton had been sent out to check on a suspicious pile of rags in the middle of the field and found a body.
Cash jumped up and pulled on the cleanest dirty socks she could find and put on her tennis shoes. She poured the remainder of the coffee into her Thermos and hooked her keys on the little finger of the hand that carried a white cup. Within five minutes she was on Highway 75 headed north, back on the Minnesota side of the Red.
Thirty minutes later Cash leaned against her mud-spattered Ranchero and watched Wheaton talk with two men. All three stared down at the flattened stubble. A body lay there, his head facing towards the river, away from Cash. Except for their black suits and Wheaton’s sheriff’s uniform, they could have been any three men discussing next year’s corn crop, the price of wheat on the Minneapolis Grain Exchange or the odds that the Sox might take the World Series.
Cash reached into the pocket of her jacket for a crumpled pack of Marlboros. She tapped one out and put it to her mouth, fished in her jeans pocket for a book of matches. With a practiced left-hand move, she lit it one-handed by bending a match over the back of the matchbook. It was a trick she’d learned from one of the vets returning from Viet Nam. In a drinking binge at the end of last summer, they had sat drinking out in a cornfield. He had shown her the one-handed match trick. You need it in the jungle, he said, so you can keep your other hand on your rifle at all times. “Of course, there are times when you are out on patrol and you just don’t light up at all ’cause the tip of a lit cigarette lets the gooks know exactly where your head is.”
Cash had practiced the one-handed trick until she got it down, suffering small black sulphur burns on her thumb before she got the hang of it. That soldier had re-upped as soon as he could. He had come into the Casbah for one last hangover before shipping out. Said he just couldn’t make it out here in the real world. He was going back until the war was over or they shipped him home in a bag. Sometimes Cash thought about him and wondered where he was, other times she just didn’t want to know.
She exhaled the smoke upward where it joined lazy fall clouds—fat like cotton candy—drifting slowly across the sunlit August sky.
The field where the men stood edged up to the Red River tree line. Cash reckoned that this close to the river it was probably feedlot corn a farmer grew, silage to feed his animals over the winter—not the cash crops of the larger acreage fields one or two miles away.
Cash put her left heel up on the Ranchero’s front bumper. She rested back on the hood, warmed by the late summer sun, wondering if the body in the field was cold or if the sun was warming him too. She couldn’t tell much of what had happened to him. She assumed it wasn’t a natural death or Wheaton wouldn’t be here and neither would the two guys dressed in suits. Around here, men only wore suits for church or if they worked at the bank.
One of the suits bent over and lifted the dead man’s left shoulder. Cash saw then the man was Indian. Wheaton glanced her way.
When she first pulled up, he had acknowledged Cash’s presence with an imperceptible nod of his head, had made a subtle hand gesture that she read as don’t come closer. She had gotten out of her truck, leaned against the front, watching.
She and Wheaton had known each other a long time. Back when she was three, her mother had rolled the car—with her three kids in it—in the big ditch north of town. All Cash remembered of that roller coaster ride was her brother and sister landing on top of her. Many times, come to think of it.
Wheaton had set Cash down on the long wooden bench in the waiting room of the jail. He went back out to the car and carried her mother in, even though her mother had walked up out of the ditch and seemed perfectly coherent and rational when she explained to Wheaton that all she had done was swerve to miss a skunk. But then she must have passed out.
Wheaton laid her down in one of the cells without locking the barred door. Cash watched him walk farther back into the jail and return with a grey army blanket and a pillow. Talking more to himself than to the little girl on the wooden bench in his jail in the dark of night, he muttered, “You’ll have to sleep out here. I’m not putting no two-year-old in a cell, even though there’s a bed in there. You don’t need that memory haunting you. There, it’s a little hard but, hey, you have to use the bathroom or anything?”
Cash shook her head no. She thought it best she just stay put. And she didn’t tell him she was three not two.
She could hear her mom breathing. She lay down on the bench. It was hard. And the wool blanket was scratchy. But even at three, she knew it was best not to talk or complain.
Her brother and sister were at the county hospital, but the hospital wouldn’t keep Cash because nothing appeared to be wrong with her. The nurses said the two older ones wouldn’t be going to school the rest of the week and that the youngest was best kept with her mother. Wheaton had tried to argue with them. But maybe having to care for three children, two of them hurt—and a drunk mother—had made him give in to the hospital staff.
Cash had no memory of her first morning waking up in jail. And no memory of what happened to her mom. Or her brother and sister, for that matter.
After that night came a succession of white foster homes, most of which she chose not to think too much about or remember. Once she learned to drive truck, she had been working any and all farm labor jobs anyone would hire her for.
And for whatever reason, she and Wheaton had developed a bond, he the county cop and she the county’s lost child. He was the one who showed up for her track meets at school. Bought her a wool sweater each Christmas. She didn’t have the heart to tell him the wool made her skin itch, probably because it reminded her of sleeping in his jail house.
He brought a second-hand bike to one of the homes for her. She rode that bike until the tires were threadbare. When the county moved her, the family kept the bike, like they kept all good things. Anything new or worth something always stayed with the foster family. Cash left the homes with a paper bag or a small cardboard box of the shabby clothes she had arrived in. She missed that bike. She didn’t know why Wheaton looked out for her. Didn’t ask. He didn’t say. It worked for both of them.
When she first arrived at the field, there had been an exchange of words among the three men with frequent scowls her way. Whatever Wheaton told them about Cash seemed to assuage their discomfort at having a fourth—actually fifth—person present at what was clearly a crime scene.
Their conversation finished, the two men shook Wheaton’s hand and walked to their car, a black Olds. As they passed Cash, they looked at her but didn’t speak. Cash took a drag of her cigarette and blew the smoke skyward.
Wheaton came over to the truck, kicked her front tire and said, “You might wanna put some air in here.”
Cash nodded her head toward the car pulling away. “Who’s that?”
“Federal folks, they said.”
“What are they doing here?”
“The guy laying over there, I think, is from Red Lake. Federal jurisdiction.”
“How’d he die?”
