Graveyard of the Gods

  GRAVEYARD OF THE GODS

  A NOVEL

  Richard Newman

  Blank Slate Press

  Saint Louis, MO 63110

  Copyright © 2016 Richard Newman

  All rights reserved.

  Publisher’s Note: This book is a work of the imagination. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. While some of the characters and incidents portrayed here can be found in historical accounts, they have been altered and rearranged by the author to suit the strict purposes of storytelling. The book should be read solely as a work of fiction.

  Blank Slate Press is an imprint of Amphora Publishing Group LLC.

  For information, contact:

  Amphorae Publishing Group 4168 Hartford Street

  Saint Louis, MO 63116

  www.blankslatepress.com

  www.amphoraepublishing.com

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Fonts: Adobe Garamond Pro, Impact, and Phosphate

  Cover Design by Kristina Blank Makansi

  Cover Art: Shutterstock

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948710

  ISBN: 9781943075201

  For my family—living, dead, and fictionalized.

  And for Tanya.

  GRAVEYARD OF THE GODS

  ONE

  THE YELLOW FLAME flickered from the natural gas pipe at the edge of the cornfield and seemed to dwindle even as Gene watched. The way it swirled the rusty edge of the pipe mouth always reminded him of the old neighborhood kid trying to lick the Fudgsicle smears from his lips and nose. Gene sat in his old Ford pickup, windows down, and listened to the crickets and the electric motor of the oil well. It was 4:00 a.m., and he expected to see headlights from Tosti’s boys any minute. Aside from the sliver of moon sliding to the west, the only light came from the sputtering flame unable to penetrate the blackness beyond the first rows of cornstalks. The old Churchill well strained to lift its birdlike head every eight seconds then dipped down again behind the tassels.

  The pump had been built and installed in the 1940s, during Carmi’s oil boom. Standard discovered oil in White County in 1939, three decades before Gene was born. As a kid Gene had loved the pumps equipped with big googly bird eyes, bobbing up and down like the glass knickknacks that perched on desks at First National Carmi Bank, founded by his great-great-great-grandfather. Gene lost track of how many greats, but he distinctly remembered one pump built to look like a huge mosquito sucking oil from beneath the silty skin of Southern Illinois.

  Now most pumps had stopped. The oil had all but dried up. What little remained was highly sulphered, like the coal in the southeastern part of the state, and expensive to process. The last dregs sucked from the caverns below brought in less than what the engines burned trying to bring it up. The wells of White County had frozen mid-pump, their steel beams stuck at various angles to the hilly countryside, and were slowly rusting back into the earth.

  This pump was one of the few still working, though it earned Gene less than thirty dollars a month. The flame had once billowed big enough to roast hotdogs and marshmallows, a bonfire on a pipe, but now the small, ghostly tongue could barely lick the rim.

  Gene’s cell phone glared 4:15. Tosti’s boys were late. The night had never completely cooled off the day’s steamy heat, and Gene felt sweat trickle down his sides from damp armpits. He wanted a smoke or even a lipful of chew, but the chronic stomach problems and nervous colon his doctors attributed to stress had forced him to quit. And he felt stressed now. Nothing good ever happened at four a.m. Four a.m. was when people woke up with food poisoning and raced to the toilet and squinted through teary eyes at the remains of what had made them sick. Four a.m. was when the wild dogs that roamed the woods along the Wabash would bark and howl and keep him from going back to sleep. Four a.m. was when he woke up last year with cramps and constipation from Irritable Bowel Syndrome so severe he had to drive himself over an hour to the emergency room in Evansville, Indiana. Four a.m. was when frozen pipes burst and roofs collapsed and foundations groaned and stairs creaked and when Tosti and his St. Louis boys did their darkest deeds, when everyone slept, even the early-rising Southern Illinois farmers dreaming that bushels of corn and soybeans would fetch as much as a barrel of oil from overseas.

  Twenty years ago, he might have listened to Led Zeppelin. These days he didn’t listen to music at all. Both the cassette and CD player in the truck were broken anyway, but if he listened to anything at all it was NPR, which would have made his family laugh since he was always the uncultured one. AM hate-radio hosts made his stomach acid churn, even if he did agree with them sometimes. This morning, like most mornings, he listened to the chattering birds and insects and creaking cornstalks.

  Gene tried to bore through the darkness to the bugs, worms, rats, raccoons, and deer he knew were in the thick of it. He was starting to wonder if he could see the dawn bluing over the Little Wabash’s scraggly tree line when headlights finally appeared. It was the usual white Chevy truck with a hard, flat shell over the bed. To the casual observer, the truck might look like a service vehicle for the oil pumps—if the casual observer lived in the city and nowhere near Carmi. It was the kind of truck driven by a foreman or estimator of a big urban construction company, which was, from what Gene could piece together, the owner.

  The truck stopped, engine idling but headlights off. Two men, both dressed in khaki slacks and white short-sleeved Polo shirts, stepped out and opened the tailgate and truck bed cover. The driver smoked a small Romeo cigar and looked about thirty-five. The other was younger and stood about Gene’s height, five foot nine or thereabouts. Each time the younger guy swigged his bottle of Sprite, his braces gleamed against the truck bed light. Gene had no idea if the guy had finally made enough money to get his teeth fixed or if his teeth needed fixing from a recent fight, but the braces reminded him of the zester his mother bought him years ago that now lay in the drawer with other useless kitchen gadget presents he never used. The name Zesty immediately sprang to mind.

  “You’re late,” Gene said.

  The driver raised his eyebrows, said nothing, exhaled cigar smoke. Gene guessed the guy had watched every mobster movie he could find and waited for him to make Don Vito’s open-handed version of the ambivalent shrug gesture.

  “You tellin’ us how to do our job?” Zesty asked incredulously. His accent sounded Brooklynesque, which was funny since the guy had probably grown up in suburban St. Louis.

  “No, I thought you might want to know that in forty-five minutes the sun will come up and these fields will be full of migrants. A hundred little Mexican eyes and the Jolly Green Giant will all be watching.”

  Romeo squinted at Gene through a rag of cigar smoke. Gene thought of the old Colt .22 Woodsman in his glove compartment—not that a shootout with these boys could lead to anything good.

  Zesty removed the plastic cover from a thick pipe, one of many various-sized PVC pipes stacked in the bed, and pulled out a body wrapped in a huge black trash bag. Romeo grabbed the other end, and the two dropped it on the ground at Gene’s feet.

  “That’s your problem now,” said Romeo. “We just got lost while passing through.”

  “We just stopped to ask for directions,” said Zesty.

  The two men got back in the truck and Gene watched Zesty take a last swig of Sprite before chucking the bottle into the field. Before he closed the driver’s side door, Romeo said, “Money’s in his pants pocket. You may want to take it out before you feed him to your piggies.”

  The truck pulled out, leaving a trail of dust smoldering in the red tail lights. Gene hoisted up Chuckles, the name he gave to the bodies Tosti’s boys b
rought, and dropped him in the bed of his rusty red Ford. Rigor mortis was beginning to set in.

  Gene wasn’t lying about the Mexicans and the Jolly Green Giant. There were few small family farms left in Carmi. Farmers had been sued by seed companies, hit with ridiculous inheritance taxes, or saddled with impossible loans. Most of the land had been snatched up by big corporate farms or two or three wealthy families. For over a hundred years the silty Wabash soil had yielded nothing but corn, soybeans, and sometimes wheat, usually winter wheat. But then Jolly Green discovered that the ground was perfect for green beans and cabbage. Mexicans came seasonally in retired school buses, usually parked in a camp near Crossville, and you could see rows of them, shirts off, hats on, bent over, picking crops. Gene still owned some of his family’s land, 240 acres, but he leased it to the Giant or parceled it out to a local farmer for corn and soybeans in a crop-sharing agreement. The soil was so depleted over so many seasons of corn and so prone to cutworms, rootworms, caterpillars, and marestail that it demanded too much fertilizer, too much herbicide, too much pesticide, too much time, and way too much money. He could no longer afford to farm himself and had sold all his machinery. But he still operated a hog shed.

  The hog shed wasn’t big, nowhere near the size of the corporate hog farms in the area. He rarely had more than fifty hogs at time, but it was enough for one person to operate by himself without too much trouble, and inside it smelled as bad as the big ones. Less than five minutes inside a hog shed and anyone wanting to rejoin the public would need to burn his clothes. And hair. But Gene did not want to rejoin the public. He had grown up with hogs, barely noticed their smell now, and had even learned to like the sweet stink by the time he was in third or fourth grade.

  Headlights off, his truck rolled toward the low aluminum barn. Gene parked by the front door and grabbed Chuckles, slung him over his shoulder, and opened the door. The hogs had heard the truck and were stirring, sullen and anxious. He hadn’t fed them since yesterday morning so they’d leave nothing behind.

  “Supper’s ready, kids!” Gene sang to them. “Sorry I didn’t have time to make anything fancy.” After the living horrors he’d seen in Operation Desert Storm, a dead man being eaten was nothing, but it still made him uneasy and sharing these private jokes with the pigs made it easier.

  With his old Swiss Army lock blade, he ripped open the black plastic and looked briefly at Chuckles, who lay face down: short brown hair, a bald spot at the top the size of a Ritz cracker. The key-shaped hole behind his left ear and no exit wound meant the poor guy had been shot execution style with two .38 hollow-tipped bullets that probably hit each other in the skull and fragmented along with most of his brains. Gene fished through two pockets of the pre-faded jeans before finding his wad of hundreds, $2,000. They used to pay him $3,000.

  “Budget cuts,” he spat out loud. The cash had been decreasing a couple hundred dollars each time for the last year. If it weren’t risky, he would have considered driving the body back to Tosti or dropping it in some construction site. Instead, Gene took off Chuckles’ shoes, picked him up from behind—he always tried not to look at their faces—then gave him a consolatory pat on the back of his shoulder and tossed him over the aluminum railing. Gene never stood around to watch. The pigs sniffed hungrily.

  Normally Gene would walk outside, toss the black plastic bag and shoes into a rusted barrel more than half full of trash, douse it with gasoline, toss in a match, and listen for the gentle froom and sizzle while the cardboard and paper burned and the plastic melted. But this morning he happened to look down into the shoes before he dropped them in the barrel and saw a piece of yellow notebook paper, folded and flattened by Chuckles’s sweaty foot.

  Gene didn’t think of himself as a particularly curious creature, but if something was right in front of him, right under his nose, he couldn’t resist looking. He peeled the paper from the inside heel of the shoe before dropping it into the barrel.

  The paper had been pressed flat and was folded four times, into sixteenths. As soon as he opened it, the page looked oddly familiar, though he’d never seen the list of names, smudged numbers, and barely legible notes with titles like County Commish, State Rep, and Dir of Design & Constr underneath. Sweat started running from under Gene’s John Deere cap even before he consciously recognized his brother’s distinctive handwriting. He hadn’t seen Miller for over ten years, but it hadn’t changed much since college—black loopy scrawls, unclosed but confident, almost looking like a shorthand version of the Arabic he’d seen during the war.

  Gene ran into the hog shed. The hogs had turned Miller’s body over and were nudging and nuzzling his clothes with their wet snouts. Gene knew better than to jump into a pen filled with hungry hogs. Desperate, he looked around and saw a large shit shovel, which he banged on the aluminum railing, startling the hungry brood. Then he stood up on the first rail, yelled “Hey! Hey there!” and waved the shovel in the air, trying to make himself look as big in his brown work overalls as possible. He jumped into the pen, threw the shovel in the general direction of the hogs, then grabbed Miller under his arms and pulled him over the top rail. After positioning the body in a slumped sitting position against the fence, Gene collapsed against the wall a few feet away and stared at Miller until he couldn’t anymore. Breathless even after several minutes, his stomach roiling and colon churning, he could barely swallow his own sour spit.

  TWO

  GENE FIRST MET Jimmy Tosti in the Marines, before Operation Desert Storm. Lance Corporal Gene Barnes had originally been trained to drive an AMTRAK, the amphibious assault tractor that carried grunts from ship to shore. Since the first Gulf War took place in the desert, the military retrained him to drive a tank filled with an assault squad.

  Gene outfitted his tank like he had his AMTRAK, with stuffed animals such as Sycamore Squirrel and Lucinda Skunk near the controls. A sergeant once tried to tell him that populating a tank with stuffed animals was not official US military procedure. At the time Gene was cleaning engine grime from his nails with an oriental butterfly knife, which was not a proper US military weapon.

  “Oh, really,” Gene said and stood up, flexing his huge farmer’s hands that were the size of diesel gears, with thick muscular fingers sticking out like large sprockets. His clenched fists were as big as howitzer shells, and the Marines had trained and shaped the rest of him. In high school he had earned a black belt in karate. But hometown friends and soldiers he shared beers with at Camp Pendleton all agreed the most menacing thing about Gene was the crazed look in his eyes—a look that said he would kill a person in a heartbeat and take a curiously detached amusement during the whole process. Gene cultivated this perception even though it wasn’t exactly true. He knew he could kill somebody if he absolutely had to, if he felt endangered and the person deserved it, but deep down he loved animals, especially furry ones, loved his mother, and tolerated most everyone else as long as they left him alone. The sergeant didn’t know the cuddly side of Lance Corporal Barnes and walked away, deciding he had bigger battles to fight.

  Gene approached the military with a supreme lack of seriousness. Even during combat, with bullets whizzing over his head, he perched through his tank hole, and as the grunts ran out from the back and toward the front line, he lisped in his most feminized voice, “Go get ’em, tholdier!” and “Thock it to ’em, tough guy!” and “Oh, you’re tho rough and tough!”

  Nobody, except Jimmy Tosti, the crew’s communications operator, said anything to Gene about his behavior because of the crazed look in his eye and the fact that he more or less got the job done, whatever the job was. A couple of years after high school, and after several minor arrests, mostly dope related, Jimmy’s interest in the Marines had been strongly encouraged by a St. Louis County judge who believed in creative sentencing. The war started right after Jimmy enlisted, and by then it was too late to back out. He had long ago concluded jail might have been a better option, and his goal was to spend as much of his time in the Middle East ston
ed out of his mind.

  Jimmy Tosti probably should have pronounced his name “Taustie,” as in Austin or Boston, but the family pronounced it “Toastie,” as in Post Toasties, or toasted, Jimmy’s preferred state of consciousness. Gene’s lack of respect for the military, or at least for his comrades in arms, amused Jimmy Tosti greatly, but as a city kid he especially enjoyed Gene’s stories of growing up on a farm.

  One day during a training mission they spent hours idling in a tank waiting for the grunts to “take the objective,” whatever that was. Gene had told him about the first time he’d seen pigs castrated. He and Miller had been kids and were excited to help the men castrate the male piglets. Their father and his brother had held the squirming pig upright, locking down its hind legs so it couldn’t kick with its sharp hooves, while their neighbor and cousin, Ralph Edson, who owned the farm, made two cuts on the pig’s small mound of a scrotum, yanked the testicles out, cut the long strands attaching them, then tossed the wad into the pig pen.

  “Rocky Mountain Oysters!” Ralph called to the boys. “Your grampa used to bread ’em and fry ’em up for breakfast.”

  Back in the pen the other piglets and the sow swarmed around the testicles and gobbled them up, squealing and sucking down their own flesh and blood and ductus deferens. It was horrific. Mothers gobbled up the testicles of their own squalling brood, brothers and sisters gobbled up brothers’ testicles, and Miller claimed he even saw one pig, released back into the pen, gobble up his own ruined and bloody gonads. The two boys climbed into the back of the truck and felt sick. Miller never went again. After his first time though, it was a mixture of pride and fascination that brought Gene back for more. He spent most every summer through high school working with pigs and soon learned how to castrate them himself, single-handedly.

  “Why do they cut their nuts off, dude?” Jimmy Tosti asked.