Graveyard of the Gods Read online

  “So they grow bigger. Also, you don’t want a bunch of bulls running around. You only want one good bull for breeding.”

  Often when they were bored, playing the military’s favorite game, Hurry Up and Wait, Tosti would say, “Tell me more about them pigs, dude.”

  “What do you wanna know?” Gene asked. He didn’t mind humoring Jimmy Tosti, who was pretty much his only friend, but didn’t know what else to tell him.

  “What else do they eat besides their own nuts?”

  “Anything. Everything. Even their own young. There was this one guy, Nolan Johnson, my grandma’s neighbor. He was a farmer, but he was into the stock market and all kinds of cockamamie schemes. The Feds busted him for sending stolen tractor engines by train. They caught him at the loading station in a sting operation. The whole thing was a set up. Anyway, when he came back a year later from prison, his life wasn’t so good. His wife was teaching grade school and had left him, his daughter was off to college, and he had to sell most of his farm. All he had left were a bunch of rusted lawn mowers and a few hogs, and one day a neighbor came to check on him and he was gone. Nowhere to be found. The neighbor walked through the house, walked down the hill to the back forty, went over to the barn—nothing. No Nolan. He gave up and was walking back to his car when he passed the pig pen and saw Nolan’s Rolex gleaming in the mud. He only had three or four pigs, but they ate him, bones, clothes, and all. All that was left were his half-chewed shoes and his watch. Nobody knows if he got drunk and careless or slipped and it was an accident or if it was suicide or revenge for ratting everybody else out or what.”

  “Damn, boy, you got some fucked-up stories.”

  Four years later, Jimmy Tosti sent Gene an email saying he had a business proposition and wanted to talk in person. They met at a Hardee’s on I-64 and Route 1, the Carmi exit, the next afternoon.

  The Hardee’s sat across from a Phillips 66 in a small valley built up by the highway ramps and overpass. It was the only hill for miles, and the brown stubble of cornstalks stretched around them until it reached the scrawl of trees that shadowed the Little Wabash. Every few years the Wabash would flood into the Little Wabash and the huge flat stretch of land between the two rivers looked like a vast lake, with waves lapping the tops of oil wells and water tanks. But this meeting happened in September. Flood season over, the corn stubbled up dry and brittle. The fields were a cheerless, leached brown, and the sky was overcast with a film the color of spoiled milk.

  Jimmy Tosti’s bright new yellow Dodge Viper stood out in this colorless landscape. He sat behind the wheel talking on his cell, when Gene pulled into the parking lot. Jimmy’s belly had bulged a bit since Operation Desert Storm and now sloped at the same angle as his fine sloped nose, which looked to Gene like it had maybe also grown a bit. He was always short and stocky with muscular arms, but he had grown a bit softer in the past few years. Jimmy’s two biggest loves were firstly smoking dope and secondly eating sweets, which he usually did ravenously after the first, especially Entenmann’s doughnuts, the dozen-sized box that came with four chocolates, four powdered, and four plain. Operation Dessert Storm, Jimmy liked to call it. Despite the extra pounds, he looked the same and at least still had a thick full head of hair, unlike Gene, who believed most of his hair had wilted and fallen out after so many years in a hot helmet before and during the war.

  “Farmer Brown!” said Jimmy Tosti, sticking out his hand. Gene had always either been Farmer Brown or “dude,” and he wondered if Tosti ever called anybody by their real name. He figured Tosti was usually too stoned to remember or too uninterested in learning it in the first place.

  “How’s life in exciting Carmi?” he asked, mispronouncing the town “Carmee.” It always irked Gene when people mispronounced Carmi as much as when people pronounced the s in Illinois.

  “It’s Carmi, with an I, as in I like it here just fine, thanks.”

  They ordered their food and stood there facing the counter while they waited. Neither man broke the silence. Gene couldn’t tell if Jimmy Tosti was contemplating the chocolate chip cookie and hot apple turnover on the dessert menu or organizing his thoughts for whatever proposition he had for Gene.

  “Looks like you’re doing well enough,” Gene told him when they sat down at a booth with their plastic trays. No one else was in the restaurant. He patted his own belly and gestured to the parking lot. “Full tummy, nice ride.”

  “Business has been good,” Jimmy said and stuck a wad of French fries in his mouth. “I travel a lot, work mostly in St. Louis and Chicago, but I travel the whole country.”

  Gene decided not to ask Jimmy what business he conducted all over the country, and after unwrapping his sandwich, his former communications operator wasted no time getting to business.

  “They used to put ’em in a tree chipper and shred ’em into the river,” Jimmy said with a mouth full of Frisco Burger. He gulped red fruit punch through a straw to wash it down, then swirled a couple fries in a large puddle of ketchup he’d squirted onto his sandwich wrapper. “But I’ve watched enough crime shows to know they can trace all the blood now.” He gestured with a couple of ketchup-tipped fries. “We don’t want nothing left behind, so I thought of you and them pigs.”

  Gene considered his financial situation. The house had been paid off long before he’d moved in, but he owed several years worth of back taxes and was behind in his truck payments. The price of corn and soybeans last year was so low he’d barely covered his costs. He told Tosti he’d have to think about it and get back with him. Three nights later, Tosti appeared on his back porch.

  “You still thinking about it, Farmer Brown?”

  “Nice to see you too. I’ve been busy, but I haven’t forgotten.”

  “I got three G’s in my pocket and a corpse in the trunk. You can have them both.”

  Gene looked out over the dark fields. Pretty Girl was still barking at the uninvited guest. Gene’s eyes had started to adjust to the night, and by the light of the full sky of stars and almost a full moon he could just make out the line of trees by the river at the end of these forty stubbly acres. The truck foreclosure notice lay on the table—this was for his GMC, his “dress truck,” as opposed to his “work truck.” He was already two months behind on the tax payment the IRS had handed him in January. A week before he had made up his mind to mortgage the farmland but not the house, but it was the farmland that worried him the most. It had been in his family for five generations, and his mother had entrusted it to him back when she was still lucid.

  “Follow me,” he sighed.

  They stopped at the trunk of the yellow Viper, and Tosti pulled out a dead man about their age wearing boxers and a T-shirt and hoisted him over his shoulder. Gene wondered if his flesh might even still be warm.

  “Friend of yours?”

  “You don’t ever want to ask, Farmer Brown. But since you didn’t know, he was an associate.” Tosti put down the body and looked out, contemplating the trees in the distance along the Wabash, then looked Gene in the eyes. “Never ask again.”

  Gene never did. He never asked where the bodies came from. He never asked if Jimmy killed these people himself or if he just arranged for the disposal. He never asked who they both worked for. He figured the less he knew, the better. He never even asked him if he still smoked as much pot as he did during the war. This transaction was business, an ugly but necessary business, and the less personal, the better.

  Tosti picked the body back up and after another fifty yards, he puffed, changed shoulders, and asked, “Is it far?”

  “Follow your nose. Not far.”

  Gene helped Tosti toss the body over the rail close to the pile of dozing hogs and started to leave, but Tosti stood at the gate.

  “You coming?”

  “I have to see this.”

  Gene couldn’t tell if Tosti meant, “I have to see this” out of professional thoroughness or personal satisfaction, but he didn’t stay to watch with him. He walked back to the house and
sat on his paint-blistered porch and sucked a cigarette, which he still did at the time, and thought about what he’d gotten himself into. The mostly full moon had moved a bit further west, cheered on by a chorus of crickets in the fields around him, fields that in two months would lie quiet and cold. He wondered if he’d get caught by the police, if these people would come back and get rid of him for knowing too much, feeding him to his own pigs, and if there was a psychic price he’d have to pay—or if he’d become a calloused son of a bitch like some of the marine sergeants, contractors, and foremen he’d worked under. He didn’t want to be a son of a bitch except to people he wanted to keep their distance. Jimmy Tosti had become one of those people.

  “They left some of the big bones,” Tosti said coming up through the darkness.

  “They probably weren’t hungry enough to work at it. I won’t feed them tomorrow and they’ll be gone.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yep.”

  “Here,” said Tosti, handing Gene a thick $3,000 in fifty-and hundred-dollar bills. “Count it.”

  The money was a mixture of old and new bills, but perfectly stacked, fresh out of a machine.

  “Three thousand.”

  “We’re good for our word.”

  “OK.”

  “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, Farmer Brown. I’ll be in touch.”

  Gene set the money on the step beside him and said nothing as his stocky ex-friend and now business partner walked to his Viper and drove off. In the several years since that night, Jimmy Tosti had sent him a body every three or four months. Usually he’d a get a phone call on his cell from an unrecognized number. If Gene didn’t answer, there’d be no message, but the phone would ring again in ten minutes.

  It was Tosti, polite but short and business-like: “Hey, Farmer Brown. Can you pick up some bags of concrete?” Every time Jimmy would change what needed picking up—lumber, rebar, bricks, paint buckets, copper pipes, tile, drywall.

  “Sure. When?”

  “Tomorrow. Usual time.”

  “OK.”

  Gene had arranged the meeting place himself since he didn’t want the deliveries at his home. Jimmy Tosti had stopped making the deliveries himself a year and a half ago and now had other people doing it. Each delivery was made by someone different, though Gene thought he’d seen Romeo at least one other time.

  Gene told no one about this relationship—not his sometime semi-girlfriend Danise, not the group he accompanied on motorbike trips who were more like regular acquaintances than actual friends. He had one friend, Keith, who he’d gone to high school with and who, like Gene, had never married and lived with his parents until an embarrassingly late age and then moved back in with them again when they got sick. Keith was a kind, shy person with an endless appetite for death metal, and Gene certainly couldn’t tell him about his side job. Gene wasn’t squeamish, but he wasn’t proud of these transactions either, and he was scrupulously careful. As he put it to himself, and he often did put things to himself since he spent most of his time alone, “The extra money doesn’t help me live high on the hog, but it does keep me from having to sell the family dirt.”

  THREE

  THE MORNING LIGHT was beginning to blue the small windows of the hog shed and split through the chinks between the aluminum walls and ceiling. It was five a.m., and the migrants would be out in the fields picking cabbages and green beans, maybe even Brussels sprouts for all he knew—he never ventured close to the big farms, as if the very land were poisoned. Gene sat on the concrete floor, his back against a ridged wall furred with dirt and grime. He stared at his brother and popped a couple tropical fruit-flavored Tums into his mouth. While they dissolved on his tongue, he recalled sitting with Miller and feeling queasy in the bed of Ralph Edson’s rusty red pickup, much like his own now, the first time they’d helped castrate pigs. His life with Miller had come full circle, not a perfectly round circle, but a jagged and lopsided one.

  “You haven’t aged well,” Gene said to him. Besides being dead, Miller looked bloated, no longer the slim six foot two he remembered. Gene had always been a pudgier five foot ten, though now at thirty-eight he’d probably lost an inch. Gene had seen enough bodies to account for the natural bloating—Miller had gained thirty or forty pounds since he last saw him, and he seemed shorter now in death. His hairline had receded dramatically, and the bald spot on the back of his head left him a sparse, ridiculous wreath of hair. He looked like a sick monk—pale, bloated, solemn, with a bad haircut—and probably hadn’t looked much better alive.

  “You should have just shaved off all your hair and been done with it,” he said as if they were sitting at a kitchen table. “Proud son of a bitch.” Gene had never liked his brother, even when they were young, but now his anger came from somewhere else, and he wasn’t sure where. “Clueless fucking idiot. What the hell did you get yourself into?”

  Gene considered the options. Feeding Miller to the hogs was the most obvious. Or he could give him a proper burial, which would risk someone finding the body and ultimately either fingering Gene for the murder or forcing him to reveal the source of his supplementary income the last few years. So many wild dogs, coyotes, possums, and turkey buzzards prowled the area that Miller’s remains would likely turn up within a couple weeks. Gene considered building an air-tight coffin and sticking Miller in an unmarked grave in their family plot by the Little Wabash, but some bored neighbor would almost certainly see him and want to find out what he was so busy doing. The thought of feeding Miller to the hogs seemed wrong. Even Miller, who presumably had no love for his brother, or at the very least no time or attention or respect, wouldn’t feed Gene to the hogs if their situations were reversed. Gene imagined Miller making a big production of a burial with honor and dignity although they hadn’t seen each other in over a decade.

  An even bigger question suddenly loomed in Gene’s mind: How the hell did this happen? Miller was the editor of The Metropolis Planet & The Southern Scene, which carried a circulation of less than 2,000 and served a population of less than that, a population dwindling every day. Like the Carmi Times, it published mostly community events and obituaries. These papers served to chronicle the last dying gasps of small Midwestern towns and the pathetic attempts to stave off the boredom of those not yet dead or part of the exodus. But how had Miller gotten mixed up with Tosti? Gene had heard through their mother, before she’d completely lost her mind at the nursing home forty-five minutes down the road, that after his divorce Miller had moved to Metropolis to edit the paper, but the connection of events stopped there. Metropolis was a couple hundred miles from St. Louis. Miller had never expressed any interest in writing about organized crime in the city and probably didn’t even know there was any. He couldn’t have known Jimmy Tosti. He never expressed anything but disdain for local politics and political ambition. Miller thought globally, not locally. It made no sense.

  For a second, Gene almost reached into his pocket to pull out his cell phone and give Miller a call—he still had the number programmed, though he couldn’t remember the last time they’d talked—and then he snorted at himself.

  “Hey, Miller—it’s Gene,” Gene said out loud. “How the hell’d you die anyway?” He snorted again. “Shit, lookit me.”

  Instead, he called the last number he had for Jimmy Tosti. He had no idea what he would say or if it was the right number since Tosti’s calls never registered a number anymore. The phone went straight to a greetingless voicemail.

  “It’s Gene Barnes. Call me. It’s important.”

  Gene next pulled out Miller’s scraggly notes and tried to make sense of them. Moisture had smudged the top right part of the page, but he could make out the words “County Commish” and an unreadable phone number, and below those scrawls, “Roy Kissel, State Rep” with a somewhat readable number. In Miller’s handwriting, the lowercase a, u, v, and o looked much the same, unclosed, and the letters g and s looked the same, loose and unclosed. Lowercase h and n looked ide
ntical as well. Gene read a name that could be “Don Hanger” or “Dan Huhser” with a half-smudged phone number, and something that looked like “Chug Maien, huild. and ops mgr, Tovani Brus” with the most readable number on the list and beginning with 314, the St. Louis area code. The only thing that was clearly legible was an address—1009 Wiley Rd—and he had no idea where that was. It wasn’t a promising start. What was he supposed to do—call up the state representative and ask if anyone knew how his brother died?

  Gene refolded the paper into his T-shirt pocket and decided to table the question of what to do with his brother now. He at least owed it to Miller to find out how he died. Despite himself, Gene could feel something starting to stir in his blood. It wasn’t vengeance exactly, but he could feel something akin to outrage and family pride. Miller would do the same for him if their positions were switched. He was certain of that. Gene remembered once when they were kids living in the Evansville suburbs and a pack of neighborhood kids—or rather, two neighborhood kids and a pack of onlookers—were picking on Gene. One of Gene’s buddies, Blake Beaumont, had run to the Barnes house to tell Miller, and Miller ran down the hill to help his brother. Gene had been in fourth grade, Miller in seventh. Fists in a whirlwind, Miller immediately laid into Gene’s tormentors, and one fat kid, unfazed by the fists, leaned into Miller and put him in a headlock. Another kid pulled off Miller’s shoes and tossed them into the creek. It had been a humiliating day for the Barnes family, but at least Miller had bravely done his best to protect his brother and defend the family honor, deflecting all torment and malice away from Gene and taking it himself. When the boys left Miller—bloodied, torn, and shoeless in the yard—they sneered and squinted at Gene but left him alone. Gene decided it was the least he could do now to find out how Miller’s life had come to such an ignoble end. Or maybe it was a noble end. The further Miller’s death sunk in, the more it stirred Gene’s sense of family honor—and also some guilt from the years of no contact between the two brothers and perhaps an obligation to repay this one outstanding debt from Miller’s feeble heroism so long ago.