Dog on the Cross (18 page)

D
EPUTY
M
ARTIN DIDN'T
want to take the call. It was the hottest summer Oklahoma had seen in two decades, and he wanted to sit in the station with his boots on the desktop, drink coffee, and read
The Perser Chronicle.
For the past three years he'd driven out to every farm and rural residence in the county—domestic disputes and petty vandalism, the more extreme cases involving a stolen tractor or possibly a camper shell. To him, “you'll have to see it to believe it” meant an addled rancher and his hysterical wife, skinny calves hip deep in mud and bawling for their mothers.

This was what he was thinking as he turned off the highway and into the white gravel parking lot of the First Pentecostal, a modest building overlooking
a sea of black oak in the valley beneath it. Pulling into a space in front of the church, he put his car in park and switched off the engine. On the steps leading to the main entrance sat Doyle Withers, a dark-complexioned man in dress slacks and a long-sleeved shirt, the collar already damp with sweat. The man was thick jowled and portly; his stomach protruded over his belt. He rose when Martin stepped from his car and tottered over to meet him.

The two exchanged pleasantries and then began walking toward the highway. As they spoke, Martin noticed for the first time the faded green tarp next to the sign at the side of the road. He'd been past the church hundreds of times and it suddenly occurred to him that beside the sign, a small wooden cross was set into the ground, that this was what the tarp had been draped over. When they reached it, Deacon Withers sunk his hands in his pockets and began to rattle change.

“I come out this morning to do the books,” he told Martin. “We been in revival about a month now, and this morning I come out and saw it soon as I pulled in. I ran out to the toolshed, got that piece of canvas, and covered it best I could.” He paused, coughed into his hand. “Blasphemy is what it is.”

Martin reached over, grabbed one corner of the tarp, and tossed it back. Starting, he retreated several steps, looked at the cross and then back to Withers. The deacon had lowered his head.

On the cross was a beagle puppy, a dog of maybe six months. Its forepaws had been secured to the transverse beam by two sixteen-penny nails, its rear legs crossed and nailed through with one. Flies skimmed its muzzle, trailed along the strips of duct tape that held the dog's mouth. From the angle Martin first observed it, the animal looked to be smiling.

The deputy pulled the tarp back over and turned to Withers. His face had a nauseated expression.

“What time you find this?” he asked.

“Earlier this morning. About nine thirty.”

“And you called us soon as you saw it?”

“Just the minute I got done with the tarp.”

Martin took a small tablet from his pocket, clicked his pen, and went to jot a few notes. His hands, he noticed, were trembling.

“You have any idea who could've done this?”

Withers began to nod, as if he'd meant to tell the deputy but hadn't yet gotten to it.

“I'm about satisfied it was that Hollis fella.”

“Who?”

The deacon gestured to the valley below them. “Jacob Hollis. Lives down the hill there.”

“Spell his name for me.”

“H-o-l-l-i-s. He moved in and built an underground home a few years back. Been after us ever since.”

Martin looked up from the tablet. “‘Been after' how?”

“What's that?”

“How's he been bothering you?”

“He comes up every so often and starts raising a commotion, telling us we need to keep it down. Works out of his home, I think. Scientist or something.”

“Scientist?”

“I don't know,” Withers told him, making vague gestures with his hands. “I think that's what he does. He's about half queer, you ask me. Big ole sucker. Brother Leslie and his grandmother went down and tried to witness to him one afternoon and he told them he was from back east. Said he didn't even believe in God.”

Martin wrote steadily for a minute or so, replaced the notepad in his shirt pocket, and buttoned it. The two of them began walking back toward the church.

“You think he's actually capable of this?”

Withers bit his thumbnail and spat. “Yes, I do.”

“But you don't really know him?”

“No.”

“Ever talked to him?”

Withers shook his head.

“You still think he might've had something to do with it, though.”

They had reached the building's front porch. The deacon lowered himself onto a step and hitched his trouser legs.

“I'll put it this way,” he said, fixing Martin with
a stare. “It surprises the living daylights out of me he ain't already done a lot worse.”

The deputy looked over to the cross. A sudden gust of wind raised one corner of tarp and held it almost vertically, dirt from the side of the road kicking up and spinning across the highway. The wind died and the air once again became hot and still. The angle of canvas lowered back to the ground.

F
IFTEEN MINUTES LATER,
Martin crossed the churchyard, went over the fence at the turnstile, and started down the hill. He was a tall man and remarkably slender, still a few years shy of forty. His eyes were bright and his nose pointed; his red hair encircled a balding crown. Despite being lanky, he moved with a certain grace, as if each step had been planned long in advance.

Below him lay the valley. Through the limbs of blackjacks he could just distinguish several outbuildings he assumed belonged to Hollis. He'd known Doyle Withers since high school, and though he didn't figure the man for a liar, he thought it a bit handy that the perpetrator of this crime should be living a quarter mile from its scene. But, regardless of probability, an uneasiness began to grow as he went through the dense stand of trees, ducking branches, skirting thickets of thorn. When he came to the bottom of the hill, Martin unsnapped the strip
of patent leather that lay over the hammer of his sidearm and loosened the weapon in its holster.

He emerged from the woods, walked into the clearing, and saw Hollis's home, only the front of it visible. Just above the door the ground rose and bled into the tree line, the rest of the structure dug back in the hill. There were a few round windows on one side of the door, a rectangular plate of glass on the other. A flagstone path led to the porch. Martin went up it and then, startled by a noise, turned to look behind him.

Twenty or thirty yards from where he stood was a small pen made of chain-link fencing. Inside, were several beagle puppies, a larger animal the deputy took for their mother. When the dogs saw Martin, they began barking, a shrill noise that sent tremors along his skin. He stood watching the animals for a few moments and then walked toward the house.

The door was made of solid oak. Martin gave a quick succession of raps with his knuckles, waited awhile, then knocked again. No sound came from inside. The dogs continued barking.

Stepping into the flowerbed, he made his way carefully among the rows of iris and azalea, moving across to the large bay window. He cupped his hands to either side of his eyes to block the glare and peered into the house. Through the glass was a long room in which the only furniture was a blue recliner
and a small wooden table. There was no television, no stereo or electrical appliance. Against the walls, stacked almost to the ceiling, were brick and board bookshelves, on them rocks and sticks and various items one might find in the surrounding woods: pine-cone and spores, hornets' nests, and bits of shale. In the spaces between the bookshelves, Martin saw that Hollis had hung an assortment of leaves, all of them dipped in lacquer, framed in oak.

There was nothing inherently bizarre about any of these articles, but their cumulative effect on Martin caused him to back away from the window and glance nervously around him. He was not yet convinced that Hollis had killed the dog, but the beagles, coupled with what he'd seen of the man's home and the fact he was nowhere around, didn't speak to his innocence. Looking over, he saw that next to the house were tire tracks, a patch of faded grass that looked to be where a vehicle normally sat. Martin jotted a few notes, went down the flagstone path, and started up the hill.

Withers was inside the church when Martin made it back to the building. He climbed the steps, went through the double doors and into a small office where the deacon sat rifling through papers, placing currency into stacks, and stamping the backs of checks. The deacon saw Martin out of the corner of one eye and motioned him over to the desk, holding up a hand to let the deputy know he was in the middle
of counting. As he finished, he leaned back in his chair and looked at Martin.

“Well,” he asked, “what did Mr. Hollis have to say?”

Martin sat down on the far corner of the desk. “He wasn't home.”

“Is that right?”

The deputy scratched at his cheek. “He's got a pen full of dogs down there, Doyle.”

Withers raised his eyebrows. “Beagles?”

Martin nodded.

“You're telling me that sick so-and-so nailed up one of his own dogs?”

Martin crossed his arms. “We don't know that. Most the people out here have beagles. For all we know, some drunk teenager from Maud thought he'd drive over and play a prank. What I need to figure out is how much longer you guys plan on holding your little camp meeting.”

The deacon's eyes narrowed. “Well,” he said, “we talked about shutting our ‘little camp meeting' down this weekend. I mentioned something to Brother Leslie about it last night.”

“Yeah.”

“But with this—” Withers broke off and gestured toward the roadside—“I think we'd be waving the white flag if we broke off now.”

“How's that?” Martin asked.

“You know how these things get around. Soon as
you get someone out here to take that dog down, everybody in Perser will be talking about it. With Pastor Hassler getting sick on us and having to leave, the revival's all that's holding this church together.” Withers shook his head and glanced out the window.

“Well,” said Martin, “you know I can't make you all shut down. But if this Hollis character is the nut you say he is, I'm not sure if it's the best idea to be up here raising a ruckus every night. You don't know what someone like that—”

“Arrest him,” Withers told the deputy. “Have one of your boys waiting to throw him in jail soon as he gets home. Get that big fella—what's his name—Lemming. Get Dave Lemming out here.”

“I can't do that.”

“Why?”

“Because we're not sure Hollis did anything. We're going to have to dust for prints, find out who the dog belongs to, question the neigh—You know how these things go, Doyle, you've seen
Cops.
”

The longer he spoke, the more Withers's expression began to tighten. By the time Martin finished, his mouth was a thin, straight line.

Withers put rubber bands around the money and paper-clipped the checks, zipped everything into a First National bag. “Yeah,” he said, standing and gathering his things, “I know exactly how these things go.”

E
VENING FOUND
M
ARTIN
stretched in front of his television. He and his wife had divorced a few years prior, and he'd given her most of the furniture. Martin kept only his recliner, but an important-looking bolt had recently appeared beneath the foot-rest and he felt unsafe tilting it back. Lying on the floor in the flickering blue light, his lower back just beginning to knot, he decided when he got up the next morning he'd disassemble the chair until he found what the bolt was meant to be attached to. He was looking forward to having the weekend off.

The day had taken its toll. Though Martin often complained about the dull nature of the calls he received, he'd realized for some time that he could not have endured it any other way. Some years back, he'd moved up north to a suburb of Minneapolis and taken a job with the U.S. Marshal Service. After several months, he was overwhelmed. It wasn't as if he'd been unaware of the type of crime that went on—it was the sheer enormity of what he saw that made him resentful. Not disheartened or insecure concerning his abilities, but angry, righteously indignant. He did not blame the perpetrators so much as the residents and the city itself—that vast network of lights, concrete, and noise—an entity that seemed to constantly produce the things that destroyed it. It spoke something of a town that there could be three homicides, a rape, and countless robberies any given night. Martin could not help feeling
that anyone foolish and lazy enough to allow such things to happen had very nearly deserved them.

So, over the years, Perser had come to mean something quite particular to the deputy. He didn't much care if the rest of the country, or even the rest of the state, fell into disarray, as long as Perser, the boring, stale, weary little town he grew up in, stayed exactly as he'd known it. This was what had upset him about Jacob Hollis, the fact that by all accounts he was an outsider causing unnecessary trouble. He'd not let on in front of the deacon—the man was excitable enough without further agitating him—but Martin was much less calm than he presented himself. Unlike Withers, he hadn't already tried, convicted, and sentenced Hollis, but he couldn't help recognizing there was a part of him that would have enjoyed nothing better than to jail this Easterner, hassle him until he moved back to where he came from.