The Mundane Work of Vengeance (Baer Creighton Book 2)
THE MUNDANE WORK
OF VENGEANCE
Baer Creighton 2
Clayton Lindemuth
Hardgrave Enterprises
SAINT CHARLES, MISSOURI
Copyright © 2018 by Clayton Lindemuth.
Published by Hardgrave Enterprises and Clayton Lindemuth.
Clayton Lindemuth asserts his moral rights as author of The Mundane Work of Vengeance.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at claylindemuth@gmail.com.
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. The Benton Fireworks Disaster was a real historical event and the reporting of it in this novel is drawn from public sources. The extended ramifications of the disaster are wholly the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
THE MUNDANE WORK OF VENGEANCE /Clayton Lindemuth —
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Also by Clayton Lindemuth
TREAD
Solomon Bull
Cold Quiet Country
Sometimes Bone
Nothing Save the Bones Inside Her
My Brother’s Destroyer
Strong at the Broken Places
For Julie.
Rights is bullshit. You got no right in the natural world. Just what you defend.
―Baer Creighton
Chapter 1
Put all that nonsense behind me. Got two buckets of gold in the bed of the truck. Heading to see Mae and give her one. Thought occurs I could strike a deer, roll the truck, and all that gold’d spread over the macadam road. Folks’d stop at the smoking wreck, look past my face shredded in glass, and latch on the glitter of three-hundred-pound gold specie.
“Me lyin dead in the cab, I’d miss all the red. Wouldn’t that be the shit? Miss all that sparklin’ red?”
Stinky Joe look at me.
“Use your words,” I say.
Thought you wasn’t gonna call me Stinky.
“Well, shit. Puppydog need a bath.”
Joe sniffs. Licks his jowl, reminds him his nuts need it too.
“You and me need cheddar cheese and cabbage. That’s the truth.”
I drive and a thought floats like a mile-high bird—slow and easy, you can’t tell it’s moving. Ain’t yet totally committed. Mae don’t know ’bout the gold, and the odds of her finding a man worth a damn is the same as me finding a woman. And speak of the devil, by now Ruth’s half back to Mars Hill.
Suppose I knock on her door; she’ll open it, damn sure. She’ll pull me inside and we’ll be fornicating in no time. After twenty-eight years in one sleeping bag or another, snuggled next a dog crate, I’d relish a woman’s round rump.
After all these years, Ruth finally give me the invitation and, being truthful, I get chubby at the thought of swinging by Mars Hill for about six minute, then venturing west.
But I’s not a man for entanglements.
Spot glowing eyes, roadside; belong a rabbit most likely.
In no time, I rap Mae’s door. Stinky Joe sleeps in the truck cab. Just be a short visit. The lights is off and all Gleason is silent, save a way-off dog or two. I start soft on the door but after a minute get to beating it. Standing in the dark I wonder if after all that’s gone on, maybe I’d best wait for daylight. Mae don’t yet know about Cory or Larry. Don’t know the man she called Daddy all these years is dead as disco, and he wasn’t but her uncle anyway. Soon as I back to the edge of the rotted porch the light blinks on and a curtain moves.
Mae opens the door and her eyes is sleepy slits.
“Got news,” I say.
She pushes open the screen with her naked toe and shiny leg. Shifts sideways to clear the path and I see silver in her hand.
“What the hell?” I say.
“What?”
“I’s proud. Lemme see.” I take the revolver. She give it up too easy. Got to tell her about that. It’s a forty-five. “Shit. Or holy shit. You know what to do with this?”
“Point. Shoot. What brings you out? I’m in bed.”
“Touch more to it ’n that.” I spin the cylinder and slap it. “Fits the hand real nice. You shoot anybody yet?”
“What time is it?” She scoots over as I walk in. Closes the door.
“Why you get a gun?”
“Didn’t you want me to? I heard on the news about that girl. They say a cop took her.”
“What girl?”
“That sixteen-year-old. I just saw it on the news but I guess it happened almost a week ago. Just disappeared. Abducted.”
“Well, I suspect I won’t be the one to save her.”
Silence.
“I’m sleeping. I’m happy to see you but shit. Why you here, Uncle Baer?”
“Corey’s dead. I rigged a trap with some barbed wire and he bled out his crotch. Larry’s dead too—though I didn’t shoot him like I wanted. The wood alcohol got him, even after I said not to drink it. But it was still my honest fault—Oh, and he was your uncle, not your daddy. And I got a couple hundred thousand dollars in gold I’s gonna give you. Maybe a million. I dunno. We’ll talk about it. They’s mostly Canadian Maple Leafs but other coin too. Then I’s heading west.”
Mae stares at the ceiling. Blinks. Looks like a cat eating shit off a wire brush.
“Oh. And I’s your father. Did I say that? I was with Ruth first and when I kicked your daddy—uncle—Larry in the nuts when we was kids, I made him a mule. Sterile. That’s why he was such a prick his whole life.”
Mae slumps to the sofa that eats people. Slides over the armrest and sprawls back with her legs a little indecent with the pink undies.
“So anyhow I come to give you the good news and some advice. When you wanna hear it.”
Mae grabs the edge of her t-shirt nightgown and pushes it down her crotch, covers everything. Looks hard left and then hard right and won’t bring her eyes to me. All quick she’s shaking, and her cheeks pull back like she’s fish-hooked out each side her mouth. She shudders and bawls and fuck if I ain’t done it again—you’d think a person would want the facts with no varnish, but no, not a woman.
She folds her arms and legs up small and tight and curls her shoulders. Her face gets shiny with tears, and fast as the storm comes it goes, and she wipes her cheeks.
“Is Ruth dead too?”
“No. Just talked to her a little bit ago.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. She was good and all.”
“You said west?”
Chapter 2
Josiah Swain was born to Norman Swain, raised by his uncle Ernest Swain, whom he murdered with an M100 firecracker.
He used a firecracker for his next two targets, then other methods.
The quirky inevitability of Josiah’s story began with his grandfather.
Sanford McSwain, born and raised in Jamestown, New York, returned from a stint in the Army reconstructing Germany in 1947. His most interesting military experience was standing guard at the hospital where George S Patton III died. Post-war Germany ignited his youthful brio. While he was away, Jamestown became more conservative, and Sanford became more aw-shucks lawless. After a night of drinking, he drove a friend’s father’s Ford Deluxe Coupe through a sewing parlor window. The next day, sensing his hometown’s unwelcome, Sanford sought his fortunes westward.
The farther he traveled, the less welcome he found, which he attributed to his Scots-Irish name. He dropped the Mc, stopped drinking and started going to Sunday Mass at the nearest parish, and even broke bread with Episco
palians if no Catholic church was handy. He ultimately landed in Buena Vista, Tennessee, the town with the heaviest Italian population in the state—only relevant because choosing this town was like dropping a fair-sized boulder a couple feet from the edge of a placid pond. The ripples rolled outward, and the ultimate ramification would hit the opposite bank in 2008, with his thirty-eight year old grandson, Josiah Swain, staring at two buckets of gold in the back of a stolen Chevy Suburban.
Sanford Swain answered a newspaper advertisement and found employment as an auto insurance claims adjuster. He met his future bride—the victim of a nasty T-bone car accident—on his second day on the job. Hilda was the passenger in a Chevrolet Series DJ Stylemaster driven by her father, an insured of Sanford’s employer. Sanford interviewed her as part of his investigation.
He visited her in her hospital room only hours after she roused from a short duration coma. A metal frame suspended both her plaster-casted legs, and Sanford fell immediately in love.
After concluding his interview with her, Sanford returned three hours later with a bouquet of black eyed Susans and daises, and commenced dating Hilda while she recovered in the hospital. They married in June, and she gave birth to Ernest eight months later, during January 1948.
Within months of delivering firstborn Ernest, Hilda conceived Josiah’s father Norman, and birthed him in January 1949.
Ernest and Norman were best friend brothers, each ever at the other’s defense. Freckled, fair skinned and haired, the boys brawled with the Buffa brothers, the Antonuccio brothers, and the Romano brothers.
One day as the Swain brothers walked home from school, Tony Romano and his brothers Dominic and Gio jumped from behind a parked car, ready for battle. Each stretched a pair of fat rubber bands between thumb and index finger, and each aimed a wad of folded cardboard—covered in a narrow strip of tin—at the Swain brothers’ faces. The tin doubled the weight of the projectile and, unlike cardboard alone, left a nasty cut and bruise. The boys liked to say it increased the projectile’s knockdown power.
The Romanos released the missiles then rushed. They tackled the Swain brothers, who with Scots-Irish glee, drove back the attack with surgical strikes from fists and feet. Although the Swain brothers were outnumbered, Gio Romano was a runt, permitted to rabble-rouse with his brothers due only to his highly accurate rubber band. After the initial assault, Gio was useless, and the Romanos retreated before the fury of the Swain defense.
Ernest and Norman picked up their books and returned to their walk home. Ernest noticed Norman’s eye was bleeding—both socket and orb having been punctured by the tin-covered cardboard projectile.
Norman, however, hadn’t noticed. He’d thought he was crying in rage, and although he wasn’t, he was too ashamed to mention the pain in his eye.
After a few days, it became apparent the eye would not heal by itself. Sanford Swain took his son to the doctor and Norman lost sight in his right eye—which prevented him from going to Vietnam.
Ernest was drafted into the Army in 1967. Although he considered burning his draft card and just listening to the Doors instead, he decided to go so he could get the GI Bill.
Ernest thought a lot about money.
Ernest served a relatively safe tour in Vietnam as a member of the REMFs (rear echelon mother fuckers), but he learned something interesting about himself. He killed a prostitute and afterward, looking at her, was surprised by his apathy. He left unseen, was transferred the next day, and was never connected to the strangled woman.
Ernest returned to the United States. He and Norman took a drinking holiday and wound up in Benton, Tennessee, which would become home of the famous fireworks disaster on May 27, 1983. The disaster did not take Ernest’s life. But it did figure in his untimely death.
That was many cheerful years to come.
First, at the county fair Ernest met a pretty girl, Emma Nelson. He married her that week. It was 1970 and Ernest was twenty-two.
Unlike his father’s instant attraction to his mother’s raised legs, for Ernest, it wasn’t love at first sight, so much as love at Emma mentioning her father, Stanley Nelson, was a second-generation owner of the Polk-Benton Savings and Loan.
If you want money, Ernest figured, you need to work at a money factory.
Chapter 3
Sophia Ellen Whitcombe was sixteen. At the age of twelve she’d realized her body was developing faster than her peers at school. Her period had started at nine, long before her mother got around to warning her. If not for the helpful folks on the internet, she probably would have thought she was about to die. Her bust swelled at twelve and grew plump by fifteen. Her hips remained small, but they rounded where they were supposed to, and in the space of five years Sophia metamorphosed from a spindle-legged frog into certified jailbait.
Named for Sophia Loren, her look was closer to a fully formed Raquel Welsh.
Men no longer got their fill by turning their heads. They stopped and rotated their whole bodies. Forgot themselves. Sophia could count the men who walked into lamp posts, trees, walls. Her mother said it would only get worse.
The attention made her self-conscious and shy. She sensed jealousy in some of her friends. They seemed to assume that because she was more developed, and because the jocks in grades ahead flirted with her, she must have been giving them what they wanted. The prettier and womanlier she became, the fewer were her friends.
Sophia was close to a couple of girls in marching band, twin sisters who played the clarinet and saxophone. Sophia played the xylophone because her real interest was piano. She remained in band because of her friends and because she liked how the uniform blunted her curves. In the classes they shared, the girls sat together. At sixteen, the twins’ only curves were their knees and elbows, but they didn’t envy Sophia. All three were shy about their bodies.
During her sophomore year, Sophia dated a senior, and when he became possessive, she ended the relationship. Then she accepted a movie date invitation from a guy who had graduated the year before and came home on weekends from college to visit. That was better. She understood he had other girlfriends at college, and her parents knew his parents from work at the hospital. They trusted him despite his age. It was simple and good. The college guy was more relaxed with himself than the high school boys, and seeing him only on the weekends helped keep the relationship cool.
The last thing Sophia wanted was to get tangled up with a serious boyfriend. From the time she could talk, her parents—both medical doctors—had helped her understand her destiny.
Perfect grades. Scholarships to Ivy League schools—preferably Yale, like mom—and then med school. Sophia was allowed great latitude in her studies: She could choose any medical specialty she liked.
Things were going well for Sophia.
Her father, a former Navy SEAL, tried to instill self-reliance in her. Between the ages six and fourteen, his wilderness survival, how-to-survive-an-active-shooter, and self-defense lessons were the coolest things in her world.
By fifteen, while Sophia’s adoration for her father remained perfect, her concentration on academics overshadowed her tomboyish interest in her father’s lessons on survival.
Chapter 4
“No. You ain’t goin’ west.” I drop into the sofa too close to the middle; try an scooch to the other edge but the damn thing’s like sitting in a puddle of pudding. Once you drop they’s no sideways going on. Either stand up and try again or stay put. I work to my feet and plant myself an ass-width from Mae.
Car headlamps flash agin the window; someone makes the turn at the edge of the block.
Mae punches my shoulder. “What do you mean, no? You come here and drop all that on me and think you’re gonna run away?”
“Mae, I can’t hardly get my mind around it. You don’t know but part of what’s gone on.”
“West is a long way. You’ll have time to tell me.”
“What do you want that’s out west?”
“You. Dumbass.” She inhales all her sniffles and jumps from the couch. In the kitchen, she spits snot in the sink. Swigs root beer from a two liter in the fridge. Clears her throat.
Outside, Stinky Joe lets out a short, clipped woof.