“"Weird"?” said Bensenhaver. Their language was all the same, too, he thought. They used just four or five words for almost everything.
“Well, I got a complaint about the younger one just last week,” the deputy said. Bensenhaver noted this casual use of “I"—as in “I got a complaint"—when in fact Bensenhaver knew that the sheriff, or his office, would have received the complaint, and that the sheriff probably thought it was simple enough to send this young deputy out on it. But why did they give me such a young one for this? Bensenhaver wondered.
“The youngest brother's name is Oren,” the deputy said. “They all have weird names, too.”
“What was the complaint?” Bensenhayer asked; his eyes followed a long dirt driveway to what appeared to be a random dropping of barns and outbuildings, one of which he knew was the main farmhouse, where the people lived. But Arden Bensenhaver couldn't tell which one that might be. To him, all the buildings looked vaguely unfit for animals.
“Well,” the deputy said, “this kid Oren was screwing around with someone's dog.”
was “Screwing around"?” Bensenhaver asked patiently. That could mean anything, he thought.
“Well,” the deputy said, “the people whose dog it was thought that Oren was trying to fuck it.”
“Was he?” Bensenhayer asked.
“Probably,” the deputy said, “but I couldn't tell anything. When I got there, Oren wasn't around—and the dog looked all right. I mean, how could I tell if the dog had been fucked?”
“Should've asked it!” said the copter pilot—a kid, Bensenhayer realized, even younger than the deputy. Even the deputy looked at him with contempt.
“One of these half-wits the National Guard gives us,” the deputy whispered to Bensenhaver, but Bensenhaver had spotted the turquoise truck. It was parked out in the open, alongside a low shed. No attempt had been made to conceal it.
In a long pen a tide of pigs surged this way and that, driven crazy by the hovering helicopter. Two lean men in overalls squatted over a pig that lay sprawled at the foot of a ramp to a barn. They looked up at the helicopter, shielding their faces from the stinging dirt.
“Not so close. Put it down over on the lawn,” Bensenhaver told the pilot. “You're scaring the animals.”
“I don't see Oren, or the old man,” the deputy said. “There's more of them than those two.”
“You ask those two where Oren is,” Bensenhaver said. “I want to look at that truck.”
The men obviously knew the deputy; they hardly watched him approach. But they watched Bensenhaver, in his dull dun-colored suit and tie, crossing the barnyard toward the turquoise pickup. Arden Bensenhaver didn't look at them, but he could see them just the same. They are morons, he thought. Bensenhaver had seen all kinds of bad men in Toledo—vicious men, unjustifiably angry men, dangerous men, cowardly and ballsy thieves, men who murdered for money, and men who murdered for sex. But Bensenhaver had not seen quite such benign corruption as he thought he saw on the faces of Weldon and Raspberry Rath. It gave him a chill. He thought he'd better find Mrs. Standish, quickly.
He didn't know what he was looking for when he opened the door of the turquoise pickup, but Arden Bensenhaver knew how to look for unknowns. He saw it immediately—it was easy: the slashed bra, a piece of it still tied to the hinge of the glove-compartment door; the other two pieces were on the floor. There was no blood; the bra was a soft, natural beige; very classy, Arden Bensenhaver thought. He had no style himself, but he'd seen dead people of all kinds, and he could recognize something of a person's style in the clothes. He put the pieces of the silky bra into one hand; then he put both hands into the floppy, stretched pockets of his suit jacket and started across the yard toward the deputy, who was talking to the Rath brothers.
“They haven't seen the kid all day,” the deputy told Bensenhaver. “They say Oren sometimes stays away overnight.”
“Ask them who's the last one who drove that truck,” Bensenhaver said to the deputy; he wouldn't look at the Raths; he treated them as if they couldn't possibly understand him, directly.
“I already asked them that,” the deputy said. “They say they don't remember.”
“Ask them when's the last time a pretty young woman rode in that truck,” Bensenhaver said, but the deputy didn't have time; Weldon Rath laughed. Bensenhaver felt grateful that the one with the blotch on his face, like a wine spill, had kept quiet.
“Shit,” Weldon said. “There's no “pretty young woman” around here, no pretty young woman ever sat her ass in that truck.”
“Tell him,” said Bensenhaver to the deputy, “that he is a liar.”
“You're a liar, Weldon,” the deputy said.
Raspberry Rath said to the deputy, “Shit, who is he, coming in here, telling us what to do?”
Arden Bensenhaver took the three pieces of the bra from his pocket. He looked at the sow lying beside the men; she had one frightened eye, which appeared to be looking at all of them at once, and it was hard to tell where her other eye was looking.
“Is that a boy pig or a girl pig?” asked Bensenhaver. The Raths laughed. “Anyone can see it's a sow,” Raspberry said. “Do you ever cut the balls off the boy pigs?” Bensenhover asked. “Do you do that yourselves or do you have others do it for you?”
“We castrate them ourselves,” said Weldon. He looked a little like a boar himself, with wild tufts of hair sprouting upward, out of his ears. “We know all about castrating. There's nothing to it.”
“Well,” said Bensenhaver, holding up the bra for them and the deputy to see. “Well, that's exactly what the new law provides for—in the case of these sexual crimes.” Neither the deputy nor the Roths spoke. “Any sexual crime,” Bensenhaver said, “is now punishable by castration. If you fuck anybody you shouldn't,” said Bensenhaver, “or if you assist in the act of getting a person fucked—by not helping us to stop it—then we can castrate you.”
Weldon Rath looked at his brother, Raspberry, who looked a little puzzled. But Weldon leered at Bensenhaver and said, “You do it yourselves or do you have others do it for you?” He nudged his brother. Raspberry tried to grin, pulling his birthmark askew.
But Bensenhaver was deadpan, turning the bra over and over in his hands. “Of course we don't do it,” he said. “There's all new equipment for it now. The National Guard does it. That's why we got the National Guard helicopter. We just fly you right out to the National Guard hospital and fly you right back home again. There's nothing to it,” he said. “As you know.”
“We have a big family,” Raspberry Rath said. “There's a lot of us brothers. We don't know from one day to the next who's riding around in what truck.”
“There's another truck?” Bensenhaver asked the deputy. “You didn't tell me there was another truck.”
“Yeah, it's black. I forgot,” the deputy said. “They have a black one, too.” The Raths nodded.
“Where is it?” Bensenhaver asked. He was contained but tense. The brothers looked at each other. Weldon said, “I haven't seen it in a while.”
“Might be that Oren has it,” said Raspberry.
“Might be our father who's got it,” Weldon said.
“We don't have time for this shit,” Bensenhaver told the deputy, sharply. “We'll find out what they weigh—then see if the pilot can carry them.” The deputy, thought Bensenhaver, is almost as much of a moron as the brothers. “Go on!” Bensenhaver said to the deputy. Then, with impatience, he turned to Weldon Rath. “Name?” he asked.