Bad Weather: THE EVENTS PRECEEDING THE INCARCERATION OF WADE J. RINKS

by

Eric Bandel

The last time I saw Carl Krauss he was barely conscious on a hospital gurney. As for the fat man with the crooked thumb, he swallowed half a gas-soaked rag in the back seat of a 1981 blue-black Ford Granada. And that’s where he died; face down on the cold vinyl with a wounded temple and no shoes in a used car with Jersey plates.

The date was set. The plan was simple. Cross the path of a wild bear on October the twelfth and kill it. It was an outing that began in the Hull County wilderness and following a luckless series of unforeseen events found me at sundown in the bathroom of a westbound bus using a folded matchbook to remove the hardened blood of two men from beneath my fingernails.

Tuesday. October eleventh. Fourteen years ago. On Route 23 at ten in the morning I sat cursing the draft of four open windows through Butler and Wanaque on my way to a place called The Big Plate. I was the passenger with Carl at the wheel. The car belonged to his mother. The open windows were on account of a faulty exhaust as the result of a makeshift muffler repair job out of a Sunoco in West Milford. I was seventeen that fall, Carl the same, older by three months but a minor nonetheless. The purchase of firearms through legal channels was not an option. And so, we borrowed the car and found a way.

The Big Plate, a converted tackle shop with counter and stools and a built-on kitchen, was a roadside eat spot near Anderson Quarry. It was far enough removed that you couldn’t hear the interstate and the only thing close to the law that ever came around was an ex-cop from Rahway who sold pills from his glove box. The sign out front, nailed to an oak tree, was carved to resemble a giant hamburger. When they hung it, they hung it low, I imagine in the interest of making it easier to read. Thing is, the lot was unpaved. And the portion that met with the road was only three yards from the sign and covered in ruts. Ruts gather water and water means mud. So each time it rained and a vehicle turned, it was made illegible by the spray of filth brought forth by the tires.

A solitary letter on the oval sign was visible the morning we arrived for the rifles. A bold yellow L, which shone in the sun like something decent, something bright, something other than what it was. If ever a place had a bad feeling, it was here. And yet, we came time and again for all things illegal, all things unsafe, all things otherwise unattainable.

The sole owner and employee of The Big Plate was a broad shouldered, longhaired Armenian cook with a two-inch vertical scar on his forehead and a tattoo of the sacred heart in the center of his left palm. In addition to running the place single-handed, Yesnig Skerlic offered an array of assault weapons and other desirables from a four-foot lock box that he kept in a hatch beneath the broom closet floor; for sale to referred customers only. Year’s back, before he joined the Navy, before he disappeared, Carl’s older brother was an occasional bagman for Skerlic’s second cousin, a man of few words with a nose like a falcon’s beak who went by the name of Baghdasar Gazanian. And so, through trust by relation alone, Benjamin Krauss was our silent referral.

It was half past ten in the morning when Carl pulled to the rear and parked beside a small screen door from which Skerlic immediately emerged in a halo of steam, scanning the landscape and holding fast to a blackened iron kettle with both hands. He looked us over before motioning with a tick of his neck in the direction of the kitchen.

We entered the heat to the sound of boiling water and stood with our backs to the ice machine. Skerlic followed, placing his pot to the stove before leading us swiftly down a darkened corridor until we reached the eleven by fourteen copper framed portrait of a crucified Christ and the closet door on which it hung.

The transaction was rapid and clean: currency for contraband, a pat on the back and out the door. It was Carl’s money that changed hands that morning as I had been given the boot from my job at the Exxon the previous August for stealing tires. We had a deal though, in the name of all things even and decent that following the hunt it was seventy-thirty in terms of the carcass with the lower percentage in my direction.

We returned to the vehicle and circled around front where Carl cut the engine, coughed twice and folded his arms. “That sign,” he said. “On the tree there.”

Across the road sat a Boxelder Maple, an orange notice tacked to its trunk. I leaned in and ciphered the script. “Private property.”

“Not that one.” He shook his head. “To the left of the car.” I looked as requested, and there in the distance, ancient and bent stood the oak with the oversized dirt-covered wooden

hamburger fastened to its lower portion. Carl sat rigid as a half-starved white dog appeared from the brush. “There was another sign…before that one,” he said,

following the motion of the animal with his eyes. “Same tree. Only it was larger. And it wasn’t a hamburger.” The dog approached and began sniffing the bumper as I fastened my seatbelt without responding. A truck passed. The dog ran off. Carl turned. “It was Ben,” he said. “That first sign. He made it. Shaped it using a borrowed

bandsaw and a Sears sander. Locked himself in the basement with a discarded section of an old barn door and emerged with a chicken leg the size of an elephant’s skull. ”

Carl hadn’t seen his brother in nine years. He didn’t like to talk about him. But when he did, his voice was wrong. Like his mouth was underwater. And that’s how he sounded that morning. “It was up for six days. And then it burned,” he said.

“Who burned it?” I asked. “Ben did, never said why exactly, at least not too clearly; something about bad blood and the Armenians dealing him dirt.” “Meaning what?” “I don’t know. But he torched the drumstick the same week he carved it. And when they hung the hamburger, he tried it

again.” Carl went on to tell me Ben laid low exactly two weeks after the second sign went up. And then one night he travels west

through the woods with a handful of foot long grill matches and a quart of Beacon brand kerosene. He comes within twenty feet of the final row of pines, lowers his body and peers from the brush. And there, on the far side of the road, beneath a lantern which dangles and another at his feet sits Yesnig Skerlic in a lawn chair. He wears an apron, white pants and no shirt. He is holding a Springfield Armory M6 Scout rifle. It’s three-o’clock in the morning. A second attempt is made the following night. Same intentions, identical encounter; one lawn chair, two lanterns, an M6 Scout and a shirtless Armenian. Ben, squatting, remains perfectly still for several minutes, contemplating the mind of a man who pulls fifteen hour days, seven days a week at a grill and counter and spends his downtime armed, half naked and guarding a sign shaped like a hamburger on a rural back road in northern Jersey. Ben retreats. He does not return. He has nothing more to do with the Armenians. A year later he ships out, sends one letter home, goes A.W.O.L and is never heard from again.

We stayed in that drive without speaking for a good five minutes, staring into the wood and field and green-brown land we grew up around. I opened the door and looked to the sky; the threat of bad weather and a small plane were up there together. You couldn’t hear it, but there it was.

“Let’s go,” I said finally. “I don’t think I like it here today.” We pulled out slow with two eight-pound Marlin model 336 bolt-action rifles with 30.30 cartridge and scope under a blanket

in the back seat and plans to take to the forest in the morning. Carl’s eyes looked wet. I tried the radio. It didn’t work. My father had been on me for some time about getting fired and for stealing what I stole. Every time I came in he called me

“leech” or “sneak thief” or “my son the white nigger.” He said if I didn’t find a job soon I had to leave. So I didn’t go home very much. I stayed with Sheila most nights or in Carl’s basement. Following our trip to The Big Plate that afternoon, he dropped me at Sheila’s and took off. It was windy and damp but as usual she was on the front steps in her bathrobe, surrounded by cats, talking to herself with the nail file going. I was hungry. She gave me a hug and said there was food -- pork chops, spaghetti, peas and cream soda. I ate and went to sleep early. I was lucky to have Sheila, I really was. She was older and didn’t look too good in the mornings. But she was kind. And that’s something.

It must have been four in the morning when I heard the horn. I crept from bed, found my pants, kissed Sheila on the chin and met the cold. We had a spot in mind forty minutes south, the near tip of Anders woods on the border between counties. The tank was

low and there was no money. I suggested my neighbor’s garage for a loan. Ten minutes later, with the headlights off, we rolled down Cedar Lake and parked the car a few houses away.

My father slept heavy but still I told Carl to walk in his stocking feet when I sent him indoors for a warmer coat. Jackass showed up in a windbreaker. I went around back to the Ahler’s garage with a spare tire, gave the heavy door a three foot lift, wedged the spare into the space, slipped inside and crawled on the hard floor with a flashlight. There were three cans on a high shelf near a circular saw in the corner. All cans were full. I took one, slid out, emptied half the gasoline into the tank, refilled the missing portion with water from a plastic jug, went back to the garage, returned the can to the shelf, got out and quietly placed the door to the ground. I then checked the trunk. We had beer and bullets, two rifles, three cans of beans, a toolbox, thick rope, some peanuts, extra socks and a shovel. Carl finally came from the side of the house. He had found one of my father’s grey work jackets from his days with Secaucus Electric. I remember Carl looked old that morning, older than usual. Maybe it was the jacket. We took to the road. Carl put his finger to the radio. No sound.

“Does it ever work?” I asked. He couldn’t hear me. His head was out the window in an attempt to briefly escape the slow build of exhaust. I did the same.

And like two dogs minus the enjoyment, we traveled that way in the pre dawn chill with chapped ears and second thoughts. We arrived at first light and prepared for the killing. There was a tree stand just off the main trail that a friend of Carl’s family

had built in the early 80’s, a quarter mile walk and sturdy as a porch. We climbed up and settled in. The beer went down. The sun rose. No life stirred below. We sat and drank and kept quiet. The last thing I remember is lying back and focusing on the scattered patches of visible sky between branches. I can’t recall falling asleep. But I did. And when I woke, there was blood.

It was a lone shot of incredible volume that cut the silence that morning. Amidst the collective flutter of unseen wings I sat up half deaf to a thin mist of black smoke and the smell of boiled copper. Turning, I saw Carl in prime firing position, one knee to the floor with the Marlin’s barrel propped to the base of the wooden ledge. His mouth was open with his chin to his chest and his earlobes resting on his shoulders. It wasn’t until the air began to clear that I noticed a scattered series of crimson welts on his neck and forehead.

Whether it was the alcohol or the gunpowder or the strange light of the cloud-hidden sun or the toxic repercussions of a broken exhaust, I don’t know. But I will tell you this; it took much longer than it should have for me to realize that Carl’s rifle had misfired and that what used to be most of his hands were spread among the floor of the tree stand including some flesh on my jeans and a thumbnail stuck to the sleeve of the coat he borrowed from my house. I’m still not sure how he managed to hold on to that gun. All I could see of his left hand was the ring finger. At least I think it was the ring finger. It was fastened to the barrel on account of the heat and judging by the lack of volume to the digit I feared the muscle and bone had been removed altogether and what remained was nothing more than skin casing. I couldn’t see his right hand at all. It wasn’t my intention to scream but I couldn’t help it. This took Carl from his stupor, which in turn caused him to drop the rifle, look down and begin to hyperventilate. I removed my jacket and outer

shirt, cut the sleeves with a knife, wrapped the stumps and somehow got us both down the ladder. He was able to walk though his breathing was still abnormal.

I put him in the back with his head to the seat and his legs folded under, found the keys in his jeans and hit the gas. Carl didn’t say a word; he just lay there bleeding and taking the air like an asthmatic pack mule. Forty-three minutes and we reached the sliding doors of Mercer County Baptist. They took him away. I parked the car, entered the building, bought a pound cake and a root beer from the machines in the lobby, ate the cake, put the can in my coat and went to sleep in the waiting room.

Sometime later I was awoken by what felt like a lion's jaw fastened to my collarbone. I opened my eyes to the hovering glare of a grey haired man with a weak chin. He had his hand to my shoulder and was slowly increasing pressure. The fingers loosened when I sat up. The man nodded, released me and took a step back.

“I’m Doctor Vidmar. You drove the boy here?” I wanted to answer but couldn’t. I felt weightless and the place was crowded. The whole situation sent a slow pulse to my

stomach. The doctor sat beside me and tried again. “The hunting accident. This morning. You drove the boy here, yes?” I took the root beer from my pocket and pulled the tab. “Will he have hands after this?” He removed his glasses. “That’s hard to say.” Leaning forward he massaged the bridge of his nose, craning his neck in an

attempt to find my eyes and explain the situation as simply as possible. “It’s not the hands. The palms and knuckles are fine. It’s the fingers. It’s complicated.”

I took a long drink and turned to face him. “What good are hands without fingers?” He removed a leather snap case from the lower left pocket of his coat, opened it, set the glasses to the red velvet lining,

returned the case to his pocket, sighed and stood up. “Look son, we’ll do our best. In the mean time, don’t leave. Some men from the sheriff’s office are on the way down to see you.”

I drained the can. The doctor then peeled back his sleeve revealing a large silver watch with a snakeskin band and a bell shaped birthmark on the

underside of his lower forearm. “They should be here in about ten minutes, give or take. Just to ask a few questions, standard practice in the event of an accident. Most likely file a report with Fish and Game. See if the weapons and registration are in order, that sort of thing. It won’t take long.”

“Alright,” I said. “Thank you, doctor.” He nodded, turned and set off down a long hallway before disappearing through a pair of double doors at the far end. That’s when I got up and left the room. After passing three sets of nurses, an open storage closet and the cafeteria, I found a

side exit, walked out, drove to a pay phone and tried Carl’s house. No answer. But that didn’t mean the place was empty. I had seen his mother on the sofa, drunk, sometimes with these strange men. And the phone would ring, a cordless Panasonic that she never

answered. I knew they didn’t have a machine so after eight rings I hung up and got back in the car. There was an ice cream stand to my left that was closed and the top floor of the hospital was still visible in the rearview. I could tell you I had a plan, except I didn’t. Until I remembered the guns were still out there.

I made the woods in decent time, followed the morning’s prints to the stand, climbed the steps of the perch and nearly shit upon reaching the top when a colossal bird of some sort began to peck at my chest and flap and holler in defense of its newfound territory. I returned to the earth, found a few good stones and commenced to pelt the beast until it vacated, which thankfully it did after being struck in the face with a narrow piece of shale. While gathering the rifles I discovered Carl’s pinky among the trash and the splinters. I placed the finger in my shirt pocket, descended the ladder with the weapons and made my way to the car. The skies darkened, the daylong preview of bad weather made good on its promise. The rains came.

I drove toward Knowlton and the house of my uncle in hopes of stashing the guns in his feed shed. After a succession of winding miles I found myself somewhere in central Morris County where a colossal dip in the road caused a slight detachment of the right hand side view mirror. And I was simultaneously in dire need of a piss. I pulled to the side, removing the small tool satchel from beneath the seat with the notion of repairing the mirror and got out. It was a sloping tree-lined street with little sound and no visible inhabitants. I put the tools on the trunk lid, moved a few feet from the vehicle, unzipped and began to urinate.

It was then that the fat man appeared with alarming speed, barefoot and unannounced from a towering cluster of roadside bushes. I turned, startled, shielding my parts, wetting my hands and my inner thigh with the remaining fluid I had yet to pass before tucking my penis into my pants.

He stood, legs apart, arm extended, back slightly bent in the fashion of an umpire, pointing and staring at the car. “Your wheel,” he said. “Your left wheel.” He took his eyes from the Ford and looked right through me. “It’s on my lawn.” He straightened his spine to the best of his ability, eyes drifting, and with his finger now thrust at the stains on my clothes, his words came soft and with an undercurrent of disbelief. “And you’ve pissed in my pines as well.”

Slowly, a step at a time, with several pauses in between, he closed the gap until there was no more than two feet between us. I was too tired to move. And with nostrils flared he began to ask questions . “What would you do in this situation?” he asked. His teeth were the color of Turkish mustard and glistened when he spoke. “Tell me, if a stranger parked his heap on your lawn and whipped his pecker out a minute later, how would you handle it?”

I looked at his hands and the lines on his knuckles and saw that his right thumb was bent to such a degree that his nail was flush against his wrist. And I thought about Carl alone in that hospital with phantom fingers and cold sweats and I told the fat man the truth; that I couldn’t answer him, that I had absolutely no idea how to handle things, that I was a thief and a bottom feeder and if I was lucky enough to own a lawn someplace I wouldn’t care if it was full up with groundhogs and fire ants.

That didn't satisfy him. With a growl, he shoved me. I stumbled back. "No answer?"

He shoved again, getting his bulk behind it. I was up against the car. He came at me, glee in his eyes, like he'd been waiting for something just like this. He had both hands raised. I turned away as he grabbed me by the shoulders.

My hand came out of the tool bag with a six inch Irwin industrial wrench. I twisted from his grasp and swung, felt a jolt up my arm when it connected to his skull. Again he growled, but with a whimper in it. I swung once, twice more, full force blows to the right side of his head. I got a grip on the wrench with both hands, ready to strike again. "Stop!"

I don't know if he said it or I did. His eyes met mine as he proceeded to vomit. Blood flowed from his head down to the folds in his chin. He began to weave and stagger, still looking at me, and with his hand to his head he fell against the Granada. I opened the rear door, got behind him, grabbed what I could of his fleshy center and placed the mass of his back to the seat. I guess some part of me thought to get the fat man to the emergency room.

With his warped and gargantuan thumb to his stomach he soon let loose a rasping dry heave. Foam spilled from the sides of his mouth. I took hold of his belt and with my other hand to his collar pulled until he was no longer in danger of swallowing. His lower half was now on the floor with his chest to the seat and his head atop a pile of rags and old clothes. The retching ceased, and his frame, which occupied ninety percent of the available space to the rear of the vehicle, was still.

I searched his pants, no identification. Just a change purse containing eighty-two dollars and a packet of aspirin. I removed the contents, ate the pills dry, took the money and returned the purse to his pocket.

I got out of the car to grab the tools. They jangled to the ground, and I crouched to retrieve them. That’s when the first wave of sirens came down and passed through my body like a live current. I could feel it in my knees. Of

course, some damn neighbor had witnessed the whole thing and called it in. Confusion covered me over. I took off, pure instinct. I couldn’t feel my face. I crossed the road in a mad dash toward the

outline of the forest without looking back. I ran until I was sure there was nothing behind me. I stopped to wash the blood from my palms, some Carl’s and some the fat man’s, in a creek bed that I knew by the sound of the cars was close to a road. It was near dark. I went to sleep beneath a large pine, woke some hours later, found the road and walked it. At the sound of wheels I would scramble up the bank and take cover.

What must have been two hours later I noticed a glow, up ahead to the right and concealed by a dense band of trees. It wasn’t police. It was red and powerful. What I eventually came upon was an all night gas station basking in the warm light of the neon Mobile Pegasus. The attendant was a black kid not much older than me with a flat top haircut a foot high and a nose that was a mass of painful looking boils. He was sitting on a chair in the middle of an open garage. I inquired as to the nearest bus station.

He pointed without getting up. “Five miles, maybe six. Stay on this road. You’ll see it. Left hand side. Across from the cemetery.”

I nodded, thanked him and moved on. I was sweating, I was also very cold. I placed my hand to my left breast pocket and felt nothing. I had lost Carl’s finger somewhere along the way. It took some time to reach the station but I found it. It was there. Just like

he said. Across from the cemetery. And with the money from the fat man’s pants I bought a ticket and locked myself in the bathroom until I felt the engine beneath my body and the movement of wheels. The last I saw of the roads of my youth was from the rear window of an Economy bus. Just over half a day and six hundred and ninety-five miles into the journey, during a scheduled pit stop in Valparaiso on the Illinois-Indiana border, I fell asleep in a restaurant called the Viking Chili Bowl. As I had slumped down in the booth, the driver, who apparently wasn’t in the practice of taking head counts, gathered the other passengers and moved on without me. When finally I sat up it was to the sound of sickness, like a giant squid being bludgeoned to death in a vacant gymnasium. The room was in a half spin, full tilt and my tongue felt cooked. I managed to pay the bill and make it to the parking lot where it seems I hit the pavement soon after.

I was taken to a nearby hospital where they tell me I was borderline coma for a good ten hours. The first thing I remember is a sharp pain to the inner ankle. Pulling from sleep I tried to alter the position of my left leg only to find that it was cuffed to the iron post of the bed. I opened my eyes to the sight of four deputies. And so, on October the fifteenth, I was officially apprehended with a body temperature of one hundred and four degrees on the ninth floor of the Porter-Valparaiso Medical Center and charged with murder one.

The fat man, possibly in the midst of a seizure, had partially inhaled one of the rags from the pile, preventing him from receiving oxygen and thus killing him. He had done this, somehow, in the short time between when I turned him over to prevent asphyxiation to when the police arrived.

I stayed in that hospital for twelve days. The fever almost took me. But almost doesn’t count. And with the doctor’s permission, I was sent back East to await trial. Eventually, the day came and I was brought before the judge. Between the fingerprints on the corpse, the weapons in the trunk, the stolen money, the prints on the change purse and the eyewitness account of a neighbor, I wasn’t optimistic. With acquittal no longer a reality, my defense team pushed for a reduction to involuntary manslaughter. A plea that went up in smoke after the prosecution convinced the jury that I had placed that rag in the man’s mouth deliberately, and that it wasn’t medically possible, considering the angle of the body, to ingest that amount of material. It was a short trial that began in shadow and ended in absolute darkness.

I currently reside within the confines of the Passaic county correctional facility, 11 Marshall Street, Paterson New Jersey. Carl now lives in West Orange with a prosthetic right hand, two remaining fingers on his left, a Puerto Rican nurse and her son from a previous marriage. Ben is still missing. My father doesn’t write. Sheila moved to Delaware and to this day I have yet to find out what Carl was aiming at when his rifle malfunctioned.