“That’s just it,” Seegmiller frowned. “It ain’t really a church. It’s more like a cult. And what’s a cult got without the head guy? A bunch of hippie-crazy-free-love-anti-government nuts living out of their VW microbuses, and not a clue in the world about how to keep a job.”
Okay. You, my reading sister, my listening brother, I’m going to stop here, to say that what you just read, just heard, is how Jimmy Seegmiller described Josh’s lifework to Arnie Mikesh. It’s what Seegmiller thought of the group of people I have grown to consider family. Don’t hold it against him personally. Seegmiller, like every other law officer from Des Moines to New Albin, was not disposed to think hospitably about Josh.
I’m pausing the story to say that, recording the unconventional way Josh navigated life, I could use the words I place on the page before you like a privacy fence, concealing what isn’t nice. Instead, I am working to make these words, this story, if I can, a window, an open one. I’m going to let you hear the trash talk you would get in reply, yourself, if you chatted with the law in the county where my brother died. So you know that Jimmy Seegmiller considered me, your source for this story, a hippie-crazy-free-love-anti-government nut. And you won’t be surprised to find that Seegmiller smiled as he pictured the grim future he imagined for my brother’s work, my work. I have lived my adult professional life as an archeologist. In that work a projectile point or a fragment of pottery or a piece of charred wood lying in a clean drawer, disconnected from the place of its discovery, can tell me little. But embedded in dirt and grit that I have carefully measured and chronicled and mapped, these objects can begin to speak. I keep Josh in situ. I leave the grit of Josh’s environment intact. I leave the window open.
“The cult sucks a few straight, decent folks in now and then, gets their money or their business, and that keeps the whole thing afloat. If they are just a church, without their main man, that will all dry up, won’t it?”
Jimmy phrased his last question like it wasn’t a question. Cops love to talk smack, and Mikesh didn’t feel like going down that road. He could still feel the cold, and in his mind still see my brother’s eye looking back at him.
“Like I said, I don’t know anything about that,” he replied.
“In your line of work, Arnie, you don’t have to deal with the kind of crap we get from people like that.” Seegmiller hadn’t put the brakes on yet. “A bunch of gypsies is what they are. And if you have to ask them for an event permit, insurance papers, a vehicle registration, or proof of legal residence, you might as well be talking Bohemian. All you get back is an empty look, a holier-than-thou speech. But they don’t fool me. You don’t talk that line of crap without needing to hide something. And, if you ask me, that probably was true for the boss as well.” Seegmiller focused his anger on my brother. “He was south of the border one too many times for me to believe he didn’t have some kind of junk racket going on to keep the whole thing afloat—marijuana, meth, whatever you’ve got to link up with Mexico to score. The guys from state are checking out his vehicle for drugs, I can tell you that. Maybe as far as that part of the business goes, that church of his won’t need him alive to keep the money coming. But if they find drugs, the state might just be able to put an end to their little business.”
“Listen Jimmy. You are talking about someone I watched die last night. Take it easy, okay?”
“Right.” Having made his speech, Seegmiller needed more oxygen and could start breathing again. “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? We need a few more details and a signature. The sheriff wants to speak with you and then you can go.”
The sheriff, in his big office, was neither as talkative nor as excited as Seegmiller. Mikesh could see that Paul Fox bore a grudge against him for his earlier entrance. Fox had moved into the county less than five years earlier and spent only two or three years as a deputy before getting elected sheriff. Even though he ran as a Republican, this was no small accomplishment for an outsider in the tight, conservative world of Winneshiek County. Mikesh pegged him for a man who might have his sights on a bigger pond. Fox had the solid, unexceptional look of a guy who might be modeling casual slacks in the men’s section of a farm-and-home store catalog, but also wore the confident authority of a man with county voters’ mandate to sniff out the criminals that made at least a quarter of them lock their doors at night. Fox sat back in his chair with a wide expanse of desktop between the two of them and studied Mikesh. The accident, Fox said, happened on a county road. It was his jurisdiction to assist in the inquiry, although the state police would take the lead, since it was a fatality. To Mikesh’s surprise, Fox announced that he would be taping the interview. Introductory details completed, with a slightly friendlier tone, Fox asked if Mikesh knew the deceased, and reviewed details of what Mikesh reported last night to the deputies. Slowly Mikesh noticed that the questions were getting less friendly. What had Mikesh been doing between nine and ten p.m. the night before? Was there anyone else at the scene who caught his attention? How in all that fog had he happened to notice that a car was in the ditch? Mikesh came to the office thinking of himself as the helpful neighbor. Fox’s questions put him on the defensive.
Fox sat straight-backed and wrote down Mikesh’s answers. “That car went off the side opposite you on a curve. From every report I got from people out on the road last night, you were lucky to be able to see your own lane,” Fox said. “I just want to make sure you didn’t meet him on that road, weren’t in a place because of all that fog that might have caused him to run off the road like that.”
“I was at work from five o’clock on.”
“Anybody there to back you up on that?”
“I checked in at the beginning of my shift. After that, though, I was on my own. It was a quiet Friday night. No evening classes. Everyone who could be off the road was home.” Mikesh scoured his memory. “I talked to the cleanup guy on the last round of milking at the dairy center, but that would have been before that time, eight thirty, nine at the latest. After that I can’t say that I saw or talked to anyone. It’s possible one of the kids at the apartments saw me on my rounds there. The last would have been around midnight.”
“No one you had to stop, no one you helped, no one else saw you at the school?”
Fox was checking that Mikesh had an alibi that would prove he had not run my brother off the road.
“Listen, I punched in at five o’clock and left work around one thirty. I talked to a guy in the dairy building about nine. On the way home I was watching the road closely and I saw some suspicious tracks in the snow bank. I stopped and found an accident and a victim that no other driver and no sheriff’s deputy discovered in what must have been several hours. If you don’t feel like thanking me for helping your office do its job, that’s fine. But don’t try to come up with a story that makes no sense—not to anyone who knows me.”
Mikesh was tired and angry.
“I just talked to the family and friends of a dead man,” the sheriff told him. “They’re distraught. They want some kind of answer about a fatal accident. I’m going to make sure we don’t overlook anything.”
Fox, in his regulation button-down shirt and his sport coat, talked a good line.
“You can understand why I want to make sure you had nothing to do with this, Arnie. You are telling me you did not pass the scene of the accident any time before you made that 9–1–1 call last night at 1:51?”
Mikesh quit talking. He shook his head.
“Do you have a clearer way of telling me and the recorder that, yes, you were nowhere near the scene before that time?”
Mikesh felt weary. “That’s right. I was nowhere near that scene between the time I clocked in and the time I drove that way home after my shift.”
“Even though you happened by a long time after the crash, you spoke with King. Remind me again if he told you anything about his accident.”
“Not really.” Mikesh wished he could find something of help, something that would put him a bit more on Fox’s side of that awful