“Sheriff, with all due respect, our position on this hasn’t changed. We don’t want to send him to a place where he’s going to be bullied.”
“Ma’am, any kid who remembers Buster allegedly killing anybody would be in high school by now.”
“He’s getting a good education here.”
“Then if you don’t mind, someone from the school will be by to test him to see how he’s getting on.”
The next day, a social worker and a school administrator came by to give Buster a test to see how well he understood the basic principals of grade school math and English.“We think this young man should be back in school,” they said, packing up their pencils and papers. “He’s sorely lacking in multiplication skills and has no understanding of punctuation.”
“He’s learning to run a business! Can you teach him that in school?” Mrs. Svendergard said, showing them the door—and for some reason, spelling out her defense in the air with her finger. “No, you don’t! Exclamation mark. Do you? Question mark.”
As for school, it started, once again, without him. Things went back to normal if one could call it that. Then one night, Mr. Svendergard didn’t turn up for supper. Buster and Mrs. Svendergard searched the entire compound, but Mr. Svendergard was nowhere to be found. Buster used his special phone number to call Sheriff Dudival. Thirty-six hours later, the naked body of Gil Svendergard was finally discovered. He had been standing on the famed steel scaffolding of his own design, rinsing off a gyrating cement truck with a high-pressure hose. Somehow the loading gate of the gravel chute had opened behind him, pushing him off the platform and inside the barrel of the truck, where he was mixed and tumbled with a fresh load of concrete intended for a condo project in Telluride.
“Any idea how that happened, Buster?” asked the sheriff, interviewing him in the Svendergard’s living room.
“Nope,” said Buster.
“No idea who pulled that gravel chute up there?”
Buster thought about that for a moment.
“Welp, there ain’t but the three of us here. The missus never go up there…”
“But you do, right?”
“Yep. Ah do a considerbull ’mount a work up there.”
“And you never saw anybody else around here…on the property?”
“Nope.”
“And if you happened to pull that cord on the chute by mistake, you’d own up to it, because mistakes do happen in life.”
“Yessir, they shor do.”
The sheriff waited for him to say something.
“So…did you make a mistake?”
“Ah don’t b’lieve ah did.”
“And you and the mister never had any harsh words or other contretemps?”
“You mean like him not lettin’ me go to school?” The sheriff thought he was finally getting somewhere.
“That’s right. Like that.”
“Truth is, sir…ah dint wanna go.”
The sheriff’s eyes fell, once again, on the Svendergards’ breakfront where he noticed that there was a second pie plate on the shelf. This one was of Gil Svendergard. The sheriff put a hand on Buster’s shoulder and pulled him closer to him so he could speak in a low voice.
“Now look here, Buster, I’m going to give you fifteen seconds to admit that you might have had a hand in this. If you did, I’ll figure something out. I swear nothing bad will happen to you. I’ll just get you some help. Understand?”
“Yessir.”
The sheriff stood back and just looked at Buster’s blank face for fifteen seconds waiting for an answer. None came. Once again, Sheriff Dudival, in his capacity as sheriff and Coroner, reported it in his journal this way: Gil Svendergard suffered an accidental death due to a contraption of his own devise for loading and cleaning cement trucks that never passed a safety test by OSHA or a certified engineering company. He was unclothed.
There was a big turnout of women for Mr. Svendergard’s funeral, despite the fact that none of them had ever been friends with the missus. Word had gotten out that Mary Boyle, owner and cook at the Buttered Roll, had prepared marinated flank steak with roasted peppers on freshly baked rolls for the wake.
Buster had liked Mr. Svendergard and had enjoyed living there for the past two years, so he didn’t have to force himself to cry when the hearse drove up from Crippner’s Funeral Home. Buster, in all the time he had lived with the Svendergards, had never cut his red hair, nor did he shave—since it was the order of day at the Svendergards to go au natural in all things. Wearing one of Mr. Svendergard’s dark suits, his white shirt sleeves stuck out a good six inches, the gestalt was that of an orangutan in cowboy boots. Sheriff Dudival gently guided the boy to the back of the hearse where he, Skylar Stumplehorst—one of the biggest ranchers on the mesa—and two contractors, who were still owed concrete jobs, lined up behind the back door of the open hearse. Mr. Svendergard had requested that he be buried in a simple pine box—convinced that his worldly remains would quickly be carried off by Isis to begin its long journey home to the sun. This turned out to be a big mistake. To begin with, when the man from Crippner’s Funeral Home rolled the coffin out the back of the hearse into the waiting hands of the pallbearers, the weight practically tore each man’s arms out of their sockets. The people at Crippner’s had had little success in removing Mr. Svendergard from the cement chunk that he was originally delivered in. Their chief embalmer wasn’t trying to be ironic when he said that it would take a better man than he—Michelangelo’s hammer and chisel perhaps—to free Gil Svendergard from the chunk of cement that enslaved him. His first half-baked attempt ghoulishly separated a foot with the shoe still on it from the corpse, so Crippner’s decided to quit while they were ahead, or at least while the body still had a head.
The pallbearers took half a dozen wobbly steps under the weight of what surely was four hundred pounds, when Mr. Svendergard’s body suddenly broke through the bottom of the pine boards and fell to the ground. The gravediggers, it turned out, had gone for a drink. With the limited manpower on hand, the pallbearers had to resort to flopping the cement-encrusted corpse end over end. Mrs. Svendergard gasped and wailed with each flop, until, like craps, seven was the lucky number and the conglomerate that was Mr. Svendergard fell into the grave, head down.
Buster shoveled a spade of dirt over his second adopted father, hoping that, after a short period of mourning, everything would return to normal. Would Mrs. Svendergard still read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped to him while cleaning his ears in her naked lap? He certainly hoped so. Mrs. Svendergard cornered Sheriff Dudival before he could close the door of his patrol cruiser.
“I don’t think I can keep Buster.”
“Why not?” Sheriff Dudival asked.
“I don’t… I don’t feel comfortable being alone with him.”
“Do you believe Buster was responsible for your husband’s death?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then what is it?”
“I think he’d be better off in a family with a male role model.”
Mrs. Svendergard was not just thinking of Buster when she made that suggestion. She had received an unexpected phone call that morning from a golf properties consortium in Coral Gables, Florida. A famous golf course architect, Gordon McClain III, had flown over her property in an UltraLight airplane on the way to Phoenix and was taken with the eccentricity of her topography. This was his specialty in golf course architecture—finding the challenging sites in what he called the “American vernacular.” Mrs. Svendergard wasn’t interested in the vernacular side