Six-legged cows and quadruple homicides: Travels with Sailor, Part Three

This is a snakeskin jacket! And for me it’s a symbol of my individuality, and my belief… in personal freedom.

– Sailor, as played by Nicholas Cage in David Lynch’s 1990 film, “Wild at Heart”

I can’t take credit for my dog’s awesome name. That distinct honor belongs to my ex-girlfriend, who wanted to name a child or a dog Sailor, in tribute to one of her favorite movies. All I can claim is to have enthusiastically embraced it when it was suggested.

This is the second time Sailor has driven across the country with me. I would like to think that makes her name all the more appropriate, and that if she could, she would thank us for such a destiny-shaping name.

Today marks the final push for my new/old home of Indianapolis, following about five days of driving a truck full of my belongings from Los Angeles. Right now, I’m in a truck stop less than an hour west of St. Louis, which puts me back in Indianapolis in about six or seven hours. There’s lots more to write, and my feeling is I’ll probably have to spend a few days parsing through some of it once I reach my destination before I’m able to write something insightful.

Inky night seeps slowly into the daytime sky when the horizons are this big. With night comes the fear. Low cash, and rain over the last several days, has forced me to sleep in the tiny, two-seater cab of my 1999 Ford Ranger. At six-foot-two, that means curling up into a ball on my side, with Sailor wedged snugly into the tiny triangle behind my knees.

Yesterday was all Kansas and all rain. I took a detour from I-70, south down US 83 to the tiny town of Holcomb, Kansas, where the Clutter family — a husband, wife, and two children — was brutally murdered in 1959, providing the subject-matter for Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” I, myself, am working on a documentary about the murders of seven members of a Mexican-American family in Indianapolis, similar to Capote’s story because it, too, followed a botched robbery attempt. I don’t know what I expected to find. Not much, honestly. But the tiny black dot on my road atlas drew me deep into southwest Kansas to see it, all the same.

The right vista, the wrong song, the days of heavy clouds and rain over Kansas and Missouri remind me of the precarious state of my emotional well-being following the break-up of a five-year relationship.

As I drove toward the juncture of I-70 and U.S. 83, a series of hand-painted billboards drew my attention. They could hardly have failed to. “SEE THE LIVE SIX-LEGGED STEER,” one proclaimed. “SEE THE LARGEST PRAIRIE DOG IN THE WORLD,” proclaimed another, “PET BABY PIGS,” yet another. They didn’t say where. It seemed a side-trip to my side-trip would be in order.

I pulled over at a gas station, where Bruce Springsteen’s “I Don’t Want to Fade Away,” was playing through the intercom speakers at the pump. A massive, billboard-sized painting of Jesus emerging from the wheat — a sort of camouflage, mixing with the long, brown locks of his hair and beard – presided over the scene. The billboard had no words, advertised nothing but what was obvious. I hopped back onto I-70.

Lucky for me, the place I sought was at the junction with U.S. 83, where I had planned to exit anyway, in Oakley, Kansas. The place was called Prairie Dog Town, and it was one of the strangest and also most depressing places I have ever been. The owner, Larry Farmer, sat behind a counter in the shop up front, surrounded by taxidermied animals. Just inside the turnstile, I was directed to a cage full of live rattlesnakes, many of which Larry had caught himself at the campground across the road.

“I’ve been here for 42 years,” he said. “I asked a guy how he liked the place once and he said ‘I only been here five minutes,’ and I said, ‘well I’ve been here 42 years, whaddya think of that?’” He started cackling. A young, college-aged kid walked in behind me and got the same story. I wondered how many times Larry had told it.

“We got over 300 animals out back,” he said. “Take your time.”

“I will,” I said.

“Make sure you take pictures of the two six-legged cows,” he said. “They’re the only ones in the world.”

I cursed myself for probably the hundredth time for not having a camera.

But once I got outside, I was sort of glad I didn’t have one. It was true, there were hundreds of animals. But most of them were in cages. There were badgers, bobcats, baby pigs, a family of six or seven foxes, countless birds, goats, turkeys, pheasants. In one circular cage, were two coyotes. One lay still, the other circled the perimeter of the cage, round and around, going nowhere.

The largest prairie dog in the world was a statue – maybe 20 feet tall. Admittedly cool were the regular-sized (and real) prairie dogs, who lived in the ground beneath my feet as I walked. Completely unafraid of humans, they popped in and out of probably hundreds of holes, darting two and fro. At any one time, you could see dozens, just hanging out. I saw a few babies, smaller than my fist. They looked like little chipmunks.

The extra legs on the six-legged cows were real, but not functional. On the larger of the two cows – a sort of rust-colored steer – the two legs hung together off his rear-end, dangling uselessly like two extra tails with hooves. The extra legs on the smaller, black cow hung together down its side, sprouted from the middle of its back.

At the rest stop where I had slept the night before, a rudimentary buffalo rifle had hung on the wall, a museum piece, basically a piece of pipe with a hammer at the end. At the back end of Prairie Dog Town, in a corral, were six or seven buffalo, a reminder of the days when they ruled the high plains. Now they lay in piles of mud and dung. It was sad. A few minutes later I would pass a huge statue of Buffalo Bill on U.S. 83. The statue depicted Bill riding a horse, leaning sideways out of his saddle, leveling a rifle at the giant buffalo that galloped before him.

I approached “Roscoe the Miniature Donkey,” who cowered a bit at first, and rolled around on his back in the dirt, like a dog in the mud. I finally managed to coax him over. I stroked his head and looked into his deep brown eyes. The left side of his nose was rubbed raw and red, scabbed over with sores. I left and went back to my truck and gave Sailor a kiss on the nose.

By the time I got to Holcomb, the sky had grown darker with rain clouds, my mood likewise dark. Hills flattened into flat wheat fields that yawned endlessly in each direction, and into miles of stinking feed yards packed with cattle. I pulled over to read a historical marker that demarcated the place where 1878 Col William H. Lewis, the last member U.S. Army to be killed by Native Americans in Kansas, met his end in a battle with Chief Dull Knife.

Holcomb isn’t much of a town in the usual sense of the word. In Kansas terms, it is. Most of the towns I saw along Kansas roads were little more than a few corrugated steel grain bins and grain elevators backed up to a railroad track, with small clusters of houses around them, the occasional Mexican food restaurant. Holcomb was slightly bigger than most, but not by much. Many of the homes were built and organized as though they had been built in the 70s or 80s, like suburban subdivisions. It had trailer parks, a few schools, including Holcomb High School, presumably where the Clutter kids would have gone to school.

The town“center” consisted of a few single-storey buildings – one of which was a Mexican Food joint that looked like it had been closed for some time. Another nearby strip of shops housed a Laundromat, a hair salon, and an out-of-business diner called “Perry’s Home Cooking” – which struck me as either unwittingly ironic or a sick joke, considering one of the Clutter family murderers was named Perry Edward Smith.

As with many of the small towns in rural Kansas, I was struck with what a large segment of the population was Latino. One of the few viable businesses there, Ron’s Market, was run by one such Latino family. A middle-aged woman ran the counter. Two girls who might have been her daughters stocked shelves and chatted with blond, floppy-haired Kansas farm boys as they worked, the same way high school kids do everywhere. I asked the woman behind the counter if they got many tourists because of “In Cold Blood.” She said sometimes, but that they always asked people to be considerate of the family living in the Clutter home today.

I didn’t see a single marker of the tragedy, some 50 years old this year. I don’t know what I was expecting. Nothing, really, but I was disappointed, all the same, that that’s exactly what I got. On my way out of town, at the eastern fringe of Holcomb, I stopped in to the Thirsty Dawg and ordered a Budweiser, a grilled cheese and some hot wings for lunch. A table of drunk men and women told dirty jokes and the place served beer out of large, probably 24-ounce jars.

Shannon, the bartender, was nice as hell. She even called the people who lived at the Clutter home for me. She said they’d be glad to show me around if she could get ahold of them. Unfortunately, they weren’t home.

An old, weather-worn Kansan man drinking Bud Light next to me drew me a map to the Clutter home, down a long dirt road at the southwest edge of town. “If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll recognize the row of trees,” he said.

When I got there, I recognized the trees right away. I’m trying to figure out what kind of trees they are, but I suppose I’ll have to wait until I unpack and can go digging through my old copy of “In Cold Blood.” A sign at the end of the dirt road said “private drive, no trespassing.” But a parallel dirt path that ran alongside the property allowed me to get a closer look. The house was smaller than I imagined. A few women worked in the yard and looked in my direction, and I became very aware of my intrusiveness, of the grotesquery of tragedy-as-spectacle, like “Roscoe the Miniature Donkey,” like the six legged cows.

I turned around and headed out of town, vaguely disturbed, typically dissatisfied and restless, “a creature driven and derided,” as Joyce wrote, by the vanity of my assumptions.

By this evening, I’ll be back in Indiana. I hope we’re ready for one another.