Ronald Rickreiner, father: farm-to-farm agricultural products salesman; throat slit, May 2003 (body in vehicle pulled from manure pond)

Barry Rickreiner, son: opposition

Babette Rickreiner, mother/widow: campaign financier and manager

Murder suspects: multiple farmers in debt to Ronald Rickreiner

Omissions:

Father’s Usury: Ronald Rickreiner credited seed, pesticide, fuel, etc. to struggling farmers at interest rates up to 40% and collected on property liens for non-payment

Toxic Impact: cash netted from repossessed farms invested in Liquor City, Supercuts, Farmers’ Direct Buy, Dollar Heaven, etc.

Revenge by Pesticide: suspects passing from sudden, multisymptom illnesses include Kermit Vick (2003) and Horst Millhouser (2004); for similar symptoms, see Kim Maybee autopsy report; Ronald Rickreiner’s product line included Killex

Brand-New Information: Oppo has just learned that former Rickreiner debtors and murder suspects Jim and Jon Golly (cleared by monkeys f^cking football; departed Bad Axe circa October, 2003) still own their property in Town of Leavings.

PLEASE STAND BY… AND DON’T DRINK THE BUTTERMILK…

CHAPTER 20

By morning, as incandescent dawn gilds the great brown river and bruised men shuffle out of tents to meet the day, Sammy Squirrel has a new name.

Hot Dog.

Last night someone threw him one.

Oscar Meyer all-beef.

He didn’t even chew.

Sunk in a foamy Mississippi backwash, he soaks his mosquito bites and his train-jump scrapes and watches the lever of daylight pry up the lid of night and tip it into yesterday.

Yesterday…

He sieves his fingers through the murky water. Yesterday? He sifts his bare feet through the silky-warm bottom mud, feeling small sharp things buried, jerks his knees up and grips them, afraid of teeth. Unanchored, he drifts and spins—a mile of brown water, a rust-and-blue barge, a tall green bluff, a coasting pelican with its surveilling black-bead eye, the tent camp. Yesterday has fallen off the spinning earth, vaporized by the new sun.

“Come on, now, Hot Dog.”

The boss of the homeless camp, Abraham, a crooked-spine black dude with a gray beard, calls down the riverbank.

“Bath time is over. Get out that dirty soup, son. Get some coffee in yuz. Then we gonna go get some jingle.”

Sammy Hot Dog shoulders his backpack and follows a loose tribe of shabby men as they limp and scuff and banter along a dirt trail away from the river. They travel through sweltering shadows of bottomland forest, over glinting tracks, through cracked lots between tunnels of rusted fences, up sour-beer alleys to the designated street corner where a few men already loiter, cupping stubby smokes and jeering at the others for being lazy and late.

“This the jingle train, Hot Dog. Go on, now, line up. Your turn is gonna come.”