“We’ve got the usual collection of old men shouting at clouds, but nobody who’s obviously nuts,” Skinner said. “If I had to pick a name, I would have picked Larry Van Den Berg. He always struck me as over-tense, but he got along okay for a long time . . . You know, before . . .”

Jenkins said to Virgil, “Motive.”

“Gotta be money,” Virgil said.

“Didn’t I already say that about a hundred times?” Skinner asked.

Wardell Holland stepped through the curtain. He had a letter in his hand, and he said, “You guys won’t believe this.”

20

As Virgil was driving Shrake through the night to the hospital in Fairmont, the woman who had swastikas tattooed on her earlobes was sitting in Jim Button’s Nazi kitchen with her hair pulled up over the top of her head in two horns, held in place by two fat, blue rubber bands. She said, “Ow! . . . Ow! . . . Ouch! . . . Goddamnit, ow! . . . Hey! . . . Ouch! . . .”

Another woman was working on her with a sewing machine needle and a puddle of black ballpoint pen ink, converting the two tiny swastikas to black squares. The Nazi earlobe woman, Marie York, had been offered a waitress job in an Albert Lea bowling alley. She’d worn big, gold-plated earrings to the job interview to hide the swastikas but knew the truth would come out sooner or later, so she was having them obliterated.

When Button accused her of anti–National Socialist treachery, she’d said, “I’ve got to eat. I’m not giving up this career opportunity.”

When the tattoo lady had shown up, Button retreated to the dining area to sulk: the fact was, the wheels were coming off Minnesota’s National Socialist wagon. Nobody would hire them, and they didn’t have a whole lot of salable skills, other than the ability to lift heavy weights and/or make methamphetamine out of Energizer lithium batteries, Sudafed, and farm fertilizer.

Recently, they couldn’t afford either the batteries or the Sudafed, and when they’d tried to steal anhydrous ammonia from a farmer’s wheeled fertilizer tank, they’d managed to break the handle off the spout, and the ammonia had run down the farmer’s driveway and stunk up the whole neighborhood. Also, they’d damn near gassed themselves to death, suffered some spotty burns on their hands and arms, and, in the end, had only come away with one two-liter Pepsi bottle of the stuff.

At this point, they were living off their individual SNAP cards, which would not allow them to buy either alcohol or tobacco, and which, realistically, could have been a good thing, because if SNAP did allow it, that’s probably all they’d buy. The cards also wouldn’t allow them to buy any hot food or food that could be eaten at the store.