Burn What Will Burn

 

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To

Mathew Madan

For

RoundTop

 

Every night I am in the same seared scene, a dream:

Where my dead tell me to burn what will burn,

Starting with them as a paperpoem ream.

—Alexander Long

 

CHAPTER 1

The body floated stubbornly in The Little Piney Creek, one and four tenths miles of graded dirt almost due south on Poe County Road 615 from my place, what used to be the Old Duncan Place.

I had stopped my morning constitutional on the rusted iron bridge when I heard a hawk's plaintive screech. A familiar red tail settled atop a loblolly like a drop of brown paint on the tip of a bristle brush and cocked an eye at the water below him. A fish rose against the creek's green face and snapped at a bug.

My eye followed this, natural, series of events—the hawk looking down for food, the fish rising up for food—until I saw the body floating like a boat that was swamped but wouldn't sink.

It was late August. Summer had been nothing but a long drought so the creek was running low and heated piss-warm in the shallows. But on occasion those days, there was the slightest chill in the morning air, a harbinger of autumn, that caused a mist to overlay the sides of The Little Piney, soft-edged strips of fog that moved as the water moved only slower, a ghost of the creek detached and hovering, too light to stay in the world, but too heavy yet to be gone.

Under this suspended shroud, on the north side of the creek, the body was lodged between a downed tree and the red clay bank, partially obscured by leaves, but unmistakably a big man in a red shirt and blue jeans.

“Oh shit,” I said when I saw him there.

Steered into the angle created by the shoreline and the fallen tree, the body was wreathed in leaves that flipped lightside to darkside in the pulse of eddied water. The skull bounced rhythmically between bark and bank. The dead man's back heaved like he was learning his first hard lesson of breathing water.

I threw up over the steel rail of the bridge. Curdled moonshine, two hundred proof, splashed on the water, whisked away.

My watch said it was six oh seven a.m.

About as good a time as any.

*   *   *

Around the foundation of the bridge, riprap reposed at a steep angle. I tugged the laces tighter on my pricey new walking shoes and started down, slipped on the loose, sharp shards of crushed granite and only barely regained my footing on a shoreline narrow and slick as a side of cheap bacon.

It was only five yards downstream from that spot to the dead man, but I dawdled. It would be misleading to say that I stopped to “pray” per se, and so imply the possession of a spiritual faculty I do not, in fact, possess. But in my stop position it would be fair to say that I “waited with hope.”

What I was hoping for, in this instance, was that I had only imagined the corpse floating in The Little Piney Creek, and that this corpse would turn out to be a mere invention of my irregular way of thinking.

Because this dead man was not a problem I wanted to claim as mine, was a problem that probably needed a god or some strong medication to obscure.

But as I reached over the downed tree and pushed a shaky hand against the dead man's shoulder, the rough bark of the white oak reminded me that this particular peculiar circumstance was real and not imagined.

A cottonmouth loosed itself from a tangle of downed tree limbs on the opposite side of the creek and began to slither across the surface of the creek in that menacing way that watersnakes have that defies gravity and logic and in that way terrifies sensible, Christian people in order to remind them of Edenic Reality.

I watched the snake cross the creek, his arrowhead swimming side to side, like a pocket watch swinging on a golden chain gone green, mesmerizing. The pollen was so thick on the creek's face that the serpent's trail was as visible as a deer track through the woods.

I reached back and grabbed up a handful of riprap stones to throw at the cottonmouth. I did not come close to hitting it, but did dissuade the snake downstream. He must have been over six feet long. The same length as the dead man in the river, more or less.

“This is some shit, isn't it?” I asked the dead man.

The dead man nodded, agreeing with me or with some conversational creature sunk in the mud a couple of feet below his face, his guide to the other side maybe.

I pushed him slightly.

The corpse was, I suppose, what is called a “floater” so he bobbed like a bottom-weighted buoy from the pressure I had applied to him. My stomach roiled and I swallowed some corn liquor bile, took ten deep breaths and “centered” myself (as some psychotherapist had once taught me to do in order to manage my anxiety). My anxiety, however, did not return to its normal, free-floating level, even after ten deep breaths.

I shoved him again, harder. He rolled onto a shoulder, but didn't show his face. I cracked back a few branches of the downed tree and touched a fingerend to the bruised depression at the base of his skull.

That bruise did not look good to me. In fact, it looked like a factor that would compound the problem.

I patted the back pockets of his blue jeans and found a couple of packaged condoms—XXL size—and a bullet about as long as my little finger. No gun nearby, though, not on the bank and not in the mud of the shallow water I filtered through my fingers.

I stuck the unfired cartridge in the pocket of my short pants along with the Trojans.

I searched all the pockets of the dead man, pants and shirt, and found he had no wallet on him, no car keys.

But looped on his leather belt was a large leather knife scabbard, empty but with the word, or name, “Buck” stamped on it. The scabbard looked big enough for Jim Bowie's knife.

“Buck” was a heavy bastard and, small as I am, it took all my strength to drag him out of the creek and when I had his body beached I was gasping at the air and my walking shoes and short pants were filthy with wet, red clay, my arms and hands covered to the elbows with mud and what I suppose was corpse slime.

The dead man's head rested between my knees, face in the red clay of the creekside. When I pushed him off, Buck fell on his back and his whole body seemed to exhale a malodorous fart.

I am not a doctor, a mortician or a policeman in any conventional understandings of those jobs. I was just a dyspeptic poet with a little family money. So I did not hazard a guess as to the cause or causes of the dead man's death. Though that big bruise on the back of his head did not, as said, look good.

Buck was hirsute with dark hair thick on his head where the flesh had not been nibbled away by fish or snapped away by turtles or pecked away by birds. Hair was thick even on his neck and arms.

There was a delicate gold wedding band depended on a thick gold link chain around Buck's neck. There was no inscription on the outside or inside of the ring, which was so thin there probably wasn't room for an inscription. The ring certainly could fit no finger of this big man, dead or alive.

I unclasped the chain and put it around my own neck, just for safekeeping.

Buck's eyelids were gone. Where his eyeballs had been were but black holes, though these spaces in his face seemed still, somehow, expressive; not so much expressing a particular emotion—of desire or loss, pain or joy—but as only empty vessels now waiting to be filled.

I swatted away the crawdads clinging to what was left of his lips and earlobes.

What remained of the dead man's nose was just a ridge of cartilage, dangled above vacant space by sinew, like a weird chicken bone suspended by fishing line over a garbage can.

Buck's exposed teeth were scary like a Halloween mask is scary—that is, so scary they did not even seem real.

I looked away from the dead man and leaned back. The sky had been made jigsaw by interlocking trees branches. I put a few blue pieces together then turned back to the dead man. He was still dead as a doorknob. And nobody to me, I decided. No one important to me at all.

*   *   *

I wanted to run away from the dead man in The Little Piney, but I'm not much of a runner. So I pulled him ashore and started another series of events, which is all history is really, mine and everybody's, just one damned thing after another.

I waited for a spell, waited for something/anything else to happen. I think I supposed someone, someone other than me and Buck, would appear. But the road I lived on was about as dead-ended as a road can be and still be a road. So …

No one appeared. Nothing helpful happened.

I'd spent much of the day before at my most local bar, in nearby Bertrandville. (There was no bar in Doker, my newish, nearest “hometown” of three hundred souls, and the whole county was dry but for the “members-only” establishments attached to hotels and country clubs, which were the only places for miles to buy a drink.) By early afternoon the day before I had been more than mildly drunk as is my regular wont.

So there were plenty of witnesses to my whereabouts that day before.

And during the early phase of my most recent bar-drunk, I had even written poems on paper napkins and distributed them liberally to my fellow patrons of the Crow's Nest Saloon and Grill. Then I watched the Cardinals play baseball on ESPN with the daily regulars, and then discussed mutual fund frontloading with the after-work crowd later on, and even later, slept away the early evening in my regular rented room at the Holiday Inn in which hostelry my Crow's Nest is housed and in which my domicile (Room 116, poolside) I pay for by the month because membership (that is, cash money) has its privileges.

The rest of the evening, after I fed my chickens and until dawn, was spent at home, returned inside my cups again watching videotapes of
Columbo
and
Rockford Files
.

Hence, the day before I'd have probably missed anybody driving down County Road 615 from ten a.m. on. Which meant that if my dead man in the creek, Buck, had come by my place the day before, I would not have seen hide nor hair of him.