Burn What Will Burn (19 page)

Miss Ollie ran a dishtowel over a tiny puddle of water that was on the booth table nearby my hand.

She had painted her fingernails, inexpertly, blood red.

My appetite disappeared much as the water under her dishtowel had disappeared.

“She owed me almost three hundred dollars in food tabs, Mr. Reynolds,” Miss Ollie told me. “Does that seem right to you? To owe somebody what you never intended on paying, like she did?”

“Put what she owed you on my tab, Miss Ollie. Whatever it is.”

“I couldn't do that, Mr. Reynolds.”

“I've got plenty of money, Miss Ollie,” I told her, repeated myself so that she would understand me. “I've got plenty of money for the right things, Miss Ollie.”

“All right then, Mr. Reynolds.”

I sat very still.

Miss Ollie made no move either. I could see the pulse in an artery in one of her dishwater hands that clutched a dishrag fiercely. I looked out the window at the Old Lion.

“Did you know her well or long?” I asked.

“I'm not sure anyone ever knew her well, Mr. Reynolds. But I have known her or known
of
her since she was a child.” Miss Ollie raised a vague hand over her shoulder. “She was raised over in Danielles though. Raised in Danielles, in those trailer houses behind the Piggly Wiggly. Did you ever shop over there, Mr. Reynolds, at that Piggly Wiggly in Danielles? A lot of men do, I hear.”

I lied, shook my head firmly against that even being a remote possibility.

“I try to stay as local as possible, Miss Ollie,” I said, though truthfully I had visited Piggly Wiggly in Danielles on a few occasions.

Miss Ollie nodded, but slightly as if I were not particularly convincing.

“Her foster parents in Danielles or Social Service or whoever was in charge of her at that time used to send her away for the summers, over here to that Osage Camp, as they called it. Leave her over here all summer.”

“Tammy Fay?” I asked, though I knew who she was talking about. “Was sent by her foster parents or Social Service or whoever was in charge of her, to Camp Osage, which was the project of Dr. Williams's wife? The kids' camp that Melissa Williams ran?”

“Yes, Mr. Reynolds. In fact, she often lived summers with the doctor and his wife and then lived in Danielles the rest of the year with various foster parents and this went on for many years.”

“Tammy Fay,” I said, since Miss Ollie seemed unwilling to say the young woman's name.

“Yessir, her.” Miss Ollie brushed a fly away from her face. “And then the doctor gave her the Old Lion to stay in when she turned twenty-one and she moved in there permanently, more or less. That was about five or six years ago, Mr. Reynolds. Right after the doctor's wife passed on.”

I tried to position all the players in this longstanding local drama.

“So Warnell knew Tammy Fay from Camp Osage?”

“My poor son, Mr. Reynolds,” Miss Ollie said. “His head was twirled like a top until it was spun off by that girl. Like all the rest, but Warnell was the worst smitten. Followed her around like a puppy dog, whining after her affection. He would do anything for her. She made him eat dog poo once in front of a bunch of other kids from camp.”

“Why?” I asked, even though I did not need to ask.

“Just because she could,” said Miss Ollie. “You know that as well as I do, Mr. Reynolds. It was pathetic.”

I looked at Miss Ollie in the face and she blushed.

“And now Tammy Fay is dead,” I said.

“She was a force of nature of sorts, Mr. Reynolds. Like a terrible storm. But even a tornado blows itself out eventually.”

I said nothing as this seemed to sum things up pretty well, save for the aftermath.

“I couldn't blame anybody?” Miss Ollie asked me. “Could you, Mr. Reynolds?”

“What do you mean, Miss Ollie?”

“Could you blame anybody in this business, Mr. Reynolds?”

After a pause, I said, “No, I couldn't, Miss Ollie.”

But somebody had to take the fall for all this business.

“I am really sorry for your own troubles in all this, Miss Ollie.”

“You cannot imagine what I have been through, Mr. Reynolds.”

“It's a shame for you, Miss Ollie.”

“Things have to work out somehow, Mr. Reynolds.”

“It's an admirable philosophy, Miss Ollie.”

We were very still for a moment, Miss Ollie was and I was. The tourists at the other end of the room chewed their food loudly and leaned toward me and Miss Ollie.

“There's just some people you're better off not having around, Mr. Reynolds. I was not one who wished her harm. She had a bad time of it too, like most of the rest of us around here. But she was no good to have around here. No good for anybody. Not back then. Not lately. Not ever.”

Miss Ollie wiped a hand over her lean face.

“A girl like that is always no good in a place like this place, Mr. Reynolds.”

A few wisps of soft gray hair escaped Miss Ollie's hairnet and she tucked them back with a move that made her tragic and almost pretty in a minor sort of way.

Ollie Ames was just a bit older than me, I realized. Or maybe even my own age.

“It's bad chemistry, Mr. Reynolds. It goes against natural order.”

“I won't argue with you about that, Miss Ollie,” I agreed, since so much of the trouble in the world was just that, bad chemistry of one sort or another.

“It's better just to take what plain thing God gives and be satisfied with it, Mr. Reynolds. Folks try to be something they're not and never can be and try to have something they can't have and never will have. Don't you think that's true, Mr. Reynolds? That people reach too high? That people expect too much out of life?”

I drank my too-sweet and too-light coffee, wiped my mouth on a paper napkin.

“I won't disagree with you, Miss Ollie.”

Though maybe Miss Ollie was totally wrong because if we only stayed in our natural states obeying natural orders we'd all still be living in caves, scratching crude symbols on rock, believing in gods and ghosts. Expectations could ruin us, but where would we be without them except always in the same old shit, in a cave battling shadows.

“I am right, Mr. Reynolds.”

I nodded just to keep the peace. I was not in an argumentative mood with the world right then. After all this “business,” as Miss Ollie had named our recent local trials, I was, truly, grateful to still have my hide even if I did not have any much hair to go along with it.

“I think I'll just skip eating right now, Miss Ollie. Tab up my daily blue plate though. Add Tammy Fay's bill to my running tab as well. I insist.”

Miss Ollie did not argue with me on this fiduciary point again.

“As you like it, Mr. Reynolds.”

I slid out of my booth, stepped to the door.

“They're talking about the death penalty for him, Mr. Reynolds,” Miss Ollie said as she followed me. “It's an election year and the district attorney is going to seek the death penalty for my poor son. But the moratorium will save him, won't it?”

“I don't think anybody's going to be penalized to death in this country for quite a few more years, Miss Ollie,” I said, though once the national moratorium was lifted on capital punishment I imagined Warnell would be on the list for lethal injection in Arkansas, even if he was brain damaged. Unless he got some powerful good lawyers.

The tourists called for their check. But Miss Ollie stayed focused on me.

“My son doesn't deserve the death penalty, does he, Mr. Reynolds? We don't deserve that, do we?”

I opened the door.

Warnell's three-legged stool was still on the slab porch.

“
You
don't deserve it, Miss Ollie,” I said.

“Thank you, Mr. Reynolds. Thank you so much for saying so. It means the world to me to hear you say that.”

“Whatever I can do then, Miss Ollie.”

“I appreciate you, Mr. Reynolds.”

I nodded.

“And I appreciate you, Miss Ollie.”

When I stepped from the cool of the inside to the heat of the outside my brain seemed to spin, for a brief moment, like a top.

*   *   *

There was a pretty, but new girl at the checkout at Goody's Grocery—An Affiliated Foodstore and she was unfamiliar with me and so would not let me cash a counter check for cash money.

“I'll have to go get Mr. Goodman for approval.”

“I'll go get him,” I offered.

The line at the checkout was backed up, the girl was flustered and her cash register was beeping angrily.

Her neck was long and white and covered in hickies of various stages of bruising.

“Goody in the back?” I asked.

“Yessir.”

Clarence Goodman was in what he hopefully called The Deli, a couple of plastic tables with attendant plastic chairs beside the butcher counter. He was eating from a family-size bag of low-fat potato chips. The remnants of a very large cut-meat sandwich littered the table. His chins were all greasy.

I put the counter check in front of him and he pulled a ballpoint out of his overpacked shirt pocket and scribbled his mark on the back.

“Shawnda's new,” he apologized, returned the check to me. “We're just breaking her in.”

“Mr. Goodman,” I thanked him.

“We appreciate your business,” he acknowledged, plunged back into his big bag of chips.

The checkout girl cashed my check and I walked across the parking lot of the grocery store and stopped at the watermelon seller.

“Hot one,” he said.

“It is a dry heat, though,” I replied.

“Unusual for these parts,” he said, repeating our earlier dialogue near exactly.

You'd have thought we'd no memories to hear us talk and maybe that's the way to be. To forget what you can forget. To forget what you say so that you can just say it again over and over and over.

To forget what you've done so that you can do it again or won't need to do it again.

I paid for a watermelon.

“I'll come back in a minute,” I said, looked across the street. “Pick me out a good one.”

“Doker special,” the watermelon seller said and winked at me. “Firm, but sweet.”

I stepped across Main, stepped inside Dr. Williams's office.

Nurse shoved aside the frosted glass of the cubicle when she heard the front door open.

“Mr. Reynolds.”

I nodded.

“Is the doctor in?” I asked.

“No, he's in Bertrandville testifying at the grand jury hearings. Then he's taking a little time off. Traveling to the Gulf Shore, I believe. And so I am not expecting him to return to the office for several weeks.”

The certificates and diplomas, the photographs in the doctor's reception room were gone. The walls of the physician's office were freshly painted institutional green.

“Could you still set me up with an appointment for a blood test, please, Nurse?”

“I can do that, Mr. Reynolds. Monday at your regular time?”

“That will be fine, Nurse.”

“You have been entirely negative for ten months, Mr. Reynolds. Are you looking for something in particular?”

“I am paranoid,” I said. “I appreciate your understanding, Nurse.”

“I'll put you down for next Monday, Mr. Reynolds. Your regular time.”

“Can I get another prescription for my pills, Nurse?”

I had been without them for many days and my nerves had not much suffered that lacking, but it is reassuring to have medicine handy for what might ail you.

“That's not something I can do for you, Mr. Reynolds. And Dr. Williams has told me that it is not something he feels comfortable continuing. So perhaps you had better find another physician to prescribe your medications as he sees fit. I'll make you an appointment at Northwest Arkansas Regional Medical Center, if that's suitable, Mr. Reynolds?”

I nodded.

“Is there something more I can do for you, Mr. Reynolds?”

“You could tell me the local gossip, Nurse. Do people know how Warnell killed Tammy Fay?”

“Excuse me, Mr. Reynolds?”

“How did Warnell Ames kill Tammy Fay Smith?” I repeated.

Nurse cleared her throat.

“He beat her and then raped her and then left her near South Slough. Then he went and sat on his stool in front of the café until his mother found him and Miss Ollie called the sheriff who came and arrested him.”

“The beating killed her?”

“No, the beating did not kill her. She rolled into South Slough somehow and drowned in the mud, Mr. Reynolds. Or else he pushed her, which seems most likely.”

She had drowned in the mud, though this was not news I had read in the papers.

“Drowned in the mud,” I repeated.

“Yes, Mr. Reynolds. She was found facedown in the mud of South Slough. If Warnell had only left her on dry land she would have survived, the doctor said. But apparently Warnell pushed her face into the mud while she was unconscious and she asphyxiated. Doctor Williams was very upset about it.”

“So, Warnell confessed?”

“Eventually he did, Mr. Reynolds. To the High Sheriff. It took a few days of persuasion but he did confess.”

“He confessed to Sam Baxter?” I asked for clarification.

“But it wasn't the sheriff that convinced him,” said Nurse. “It was his dear mother, Miss Ollie, saint that she is, who finally persuaded Warnell to confess his sins and make a clean breast of it. For the good of everybody. For the good of the community.”

“So Warnell confessed to killing Tammy Fay?”

“Eventually he did, yes, Mr. Reynolds.”

“But not at first?”

“The gossip is that at first Warnell only confessed to hitting Tammy Fay because she wouldn't…” The nurse blushed slightly. “‘Go all the way' with him is the way he put it. He knocked her out apparently.”

“Then later on he confessed to killing her? Beating her, then drowning her in the mud of South Slough?”