Burn What Will Burn (23 page)

He also confessed to setting fire to about seven hundred and sixty-nine chickens at the Tidy Chicken poultry processing plant in Danielles, though he was nowhere near Danielles when that fire was started.

With the help of a group of anonymously hired, overpaid but excellent criminal defense lawyers imported from Houston, Texas, Warnell successfully pleaded insanity, avoided a potential eventual lethal injection and was incarcerated in a maximum-security mental institution in the Delta region of Arkansas for an indeterminate period of time, most likely life.

*   *   *

Where Miss Ollie visits him irregularly.

*   *   *

I don't believe anyone other than Sam Baxter knows I killed his father.

I haven't told anybody, because I got nobody to tell.

Maybe one day I will have someone to tell about all that.

But I know firsthand that people are devious and hard to trust, so I'm not holding my breath that I will ever have someone I trust enough to share my life and my secrets with.

Since I've none to discuss that killing with, none to really trust it with, I try not to think about it. I don't dwell on what I did because it's not healthy to dwell on things like that.

*   *   *

Naturally the crazy man, Old Baxter, comes to me unbidden in dreams. With the rest of them. My dead.

But truthfully Old Baxter does not seem angry at me. Seems to forgive me as the rest do not, does not linger at my shoulder like the others do, means me no more harm than I meant him.

Sometimes I think I did the old man a favor.

I like to think so.

I know I did his son a favor.

The old man is dead anyway.

And the dead don't need me.

*   *   *

The second day of the New Year next I got an unexpected package.

It had been a Holiday Season less lonely than I was recently accustomed to. I recognized my mother's death date somberly, with a long, slow walk in a stiff new pair of mail-order walking shoes I had gifted myself and then I had a mediocre but filling chipped beef dinner at Miss Ollie's EAT

For Christmas I had a little tree on the front porch that Malcolm helped me decorate with popcorn strings, which the chickens liked. Miss Ollie gave me a modestly priced, but water-resistant Timex wristwatch and I gave her a generous gift certificate to a mail-order leatherwear company since she had pointedly told me that she wanted exactly that.

New Year's Eve I escorted Miss Ollie to Smarty Bell's party at the Crow's Nest.

While I inexpertly steered her that evening around the edges of the small, crowded square of parquet dance floor under the saloon's rotating mirror ball, she confessed that the stress of her husband dying of alcohol poisoning and the stress of living widowed after that for twenty years with her damaged and, apparently, dangerous son Warnell had pretty much ruined her life up to that point in time and, even though she still loved her son and was upset and guilt-ridden about the deaths that past summer and all the other troubles Warnell had caused, she was happy her son had confessed and was gone from her but in a safe place, happy with the way things had worked themselves out, happy that, miraculously, her crooked world had been straightened out a little bit, happier than she had been in a long time, perhaps in forever.

I didn't make any confessions myself to Miss Ollie.

But I did stay fairly sober and did have a pleasant New Year's Eve with her.

And Miss Ollie looked ten years younger after Warnell was locked away, which made her look several years younger than me.

*   *   *

New Year's Day, Malcolm brought the butcher paper–wrapped envelope, out to my place. He thought it might be a belated Christmas present.

There was no return address, no postmark, no stamp. “Mr. Bob Reynolds” was printed in block letters on the front of the envelope.

“PaPaw said it was left outside the store. He told me to bring it on and get his fifty cent for delivery. Is it a present, Bob Reynold?”

I slit the package open with a thumbnail, slid the several photographs out of the envelope and immediately slid them back into the envelope.

“May be, Malcolm Ray,” I said. “Or maybe not.”

*   *   *

I waited until almost dusk to walk to the creek, stuck the envelope in my heavy parka, locked the chickens on the front porch and turned on their space heater for them so they wouldn't freeze into poultry ice pops.

I walked briskly then because the weather was very cold. After the hottest, driest summer on memorable record the winter had turned cold quick and stayed cloudy.

I had not set foot on the bridge over The Little Piney since that past August, consistently aimed my morning constitutionals in the opposite direction.

The fields were frosty and the livestock illegally in my front forty in them huddled and steaming.

The black forest on the other side of the creek was yet but crystalized stumps, some of them orderly as an orchard.

When I stepped on the iron bridge over The Little Piney my footfalls echoed hollow between the elevated steel and the flat water below it.

*   *   *

The creek was frozen solid along the edges, but in the middle it still ran, fast and green. The downed white oak was a lovely accumulation of icicles. The red-tailed hawk was nowhere to be seen. The fire had seared her aerie and she had moved on.

I extracted the three snapshots from the envelope.

One was the one of Tammy Fay and me having sex in the garden. The one Warnell took, for blackmail if she ever needed it, if she needed to pin the murders on me. I suppose she was just the type that liked to keep all her options open.

The photo was blurry. My eyes were red dots and my bald spot looked like a monk's shaved dome. She looked beautiful. And bored.

One was of her coaxing Doc Williams to an orgiastic climax. An interior shot, maybe in the Old Lion, perhaps even from that year. The doctor's legs were thin and white under his potted belly, marbled by varicose veins. His penis was like a little white bird's egg in a curly nest.

The last was of Miss Ollie in a skimpy mail-ordered leather bra-and-panty outfit.

I ripped two of the pictures into shreds and let those drift out of my hand toward the flowing water. Most of them stuck on the ice, some lightside up and some darkside up.

I folded the third photo in half and tucked it in my parka, zipped the pocket up tight.

I dropped the envelope with my name on it off the bridge and did not watch to see where it landed.

I started the walk home.

*   *   *

The clouded sky was low and dark.

I reached a hand up to pull aside those clouds.

I started to run.

 

BURN WHAT WILL BURN

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

I choke on every morning-after; the sun's gleam

Stirs the moonshine with sunshine, but then my guts churn.

Toward the night-black same dream:

My dead ignore me as they scull downstream

And pour their gone lives like oil on water from an urn

Themselves. When I call out, first they steam

Then smoke flame, then become flesh, then air. God's scheme

Isn't buttressed by love; it's a test of spurn after spurn

In the same noire dream, sometimes with scream

My dead pull at me from beneath the stream

And I don't fight back, grateful for my turn

To finally join them as dead without, even, a dream.

 

ALSO BY
CB M
C
KENZIE

Bad Country

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CB McKenzie
is the author of
Bad Country
, which won the Tony Hillerman Prize and the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America and was named a finalist for the Edgar and Shamus Awards for Best First Novel. A graduate of Arkansas Tech University, he lives on the Slow Coast of California when he‘s not traveling. You can sign up for email updates
here
.

 

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CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

“Burn What Will Burn” (poem)

Also by CB McKenzie

About the Author

Copyright

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin's Publishing Group.

BURN WHAT WILL BURN.
Copyright © 2016 by CB McKenzie. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

“Burn What Will Burn” (poem) copyright © 2016 by Alexander Long.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.minotaurbooks.com

Cover photographs: fire © Jane Fulton Alt / Gallery Stock; trees © Sasha Bezzubov / Gallery Stock

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McKenzie, C. B., author.

Title: Burn what will burn: a novel / C. B. McKenzie.

Description: First edition. | New York: Minotaur Books, 2016. | “A Thomas Dunne book.”

Identifiers: LCCN 2016000052 | ISBN 9781250083371 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250083388 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: City and town life—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Crime. | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction. | Suspense fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3613.C55566 B87 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000052

eISBN 9781250083388

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