Burn What Will Burn (7 page)

“My mother was a Roberts,” Baxter told me and seemed disinclined to tell me more.

“So, that's your mother buried in Rushing Cemetery?”

Baxter did not say yes and did not say no.

“Your daddy still alive?” I pressed.

Baxter shrugged then squinted, which I thought was an unusual gestural reply to that simple question. I did not pester him about his family as I did not like to get pestered about mine. The sheriff lowered his side window, tossed his live cigarette.

“High fire hazard out here now,” I said, though every fool in the state of Arkansas knew this about that summer: red, white and black
DANGER: NO OPEN BURNING
signs were posted pretty much all over that droughty part of the country that summer.

Baxter raised his window, punched in the cigarette lighter on the dashboard, waited until it popped, then lit a fresh unfiltered, exhaled into the windscreen.

I coughed.

“Good fire clean this valley right out,” he said.

*   *   *

We rode past other remnants of failed Rushing.

Point seven miles south of Mean Joe's current establishment of UPUMPIT! were the remnants of the original Pickens Family Mercantile Store now just three chisel-cut granite steps that led to a pile of weathered gray boards with nails in them like gunshot wounds bleeding rust. Nearby there four tarpaper shacks huddled together in an overgrown field where granite miners had once tried to eke a living out of the hills. The walls of these old hovels were collapsed by the load of their roofs and canted uniquely as each fought gravity from a different angle, but all were dedicated to the decomposition and disappearance of another failed, human venture.

“That's why you moved up here,” Baxter told me.

I was not sure what he was talking about. I thought he would ask about the dead man. He didn't.

I shrugged.

“Family ties,” he explained. “That's what brought you up here last year.”

My twice great-grandfather, the last of the Reynoldses to die in Arkansases, was decomposed in a pine box in the unregenerate dirt of Rushing Cemetery; but that presence didn't seem much an enticement to relocate from the posh, Gulf Shore condo I had been in, moved into after my wife's death.

But I had never been comfortable in a condo—the carpet was always dirty and stained, the neighbors too loud, the parking lots around the place just heat collectors, the mailboxes jammed full of flyers for real estate and car washes and cheap furniture.

“Could not say what brought me up here,” I admitted.

Rushing did not feel like Home. But you had to be somewhere and the persistent poverty of the place, the hard lines of the hills, the rocky fields that yielded little spoke, someway, to my condition, rose familiar in my impending middle ages from an artesian depth that my old home folks seemed preserved in.

I was newish rich now, living like old poor for reasons somewhat uncertain even to me.

“Who knows exactly what moves people to do what they do,” I told the sheriff, something he knew already probably, that blood, a man's nature, is thick, runs deep, is hard to shake or slake and that life is too usually just about living, surviving somewhere or anywhere.

What was left of the old schoolhouse went by on the right. Jacob Wells had stripped it to a skeleton, relocated the dry-rotted wallboards to his place, piling the useless lumber between his collection of bald tires and his cadre of rusted-out propane tanks and his army of dysfunctional household appliances and log skidders, thrown a blue plastic tarpaulin over the worm-eaten planks, because that was my neighbor's fine idea of progress—to get whatever he could onto his dog-chewed piece of property and get a blue, plastic tarp over it.

“You don't get along with your neighbor, I hear,” the sheriff said as we passed by the Wells place.

“The Twins shoot holes in my mailbox, shoot at my truck, call me names. Jacob's dogs shit in my yard. His sheep and goats eat my garden. And I can't hardly leave my house without some Wells or another coming over and stealing whatever he or she can steal from my house. Jacob even stole the hay out of my field when I went off to Hot Springs for a weekend. Came in and cut it and baled it and moved it all out in two days.”

Baxter grunted.

“I know what you're saying, Mister. Jake Wells was boxing the fox, stealing apples out of my daddy's orchard since he could walk. You move into country like this, though, you got to expect what you get.”

“He's no account, as far as I'm concerned,” I said. “And too stupid to drag a board around the house.”

“Out here, Mister Reynolds,” the sheriff advised me, “you just got to know who you're doing business with.”

We passed the First Rushing Evangelical True Bible Prophecy Church of the Rising Star in Jesus Christ.

“You know the Reverend Pickens?” I asked.

“Mean Joe married my folks, buried my mother and baptized me,” the lawman said.

Baxter didn't seem the baptized type.

“You know him and his grandson, the Retard, pretty good,” Baxter said to me, pointedly I thought.

“I know his grandson, Malcolm, pretty good,” I said.

“So I hear tell,” Baxter said, as he braked in front of my place.

*   *   *

We sat the car for half a minute. I counted.

The sheriff didn't say anything, so I just waited, counted up and then counted down to calm my nerves.

“Malcolm's worried about his daddy,” I said finally.

“He has got good reason to worry,” the sheriff said. “Junior's jumped bail, which was the Reverend's last cash money lost. So if Mean Joe catches Junior he will surely tear his son a new asshole and then probably kill him outright.” The sheriff paused, then added, “and the bondsman in West Memphis has set the hardest hard-case bounty hunter in Arkansas after Junior's ass besides.”

“And you're after him too, Sheriff?”

Baxter looked at me.

“That goes without saying, Mister.”

I fidgeted.

“You know where Joe Junior might be?” I asked for Malcolm's sake.

The sheriff cut his eyes at my house and raised his lip a fraction.

“You might want to check for him in a burn barrel, Mr. Reynolds. That's where trash usually winds up around here.”

*   *   *

I bought the Old Duncan Place because it was cheap property and a lot of it, but the house was a crooked, unrighteous mess. Clapboard peeled and bucked off the frame like dried-out scabs. The tin roof was streaked with deltas of rust. Thick coats of dust turned the windowpanes into privacy glass. My chickens moved listlessly on a front porch that was canted as a loading ramp, behind bugscreen wavy and patched with duct tape Xs.

The candy-apple red, fin-tailed Cadillac convertible I had bought my dead wife, a singular indulgence, a bribe, an investment, sat beside this wrecked abode like a reminder of better times.

It was so hard to explain to people why I lived this way that I'd quit trying. Some of us were just not meant to enjoy money.

“Still got your Texas plates on the Caddy,” Baxter noticed. “So you're not planning on staying around here then, I take it. Little slow out here for you, Mister Reynolds?”

I shrugged.

I had no idea whether I was leaving soon, or staying put for a while. That depended. I didn't like it here especially, but I didn't dislike it either. I had local interests. It was someplace to be.

Baxter drew hard on his cigarette, forced smoke out his nose, looked at me, at the house, at the Cadillac, then back at me. He shook his head as if all that did not add up. He chain lit another Camel, rolled down his side window and tossed the old butt on the road. That one cigarette, under the correct circumstances, could ignite a fire to burn my whole hundred acres, a thousand beyond, burn black the whole valley.

He rolled his window back up.

“You letting me out here?” I asked.

Baxter accelerated down the road.

“Seems you said he was down this way,” the sheriff told me.

A hot bead of sweat slid down my spine, dripped off my tailbone.

“Did I?”

Baxter aimed his gray eyes at me, lifted that corner of his mouth again.

“I do believe it is what you said, Mister.”

He sounded as if he was reminding me of a deal we had made a long time before.

“I suppose I said he was a ‘he' too.”

I stared at my little hands, swollen fat by the heat. I clenched and unclenched them, twisted the tight wedding band on the heart's finger of my left hand, felt a golden edge cut hard into the flesh between my knuckles, pressed my palm against my shirt front, felt the other wedding band, the dead man's property hanging there against my skin.

“I suppose you did say it, Mister.”

I nodded, stared out my side window. Half a dozen of Jacob's sheep, shaggy and dirty as a junkie's hair-do, grazed in my front forty like it was common ground.

“He is down by the creek,” I said. “I pulled him out of the water. He's on the northside bank.”

We were near the bridge. Baxter slowed the cruiser to a crawl.

“He better be,” the sheriff said. “Because I'd hate to come all the way out here for nothing.”

*   *   *

It seemed though that he had.

The sheriff parked on the middle of the old bridge, but kept the cruiser's motor and the AC running. We got out and I moved to the side of the bridge that would give view to the dead man's resting place. The sheriff moved beside me, too close for comfort.

The body was gone.

Baxter sighed like he'd been holding his breath. His breath was like vaporized peppermint schnapps. He seemed relieved, but he could have been frustrated, hungover or something else. He was hard for me to read.

He stared at the north bank of The Little Piney where I was staring, spat cleanly over the rusted rail of the bridge into the water below. With a thumb he pushed up the brim of his hat, just a hair.

“He was right down there, Sheriff.”

The white oak in the creek clung to land with thick torqued roots. Green leafed, it was the livest plant around. Even the usually succulent kudzu vines were dry, fibrous as sisal rope wound around the trunks and limbs of heat-exhausted trees on the cut bank.

When I leaned against the bridge rail and pointed at the spot where I had found the corpse, the ring on the gold chain around my neck slid over the collar of my T-shirt.

The sheriff looked at the ring on the chain, not at where I pointed. He raised his eyebrows and frowned, which complex maneuver seemed the sort of facial move that lawmen must practice and which could mean anything from personal knowledge to professional curiosity. I tucked the chained gold band back under my shirt.

When I dropped my hand I felt sweat cold in my armpit.

“I suppose, Mister Reynolds,” he said conversationally, “that a rich fellow from Houston and Gulfport and wherever else you been, would just naturally get bored living out in this kind of Pure Country.”

The sheriff had checked up on me.

“I don't think you understand Rural America. How it is out here.”

Though the High Sheriff might have been aiming at informed sarcasm, his critique came off as canned. And he was clearly underinformed about me on these older counts, since I'd been born in a town not much bigger than Doker and raised in one no bigger than Bertrandville and only lived in Houston because that was the only place that would accept me in graduate school and only had traveled some of the world because my father drug me on business trips around the world only to carry his bags and tend to him when he was drunk, which my mother would not do for her husband.

But I didn't say anything. People think they know you when they know where you're from or where you've lived or where you went to school or who your people are; but that is often not the case in the least bit and apples can roll as far from the trees that bore them as the grocery store, oftentimes many states and even countries far away from their place of origin.

The sheriff turned back to his car.

“Shouldn't we take a look?” I asked, because I felt I should ask, though I did not want to take a look with the sheriff.

It was curious that the body was back in the creek or gone elsewhere, but I was relieved that it was.

The sheriff made a big production of looking east and west and north and south.

“Take a look at what, Mister?”

Truthfully there was not much to see. Even the heel marks my walking shoes had made in the creekside mud seemed now smoothed to inconsequence.

I looked over the bridge rail. In the shallow water river stones were smooth and speckled as cresting trout, metal pull tabs glittered like silver jewelry, plastic bobbers were hooked in a nest of fishing line. A faint scent of burned wood rose as a quick hot breeze whisked up and twirled the white trash ash inside a fire pit like insubstantial egg whites, shirred to the ultimate thinness of dust. Empty cans of potted meat-food product and oysters, soda cracker wrappers and chewing gum wrappers and Styrofoam worm containers, beer cans and fish bones and heads, spent rifle cartridges littered the ground.

A branch snapped on the southside bank and the red-tailed hawk was yanked off his regular perch atop the loblolly and reeled into the blue sky.

I peered into the brush below the pine trees.

A feral cat showed itself. This was one of the tribe of housecats gone wild that inhabited all the area around the creek. The old yellow tom twisted his head skyward, looking up at the bird settled back in the loblolly. But the aerie of the hawk was a long climb up a tall tree for an unlikely meal, so the scroungy cat backed out of sight.

“I'm leaning towards just chalking this little episode up as a waste of County time, Mister Reynolds.”

“Chalking it up,” I repeated.

I wasn't complaining, though chalking it up did not sound like exactly correct procedure.