Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (21 page)

Sheriff Memphis LaCour unfolded himself from his prowler and walked regretfully to her door. A tall, rangy, grey-eyed man who looked just like his brother Tender, the sheriff spoke politely. “Miz Melveena.”

Melveena unleashed her best cotillion smile. That smile nearly brought Memphis to his knees, but it was her polite growl that did him in. “Sheriff, you have
no
idea how relieved I am to see you.” Her accent hit him near the knees and migrated upwards, settling around his future generations.

Memphis had to steady himself with a hand to one of her fenders. “Now, Miz Melveena, I can’t imagine you’d be too happy to see me when you’re driving down the highway with all these children packed in here without benefit of seatbelts.”

She batted those green eyes. “Oh, but this is where you’re wrong, Memphis. I’ve had to use Granny’s Caddy as an impromptu school bus, and I’ve just been sick with anxiety over it. And I was
just
thinking, wouldn’t it be helpful if some long, strong arm of the law could encircle us the rest of the way to the schoolhouse, and keep these babies safe?”

“I’ll do it on one condition.”

“What’s that, Sheriff?”

“I was on my way out to talk to you about the Reverend’s death. I trust you’ve heard about it by now.”

“I certainly have. What a shame.”

He looked back at the girls. “I can see you have your hands full. I’ll get you to the school if I can drop by this afternoon and talk to you then.”

She smiled again. No man born could resist a second smile.

HE FOLLOWED A
ways back. Far enough back that the girls relaxed, turned from stone to flesh and blood. Even though his lights flashed in the desert sun, the girls began to play.

They talked and bounced and sang, road dust marring those icy white complexions and catching in their sharp teeth. They traded lines back and forth, one to another, without missing a beat. They could do that for an hour, she knew. If a child got stuck on a word, she kept the rhythm and changed the rhyme, or the girls started rhyming in alternation.

Another teacher might have scolded them for using the words and phrases they heard all the time at home. Melveena only listened. The rhymes were funny, grim, scatological, macabre. That didn’t surprise Melveena. Bone Pile was all of that.

Her girls were all too thin, too scabby. Long hair and bare feet washed with water from bad wells meant ringworm and lice and giardia, in Bone Pile. Melveena Strange watched all that hair flying around in the wind behind her, floating like the hair of mermaids. She had fought the parents, the poverty, and the Right Reverend Henry Heaven to get those girls to school every day. And she knew that Granny Strange would be more than happy to have her Caddy used as a school bus for desert mermaids.

THEY ARRIVED AT
the schoolhouse. With a tip of his hat, Memphis drove on. Melveena pulled in, the potholes in the lot making her car buck and heave like a tormented leviathan. She watched her girls clamber over the side of her car and descend, barefoot, to that hot gravel. They flitted into her classroom like birds to a baited cage, unaware that the door might not open when it’s time to fly.

She gathered them into a little circle around her desk. “The Right Reverend Henry Heaven has died, girls.” She looked from one face to the next. “Now, I’m sure your parents will find you other churches.” The girls stared at her. There was something obscene and provocative about those women’s faces balanced on top of skinny bodies with sharp hipbones and flat chests.

She installed the two youngest in the block center and worked with the others in math. Bone Pile kids easily learned everything by eights, faltered at all other denominators. She made them stay in for the first recess, because “we have so many things to do, girls, and we’ve lost valuable time this morning.” The girls fixed her with their strange eyes, then redoubled their efforts.

Melveena didn’t believe in reading groups. All her students read out loud, and together. They took turns, and it was like tag, the way one would pick up the last word of the preceding reader, then carry off the next sentence. Melveena looked at the array of children before her, and wondered how Ochre water would survive it when these beautiful girls hit Ochre Water High. She studied those faces carefully to see what was in those eyes besides the usual magic. She allowed herself the luxury of a very small smile.

They were all doing better. Much better.

While they picked through their lunches, served in the classroom because they had no cafeteria, she studied a pile of penmanship exercises that looked like sheets of paper covered with the tiny tracks of songbirds. Melveena’s eyes kept sinking shut in something dangerously close to exhaustion. “Lunch recess, girls.” While they played, she listened at her window, giving their words the same attentive analysis she’d applied to Emily Dickinson while earning her master’s.

The girls rhymed, clapping hands.

Melveena turned on a crocodile heel and walked swiftly to where Edana had been sitting. The girl, tired of practicing cursive in unforgiving ink, had dropped a metal-cylinder ball point to the floor and nudged it under her desk with a delicate, filthy toe. Melveena retrieved the pen. She held it for a moment. Her hand, so groomed and supple, began to stiffen. She looked down and watched the pen writhe.

Melveena had no fear of snakes. A snake is simply a suggested thing, barely there, in reality. A snake is just a click and a whisper and a sting. But watch a blacksnake ready for battle. It will thicken, stiffen, harden into armor before it strikes.

The pen was simply a pen. It rolled back under the desk. And Melveena Strange walked back to her post at the window.

MEMPHIS STOPPED AT
the store, first. The young man behind the counter had a mouth full of a Slim Jim and a can of Mountain Dew in his hand. Memphis knew this boy. A month before, Angus had taken out two miles of fencing while driving without a license in his cousin’s truck. Of course, his cousin had pretended to be the one driving, and had gotten off with restitution.

Angus MacPherson. There were also some rumors about this boy and Melveena Strange. As a gentlemen, Memphis wanted to ignore those rumors. As a lawman, he couldn’t. “I’m out here looking for a little information.” Angus’ eyes turned blank as shale. “What do you know about the Reverend? I mean, personally.”

“Oh, not too much. He don’t talk much to me.”

“I sure would like to talk to a few of those folks who go to the Open Arms, Angus. Did you ever go?”

“Piss on church.”

“Whereabouts does your family live?”

“Up in the hills.” He drank off his pop with audible gulps.

“Could you give me directions?” Angus gave Memphis five minutes worth of detailed, talking-with-his-mouth-full directions. Memphis filled three pages in his notebook. “Let me read these back.” It took him another ten minutes to get them right. “OK,” he said, closing the notebook and slipping it in his pocket. “Thank you.”

“No problem.” Angus opened up three tiny pecan pies and set them in a row on the counter. He threw down those pies one at a time, a single gulp for each. Like shots of whiskey. “Hey, you know my da won’t be there, right?”

“He won’t?”

Angus tore open a pepperoni stick. “Nope. Most of my kin went to that bluegrass festival up in Idaho.”

“The men are still up there?”

He took his time with the pepperoni and the answer. “Everybody in Bone Pile goes every year. I wanted to go, but I had to work. Still paying off that fence.” He smiled. “A few of my cousins are left back up to the trailer park, getting’ ready for the talent show.” He rubbed his rock hard stomach and let out a sharp belch.

Memphis looked at the ratty boy in his overalls and polished boots, and wondered why in God’s name women went so wild over these Bone Pile characters. Lettie Tyson, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Hiram, his dimwitted deputy, had gone crazy over Angus when he arrived at Ochre Water High school. She had written him love letters, followed him around, broken into his locker, tearfully confronted him whenever he talked to another girl, and finally scratched his name into her forearm with a pair of nail scissors. The boy had not so much as called her on the telephone.

The Sheriff sighed. The kid tore open another Slim Jim.

Memphis, feeling the futility of any further conversation and unwilling to witness any more junk food carnage, drove up into the hills.

IN HIS EARLIEST
years on the reservation, before he and Tender had been taken to school, there had been rumors of towns that could hide. Older men with laughing eyes told stories of entire villages that would vanish at the approach of an interloper. Memphis never knew if he was being instructed or teased or both.

His day in the hills around Bone Pile reminded him of these stories. He followed Angus’s directions carefully. He did find a group of railroad cars, four to be exact, all of which were absolutely silent at his approach. The rumor was they lived in these cars. He knocked on a graffiti-covered metal wall and heard nothing, not even a drawn breath, to let him know his knocking was heard by anyone within.

He gave up and went back to the school.