Soil (11 page)

“That's horrible,” Sandy replied, setting her napkin on the table.

Shoals may have told the story with a shade more mirth than it deserved.

“A lot of folks thought so. It was one thing killing Shitty Boy, I guess, and another thing killing his wife and kids. The FBI swooped in and threw Mitchell's ass under the jail.”

“Don't call him that, please,” Sandy said.

“What?”

“That . . . the man who was killed.”

“Shitty Boy? That's what they called him!”

Any ground he'd gained during the meal was lost by the time the dessert cart rolled around. Sandy passed on another course and excused herself again. Shoals gave the waiter his credit card and scarfed down a powdery beignet-type pastry while he planned his next move. If he could just get her in the Boss, he'd have her. Something about having a woman's derriere in his bucket seat drove him wild. Like sitting in the palm of God, he'd tell them, and they melted every time.

She came back, all polite smiles and false reserved cheer. She said that she needed to fetch her son, who was staying at her father's house. He tried to get her talking about her son and her father, but she threw up roadblocks at every turn. Evidently he'd been too tactless with his conversation.

“Well, can I call you sometime? I'd love to take you for a ride. I could show you parts of the county you probably never knew existed.”

“I bet you could, Danny, but honestly, I'm incredibly busy and just in a difficult place right now,” she said.

“I understand,” he replied with tender reservation. “I probably shot off my mouth trying to impress you, and I'm sorry for that. I was just trying to make you laugh, make you forget about your troubles. I've been trying to imagine what you're going through. I know how hard it is to be alone. Sometimes it seems like the rest of the world has forgotten about you. It has to be twice as hard with a kid.”

She smiled, and he detected a softening in her gaze. His final volley may have scored a hit.

“If you ever feel that way, like everyone has forgotten about you, give me a call and we can do this again,” he said.

He stood up like a gentleman and began to walk out with her when the waiter hollered across the restaurant. “Sir, sir, you forgot your card.” Shoals frowned at his overeagerness and waved him off. He wanted to escort her to the car. There was always a chance, when faced with the prospect of return
ing home to her sadness, that she would change her mind. But she simply shook his hand, thanked him for dinner, and flittered off in a rush.

The slugger Shoals had struck out. But as he watched her drive away in her sad lttle Maxima, he remembered a lesson his uncle taught him. The best gains come from a hard day's work. And while he considered himself a romantic, he knew there was no magic formula. Familiarity built trust and comfort and ultimately love. He believed if he just showed up and did the work, convincing Sandy of his loyalty, then her desire would eventually tilt his way.

15

Autumn drove a lance up summer's ass that last weekend in September. The sky spewed rain and hail. Violent winds and lightning lashed the already broken land. A big twister cut a swath just north and west of the Mize place, ripping up what the flood had spared. In the storm's wake, a new chill descended. All manner of nature would now take its cue to start dying.

Jay awoke from a deep hibernation, sobbing in the overcast dawn. He was unsure where he was or on which side of reality. The last thing he recalled was being in a house he could not place, some combination of houses from his youth, and his lumbering ape of a father walking in with a .22 rifle, gesturing for him to come and see something. Jay assumed he'd killed the dog and followed his father reluctantly to a side porch, where they viewed not a dog but Jacob, shirtless in a small pair of khaki shorts, lying on his side, a neat little tear above his heart, his eyes open and lifeless. As Jay crouched down to gather the boy, whose body was slick like a fish and resisted his embrace, his father stood by with silent idiotic pride. Next Sandy appeared, and when she recognized her son's body, she attacked Jay first with a book and then with her fists.

And that was it. Short and precise, distinctly lucid and undreamlike. Almost farcical, but there was nothing funny about the way he felt when he woke up. He'd succumbed to a true emotion, one with the weight of premonition. It felt like he'd touched an alternate reality at the dead end of slumber.

He writhed in bed awhile, trying to come back to life. Much of the ache inside him was physical hunger. He'd not eaten since the porch onion—days
ago, he guessed—and he still tasted smoke and blood in his throat, raw from all the dust and fumes. Chipper smiled lazily, lying next to him in bed. The house reeked of shit.

He got up finally and stumbled through his barren home, looking for something clean to ingest. The rooms were cool, the hall and kitchen. A pitcher of water went down him like a blessing.

In the pantry he found the same old carton of baking soda and tub of shortening, a sack of beetle-infested flour, the odd birthday candle and plastic fork. On the floor lay the gnawed-open sack of dog food to which Chipper had helped himself. Jay went down on all fours to inhale the grainy stench of the empty bag and was enticed by all the powdered fats and rendered essences of bygone animals.

Against his better judgment, he went to his emergency rations, bound up in a box with several layers of packing tape and a scrawled warning—“Don't eat except in emergency! Women and children only!” Even if this was an emergency, and he was beginning to think that it might be, he still didn't qualify. Nevertheless he bore into the cinched box like a campground bear and plucked out a can each of ravioli and black beans, stabbed them open with a butcher knife, and choked down the contents. In the stash was an unopened bottle of good tequila. A drink would do him right, but he opted instead to place it above the cabinets, a prize to accept when Sandy and Jacob returned.

He also found a pill bottle containing a few hard buds of marijuana. He sniffed and remembered it, a potent batch. He put it away lest he be tempted. To smoke it would only amplify his misgivings.

In the living room he scooped up the dried turds in a dustpan. By the door he found his mud boots, so shiny they were like new. He stepped into them and walked outside to greet the cool new season. It felt good to breathe again. There was a cleansing wet as opposed to a rotting wet in the air. A few leaves shuffled about, trying to start a movement. He tossed the turds under an azalea bush, and when he came back to the carport, he found Chipper sniffing under the brown tarp at the bucket of charred bone fragments. He knelt down
and opened the bucket, sifted his hands through the black grit and splinters. It wasn't a dream after all. Here was hard proof, just lying out in the open for anyone to walk up and find.
Proof of what?
he wondered.

He decided he needed to untangle his mind, to bring himself back to a balanced temperament more in tune with the earth and its natural cycles, so he went inside and crumbled and smoked a bit of the marijuana. It clawed at his throat going down and didn't take long to grab hold of him. He felt every sensation more acutely. A light came on inside him and he could feel his body's points of entropy.

He took the .22 from behind the mudroom door and walked outside. The wind had picked up and the dancing branches created flickering shadows along the ground. He stood and stared, his mind creating narratives for all the furious shadows. He could not discount that this arbitrary play of light and darkness might hold the answer. Anything was possible and everything was ripe with significance in his current disposition.

He whistled at Chipper and together they headed for the woods to scare up a rabbit or squirrel. They started over the hill and into the pasture, down near the hollow. Gauzy light through the dying foliage conjured a fog, perhaps smoke still lingering from the burn, or old ghosts wound through the trees like cotton candy. They retreated and set out for the woods along the river instead.

Occasionally during their hike he was seized with a surfeit of thoughts or waves of crackling energy inside his abdomen. He stopped and listened to the woods—a lone mosquito chasing him, complaining in his ear; the pulse of the river ahead and the flitting of birds from bough to bough; the scratch of tiptoes over damp undergrowth, walking Indian-style. He heard a distant shotgun, probably a hunter priming his weapon for dove season. Or maybe someone sitting out back on his patio, taking his life out of his own hands.

Jay's mother insisted it was an accident, but who cleaned his shotgun in the hot tub? He could understand her denial, but not his sister's. Their father had never been a happy man. How long could you carry around shame like that? The insurance company alone would admit the truth, if only to nullify the life policy.

He'd gone to the funeral by himself, refusing to expose Jacob to it. Few showed up for the service or burial. What pity that ever existed for Mizes must have all been used up by previous generations. He stayed a few days to sort out odds and ends. They found a few dumb-luck investments that might allow his mother to carry on with the bills for a while, after all the penalties and fees that accompany death. Jay couldn't wrap his head around it and expressed his frustration as outrage. He gave the family lawyer a royal cussing for no good reason and embarrassed his mother, who was looped on barbiturates. His sister finally asked him to leave. Months had gone by and he hadn't spoken to either of them.

Mourning his father had not been what he imagined. Instead of crying over his casket, Jay had wanted to open it. He had a sadistic need to see his father, to judge the hole in his head where he'd blown out all knowledge of his careless ancestors.

Jay had learned about his grandfather in eleventh-grade social studies, during a unit on civil rights atrocities in Mississippi. The teacher was a young man from the north who taught this lesson with self-righteous vitriol. He wasn't teaching so much as berating them, as if to say,
How could all
of you unborn have let this happen?

They sat ashamed in the dark, whites and blacks alike, and watched the parade of evil projected against the classroom wall while the teacher delivered his scathing indictment of civil rights assassins—the Rays and De La Beckwiths, Milams and Bryants, and all the anonymous lynch mobs from the hills to the Delta to the piney woods and coast, villains and citizens who accepted murder for the preservation of a dominant white society. When the teacher mentioned Mitchell Mize, classmates turned to stare. It all came together—his father's hostile ambivalence when asked about his old man; vague rumblings of some family member in prison and sympathies for a long-suffering grandmother he never knew; the morning after Halloween when he was ten or eleven, waking up to find a white-robed and hooded effigy swinging in their front yard.
Just a ghost, a silly prank
, his mother had assured him.

He went home after class in an adolescent rage, demanding answers. It
earned him a smack across the face, the first and only time his father struck him. That blow told it all. If we were all meant to pay for our daddies' mistakes, then who would be left innocent?

Jay never mentioned it again, only satisfied his curiosity by reading every account he could find of Jim Crow injustice. In all of his delving, he did not find atonement, only a darker shame than he could sufficiently bury, unlike his father, who'd finally reached bedrock.

Jay was startled just then by a fit of barking. Chipper had flushed out a scent in the brush and charged a live oak. He stood against the trunk on hind paws and bayed. Jay raised the rifle and peered under the leaves. There appeared indistinctly a naked black man on a high heavy branch, stone-still, staring down at them.

“Who's that?” Jay called up. “Who's in this tree?”

The perched man did not respond.

“What do you call yourself doing up there?”

Jay walked ten or twenty feet away and then turned around to check again. The world around him was real enough—the smell of rotting leaves, the spongy ridges of tree bark beneath his fingers, the tendrils of light spilling through the trees, and the sound of a large truck distant on the road. The prospect that his mind was projecting two sides of reality, toggling back and forth at its own demented pleasure, worried him.

He went back to confirm that the man was still there. “You'll have to come down from there this instant!” he cried and crouched low.

No, it was the buzzard. Had it been there all along? He took up the .22 and popped off several shots, scurrying around the base of the tree, angling for a clearer shot. The bird stood and raised its wings, reached up and disappeared into the greenery.

He sat down on the splayed trunk, overcome, short of breath. He grabbed Chipper in a needful embrace, but the dog was intent on his flown quarry and wouldn't even stand to be loved. Jay wound up clutching himself but was repulsed by his own stench and wanted a bath, maybe a dip in the river. A cold shock to reset his brain like electricity.

He stood and made slow, stammering progress through the woods as Chipper trailed along behind him, finding interest under every hollow stump and in every turned burrow. Soon he came to a glen and froze when he saw two deer twenty yards distant. They were both too distracted to notice him. He raised the .22 and sighted the buck, his rack a wide twelve points. It would be a difficult kill with this small caliber, only a clean shot to the brain would do the job. His hands were shaking, and he leaned against a tree, rested the barrel on a flimsy branch, and took slow, deep breaths. He watched the buck nose up behind the female, his tongue flickering over her backside. He made a clumsy attempt to mount her, and she pulled away, ran a few steps ahead, stopped, and raised her tail to taunt him. He swung his antlers and came back around, climbed atop her a second time. She stood still, ears back and eyes terrified as he rose over her in a supplicating hunch, tugging her close with his legs, licking her neck and stabbing her underside with his engorged red prick. His hips pulsed as he found purchase, and they locked in a moment's synchronous ritual. Jay's finger rubbed the trigger. He could take either one of them in their ecstasy.

Then came Chipper howling down the glade. The stag scrambled over the doe, kicking free of her, each bounding in a different direction. They were gone by the time Chipper arrived, sniffing and pissing and rolling in the leaves near their lovemaking. Jay lowered the rifle, surprised to find himself aroused by these animals and their unabashed, difficult partnering.

He walked on toward the river, where he stopped to watch the waters roil and tumble. A few trees on the opposite shore had collapsed and were kneeling head-down in the current. Chunks of earth were ripped away by floodwaters. Jay imagined this was how the land defended itself from the onslaught of water, a sacrifice of trees and banks of mud, damming up and fortifying, forcing the water to dredge deep instead of wide. He inspected his own side of the river to find similar features and encountered a washed-out cleft where part of the shore had come away. Holding on to a vine, he climbed down for a closer look. The mud snatched his foot and yanked, sucking him into the heart of it. He flailed in a panic, worried he'd stumbled into quicksand, but it was only a
knee-high bowl of cold mud and clay that tingled against his skin and left sweet stains on his lips.

Along the edge of the pit, the mud was as smooth and supple as flesh. He wallowed around, enjoying the sensation, like a million fingers on him. He closed his eyes and imagined human touch, the musk of the earth ripe and familiar. He tilted his head back and let the slough take him. Behind the flickering pink light of his closed lids he saw his wife caressing the vine, poised in her careful descent, her naked white body overcome by gooseflesh from the wind off the river. She'd made herself up for him, the curls and red lips. She balanced herself, arms out daintily at her sides as she moved through the ooze toward him. Her shadow enveloped him and then lowered and straddled him. He crawled out of his pants and flopped onto his stomach. He nuzzled his face down into her pristine pale skin and then entered her body, which was succumbing to the dark mud until she had disappeared. The slop worked him like a generous hand. He lifted himself over it slow, gaining rhythm, thrusting again and again, the wet suction completing his fantasy quickly in a fit of twitches and airy whimpers.

He lay spent on his back for a moment, breathing in the mist falling from the trees, listening to the river's patient hustle close by. The mire covered him head to toe and it felt cleansing. The smell poured into his nostrils like fresh air. He sat upright and began rubbing mud deep into his skin. In his desperate repetition, scouring away the stench and all of its incrimination, plying the craft of creation to himself, he attempted to make a clean new man from old scum.