Soil (17 page)

22

Shoals dropped by several times a week to visit his mama. Her house was nestled in the pines, the property butting up to state forestry land. It was an old county neighborhood that had been annexed and swallowed up by Madrid proper years ago. It was about as far removed and quiet as you could get and still pay city taxes.

Often he stopped in on his way home, a quick visit between work and evening pursuits. Sometimes he stayed and ate dinner with her or sat out back in the screened-in garden and had a drink while listening to her unbottled thoughts. She was a city girl gone country and didn't like to leave home except to the grocery and liquor stores, the beauty salon on Friday and church on Sunday.

The house was an expression of her personality, the walls and shelves covered in folk art and magazine clippings and old photos from a lost carefree world. She listened to obscure folk rock and country on the stereo, speakers wired and stretched throughout the house. She couldn't stand darkness. Candles burned in every room, so many he often feared she would burn the place down. They also helped to cover the aroma of exotic boas she kept in aquariums and lizards that were allowed to roam. It was nothing to have to move an iguana from an easy chair before sitting down.

She dressed in cutoff blue-jean shorts and paint-splattered T-shirts under sheer robes and kimonos, wore tinted glasses, and smoked long cigarettes. Her skin was pale as cream, her hair dirty blond and wild. She moved with casual grace. It was a great tragedy to the bachelors of Bayard County that the
lovely widow Shoals didn't get out and mix with the populace. In a sense she had never reappeared from mourning, was closed for business except to her son, who enjoyed the special access he had to the strange and lovely recluse with her bevy of reptiles.

He'd come to her today with a simple request—would she make him one of her miraculous lemon pound cakes? He knew she would do anything for him, but it was not a quick process. The eggs would have to rise to room temperature and the butter would have to soften. Perfection was slow and earned.

They sat in the kitchen and drank iced tea and carried on easy banter while they waited. He learned about the goings-on of his cousins and aunts and uncles, information she gathered daily by phone. Then he related the more benign aspects of his work. He was careful to gloss over the seedier details. Even talk of a domestic disturbance or a bar fight made her throw up her hands and cringe. A little gossip was all she needed, just to feel like she wasn't missing anything being holed up in her house.

During their conversation, Shoals inquired about a rotten smell proclaiming itself through the dense perfume of candles.

“I fear one of the dragons crawled behind that bookcase in the den and expired, dear,” she said in her smoky voice. “I would've moved it earlier but then I'd just end up toppling the whole thing.”

It was an enormous shelf that filled most of the wall. Plenty of books with creased spines and framed photographs and trinkets and geegaws. Little glass and plastic reptiles, odd rocks, and mysterious mementos. Small potted cacti and a wild serpentine vine. He got low and canted the shelf away from the wall gingerly without knocking stuff off. But it was so top-heavy that some frames fell over and a delicate origami cat toppled from its perch. “Careful with Pickles!” his mother cried, scooping the paper creature off the floor and cradling it.

Sure enough, wedged between the shelf and floor molding, a stiff orange lizard lay upside down, mouth agape, emanating a ripe funk. His mama squinted and shivered, trying to hold back the tears. “Oh hell, Geronimo!” she wailed. “It had to be you, my bearded warrior. I began to worry when you
didn't show up for dinner Monday night. I just assumed the owls got you.” She plucked him up with a pair of kitchen tongs and set him in a tissue-­paper-lined shoe box. “You always were a little adventurer. I should've known you could never be content in this tiny world of ours.”

Shoals drove the shelf back into place, straightened the trinkets and frames. The photos were mostly of him as a boy. There was a staged prom photo of him and Mary Nell Ballas that always made him recall their midnight dalliance poolside at that hotel in Memphis. There was another, first year as a deputy in uniform, proud and sunburned, his arm around his uncle's shoulder. And there were plenty of his father too, with his prismatic glare and his famous sly half-twist of a smile. He seemed to be observing Danny, sizing him up from the afterlife. He was the same age now as his father was then, and yet Big Jack seemed made of so much more.

“How old was Daddy when he became chief?”

She would physically cave in a little when talk came around to Big Jack. She often had to sit down from the intoxication of his memory.

“Let me think,” she said to explain away this flash of quiet grief. “He must've been a couple of years older than you.”

Danny knew he was chief at thirty-two, dead by thirty-five. She stretched the truth to give him some leeway. There was still time for him to make something of himself. She probably believed he was floundering, or maybe she was just happy he was still alive.

“Quite a family of boys,” she said. “Handsome and doomed.”

There were three brothers in all, Big Jack and Uncle Bud, the youngest, and the eldest brother, Donald, a decorated soldier killed in Vietnam. No one spoke of him. There were no stories of him, only a few photos of a nondescript child, an occasional shot of a stern-looking teen. The parents, both gone before Danny could know them, smoked and drank themselves away. They were a family destined to die young, all but boring Uncle Bud, the passive lawman who tiptoed through life lest Death realize it had missed one.

“Not a one would be anything without their women,” his mama said.

Danny wooed her back into the kitchen, where the afternoon light refracted wild through the jars of red jelly and green pickles on the windowsill. She deemed the ingredients temperate and enlisted his help creaming the butter and sugar. He tried to refuse, but she pushed him. “Just remember,” she said, handing him the spatula. “It'll fall flat if you beat it too fast.”

“You're telling me,” he joked, but she was too innocent to acknowledge.

He took the spatula and beat it as she'd taught him many times before, the old-fashioned way, feeding sugar to the supple mixture a bit at a time, followed gingerly with vanilla, lemon juice and zest. He cracked an egg and whipped—another egg, another whip, over and over, working in the white powders with splashes of evaporated milk or a dollop or two of sour cream, steadily stirring and stirring, reaching and pouring and stirring.

“See there, you always could bake,” she said. “You're just too stubborn and macho to admit it.”

“Mine never turn out like yours,” he said, placing the cake in the oven.

“Well, you oughta know my secret,” she said.

She took him into the backyard, which she'd fenced in with fiberglass siding and turned into a greenhouse. It could get treacherously hot back there, but she had a huge fan at the far end and misters hanging from the ceiling, lots of wild tropical plants. They approached a spindly tree, the same height as him, yellow fruit hanging from the branches.

“Take some,” she said. “Sour as you please.” She bent down and ran her fingers through the soil. The tree was sitting in an enormous tub, roots escaping through the bottom. “Love from the ground up,” she said. “That's the only way.”

It was really the oddest, most fascinating little garden, tangled with alien plants and vines that seemed to grow before your eyes, always a ceramic gnome or top-hatted frog peeking out from under the leaves. She had grown all sorts of peculiar fruits he'd never seen as well as big spiny flowers and broad jungle brush. The thought of loose snakes sliding through the greenery kept him on guard.

They moved to the porch, where a pair of ceiling fans kept them cool.
The six o'clock mist rained down from the ceiling and tickled their cheeks and forearms.

“I love how you keep summer held hostage back here,” he told her.

“Soon it will all go dormant,” she said. “I'll miss them like friends, you know.”

“You need to get out and meet some real friends, Mama,” Danny said. He told her this all the time. “The world aint such a bad place when it's right in front of you.”

She held a far-off stare, possibly recalling the handful of times when that simple assessment didn't bear true. Then she looked at him and sighed, smiled and patted his hand. They sat in the cool quiet and enjoyed the mist, followed by the late-season steam and the sweaty glasses.

He couldn't tell if she'd moved on from iced tea to rum, but she was taking it down in gulps. Often she'd get tight quick and start talking about the old man. One minute he was a saint, a giver, a poet. The next he was disloyal, a loudmouth, always criticizing or making fun of her. She talked as though he were still around. Danny rarely stayed late enough for her to turn aim on him.

A while later the timer buzzed and they returned inside to remove the cake. Only after it cooled on the wire rack did Danny tell her why he needed it. If she'd known she was baking for a stranger, she wouldn't have put her full love into it. She might have cut some corners on purpose if she'd known it was for another woman.

“Who is it you're seeing, Danny?” she asked.

He smiled at her shyly. “A lady I met in town, a teacher. She's having a rough time. I tried to think of the most special thing I knew to give her. Your cake, that's the thing.”

“That's your cake now, baby doll.”

“It'll always be yours.”

She went quiet and absently removed a roll of wax paper from the drawer. “You don't have to bring her over here, you know. You'll probably just scare her away if you bring her over here.”

“Mama, what are you talking about?”

“I'm serious. I forbid it.”

“That's the craziest thing I've ever heard,” he said. “Besides, we're not even that far along yet.”

She was silent, intrigued. “Well, I hope you've found one. I would love to see you settle down, maybe find a nice job, a nice kitchen perhaps. Raise some kids.”

It was odd hearing her talk this way. She'd always quietly sanctioned his philandering, never pined openly for grandkids or urged a conventional lifestyle, as if she imagined every marriage would only result in tragic death, single parenthood, doddering seclusion with reptiles.

“I've got the best job in the county right now,” he said.

“Yeah, but for how long?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your uncle's not gonna be sheriff forever, hon. He always said he wouldn't stay in office past sixty. Next election he'll be sixty-one.”

Danny shook his head, unable to fathom this. He'd rarely considered the next day, much less an election, retirement, any change whatsoever. “When did he tell you this?”

“He's said it for years,” his mother replied, waving him off, tearing a sheet of wax paper to wrap the cake. “Wasn't there some big to-do about it at his over-the-hill party?”

Danny remembered the occasion last spring, a nice back porch get-­together at his aunt and uncle's home on the lake. It was a rare outing for his mother, who even took a turn on the dance floor after a few drinks. A little bluegrass trio was set up, yodeling out the classics. He spent the party bird-dogging the fiddler's girlfriend, a round-eyed brunette in cutoffs and a flimsy checkered top. She'd left her brassiere at home, and Danny couldn't let it go. It was a rare dead end for him. Her eyes said yes, but she had a faithful country heart.

“You don't think I've got the stuff to be sheriff?”

His mother laughed and wiped sweat from her forehead, took a long flustered gulp.

“Well?”

“You can do whatever you put your mind to, Danny boy, but I sure would hate to see you take on a responsibility that size. It's not worth it in the end.”

He felt embarrassed to have even mentioned it, just a knee-jerk reaction to news he hadn't anticipated. Of course the department would keep him on as deputy, but how would it go for him without his uncle's dutiful patronage? Would he have to put on the ranger suit, those horrible green slacks, and putt around in a county cruiser? That would be his tumbling fire bale, a fate worse than death.

Maybe, though, what stung was the undercurrent. She would never have come right out and said it, and her implications were tenderly concealed, but he knew it was there. She didn't have to say it.
I love you like no other, Son, but as a man, you can't hold a candle to him.

He fixed his mama a fresh drink, kissed her on the head, and took his loaf with profuse thanks and love. He set out for home in the peaked evening, winding through the pine-swept neighborhood toward the highway, a high lonesome moan playing on a slow road.

23

There were two main routes into Madrid. The first was the old Silage Town Road. There was one rickety gas pump in Silage Town that sometimes worked, but Jay meant to steer clear of the village. Undoubtedly he would run into someone who would quiz him about his land, his wife, his white-dyed goatee. He decided to take the highway instead. Halfway to town there was a country store, Hilltop Grocery, where folks were less apt to know him.

Hilltop was an old clapboard house with four gas pumps in the gravel driveway. Big cigarette placards and rusty oil drums sat out front. A neon sign for a discontinued beer flickered in the barred window. Out by the road, a portable yellow marquee with its flashing arrow advertised,
TRUCKERS TAN FREE
. What looked like a scenic lake off in the distance behind the house was instead the sewage treatment plant, and often, especially in summer, the air got so sour it was hard to stay and pump a full tank.

Jay got out and uncapped the tank, removed the hose, and started filling. The pump hadn't been updated since the eighties, with its spinning number wheel and the switch lever you flipped to turn it on. The price was modern enough, almost $3.50 a gallon. He wouldn't be able to fill up, for damn sure. Barely enough to get to town and back.

The proprietor was a crusty geezer named Fletcher, who looked like a badger in a guayabera. He was always propped on a stool behind the counter. His family lived in the back. His wife prepared brittle sausage and crumbly biscuits in the morning, and a lot of the old kooks from the county met in
the cramped sitting area to drink coffee and discuss fishing or what politics they'd picked up from raving TV jerks. Jay preferred leaving his meager bill here than at the corporate pump in town, with their automatic doors and security cameras, their wall of inscrutable beverages and Siamese-twin fried chicken addendum.

He stepped inside to pay for the fifteen dollars of gas he'd pumped. A harried lady stood ahead of him in line, and Fletcher yelled back at a teenage girl to get off the phone so he could use the line to run a credit card. Clutching his twenty, Jay chose a soda, a dusty bag of peanuts, and a mongrel sausage from a revolving display case. He noted the old-timers at the back of the room and obscured himself behind a display of music CDs when he felt them craning their necks for a nosy gander.

Fletcher rang his purchases, which came to twenty-one and change. Jay sheepishly asked to cancel the nuts.

Old Fletcher huffed. “Aww, just go on and take em,” he said with a cigarette wheeze. He nodded to the back table of geezers. “I got more nuts already than I can stand.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Jay noticed the men whispering and appraising him from their dark corner. He hurriedly scooped up his dinner and thanked Fletcher, vowing to bring the extra dollar next time.

“Whatever,” the old man croaked from his perch.

Jay almost sprinted to the truck, jumped in and pushed Chipper out of his seat, threw it in reverse, and backed all the way out of the lot. He kept an eye on the front door. If they were so damn curious about him, then they could look all they liked, but he wouldn't give them the chance to memorize his license plate. He whipped around in the gravel, masking his plate in a cloud of dust, and hung a right on the highway toward town. He drove a quarter mile down the road with a nagging suspicion. Had they mistaken him for one of their elderly pals, or had they seen right through his disguise?

He pulled to the shoulder, made a U-turn headed back. He passed Hill
top and strained to see if anyone had come out to follow him. He saw no one but noticed, among the trucks parked off to the side, a pickup with camouflage detailing. “Son of a bitch!” He took the right toward Silage Town. The fool who'd stopped and asked him if any fish were biting! His heart skipped and dropped into his stomach. That was right before he rowed up on the body. Did this guy know anything? Had he seen it too? Why else make a big production about straining to see him and nudging his buddies?

Jay swung right into what looked like someone's driveway but was instead a little-known and rarely used third route into town. He urged the truck ahead, putting some distance between him and the grocery in case anyone had taken a notion to follow. If the guy suspected him or had some beef, he knew where Jay lived. Surely he would have sent the sheriff by now if he'd seen anything. It didn't matter, Jay tried to reassure himself. The evidence was gone.

The awkward encounter left Jay with plenty to obsess over as he disappeared into the back country. This remote gravel road cut through dense forest before turning to tattered, unlined pavement beset with shacks and mobile homes. The road ultimately dumped out in a fringe subdivision on the outskirts of Madrid and took twice as long to maneuver as the other preferred routes.

He had time to kill before Sandy was off work, so he decided to do some detective work. He navigated a series of backstreets to the public library, drove around the block a time or two to scope out the lot and look for any cars he recognized. He parked away on a side street, under a shade tree for Chipper. He took a moment to adjust his disguise. If he saw anyone familiar, he'd play dumb or speak with a northern accent. He adopted an elderly pace, affected a slight limp. Once inside he shuffled around the dollar book sale in the foyer, thumbed through an old
National Geographic
before slipping into the periodicals room, where he sifted through recent back issues of the local newspaper,
The Madrid Folk Standard
.

He found what he needed on the front page of the August 27 edition.

Bayard Sheriff Hunts Missing Ohio Man

SILAGE TOWN—The Bayard County Sheriff's Department is searching for a 43-year-old Ohio man believed to have disappeared while visiting relatives in the Silage Town community.

The missing person, Tovis Boyers of Dayton, Ohio, was last seen August 17 by his cousin, Eugene Weaver, 38. Boyers was staying at Weaver's residence in Silage Town. “He said he was going to the boats,” Weaver said, referring to the canal-docked casinos ninety miles northwest in Tunica County. “Then we never seed [sic] him again.”

Bayard County Sheriff Bud Shoals said his department is working closely with the Tunica County Sheriff to determine if Boyers made it to the casinos. Shoals said they are examining security camera footage and credit card receipts now to determine Boyers's movements on the days surrounding his disappearance, but so far they have no leads.

Meanwhile, Boyers's family in Dayton has made a heartfelt appeal to Bayard County authorities to find their beloved member. Boyers is the father of four children, grandfather of one. His wife, Monika Boyers, described her husband as “a responsible person with everything to live for.”

Boyers serves as a foreman at Gimlet Alloy, a Dayton foundry that casts automotive parts and other industrial machine components, where he has worked for the past 13 years. His boss, Jerry Banghart, describes Boyers as “a class act and hard worker. We really need him back.”

According to his wife, Boyers had built up two weeks' vacation time and decided to spend it visiting relatives in Mississippi. “We've been having stress at home and work, and he just wanted to relax awhile.”

He enjoys fishing, dancing, and eating. His wife described him as “an especially good whistler.”

Boyers drives a Dodge Dakota. He is five feet, nine inches tall and is missing half a finger on his left hand.

Sheriff Shoals asks anyone who knows Boyers's whereabouts,
or has seen him or had an encounter with him, to please report any information to the Bayard County Sheriff's Department, 226-4656.

Instantly Jay thought of the missing half-finger. Which hand of his corpse had gone missing? He tried to recall. Playing it back in his mind, he saw it either way and couldn't remember the truth. No missing fingers, he was certain. He remembered the charred bones, all five crispy digits. If Boyers had been murdered, the killer may have detached his hand to confuse identification.

As for the height description, he didn't remember the body being especially short or tall. Five-nine might have been about right. Jay studied the photo again, trying to remember the hair, the nose. None of it made a perfect match, but it was close enough to be possible.

He flipped the pages forward, hoping to find updates. Sure enough, a follow-up appeared two weeks later.

Vehicle of Missing Ohio Man Recovered

The Dodge Dakota belonging to an Ohio man who went missing while visiting relatives in Bayard County was discovered stripped and burned on a county road near Mullins in Rayburn County late last week.

The owner of the vehicle, Tovis Boyers, 43, of Dayton, Ohio, was reported missing on August 24 by members of his extended family with whom he was staying in Silage Town.

No mention of an ATV. And how did he end up in Rayburn County? Maybe this wasn't the same guy after all. Jay read on.

Rayburn County deputies conducted a search of the woods near the vehicle's location for the remains of Boyers. No clues were discovered, but the hunt goes on in the surrounding area.

Jay tried to remember when Shoals had stopped by to inquire about the missing person from Ohio. He checked the date of the issue, September 11. A memorable date, but he had no idea when the deputy had visited. He'd become a man without a calendar. Before the missing truck was found, right? Otherwise, why waste time searching near Silage Town? Unless Shoals knew something he wasn't telling.

Mullins was well south, nearly to Jackson. It stood to reason that the body would be found near there, but evidently it wasn't. And the fact that the vehicle was burned and stripped was odd. Boyers could have been killed and left near Silage Town, his car taken down to Mullins before being stripped and burned. Why go through all that trouble? Unless you were trying to cover something up. Jay was no detective, but it definitely sounded like foul play to him.

He flipped forward several more editions, hoping he would find an update that explained the whereabouts of the missing stranger, but there was nothing. He went back and combed each edition page by page and still found nothing.

He knew it was foolish, but he couldn't resist accessing one of the library computers to conduct an internet search on Boyers. He found the
Dayton Daily News
website, punched “Tovis Boyers” into the search engine, but came back with nothing. There was little about the man in the search engine, just listings on the Gimlet Alloy site and a church newsletter. The
Madrid Folk Standard
online articles weren't referenced. Jay searched the online phone directory and came up with a number, which he scribbled on a gum wrapper he found wedged into one of the hard-drive vents.

He looked at the phone number on the gum wrapper. Why had he written it down? Would he really call, or had he just created a piece of evidence? He memorized the number, then scratched it out, tore the wrapper in half. He cleared the browser history and cache, wiped prints off the keyboard with his shirt, and left calmly. He threw one half of the gum wrapper in the garbage on the way out and popped the other half in his mouth and swallowed.

Outside, he saw two kids standing by the Bronco on the street and got
nervous. They were petting Chipper through the breach in the passenger window. “Hey, you kids, get away from him, he's dangerous!” he called, expecting them to flee.

“No he's not,” said one, a pubescent boy. A younger girl echoed his sentiment.

“Well, he's got worms,” Jay said.

The girl reached up on tiptoes. “I don't see any.”

“They're microscopic. You can't see em, but they're on his tongue, and if he licks you, they'll grow in your stomach and you'll be crapping them out in a week. Big itchy worms, coming out of your butt.”

The kids laughed.

“Where are your parents?”

“We're not supposed to talk to strangers,” the boy said.

“Go home then!” said Jay, climbing in and cranking the truck and screeching off as the kids waved good-bye to Chipper.

It made him want to see Jacob. He knew his boy would be excited to see him, or Chipper at least. It would be good to hang out with his family again, start the process of reconciliation. If he timed it right, maybe they would feed him. He looked at the clock on the radio and thought it might be too early for them to be home. He could wait, maybe hide out in the park, the little wooded area behind the playground. No, someone might report him—a predator hanging out in the woods by the playground with restless hands in his pockets. Nor could he drive around wasting precious fuel.

The park near Waller wasn't far from the library. Jay had taken a roundabout way and approached from the rear. He saw the backside of the hideous teal house and then, out of the corner of his eye, caught sight of a familiar blue Mustang parked in the outfield lot to the left. He jogged his memory, trying to remember where he'd seen it. He came to the stop sign to turn onto Waller and saw the deputy standing in the driveway. Jay cut a calm right and cruised out of the neighborhood.

His heart raced ahead. He kept an eye on the rearview. What the hell was Shoals doing there? Was it a stakeout? Were they waiting for him? If the
blue Mustang pulled out, would he have enough of a head start to lose the deputy through the maze of neighborhoods? He turned off Waller just in case, plunged downhill into a residential area, and took turn after turn until he'd lost his way in a new development and feared being trapped at the end of a cul-de-sac.

He wound back to the commercial district and pulled into the lot of Flash-in-the-Pan Chicken. He steered the Bronco around back behind a dumpster and switched off the engine to gather his thoughts.

One thing was certain, he wouldn't be staying in town to sit with Jacob. That would make a hell of a sight for the boy—his father spread out against a squad car, the flickering blue lights, the handcuffs and shouting and impounded Bronco. That image would define him for the rest of their lives.