Burn What Will Burn (13 page)

“Let most wise counsel prevail when affairs of state are in unrest, gentlemen,” declared the doctor. “Most Wise Counsel being me. Bob is not suing the Poe County Sheriff's Department. I am taking him home.”

“Fine,” I said, and stood. “See you, Smarty Bell.”

“See you around the well, Bud.”

Doc and I walked out of the Crow's Nest.

Outside in a dusky sky a pair of stars were faintly appealing.

 

CHAPTER 8

In his capacity as Poe County medical examiner Dr. Doc drove an olive-green station wagon with
GOVERNMENT USE ONLY
plates. The vehicle was much abused, scraped and buckled. The smell of corpses hauled to the morgue made my nostril hairs curl.

Doc established himself on the driver's side, extracted a can of disinfectant from under his seat, blasted a spray over our shoulders.

“Sorry for the scent, Bob. Death does stink, but it has its purposes,” Doc said. “Like 'most everything else.”

By the time we were over the bridge spanning the Interstate the scent of his pipe tobacco overwhelmed the scent of collected dead bodies. Doc turned on the radio and Hank Williams sounded so lonesome.

The outskirts of Bertrandville was trailer parks and low-tech industry that looked like giant aluminum shoeboxes and giant bricks dropped randomly in cow pastures without a thought to architecture or urban planning. We passed the Pancake House and the Waffle House, Wonder Burger, Shoney's, Scottish Inn, Motel 6, RW King's Tire Palace.

“As Sam reported the incident to me, Bob, you were trespassing—” Doc started.

“Stop the car, Doc,” I interrupted. “Pull over, please.”

I guess I looked queasy because Doc immediately braked in the parking lot of RW King's Tire Palace.

I hopped out of the station wagon, backtracked a hundred yards to the Motel 6, walked through the parking lot slowly, went into the office.

“May I help you, Sir?”

I looked over my shoulder.

“I'm with the Poe County Medical Examiner,” I said, truthfully enough. “I want to know who owns that maroon Oldsmobile Cutlass sedan parked out behind the dumpster. It's got big, whippy antennas on it, Arkansas license plate number BCK FVR.”

The desk clerk stared at me. I blinked.

“Don't I need to see some … some ID, maybe? Officer?”

“I'm afraid I don't have my ID, young man.”

Doc stepped into the office.

“Bob? Are you checking into a motel?” the doctor asked. “I was quite certain that I was taking you home.”

“Dr. Williams, have you got your Medical Examiner Identification Card with you?”

“I don't believe I ever had one, Bob,” said the local ME. “Everybody just knows me.”

I shrugged at the desk clerk, who seemed satisfied by this level of tertiary and suspect identification, so he took the easy route and copied information off a registration slip and handed me a sticky note.

“When did you last see this fellow, Leo King, young man?” I asked. “The man who owns the Olds Cutlass?”

“He prepaid for a week on last Sunday, Officer, but I haven't seen him since then at all. I hadn't even seen his car in a while. Didn't have any idea it was parked out there 'til ya'll pointed it out me.”

“Bob,” Doc said. “I think we should be going now.”

I nodded briskly at the desk clerk.

“We thank you for your cooperation, young man.”

“Yessir, Officer.”

Doc led me by the elbow outside. I tucked the note into my T-shirt pocket, got back into the meat wagon.

Doc steered us onto the highway without checking for traffic.

“Bob, what was all that about?”

“Business,” I said.

Bob Reynolds business.

*   *   *

We rode toward Doker in silence. Doc was probably thinking. I counted thirteen speed limit signs, all of which the doctor ignored.

There was raised-up ground around us that could have been big hills or small mountains, depending on your perspective. I had come to the area from the flat Gulf Shore so I supposed the mounds were the fractured last bits of the Boston Mountains, near cousins to the Ozarks. This isolated, extruded ridge Locals called the Grays, a name earned because, drenched in westering light, the piles of granite resembled a line of blood-splattered Confederate kepi caps with bayonets raised among them here and there in feeble defense against the setting sun.

I didn't see this scene from what Locals still persisted in calling The War myself, but a lot of what the natives saw escaped my perception.

The music on the car radio was country western, but not country and not western.

*   *   *

“It might serve our collective purposes better if you just start the story from the beginning, Bob,” Doc instructed as he slowed the speeding wagon only slightly at the Doker city limits sign.

How could anyone ever say where the beginning of anything was?

And I wasn't sure what “collective purpose” the good doctor and I might have in common.

I wasn't even sure what my individual purpose was.

I had a feeling, though, that I had gone about as far toward it as I was willing to go. That to go farther was to go too far. That the story might soon tell of my exit.

“Who were you autopsying today, Doc?”

He raised his shaggy white eyebrows, pursed his lips, shook his head, parked on Main Street.

“I have been instructed not to say, Bob.”

“Someone you knew?”

“I know everybody, Bob.”

He frowned as if that knowledge was disagreeable. He motioned toward his office.

“I want to give you a quick checkup, Bob,” Doc said. “Gratis.”

“Okay, Doc.”

I was not one to turn down free medical attention.

Downtown Doker was pretty much deserted. A three-legged dog wandered the sidewalk in front of the closed-down First National Bank building.

I whistled a call.

The damaged old bluetick barked once sharply, sniffed the hot, dry air, then barked steadily in my direction.

“Come 'ere, Stank,” I called Tammy Fay's dog.

The bitch hound hobbled to me and nuzzled my leg. I scratched her ass, the rubbed-raw spot near the base of her tail, as Doc unlocked his storefront.

“Dog likes you, Bob.”

I didn't put much weight on canine opinion. Stank saw me almost every morning, knew me and I usually gave her a treat to stop her barking, so she liked me and that's the way it goes with a dog's affections more often than not.

A lot of good dogs like bad people. As a lot of bad dogs like good people.

“Let's us step into the office a minute before we run you to your house,” Doc said. “I'll give that sore head of yours a couple of stitches. We can talk inside.”

Fluorescent bulbs buzzed and bathed the waiting area in unnaturally white light. Outside Stank barked and barked.

“It's Nurse's day off, Bob, so give me a minute to set up.”

Doc went off behind frosted glass. It sounded like he uncradled a telephone, murmured. I picked up a year-old
National Geographic
with a gorilla on the cover, tossed the magazine back on a plastic couch and studied the photographs that covered one wall of Doc's office.

His dead wife was there prominently—as a new bride with a stiff new Doc in a couple of shots; alone, variously aged, unposed in others; hugging unrelated children in a few; older, shoulder to shoulder with another woman in one, she smiling, the other not. Doc's wife had a very winning smile that looked natural, but apart from that she was not attractive.

“Melissa,” Doc said.

He had come up behind me unnoticed.

“We couldn't have kids of our own, so she got into the habit of appropriating the dispossessed.”

I guess I looked like I was not following his train of thought, because he added some explanation.

“She started this camp for kids. She wanted to call it Camp of Hope, but I thought that was … well, a little too ambitious, I guess. So we wrangled about it until we arrived at a compromise, as we usually did.”

“What was the place called, Doc?”

“Camp Osage.”

It seemed a long way from Camp of Hope to Camp Osage, so I gathered this “compromise” was like most of the compromises I'd encountered, unilateral. Doc seemed to be the sort to make “suggestions” that carried the same force as “orders.”

“I guess you still miss her, Doc?”

“There was only one of her in existence, Bob,” he said, sort of avoiding the simple answer I thought he would give. “Can't help but miss an extinguished species, can you?”

I pondered his answer for a moment, wondering about it, poetic as it sounded.

“Ever think about remarrying?”

“At my age, Bob, no point in trying, since you can't usually get what you want anyway. You of all people should understand that.”

I stared at the wall, not sure how to take that.

I had never paid much attention to the doctor's Wall of Fame, the diplomas there and the photographs. Several drew my attention though now, seemed suddenly pertinent.

I leaned over the plastic sofa and touched the glass protecting a faded picture of a trio of crew-cutted soldiers in fatigues, two of whom looked familiar—one looked like a version of the dead man, seen recently in The Little Piney, perhaps Buck's father. The other, redressed in civilian garb and forty years older now stood right behind me, Doc Williams.

“That was Dick King,” Doc informed me. “We shipped to Korea at the same time and never got separated. His people were from Arkadelphia and I got him to move to Bertrandville after our duties were done. My daddy loaned him the money to start up his first tire store. We were quite the whippersnappers back then.”

“Dick have a son?” I asked.

“Leonard,” Doc said, real soft. “Called him Buck. Looked just like his daddy. Spitting image. Come on back to the exam room now, Bob.”

I didn't move.

“You said, ‘looked,' Doc. Buck ‘looked' just like his daddy. Past tense.”

Doc didn't say anything. I kept focused on the wall.

“You figure the fellow in The Little Piney was Leonard ‘Buck' King, your Korea buddy's son?”

The corpse I had found in the creek matched in his looks the man in the photo near exactly—my dead man had to have been the son of Doc's old friend from Korea.

Doc answered me with silence.

“Who's the other fellow in Korea with you and Mr. King, Doc?”

Doc sighed and his breath was musty and moist on the back of my neck.

“That's me and Dick King, Buck's daddy…,” Doc told me. “And Samuel Baxter Senior.”

Beside the snapshot of the soldiers was a teenaged football player in Doker Buccaneers red and black, padded, but still shortish, lean and mean as a greased M16. A young Sheriff Sam Baxter. Next to that sports shot a formal portrait of a Marine. Again Sheriff Sam Baxter.

“Samuel Baxter Senior, your old buddy, is the sheriff's daddy?”

“Yes, Bob. That's the sheriff's mother, Frances, there with my wife, Melissa. Frances had just been diagnosed with lung cancer. Never smoked a cigarette in her life, but Samuel smoked like a chimney. Melissa and Frances were both passed within two years. Both cancer.”

Doc walked behind the frosted glass, made a racket with metal medical paraphernalia.

I examined the rest of Doc's wall, mostly baby pictures, saw Malcolm. I didn't see much else to pique my interest, save for one oldish group photo of a mixed bunch of people, ranging from little kids to adults.

Spanning the length of the wide-angle shot was a severely homemade banner that identified the gang as tribesmen of
CAMP OSAGE—1970
.

Centered in the shot was an obviously beleaguered Mrs. Melissa Williams. On one side of her was a kid I recognized as the brain-damaged son of Miss Ollie Ames, Warnell Ames. On the other side of the camp administrator was a young version of Sheriff Sam Baxter, somewhere around his midtwenties probably, crew-cutted, GI-dressed, home from the Corps. A pale, skinny white kid was Malcolm's daddy maybe, Joe Pickens Junior. Anchoring one end of the banner was Dr. Doc Williams, even then looking like an old man.

The other end of the banner was upheld by a willowy, white blond–headed girl, just in her teens or maybe even a tall ten- or twelve-year-old—though Tammy Fay looked old in the eyes already. Those deep-set eyes as seen in the photo were cast over her shoulder at the thick-necked man in a GI-green T-shirt looming over her, who was a young grown man, roughly handsome, though, with a meaty face under a severe high and tight crew cut. But this young jarhead was not Sam Baxter—this was Leonard “Buck” King.

Buck's arm was snaked around the tall girl's waist.

Photographic film interprets faces in its own peculiar way. So I couldn't tell if Tammy Fay was happy to have the man's arm around her or if she was pissed. In my experience she was usually pissed at the world but liked the attention it provided her.

The big GI giving her the attention in the old photo seemed matured well beyond high school, also in his midtwenties at least. I did the math in my head. It was fourteen years since this group photo from Camp Osage—1970, so Buck would be around forty years old now to Tammy Fay's midtwenties. Buck had been a big man in the real world. But in the photo hanging on the doctor's wall, Buck was covered by the thumb I pressed over him.

The tattoo on his forearm was just a black smear with wings.

I guessed the worded inscription on Buck King's flesh was
Semper Fidelis.

*   *   *

“You might want to clench your jaw right about now, Bob,” my physician advised.

I felt the air cold on the shaved circle at the base of my skull. Swabbed-on alcohol stung tears into my eyes.

“You sure I need stitches, Doc?” I asked, shifted on the examination table. The fresh white paper rustled under my ass.