Burn What Will Burn (17 page)

“But, you did see somebody down at the creek?”

“Yessir, Bob Reynold. Like I say, I was waiting on my daddy to show up but when he didn't I guess I fell asleep and when I woke up I heard that red-tail hawk crying out and I heard some splashing noises. For a second I thought it was my daddy, Bob Reynold. So I hollered out to him, thinking it was him down there.”

He glanced down the dirt road as if there might be someone coming our way, a ghost maybe.

“You scared of something?” I asked him.

“Nossir, Bob Reynold. Ain't nothing to fear when Jesus be with you like the Rising Star.”

I had my doubts about that but didn't voice them.

“There was somebody in the creek,” I reminded.

“It was two mens, Bob Reynold. One standing over the other. The one looked at me and he throwed his hands up at the sky like he had been caught out.”

“And the other man…?”

“That man, he was down in the water, Bob Reynold, laid out like he was getting baptized, but he didn't have no robe on him and shirt on him neither.”

Malcolm looked down the road again.

“That man down in the creek, I believe he was that man I seen at Miss TamFay's day or so ago, Bob Reynold. The one in the blood-red car. The one you hit upside the head.”

I did not bother arguing this point with Malcolm again.

“I know who this man is too,” Malcolm said. “Friend of the sheriff, name o' Buck's King. Bounty man, PaPaw tell me. Come after my daddy, because my daddy jump bails.”

“You recognized him? Weren't you a ways off, Malcolm?”

“They was just near the bridge there, you know where the old down oak tree's at, right about in there. And I see good, Bob Reynold. You know about that. I can sure tell a man I seen before when I see him again. Even if he is dead. Or sitting up in his truck on Ellum Street.”

“But who was the other man, Malcolm? The man over the dead man?”

“Bob Reynold, you know sometimes I sleep down by the creek. When PaPaw's mad at me.”

Sometimes the kid slept with the chickens on my front porch as well, when his granddad's whippings got too severe.

“So?”

“PaPaw tells me I'm 'magining things, but sometimes I thought I seen him before,” Malcolm told me. “An old man with a crazy beard down around the water. Wears hunting clothes with a orange deer hunting hat most the time. But this time he had on a red shirt with his orange deer hat.”

“And it was this old man that was drowning the man you saw parked at Tammy Fay's place?”

Malcolm shook his head.

“Wasn't drowning him though, Bob Reynold.”

The kid looked over his shoulder, then started walking toward my house.

“That old man was cutting his head off.”

*   *   *

The truck wouldn't start. Not even a click from the starter.

“Shit.”

The Cadillac, which hadn't been turned over in months, wouldn't start either.

“Malcolm, I'm going to walk up to the Wellses.”

The kid hopped out of the truck bed. The dog hopped out too.

“I'll fix you truck for you, Bob Reynold. Me and Three Leg wait right here.”

*   *   *

Faith Sue Wells was not going to let me in her double-wide trailer house.

Her dogs, penned on all sides of the house, were setting up a quadraphonic racket. Her twins, Isaac and Newton, hidden behind their mother's denim skirts, matched the dogs for howling. The woman stood in her doorway, jaundiced in bug light, steadfast as a courthouse statue of General Robert E. Lee.

“Faith Sue, this is a real genuine police emergency.”

A twin poked his head out from between Faith Sue's hairy ankles.

“The thing is, Mr. Bob, it wouldn't be proper to let a man in the house at night without my Jacob being here. And he's over at Danielles shopping at the Piggly Wiggly right now.”

“With due regard, Faith Sue, I am coming into your house and using your telephone. So please move aside.”

“Well, the house is a mess,” my neighbor apologized with a gross understatement, stepping aside. “We just in the midst of redecorating.”

Apparently Jacob Wells's predilection for accumulation was infectious, interior as well as exterior and family-wide. Stuff I couldn't put names to was piled everywhere there was space for a pile.

A goodly bit of it was, or had been at one point in time, mine.

One of the twins (they were indistinguishable at a glance) picked up a dog-chewed dress shoe and looked ready to clout me with it, but the other kid got ahold of it and soon the pair of second-graders were tussling across a floor rug of mine I had bought in Turkey for almost five hundred dollars. The children tumbled out of the room, neither one of them uttering a syllable but energetic grunts.

The telephone was atop a pile of composting newspapers.

I dialed the operator and told her to connect me with the Poe County Sheriff's Department.

“You calling the Po-lice on us, Mr. Bob?”

My eavesdropping neighbor's disembodied voice filtered through trash and into the kitchen.

“I'm not calling Police on you, Faith Sue.”

I hung up the phone, unsure of it now that it was in my hands and ringing.

“Jacob won't appreciate that, Mr. Bob.”

“Got nothing to do with you or Jacob, Faith Sue.”

“It's not very neighborly, Mr. Bob. We didn't mean nothing by what we took.”

“I don't care what y'all stole from me, Faith Sue. I know all about that.”

Maybe I should have forgotten the whole thing.

But Malcolm had seen the corpse in the creek.

“Mr. Bob?” the housewife called from the distance of another room.

“I'm still here, Faith Sue.”

Thinking.

If I called State Police or the FBI, Baxter would be pissed enough to mess up my local life completely. As Smarty Bell had warned, the sheriff could plant drugs on me or in my place or in my vehicles, and screw me royal. Or worse. Kill me and have me bathing with the bigmouth bass just like that.

Tammy Fay said I would be okay: If I played ball.

I found a phone book and dialed a Doker number.

“Doc Williams here,” my physician answered.

“Malcolm found another dead man in The Little Piney. I imagine it's the son of your old friend from Korea, the bounty hunter named Leonard ‘Buck' King.”

“Malcolm found him,” Doc repeated.

“Said he saw an old man cutting Buck King's head off. Would that old man be Baxter's daddy, your old friend, Samuel Baxter Senior?”

Doc cleared his throat.

“No telling what that boy will say, Bob. Malcolm Pickens is not a credible witness.”

“You coming out here?”

“I will, Bob. Nothing to it, probably, but I'll be out shortly. You call anybody else about this?”

“I was considering calling the Staties, Doctor. Or the FBI.”

“That wouldn't be wise, Bob,” Doc said.

“I thought you might say that, Doctor.”

Doc cleared his throat again.

“Bob, if I were you, I'd just vacate the vicinity for a while.”

“Are you suggesting that a word should be sufficient to direct the wise out of town in this instance?” I asked.

“That's about it, Bob.”

“Where would you suggest I direct myself to? Out of state? Out of county? Out of country?” I asked. “How far is far enough, Doc?”

“No need to be dramatic, Bob.” The doctor was using his doctor's voice on me, making his orders sound like suggestions. “It's a very nice drive to Hot Springs this time of evening, for instance. Put the top on your convertible down, Bob.”

“That top-down thing never worked for me,” I admitted. “Since I don't have enough hair to blow in the breeze.”

“Well, Bob, wherever you decide to go and however you decide to get there, just have a nice long stay…”

“A nice long stay away, you mean?” I asked, just to clarify.

“Yes, Bob.”

“You mean don't come back for
a while
.”

“Correct, Bob.”

The good doctor seemed to be losing his patience with this patient, but I wanted as much information about his deal as possible as it seemed my life might depend on it.

“How long would ‘a while' be?” I asked.

“You can be the judge of that,” the doctor replied and hung up on me.

I guess I can upset even the most even keeled.

*   *   *

Malcolm was under the hood of the Cadillac, Stank beside him propped steadily on her three legs.

“I got to get going, Malcolm,” I told my friend. “Like now. Like Right Now.”

I stared at my truck. The hood was popped up in full extension and a wide array of mechanical-type things were spread on the ground around it like artifacts at an archeological dig.

“What happened to my pickup?” I asked.

“Bob Reynold, I tell you, it's been somebody messing with that truck of yours. Distributor wires all cut up, plugs pulled all out. Carb'rator off it. Issa mess in there. And idn't nothing I could do with all that mess, Bob Reynold. But I have the Elvis car started in about a second.”

The Caddy had not ever run well, had not run much at all lately.

“If you can manage that I will much appreciate you, Malcolm.”

I leaned into the pickup and opened the glove compartment, found my wallet. The cash was gone, but at least Tammy Fay had left the credit cards and the checkbook.

“You lookin' in a hurry to go, Bob Reynold, but you could cut me a check fo' my 'heritance first.”

I headed toward the house.

“Thousand dollar, Bob Reynold!” Malcolm called after me “You remember 'bout my 'heritance I ain't got that you 'sposed to be givin' me?”

I walked into the house.

“I need me some 'heritance too,” I heard Malcolm grumble behind me.

*   *   *

I stuffed a package of new T-shirts into a grocery bag, with some clean underwear, an extra pair of walking shoes, my favorite short pants and some pressed chinos.

Still in the pocket of the dirty short pants I'd worn to the creek and that had not yet been cleaned were the XXL condoms and the cartridge I had found in the dead man's jeans, in Buck's back pockets.

I regretted not having used condoms with Tammy Fay—using both of these of Buck's would have been ironic—but sometimes it's difficult to be clearheaded and the big Trojans would not have stayed on me anyway.

I stuck the XXL Trojans into the back pocket of my chinos and also pocketed the cartridge and planned on dumping these off my property altogether by throwing them out the window as I overpassed South Slough, burying them in the sucking mud, alongside my binoculars.

I washed my hands very thoroughly several times, looked myself over in the mirror.

I still didn't look much different, looked pretty much the same as per usual.

And I guess I felt the same, more or less.

So, if anybody had been there to inquire about my state of well-being, I'd of said, “Fine,” just like everybody else around here always does, sometimes even as they lay dying.

*   *   *

I let Malcolm and Stank off at the First Rushing Evangelical True Bible Prophecy Church of the Rising Star in Jesus Christ. The kid wanted to pray for his daddy. I think he also wanted to thank Jesus for his thousand-dollar windfall inheritance.

I honked good-bye, reached under the front seat for my emergency Jim Beam.

The flask was gone.

In its place, snug in a nylon shoulder holster, was the biggest revolver I had ever seen in my life.

*   *   *

The handgun was probably a foot and a half long and weighed maybe four pounds. The grip was black rubber, too big for me to comfortably hold in my small hand. I slowed the car, used a T-shirt to flip the cylinder open. All six chambers were empty. I slipped the finger-long cartridge out of my pocket, loaded the single bullet into one of the empty chambers.

The cartridge fit the revolver perfectly, so I figured it was the bounty hunter's gun in my hands.

Short of having “Buck” engraved on the barrel the revolver was a perfect match for the big man that had been Tammy Fay Smith's sugar daddy (or whatever) since 1970 or thereabouts, the bounty hunter I had coshed on the head with my big binoculars in Doker and then found facedown in The Little Piney, breathing water, dead as a doorknob, and then who had disappeared only to reappear again.

*   *   *

I wiped the gun and reholstered it.

If I threw it out the window there it would be for anybody to find.

I shrugged, though there was nobody to see me do it.

I drove on.

*   *   *

There were headlights ahead on County Road 615 so I cut the Caddy's lights, pulled off the farm-to-market road and parked behind Pick's store, sat the car until Doc's meat wagon went by.

If I'd had a local lawyer maybe I would have called him for advice. But I didn't have one person in the world to trust.

And a whole world out to get me, it appeared.

A light went on in the store, then went off.

The gun beside me was about to burn a hole through the red leather seat.

I opened the door slowly, slipped out with the revolver, slunk eleven steps to Malcolm's snake pit, listened to their sibilant complaint. I wiped the gun completely with the tails of my T-shirt, tossed the firearm into the middle midsts of the pit, recovered the hole with the tarpaulin, then crammed the shirt deep in the burn barrel in Mean Joe's sideyard, got in my car and backed up, eased onto the dirt road, took a right and headed down CR 615 to State Highway 7 and then the Interstate Highway and way out of there.

*   *   *

Tammy's tow truck was parked well off the road near South Slough—a regular Local spot for sex and where she'd gone to give Warnell his hand job, I guessed.