Burn What Will Burn (21 page)

I tried to parse that out.

“The man with the badge shot the man with the red shirt?”

Old Baxter shook his head.

“Nobody shot him,” he told me. “Them that killed the man in the red shirt drowned him.” The crazy man jerked his head toward where I had found Buck King the first time in the shallow water near the downed oak tree.

“And then the man with the badge took the gun off the man in the shirt?”

“I had it, found it in the water just down below so it was mine but the man with the badge and handcuffs took that gun I found from me and give it to you so you could kill me with it. He sent you to kill me.”

“Why would he do that, Mr. Baxter?” I asked. “Why would your son send me or anyone to kill you?”

“He's tired of me,” the old man said. “Tired of taking care of me. That's what he said. That's why he gave the gun to you. The other man he sent couldn't do it and I killed him first with that gun then the one with the badge took the gun away from me so I couldn't protect myself and now he sent you with the gun to kill me so he won't have to take care of me anymore, didn't he?”

“Nossir. The sheriff did not send me here to kill you,” I said, tried to sound calm. “Nobody sent me here at all. I just live around here. I come here to the creek all the time. I'm sure you've seen me before here, Mr. Baxter. I walk down here every day almost.”

“I have seen you,” he said and stared at me as if trying hard to figure out just where he had seen me. “You came to my house to kill me but I killed you with a rock but now you're back, alive just like that drowned one in the red shirt who wouldn't stay drowned—that's why I cut his head off of him.”

This was a muddle I was not going to be able to decipher in detail under duress, though I could gather that Old Baxter had seen Tammy Fay and Warnell drowning Buck King, Old Baxter had found Buck's big revolver and, because of his paranoia maybe, shot Joe Pickens Junior with that gun, which the sheriff then found on his father and tried to use to frame me for the death of Joe Pickens Junior, if Sheriff Baxter needed to frame me for something like that, to tie up loose ends or just out of spite.

“I didn't come to kill you, Mr. Baxter.”

“That's why I kept the knife,” the old man told me. “I took the knife from the man with the red shirt and I kept it because it's my property. I kept the knife. But the one with the badge, he took the gun away from me and gave it to you.”

“You did keep the knife,” I said, staring at the weapon in his hand.

And I would have thrown the revolver over the railing right then, but for that knife. I should have gotten rid of the gun then anyway, probably. Because a gun is too simple a solution.

But the gun was there.

And I didn't get rid of it. Because I cannot run, am not a good runner, not even fast enough to outdistance a crazy old man.

When he narrowed his eyes at me Old Baxter seemed to be trying to figure me out, understand me, comprehend me. As if he might be the sane one. As if I might be the crazy one.

There was no way, though, that he could know that, if he was or if he wasn't or if I was or if I wasn't.

“He would like to, but he knows he can't kill me,” said the old man. “That's why he sent you. That's why the one with the badge sent you to kill me. Because he can't do it himself.”

He stated this, but seemed to be asking a question.

I didn't know if this could be true or not. If I had been sent, by the High Sheriff as executioner of this deranged old man, the sheriff's father. Maybe it was all just a coincidence.

I didn't even know if the gun was still loaded with the single cartridge I had put in it, the bullet lifted from Buck King's pocket. I assumed that one cartridge was in the revolver but I hadn't checked.

The gun had been planted under the seat of the Cadillac, by the sheriff I was quite sure. It was evidence against me, just in case such was needed and never meant as a weapon for me, I didn't think.

But there was the one bullet from Buck's pocket, the single shell I had found on the corpse in the creek and loaded into the revolver before I threw that gun into Malcolm's snake pit, a cartridge now likely lodged in some chanced chamber of a rouletted cylinder.

“He sent you,” the man repeated. “To kill me for him.”

“May be, Mr. Baxter. But I don't think so.”

The crazy man moved forward again.

I should have kept talking. Maybe I could have dissuaded Old Man Baxter from the murder in him. I'm a big talker.

But my rhetoric is seldom persuasive.

I should have tried to run.

He was old.

But I was slow.

And there was that stubborn blister still on my left heel.

And I was tired. And sometimes you just get so tired that nothing matters that much and even fear is too much struggle.

And I saw that gleaming huge knife planted between my shoulder blades as I turned tail … and

I would not go down that way.

I would, when the time came, face what killed me.

“I killed you once,” the old man said. “You remember. You were sneaking around my house waiting to kill me, but I killed you with a rock. I smashed your head in. But then the man with the badge and handcuffs came out here to bring me food and he found you and put handcuffs on you and took you off and raised you from the dead.”

“You didn't kill me, Mr. Baxter. And no one else has either. Not yet.”

The old man began to inch forward raising the knife as he advanced.

“What is dead should stay dead,” he said hoarsely.

“You're confused, Mr. Baxter.”

I managed to retreat a step, one step.

I put two hands on the gun, fingered the trigger.

“Go back to your house and wait for your son to come, Mr. Baxter,” I said in a surprisingly calm voice. “I mean you no harm. You are confused. Just go home now.”

He could not hear me. He had not heard any sane thing in a very long time.

He lifted the knife and aimed it at my stomach, pretended to twist it in my guts.

I pulled the trigger.

The first chamber was loaded.

The recoil of the revolver knocked me sideways and drove a spike of pain through my wrist.

Samuel Baxter Senior fell dead on his back. Old Baxter was torn apart, like a watermelon had exploded on his chest.

I picked up the mechanic's rag that had swaddled the revolver. I stepped to the dead man and dropped the greasy rag over his face.

Then I turned away, flipped open the cylinder of the gun.

The first chamber had been loaded. The other five had also been loaded.

*   *   *

I drove to UPUMPIT! to make the call.

The dispatcher located the Sheriff at the Crow's Nest.

“Your father is dead,” I told Sam Baxter.

The noise of the bar was loud and raucous in the background. The regular world enjoying a regular night. As per usual.

The High Sheriff of Poe County didn't say anything. I could hear him smoking. I could almost hear his brain working. I didn't count the seconds, but it was a while before he spoke.

“You call anybody else?” he asked me.

I remembered what Professor Ford had told me at the Crow's Nest about Sam Baxter, about suiting the lawman's purposes, so I figured my chances were about fifty-fifty with the High Sheriff of Poe County. Maybe even better.

“No,” I said. “I can. It was self-defense. But I figured it's your business.”

Baxter said nothing more for a long moment.

“I'll take care of it then,” he said finally, flatly.

He hung up.

I sat my car in the parking lot of Pick's for a while, past long enough for the sheriff to get there.

At that point there was no point in leaving, running. If Baxter wanted me Baxter would find me. I had placed my bet and shown my own hand and only waited for the house, the High Sheriff, to show his hand.

When he didn't show I went on home, cracked into a quart jar of Smarty Bell's moonshine, established myself on the front porch with my chickens and waited.

*   *   *

I suppose I went to sleep soon after I sat down and only woke up when I felt the rocking explosion that was probably the propane tank or the gas generator or both, blowing up the shed behind the stone house across the creek.

In about a quarter hour I smelled the smoke.

It was the deadest time of morning, around four a.m., the prime time for mischief and madness. I had slept for a long while. If Sheriff Baxter had passed by my place I hadn't noticed.

He could have circumvented County Road 615, taken the expedient backwoods way, as he did usually, I imagined, when tending to his father's rough needs. That back road was not a road I had ever taken, but I guess it was more passable than I had thought—you don't know if you can drive over a bad road until you try to drive over it.

I had never confessed to anything before and it was not liberating, it was just a heavy, moist weight descended on me like a smothering cloud and I just reposed in the chair on the porch for a while, an inert, dead weight myself, just waiting for the sheriff to show up and arrest me or beat me or kill me or thank me.

Whatever way it worked out it would. That die was cast.

There didn't seem much else for me to do than wait, but watch.

*   *   *

After a while I set a ladder against the house and climbed up on the roof and sat there on the rusty tin watching the valley burn. The fire was a lovely, sweat-provoking experience as illicit, dangerous consummations should be.

Not good nor bad so much as moving.

Memorable.

The Wellses came by about six a.m., stood in their pajamas in my front yard, all eight eyes aimed south from whence a dull glow throbbed steady.

My neighbor Jacob didn't seem too worried himself about the fire blazing one point six miles from his house and I don't imagine he had proper homeowner's insurance.

I had more than full coverage on my property and decided that if it burned I would take my new money and move on. If it didn't burn and I could stay, then I probably would stay.

“You think it's going to get to our places?” Jacob asked me as his family moved off, shuffled back home after a few minutes, bored already by this most local and immediate disaster.

“I don't know if it will and don't much care if it does, Jacob,” I said.

“That's the way to be about it,” he said.

He stood without his family and stared toward the pillar of black smoke feathering into the first fan of dawn. The valley seemed to pulse with yellow and orange light.

He raised his hand toward me after a spell.

“Guess I'll go on back to the house and rouse the volunteers if I can.”

“All right,” I said.

 

CHAPTER 14

The fire raged on until midmorning or thereabouts, then I guess it mostly just quit, burned itself out. Smoke continued to rise against the blushing sky but it seemed the smoldering kind. Ash fell like smudged snow. The danger to my property appeared past.

I climbed off the roof then and fixed myself some breakfast in the anticlimax. I was on the front porch finishing my coffee when the volunteer firemen finally arrived from Doker, parked their antique water pumper in my front yard.

The attendant from the Exxon station, T. Bo, was hanging on the back of the fire truck. Clarence Goodman, the grocery store man, was driving and the watermelon seller, Kendrick, was riding shotgun. The new checkout girl, Shawnda, wearing nothing but a shiny slip, was barefooted and wedged between her boss and the watermelon seller, looking somewhat uncomfortable to be there.

I stepped off the porch and lifted a hand.

“Y'all hungry?” I asked the crew.

“When ain't we hungry 'round here?” T. Bo asked as he swung off the back of the fire truck, then answered his own question. “We always hungry 'round here, Boy. We was born hungry around here.”

*   *   *

Altogether they ate two pounds of bacon, a dozen eggs and drank my two weeks' supply of orange juice and a pot and a half of coffee.

I didn't have any milk, nor any bread for toast, but they did not seem to notice these lackings.

They didn't talk much but to grunt. They pointed their forks at what they wanted and when they got what they wanted they nodded cordially at no one in particular. The girl ate and drank the same as the men, though I thought she could have eaten more than that and would have eaten more if the men had not been there or if only I had been there.

Shawnda was pretty in a raw-boned way and tall and shapely, but her teeth were very bad. She held one of her hands near her neck all the time. She watched the volunteer firemen very carefully, but avoided looking at me. The once she did look at me directly, I blushed.

The volunteer firemen seemed in no hurry at all to leave, to go home or go to the fire site. They lingered over their coffee as the announcer on the weather band radio described the fire damage as limited to a few sections of privately held land. The granite ridge of the Grays deflected the fire away from BLM and state park property on the westside and because of the calm weather the flames had never threatened to jump The Little Piney on the southside and get the northside of the creek where Rushing was, where I lived.

There were no reported deaths or injuries, not to man nor to domesticated animals.

“' Bout as good as could be expected,” Kendrick suggested.

We all nodded.

“How did y'all get summoned?” I asked as I cleared their plates.

“First off we got a 'nonymous call.” Kendrick turned to the pump jockey. “What was it, T. Bo? About three or four a.m.?”

“Little after four a.m. is about right, Kendrick,” said the Exxon fellow who picked bacon from his teeth with the corner of a matchbook. “Took us a while however to get dressed and locate one another. Especially our Chief of Auxiliaries, Mr. Goodman here. And then we had to find the fire truck keys. And then about then Jake Wells calls up but it wasn't no water in the pumper to speak of so that was another issue.”