Authors: Lisa Howorth
Mary Byrd and Teever had ridden down the interstate toward Wallett mostly in silence. It was alarming to see all the damage the ice storm had done to the landscape close to town. Trees down on houses and cars, more cars abandoned on the road, hedges and decorative shrubs broken up, people out with chain saws trying to push all the dead trees into bonfires. Coming back from the airport the night before, Mary Byrd hadn’t been able to see the craziness of the damage in the dark. She’d commented to Teever that it looked like a war zone, and he’d snapped, “Un-uh, no way. How you know what a war zone look like? Those people look dead to you? War zone, ain’t
nuthin’
alive. This here just a bad storm, just branches be piled up, not people. It ain’t
nuthin’
like a war zone.”
But fifteen, thirty minutes away everything had looked pretty normal. It was so odd to Mary Byrd that she’d missed the apocalyptic storm that people would be talking about for years. Lots of people, she’d heard, still didn’t have electricity. The damage seemed so weirdly biblical, as if some vengeance were being wreaked in a narrow swath west to the river. On whom and for what? Or maybe it was just a reminder that there was always a monkey wrench that could be thrown into the existence that everyone pathetically believed they had some control over. A cosmic smack-down, known to many as
an act of God.
When they’d gotten close to Wallett, they’d seen that a roadside memorial had already been put up at the exit where Ernest had died. A white cross, a plastic wreath, some antlers. A little cedar had been planted where the storm debris had been cleared. Mary Byrd had glanced over at Teever, wondering what he was thinking. It was tempting to think that he wasn’t thinking at all, which was what most people who knew Teever probably thought, but she knew better. The inside of that head was wired and streamlined for sizing things up quickly, manipulating, and surviving. He didn’t waste a lot of time or brain cells worrying about things he couldn’t do much about, or cluttering his thoughts with nonessentials like art, love, responsibility, or hog futures—crap that caused people misery, ulcers, and heart attacks. But what did she know? There was a little flotsam in Teever’s hair, Mary Byrd had seen; god knows where he’d spent the night. Or any night. Otherwise, he looked presentable. She was surprised to notice how gray he was getting; he was too old to be doing yard work. Mary Byrd had tried to avoid breathing in the air close around Teever in the warm car, but she was pleasantly surprised that he smelled of wood smoke and, faintly, gasoline. Maybe a little beer. He had on some wrinkly but fairly clean khakis, a wrinkly but fairly clean blue button-down shirt, an expensive-looking tweed jacket that he said he’d “traded-up” for with a dude who’d gotten it off Ernest, which he wanted to wear for the sentiment of it, and a nice tie of Charles’s. He’d asked to borrow one that she’d gotten for Charles at Barneys years before; it was deep blue, with tiny, barely discernible black skulls all over it. Mary Byrd had suggested that it might not be great for a funeral, but Teever had said
he
thought it was just right.
Breaking the silence in the car, Mary Byrd had said, “Okay, so tell me again exactly how you hurt your foot the other night?” She expected a variation on what he’d already told her.
“I tole you: tryin’ to help Mr. Johnny break up some ground for a lady’s garden,” he’d lied. “Stepped on a tool blade.”
“And it cut you that badly?” she had asked suspiciously. “Through your shoe?”
“You seen them shoes, Mudbird,” he’d said. “They was rotten.” Teever had groaned and shifted on the seat. “Man, this thing still
hurtin’
, too.”
“God, I’m sure it does,” Mary Byrd had said almost sympathetically, knowing what was coming.
“Don’t you have somethin’?” he’d asked. “
Anything
?”
“Damn it, Teever,” she’d protested. “I think I have a Xanax.
A
Xanax. With her right hand she’d rummaged in her bag for a Tylenol tube. She didn’t want him handling all her pills but she couldn’t drive and open the tube. “Here,” she’d said grudgingly, handing it to him.
Teever had shaken out the assortment into his palm and had flipped through them with his index finger: Tylenols, a pink Benadryl, two Ritalins, a green capsule, a blue Xanax, and some white and yellow pieces.
“Take
one
,” she’d said.
He’d put all the pieces quickly in his mouth, letting the Xanax drop to his lap. “Okay, but I see all these halfs in here,” he’d said, chewing. “You ain’t foolin’ nobody.” He’d shuddered. “
Oowee.
Bitter.”
“Well, thank god they’re bitter, and expensive, or we’d all be dead,” Mary Byrd said. A huge truck had passed them on the right, doing about ninety, just inches from Teever.
“Shit!” she’d shouted. “Did that seem really, really close?”
“Um-hmm,” he’d answered, unconcerned. He’d been fiddling with the pills, pretending to be trying to get them back in the tube and stashing the Xanax. “Seem a shame. Ernest still around, we’d have
plenty
. No tellin’ what he leff behine.”
Mary Byrd had been occupied with trying to drop back behind another insane truck. “What is the
matter
with truck drivers?” she’d said, thinking of Foote, hauling major ass around the country, never hitting anything, stately in his expert careenage.
Teever had replaced the tube in her bag and settled back. “They jus’ like everybody else. Trying to get where they goin’ fast as they can.” He sighed. “Man, I feel better already.”
Teever’s foot had been scary when she saw it this morning. It didn’t look infected and he felt fine, but he needed stitches and antibiotics. Mary Byrd decided she would make him see a doctor the next day. He’d said it had been much worse but he’d gone to the Mexicans and one of them had doctored on it and it was going to be fine. That could be the truth, or not. They’d been in such a rush to get off to Wallett, and she hadn’t wanted to get too close a look, but she’d made him come in the kitchen and take off the nasty bandage and poured peroxide over it, even though Big William had scorned peroxide (“It’s just water with bubbles,” he’d said).Then she’d made him squeeze in half a tube of Neosporin and she’d given him a fresh Light Days maxi pad and adhesive tape and made him tape it on whether he liked it or not. She’d retrieved Charles’s old pair of Bruzzi Boots; Mary Byrd’s father sent everyone a new pair every few years. The size twelves could accommodate Teever’s short, flat feet even with the bandage. It would be fine for the funeral; in messy winter weather country guys always wore boots, even with tuxes. Teever had been happy about the boots and looked the part of the Delta planter. Meanwhile the Quarter Pounder had stolen the disgusting alleged Mexican bandage and had been gnawing on it in the dining room. What was the matter with
dogs
, she’d thought, changing lanes again to avoid a large, blackened roadkill loaf.
A few people, even later than Teever and Mary Byrd, had continued to file into the church. The choir lady had stopped singing, but the keyboardist played on. Let’s get this show on the road, Mary Byrd said to herself with a sigh. She was exhausted from the Richmond trip and knew she had no business coming to Wallett. But she also felt strangely energized and buoyant in a way that was so unfamiliar. To have gone to Richmond, done what she’d done, and heard what she’d heard
was such a relief. She felt a mix of feelings: liberated, but a tiny part of her was sad to have to let go of the comfortable guilt that was so much a part of her and such a convenient excuse for so many things. And in a lesser way, the news of Ernest’s sad death was the reverse: her heart had broken a little and she knew she’d miss him, and maybe awfully. Their silly, unsettling attraction for each other was erased. There had been no crimes, not really, and now no footprints remained on the slippery slope she’d walked. Mary Byrd realized that into the ground with Ernest she could dump a whole lot of the shit that had been weighing her down. She knew Ernest would be happy to take it all with him, even the stuff that had nothing to do with him, like her guilt about Stevie. She could hear Ernest saying, “Baby, just put it all on me. I can handle it. Where
I’m
going, I can just chunk it all on the bonfire.”
There would be more Richmond crap to deal with; Mary Byrd knew that. Linda Fyce had her beady eyes on the prize. She’d put something out there. More people might bother them or want to talk to them. But they didn’t
have
to talk to
anybody
anymore. Zepf, the murdering, child-molesting asshole, was safely behind bars, and it was clear that Stith was going to try to keep him there. Ned Tuttle wasn’t guilty after all, and he wasn’t coming after anybody. How different would life be if the murder had been solved in 1966? Maybe Pop wouldn’t have frozen her out. Maybe he wouldn’t have had a heart attack and James and Pete would have had a father. Maybe she wouldn’t have had nightmares all these years. She wouldn’t have felt like a complicitous, white-trash slut. She imagined Eliza in her place; she’d sheltered Eliza and Will in ridiculous ways. Their lives were so stable and innocent. There was still what had happened and her heart hurt so much for Stevie, and for all the other boys and their families. And for Tuttle—pitiful, dorky thing—and his family. Mary Byrd understood how even Zepf himself was a victim; no doubt some sort of unlucky and terrible circumstances had occurred in his life to cause him to become a victim of his own monstrous and uncontrollable urges. She felt her eyes sting with stupid tears and she had to cough back what she thought might be some gross noise rising in her throat. Teever looked over at her and awkwardly pawed her shoulder. He would be thinking she was choking up over Ernest, which was fine; but there was really no point in crying over Ernest, who’d courted disaster as if it were one of his women, and had clowned around with death every day of his crazy life.
Teever tried some Richard Pryor—“Eulogy”—to comfort her, leaning over and whispering, “And it seems that death was quite a surprise to his ass,” but she didn’t get it. One thing Mary Byrd was grateful for: she’d learned early that this is the way the world works, randomly and chaotically, with billions and trillions of stories overlapping and colliding and entangling so that one could never feel that one’s own story was one’s own. Everything that happened was like a stone thrown in a pond, rippling out, or an earthquake causing distant tsunamis. There was no black and white, yours and mine, almost no good or bad. But who threw the stones and heaved up the earth? Pssh, she’d exhaled, dismissing the lame, Zennish drift of her thoughts. Was she having an acid flashback or something? If there
was
a god, he was a player and a cruel asshole. A real trickster dickhead. Someone who, if he’d been in your fraternity, you’d have hated. God may work in mysterious ways, she reflected, but a lot of those ways suck.
As if in punishment for this thought, there was a loud, feedback buzz from the keyboard at the front of the church. Mary Byrd jumped, and Teever looked at her and laughed silently, his tweedy shoulders heaving. The service got under way at last, although the little church was only about a third full. There were lots of empty rows between the congregation and the back-row rat pack who were Ernest’s buddies. That included Teever and Mary Byrd, she supposed, although they sat on the other side of the aisle from the posse. As the keyboard guy played a hymn (Mary Byrd knew she wouldn’t know most of the Protestant songs), Ernest’s family straggled in to take their seats in the front pews. There were Ernest’s two aunts, or grandmothers or whoever they were. A tall, skinny one who looked nervous, and like she might be smelling something bad, and a short, plump one who looked placid and composed, but sad. Uncle Pothus came last, an old colonely-looking guy in a suit with a bow tie, a neat white beard, and longish white hair. He looked somewhat out of place in this crowd, like Ernest would have. Or did: Mary Byrd could see that in the coffin he was similarly decked out. The uncle limped a little—she remembered that Ernest said he had the jake leg—and was visibly, but not, thank you Jesus, audibly, weeping.
Mary Byrd knew Ernest didn’t have a mother and did
have a father, but who knew where he was. Ernest had never met him but knew his face from pictures. He’d seen him at the casinos a couple of times over the years. His father didn’t know him, but Ernest told Mary Byrd he didn’t care. Could any man not care about having a father? That was it for family, except for the aunts and uncle. How weird it must have been to have grown up around nobody but adults. No
wonder Ernest did whatever he pleased and expected to get what he wanted. Spoiled, orphaned only child. That’s probably where he’d gotten spending money, too, from the relatives. He always had plenty, but to Mary Byrd’s knowledge he’d never worked. He’d always said he had “oil rights” from some family property in south Mississippi, Lux or Sumrall or somewhere.
The funeral proceeded slowly. There was more hymn-singing and scratchy tapes of certain of Ernest’s favorite songs—“To Live Is to Fly,” “No Expectations,” “Tom Ames’ Prayer,” the Neckbones’ “Cardiac Suture,” “Free Again,” and “Lawyers, Guns and Money”—which caused Mary Byrd and Teever to nudge each other, amazed that the old ladies had been okay with having that stuff played. Surely they wouldn’t play “Jack on Fire,” Ernest’s anthem, which had some really bad lines.Then, a raw, lovely song by somebody, or some group—she couldn’t remember the name but it had “nails” in it—a song that Mary Byrd recognized because she’d heard it coming from Eliza’s room, and it had been so haunting—
my empire of dirt—
that she’d stopped in her tracks outside Eliza’s door to listen to it. She’d had to take the tape away from Eliza because the next song had been about somebody’s big gun or big dick rubbing on someone’s face. Then the jam box played Jim Mize’s crusty love song “Drunk Moon Falling” and “Simple Man,” which Mary Byrd was surprised about because Ernest had thought Skynyrd was
déclassé,
and Green Day’s “When I Come Around,”
which probably meant he’d recently been messing with some coed, but
she didn’t see any likely suspects in the small crowd. An annoyed, weary-looking preacher had given a sermon, claiming that they’d all come to “celebrate the life of John Pothus Ernest,” but his message had been a sad spiel of resignation about the fact that even if you’d started life as a good boy, a great baseball player and turkey hunter, and a good student, as Jacky-boy Ernest had once been, if you
strayed from the flock,
you were bound to come to an end like his, because of
God’s plan
. Hardly a celebration. Ernest’s life
was
the celebration! And as if they
all
weren’t ending up in a box or an urn no matter how much drinking they did or didn’t do, how many other people’s spouses they fucked, or Sundays they didn’t show up in church. It seemed . . . un-Christian to Mary Byrd, and unfair because Ernest wasn’t there to defend himself, and if
she’d
been Ernest’s kin, she would have prayed for a bloody flux to be visited upon the preacher. No one in the church seemed to mind, though, so maybe they all agreed.