Bubba and the Dead Woman (2 page)

Bubba had better things to do than to mind the cash register. He had old Mister Smith’s transmission to rebuild, and some kind of clanking problem with Bryan McGee’s Ford truck. He drove it; it made a noise akin to an old, liquor still about to explode. I.e., something was wrong with the truck. And Bubba didn’t even want to mention the broken down Camero. But no one was at the register, and Bufford Gas and Grocery stayed open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three-hundred, and sixty-five days a year. Even the garage side of the business was supposed to be open, not that most decent folks brought their broken cars into the place at three AM.

Looking around for a calling list of other Bufford employees, Bubba had finally found one, even while had considered calling Mrs. Shirlee Bufford. But he knew he couldn’t look her in the face, without thinking of old George doing the wild thing in the Bahamas with his secretary, Rosa Granado, a woman some twenty years younger and twenty inches smaller than the missus.

Bubba sure hoped that George’s insurance was paid up, because Rosa was going to kill him one way or another.

In any case, Bubba called the relief cashier only to listen to a nonstop ringing on the other end. He finally decided that he would tend the damned register, even if he didn’t have a clue of how it worked, and let the clerk in the morning clear up any mess he made. He would make up the work on Bryan McGee’s truck and Mister Smith’s Mercury the following night. The hell with the Camero.

At half past ten, Lloyd Goshorn came rambling in for smokes. He was the town jack-of-all-trades, and not one to keep to banker’s hours. He leaned his rickety frame over the counter, after purchasing two packs of Marlboros, and discussed the humidity as related to his fifty year old bones. Bubba nodded once or twice, said, “Uh-huh,” once, and even once asked, “Is that right?” Old Lloyd wasn’t a bad sort. He looked for honest work, did a trustworthy job, and didn’t pass out drunk on the town square like the town mayor had done the previous Fourth of July. Lloyd even did a chore or two for Bubba’s mother, Miz Demetrice, when Bubba was too busy to take care of the housely business.

Whilst Lloyd was talking about possibly having gout and the agony of an ingrown toe nail, a car pulled up to a gas pump on the outside most islands. Bubba half stood up to peer over Lloyd’s gangly shoulder. Lloyd didn’t budge, but merely shifted his smokes around between his hands, and continued to speak about various home remedies for relief of various ailments. “...Favor taking coffee grounds, at least five days old, mind you, combined with boiled dandelion juice, then...”

The driver got out of the car and fiddled with the pump some. Bubba glanced over at the computerized do-hickey and saw that the driver had used the pay-at-the-pump option with a credit card. But he stared over Lloyd’s shoulder until the other man finally noticed.

It wasn’t the car that Bubba was intent on, but the driver. For a second, in the fluorescent lights that lit up the islands out on the asphalt, he had thought that she was someone he had known from awhile back. Her hair was blonde in the dim light, no doubt about that, a light honey blonde, and there was something about the way she moved. It put a knot deep down in the pit of Bubba’s stomach that threatened to grow like a cancerous tumor.

The other man was saying, “...You know her?”

Lloyd finally determined that the younger man’s concentration was fully lost in the customer outside. A few seconds later, Bubba figured out that Lloyd had asked if he knew the woman.

Staring at the lonely shape by the gas pumps, Bubba finally shook his head. There was no point in dredging up memories of three years past. He didn’t know that woman. Nope. He didn’t want to know her. “Naw, Lloyd,” he drawled.

Lloyd knew of every woman under the age of forty in Pegram County. His purely male mind spent a significant amount of time categorizing women. And he most certainly knew of all the blondes. He glanced over his shoulder, and then back at Bubba Snoddy, positive that he didn’t know that particular one. “Someone you knew from the Army?”

Bubba shrugged. It didn’t matter now.

Not one for long farewells and intent on catching the middle half of the Tonight Show Lloyd took the opportunity to grab his smokes and slide out the door before Bubba even said goodbye. Bubba watched as the woman approached Lloyd on the far side of the asphalt, and they talked for a moment. She was standing in the shadows, and Bubba couldn’t rightly get a good look at her face. Lloyd motioned eagerly left and right, pointing as they spoke. It dawned on Bubba that Lloyd was giving the woman driving directions. She thanked him with a wave of her hand, and went back to her car. Lloyd watched, and then shuffled off toward his ramble-shack home a mile down the freeway.

On the floor beside the stool that Bubba sat on, Precious snored away, her paws twitching as she dreamed of all things canine. The rental car’s lights came on, and the woman drove off, leaving Bubba to think of things in the past. These were things he didn’t care to be thinking of, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to prevent the thoughts from trickling into his mind as he sat in the silent and lonely gas and grocery store.

As it turned out, he didn’t have a single customer until well after midnight, and that one, Martha Lyles, elementary school teacher, had awoken from a dream about winning the lottery. She had felt compelled to come down to the store in her bunny slippers to immediately purchase the numbers of which she had dreamt. It had taken Bubba a good twenty minutes and a lot of help from Martha to figure out how to work the machine that dispensed lottery tickets.

Bubba lost any good humor he had left when a couple of drunks drove into Bufford’s Gas and Grocery around two AM, intent on purchasing cheap beer, and pretzels. Bubba didn’t care to let these two on the road, and wouldn’t let them leave until they had called a cab to pick them up, leaving their Dodge truck in one of Bufford’s undersized parking places. After that, there hadn’t been another customer until five, when the earliest working folks began to trickle in to buy coffee and donuts that they didn’t have to make themselves.

Coffee, Bubba felt sure, was the one thing he could do, after he spent about thirty minutes looking for filters and coffee grounds. Unfortunately, when the coffee began to percolate, it smelled as though something had died in the coffee pot, rather than redolent from the fresh aroma of coffee beans.

Only an hour late, Leelah Wagonner wandered in at seven AM sharp to relieve the night shift, finding a grumpy Bubba behind the counter, money sticking haphazardly out of the cash register, and Precious snoring to Kingdom Come underneath Bubba’s feet. Bubba had a look on his face that indicated that not only was he unhappy, but that he was also not pleased.

Leelah, a married woman of five years with two toddlers causing havoc back at her mama’s house while Leelah’s husband, Mike, worked at the manure factory, deduced correctly that Bubba Snoddy was highly irate and agitated. She was late because of her kids deciding that tennis shoes made dandy containers for mud pies and Bubba did not look thrilled at her hastily muttered explanation.

“Where’s Mark Evans?” she asked carefully, studying burns on Bubba’s arms that could only come from the hot dog machine. She knew because she had gotten some herself, when she had first started working at Bufford’s. And she was uncertain why Bubba Snoddy had thought to fill that machine up so early in the day, when it would most probably go to waste.

If Leelah had asked, Bubba would have said he had put the hot dogs in because of some low-carb minded idiot who demanded one of the all beef weenies for his breakfast, sans buns. Bubba thought that was the culmination of his day because he determined that the hot dog machine was a diabolical machine invented by satanic hands in order to ruin mankind. It had finally become obvious to even Bubba that one was not supposed to insert one’s arms into the innards of the devilish device. His dark eyebrows drew together in a fierce frown and he finally answered Leelah’s question. “He quit.”

“Mary didn’t answer the phone,” Bubba said softly. Precious woke up, and began to bay softly, sensitive occasionally to her master’s moods.

“Uh, Bubba,” Leelah felt compelled to observe. “If the Health Department comes in and sees that dog in here, we’re going to hell in a hand basket.”

Bubba gave Precious a nudge toward the door. “As far as I’m concerned,” he called back over his shoulder. “We’re already there.”

Leelah, in all of her twenty-three years on the planet Earth, had never seen such a mess as what Bubba Snoddy had left in Bufford’s Gas and Grocery. The cash register was awry. There was a hot dog stuck in the self-propelled mechanism of the hot dog display. Coffee was strewn on the floor from the cash register to the back store room. Furthermore, the coffee smelled like an unholy cauldron from a witch’s circle. She shrugged, and began to clean things up before the big morning crowd came in. She only briefly looked out the large, glass windows when Bubba revved up the engine in his old truck, and peeled out onto the highway, leaving a trail of rubber ten feet long. Neither he nor Precious ever looked back at Bufford’s.

Twenty minutes later he pulled into the Snoddy family estate. It consisted of one hundred and fifty year old mansion, replete with columns, flaking paint, and the odd termite, and a caretaker’s house out back. The caretaker’s house used to be a stable, but was converted just after World War II. Elgin Snoddy’s father, Lionel, had wanted to rent out to soldiers stationed at nearby Fort Dimson, and make a few bucks in the process. All he really accomplished was to convert a perfectly good stable into an oddball residence, which most normal folks didn’t care to rent, anyway.

The grounds were still inundated with the last century’s plush gardening and landscaping. There was even a koi pond out back with koi that had grown into the size of trout, and a whole mess of water lilies that threatened to take over the entire pond. It was all Bubba could do to keep up with trimming the yard and gardens out of complete wilderness. He noticed with dismay that if he didn’t get his weed wacker out soon, the weeds were going to take over the front veranda of the Snoddy mansion, and a machete would be necessary to make one’s way to the front door.

When Bubba parked his car, he also noticed with dismay that Miz Demetrice had a visitor, whose car was parked on the side of the mansion. A visitor whose blue Honda sedan had Hertz stickers on the sides, he observed with a growing sense of something he couldn’t quite identify. No, wait, he could identify it. Anger. It
had
been her.

Obviously, Miz Demetrice had taken her right in, probably even dragged her over to the poker game, too
, he thought. But there was a hesitation. It was after ten PM when he had seen the young woman at Bufford’s. Miz Demetrice should have been long gone from the Snoddy residence, and probably wouldn’t come back until every woman over the age of fifty in Pegram County had lost their sewing monies and most likely some welfare cash as well. Certainly, Bubba hadn’t seen Miz Demetrice crawl back into the mansion before noon after most poker nights.

Bubba got out of the truck, and let Precious clamber down as well. Almost instantly, the dog began to howl again, snorting at the ground and shuffling around. She began to sniff around a pair of boots sticking out of the tall weeds at the side of the caretaker’s house. Then she fixed her master with a look that fully indicated that he should also come and take a sniff.

Bubba took a step over toward the boots, and realized that they were attached to legs. Then the legs were attached to a torso. And the torso was attached to a...

A man appeared beside Bubba, and looked down at what had Bubba dumbstruck. Precious barked at the man and backed off a ways, variously baying and barking as she saw fit. Bubba glanced up and saw the real estate agent, Neal Ledbetter, who had been pestering Miz Demetrice for months about selling the Snoddy lands, or at least what was left of the Snoddy lands. Neal had walked from the front of the property, where he had parked his Lincoln Continental, after following Bubba’s truck down the road a bit. Neal never was one to let it be said that he didn’t take every opportunity to talk a potential client into a sale.

That man gazed down at the woman at their feet with an expression akin to pure befuddlement. Finally, Neal, not the most smart and congenial of fellas, looked back at Bubba and stated, “Bubba, that woman is as dead as road kill.”

Chapter Two - Bubba and the Sheriff –

Friday

While Bubba Snoddy was standing wordlessly over the dead woman, Neal Ledbetter extracted a compact, cellular phone, and made a call to 911. Bubba barely heard the real estate agent saying to the emergency operator, “Yep, Mary Lou, this is Neal Ledbetter down at the Snoddy’s place. Yes, I am still trying to get them to sell their house. Well, you wouldn’t believe how stubborn and obstinate that Miz Demetrice can be. You would? You remember the time that she chained herself to the cannon in the town square? You know the one the mayor passed out next to? Yeah. That was...oh, yeah, there’s a dead woman out here at the Snoddy’s place.”

Bubba took a half-stumbling step backward, suddenly discomfited in his sudden realization of how short life was, and how the past had come back to bite him on his proverbial white cheeks. Precious stopped her baying and approached her master with doglike concern. He hunkered down, and put his hand on Precious’s head. The dog butted his hand in order to promote the proper human-dog social interaction of petting. He absently scratched behind one of her large, floppy ears, and then behind the other. One of her hind legs scratched air in gleeful assistance.