Burn What Will Burn (10 page)

“Hello? Anybody home here?”

A breeze blew hot across me, vaporized the sweat on my forehead and bald spot. I thought I heard the sound of a car coming from the dirt road that ran southeasterly into the deep woods. This road was only twin tracks gouged into red clay, virtually unpassable by anything other than an ATV during wet season, and still three miles of bad road to pavement even during dry season. I strained my ears but the sound of a motor was extinguished by the wind in the trees.

The grass was beaten down somewhat around the fieldstone building, a place that was not as pretty up close as from the road, with the slate roof gapped and chipped and the wooden window sash droopy and dry-rotted.

Dry leaves were piled up against the house like combustible brown snow. I smelled gasoline and another smell, like ammonia, cat piss.

The place seemed deserted by all but the feral felines. There were cats on the roof and cats in the trees and cats supine and cats mobile. Cats around like they owned the place. Most bolted when they saw me, some stayed put.

The sideyard was littered with disintegrating wooden bushel baskets, some with crenelated apples still in them. Pine needles clustered on the small slab porch. The varnish was worn off the front door. A hasped padlock, as old and rusty as the ones on the gate, kept out visitors.

I knocked, didn't wait but a moment before stepping into the sideyard where a rusted-out wheelbarrow was full of dried cat shit. On that southside wall of the house were two windows.

Between those two dark windows was an ornamental bush, a shoulder-high shrubbery, powdered thick with red dust, with a filthy, blaze-orange watch cap set atop it, probably the figure, the “man” I thought I'd seen.

I strained to see into the house, but all the glass was painted on the inside solid black.

I whirled around at a snaky hiss. A giant yellow tomcat glared at me from his crouched position on the edge of the sideyard. He bared his teeth, hissed again.

“Scram!”

I feinted a leap at him, but the cat just laid his ears flat, eyeballed me, rigid as a yellow-streaked stone.

As I stooped to pick up a slate shard the tom bounded and I discovered myself recoiled in the dusty shrubbery, put down by a raggedy housecat, which did not presage much good luck for this venture.

Spooky cat bastard.

I extracted myself from the decorative shrubbery. My heart was racing. The giant tom was gone, so I threw a chunk of granite at some other cat, then patted my pants clean.

More broken bushel baskets littered a backyard hard-packed, unvegetated and covered with cat crap in various stages of dehydration.

In a lightning-scarred oak tree several more cats lounged, limp in the heat, draped over thick limbs like furred and whiskered sacks of soft bones.

Hanging by fishing line from the lower branches of the giant white oak were numerous rusted, perforated cans, many of them cat food–size. Some of the larger ones had bones in them as clappers. When the wind blew, the cans clanked together hollowly as the finger-long bones chimed dryly.

The Wells kids must have sawed the hole in the fence and turned the deserted place into their private playground. I couldn't imagine Isaac and Newton feeding cats though. The Wellses were Dog People if ever there were.

It could have been Malcolm too, I supposed, but Malcolm claimed he wouldn't go across The Little Piney for penny biscuits and free gravy, because the place was haunted and because his grandfather forbade it for reasons unclear.

When I stepped up on the back slab porch a trio of mottled kittens tumbled off and away as if their back ends were not properly attached to their front ends. The window glass of the door was painted solidly secret. I continued into the backyard where there was a detached garage.

Fairly fresh tire tracks ran under what seemed incongruously to be a fairly new single-piece rolling garage door, which was padlocked tight to a thick iron ring set in a cement slab that also looked much newer than the rest of the construction around the place. One of the high, narrow windows of this garage door was cracked though, a sizable corner of a pane missing. But I was too short to see in.

There was nothing in the yard to stand on but rotten bushel baskets. The wheelbarrow, when I pushed it, fell apart like a prop in a comic sketch.

Behind the garage was another shed, its door hanging open. I peered inside and saw an old generator, cobweb shrouded and dusty, and several 55-gallon metal drums. The place smelled strong of gasoline and motor oil.

Next to the generator was a horizontal propane tank. Though the gauge on the tank was broken the eight-foot-long steel can still smelled of rotten eggs.

Atop this tank were two empty Coca-Cola cans with rough-edged holes punched in them to make rustic lanterns. The candles in them had reduced to pools of wax with nipples of charred wick. The top of a propane tank didn't seem a safe place to light votive candles. It seemed a queer place for a shrine, but it seemed a shrine.

Between the candleholders seven locks of braided hair, short as a thumbnail and delicately knotted, were arranged around a small mammal's skull.

I was in a feline shrine.

The close space smelled of burnt hair and, unmistakably, of a man, of dirty skin long cured in sweat, of rank, bare feet.

Sweat dripped off my tailbone.

I edged to the door of the shed, leaned out slightly.

The color red streaked by my face and my legs collapsed just before the heat and blackness spread over my brain and I fell.

 

CHAPTER 6

I woke up with a terrible headache.

In jail.

Hanging on the bars of an adjoining cell was a reedy man with neat, high-piled hair who massaged his crotch in a manner more habitual than provocative.

There was no other visible presence in the cell block.

“What you in for, Pard?”

My neighbor was lily white with purple skin hung up under his deep-set eyes like colostomy bags half filled with old blood. His scent was strong and complex—snuffed tobacco, fish guts, hair oil and expensive cologne, all lightly liquored up. His clothes were dirty, but his hands and fingernails were very clean.

I sat up on the edge of the cot, felt nauseated.

“You didn't answer my question right away, Pard.”

His drawl was so cellular it was a speech impediment.

“Are you a character?” he asked me.

“Where am I?” I asked, to begin with.

“Poe County Jailhouse, Pard. Bertrandville, Arkansas, United States of America. You was in here when I got my own accommodations, so I am a little bit uninformed about you.”

He stared at me, licked his lips like he was tasting old dinner.

“Are you the murderer, Pard?”

I almost threw up.

“Who said I was?” I managed to ask.

“All's I heard when Deputy Lloyd booked me was Sheriff found a floater in The Little Piney. Maybe murdered. And I just bet you know something about that, Pard.”

My neighbor squinted at me, sneezed.

My empty stomach clenched against nothing. I was speechless.

“Been in here a awful lot,” the fellow told me, sneezed again. “But ain't seen no murderer yet to tell of, so this will be a particular first.”

He sneezed again, wiped his nose with a tattooed hand, grinned at me, sniffed.

The police had let him keep his jewelry on and the stone in his gold finger ring glowed blood red. One of his tattoos was of an eagle rampant.

I examined what I could see of the ceiling, then stared at the floor.

My neighbor hacked up a spoonful of phlegm and hocked it on the floor of my cell.

“Ain't a summer cold just the worse thing in the world, Pard?”

“I'm not a murderer,” I said.

My neighbor was not relieved to hear this.

“Now that's a damned shame.”

He swung on the bars between us like a bored monkey.

“Because a murderer would keep me entertained, I really figure one would.” He sighed. “But it's no really good diversions for the truly evil wicked like us, is it, Pard?”

It seemed to me that there were plenty, but maybe I was wrong.

“You know what time it is?” I asked.

“'Bout couple hours or so after lunchtime, Pard, because we have done had our lunch a while back, us that wasn't beauty sleeping their lives away.”

I felt a lump on the back of my head.

“Do you have any idea why I'm in here?”

“Nope, Pard, but I do know a good joke about three queer Jew doctors and a nigger hitchhiker, my neighbor told me. You ever heard a that one?”

“I made that one up,” I said.

“Why, Pard, you're a funny man. I been looking for you. You and me's like-minded, like they say.”

It was hard for me to argue that right then.

“I've got no sense of humor at the moment.”

I felt like I had been drugged.

“I can't hardly believe that, Pard, to hear you speak. But if it is true, then it's a burden for you I can appreciate.” He sneezed out his summer cold.

“Everybody's got their peculiar cross to bear. Right, Pard?”

I didn't answer since that seemed inarguable.

“Still, you might's well cozy up. We bedfellows in the same boat, as they say. Right, Pard?”

“You would think so to see us,” I said, though I hoped that was patently untrue.

But the bars surrounding us were exactly the same to look at them, on all sides. But bars always look different from the outside than from the inside.

“And it ain't a White way to be, is it, Pard? Odds out in close quarters with a particular badass like myself.”

He was about as puny as me but I nodded anyway.

He smiled, showing off his even, white teeth.

“See there, Pard? We understand one 'nother just about perfect. And for wise fellows like us only just takes that one word to the wise.”

I stared at my fingernails, went to the basin and washed my hands in tepid water. There wasn't any soap and no towel and no toilet paper.

“What are you in for?” I inquired, sat back on the hard and narrow cot.

The man stretched, rubbed his crotch, at home, apparently, in jail.

“Disorder,” he confessed.

“What kind of disorder?”

“Drunk and,” he said. “What other kind is there?”

“Mental,” I suggested.

He nodded agreeably, lifted two fingers.

“Really, Pard, it's two things. First off, I was fishing out at River Park this afternoon and Deputy Lloyd, he picks me up on drunken disorder.”

He sneezed heartily, collected snot in his palm and wiped it on his blue jeans.

“And…,” he went on, stared at the ceiling as if he was wondering himself what the number-two thing was.

“It's a new oustanding on me for rape I just found out.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“That's my sister'n'law says I raped her.”

“I see,” I said.

“Which is a damned lie, Pard. Trust me on this one.”

“Well,” I said, “I don't know the whole story.”

“Cain't say we ever do know that, Pard,” he told me. “The whole story, what I mean.”

He scratched in his thick, pomaded hair, pursed his lips, nodded to himself, spoke.

“Tidy Chicken, where we work at, is out on strike and me and my wife we was killing time over at my sister'n'law's house is the story.”

He looked at me and I shrugged.

“You know her?”

“Who's that?” I asked.

“My wife, Hannah Lee.”

“No.”

“You know my sister'n'law then? Jucinda Lucille Harvey? Harvey's her married name. Her maiden name's Hayden. Not that she was ever no maiden.”

I shook my head.

“Well, Pard, I just guess you ain't a sporting man then or you'd at least heard of her. Jucinda Lucille Harvey, second biggest whore in the Arkansas River Valley.”

He frowned at me like I might be holding out on him somehow.

“She lives over at those trailer houses behind the Piggly Wiggly in Danielles, acrossed the Arkansas River. You know the ones?”

He seemed to want to connect me to the story someway. That seemed very important. I didn't feel connected, but maybe I was. Maybe everybody was connected, everybody everywhere responsible for everybody and everything.

I didn't particularly believe that. But it was a thought.

“I do know those trailer houses behind the Piggly Wiggly,” I said.

“If you know them then you pro'bly might know Jucinda Harvey then,” he posited hopefully.

I didn't know who he was. Didn't know who his people were. He did not seem to be anyone I wanted to know. And I was not particularly interested in gaining new friends.

Still it can pay to be cordial.

“I just might,” I allowed.

“All right then,” he said. “Then you know it's just a whorestown over there, all it is. 'Bout as bad as Doker. Might's well paint the whole trailer park red and put up a price sign.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“So you know how it is,” he told me.

I wasn't sure I wanted to know how it was, was not certain at all that I wanted to even talk to this jailbird, if that's what he was. But there is something magnetic about ignorant degenerates and trashy whores, and time passes slowly in jail, as they say. And the unregenerate serve as scapegoats some way maybe, balance the scales of humanity perhaps. We're all crooked, but some of us are stupid too, some of us get caught; and those of us who aren't stupid and don't get caught feel better that those of us who are and do are there, here, everywhere serving as a reminder that it could be worse for us, that we could be worse.

And it didn't appear I was going anywhere soon. So I nodded.

“So me and my wife, Hannah Lee, we was over there in that trailer park behind the Piggly Wiggly last afternoon, killing time and my sister'n'law, who holds liquor like a fishnet, got fucked up was what happened and her husband, man name of T. Bo Harvey, works at the Exxon station over in Doker in your part of the woods. Volunteer fireman sometimes … You know T. Bo?”