Burn What Will Burn (2 page)

So (I speculated, that is, hoped) my dead man in The Little Piney had passed by my deserted place, found the creek, fished awhile, imbibed a few cold ones maybe, tried to climb back up the steep slope of riprap, slipped as I had, fell, coshed himself on the back of his head, managed to return to the fallen oak tree, sat down for a rest, got woozy, blacked out, fell into the creek and drowned, in two feet of water as easy as in twenty. Buck had slipped, bumped his head and drowned. That seemed a satisfactory scenario. Happened all the time.

But where were his beer bottles? Where was his fishing tackle? His wallet and ID? His big hunting knife? The gun that went along with the bullet?

Most of all where was his vehicle?

“You shouldn't be out here,” I told the corpse. How did you get
here
of all places?

Because I had never, in ten months and twenty-one days of local residence, seen a stranger at that spot on The Little Piney. That part of The Land o' Opportunity was just not someplace tourists wound up in, accidentally or on purpose. It was too far off Arkansas Scenic Highway 7 to attract visitors. The road was just brown dirt or red clay, gutted in places, ribbed in others. And it was no place in the world you could get to without a car or truck, a mule or a pair of willing feet in sensible walking shoes.

Only a few Locals ever went to that spot on The Little Piney and only me and one other fella ever walked down here. Buck was not a Local that I knew of and he did not seem to me to be the type of fella to walk much of anywhere in his snakeskin cowboy boots. He also did not seem like a tourist—he seemed like a well-heeled hillbilly who would know his way around a creekside, drunk or not.

So it was hard to explain how, or why, Buck had gotten himself there dead in The Little Piney of all places.

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

When you live a long time alone you just do things like that—shrug, nod, talk to yourself, or your chickens, the dead or God.

I have these habits of action, because, in general, I am as lonely as Adam before Eve appeared—living underneath a God who thinks of me as only a hobby of His, but in a Garden, more or less, of Plenty.

Thinking of Eden's Garden made me hungry for Miss Ollie's diner. I was missing my breakfast at EAT Cafe spending time with this dead Buck.

I tore a small branch off the water-soaked white oak, knelt beside the corpse, covered the dead man's face with the oak leaves, looked again at him.

On the inside of his right forearm was a crude tattoo of eagles rampant, the Stars and Stripes, the Marine Corps motto.

Semper Fidelis.

“If you say so, Buck,” I suggested as an encomium.

I started up the bank.

*   *   *

Brush rustled under the trees on the opposite shore.

“Hello?” I called across the creek.

No answer.

I snatched a handful of riprap and threw the stones across the stream, almost.

“Hello!” I hailed a shadow.

I looked past the bridge toward a weedy twenty acres or so that was outlined by ten-foot-tall chain-link fencing decorated with loops of concertina wire and
NO TRESPASSING
and
DANGER: NO OPEN BURNING
signs.

A stone house was tucked in one corner of the untended spread. But no one lived there. Mine was the last inhabited place going in that direction for several miles past The Little Piney. Beyond which was nothing but a very bad, two-track road, deer trails and kudzu cloaked, dense-to-black forest, hardwood and softwood crowded thick and currently dried out as stacked, seasoned cordwood ready for a fire.

“Malcolm? Reverend Pickens? Isaac? Newton? Jacob?”

I named almost all the inhabitants of our isolated little hollow.

None of them answered me.

But someone was watching me.

This is not an unusual feeling for me to have. I have long lived with the ghosts of my departed and often sense my dead daddy, momma, my wife, our stillborn child hovering nearby me. At times I believe God is taking a too-keen interest in my simple affairs, intruding into my complicated thoughts like a bookmark stuck over and over again, willy-nilly in the pages of my life's odyssey, my crazy story.

But this was different because there was really someone there, on the other side of the creek, hiding in the bushes, watching me.

I didn't waste any more time trying to find out who, if anyone, was there spying on me from the other side of The Little Piney. It was probably someone, or something I didn't want to know or even know about.

*   *   *

Out of habit I stopped at my bullet-riddled mailbox. It was open, but empty, as per usual. The Star Route postman would not deliver rural mail to my rural house as he didn't approve of a Reynolds living at the Old Duncan Place since nobody but Duncans had ever lived there before me. Snow, rain, heat of day, gloom, etc., apparently did not dissuade local government employees of USPS from their appointed rounds, but delivering dividend statements to a nonLocal did.

The Locals had their own special reasoning about life and its operating procedures that I didn't even try to understand.

A black widow spider had constructed an elaborate web in the mailbox, which was but a metal box with a hinged lid on it, a lid that could be shut tight at any time. Still, she sat centered in her ignorance, waiting, doing her thing. If I closed the lid on the box, the spider would die. But I left the mailbox open because I admire patience and can appreciate making an innocent mistake as much as the next guy. Sometimes we set ourselves down in trouble through no fault of our own and only survive it because a god doesn't shut down the lid on our little box and cut off our life supplies.

I limped to the house to find my car keys so I could drive to a public telephone.

A blister bloomed on my left heel. I had paid a lot of money for my walking shoes, but they still did not fit me.

*   *   *

I don't have a phone for two reasons—either they ring or else they don't ring. They're bothersome to me either way, so I don't have one. Except for a couple of distant relations who are waiting impatiently for me to die, my neighborhood friend Malcolm and my stockbrokers and money managers in Fargo and Houston and elsewhere, nobody cares in the least where I'm at or what I'm doing there.

Most people need a phone, for emergencies if nothing else. But I didn't have any emergencies left in my life.

I didn't think of my discovery of the corpse in the creek as being any kind of emergency situation—not for me, at least. And Buck's emergency had passed. He was passed. In an hour he would be just as dead as he would be in another day or next week, forever dead, suffering or celebrating beyond this pale.

And the dead don't need me. Maybe sometimes they bother me, but never do they need me.

And I cling to the misguided belief that the dead, in general, somehow, consciously or subconsciously or unconsciously, bring their ends on themselves, by deed or else by nature.

So to protect my own self from death, purposeful or accidental, I don't keep straight razors or abusable pills or loaded weapons in the house and before I start any vocational drinking I hide my car keys from myself, because, sometimes, we can be our own worst and most dangerous enemies.

It took over nine minutes but I found the keys in the bathroom.

I slipped on dishwasher's gloves and extracted the key ring from the tank of the toilet, washed the keys in shampoo, rinsed them and dried them and sprayed them with disinfecting spray, ungloved and scrubbed my hands thoroughly with lye soap, cleaned out my fingernails with a stiff brush, smelled them.

They smelled faintly of corpse slime, so I redid the whole handwashing operation and topped it off with a rubbing alcohol rinse and a splash of bleach, dried off with toilet paper and flushed the paper down and out into the septic tank in the backyard.

I took a long but tepid shower, abusing my skin with the coarsest loofah available on the common market, then dried off with the coarsest bath towel available on the common market. I brushed my teeth until my gums bled, swallowed the toothpaste spit, then rinsed with Listerine for the prescribed two minutes, then scrubbed my face, again, with a wet sponge, put rubbing alcohol in my ears and nostrils and put a moleskin patch on my newest blister. I slathered my whole body in sunscreen, adding an extra dab to my bald spot, then proceeded to the bedroom and changed my dirty short pants for a clean pair of chinos, a fresh-from-the-package, white pocket T-shirt, antifungal cotton socks and another pair of expensive walking shoes that had been guaranteed to work cooperatively and efficaciously with my small and preposterously flat feet.

I wasn't hopeful.

*   *   *

By six forty-nine a.m. I was returned to the bathroom and examining my face, hairline, and waistline in the crooked mirror hanging above the sink.

I looked the same as per usual.

I did feel a slight twinge of nausea, but I have felt a slight twinge of nausea every day of my life.

If anybody had been there to ask me, I would have said, automatically, that I was fine.

 

CHAPTER 2

Poe County Road 615 is an antique farm-to-market thoroughfare that resembles one rumpled leg of a pair of washed-out corduroy trousers. I steered my battered old pickup in the smoother wales. Behind me exhaust thick enough to slice poured out of a clanging tailpipe.

Three-tenths of a mile east of my place was the First Rushing Evangelical True Bible Prophecy Church of the Rising Star in Jesus Christ.

WELCOME ALL
, a large but rusty metal sign planted in the hardpack dirt parking lot greeted the Faithful and the Prospective.
WELCOME ALL, SERVICES AT 8:30 AM SUNDAY, THE LORD'S DAY,
the sign informed.
THE CORRECT AND GOOD NEWS AS PROCLAIMED BY THE GOSPEL AND DELIVERED BY THE RIGHT REVEREND JOE PICKENS, SENIOR, MINISTER OF THE FAITH
, it promised.

This sign seemed a bit redundant on several counts, but it worked somewhat for Mean Joe. Even though the Preacher Pickens was acknowledged, hands down, as being the most mean man in Rushing and surrounding areas all the way into Oklahoma on the one side and Missouri on the other side, and was suspected of being even one of the meanest men in the whole of the Ozarks, and even though he preached every week in one of the most isolated hollows in all of the Americas, the hallowed grounds of the Right Reverend Joe Pickens, Senior, still hosted at least ten vehicles a week, which might not seem like a lot, but it was. A hundred and twenty-two yards farther “down the hill”—as was said locally to establish latitude and longitude (meaning south, toward the river)—was the Wellses' spread, a double-wide mobile home that could never be moved because of all the trash piled around it like an Osage Indian village barricade and because of all the anchored additions attached to it—decks and patios and garages and carports and storage sheds and two aboveground swimming pools (the one simply abandoned when the algae in it solidified to the point where seedlings started taking root and the swimming pool became a sort of virgin island)—and giant dog houses for their giant dogs—rottweilers on the east end of the house with Great Danes on the west end and two types of pit bulls, one penned on the north side of the trailer house the other on the south side.…

This whole extravagance of rural riches, this decomposing and ever-expanding fiefdom of valued trash, was set up on a knoll denuded by chicken-scratching and dog-digging and kid-playing and was boundaried by almost a half mile of pooched-out chain-link fencing and surrounded by acres of the most comprehensive collection of white trash necessities imaginable, including a finite but uncountable number of jacked-up and rusted-out car and truck and SUV and tractor and school bus and ambulance and hearse and ATV and motorcycle chassis (many of them so kudzu-covered they seemed organic), as well as an armada of holey boats (from Sunfishes to Glastron tri-hulls, to oceangoing whalers to a dozen johnboats, scuttled Skeeters, even a real birch-bark canoe gone to rot with a river willow growing out of it), enough wood pallets to set that part of the world on fire, every playground set available at Walmart and even a life-size plywood nativity scene established year round in the front yard, this assembly of the Holy so shrouded in red clay dust all the Wise Men looked like the Cleveland Indian.

A pair of very small bore rifle barrels rested on the shoulders of a brace of these headless Wise (Red) Men.

One of the little Wells bastards shot at me.

Another star materialized on my windshield.

I leaned on the truck's horn.

It wheezed asthmatically.

“Reynolds Queerbait!” one of the twins yelled.

Jacob and Faith Sue Wells and their diabolical set of eight-year-olds, Isaac and Newton, had a telephone, but I never asked to use it.

For obvious reasons.

Another BB pellet, losing steam, clattered into the bed of my pickup.

Neighbors.

*   *   *

Two point six miles of uninhabited country later the truck stalled as I steered off County Road 615 near the intersection of that dirt road and the pavement of a semi-major state road. I coasted past the gas pumps of Pick's General Store and UPUMPIT! and handbraked beside the mud-encrusted, freestanding phone booth.

When I unhooked the bailing wire from the glove box, pickup paraphernalia exploded onto the floorboard like Fibber McGee's closet junk. I tucked my big fat wallet back in the box but held on to a prescription bottle of the tiny tranquilizers my physician, Dr. Doc Williams, allowed me.

Atarax, they are called, a pharmaceutical advertising word derived from the Greek
ataraxia
, which means “a state of robust calm,” which was a state I liked to dwell in, far from the state of distress; but it was hit or miss with me, from day to day, where I landed, with medication or without it.

I could, as medically advised, take six pills a day. I wanted twenty. There were only three left. I showed restraint and took two.