Burn What Will Burn (6 page)

This information from Malcolm seemed to complicate the situation for me. Malcolm continued.

“Some months back I seen him too with Miss TamFay arguing 'bout something,” he said. “But not this time. This time I saw him lately he was just sitting in his car and then the bus pull into the grocery store parking lot and it wudn't any cricket, so I went on into Goody's Grocery Sto' and bought some those white cans for PaPaw and when I come out that blood-color car was gone.”

“What's a white can, Malcolm?”

“Whatcha callit. 'Neric?”

“Generic,” I supplied. That's what I bought too, generic cans and boxes of this and that, all packaged in white with black text describing contents simply as
BEANS
or
MAC 'N' CHEESE
or
TOMATO SOUP
. I was as cheap as Mean Joe, but with a lot less reason to be stingy that way.

I thought of what next to ask Malcolm, but he had a question for me.

“I think you ol' truck was gone too, from Ellum Street, wudn't it, Bob Reynold?”

I said nothing.

“Seems like before I went into Goody's Grocery I seen the bloodred car at Miss TamFay's Old Lions and I seen you truck behind the 'zalea bushes, but then when I come out of Goody's Grocery Sto' it's both them gone.”

“I don't think that is correct, Malcolm. I don't believe my truck was downtown on that particular morning at all.”

Malcolm stared at me with enough intensity to make me move. I slid off the tailgate of the truck, headed toward the store. Inside I saw no one but I could hear the chainsaw of Storekeep Pickens whining from somewhere nearby. I snagged the heavy fobbed key ring for the ladies' room off a nail in the wall, walked down a narrow aisle and out the back door, went around to the north side of the building, which was nearly covered in snakeskins tacked to the wooden walls, curing.

In the sideyard the rattlers in Malcolm's deep snake pit were entwinations of limp, overheated flesh. My stomach churned as I looked down at them and I wished Malcolm would hurry up and make of all those snakes the nice wallets they had taught him to make at Special School.

I locked myself into the restroom, the only cool, spotlessly clean place for miles around and started washing my hands.

Outside, Malcolm played a sweet old hymn on his harmonica.

The captive snakes were a sibilant, half-buried presence.

I threw up in the sink.

*   *   *

Some minutes later Malcolm thumped on the frosted glass of the ladies' room door.

“Sheriff here, Bob Reynold.”

I tapped powdered soap from the Borax dispenser, wet it with fulvous water, scrubbed my teeth with a finger end, swallowed the soap spit, double washed my hands, dried off with a roll towel, left the restroom, reentered the store by the back way, rehung the key ring.

Mean Joe Pickens Senior, the right reverend, was sitting on a low stool behind the zinc-topped counter, whittling a big crucifix cross out of osage orangewood. His clasp knife sliced through that branch of hardwood like through cardboard.

“Good morning, Reverend,” I said.

Mean Joe did not look up from his handwork. His lap was littered with curled shavings. His face in profile was a sharp-edged stone with blood vessels running under his pale skin like dirt veins shooting through quartz.

There was a deer rifle propped in a corner of the picture window behind him, a scruffy gray cat curled around the well-oiled stock. A bluebottle fly buzzed against the glass, slid down and up and side to side in a regular pattern until the cat killed it and swept it to the floor.

“That's one opinion,” the preacher said, which was more than he usually said to me.

The reverend rose slowly, an engine of old repose cranking reluctant to some absolutely necessary action, every mechanism in him seeming stoved up from rust. He jerked his long chin at a paper chit pad on the countertop nearby a chewed-down pencil stub. He laid his crucifix cross on the countertop, laid his hands atop the splintered wood.

His hands were huge, hard as the hardwood beneath them, the gnawed fingernails the same color as that orangewood. An index finger tapped the decussation of the cross, about where the tortured head of Jesus might be hung.

“That's fifty cents for one Coca-Cola. And so for two is one dollar. Plus ten cent deposit on two bottles is a dollar and twenty cents. Plus Arkansas State sales tax.”

He glared at me as at a man far fallen from grace.

“Plus it's the fifty cents charge for holding your mail.”

I signed the chits as “R. R. Reynolds, MFA” just to irritate Mean Joe because I had once told him that acronym meant I had earned a Masters degree at Fucking Around. But Mean Joe liked my money well enough so he collected his credit vouchers and put them away in a pigeonhole on the side wall, returned to his seat on the low stool, recommenced his whittling.

I pushed the front screen door half open. There was a tan-and-white police car parked near my truck.

“You have a nice day, Reverend,” I said over my shoulder.

“Too late for that,” he replied.

I nodded, agreeing with him, stepped out of the building and into the sliver of awning shade, lingered there a few seconds to let my eyes adjust to the glare.

“Shut the door,” Mean Joe said. “It's hot as hell out there already.”

I let the screen door swing closed behind me and did step into a day hot already as pure hell.

 

CHAPTER 4

The sheriff stood behind the open door of his Tan-and-White. He adjusted his cowboy hat and nodded at me.

I started toward him, but Malcolm rushed up and blocked my way.

“Bob Reynold, you going down to the creek with the sheriff?”

The kid was agitated, bouncing from foot to foot.

“I suppose so,” I answered.

The strap of his overalls slid off and I put it back in place.

“Something the matter with that?”

Malcolm glanced the way of the sheriff. The lawman stared at us but was too far away to hear us.

“You seen anybody down there lately, Malcolm? At the creek?”

“Nossir, Bob Reynold. Just them mean-spirited kids of Jacobswell, shooting at them wildcats down the bridge.”

“You seen Jacob down there?”

“Not since a couple of weeks when he was electrocuting all the fish out of the water with his generator box, Bob Reynold.”

“Nobody else?”

“Just you, Bob Reynold. They is nobody else. Communerty's gone. You know that well's me.”

Rushing was gone, never to return. From my perspective this was a selling point.

“Collection plate so empty at church last Sunday we didn't get but four dollars and a dime offering. PaPaw said attendance so low down he was going to have to go to Li'l Rock to fetch some peoples in real need.”

The kid was always hitting me up for money for his church but at Christmas I had donated five hundred toward paving their parking lot and had seen no asphalt spread, so I wasn't in the mood to be additionally charitable.

“I got things to do right now, Malcolm Ray. Why you holding me up?”

He kept bouncing and did not seem to be listening to me.

“You come on this Sunday, Bob Reynold. I'm doing Special Music.”

I shook my head. I hadn't been inside a church since my momma's funeral. And I hadn't learned anything that bleak day, but that I was, truly, not a churched person.

“You like my daddy someways, Bob Reynold. You think the Lord He's abandoned you,” Malcolm said quietly. “But ya'll got it backwards—it's ya'll abandoned the Lord Jesus Christ Rising Star, my daddy and Bob Reynold both. Times of trouble, when you be needing the Lord, the Lord might not know who Bob Reynold is.”

The sheriff honked his car horn.

“I'll take my chances, Malcolm Ray.”

I stepped around him, but the kid grabbed my arm, bent his head close to mine.

“Sheriff's looking for my daddy.”

I stared hard at Malcolm. He didn't look away.

“Your daddy jumped bail some days ago, Malcolm Ray. You know about that?”

“Yessir.”

“You know where he's at?”

The kid didn't blink. I blinked.

“Nossir, Bob Reynold. Figured you could find out if the sheriff know.”

Baxter honked the cruiser's horn again. I lifted a hand.

“I got to go, Malcolm.”

He nodded.

“I'll try to find out what the sheriff knows.”

“I'preciate you, Bob Reynold.”

I nodded, headed toward the lawman. Malcolm shuffled toward the store.

“And I pray for you to be in church on Sunday,” he said so I could hear.

I looked backward to see Malcolm framed in the doorway of Pick's place, his granddad looming over him, both of them staring through the rusty, warped door screen at the law in their yard.

The tin roof of the store ticked with heat.

Malcolm lifted a hand at me. His PaPaw pulled him backward into the dark.

*   *   *

I don't like cops. I don't like judges either, soldiers, Uniforms in general except for firemen.

It's a question of who should be in authority maybe. Maybe I think it ought to be me. Maybe I believe people in general should be more sensible and take care of their own troubles privately and then we all wouldn't need so much public policing. Maybe I just think the Law is generally useless for leveling things, that life is as corrugated, twisted and irregular as my bowel system and meant to be that way and if the fit survive they do for a reason but it's hard to tell by looking or the law who the fit are.

*   *   *

“You're Randy Reynolds,” the cop, Baxter, told me.

He stood behind a decal of the encouraging phrase,
TO SERVE AND PROTECT
.

“Bob,” I corrected, set a handshake in motion, but checked it when the sheriff stuffed his right hand into the pocket of his center-creased jeans.

With two fingers he tweezed out a government-green Zippo, pulled a pack of Camel shorts from the pocket of his starched white shirt, lit up a coffin nail. The stone in his thimble-size armed forces finger ring was blood red.

He was probably my age or thereabouts and only slightly taller than I was but he was a rock-hard if well-worn forty-something with a broken-in-boot face that remained rakish in an old-fashioned way. He had woman-size hands, as small as mine, but with a brawler's set of knuckles. His pure white summer-weight hat was about a six and three-quarters, spotless, pressed in a fashion favored by rodeo cowboys and dead movie stars.

“Sheriff Baxter,” I said, completing our introductions.

Baxter nodded once then laid a hand on the ivory grip of his very big sidearm. Though we were about the same level of shortish, the sheriff looked hard and deadly as a rifle while I looked more like the scabbard for the rifle or, as my wife used to say of me, a sack of wet shit that needs to get dumped.

I sucked in my potbelly.

“We'll take my vehicle,” he said, flicked his barely smoked cigarette on the ground. “Give us a chance to visit.”

The smell of whitewashed drinking (mint mouthwash over hard liquor) was as unmistakable on him as it was familiar.

I stomped the smoldering cigarette.

“I'd rather drive my truck back home.”

Baxter moved toward his driver's seat.

“I'd rather you didn't, Mister Reynolds.”

He got in his cruiser, shut the door.

Mean Joe would have my truck towed as soon as I was out of sight. This had happened to me before. But Tammy's Towing Service needed the business and getting towed would give me a reason to get near her.

Malcolm banged out of the front door of the store, stuffing stick after stick of chewing gum into his maw, Juicy Fruit being the kid's tranquilizer.

“I'm riding with the sheriff, Malcolm,” I raised my voice. “When Tammy Fay gets here with her tow rig, tell her to try to fix the transmission again.”

Malcolm nodded.

His granddad appeared behind him. The deer rifle was in the reverend's hands and he rubbed the scarred stock with a red mechanic's rag.

I went around to the passenger side of the sheriff's cruiser, opened the door, sat down inside a cool, quiet place that smelled strongly of dead cigarettes and old, scared sweat, faintly of vomit and french-fried potatoes.

Baxter reversed us onto Poe County Road 615 without a backward glance, shifted into drive and accelerated down the road like he knew exactly where we were going.

*   *   *

We rode in silence, at a slow, even speed, for a couple of minutes, rolled past the Rushing Cemetery where sixty-four men and women and twenty-two children were buried—Duncans and Browns and Lewises and Wellses interred besides the McLahans, Smiths, Pickenses, Roberts and even the one Reynolds, one of my own old home folks, the single, solitary old bastard left around these Ozark parts, before the rest of my paternal clan migrated into the Midwest and Texas.

“You got people up here,” the sheriff said like he knew I did.

“From a long, long time back.” I tapped on my closed window. “In the graveyard. Out there.”

“There's a Robert Reynolds,” Baxter told me what I knew already. “Born about the end of the War.”

My paternal great-great grandfather, Robert Peter, had been born in a log cabin, in Rushing, in 1865, died in the same cabin twenty-eight years later of a ruptured liver and a gunshot wound in the back. His grandson had wildcatted the southern Arkansas and northeast Texas oil that eventually created the generational wealth that left me most of my modest little fortune.

I was surprised the sheriff was so familiar with the old headstones. But I was familiar with them as well.

“Is it your mother buried there?” I asked the sheriff.

I tapped on the window again, towards Frances Mary Baxter, dead six years and eight months, more or less.