Burn What Will Burn Read online

  “You tell that buddy of yours, Sam Baxter, the fellow that sapped me to unconsciousness, that if I’d needed one more stitch on the back of my head I would have sued.”

  Doc straightened up his paraphernalia.

  “I doubt that was a wound from a leather sap, Bob.”

  “Meaning?”

  The Poe County Medical Examiner stripped off the old white paper and rolled a fresh sheet out, pulled it tight and clipped it to the sides of the table.

  “The wound on your head is not consistent with the description of a wound suffered from a policeman’s leather sap.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “The skin was broken. In a jagged fashion. Not serious, but inconsistent with the profile of a sap wound. I cleaned out some rock dust and fragments as well.”

  “A rock?”

  “You could have fallen. Sam says you did.”

  “What exactly is the sheriff’s version, Doc? I know you’re tight with Baxter. I guess you’ve known him since he was a baby.”

  “I delivered Sam,” Doc said. “In that house I helped his daddy build, the one across The Little Piney. Helped Samuel plant his apple trees and press his first batch of cider. Melissa introduced him to Frances Roberts.”

  Doc switched off the examining room lights, held back the frosted glass door for me. I passed out of that room and into the waiting area, looked again at the doctor’s Wall of Fame, at the cast of Locals, the babies delivered, the football hero High Sheriff, his momma, his daddy, the doctor’s dead wife, the doctor’s diplomas, Tammy Fay as a child, the dead man in The Little Piney with a tattooed forearm around her waist, Miss Ollie Ames’s hulking son Warnell.

  “It’s right here, isn’t it, Doc?” I asked. “The story is right here.”

  “It’s really a local matter, Bob.”

  “And the sheriff’s version of today’s events?” I repeated my earlier query.

  “Sam had you dead to rights trespassing. You resisted arrest, fell and knocked yourself out. He released you because he wants to keep all his options open, Bob.”

  “Options?”

  Doc turned off the lights.

  “Sam might want to press murder charges.”

  * * *

  Doc pulled onto Main without checking for traffic, as if he knew no one would be in his way.

  “You’re looking very peaked, Bob.”

  “Who did I…? Who was I supposed to have killed, Doctor? Can you tell me that?”

  “The man in The Little Piney was Joe Pickens Junior,” Doc informed me. “I can tell you that much.”

  “Joe Junior? He was…”

  I stopped myself.

  “Who identified him?” I asked.

  “I did. Known Junior since he was born.”

  “Who found him?”

  “Warnell Ames discovered the body. Facedown on the gravel shoal just south of the bridge over The Little Piney. Very near your home. Warnell walked up to Jacob Wells’s place and Jake called the sheriff, who called me. While he was in the area, Sam decided to check on his property, that spread behind the cyclone fence on the other side of the river.”

  “We struggled?” I asked. “I fell and bumped my head. Sheriff Baxter put me in jail.”

  Doc nodded. “Pretty much like that, Bob.”

  “Warnell hasn’t left Doker in years,” I said.

  Miss Ollie had told me that a hundred times, sniffed sadly about it a bit on several occasions when she misread my silence as sympathy. Her son didn’t even know how to drive a car or even ride a bicycle.

  “I have never once seen him down by the creek. Not in the ten months plus I’ve lived here,” I told Doc Williams. “All Warnell ever does is sit on that stool and watch the Old Lion, looking out for Tammy Fay.”

  But Warnell was not out front of EAT as I spoke.

  Miss Ollie, however, was staring out the front picture window but as Doc drove us past the café she backed out of sight and the OPEN neon above the entrance was extinguished.

  When we were abreast of the Old Lion I asked Doc to stop. He did.

  “Maybe Tammy’s got my truck ready, Doctor, and I can save you a trip to Rushing.”

  The single garage work bay was empty, the rack lowered. Tammy Fay’s tow truck was gone. I mounted the steps to her upstairs apartment and could see through a parted curtain that the upstairs apartment was its usual mess and seemed empty. Stank wasn’t there either. Maybe the dog was still roaming the streets looking for some affection.

  I got back into the station wagon, scratched the itch at the back of my head.

  The doctor pulled onto Main Street without looking behind him, as was his privilege apparently.

  “It just doesn’t make any sense, Doc. What in the world was Warnell Ames doing at The Little Piney, that far from home?”

  “Warnell said he was fishing.”

  “Fishing?”

  “That is the story, Bob.”

  I scratched at my head some more.

  “Who’s going to tell Malcolm?” I asked. “About his daddy?”

  “This is not yet for public broadcast, Bob. I shouldn’t have said anything about this.”

  He sped out of Doker, only slowed when crossing the narrow bridge over South Slough, an elongated depression that was not quite a creek and not quite dry land but just perpetual thin mud with a bridge depended over it.

  My very expensive binoculars were sunk in South Slough.

  The doctor braked the County meat wagon and eased off the State Road and onto County Road 615, hurried down the dirt. The wind whistling by us was hot and dry.

  “So, what killed Joe Pickens Junior, Doctor?”

  We passed Pick’s UPUMPIT! There was nobody in the yard and no lights on in the store. My truck was gone, so I guessed the Right Reverend Mean Joe Pickens Senior had had it towed off as he had done on several previous occasions.

  “Gunshot killed Junior, best I can tell at the present moment. Very large caliber. In the back.”

  “I don’t even have a gun.”

  “Well, Bob, you maybe might would think that is a point in your favor,” Doc allowed.

  “Malcolm’s going to take this hard.”

  Doc shrugged philosophically.

  “Malcolm sees what he sees, Bob, so the child can entertain some fantastic notions very seriously. He’ll probably invent a story where his daddy’s the hero,” Doc suggested. “Anyway, I don’t believe that Malcolm has seen Joe Junior in several years. Perhaps that will make the situation easier on him.”

  I was not sure about that. Whether it would make it easier or harder on Malcolm and whether the kid had seen his daddy recently or not. I suspected Malcolm had seen his daddy, down by the creek, indeed had been supplying Joe Pickens Junior with potted meat and cigarettes and Coca-Colas for at least a couple of days judging by the trash I had seen around the creekside fire pit.

  “Was Joe Junior always a problem, Doctor?”

  “He wasn’t a ‘bad kid,’ if that’s what you’re asking, Bob.” The doctor considered. “Junior was just a wee bit too stupid to be smart and a wee bit too smart to be stupid, if you understand what that means.”

  I nodded since the same might be said of me.

  “Junior used to attend Melissa’s summer camp, Camp Osage, along with pretty much all the rest of the cast of young characters around here and it was just remarkable how Junior could figure out games and crafts and get along fine with people and then he’d do something so stupid it would be remarkable. The main problem with Joe Junior was that he was just smart enough to get himself in serious trouble and too stupid to get himself out of it.”

  “Not like Warnell?”

  “Warnell’s intelligence is about on par with a box of hair stored in the back room,” the doctor said. “But that is not his fault. Warnell was dropped on his head several times,” the doctor said. “I actually once dropped him myself when he was just a few days old.” Dr. Williams nodded. “But Warnell, defective as he is, has at least been wit
h the program around here. Not like Joe Junior, who had to go off and do his own thing and never did get with the program around here.”

  “Never got with the program,” I repeated.

  “Some people just don’t, Bob. Some people just stay stupid and don’t ever get with the program and just won’t change their ways.” The driver looked sideways at me, then looked back at the road. “I won’t mention any more names, Bob.”

  “People don’t change much, do they, Doctor?”

  “Unfortunately just a few things that I’ve noticed really change people, Bob—drug addiction, electroshock and the Conversion Experience. Not much else seems to make a fundamental difference.”

  “Including summer camp?”

  “The women, my wife especially, thought they were making a positive difference in those kids’ lives, Bob. I was hardly in the position to tell them they weren’t. To look at those kids all grown up now you would have to say Camp Osage did not exactly turn out as the women planned.”

  “What does, Doctor?”

  “Exactly, Bob.”

  The physician smiled nostalgically.

  “But it did have its moments, Bob. Camp Osage surely did have several of those.”

  The graveyard going by on our right was a collection of upstanding white stones.

  “What do you mean, Doctor?”

  “It’s not something I want to discuss right now, Bob. It really is local business, which means it is not your business and the only reason I have given you as much information as I have is to impress upon you the importance of personal space.”

  “Personal space?”

  “You might want to expand yours, Bob. Say, to Hot Springs. I understand you are partial to Hot Springs.”

  “I see,” I said.

  The doctor stopped in front of the First Rushing Evangelical True Bible Prophecy Church of the Rising Star in Jesus Christ where these promises still held forth:

  WELCOME ALL, SERVICES AT 8:30 AM SUNDAY, THE LORD’S DAY. THE CORRECT AND GOOD NEWS AS PROCLAIMED BY THE GOSPEL AND DELIVERED BY THE RIGHT REVEREND JOE PICKENS, SENIOR, MINISTER OF THE FAITH.

  I looked at Doc. He seemed to be dismissing me.

  “I just thought you maybe might would appreciate the little walk home from here, Bob. Stretch the old legs out.”

  I opened the door.

  “Thanks for the ride, Doc. And the information.”

  “Hot Springs is nice, Bob. Just what the doctor ordered, I believe.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Yes, it is, Doctor.”

  “Let a word to the wise suffice, Bob?”

  “Sure, Doctor.”

  I got out of the ME’s car, shut the door.

  Doc drove off.

  I headed home with that wise word ringing in my ears.

  CHAPTER 9

  I walked in the middle of the road. The blister on my heel was a dull throb.

  Jacob Wells’s cows in my unfenced fields shuffled and lowed. I stopped and threw rocks at them until my sore shoulder gave out, then I went on.

  The air was hot in my lungs and my body was hot, flushed as if I had been working all day in the garden. Chinos chafed my legs and my T-shirt clung to me like a second, dirty skin. I peeled it off and wiped the sweat from my face, my scalp.

  The late-summer sky was tilted fully at night, the gibbous moon inserting itself like a bookmark through a hazy, dark book of clouds.

  My chickens would be glad to have me safely home. I heard their scratching on the warped boards of the front screenporch.

  A dog growled when my loafers crunched on the driveway. I picked up a handful of pea gravel to throw, thinking it was one of the Wellses’ mutts escaped their pens and gone awandering.

  From the shadows under the porch hobbled a short-one-leg hound.

  “Stank?”

  The old bluetick barked once, bent her head into my knee, whined. I scratched her ass, looked up the sideyard and saw the scabrously rusted propane tank, saw my Cadillac. And saw the gleaming grille of a big, well-tended tow truck.

  “Tammy Fay?”

  Stank hobbled toward her mistress’s vehicle. I followed.

  My mechanic was asleep in the front seat of her truck. Her arm was crooked and propped on the open window, the sleeve of her coveralls rolled up above her biceps to expose the white skin of her elbow.

  The soft flesh on the inside angle of her left arm was tracked with the scars of intravenous drug use. Years’ worth of heavy use and a fresh dot of congealed blood.

  That didn’t surprise me. We are all attracted to types.

  Tammy Fay snored softly. Sweat sheened her upper lip.

  My beat-up Ford pickup was still hooked and hanging by a thick steel thread from her tow truck.

  Her head was tilted back on the bench seat. On the shotgun side floorboard was a stuffed-tight army-green duffel bag with glossy fashion and pulp True Story magazines piled atop it. A corner of a red leather suitcase poked from under a tarp on the tow truck’s rear bed.

  Tammy Fay’s swollen lips were cracked and parted. I touched a fingerend to her bottom lip and she stirred, opened her puffy eyes.

  I put the finger in my mouth, tasted salt and spit and cigarettes, savored the smell of her hair, of grease and oil and sweet skin.

  She stretched. When she shook her hair out I saw the golden wedding band on the gold-link chain around her neck.

  “You surprised me, Bob. I just came out to bring…”

  I walked toward the back of the house.

  “I just came to bring your truck back,” she said. “Preacher Pickens called me to tow it, but I just towed it here instead of into town.”

  Those logistics did not sound likely.

  I didn’t turn around, just kept walking.

  On the slab patio Stank was facing off with one of Jake Wells’s sheep, squared nose to nose with a big ewe.

  “Get her, Stank,” I said.

  The sheep bolted at the sound of my voice and the dog chased after her, well as the dog could on three legs, limping into the back field.

  I mounted the steps, stopped on the back porch to grab a couple of beers out of the refrigerator, opened the screen door, switched on the kitchen lights against the darkness, let the screen door slam shut behind me.

  I plugged the drain of one side of the double basin kitchen sink and filled it half full with cold tap water, dipped my dirty T-shirt into the water, soaked it loaded, squeezed it empty over my head. I screwed the cap off a beer and took a long draught, pulled the soggy stick-it note from Motel 6 out of the pocket of the wet T-shirt, reread the information there.

  Leo King, 483 Babcock St., Arkadelphia, Arkansas.

  An engine started up, the winch whined, but I didn’t look out the kitchen window. I killed the beer, went to the front porch and checked on my chickens. Malcolm had fed them but I changed their fouled water. I returned inside, went into the bathroom and took a long, chilling shower, scrubbed myself, from head to toe with lye soap and a rough loofah, washed myself until I squeaked. Cleaned my fingernails, between my toes, every little nook and cranny of me, until I was clean as a whistle.

  I figured Tammy Fay was gone.

  Naked, I padded barefooted back into the kitchen for the other beer I’d left on the counter.

  From the back porch the distinctive sound of a Zippo lighter unhinged with a clink!

  Tammy Fay’s face, behind the warped screen of the back door, was briefly illuminated as she lit a cigarette with a green G. I. issued Zippo. Her features were raised up and hollowed out by that small flame, the lines on her face, around her deep-set eyes, around her wide mouth, on her broad forehead, were grooved and deeper than I had seen them before.

  She blew smoke through the screen between us. I put the beer down on the countertop.

  “Hey,” she said. “You. Bob.”

  I went to her straight as a divining rod to deep buried water. She put a hand against mine to hold it there on the screen and I could feel her palm hot through the wire mesh, f
eel her skin. Water dripped off my spine and a breeze went past us both, from outside to inside and it chilled me to a shiver.

  She closed her eyes and pressed her lips together, dropped her hand from the screen and let me push the door open to her. I stepped onto the porch and put my hand on her face, open against her cheek, and she leaned into my hand and kissed my palm. That hand quaked and moved down her long neck, traced a line over the tanned triangle below her chin, fingered the zipper of her coveralls where her flesh was soft and encaved, hollow at the base of her throat, soft. I took hold of that zipper and dragged it down, over the gold chain, over the gold ring, between her breasts and to the cleft of her legs.

  She was naked underneath.

  The cigarette slipped from between her fingers, discharged sparks against my bare feet, burned my skin.

  She bit her lower lip and swayed slightly backward and then leaned into me, took my hand and guided it to her breast, put her mouth on my neck and bit into me.

  “Tammy…,” I said because that was pretty much it for me at that moment, just her.

  She bit my lip, drew blood.

  “Shut up,” she warned.

  She dragged me down the back steps, to the garden where the dirt was crusty dry on top and wet underneath. Her coveralls were now undone to her waist and my mouth fell to her breasts, to her nipples, and she moaned and fell back on the dirt as I worked the coveralls off her, explored her skin, felt the scars on her arms and the scars on her back and ass, as I buried my face in her and tasted her, smelled her like the dirt. My tongue, my fingers tested her to the curved bone, drew a dry, hoarse scream.

  In the back field a dog howled and a sheep bleated and the woman’s breath rattled as she pulled me up on her, into her and forced her teeth into my shoulder.

  Blood ran and her nails on my back were a rake. I augured into her and she moaned very loud as they do in pornographic films. The sky above us was distant and vaulted and, to me, there was nobody in the world but us for a moment.

  Lights flashed, a star exploded and a hot breeze blew over the garden, to shake loose seeds from the fibrous, dried-out pods of okra. She dug her hands into my ass, raised her knees and pulled me deep, yelled, “Hard!”

  I tried to be hard.

  “Hard! Hard! Hard!”