Burn What Will Burn Page 12

  Like that was not just a request but a statement of fact and meant something about the world maybe but nothing much, really, about me, Bob Reynolds, at all.

  And then she shivered and cried out again, moaned and wrapped her long legs around my waist, her long arms around my ribs and crushed me to her, opened her eyes, finally, and looked at me, commanded,

  “Come in me now.”

  And I did, like I hadn’t for a very long time.

  * * *

  She pushed me off, gathered up her discarded work boots her coveralls, went inside.

  A minute later the shower came on and she screamed curses because there’s no hot water in my house, just very cold water from a very deep artesian well.

  * * *

  It was several minutes before I realized I was being watched.

  Leaning on the hood of Tammy Fay’s tow truck Warnell Ames, Miss Ollie’s son, snickered.

  A camera light flashed and he took another picture of me.

  * * *

  She was standing in the kitchen, dressed in one of my white dress shirts, a pair of clean chinos cinched round her waist with my favorite necktie. It was the tie, red silk with a neat print of yellow, I’d worn for my momma’s funeral and many years later for my own wedding.

  A good necktie is a good investment.

  Her boots were in one hand, a beer in the other. A cigarette dangled from a pouty lip.

  I walked past her and into the bedroom where her dirty coveralls were tossed atop my dirty clothes pile. I dressed in a pair of cleaned and pressed chinos and a fresh-from-the-package white T-shirt, antifungal socks and one of my many pairs of sensible walking shoes, then returned to the kitchen.

  She was leaning over the sink, staring through the screen into the sideyard.

  “Warnell! You idiot, get the hell out of the driver’s seat!”

  “Warnell’s not exactly a credible witness,” I said. “Or a dependable accomplice.”

  She turned, leaned her ass against the counter, dropped her boots on the floor, dragged on her unfiltered coffin nail.

  “You cannot even imagine, Bob.” She sighed, blew out smoke. “Warnell doesn’t even know how to drive a fucking car. Which has made things pretty complicated of late. But I do have a tow truck. And Warnell is big and strong. And faithful as a stupid dog. Has been forever.” Tammy Fay seemed to reconsider her sidekick. “Actually Warnell, he’s pretty handy. Idiot Warnell ties up loose ends pretty good, him just being him and being so faithful to me and all. He surely does.”

  “It’s surprising what people can accomplish when you take full advantage of them,” I suggested. “People can downright surprise you when you pressure them enough,” I said.

  “You take what you can get and work things out, don’t you, Bob?”

  “I suppose you do,” I agreed. I had.

  “Anyway a picture’s worth the word of a thousand idiots, right, Bob? And the best insurance a girl like me can get is photographic evidence.” She looked at me sideways. “Besides, do you think anyone wouldn’t believe you fucked me if you had the chance? That you wouldn’t be my sugar daddy if I let you? That you wouldn’t do anything for me if you were my little john? Any crazy thing at all, Bob?”

  These were more rhetorical questions, so I didn’t answer them.

  “You’re smart enough to understand all this, aren’t you Bob?” she asked me.

  I wasn’t sure if I was or if I wasn’t.

  “I don’t care what everybody says about you, Bob. You are not the crazy stupid guy people think you are. You are actually pretty smart, aren’t you, Bob?”

  I said nothing to that backhanded compliment that damned me with faint praise, considering the local intelligence level.

  “So?” she asked me. “What?”

  The “so what” seemed to be (as far as I could ascertain it on available information) that in the very recent past Joe Pickens Junior had been hiding on the creek side of The Little Piney (with his son, Malcolm provisioning him) and Joe Pickens Junior had witnessed Warnell and Tammy Fay dumping Buck King’s body into The Little Piney (for whatever reason they had to do that and on whatever day at whatever time, I didn’t know), then Warnell (or Tammy Fay herself, though that seemed less likely) had probably also shot and killed Joe Pickens Junior, in order to eliminate Joe Pickens Junior as a witness (who might want to trade such eyewitness testimony about a murder one for a plea bargain on his own dope-dealing rap).

  The timetable was hard to figure, but Buck was drowned sometime shortly after I coshed him unconscious. And then Joe Pickens Junior had probably been killed (and reported by Warnell, which seemed highly unlikely, but there it was) while I was in jail.

  But I wasn’t going to ask Tammy Fay if this was how it had played out.

  She would tell me what she wanted me to know and would not confess to anything she did not want to confess to. If she needed to implicate me in Buck’s death or if she needed to pin Joe Pickens Junior’s death on me, then she would try to do that. She would not hesitate to make me her scapegoat if I was the best option. That was plain.

  “Poor Bob. Everybody in town knows you sit over there on Elm Street in the morning with your big ol’ binoculars and your little old dick, jerking off in your truck behind Miss Ollie’s azalea bushes. Even poor Miss Ollie knows you’re obsessed with me,” Tammy Fay said. She looked at me like as a dead catfish ready for the fishnet. “Stalker, is what you are, Bob. And everybody around here knows that because I have told everybody about it and even have pictures of you doing it. Poor Bob, jerking off in his truck when I open up my morning curtains for him.”

  “And you knew I was over there all this time, across the street from the Old Lion?” I asked. “Watching you. You never said anything to me about it.”

  “You never saw much, did you, Bob?” she asked.

  “Just enough to keep watching,” I remembered.

  “I always thought you might wind up being useful for something, Bob,” she said. “Though I also always knew I might have to let you come inside me to make you that useful.”

  I nodded.

  “Well, Bob, was it as good with me as you always imagined?”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  Why not admit it?

  “I didn’t feel much myself, Bob. A guy like you can’t really fuck a girl like me, can he?”

  She said that without rancor, without much interest really, casually, as an ethnographic observation almost, which made it even worse.

  But she said it. And it hurt me.

  But I nodded.

  She smiled, picked up the soggy stick-it note from Motel 6, smoothed it out on the countertop, exhaled through her nose.

  “Oh Buck,” she said to the sticky note. “I’m going to miss a real man’s good hard fucking, you bastard.”

  She raised an eyebrow at me, baiting me though my rising was over with her.

  “Husband?” I asked.

  She ripped the note into shreds and stuffed the shreds into the drain of the sink, stuffed in her cigarette after them and ran some cold water over them.

  “Why, Bob Reynolds, Buck King was an old man, just like you. Not quite old enough to be my daddy in the regular world, but he did not miss it by much.”

  “Was he your daddy?”

  She moved her head. Her long hair was wet along the edges.

  “Not in any biological sense,” she said. She looked pensive then or something other than cruel. “I have had a lot of daddies, Bob. And Buck used to pretend he was Daddy sometimes. When I was especially naughty. But generally he was more the husband type, even though we never actually could get legally married since he’s already married, has been since high school to his prom queen sweetheart.” Tammy Fay laughed, sarcastically I thought, and touched the jewelry on her neck. “We traded rings though. A long time ago.”

  She touched the gold band chained around her neck, the one I had taken off the neck of the dead man from the creek, from around Buck’s thick, red neck and that the
High Sheriff of Poe County had taken back from me and given to Tammy Fay—the industrious black widow in my great big rural route mailbox could not have constructed a more elaborate web. And with the exact same amount of consciousness.

  “I see,” I said. And I did see. I thought, at least, that I understood a good bit now.

  She gathered loose tobacco off her lip with her tongue, then spit it out.

  “Maybe you do, Bob. A fellow like you … Maybe you do see how it is with some men, some people.” Tammy Fay nodded. “Buck, he just had this crazy thing for me. From the time I was just little, he had a thing for me. Not love, but something.”

  She started to work bare toes into a work boot.

  “You know how that is, Bob?” she asked “Obsession?”

  “I might,” I said. “So what now?” I asked.

  “So now, thanks to you, Bob Reynolds, I am a free woman.”

  “Thanks to me?” I asked.

  She nodded, slipped the other foot into the other work boot.

  “You delivered the blow with your binoculars, Bob. That blow was not fatal, but it disarmed him enough so that Idiot out there and me could deal with Buck. I hadn’t been able to deal with him for years and it was just getting worse with ol’ Buck.”

  “I understand,” I said. I was a tool. I understood that.

  “Hard to believe you could do it,” Tammy Fay said. “Hard to believe you had it in you. And it was very hard, very, very hard to ever catch Buck unawares. But I guess you caught him off guard and a righteous whack with a pair of big-ass binoculars did the trick for us, didn’t it?”

  “You found him unconscious and that was a good opportunity for you,” I said. “And you are an opportunistic predator, aren’t you, Tammy Fay?”

  “It was a good opportunity, Bob. And yes, I am an opportunist, so I took advantage of the good opportunity you provided me with.”

  “I understand,” I said. “Buck was getting to be a problem.”

  “I’ve been trying for several years now to get rid of Buck,” she said. “You know how hard it can be to get rid of somebody who’s in your life but weights you down so much, you feel like you’re swimming in mud, don’t you, Bob?”

  I nodded. I did know about that perfectly well.

  “But you have to get rid of them so you can move on with your life. Right, Bob?”

  I said nothing, admitted nothing.

  “But what with one thing and another I just never got around to getting rid of ol’ Buck. That man was pesky and persistent. Has been for fifteen years.” She shrugged a shrug that explained a lot.

  “Why didn’t you just leave?” I asked.

  “You don’t understand the situation around here,” Tammy Fay told me.

  She thumped the flesh of her inner arm and winked at me, explaining somewhat the situation.

  “Something of a bird nest on the ground, you might say,” she said. “Though the downside is way down.”

  “So you didn’t leave because your drugs were here?” I asked.

  “I didn’t leave before now because the circumstances were never exactly right for me to leave before now. And, you don’t know Buck, but Buck would have found me. He was the best bounty hunter in this part of the world. He would have tracked me down.” She shrugged again. “And then who knows what would have happened. Me dead instead of him, probably.”

  “But the circumstances got right recently,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Exactly right, Bob.”

  “You saw your boyfriend Buck laid out, knocked out unconscious in his car and Warnell was right there to help load him on your truck and take him to the creek and dumped him in and you just couldn’t resist that opportunity.”

  “Golden opportunities don’t grow on trees, Bob,” Tammy Fay said.

  “No,” I said. “They don’t.”

  She sighed, sort of nostalgically.

  “He was a good fuck, Bob. And Buck, he took care of me and my expensive little habit all these years.”

  She massaged the inside of her arm.

  “But it was getting a little old, you know? I’m getting a little old, Bob. Fourteen years plus with that bastard was just too long with that bastard. Buck would never have let me go either. Not free and clear. He was just too crazy about it, you know? We were too connected. He couldn’t just let me walk. That was never going to happen.”

  I nodded.

  “And life’s too short. You know what I mean, Bob? I was crazy about him for a while. When I was a kid I thought he was the one and only shit. He was a handsome bastard. And when he came back from the Corps I even let him get me hooked. Got that little master-slave thing going when I was a kid. But even that’s got old. You know what I mean, Bob?”

  “Yes.”

  Obsession can get old, even obsession can get old. And there arrives a time when you have just had enough. There are limits to patience, even the patience of a spider must wear out eventually.

  “There are limits,” I agreed.

  “You do understand me, Bob.”

  “Better than you might imagine,” I agreed.

  She smiled, pursed her lips.

  When she moved toward the door I grabbed her arm.

  “Let me go, Bob.”

  “I thought you liked it rough.”

  She glared at me.

  “Warnell!” she called for her bodyguard who hulked on the back porch.

  I let her go, backed away.

  She put her hand on the screen door.

  “So now you’re leaving,” I said.

  “To parts completely unknown, Bob. So, if you were thinking of following me, forget that thought.”

  “I wasn’t. I wasn’t thinking that thought at all.”

  “You’re a smart boy, Bob. Not too pretty, but smart. And if I ever have need of you, I’ll be in touch.”

  She pushed open the screen door. On the back porch steps, breathing heavy, Warnell waited.

  She turned back to me.

  “I’ve got to give Idiot here another hand job and then I’ll be out of this country, Bob. Probably out of your hair for good.”

  “What about the sheriff?”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Who do you think the High Drug Lord is around here, Bob?”

  I nodded.

  “And Joe Pickens Junior?”

  She shrugged.

  “Joe Junior was always stupid enough to think he was smarter than everybody else, Bob. Or let me say Junior was always just smart enough to get in on the shit and then to just get the short end of it.”

  “So you, or Warnell, shot and killed Joe Pickens Junior? Did you find Buck King’s gun and shoot Joe Junior with it?”

  “Bob, really…” When Tammy Fay shook her head her honey-blond hair hid her eyes for a moment and then revealed them again, staring at me. “I said Joe Junior was stupid, I didn’t say I was.” She paused, then added, “Let’s just say things worked out in a local way.”

  “Quite a place this place,” I said.

  “You cannot imagine, Bob.”

  She leaned against the screen door as if she were weary.

  “Just to warn you, Bob. Because you are sort of nice, in a loser way. Buck’s got to turn up. He is a respectable citizen in our community. He’s a deacon in the Second Baptist Church. He has a wife and kids and clients, even lawyers and judges and doctors upstanding, who will ask questions. His daddy is Dick King, King of Tires.”

  “That could get sticky,” I suggested.

  She shrugged and did not seem too concerned.

  “Sammy will take care of it. Sammy’s good at stuff like that. And you’ll be all right if you stay out of Sammy’s way. He won’t bother you, because you’ve got money and your own lawyers. But if any of you screw with me…”

  “You’ve got pictures,” I said.

  “And I’ve got stories to go along with my pictures, Bob. All recorded. All safely hidden away here and there and everywhere.” She looked at me again and raise
d a dark eyebrow. “And now you’re in the pictures and in this story too.”

  “I am,” I said.

  She stepped off the back porch onto the slab patio and headed toward the tow truck.

  “You ready for your hand job, Idiot?” she asked Warnell, who was drooling on the back patio, staring at her.

  “Whole thing, Tammy,” Warnell said. “I get the whole thing this time,” he pleaded. “Just like him.” He pointed across her at me, standing on the patio. He was fairly slobbering.

  “We’ll see about what you get when we get to the Slough,” Tammy Fay said.

  She walked to the truck with her lapdog leashed to her.

  “Good-bye,” I said to her.

  She did not even look at me.

  They left in the tow truck.

  CHAPTER 10

  She had forgotten half a crushed pack of Pall Malls in a pocket of her coveralls. I kept the cigarettes and burned the coveralls in the backyard trash barrel down to pure ash and a long metal zipper. For a long time I sat on the back steps smoking her cigarettes even though I do not normally smoke.

  I had spent a lot of time sitting on those steps over the last few months, staring at my weedy fields, on the lookout for my neighbor’s livestock, waiting for the sun to rise or set. Waiting for something to happen. Now something had happened and I waited for it to be over.

  This too will pass, I told myself. Like all else, this too will pass and she will be gone, physically at first and then from my memory and eventually there will be nothing to remember about her that I don’t care to remember because life is mostly memories and projections and so controllable, if your mind has the correct control dials.

  I tried to pretend it was just another such time, a time that would pass as just another memory.

  But then Stank limped out of the back field and started barking.

  “Oh shit.”

  Stank whined.

  “This is pushing it,” I told the dog.

  The old hound barked, then sniffed my crotch.

  I did not want a dog.

  “I have got my limits,” I told Stank.

  Stank barked hoarsely.

  I raised my hand but could not hit her.

  I walked off, toward The Little Piney.

  Stank bounced after me. She was slow, but seemed persistent. I decided to let her run herself out, pick her up on the way back.