Burn What Will Burn Read online

  To distract myself I skimmed an account summary from First National Bank of Bertrandville which told me how much I was worth in Arkansas, then scanned a few other missives of a fiduciary type to refresh my memory about how much I was worth in North Dakota, New York, Texas and elsewhere.

  “That banking stuff, Bob Reynold?”

  I nodded.

  I’ve never been entirely comfortable with my money. It has never seemed my own, but always my daddy’s who was a sort of stock character, the Midwestern Businessman who goes somewhat global, but whose wife stayed at home and still shopped at the Salvation Army and spent most of her time at church.

  I would complain about my daddy, but he did always maintain me, if not in high style at least in some style. He really, simply ignored me. And his success in the world did not ever really rub off on me, but not a lot does rub off on me—my skin is as thick against success as it is against failure.

  Malcolm handed me a bottle of Coca-Cola. Ice oozed up the curved neck. I sucked out the frozen soda pop.

  The kid hung on the sidewall of the pickup, resting on his armpits, slack as a heat-struck snake. True South, Malcolm was a boy who knew a hundred ways to take a load off and save his strength in deadening heat.

  “You rich as Solomon’s mind, ain’t you, Bob Reynold?”

  “Near enough to suit me,” I admitted.

  Malcolm nodded like that was important information.

  “And where you get it all from again?”

  The kid had trouble understanding that most of the rich people in the world didn’t earn their wealth with good ideas and hard work.

  I’d never had a real career. Just hung around and pretended to be a poet until money came to me and then invested it, prudently. I am a cautious but shrewd investor with pathologically plain tastes who can be very aggressive when the mood strikes but seldom makes a move in the market or elsewhere without assaying the risks and covering my ass.

  My stockbroker says I am an opportunistic predator. Camouflaged.

  “Inheritance,” I reminded the kid. “My parents died. And then my wife…”

  “She drug overdose because y’all’s baby pass,” the kid reminded me.

  I had told him about my wife, how I’d met her during graduate school where we were both “poets” of some but not the same sort—as I could actually write a bit and she could only pose as a poet—then courted her, bought her a (nice and classic, I thought) used Cadillac, married her, indulged and endured her alive, suffered her dead, insured her to the hilt.

  Malcolm figured my wife and I had needed Jesus in our life to make our marriage work. Which was exactly what he thought everybody needed about everything. If you didn’t catch fish you needed Jesus. If you had a headache or got a rash or fell down the steps you needed Jesus. If you lost your car keys you needed Jesus, etc., etc.

  I, actually, could not argue with him about all that. Because who knew why you lost your car keys when you knew right where you had put them, why your mother got lung cancer when neither she nor anybody around her ever smoked, why some watermelons would be just the right firm and sweet and some mealy and soured and inedible and all from the same patch, planted and picked on the same days?

  “Your explanation is close enough to the truth to be its cousin,” I told my friend.

  Malcolm did not seem to be pondering out my statement. He looked at me and squinted.

  “My daddy sell dope. You think he kill you wife wit his dope?”

  “No, Malcolm.” I shook my head. “Your daddy selling Arkansaweed had nothing to do with my wife’s death way down in Texas.”

  “You sure, Bob Reynold? You know my daddy he very successful at dope selling. And they say his dope is pretty strong.”

  “I’m fairly certain your daddy did not have anything to do with my wife’s death, Malcolm.” Indeed, I knew for a fact it didn’t.

  “You swear on Jesus Rising Star?”

  “Sure,” I said because it never bothered me to swear to any useful statements. “I swear on Jesus Rising Star.”

  Malcolm was quiet for a long moment. I imagined he was reflecting on Death and the Hereafter or some other religious topic. But he was not.

  “I don’t ’spect I’ll get anything when he pass, will I?”

  “Who you mean, Malcolm?” I asked.

  “Daddy,” he said. “And PaPaw. Momma if she aroun’. I won’t get no ’heritance from any them, will I?”

  I shook my head, because it didn’t seem at all likely Malcolm would inherit anything from his people. Most weed dealers in that area, once everything was said and done, netted less money than the waitresses at Shoney’s, all lived like trash and absolutely always wound up nailed and jailed. And Mean Joe’s place of business, UPUMPIT!, and his church were mortgaged to the hilt, from what Miss Ollie Ames at EAT had told me, so Malcolm wouldn’t get anything when his granddad Pickens died either, save for crippling debt or, if he was lucky, a big fat zero and some help from Social Services.

  I stared at my financial statements. I had nearly enough money to burn a wet mule, but you usually can’t buy what you want.

  Maybe that’s why I lived like I did, like I didn’t have anything. Because I couldn’t have what I wanted anyway. Maybe I was just genetically cheap. That accusation had been made.

  “So what were you doing downtown, Malcolm Ray?” I flipped our conversation from the financial page to the gossip column.

  Nobody in our little enclave ever ventured much farther from home than to Doker for gas and groceries or to the Walmart at Bertrandville for larger purchases, unless they were making a beer run to a wet town across some county line or headed to the nearest hospital.

  (Tiny and isolated as our “community” was, the Rushing Valley people still seemed to get up to regular excitement—Faith Sue and Jacob Wells were in constant domestic dispute and their twins, Isaac and Newton, were perpetually on the way to the emergency room at Northwest Arkansas Regional Medical Center; Malcolm was always falling in some hole and needing to be rescued; and I was … Well, I was in constant existential crisis—making the Rushing Valley, even small as it was, a microcosm of the world as much as anyplace else, I suppose.)

  Malcolm did not like to get farther north than the store or farther south than the creek or go much beyond the hills that narrowly defined the Rushing Valley on the east and west. But he did once or twice a week have to drive Mean Joe’s old Buick into Doker when the reverend needed something from town he didn’t have at UPUMPIT!, like a fresh supply of live bait.

  “Cricket s’posed to come in.”

  His granddad kept crickets in a ventilated plywood box in the back of the store and pint containers full of nightcrawlers in the Coca-Cola cooler. Fishermen on their way west to The Little Piney State Park bought them, occasionally.

  I tapped the crystal of my watch again, but the sweep hand was not stirred. So, it would stay seven thirty-three, which would at least be accurate one more time that day.

  I finished my Coke, which was tepid already. The tranquilizers made me woozy.

  “You see anybody strange around downtown lately?” I asked after a while.

  Malcolm didn’t answer.

  “Well?”

  “May be I did.”

  He looked off, avoiding my stare.

  “You did.”

  Malcolm shook his head.

  “Bible says not to tell a lie, Malcolm Ray.”

  “I know ’bout the Bible more’n you, Bob Reynold,” Malcolm said, sore on this point with me. “Ain’t telling no lie.”

  “Sin of omission,” I said. “Leaving something out is just as bad as making something up.” I did not believe this, but it was a useful axiom to weaponize on occasion against people who actually occupied and operated on moral high ground like Malcolm.

  Malcolm glared at me.

  “You tell me why you’re calling up Sheriff—I tell you who I seen downtown,” he bargained.

  It would be common knowledge soon anyway, what I
had found in The Little Piney.

  “When I was taking my walk this morning I saw a man in the creek,” I said. “Drowned.”

  Malcolm’s jaw went slack. He held his breath.

  “Who was it, Bob Reynold?”

  “Big white man, maybe late thirties or forty years old. He had a Marine tattoo right about there on his arm.”

  I touched the kid’s forearm and he jerked back, stepped away from the truck, looked up at the sky, let out a big halitosis sigh.

  “Thank You, Jesus Rising Star,” he whispered, clearly relieved, not talking to me.

  I waited.

  “Malcolm Ray? You know the fellow?”

  “It wudn’t my daddy,” he said. “He ain’t got no tattoo like that. His tattoos all ladies or monsters.”

  “Was the big, dead white man maybe who you saw downtown?”

  The kid looked at me sideways.

  “You seen him too, Bob Reynold.” He said this as an accusation, so my stomach plonked into my groin.

  I shook my head, no.

  The kid shrugged.

  “Like you say, Bob Reynold, not telling is just another way o’ lying,” Malcolm said, clearly pleased he’d turned the tables on me, but not rubbing it in. “And whichever way, it’s a sin against Jesus.”

  “Where did you see this stranger, and what was he wearing?” I asked.

  “All’s I could see was he was wearing a red shirt and he was hanging out at the Old Lion.”

  “When?”

  “One morning, couple of days ago, when I was down there acrossed the street in the Goody’s Grocery Sto’ parking lot, sitting in PaPaw’s Buick, waiting on the first Trailways bus, waiting for the Grey’s cricket.” He paused and looked at me closely and then looked away, toward the store. “You know when it was ’cause you truck was parked right there on Ellum Street, Bob Reynold. Parked right behind those ’zalea bushes back of Miss Ollie’s EAT place. Cantycornered from Miss TamFay’s place.”

  “I wasn’t in the truck,” I said.

  Malcolm shrugged.

  “I thought you was in it with your ’noculars looking over at Miss TamFay’s Old Lions.”

  “My pickup might have been there, Malcolm. Tammy Fay was working on the transmission and she might have parked it over there to clear some space in the garage. But you didn’t see me in the truck,” I insisted. “And you did not see any binoculars. I don’t even own a pair of binoculars.” I didn’t anymore, at least.

  Malcolm shrugged, looked off into the hazy blue sky.

  “What day was that?” I asked.

  He tugged on one of his outsticking ears.

  “Day ’fore yesterday, I guess. Whatever day that was.”

  “Monday?”

  “Sound right,” Malcolm said. “S’posed to get cricket in on First Day of Week, but they didn’t come in. This morning still ain’t come in yet. Must be bad time for cricket raising, wherever they raise ’em at.”

  “What was the stranger doing,” I asked, “at Tammy Fay’s place?”

  Malcolm cut his eyes at me and squinted, again.

  “Parked up under the front shed, in a blood-color car…”

  “Like a maroon-color sedan?” I asked.

  “You always fixin’ my words, Bob Reynold,” Malcolm said and shrugged. “Look blood color to me. You need to ’pologize.”

  “I apologize,” I said, meaning I apologized for my intrusive grammar and linguistic lessons since they consistently had absolutely no instructional efficacy whatsoever with my friend and so served no pedagogical purpose at all in our relationship and merely reflected the insistence of my own tastes in semantics.

  Malcolm accepted my apology with his normal good nature.

  “Thass all right, Bob Reynold.”

  “So, what was the man in the red shirt doing while he was sitting at the Old Lion in the bloodred car?”

  “Just sitting there like he was waiting to get some gas, but it hadn’t been no gas pumps there at the Old Lions in a long time and anybody can see that.”

  “The man in the car was a big man? How old would you say?”

  Malcolm stretched an earlobe.

  “Bigger’n you, Bob Reynold. Not old’s you,” Malcolm judged. “But he’s a good-looking man and had a full head of hair and hairs all over his arm even where he had it danglin’ out the car.”

  “And he wasn’t doing anything? Spying on somebody or smoking or anything?”

  “He look asleep to me,” said Malcolm. “It’s how I sleep in a car wit’ my head back and mouth open. Flycatcher, PaPaw call me when I rest like that.”

  “And you didn’t know him?”

  “He wudn’t nobody I know to name, I know that.” Malcolm seemed certain of this uncertain identification.

  “You didn’t see him and Tammy Fay talking or anything?”

  “Not just then, Bob Reynold. But that man he been around before. For some years, off ’n’ on. Friend with Doc too, I think. Just I don’t know him. He don’t come in the sto’ here.” Malcolm jerked his head toward UPUMPIT! where his grandfather hovered just in the shade of the doorway, like a watchful shadow, then moved away out of sight.

  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 Picken
s 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.