Burn What Will Burn Read online

  “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.

  “My mother was a Roberts,” Baxter told me and seemed disinclined to tell me more.

  “So, that’s your mother buried in Rushing Cemetery?”

  Baxter did not say yes and did not say no.

  “Your daddy still alive?” I pressed.

  Baxter shrugged then squinted, which I thought was an unusual gestural reply to that simple question. I did not pester him about his family as I did not like to get pestered about mine. The sheriff lowered his side window, tossed his live cigarette.

  “High fire hazard out here now,” I said, though every fool in the state of Arkansas knew this about that summer: red, white and black DANGER: NO OPEN BURNING signs were posted pretty much all over that droughty part of the country that summer.

  Baxter raised his window, punched in the cigarette lighter on the dashboard, waited until it popped, then lit a fresh unfiltered, exhaled into the windscreen.

  I coughed.

  “Good fire clean this valley right out,” he said.

  * * *

  We rode past other remnants of failed Rushing.

  Point seven miles south of Mean Joe’s current establishment of UPUMPIT! were the remnants of the original Pickens Family Mercantile Store now just three chisel-cut granite steps that led to a pile of weathered gray boards with nails in them like gunshot wounds bleeding rust. Nearby there four tarpaper shacks huddled together in an overgrown field where granite miners had once tried to eke a living out of the hills. The walls of these old hovels were collapsed by the load of their roofs and canted uniquely as each fought gravity from a different angle, but all were dedicated to the decomposition and disappearance of another failed, human venture.

  “That’s why you moved up here,” Baxter told me.

  I was not sure what he was talking about. I thought he would ask about the dead man. He didn’t.

  I shrugged.

  “Family ties,” he explained. “That’s what brought you up here last year.”

  My twice great-grandfather, the last of the Reynoldses to die in Arkansases, was decomposed in a pine box in the unregenerate dirt of Rushing Cemetery; but that presence didn’t seem much an enticement to relocate from the posh, Gulf Shore condo I had been in, moved into after my wife’s death.

  But I had never been comfortable in a condo—the carpet was always dirty and stained, the neighbors too loud, the parking lots around the place just heat collectors, the mailboxes jammed full of flyers for real estate and car washes and cheap furniture.

  “Could not say what brought me up here,” I admitted.

  Rushing did not feel like Home. But you had to be somewhere and the persistent poverty of the place, the hard lines of the hills, the rocky fields that yielded little spoke, someway, to my condition, rose familiar in my impending middle ages from an artesian depth that my old home folks seemed preserved in.

  I was newish rich now, living like old poor for reasons somewhat uncertain even to me.

  “Who knows exactly what moves people to do what they do,” I told the sheriff, something he knew already probably, that blood, a man’s nature, is thick, runs deep, is hard to shake or slake and that life is too usually just about living, surviving somewhere or anywhere.

  What was left of the old schoolhouse went by on the right. Jacob Wells had stripped it to a skeleton, relocated the dry-rotted wallboards to his place, piling the useless lumber between his collection of bald tires and his cadre of rusted-out propane tanks and his army of dysfunctional household appliances and log skidders, thrown a blue plastic tarpaulin over the worm-eaten planks, because that was my neighbor’s fine idea of progress—to get whatever he could onto his dog-chewed piece of property and get a blue, plastic tarp over it.

  “You don’t get along with your neighbor, I hear,” the sheriff said as we passed by the Wells place.

  “The Twins shoot holes in my mailbox, shoot at my truck, call me names. Jacob’s dogs shit in my yard. His sheep and goats eat my garden. And I can’t hardly leave my house without some Wells or another coming over and stealing whatever he or she can steal from my house. Jacob even stole the hay out of my field when I went off to Hot Springs for a weekend. Came in and cut it and baled it and moved it all out in two days.”

  Baxter grunted.

  “I know what you’re saying, Mister. Jake Wells was boxing the fox, stealing apples out of my daddy’s orchard since he could walk. You move into country like this, though, you got to expect what you get.”

  “He’s no account, as far as I’m concerned,” I said. “And too stupid to drag a board around the house.”

  “Out here, Mister Reynolds,” the sheriff advised me, “you just got to know who you’re doing business with.”

  We passed the First Rushing Evangelical True Bible Prophecy Church of the Rising Star in Jesus Christ.

  “You know the Reverend Pickens?” I asked.

  “Mean Joe married my folks, buried my mother and baptized me,” the lawman said.

  Baxter didn’t seem the baptized type.

  “You know him and his grandson, the Retard, pretty good,” Baxter said to me, pointedly I thought.

  “I know his grandson, Malcolm, pretty good,” I said.

  “So I hear tell,” Baxter said, as he braked in front of my place.

  * * *

  We sat the car for half a minute. I counted.

  The sheriff didn’t say anything, so I just waited, counted up and then counted down to calm my nerves.

  “Malcolm’s worried about his daddy,” I said finally.

  “He has got good reason to worry,” the sheriff said. “Junior’s jumped bail, which was the Reverend’s last cash money lost. So if Mean Joe catches Junior he will surely tear his son a new asshole and then probably kill him outright.” The sheriff paused, then added, “and the bondsman in West Memphis has set the hardest hard-case bounty hunter in Arkansas after Junior’s ass besides.”

  “And you’re after him too, Sheriff?”

  Baxter looked at me.

  “That goes without saying, Mister.”

  I fidgeted.

  “You know where Joe Junior might be?” I asked for Malcolm’s sake.

  The sheriff cut his eyes at my house and raised his lip a fraction.

  “You might want to check for him in a burn barrel, Mr. Reynolds. That’s where trash usually winds up around here.”

  * * *

  I bought the Old Duncan Place because it was cheap property and a lot of it, but the house was a crooked, unrighteous mess. Clapboard peeled and bucked off the frame like dried-out scabs. The tin roof was streaked with deltas of rust. Thick coats of dust turned the windowpanes into privacy glass. My chickens moved listlessly on a front porch that was canted as a loading ramp, behind bugscreen wavy and patched with duct tape Xs.

  The candy-apple red, fin-tailed Cadillac convertible I had bought my dead wife, a singular indulgence, a bribe, an investment, sat beside this wrecked abode like a reminder of better times.

  It was so hard to explain to people why I lived this way that I’d quit trying. Some of us were just not meant to enjoy money.

  “Still got your Texas plates on the Caddy,” Baxter noticed. “So you’re not planning on staying around here then, I take
it. Little slow out here for you, Mister Reynolds?”

  I shrugged.

  I had no idea whether I was leaving soon, or staying put for a while. That depended. I didn’t like it here especially, but I didn’t dislike it either. I had local interests. It was someplace to be.

  Baxter drew hard on his cigarette, forced smoke out his nose, looked at me, at the house, at the Cadillac, then back at me. He shook his head as if all that did not add up. He chain lit another Camel, rolled down his side window and tossed the old butt on the road. That one cigarette, under the correct circumstances, could ignite a fire to burn my whole hundred acres, a thousand beyond, burn black the whole valley.

  He rolled his window back up.

  “You letting me out here?” I asked.

  Baxter accelerated down the road.

  “Seems you said he was down this way,” the sheriff told me.

  A hot bead of sweat slid down my spine, dripped off my tailbone.

  “Did I?”

  Baxter aimed his gray eyes at me, lifted that corner of his mouth again.

  “I do believe it is what you said, Mister.”

  He sounded as if he was reminding me of a deal we had made a long time before.

  “I suppose I said he was a ‘he’ too.”

  I stared at my little hands, swollen fat by the heat. I clenched and unclenched them, twisted the tight wedding band on the heart’s finger of my left hand, felt a golden edge cut hard into the flesh between my knuckles, pressed my palm against my shirt front, felt the other wedding band, the dead man’s property hanging there against my skin.

  “I suppose you did say it, Mister.”

  I nodded, stared out my side window. Half a dozen of Jacob’s sheep, shaggy and dirty as a junkie’s hair-do, grazed in my front forty like it was common ground.

  “He is down by the creek,” I said. “I pulled him out of the water. He’s on the northside bank.”

  We were near the bridge. Baxter slowed the cruiser to a crawl.

  “He better be,” the sheriff said. “Because I’d hate to come all the way out here for nothing.”

  * * *

  It seemed though that he had.