Burn What Will Burn Read online

  Behind me brush rustled. I threw a rock, more or less across the road in the general direction of the brush rustling.

  “Let that one be a warning!”

  I picked up another rock, one with better balance, I hoped.

  Briefly a pale face appeared under a tree limb. The face was vaguely familiar.

  “Hello?!” I yelled.

  The face disappeared.

  “I know it’s somebody over there,” I said, in a more conversational tone, I hoped. I was not a threat to anybody at that moment and did not want anyone to be defensive toward me.

  It wasn’t the dead man over there: that I was sure of.

  “Mr. Pickens?” I guessed. “Are you Joe Pickens Junior?”

  Nothing.

  “I’m a friend of your boy’s,” I said. I don’t know why I was proceeding, why I just didn’t leave—maybe I stayed to settle something, find out something, maybe just to do something. Maybe to find Malcolm’s daddy for him. “I’m a friend of Malcolm Ray’s,” I repeated, louder. “You can trust me,” I promised.

  I waited. A while.

  “I’m not just going away,” I said.

  A man cleared his throat.

  “Boy told me who you is, but I ain’t trust nobody.”

  “Mr. Pickens? Joe Pickens Junior?” I asked.

  Though I was pretty sure now who the man hiding by the creek was, if not where he was or what he meant to do.

  “I don’t mean you no harm, Man,” he said. “So don’t throw no more rocks.”

  “I apologize,” I said. “It was an accident.”

  “Best not be no mo’ accident again, Man, or I will fetch you up for reckoning.”

  That sounded like something the Right Reverend Pickens, Mean Joe, would say to Malcolm when he was mad at him.

  “You don’t have a gun, do you, Mr. Pickens?”

  I had been beaten plenty of times, from forever, for reasons various and sundry, some probably justified, but I’d never been shot.

  “I wished I did have a gun. But I ain’t. Whoever told you that was lying.”

  “Nobody told me anything,” I said.

  I stepped toward the road.

  “Don’t come up on me, Man,” Joe Junior warned. “Just because I ain’t got no gun don’t mean I ain’t armed.”

  There was a flash of shiny metal in the brush that could have been a soda can, but also could have been a knife.

  “All right,” I said and showed my empty hands to any part of the world that could see them.

  I had never been seriously cut before either.

  Nothing more was said for over a minute. I counted.

  “You Bob Reynold, what the boy call you,” Malcolm’s daddy said.

  “That’s right, Mr. Pickens.”

  “I know about you, Man. I know you name. The boy he keep care you chicken he said.”

  “That’s right, Mr. Pickens.”

  “But you some older’n what the boy say. The boy he ain’t right though. You see that.”

  “Malcolm’s a good boy, Mr. Pickens. I never met a better kid. You’re very lucky to have him as a son.”

  “Shit,” Malcolm’s daddy said.

  I waited.

  The man in the bushes cleared his throat.

  “He ain’t right. Fool could see that from day one.”

  “I imagine that’s more your fault than Malcolm’s, Mr. Pickens.”

  “His momma’s fault, you mean,” Joe Pickens Junior said. “That woman she a parking lot ’ho and a drunk to boot. You know about that?”

  “I heard it of her,” I said, though I had not heard this from her son, Malcolm, who thought she had gone off to make some money so she and he could have a house, with a yard and pit for his snakes and maybe even a swimming pool in the backyard.

  “Woman she got some sort a blood defection now lately,” Joe Pickens Junior said of his wife. “She be dead shortly, what I heard.”

  “That happens sometimes when people have unprotected sex with people they don’t know about, Mr. Pickens. You could be infected too,” I added.

  “Huh? What you say, Man?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just a science lesson, Mr. Pickens.”

  I gathered myself. Malcolm’s momma was dying of AIDS, probably, the boy’s daddy was hiding out from the Law in bushes alongside a nowhere creek at the end of a dead-end road … but there was a reward for Joe Pickens Junior. If I could bring him in, that reward would be mine.

  “I’m just wondering what will happen to Malcolm if you get put in jail for a long time,” I said. “If you come with me and turn yourself in it might go better on Malcolm,” I suggested. “He’s worried about you, Mr. Pickens. Your boy is worried about you.”

  “Hell,” said Joe Pickens Junior. “That boy don’t know what he’s saying half the time and don’t know where he is half the time and don’t know what he is or what he thinking all the time. I never seen a thing like that boy. How you gone live with something like that as your own boy, Man? He plain stupid, Malcolm is.”

  “Malcolm’s not the one hiding in the bushes though, Mr. Pickens.”

  Joe Pickens Junior didn’t have anything to say about that judgment for a spell; but then he asked, “You got kids, Man?”

  “No.”

  “Then shut up talking about them.”

  I sighed.

  The stupidest, most worthless people in the world could have children and know more than I did just because I didn’t have children and they did.

  “What you bring Law down here for, Man? That’s exactly what I want to know ’bout,” Joe Pickens Junior said. “The boy tell you I was down up in here?”

  “Malcolm didn’t tell me a thing except he was worried about his daddy, Mr. Pickens. I just heard at the bar in Bertrandville that you had jumped bail and that the Law was interested in seeing you and bounty hunters after you. Since I know this was your old neighborhood, I just guessed it was you in the bushes,” I said. I waited. “I swear, Mr. Pickens, it was just a guess it was you down here hiding out.”

  “So you brought Law down here to see ’bout me.”

  “Nossir. Like I told you, I didn’t even know you were here, Mr. Pickens. Until just now, until you admitted yourself. I’m a friend of Malcolm Ray’s. I wouldn’t go against him.”

  “You a friend of the boy’s don’t make you no friend a mine, Man.”

  “Me bringing the sheriff down here had nothing to do with you, Mr. Pickens. We were together down here on an unrelated matter. I swear to that.”

  “You can swear to a lot o’ things,” said Joe Pickens Junior. “But you done did said one thing right, Man—it ain’t got nothing to do with me. No, none a’ this shitbidness on this creek and none of it over in there acrossed that cyclone fence got a thing to do with me, Man, an’ surely never did.”

  “What business is that, Mr. Pickens?” I asked.

  “Crazy-ass shit, Man,” he told me.

  “Did you see something down here lately? By the creek? Did you see somebody do something? Did you see somebody drive through the gate?”

  “It ain’t none a’ my business one way or the other, Man. It’s them’s business. Sure somebody else’s, not mine’s. I didn’t see nothing. I didn’t do nothing. So, I ain’t got nothing to say about it. None of this crazy-assed business is mine.”

  I could sense him moving downstream, our visit done. I had questions. But Joe Pickens Junior had more compelling reasons to leave than to stay and answer them.

  “You tell the boy, stay ’way,” he called to me.

  I heard him splashing through shallow water and so I hurried to the bridge, looked over the eastside railing and saw Joe Pickens Junior slog through mud, gain a gravel shoal, turn around a bend. He was dressed neck to ankle in prison denim and there was a big butcher knife in his right hand and a plastic grocery bag in the other. I called after him, but Joe Junior did not look back. Not once. The fugitive just ran, like a rabbit without options. And he would have taken a bullet in
the back without even looking at who shot him.

  * * *

  When Joe Pickens Junior—Malcolm’s daddy, Mean Joe’s son, somebody’s estranged husband, many people’s dope dealer—was long gone I strolled down the fence line that bordered the weedy twenty acres, glancing occasionally at the stone house in the near distance. Posted on the fence, every twenty feet, was a NO TRESPASSING: NO ENTRANCE WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE OWNER: ALL VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW sign. Between these signs, as evenly spaced, were signs that read HIGH FIRE DANGER: NO OPEN BURNING.

  I kicked the bottom of the fence. It was buried in the dry dirt.

  But thirty paces from the gate, I stumbled into a hole and discovered a jagged cut in the chain link—an egress, low down.

  * * *

  A two-foot-deep trench had been gouged out, and the buried fence pulled from the ground, the pencil-lead-thick wires of the chain-link fence crudely sheared. This entrance-exit was camouflaged with leaves and sticks. I removed the old-fashioned clothespins that held the steel curtain together, looked around, considered.

  * * *

  The corpse in the creek had not walked to the creek. No white man around there would walk as far as town to The Little Piney even for free money. So the way I saw it, the man I was calling Buck had either driven to the creek of his own volition or had been driven there—in his maroon sedan or in someone else’s vehicle. If he had driven to the creek in his own car, then he was at least alive when he arrived at The Little Piney. But if he’d been driven to the creek, then he was either under serious duress—unconscious from a blow to the head, for instance—or else he was DOA at The Little Piney. A man that big would have to be pretty much out of it to be manhandled into the creek, even by another big man.

  If Buck had driven to the creek, then I was probably in the clear.

  But if he had been hauled to The Little Piney unconscious from a previous blow to the head and then dumped by party or parties unknown, well, then …

  I wasn’t sure what Malcolm had seen downtown Monday morning.

  Probably nothing. If something not much. A scuffle in the gloomy wee hours under the portico of the Old Lion. A small man sneak-attacking a much bigger man as the big man lay sleeping in his sedan. Little man driving away from the scene in a beat-up pickup truck like mine.

  I wanted to know if the maroon sedan Malcolm was calling “blood-colored” was around, parked in the woods or parked and hidden behind the high chain-link fence. Because if it was, then it was probable that the stranger, Buck, if that was, had been his name, had recovered from our very brief tussle on Elm Street, no real harm done him.

  But why had he driven then to The Little Piney? To wait for me? To ambush me during my morning constitutional and pay me back for beaning him, for blindsiding him while he stalked the woman I was trying to stalk? To scare me away from Tammy Fay for good? To maim me? To kill me?

  Or had Buck been at The Little Piney looking for a bail-jumper, trying to recapture Joe Pickens Junior for a nice reward?

  * * *

  If the maroon sedan was parked around The Little Piney somewhere, then I probably hadn’t killed the dead man and had nothing to worry about, since hitting a man who was spying on a female friend of yours (coshing him while he dozed with a very nice pair of Bushnell binoculars) was probably just a misdemeanor in Arkansas if you had the right lawyers and, even though Arkansas was not my natural home state, I imagined I would have the best lawyers available since the Land of Opportunity runs mostly on money just like every place else in the world.

  But if Buck’s car had been parked nearby, accessibly, and if Joe Pickens Junior had killed Buck and pushed him into the creek, then it seemed to me that such a nefarious criminal as that would not have hesitated to steal a car for his getaway. Joe Pickens Junior had not taken an abandoned maroon sedan, I was quite sure of that. If he had killed Buck, even Joe Pickens Junior wouldn’t be stupid enough to be hiding in the bushes right at the crime scene on The Little Piney.

  So, I ruled out Joe Pickens Junior as the killer of the man in the creek.

  But he might very well have seen who did kill Buck or know what had happened to Buck.

  It would be illuminating to speak more with Joe Pickens Junior.

  Movement nearby the stone house caught my eye. I squinted and imagined a man.

  “Mr. Pickens!” I yelled.

  The figure blended into the slanted shadows against the south wall of the house.

  I squinted harder. Maybe Joe Pickens Junior was hiding out in the abandoned stone house behind the cyclone fence.

  “Mr. Pickens!” I yelled again. “Is that you?”

  I waited for one minute then I parted the chain link and crawled into the weedy field. Plowing into waist-high Johnsongrass like a vertical lawnmower, I made my way to the stone house.

  * * *

  The stone house was various shades of red and brown, sandstone and red rock, the cement between the fieldstones highlighted by a sun straining toward midmorning.

  Beside the house I saw what I thought was a man in dark pants, a red shirt and an orange cap. He seemed to turn my way, then froze like a spotlighted deer when he saw me, then collapsed like he was playing possum. I squeezed my eyes tight shut, reopened and refocused hard but the world to my myopic eyes remained blurry, smeared in the middle and only clear in my peripheral vision.

  The stone house was eighty yards away. That was a long way for me to see with distinction anything as small as a man.

  I needed my binoculars but they were long gone.

  The field grass stirred, then stilled.

  “Mr. Pickens?” I yelled, thinking that that man, redressed, had backtracked, gone around the creek’s bending and to ground inside the fenced area.

  “Mr. Pickens?”

  I waited, counted to calm myself. I didn’t see anyone and probably hadn’t seen anyone.

  I went on, tripped and fell and my shoulder slammed into a half-rotted stump. I groaned and got up, took a few more steps toward the house and stumbled on another tree stump, the ordered remnants of an orchard.

  On the weedy, crushed-rock driveway I paused.

  “Hello, house!”

  I could see clear to the backyard of the place, could see the corner of a detached garage and part of another outbuilding. I didn’t see anybody, but I was not sure I wanted to see anybody.

  The fine hairs on the back of my neck were raised though.

  A pair of mangy feral housecats slunk across the driveway and back into the weeds.

  I counted again, but since this trick was not working to reduce my stress I went on. Cautiously.

  “Hello? Anybody home here?”

  A breeze blew hot across me, vaporized the sweat on my forehead and bald spot. I thought I heard the sound of a car coming from the dirt road that ran southeasterly into the deep woods. This road was only twin tracks gouged into red clay, virtually unpassable by anything other than an ATV during wet season, and still three miles of bad road to pavement even during dry season. I strained my ears but the sound of a motor was extinguished by the wind in the trees.

  The grass was beaten down somewhat around the fieldstone building, a place that was not as pretty up close as from the road, with the slate roof gapped and chipped and the wooden window sash droopy and dry-rotted.

  Dry leaves were piled up against the house like combustible brown snow. I smelled gasoline and another smell, like ammonia, cat piss.

  The place seemed deserted by all but the feral felines. There were cats on the roof and cats in the trees and cats supine and cats mobile. Cats around like they owned the place. Most bolted when they saw me, some stayed put.

  The sideyard was littered with disintegrating wooden bushel baskets, some with crenelated apples still in them. Pine needles clustered on the small slab porch. The varnish was worn off the front door. A hasped padlock, as old and rusty as the ones on the gate, kept out visitors.

  I knocked, didn’t wait bu
t a moment before stepping into the sideyard where a rusted-out wheelbarrow was full of dried cat shit. On that southside wall of the house were two windows.

  Between those two dark windows was an ornamental bush, a shoulder-high shrubbery, powdered thick with red dust, with a filthy, blaze-orange watch cap set atop it, probably the figure, the “man” I thought I’d seen.

  I strained to see into the house, but all the glass was painted on the inside solid black.

  I whirled around at a snaky hiss. A giant yellow tomcat glared at me from his crouched position on the edge of the sideyard. He bared his teeth, hissed again.

  “Scram!”

  I feinted a leap at him, but the cat just laid his ears flat, eyeballed me, rigid as a yellow-streaked stone.

  As I stooped to pick up a slate shard the tom bounded and I discovered myself recoiled in the dusty shrubbery, put down by a raggedy housecat, which did not presage much good luck for this venture.

  Spooky cat bastard.

  I extracted myself from the decorative shrubbery. My heart was racing. The giant tom was gone, so I threw a chunk of granite at some other cat, then patted my pants clean.

  More broken bushel baskets littered a backyard hard-packed, unvegetated and covered with cat crap in various stages of dehydration.

  In a lightning-scarred oak tree several more cats lounged, limp in the heat, draped over thick limbs like furred and whiskered sacks of soft bones.

  Hanging by fishing line from the lower branches of the giant white oak were numerous rusted, perforated cans, many of them cat food–size. Some of the larger ones had bones in them as clappers. When the wind blew, the cans clanked together hollowly as the finger-long bones chimed dryly.

  The Wells kids must have sawed the hole in the fence and turned the deserted place into their private playground. I couldn’t imagine Isaac and Newton feeding cats though. The Wellses were Dog People if ever there were.

  It could have been Malcolm too, I supposed, but Malcolm claimed he wouldn’t go across The Little Piney for penny biscuits and free gravy, because the place was haunted and because his grandfather forbade it for reasons unclear.

  When I stepped up on the back slab porch a trio of mottled kittens tumbled off and away as if their back ends were not properly attached to their front ends. The window glass of the door was painted solidly secret. I continued into the backyard where there was a detached garage.