by Steve Weddle
“Yes, sir.”
“And here’s Mr. Randall J. Pribble Jr., beaten and deceased, on the property of a violent ex-con. Now, what would you do if you were me?”
I kept my wiseass comments to myself. Shrugged.
“Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to cover this entire goddamn area with dogs. I’m going to read your account of your whereabouts. I’m go “>“ ming outing to have deputies walk around and interview your neighbors to see if there’s five minutes you can’t account for.”
“Okay.”
“Tell me, son. You get out here much? Last week or so? Last month? Maybe you were out here, I don’t know, fishing?”
“No, sir.”
“You see over there where the Daltons’ line starts?” He pointed off, what seemed far away. I turned to look, and he kept talking. “Couple of my deputies caught some Mexicans up there growing a little cash crop not too long ago.”
“I’ll be on the lookout,” I said.
He shook his head, looked down, and dabbed his forehead before looking back up at me. “I don’t need you be on the lookout for no goddamn Mexicans.”
I waited for him to tell me what he did need. “Okay.”
“I need someone to tell me what the hell is going on here.”
“I haven’t seen anything, Sheriff. I don’t come back here.”
“See, that’s the thing. We’re gonna pull us up some boot prints. You understand what I been telling you? We’re gonna fly a copter ’round here. You seen the TV? That CSI? You know how soon we can find out if you’re lying to me? That’s the shit, son. You understand what I’m telling you? Maybe it was Mexicans growing some more of their weed. Maybe Mr. Pribble was out selling Girl Scout cookies and he stumbled upon them. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe someone whose goddamn property this is was out here with a bunch of Mexicans growing some weed. Right now, I don’t know. But we’ll find out for damn sure. And if it turns out it’s pot growing, well, that’s one thing. And if it turns out it ain’t, well, that’s another.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t you ‘okay’ me, boy. I’m telling you it’s one thing these goddamn Mexicans growing their weed …”
He stopped, looked around the woods, shook his head again, working up to some sort of speech. Maybe the sort of election-year crap he delivered at Wednesday Chamber of Commerce luncheons. Letting the dress-shirt crowd know that, sure, they’d had some cases of bad people coming into the county, but by and large, they all made mistakes and when they did he was there and he’d appreciate your continued support. Not long ago I’d worked eleven days washing dishes at the Sweet and Sour Cafe, so I’d gotten to hear him once. He’d been the sheriff for two decades now, and you don’t change horses in midstream. If you were growing weed or cooking meth, they’d find you, no matter how untouchable you thought you were. Everyone in the building knew he was talking about Didemus Rudd. They’d gotten him for being tied to some gas station robbery, ended up charging him for all the drugs he had on his property. I’d read all about the hearings in the news. I’d been going through the local want ads in the paper from the day I moved here, and I’d come to find out a good bit about who was on the honor roll, how much the Lions Club raised at their yard sale, and how well some old lady was making out with her cancer treatments. And the crap the sheriff served up at the Chamber of Commerce luncheons.
“I better not find out any of you asshole convicts is trying to bring meth into my county. You ever seen what that does to a woman’s face? Shit. Bad enough you nutbags run). The like around tending your goddamn marijuana crops. Farmers, my ass. My daddy and granddaddy farmed this land, son, and you know what they farmed? Hell, no, you don’t. They farmed goddamn food, son. They fed their families. Goddamn nutrients. You understand what I’m telling you? You sons of bitches with your goddamn marijuana farms, why, hell, that’s one thing. But I’ll be John goddamn Brown I let you ruin this county my family built. I find out any of you fuckers is setting up some sort of operation in my county, I will cripple every last one of you.” The sheriff waited until I looked him in the eye. “You understand, boy? Abso-fucking-lutely cripple you.”
I guess I didn’t get the same speech he gave the Chamber of Commerce. “Yeah. I don’t know of anything like that, Sheriff. Not my crowd.”
He thumped his index finger into the center of my chest. “Better not be, son.” He turned and walked away.
• • •
I got back to my grandmother’s house in time for her to reheat me some chicken and dumplings before she went to bed.
“Sheriff find you?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Asking about that Pribble boy?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“On our property?”
I nodded, mouth full of dinner, said he was pretty close.
“That can’t look too good, Roy. Not good at all.” She shook her head. “You tell them you were with me the whole time?”
I nodded.
“Course, they’ll just think I’m lying for you. Still, though.” She shook her head, looked at the ceiling, then closed her eyes. “Wonder what the Pribble boy was doing wandering around the woods.”
I said I wasn’t sure.
She took a deep breath, clicked her tongue, letting me know she was changing subjects. “You know, I hear Cassandra Pennick is learning to be a doctor.”
“That right?”
“Not the medical doctor, mind. The P-h-D kind.”
“Sounds smart.”
“And cute, too. Don’t you think?”
“Hadn’t noticed.”
“You noticed her twenty years ago,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe not twenty. Near about that, I guess. When you and her and Uncle Fed’s two boys used to play around here.”
“I don’t remember that,” I said, folding the last dumpling onto the tip of the fork, dragging it along the bottom of the bowl, picking up the leftover specks of cornbread.
“Over where that Mitchell boy put up that trailer.”
“All right.”
“Might be a good time to go through all them boxes in the back. The girl was asking some questions.”
“About us?”
“About everybody. Got Birdie Cassels talking for plumb near three hours, from what I hear. Of course, reckon it seemed a mite longer for the girl than for Birdie.”
“What’s she talking about?”
“Her doctor work. Country folks, what they’re saying. She’s staying in her uncle’s house for a while. They say she’s going around talking about life around here. How it used to be. What’s changed. All that sort of thing.”
“Sounds like a bad idea, all that looking behind you.”
“Why’s that?”
“Folks like to ask questions, write stuff down on notepads. Make a list of what you’ve done. Like you’re a sickness needs treating.”
“I think the Pennick girl is just interested in the area and her family. What everyone around here has done.”
“Everything everybody’s done?” I shook my head, took the bowl to the sink. “Not like a history lesson’s likely to help anybody.” I rinsed the bowl, set it on the dishtowel to dry.
She chuckled, turned a lamp off, headed for bed. “You never know, Roy.”
• • •
I was trimming around the headstones at the Western Cemetery when a sheriff’s deputy waved at me from behind the parsonage, which had been empty for the past year or so. I leaned the weedeater against Jasper Womack’s stone and walked through the tall grass to the chainlink fence.
The old black and tan coonhound I’d shared my sandwich with came from behind the Mosley headstones, fell into step with me, nosing my hand as I walked.
The deputy—Skinny Dennis McWilliams—leaned down, pulled a sprig of crabgrass from along the fence, and slid it into his mouth. “Looks like a good dog you got there.”
“Stray,” I said, scratc
hing the dog behind his floppy ears. “Go on, Buddy. Get.”
“Not much of a stray if you named the little guy.”
“Gotta call him something. Dog doesn’t care.”
“Guess that’s right. He much help cleaning up around here?”
“Naw,” I said. “More trouble than he’s worth.” Pointed to the shed on the edge of the yard. “Caught him trying to put two-stroke in the mower. Coulda ruined the whole engine.”
McWilliams grinned. “That right?”
“Yeah. But he works cheap, so I keep him around.”
The deputy made a point of giving the cemetery a long look-over while I waited for him to say what he’d come for. “I always cut the yard first, then come back and weed-whack. You telling me I’m doing it wrong?”
I looked around the cemetery, the weeds around the headstones cut down into stalks along the ground, the grass growing up in clumps between the rows, mostly down in the low, soggy area where the Talleys were buried.
“Mower won’t be fixed til tomorrow,” I said. “Getting a little ahead of the game is all. Nobody much cares how you clean up a mess, long as you do.”
McWilliams nodded. My dad had coached him in high school when the Waldo Wildcats went undefeated. That had been a long time ago, but he still felt some sort of connection, I guess. He’d gotten me out of some trouble a few months ago when he probably shouldn’t have. “Good to get ahead when you can,” he acan H said. “Makes things easier.” He shifted the weed around in his mouth. “Never know when the next storm’s gonna pop up.”
I knew what he wanted to talk about. Deputies don’t just drop by to talk about grass cutting. “Something I can help you with, Deputy?”
“Guess I was trying to figure out what happened out in the woods the other day.” He took the weed from his mouth.
“I already talked to the sheriff.”
“You ever see anything out of the ordinary? Shorter plants. You know,” he waved around the cemetery, “weeds.”
“I’m not really what you’d call an agricultural expert. Sheriff said he’d caught someone out there, I believe.”
“Roy, you ever hear the expression ‘don’t shit where you eat’?”
I nodded.
“You ever hear the same kind of expression about not growing your illegal crop on your own property?”
“That’s a weird expression.”
McWilliams grinned again. “Maybe it’s more like a rule of thumb, then. You been following this Didemus Rudd case?”
“The drug dealer?”
“Alleged.”
“What I read in the paper.”
He picked up another weed, peeled it apart as he talked. “Why don’t you just spray the weeds, you don’t mind my asking? Instead of always moving around and cutting them down.”
I wiped my sleeve against the sweat dripping into my eyes. “Don’t know. Never thought about it much.” I turned and looked around at the cemetery. “Lotta dead folks, though. Be a lot of poison to get rid of all the weeds.”
“Easier just to cut them down when they crop up?”
“I guess.”
“But you have to see them come up. Sometimes they spread out and you can’t tell what’s a weed. I mean, you think something might be a weed, or maybe it’s harmless. Maybe it’s grass. Maybe it’s crabgrass. Hell, maybe it’s an oak tree trying to come up. Then the next thing you know, all these weeds have grown up and they’re all of a sudden choking the life out of the decent plants.”
“Deputy, I get the feeling you’re going the long way around the barn to get to something.”
“Roy,” he said, then took a breath. “I need your help.”
“That right?”
“You know your dad was the first real coach I had, playing ball.”
I said I knew that.
“We had a couple good pitchers on the team. Pat Crawford. Andy Daniels. But Andy gets hurt in a game, snaps his elbow, and your dad takes me over off the field and spends a few minutes showing me how to pitch.”
“Okay.”
“Not throw. Pitch. Takes a while. He sends me out to the mound and I walk the first few guys I see, then give up a grand slam. I think we lost that one by fifteen runs.”
“You going to tell me to practice my weed cutting?”
“I ing a hadck’m going to tell you what your dad told me.” He flicked away what was left of the weed he’d been chewing. “He said I needed to get off my ass and do something I could be proud of. He said you can’t schedule opportunity, Roy. It just shows up when it feels like it.”
• • •
When I got back to my grandmother’s, she and Cassie Pennick were sitting in old, metal lawn chairs, sharing a pitcher of iced tea.
I guess I could have talked to them about what the deputy had been trying to get me to do. Or I could have gone right to my cousin, Cleo. Told him what the deputy wanted. I could have talked to somebody, I guess. Maybe that’s what people do when they get their problems. They talk to their wives or their shrinks or their preachers. I could have done that, if I’d had anybody, I guess.
“That deputy find you?” my grandmother asked as I walked up.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Popular fellow these days,” she said.
“Guess so.”
“He give you any trouble?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Give him any?”
“Hardly any.”
She nodded to Cassie. “Roy, I think you know Miss Pennick.”
“A little,” I said.
My grandmother got up, said she had to check something in the kitchen.
Cassie tried to set her glass down quietly on the metal table, but it clanged anyway. For a minute she scraped her fingernail along the outside rim of the table, flecks of rust falling off like snowflakes. “Roy, I said my uncle knew your grandfather.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, there was a little more to it than that.”
• • •
Ever since Didemus Rudd had gotten arrested, folks had been fighting to be the county’s king of pot, Deputy McWilliams had said. The pot king and the meth mob. Pot took lots of land, but meth was a kitchen operation. Rudd and Sawyer could fight over the cash crop, he’d said, while your neighbor was cooking meth all by himself.
I’d always tried my best to steer clear of all that, but it didn’t always work out that way.
“Your father was a good man, Roy. He helped me out in a lot of ways. And now there’s some shit going on around here I need your help with. Everything’s a little mixed up right now. Just getting worse. People aren’t thinking about what they’re doing. They’re just doing. The Sawyers and Pribbles and, between me, you, and the coonhound over there, probably a handful of people wearing badges.”
Badges. No badges. Ex-con. All those little boxes they want to put you in. Yeah, my father was a good man. What’s that to me? I’m supposed to coach a baseball team? I’m supposed to do what the cop asks me to because he knew my father? I knew enough about cops to know that the first thing they do is look at your history. Not Cassie’s kind of history, either.
Driving along the highway, I kept thinking about what Cassie had told me that afternoon after my grandmother had gone inside.
Cassie sat up in her chair, elbows on her knees. “You know my uncle and yourq,an H grandfather worked together?”
“You said they were friends.”
“Work, too.”
“At the place up in Bradley?” The last job he’d had before he was killed.
“No. Not that kind of work. They did jobs together, but not like ‘a job,’ you know.”
“All right.” The late afternoon sun was pressing down, the sort of heat so heavy that it weighs on the dirt, pushes it so much that it starts to float back up into the air, like some sort of reverse evaporation, getting dust into everything you’ve got.
“Your grandmother and I started talking a little about it. About how my uncle was always into som
ething. About how that’s how come we’re all here now.” She shifted in the chair. “How come I am, I guess. Come back home, kinda. Not sure if I should have been saying anything. Just … ” She looked off behind me as a truck rattled along the dirt road, scratching gravel into the ditch. “It’s just, some of it is hard to talk about, you know?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Just tell what you want to tell.”
She nodded. “Your grandmother reminded me about when we were kids. She said how we played together a couple of times when I was here. Guess she remembers more than either one of us.”
“Yeah. She mentioned it to me.”
“Don’t really remember it. I mean, I remember some stuff from back then, but, I don’t know.”
“Like maybe it was a TV show you’re remembering?”
“Exactly. Like I’m kinda detached from it.”
“Detached,” I nodded.
“They oughta bottle that, you know? Detachment.”
“I’m pretty sure they do.”
She grinned. “Not sure my insurance would cover it.”
I tried to think of something to say. Tried to imagine I was someone else for a second, someone who knew what to say. My dad. A preacher. Some counselor saying the right thing.
“I got a college question to ask you,” I said. “You ever read a book with a line goes ‘we live as we dream—alone’?”
“Sounds familiar,” she said. “What’s it from?”
“Don’t know. Some guy said it to me a while ago.” Seemed like a long while ago.
“You know what comes next?”
“With what?”
“The next line. Like is it something about how we dream alone so we have to work together, have to live together? Like that’s what draws us together. If we have this shared aloneness, then we have a shared trait.”
“That’s not the sense I got.”
“Okay. Because now that you mention it, that’s a big part of my dissertation. How rural life offers a continuity of identity because of the group dynamic.”
“If you say so.”
“No, see, what I mean is how in an urban area you have people coming and going and they can recreate their identities twenty times a d verybody hadckay. In rural America, everyone knows your whole history and your parents’ history.”
