by Larry Brown
“I didn’t mean to. Laid down to close my eyes for a minute and I just now woke up. What about Byers?”
Jake hooked a thumb in his belt and blew on his coffee. He had to think about it before he spoke.
“Not much. Did two years in the army and worked in Detroit for six months. What time you want to go down there?”
Bobby unplugged the razor and put it away. There was a small closet in the corner and he stripped off his shirt and threw it into a gym bag on the floor and pulled a clean uniform shirt off a hanger. He put it on and started buttoning it up.
“Let me get some coffee and we’ll head out. Is Harold here?”
“Not yet. You gonna try to go to church?”
“I don’t know.”
Jake moved aside as Bobby went past him out the door and down the hall and he followed him, his gun belt creaking. The sheriff sat down at the desk in the dayroom and started rummaging through some drawers.
“I ain’t had time to go in a month. Hell, she had the preacher over for dinner last Sunday and I couldn’t even make that. Have you seen that … here it is. Is that coffee ready yet?”
He pulled out a card with some new brass and began clipping it to his shirt. Jake was pouring him a cup at the table. He put a spoonful of sugar into it and stirred it and shook off the spoon and laid it down and brought the cup to him all steaming.
“Thanks.”
He leaned back in his swivel chair and put his feet up on the desk and took a drink of his coffee. There was a pack of Lucky Strikes on the desk and he shook one out. Jake took his own chair across the room and slid down in it until he was resting on his backbone. “You think he really did it?”
“I guess if we dig him up he did.”
“Who’s gonna do the diggin?” Jake wanted to know.
Bobby just smiled at him.
“Why don’t we take a trusty down there with us?”
“Which one you trust?”
Jake thought about it. He pushed the brim of his hat up off the front of his head.
“We could take Willowby. He’s got that bad leg and couldn’t run off from us.”
Bobby sipped his coffee and slid an ashtray closer. He waggled the toe of his boot.
“He probably couldn’t dig too good either. We got to take Byers down there anyway, we can just let him do it.”
Jake took his hat off and laid it on the chair beside him as a troubled look crossed his face.
“Goddang, Bobby, you gonna make a feller dig up his own daddy?”
Bobby got up and refilled his cup and smiled over his shoulder. “I am unless you’d rather do it. Go stick him in the car and see if you can find a shovel. I’ll be ready in a few minutes.”
Jake took his coffee with him and pulled out a big ring of keys and went down a hall to a closed door. He entered through it and the door swung shut behind him.
Bobby sat back down at the desk and stubbed out his smoke and lit another one almost immediately. He wished folks would do all their meanness on Thursday nights instead of Saturday so he wouldn’t have to work Sunday every weekend. The phone was there beside him and he picked up the handset and dialed the first three digits of his mother’s number and then put it back in the cradle. She was probably still in bed this early.
He leaned back in the chair again and looked at his watch. He smoked and just waited for the noise that would be Jake bringing out the prisoner. The things that people did to each other didn’t surprise him anymore, ever since he’d learned they were capable of doing any thing you could imagine and some things you couldn’t.
The coffee was growing cold in the cup. He finished it and set the cup on the desk and got up. Harold was coming through the front door with his lunch box and a couple of paperbacks.
“Mornin, Sheriff.”
“Mornin. Me and Jake’s going down below Taylor to see about this mess. Stick around the radio in case we need you, okay?”
“Sure thing, Sheriff.”
Bobby went back to his office and picked up his revolver by the belt that held the holster and carried it back through the dayroom, but he didn’t strap it on. The steel door down the hall slammed and a bandaged black prisoner came shuffling out with his wrists manacled, looking neither left nor right, Jake following. Harold was pouring coffee at the table. After he got his cup he turned on the television and started watching it.
They went out and Bobby held the back door of the car open for the prisoner, then got behind the wheel of the cruiser and put the gun on the seat. He cranked the car and turned up the volume on the radio. Jake got in beside him and they pulled out.
Traffic was slow this Sunday morning. Churchgoers rising to leisurely breakfasts and dressing in their good clothes, lawns mown, clean cars parked neatly in their drives. The streets lined with big oaks that gave a welcome shade. He eyed the prisoner through the rearview mirror, but Byers never lifted his head. Jake tapped his fingers on the roof.
“We ought to go fishin sometime, Bobby.”
Bobby glanced at him and pulled up at a stop sign, looked both ways, and drove on through. “Fishin?” he said. “If the county would hire me about four more deputies I might have time to. Hell. I’d settle for a day off once in a while.”
They drove around the square, the shops closed, the sidewalks empty, as if nobody lived there. Easing around it Bobby saw a pint whiskey bottle standing beside a curb. He pulled up next to it and halted the car, then stepped out and picked it up. It still had a drink or two left in it. He got back in the car with it and turned to look at his prisoner.
“You want a drink?” he said. Byers nodded and mumbled something softly and Bobby passed him the bottle and watched him twist off the top with his cuffed hands and turn it up. Bobby looked at Jake. “Might be the last one he gets for a while.”
Jake didn’t answer. Bobby shut the door and they drove on.
There was a patch of plowed ground furred with young grass out by the old house and there was a clean low mound of dirt humped up in the center of it. A good crop of turnips in a row along one side. Jake was looking at the turnips and Bobby was looking at the dirt. Byers stood still handcuffed and looking off into the distance somewhere.
“Them’s some pretty turnips,” Jake said.
“Where’s the shovel?” Bobby said. It was hot out there under the sun and he wanted to get it over with.
Jake winced a little and said, “Shit.”
Byers had put a dreamy look on his face and he pointed toward the side of the house. Bobby walked over there and found a shovel so worn the blade was thin like a knife, fresh dirt caked in dull brown clots. He got it by the handle and walked back out to the plowed ground where Jake was still admiring the little patch.
“I swear them is some pretty turnips.”
“Get over here and uncuff him, Jake.”
Bobby stood holding the shovel until the bracelets were off and then he handed it to Byers.
“Dig,” he said.
The prisoner walked the few steps to the mound of earth and studied it for a moment. He looked up at Bobby with nothing showing on his face and then he sank the blade into the ground. He lifted a spadeful of dirt and threw it backward and without pausing reached in for another one. Bobby squatted on his heels and fished a cigarette from his pocket and watched him dig. He hadn’t dug long before the shovel hit something soft. Byers stopped digging and stared down into the dirt for a few moments. Then he dropped the shovel and went to his knees and started pulling at the soil with his hands, piling it to one side. Jake made a move to come forward but Bobby stopped him with his hand. Byers stayed on his knees, clawing with his fingers as he started breathing faster and moving his hands more rapidly. He began to resemble a dog digging his way beneath a fence as the dirt flew back and landed on his clothes. He moaned as he dug and he kept shaking his head and muttering so that Bobby had cause to wonder who he was talking to.
The head and face emerged first, closely cropped coils of gray wire encrusted with dirt, s
mall pockets of dirt cupped on the eyelids. Byers brushed it away gently, gently, a bone hunter exhuming fossils. He had stopped moaning now. He paused and looked up at Bobby.
“Shit fire,” Jake said quietly.
Byers was crying without making any sound as he went down the length of his father’s body, uncovering the arms, the hands. At last he stood up and bent over and grabbed the wrists. He pulled hard, straining against the earth that had temporarily claimed this cadaver. He dragged the body from the shallow grave. They could see blood on the shirt, knife cuts on the throat that were coated with dirt. There was a light smell of rot about him already, that and the fragile pungency of the earth, reminding Bobby of spring somehow, the freshly turned dirt in the rows, small green things growing.
Byers released his hold and the arms dropped stiffly. He squatted and looked at them each in turn for instructions as to what came next.
“Cuff him,” Bobby said. “Give him a cigarette and I’ll go call the coroner down here.”
He got up to walk over to the car and Jake pulled the cuffs from his pocket and snapped them back on the prisoner. He was pulling his smokes out when Bobby opened the door and sat down on the seat of the cruiser. He watched Jake bend over Byers and he picked up the mike and called up to the jail. Harold answered and Bobby told him they needed the coroner, and he was thinking that he should have told Jake to find something to cover the old man with, a blanket, something. It didn’t seem right to have him lying out in the sun like that. He keyed the mike again and told Harold to call over to his house and tell his mother that it didn’t look like he was going to be able to make it to church and probably not dinner either. Harold said he’d take care of it and Bobby thanked him.
He hung up the mike and looked out. Byers was sitting on the ground right in front of the car, smoking, talking to the body. Bobby didn’t see his deputy.
“Jake?”
“I’m over here.”
Bobby got out of the car and turned around. Jake was over in the turnip patch, digging with the shovel. He walked over there.
“What in the hell are you up to?”
The deputy paused in his work only for a moment. He already had a good-sized pile heaped up in a growing mound.
“It’d be a shame to leave these good turnips down here. Ain’t gonna be nobody here to eat em now.”
“Have you lost your rabbit-assed mind?”
“Naw. I just like a good mess of turnips once in a while.”
Virgil was sitting on the top step eating a biscuit and smoking a cigarette when Glen walked out on the back porch and stepped to the end where a wringer washing machine and a tub full of car parts and empty dog food sacks rested. The boards were dangerous with decay and Virgil watched him place his feet carefully on the joists where there were nail heads and then start peeing off the end of the porch into a flower bed made out of an old tractor tire that now held only grass and weeds.
“You got any coffee in this house?” Glen said.
“Look in there next to the sink.”
Virgil turned his head away and just sat there gazing out across what he called a yard. There were several junked cars back there with cardboard boxes full of hay and they were inhabited primarily by scrubby chickens. Virgil would go out there and get an egg or two once in a while. There was a car battery on the porch and it was wired to a headlight. Whenever he heard a ruckus among the chickens at night he would go out with a little Sears single-shot .22 and flip a wall switch for the battery and with the whole pastoral scene illuminated he would ventilate whatever house cat coon fox or possum was making off across the yard with one of his squawking fowl. He rarely hit the birds and they could usually be returned minus a few feathers to their nests. The coons he roasted in deep pans covered with tin foil and stuffed with carrots and sweet potatoes and feasted on them, dividing the bones for gnawing with the Redbone puppy.
Glen finished and leaned on the post there and fished his cigarettes and lighter from his pants pocket.
“Why don’t you cut that TV off when you go to bed? Ain’t nothin on that time of night anyway.”
His daddy tossed the rest of the biscuit to the puppy, who had come from under the porch. He sniffed it, picked it up delicately, then trotted back out of sight wagging his tail.
“It’s just company. I didn’t even know you was here till I got up. What time did you get in?”
Glen came back down the porch with a cigarette in his mouth and stopped to stretch near the steps.
“I don’t know. Twelve-thirty or one.”
“You go see Jewel?”
“I went over there and fucked her.”
Virgil got still and didn’t move. He’d almost given up on trying to get along with Glen but never had given up on blaming himself for not unloading the gun that morning. He didn’t know how one man could keep so much hate inside him. Especially his own boy, especially for his own father. Puppy was right. Going down there didn’t do him any good.
“I don’t see how you can talk about her like that. Like she ain’t nothin.”
Glen snorted. “What you gonna do about it, whip my ass? You got too old for that a long time ago.”
It was getting hot already. The bright spots of a thousand drops of dew gleamed in the grass and with the sun risen the spans of new webs stretched down from the clothesline and over the rusted fence and the vines of morning glory threaded through the wire.
“I just think she deserves a little more consideration than what you give her.”
“Consideration?”
“Yeah.”
Glen hooked a ladder-back chair with his toe and slid it close enough to sit down. He crossed his legs.
“Okay, old man. Lay your wisdom on me. What do you consider I ought to do about her?”
“She’s in the mess she’s in cause of you.”
“Ain’t you a good one to talk about stuff like that? A man who never made a mistake. Seems like I talked to one of your mistakes yesterday.”
Virgil half turned and leaned his shoulder against a post, then looked into the eyes that studied him with such contempt. A face so like his own mocking him.
“When I was sick last year she come by here and cleaned this house. Fed me too.”
“I never asked her to do a thing for me. You neither.”
“She brought that boy over here too.”
“She better not bring him no more.” Glen flicked his ashes idly on the porch and slumped in the chair and stretched his legs out. “I know what she wants. Same thing ever woman wants. Get married. I’ve done tried that and it don’t work. Does it? You tell me.”
Virgil stood up and hitched up his pants. He walked a couple of steps and caught hold of the door. “It’s what most folks do. I didn’t blame Melba when she left you. You the cause of that, too. Only good thing about it was you didn’t have any kids. And I’m damn glad of it, too. Cause I don’t know what the hell they’da eat for the last three years.”
Virgil stepped inside and went to the stove and got the coffeepot and took off the lid. He was shaking. There was some mold on the grounds inside. He took out the strainer and knocked it against the garbage can and refilled the pot with water from a gallon wine jug that was sitting on the kitchen table. The coffee was in a blue can beside the sink and he fixed it all and clapped the lid over it and set it on the burner and lit it with a match.
“You ever feed this dog anything besides a biscuit?”
Virgil picked up a small bag of dog feed and pushed the screen door open. The puppy was walking around on the porch with his tongue hanging out. He poured some of the feed into a plate and the puppy started eating. They watched him. Occasionally he’d lift his head and crunch his breakfast loudly to let them know how it was going, look around, wag his tail.
“What’s your plans?” Virgil said.
Glen flipped the cigarette butt out into the yard and stood up. He locked his fingers behind his head and stretched again.
“I don’t know. I got to
work on my car some more. I might see if I can get my job back.”
“If you go to town sometime I wish you’d pick me up a contact switch for my pump. I can straight-wire it to run but I don’t want to burn it up.”
“I thought it run dry.”
“It ain’t run dry. They’s thirty foot of water in it.”
“That’s what Puppy said.”
“Puppy don’t know shit about a well.”
Glen opened the door and went into the kitchen with his father following him. The coffee was perking on the stove.
“Why don’t you clean this place up?” Glen said. “Looks like a bunch of pigs lives here or somethin.”
He looked through the cabinets for two clean cups and it took a while. Virgil picked up a dish towel and grabbed the pot and poured. Glen opened the refrigerator to see a hunk of dried cheese, some rancid bacon, a can of evaporated milk.
“I’ll get around to it,” Virgil said. He spooned sugar from a bag into his cup and tossed the spoon into the sink. Glen poured milk the viscosity of motor oil into his cup and looked at it.
“Damn,” he said. “What do you do for food around here?”
“I got some chili and stuff in that cabinet. Puppy’s good to bring stuff over. I can always walk down to the store.”
“Where’s your cane at?”
“It don’t hurt every day. Just some days.”
“Does it hurt today?”
“Naw.”
They sat down at the table and lit cigarettes. The Redbone peered through the ragged screen door and then flopped down against it. It sagged in and out with his breathing. Glen looked above the door. The two bent horseshoes were still hanging there on their rusty nails. He blew on his coffee and stared at nothing.
“How’s it feel to be out?” his daddy said.
“What do you care?”
“How’d they treat you?”
“Keep you in a pen about like a cow. Can’t sleep. Always somebody yellin some crazy shit at night.”
Virgil looked at the dog lying against the screen door. He seemed to sleep about twenty-three hours a day.
