Burn What Will Burn

by C. B. McKenzie

  The sheriff parked on the middle of the old bridge, but kept the cruiser’s motor and the AC running. We got out and I moved to the side of the bridge that would give view to the dead man’s resting place. The sheriff moved beside me, too close for comfort.

  The body was gone.

  Baxter sighed like he’d been holding his breath. His breath was like vaporized peppermint schnapps. He seemed relieved, but he could have been frustrated, hungover or something else. He was hard for me to read.

  He stared at the north bank of The Little Piney where I was staring, spat cleanly over the rusted rail of the bridge into the water below. With a thumb he pushed up the brim of his hat, just a hair.

  “He was right down there, Sheriff.”

  The white oak in the creek clung to land with thick torqued roots. Green leafed, it was the livest plant around. Even the usually succulent kudzu vines were dry, fibrous as sisal rope wound around the trunks and limbs of heat-exhausted trees on the cut bank.

  When I leaned against the bridge rail and pointed at the spot where I had found the corpse, the ring on the gold chain around my neck slid over the collar of my T-shirt.

  The sheriff looked at the ring on the chain, not at where I pointed. He raised his eyebrows and frowned, which complex maneuver seemed the sort of facial move that lawmen must practice and which could mean anything from personal knowledge to professional curiosity. I tucked the chained gold band back under my shirt.

  When I dropped my hand I felt sweat cold in my armpit.

  “I suppose, Mister Reynolds,” he said conversationally, “that a rich fellow from Houston and Gulfport and wherever else you been, would just naturally get bored living out in this kind of Pure Country.”

  The sheriff had checked up on me.

  “I don’t think you understand Rural America. How it is out here.”

  Though the High Sheriff might have been aiming at informed sarcasm, his critique came off as canned. And he was clearly underinformed about me on these older counts, since I’d been born in a town not much bigger than Doker and raised in one no bigger than Bertrandville and only lived in Houston because that was the only place that would accept me in graduate school and only had traveled some of the world because my father drug me on business trips around the world only to carry his bags and tend to him when he was drunk, which my mother would not do for her husband.

  But I didn’t say anything. People think they know you when they know where you’re from or where you’ve lived or where you went to school or who your people are; but that is often not the case in the least bit and apples can roll as far from the trees that bore them as the grocery store, oftentimes many states and even countries far away from their place of origin.

  The sheriff turned back to his car.

  “Shouldn’t we take a look?” I asked, because I felt I should ask, though I did not want to take a look with the sheriff.

  It was curious that the body was back in the creek or gone elsewhere, but I was relieved that it was.

  The sheriff made a big production of looking east and west and north and south.

  “Take a look at what, Mister?”

  Truthfully there was not much to see. Even the heel marks my walking shoes had made in the creekside mud seemed now smoothed to inconsequence.

  I looked over the bridge rail. In the shallow water river stones were smooth and speckled as cresting trout, metal pull tabs glittered like silver jewelry, plastic bobbers were hooked in a nest of fishing line. A faint scent of burned wood rose as a quick hot breeze whisked up and twirled the white trash ash inside a fire pit like insubstantial egg whites, shirred to the ultimate thinness of dust. Empty cans of potted meat-food product and oysters, soda cracker wrappers and chewing gum wrappers and Styrofoam worm containers, beer cans and fish bones and heads, spent rifle cartridges littered the ground.

  A branch snapped on the southside bank and the red-tailed hawk was yanked off his regular perch atop the loblolly and reeled into the blue sky.

  I peered into the brush below the pine trees.

  A feral cat showed itself. This was one of the tribe of housecats gone wild that inhabited all the area around the creek. The old yellow tom twisted his head skyward, looking up at the bird settled back in the loblolly. But the aerie of the hawk was a long climb up a tall tree for an unlikely meal, so the scroungy cat backed out of sight.

  “I’m leaning towards just chalking this little episode up as a waste of County time, Mister Reynolds.”

  “Chalking it up,” I repeated.

  I wasn’t complaining, though chalking it up did not sound like exactly correct procedure.

  “I guess I could haul you in,” the sheriff said casually, giving me the distinct impression that Sam Baxter did not like me, nor dislike me, but was, in actual fact, trying to figure out what to do with me.

  “Haul me in for what, Sheriff?”

  “I’m sure I could think of something, Mister Reynolds. I am High Sheriff of Poe County.”

  He moved toward the cruiser.

  “Is that the way things work out here, Sheriff?”

  He appeared to seriously consider that question.

  “I’d have to say, yes, Mister. Things do work about like that out here.”

  He stared at me and his thin lips curled up, ever so slightly.

  I blinked, brushed dust out of my eyes. I have a problem keeping my eyes open when someone stares at me.

  “I didn’t invent the man.” I declared this with some surety, but I was not sure how sure I was about that. Pretty sure, I thought. But you never know.

  I was reassuring myself more than arguing, but the sheriff took the opportunity that presented itself.

  “So you say, Mister Reynolds,” said the sheriff.

  He sounded skeptical, as if I was not a credible witness in this case.

  “Why would I?”

  “That’s the Sixty-Four Dollar Question, isn’t it, Mister?” he said. “Why did you?”

  “He was there,” I said and nodded at the creek. “I don’t know who he was or how he got there. But he was there.”

  Baxter thumbed loose tobacco off his lip. He did not act like he believed me.

  “So you say. But you could have invented him, from what I hear tell of you, Mister Reynolds.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  The sheriff walked to the driver’s side of the car, rolled up his shirtsleeves and laid his hands on the roof. His shirt was sweat-stained under the arms. The five-pointed star on his breast pocket was shiny brass.

  A crude tattoo on the inside of his right forearm seemed familiar—an eagle, a banner, an encouraging, inspired motto.

  “It means, Mister, that I heard you got a screw loose.”

  I stared at the spot where my dead man had been.

  “Depends on who you talk to,” I said.

  “Well, Mister I believe you’re right in saying that. In general. But when there’s near about unanimous agreement on a man’s state of mind, that saying kind of loses its punch, doesn’t it?”

  I spit, meaning to hit the water, but my spit dribbled onto my chin. I swiped at it with my hand.

  “You don’t know anything about me.”

  Baxter tapped on the roof of his car with the Zippo.

  I turned around and he stared at me until I blinked.

  “I know what I know,” the sheriff said.

  If he’d called the Houston Police Department he knew that some homicide detectives there believed that if I had not exactly killed my wife I had had some hand in her death. Or rather, that I had failed to raise a helpful hand.

  My wife possessed a lot of troubles from the start—drugs, men, women, whatever. After the miscarriage she just got worse, fell completely off her rocker, spent my money like crazy, on dope, on her people. My ex-in-laws, their lawyers, their private investigator, my lawyers, the insurance investigators, my distant relations all knew I’d been in therapy over all that, had never actually received a clean bill of
mental health. But having an unclean bill of mental health is not a crime, yet and truth is hard to ascertain sometimes.

  Though I was off serious medications Dr. Doc still mildly tranquilized me for my “nerves.” I didn’t usually talk much about my family affairs to strangers.

  Jacob Wells and his ill-bred brood would say I was a crazy eccentric nuisance who threw rocks at their livestock.

  Preacher Pickens, I was quite sure, despite my charitableness to his church and the fact that I paid his grandson ten dollars a week to, basically, do nothing, considered me a bad influence on his grandson Malcolm.

  Baxter grinned the sort of grin the cat gets when it gets the canary in the coal mine, just before the bird squawks.

  I wanted to drop him in a very deep hole and dump snakes on his head.

  “You don’t know shit,” I said, looked away before another staring match ensued.

  Baxter sniffed and wiped a hand over his chin in another gesture that seemed well rehearsed.

  “Well, Mister, let me just put it to you like this—if a dead man, a dead drowned man, does show up in this creek, anywhere within hailing or driving distance from your domicile…”

  He let that veiled threat curtain between us for a moment.

  I stared at the water.

  “Your wife drowned, didn’t she,” Baxter stated, didn’t ask. “Official cause of death was drowning.”

  The Little Piney was moving under me. I felt dizzy.

  “My wife was a drug addict, Sheriff. She fell asleep in the bathtub.”

  I saw, I imagined her face in the creek below me, her blue eyes open, her blond hair spread, darkened in the water as a nun’s black habit.

  “She drowned,” Baxter reminded me again, lowered his voice. “And she had thumb marks on her neck and bruises on her shoulders.”

  She was very frail. Still beautiful, but very frail by then, junkie thin, with papery, pale skin that bruised easily.

  When I’d lifted her out of the tub she’d been light in my arms as an underfed child.

  “Yes, Sheriff. The official cause of death was accidental drowning.”

  My lawyers had persuaded for that grand jury verdict four years and three months before. I was the older, parsimonious, boring husband of a very attractive, very unstable young woman, but there was no evidence to indict me for any wrongdoing.

  I was a good husband.

  If it was a suicide, she hadn’t left me a note. But that was no surprise to anyone. My wife had never thought much of me and had been pretty public about that disregard.

  “She did drown,” I repeated, so there would be no confusion.

  It was as easy for me to understand how I lost her as it had been difficult for me to understand how I got her. Even with my money, I was not the kind of man to get a woman like that—not for long, not for keeps.

  Baxter studied me for a moment, lifted an eyebrow, tossed his straw Stetson through the open door of the cruiser.

  He had a full head of short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair.

  “I hear your daddy drowned too. That right, Mister Reynolds?”

  “In a manner of speaking, Sheriff,” I allowed.

  I was still living at home then, almost twenty-five years old, taking care of my invalid mother. I found him collapsed in his car, Jim Beam in hand.

  “He choked to death on his own vomit,” I recalled, wiped the sweat sheen off the bald spot at the back of my head.

  Baxter nodded.

  “He was a chronic alcoholic, Sheriff. An affliction I’m sure you’re familiar with.”

  I knew that was pushing it, but I was mad.

  Baxter just narrowed his eyes.

  “Your mother managed to die of natural causes, I hope, Mister Reynolds.”

  I nodded.

  My mother followed her husband into the grave pretty much, pausing only long enough to put her strange affairs in order. Codependents my parents would be called currently, though not, perhaps, in most conventional senses were they …

  Enablers.

  As they did not really enable each other, but quite the opposite. They, sort of, eventually, killed one another.

  That was another one of their mistakes I had not repeated. I had not let my wife kill me.

  “Heart failure,” I said.

  It had always been my understanding that Momma loved me like she did him, but her sudden departure from my continuing scene led me to believe otherwise. She did leave me most of her money, which had been my daddy’s money, which had been his daddy’s money. But she allowed me my full inheritance, one hundred percent, only after I swore on one of her many Holy Bibles to keep her storefront church open …

  Which I did not do.

  Because I do not, really, believe in Promises.

  Semper Fi, you can have it.

  “My momma died in the hospital,” I said.

  Baxter nodded, as if he knew that that was a lie from me even though he was not sure because he had not done that much background check on me.

  Actually, my mother had died at home with me in the house. She had a heart attack and drowned facedown in her oatmeal bowl.

  The sheriff looked over my shoulder at the fenced-in “compound” over on the south side of The Little Piney, then he looked back at me, stared at me.

  “You know what ‘modus operandi’ is, Mister?”

  “It’s the way a fella has of doing something that is peculiar to that particular fella,” I answered. “More or less.”

  “So…,” he said, hitched up his pistol-weighted belt. “Let’s just say if a man does turn up dead by drowning nearby, you’re going to be first on my list of prime suspects for putting him there, Mister Reynolds. So if I was you, I’d forget about this particular fantasy of yours of finding a dead man in The Little Piney right here.”

  “All right,” I said, not looking his way, looking at the creek, right at the spot where I knew I thought I’d seen the dead man, “Buck.”

  “And, out of courtesy, Mister Reynolds, I will remind you once more that I’m High Sheriff of Poe County. And ask you plainly if you get my drift about what that might mean for you.”

  I nodded. “I get your drift, Sheriff Baxter,” I said, because I did.

  “Just a word to the wise, Mister.”

  “I got it,” I said. “High Sheriff,” I repeated. “Poe County. Word to the wise should be sufficient.”

  “We’re on the same page so far, Mister Reynolds.”

  If the High Sheriff of Poe County and I were on the same page that would be the first time in a long time I had been on the same page with anybody, so I doubted that we really were. But I did not argue with Sam Baxter about where we were relative to one another. The High Sheriff of Poe County was not someone I wanted to arrest me or book me, and I surely did not want to become to him any sort of Person of Interest.

  Sheriff Sam Baxter got in his car, shut the door, backed off the bridge, turned the Tan-and-White around in County Road 615 and drove east in a cloud of red dust.

  He didn’t ask me if I wanted a ride.

  I wouldn’t have taken it anyway.

  CHAPTER 5

  I stood on the bridge, blinking. According to my dead watch it was seven thirty-three and would be forever if I kept that watch on.

  I slipped the cheap Timex off my wrist.

  I’d worn a watch, every day and every night, since I was in grade school, usually a cheap Timex, so without a watch on my wrist my whole arm felt strange, even more insubstantial than as per usual.

  But maybe it was time to quit keeping time and quit worrying so much about dead bodies and such.

  I had the unsettling feeling that the lawman Baxter did not much appreciate me ruining his morning with what he perceived to be a false alarm and that he and I had business as yet unfinished; but I was tired of keeping track of who I had business with, quick and dead.

  I threw the wristwatch as far upstream as I could and watched the cheap piece of plastic float almost instantly under the bridge.r />
  But maybe I was imagining the sheriff’s rancor toward me. I had been accused of paranoia before, officially and unofficially.

  And I should have had something better to do with my time than stand on a bridge in a backwater of northwest Arkansas wondering why a local county sheriff had gone to the trouble to make general inquiries of me and lower my self-esteem.

  But I didn’t.

  Apart from my garden and my chickens nothing in the world depended on me in the slightest. Even my money took care of itself, multiplied even as I stood staring down at water that appeared deep and cool but was really not much deeper at its deepest than a tall man standing and was as warm along the edges as blood.

  * * *

  I thought of what to do.

  Do Nothing made a very persuasive argument. Most of my life I usually Did Nothing, so it was a familiar activity I was successful at.

  I was probably in trouble already.

  * * *

  County Road 615, as a maintained public road, terminated at the old iron bridge.

  I strolled to the south side of the bridge and examined tire tracks in the dust of what CR 615 continued to be past its legally maintained limits.

  No matter my other flaws, I will say I am rather meticulous in my observations.

  (There are seventy-six teeth on one side of the zipper of my favorite short pants, for instance. Thirty-five nylon bristles per tuft on my toothbrush, forty tufts, fourteen hundred bristles altogether.)

  I noticed one particular set of tracks that ran under the gate of the fenced field and aimed south at the empty stone house one way and in a vaguely southeasterly direction down the rutted two-track road into the deep woods another way, all headed away from Civilization (as we knew it locally, at least).

  I handled the pair of padlocks on the gate. Two locks on two chains. One chain on the ground.

  There had always been three rusty locks on three lengths of rusted chain. I searched in the weeds until I found the third lock, in a mole hole, under a leaf, a rusty affair, sheared in two, by a small explosion probably, so not bulletproof as advertised. Then I noticed that the locks remaining on the gate were new, still slick with packing grease.

  Somebody had shot the old padlocks off the gate, replaced two of them with new locks. Somebody in a hurry to get inside or somebody not supposed to be inside.