Burn What Will Burn

by C. B. McKenzie

  Fairly fresh tire tracks ran under what seemed incongruously to be a fairly new single-piece rolling garage door, which was padlocked tight to a thick iron ring set in a cement slab that also looked much newer than the rest of the construction around the place. One of the high, narrow windows of this garage door was cracked though, a sizable corner of a pane missing. But I was too short to see in.

  There was nothing in the yard to stand on but rotten bushel baskets. The wheelbarrow, when I pushed it, fell apart like a prop in a comic sketch.

  Behind the garage was another shed, its door hanging open. I peered inside and saw an old generator, cobweb shrouded and dusty, and several 55-gallon metal drums. The place smelled strong of gasoline and motor oil.

  Next to the generator was a horizontal propane tank. Though the gauge on the tank was broken the eight-foot-long steel can still smelled of rotten eggs.

  Atop this tank were two empty Coca-Cola cans with rough-edged holes punched in them to make rustic lanterns. The candles in them had reduced to pools of wax with nipples of charred wick. The top of a propane tank didn’t seem a safe place to light votive candles. It seemed a queer place for a shrine, but it seemed a shrine.

  Between the candleholders seven locks of braided hair, short as a thumbnail and delicately knotted, were arranged around a small mammal’s skull.

  I was in a feline shrine.

  The close space smelled of burnt hair and, unmistakably, of a man, of dirty skin long cured in sweat, of rank, bare feet.

  Sweat dripped off my tailbone.

  I edged to the door of the shed, leaned out slightly.

  The color red streaked by my face and my legs collapsed just before the heat and blackness spread over my brain and I fell.

  CHAPTER 6

  I woke up with a terrible headache.

  In jail.

  Hanging on the bars of an adjoining cell was a reedy man with neat, high-piled hair who massaged his crotch in a manner more habitual than provocative.

  There was no other visible presence in the cell block.

  “What you in for, Pard?”

  My neighbor was lily white with purple skin hung up under his deep-set eyes like colostomy bags half filled with old blood. His scent was strong and complex—snuffed tobacco, fish guts, hair oil and expensive cologne, all lightly liquored up. His clothes were dirty, but his hands and fingernails were very clean.

  I sat up on the edge of the cot, felt nauseated.

  “You didn’t answer my question right away, Pard.”

  His drawl was so cellular it was a speech impediment.

  “Are you a character?” he asked me.

  “Where am I?” I asked, to begin with.

  “Poe County Jailhouse, Pard. Bertrandville, Arkansas, United States of America. You was in here when I got my own accommodations, so I am a little bit uninformed about you.”

  He stared at me, licked his lips like he was tasting old dinner.

  “Are you the murderer, Pard?”

  I almost threw up.

  “Who said I was?” I managed to ask.

  “All’s I heard when Deputy Lloyd booked me was Sheriff found a floater in The Little Piney. Maybe murdered. And I just bet you know something about that, Pard.”

  My neighbor squinted at me, sneezed.

  My empty stomach clenched against nothing. I was speechless.

  “Been in here a awful lot,” the fellow told me, sneezed again. “But ain’t seen no murderer yet to tell of, so this will be a particular first.”

  He sneezed again, wiped his nose with a tattooed hand, grinned at me, sniffed.

  The police had let him keep his jewelry on and the stone in his gold finger ring glowed blood red. One of his tattoos was of an eagle rampant.

  I examined what I could see of the ceiling, then stared at the floor.

  My neighbor hacked up a spoonful of phlegm and hocked it on the floor of my cell.

  “Ain’t a summer cold just the worse thing in the world, Pard?”

  “I’m not a murderer,” I said.

  My neighbor was not relieved to hear this.

  “Now that’s a damned shame.”

  He swung on the bars between us like a bored monkey.

  “Because a murderer would keep me entertained, I really figure one would.” He sighed. “But it’s no really good diversions for the truly evil wicked like us, is it, Pard?”

  It seemed to me that there were plenty, but maybe I was wrong.

  “You know what time it is?” I asked.

  “’Bout couple hours or so after lunchtime, Pard, because we have done had our lunch a while back, us that wasn’t beauty sleeping their lives away.”

  I felt a lump on the back of my head.

  “Do you have any idea why I’m in here?”

  “Nope, Pard, but I do know a good joke about three queer Jew doctors and a nigger hitchhiker, my neighbor told me. You ever heard a that one?”

  “I made that one up,” I said.

  “Why, Pard, you’re a funny man. I been looking for you. You and me’s like-minded, like they say.”

  It was hard for me to argue that right then.

  “I’ve got no sense of humor at the moment.”

  I felt like I had been drugged.

  “I can’t hardly believe that, Pard, to hear you speak. But if it is true, then it’s a burden for you I can appreciate.” He sneezed out his summer cold.

  “Everybody’s got their peculiar cross to bear. Right, Pard?”

  I didn’t answer since that seemed inarguable.

  “Still, you might’s well cozy up. We bedfellows in the same boat, as they say. Right, Pard?”

  “You would think so to see us,” I said, though I hoped that was patently untrue.

  But the bars surrounding us were exactly the same to look at them, on all sides. But bars always look different from the outside than from the inside.

  “And it ain’t a White way to be, is it, Pard? Odds out in close quarters with a particular badass like myself.”

  He was about as puny as me but I nodded anyway.

  He smiled, showing off his even, white teeth.

  “See there, Pard? We understand one ’nother just about perfect. And for wise fellows like us only just takes that one word to the wise.”

  I stared at my fingernails, went to the basin and washed my hands in tepid water. There wasn’t any soap and no towel and no toilet paper.

  “What are you in for?” I inquired, sat back on the hard and narrow cot.

  The man stretched, rubbed his crotch, at home, apparently, in jail.

  “Disorder,” he confessed.

  “What kind of disorder?”

  “Drunk and,” he said. “What other kind is there?”

  “Mental,” I suggested.

  He nodded agreeably, lifted two fingers.

  “Really, Pard, it’s two things. First off, I was fishing out at River Park this afternoon and Deputy Lloyd, he picks me up on drunken disorder.”

  He sneezed heartily, collected snot in his palm and wiped it on his blue jeans.

  “And…,” he went on, stared at the ceiling as if he was wondering himself what the number-two thing was.

  “It’s a new oustanding on me for rape I just found out.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “That’s my sister’n’law says I raped her.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “Which is a damned lie, Pard. Trust me on this one.”

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t know the whole story.”

  “Cain’t say we ever do know that, Pard,” he told me. “The whole story, what I mean.”

  He scratched in his thick, pomaded hair, pursed his lips, nodded to himself, spoke.

  “Tidy Chicken, where we work at, is out on strike and me and my wife we was killing time over at my sister’n’law’s house is the story.”

  He looked at me and I shrugged.

  “You know her?”

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

&
nbsp; “My wife, Hannah Lee.”

  “No.”

  “You know my sister’n’law then? Jucinda Lucille Harvey? Harvey’s her married name. Her maiden name’s Hayden. Not that she was ever no maiden.”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, Pard, I just guess you ain’t a sporting man then or you’d at least heard of her. Jucinda Lucille Harvey, second biggest whore in the Arkansas River Valley.”

  He frowned at me like I might be holding out on him somehow.

  “She lives over at those trailer houses behind the Piggly Wiggly in Danielles, acrossed the Arkansas River. You know the ones?”

  He seemed to want to connect me to the story someway. That seemed very important. I didn’t feel connected, but maybe I was. Maybe everybody was connected, everybody everywhere responsible for everybody and everything.

  I didn’t particularly believe that. But it was a thought.

  “I do know those trailer houses behind the Piggly Wiggly,” I said.

  “If you know them then you pro’bly might know Jucinda Harvey then,” he posited hopefully.

  I didn’t know who he was. Didn’t know who his people were. He did not seem to be anyone I wanted to know. And I was not particularly interested in gaining new friends.

  Still it can pay to be cordial.

  “I just might,” I allowed.

  “All right then,” he said. “Then you know it’s just a whorestown over there, all it is. ’Bout as bad as Doker. Might’s well paint the whole trailer park red and put up a price sign.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “So you know how it is,” he told me.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know how it was, was not certain at all that I wanted to even talk to this jailbird, if that’s what he was. But there is something magnetic about ignorant degenerates and trashy whores, and time passes slowly in jail, as they say. And the unregenerate serve as scapegoats some way maybe, balance the scales of humanity perhaps. We’re all crooked, but some of us are stupid too, some of us get caught; and those of us who aren’t stupid and don’t get caught feel better that those of us who are and do are there, here, everywhere serving as a reminder that it could be worse for us, that we could be worse.

  And it didn’t appear I was going anywhere soon. So I nodded.

  “So me and my wife, Hannah Lee, we was over there in that trailer park behind the Piggly Wiggly last afternoon, killing time and my sister’n’law, who holds liquor like a fishnet, got fucked up was what happened and her husband, man name of T. Bo Harvey, works at the Exxon station over in Doker in your part of the woods. Volunteer fireman sometimes … You know T. Bo?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, he’s gone over there to Doker all the time,” my neighbor said thoughtfully, like that could explain it, the whole mess he was in.

  “I think he gets his over there too. What I hear from Jucinda Lucille, T. Bo he doesn’t get it at home from her.”

  I nodded, kneaded my eyeballs with my knuckles, inhaled, exhaled.

  “So Jucinda Lucille she knows me and my old lady, her own sister, hadn’t been doing it of late ’cause of Hannah Lee’s got a yeast infection. So she’s working up to me all night long. You know how it is. I got a fearsome big dick. Her husband’s gone off. Finally I had enough of that shit, so I told her if she wanted it so bad I’d surely give it to her. What else could a man do?”

  He stared at me like I might not understand his reasoning, though I could, totally.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Shit’s truth, Pard,” he claimed, sneezed. “Of course just looking at you I might think women were not your thing, no offense, so I couldn’t say for you. But for me, Pard, it’s the sporting life morning, noon and night, whenever, wherever. So I poked ol’ Jucinda right up her ass in the bathroom of her double-wide.”

  “Where was your wife at this time?”

  He thought about this.

  “My wife was just passed out in the living room.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “It’s Gospel, Pard.”

  He raised the Boy Scout fingers, sneezed and wiped his nose on his pledging hand.

  “Jucinda Lucille asked for it outright, as you heard me tell for yourself. What’s did me in though, was coming in her porthole. Jucinda Lucille hates that and I knew she hated it and I went on and did it just the same.”

  He nodded at me like I’d understand that.

  “And, Pard, that’s why she called the Law on my dumb-ass self.”

  He acted like Life was a very simple proposition but for the details and his forgetfulness of them.

  “I see,” I said.

  He sighed sincerely.

  “I hope Sammy the Man don’t let you out, Pard,” he told me. “No offense, but I’m in here awhile and I hate to lose a winner like you. Good listener hard to find in this shithole. Mostly just niggers. Not that I got anything against niggers themselves, but they just not like us, Pard. And like to like, I say.”

  I wasn’t sure I appreciated the comparison.

  I wasn’t entirely sure that I could disagree with it though.

  My jail cell neighbor looked me up and then down.

  “You live out at Rushing, don’t you, Pard?”

  He said that like he knew it for a fact.

  It did not seem wise to confirm to the man where I lived.

  “I think you do,” my jail mate said. “I think you that rich fella my pardner Jake Wells told me about. The one that bought the Old Duncan spread a little while back. That you, Pard? You that crazy Texas fella Jake tells me about that throws rocks at his cows and his kids? Likes to go down to Hot Springs?”

  I shrugged like I didn’t know who I was.

  “Well, them kids a’ Jake’s—Isaac and Neutron, if you can believe those dumb-ass names—are little green shits that need to get stomped on, Pard, if I do say so.”

  I didn’t say anything, because this too was inarguable.

  My jail neighbor coughed and spit on the floor on his side of the bars.

  “You know your buddy Sammy Baxter’s got a place out yonder too.”

  “The sheriff does?” I asked.

  “Yup. That place the other side of The Little Piney, the spread that’s got the badass fence ’roundabout it.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Sworn truth, Pard. Why would I lie ’bout a thing like that of all things?”

  I didn’t know the answer to that question and I must have looked a wee bit surprised since my new jailhouse buddy continued with his data dump.

  “Sammy was born and raised out over there, lived there every day until he run off to join the Marines Corp. His own momma was a schoolteach over at Doker High. Very sweet woman. Loved cats. And his daddy used to raise up apples. Me and Jake just about lived off them apples when we was kids.”

  “What happened to Baxter’s folks?”

  “His momma died a cancer while back. His daddy went crazed as a coot short while after that fact. Old man still stays out over in there what I hear. Not in the house, but outside. Won’t sleep inside. What that fence is all about—to keep the old loon penned up.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “As a heart attack. Tried to put old man Baxter in a crazy house over in Fort Smith, but he hurt some people and broke out. I guess Sam figures his daddy, he’s ’bout’s well off out there in the woods as in town.”

  I wondered about that.

  The locks on the door to our cell block clicked. It wasn’t a loud sound, but I was keen to hear it. I stood up as a fat deputy walked our way.

  “Mr. Reynolds,” he called out. “Pack your bags, Sir. Freedom train’s acoming your way.”

  * * *

  The deputy opened my cell, stepped aside to let me pass by into the aisle, locked the gate shut again, looked at my ex-neighbor.

  “You been yapping all this time, Ricky Dale?”

  “Just being neighborly, Deputy Lloyd,” said Ricky Dale to the jailer. To me he said, “I’ll come
visit you at Rushing when I get out, Pard.”

  “Long’s you’re going to be in the can this time, Ricky Dale, he probably won’t even be living out there after all that time. Will you, Mr. Reynolds?”

  I shrugged.

  “Or might be too old by then to remember you, Ricky Dale,” the deputy added.

  “See you,” Ricky Dale said to me anyway. “Pard.”

  “Stay out of trouble,” I said.

  * * *

  I sort of expected somebody to be there, one of my lawyers, a judge, the sheriff, somebody, anybody with an explanation.

  But there was nobody except Deputy Lloyd beside me. He locked the block down, stepped behind the booking desk and started searching under the counter.

  “You got some valuables here, Sir?” he asked me.

  I pressed a hand against my chest. The wedding band, the gold ring on the chain around my neck, the property of the dead man, was gone. My own wedding ring was still on my finger. My wallet and car keys, I thought, were in the pickup.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  The deputy looked under the counter again.

  “I don’t see a thing, Sir.”

  He pushed a form at me, held out a pen, jerked his head at the hallway that led to the sidewalk.

  “Sign this release form then, Sir, and you can go on.”

  “What if I don’t sign?”

  “Everybody always signs, Sir. You’ll surely want to sign too.”

  I signed.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “Far’s I’m concerned,” the deputy said. “Sheriff called in and said to drop the trespass charge against Randall Reynolds and let him out. Sheriff Baxter had you criminal trespassing dead to rights as I heard it. He let you loose on that. You got some complaint, Sir?”

  I guessed I didn’t. My head was sore and I was hungry, filthy and tired, but free and really none the worse for wear after a few hours in jail.

  At my age I never felt too good anyway.

  “You want me to call you a taxicab, Sir?”

  “I guess I’ll just walk up to the Holiday Inn and get some dinner.”

  I had a running tab at the Inn, so didn’t need my wallet for that.