Burn What Will Burn

by C. B. McKenzie

  “You cannot imagine what I have been through, Mr. Reynolds.”

  “It’s a shame for you, Miss Ollie.”

  “Things have to work out somehow, Mr. Reynolds.”

  “It’s an admirable philosophy, Miss Ollie.”

  We were very still for a moment, Miss Ollie was and I was. The tourists at the other end of the room chewed their food loudly and leaned toward me and Miss Ollie.

  “There’s just some people you’re better off not having around, Mr. Reynolds. I was not one who wished her harm. She had a bad time of it too, like most of the rest of us around here. But she was no good to have around here. No good for anybody. Not back then. Not lately. Not ever.”

  Miss Ollie wiped a hand over her lean face.

  “A girl like that is always no good in a place like this place, Mr. Reynolds.”

  A few wisps of soft gray hair escaped Miss Ollie’s hairnet and she tucked them back with a move that made her tragic and almost pretty in a minor sort of way.

  Ollie Ames was just a bit older than me, I realized. Or maybe even my own age.

  “It’s bad chemistry, Mr. Reynolds. It goes against natural order.”

  “I won’t argue with you about that, Miss Ollie,” I agreed, since so much of the trouble in the world was just that, bad chemistry of one sort or another.

  “It’s better just to take what plain thing God gives and be satisfied with it, Mr. Reynolds. Folks try to be something they’re not and never can be and try to have something they can’t have and never will have. Don’t you think that’s true, Mr. Reynolds? That people reach too high? That people expect too much out of life?”

  I drank my too-sweet and too-light coffee, wiped my mouth on a paper napkin.

  “I won’t disagree with you, Miss Ollie.”

  Though maybe Miss Ollie was totally wrong because if we only stayed in our natural states obeying natural orders we’d all still be living in caves, scratching crude symbols on rock, believing in gods and ghosts. Expectations could ruin us, but where would we be without them except always in the same old shit, in a cave battling shadows.

  “I am right, Mr. Reynolds.”

  I nodded just to keep the peace. I was not in an argumentative mood with the world right then. After all this “business,” as Miss Ollie had named our recent local trials, I was, truly, grateful to still have my hide even if I did not have any much hair to go along with it.

  “I think I’ll just skip eating right now, Miss Ollie. Tab up my daily blue plate though. Add Tammy Fay’s bill to my running tab as well. I insist.”

  Miss Ollie did not argue with me on this fiduciary point again.

  “As you like it, Mr. Reynolds.”

  I slid out of my booth, stepped to the door.

  “They’re talking about the death penalty for him, Mr. Reynolds,” Miss Ollie said as she followed me. “It’s an election year and the district attorney is going to seek the death penalty for my poor son. But the moratorium will save him, won’t it?”

  “I don’t think anybody’s going to be penalized to death in this country for quite a few more years, Miss Ollie,” I said, though once the national moratorium was lifted on capital punishment I imagined Warnell would be on the list for lethal injection in Arkansas, even if he was brain damaged. Unless he got some powerful good lawyers.

  The tourists called for their check. But Miss Ollie stayed focused on me.

  “My son doesn’t deserve the death penalty, does he, Mr. Reynolds? We don’t deserve that, do we?”

  I opened the door.

  Warnell’s three-legged stool was still on the slab porch.

  “You don’t deserve it, Miss Ollie,” I said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Reynolds. Thank you so much for saying so. It means the world to me to hear you say that.”

  “Whatever I can do then, Miss Ollie.”

  “I appreciate you, Mr. Reynolds.”

  I nodded.

  “And I appreciate you, Miss Ollie.”

  When I stepped from the cool of the inside to the heat of the outside my brain seemed to spin, for a brief moment, like a top.

  * * *

  There was a pretty, but new girl at the checkout at Goody’s Grocery—An Affiliated Foodstore and she was unfamiliar with me and so would not let me cash a counter check for cash money.

  “I’ll have to go get Mr. Goodman for approval.”

  “I’ll go get him,” I offered.

  The line at the checkout was backed up, the girl was flustered and her cash register was beeping angrily.

  Her neck was long and white and covered in hickies of various stages of bruising.

  “Goody in the back?” I asked.

  “Yessir.”

  Clarence Goodman was in what he hopefully called The Deli, a couple of plastic tables with attendant plastic chairs beside the butcher counter. He was eating from a family-size bag of low-fat potato chips. The remnants of a very large cut-meat sandwich littered the table. His chins were all greasy.

  I put the counter check in front of him and he pulled a ballpoint out of his overpacked shirt pocket and scribbled his mark on the back.

  “Shawnda’s new,” he apologized, returned the check to me. “We’re just breaking her in.”

  “Mr. Goodman,” I thanked him.

  “We appreciate your business,” he acknowledged, plunged back into his big bag of chips.

  The checkout girl cashed my check and I walked across the parking lot of the grocery store and stopped at the watermelon seller.

  “Hot one,” he said.

  “It is a dry heat, though,” I replied.

  “Unusual for these parts,” he said, repeating our earlier dialogue near exactly.

  You’d have thought we’d no memories to hear us talk and maybe that’s the way to be. To forget what you can forget. To forget what you say so that you can just say it again over and over and over.

  To forget what you’ve done so that you can do it again or won’t need to do it again.

  I paid for a watermelon.

  “I’ll come back in a minute,” I said, looked across the street. “Pick me out a good one.”

  “Doker special,” the watermelon seller said and winked at me. “Firm, but sweet.”

  I stepped across Main, stepped inside Dr. Williams’s office.

  Nurse shoved aside the frosted glass of the cubicle when she heard the front door open.

  “Mr. Reynolds.”

  I nodded.

  “Is the doctor in?” I asked.

  “No, he’s in Bertrandville testifying at the grand jury hearings. Then he’s taking a little time off. Traveling to the Gulf Shore, I believe. And so I am not expecting him to return to the office for several weeks.”

  The certificates and diplomas, the photographs in the doctor’s reception room were gone. The walls of the physician’s office were freshly painted institutional green.

  “Could you still set me up with an appointment for a blood test, please, Nurse?”

  “I can do that, Mr. Reynolds. Monday at your regular time?”

  “That will be fine, Nurse.”

  “You have been entirely negative for ten months, Mr. Reynolds. Are you looking for something in particular?”

  “I am paranoid,” I said. “I appreciate your understanding, Nurse.”

  “I’ll put you down for next Monday, Mr. Reynolds. Your regular time.”

  “Can I get another prescription for my pills, Nurse?”

  I had been without them for many days and my nerves had not much suffered that lacking, but it is reassuring to have medicine handy for what might ail you.

  “That’s not something I can do for you, Mr. Reynolds. And Dr. Williams has told me that it is not something he feels comfortable continuing. So perhaps you had better find another physician to prescribe your medications as he sees fit. I’ll make you an appointment at Northwest Arkansas Regional Medical Center, if that’s suitable, Mr. Reynolds?”

  I nodded.

  “Is there
something more I can do for you, Mr. Reynolds?”

  “You could tell me the local gossip, Nurse. Do people know how Warnell killed Tammy Fay?”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Reynolds?”

  “How did Warnell Ames kill Tammy Fay Smith?” I repeated.

  Nurse cleared her throat.

  “He beat her and then raped her and then left her near South Slough. Then he went and sat on his stool in front of the café until his mother found him and Miss Ollie called the sheriff who came and arrested him.”

  “The beating killed her?”

  “No, the beating did not kill her. She rolled into South Slough somehow and drowned in the mud, Mr. Reynolds. Or else he pushed her, which seems most likely.”

  She had drowned in the mud, though this was not news I had read in the papers.

  “Drowned in the mud,” I repeated.

  “Yes, Mr. Reynolds. She was found facedown in the mud of South Slough. If Warnell had only left her on dry land she would have survived, the doctor said. But apparently Warnell pushed her face into the mud while she was unconscious and she asphyxiated. Doctor Williams was very upset about it.”

  “So, Warnell confessed?”

  “Eventually he did, Mr. Reynolds. To the High Sheriff. It took a few days of persuasion but he did confess.”

  “He confessed to Sam Baxter?” I asked for clarification.

  “But it wasn’t the sheriff that convinced him,” said Nurse. “It was his dear mother, Miss Ollie, saint that she is, who finally persuaded Warnell to confess his sins and make a clean breast of it. For the good of everybody. For the good of the community.”

  “So Warnell confessed to killing Tammy Fay?”

  “Eventually he did, yes, Mr. Reynolds.”

  “But not at first?”

  “The gossip is that at first Warnell only confessed to hitting Tammy Fay because she wouldn’t…” The nurse blushed slightly. “‘Go all the way’ with him is the way he put it. He knocked her out apparently.”

  “Then later on he confessed to killing her? Beating her, then drowning her in the mud of South Slough?”

  “Apparently it took some persuasion to get him to admit that he beat her at all beyond the one blow that knocked her unconscious. He never admitted to raping her. Insisted she promised him to ‘go all the way’ and so that was all he was doing—getting what he had been promised.”

  I nodded because I understood.

  “And it was Warnell’s mother, Miss Ollie, who convinced him to confess to more than that?” I asked.

  “Yes, Mr. Reynolds. Warnell confessed to Tammy Fay’s murder by drowning, but he never would confess to the rape. He did confess to the rape and murder of a lady tourist from several years ago. And he might not be done confessing yet. He has been crazy all his life, so there is no telling what else he might be responsible for.” The nurse paused. “I’m sure he’ll get the death penalty, won’t he? Even though he’s pretty retarded?”

  “I believe there’s a moratorium on capital punishment just now,” I informed. This was something I knew because it was something I had thought about in the last several years. “Without smart lawyers, Warnell will probably be lethally injected, eventually, even if he’s mentally retarded. But that will probably take a few years.”

  “Unless that liberal governor we got pardons him,” said the nurse with some heat.

  I did not ever want to get into political discussions, but I said, “I don’t see that happening, Nurse. Not if there are any bigger elections on the offer for the current governor.”

  “Warnell will probably like prison,” the nurse said after a thoughtful pause. “I’m sure the food in prison is no worse than Miss Ollie’s is at EAT. And all he ever does is sit around anyway.”

  “That’s not quite all he did,” I said.

  * * *

  In fact, Warnell had taken care of local business that summer. He had settled some complex affairs with his simple presence.

  And if that did not seem exactly right—that it should all fall on Warnell Ames—it did not seem exactly wrong either. Particularly if he had really raped and murdered a tourist at some point in the not-so-distant past.

  Sometimes there are extant in the world simple solutions to complex problems, not more or less improbable than the rest. The Greek tragedians had their God Machine. In Doker, Arkansas, that summer, we had Warnell Ames.

  I went to the door.

  “We’ll see you next week then, Mr. Reynolds, for your blood test,” Nurse said to my back. “Regular time. And I’ll get you set up at Regional Medical Center for your medications.”

  “Thank you, Nurse.”

  “You’re welcome, Mr. Reynolds. You have a nice day.”

  * * *

  The Cadillac had been parked in tree shade near the Exxon station. The watermelon seller touched the corner of his eye as I approached then pointed at my car. In the shotgun seat there was a melon, light skinned, veined dark green, oblong, probably ten pounds worth of red meat.

  I got in the fin tail, rolled all the windows down. The pump jockey came out of the Exxon station. I handed him a twenty.

  “She was low three quarts.”

  I handed him another twenty. He went off to get change.

  The watermelon seller stepped up beside me.

  “Me and T. Bo, we was just saying this is quite a ride you got yourself here, Mister,” the watermelon man said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Wouldn’t want to sell or trade, I don’t suppose?”

  I shook my head.

  “It was my wife’s car,” I said.

  “Good divorce settlement, huh? Me, I didn’t get but heartache and assache from either first two times and on number three probably won’t get much better.”

  “My wife died.”

  “Oh. Well, sorry to hear about that.”

  “She drowned in the bathtub.”

  The pump jockey returned from the office and handed me my change, which was short by a couple of dollars by my calculations.

  “You hear about that, T. Bo?” the watermelon seller asked the station attendant.

  “What’s that, Kendrick?” asked T. Bo.

  “Poor man says his dear wife drownt in the bathtub.”

  T. Bo took off his gimme cap and wiped the sheen off his bald head with the cap and put it back on, all the while eyeballing me.

  “Ain’t that a strange shame,” T. Bo said.

  I blinked and drove out of the shade and into the sunshine.

  * * *

  As I passed over South Slough I felt a tug at my belly like you will get when you’re coming home from a trip, a nervous apprehension that is really the hope that everything is at home exactly as you left it battling the certainty that it is not.

  Our bellies often remember what our brains forget.

  I stopped at Pick’s UPUMPIT! for bread and milk and my mail.

  UPUMPIT! was closed, locked up tight as a drum. The handwritten sign on the front screen door said, “Went to Memphis. Be Back on Next Sunday for Regular Church Service.”

  I walked around to the sidelot.

  Malcolm had cleaned out his snake pits, let the reptiles loose to fend for themselves while he was on holiday probably, released them so he could catch them again or else sold them all off to the snake-handling Christians who practiced their faith on the other side of the Grays or killed and skinned them for his wallet-making business, though I did not see any fresh snakeskins nailed to the back wall of the store.

  The gun I had thrown into the snake pit was gone from the snake pit.

  * * *

  I parked the Cadillac on the edge of the cemetery, strolled over to see the freshly whittled crucifix cross that was planted in the freshly turned grave dirt on the Pickens plot. The orangewood above Joe Pickens Junior was still splintered from its very recent carving. Since the Right Reverend had been carving that cross while his son Joe Junior was still alive, I wondered if Mean Joe had predicted Joe Pickens Junior’s fate or caused it.


  In the well-tended Baxter plot Frances Mary Baxter was interred under a spray of new tea roses, still waiting patiently for her husband Samuel Baxter Senior.

  * * *

  The Wells Twins had rearranged the nativity scene in their front yard and decapitated a couple of the Magi and now were strategically located amongst the dusty men throwing clods of brick-hard red clay at one another.

  Stank was asleep in the shade under the manger.

  The twins threw dirt clods at my car until they couldn’t throw far enough to make that fun.

  * * *

  My chickens had been let loose, were free ranging around the yard, appeared little worse for wear after my days away, but seemed glad to see me. They clustered around my feet and pecked at the laces on my walking shoes as soon as I alighted from the Caddy.

  I counted twelve birds left from my baker’s dozen, but could not figure which one was missing since they all looked the same to me.

  The dead one I found later in the backyard trash barrel, dismembered by hand not knife it appeared, ripped apart and somewhat defeathered, beheaded and half charred.

  The handiwork of the Wells kids probably, practicing their torture methods.

  * * *

  The screen door of the front porch was propped open with a rocking chair and there was still a scatter of feed in the troughs. The water in the birds’ water feeders was fouled thick and gray with their own shit.

  I changed the straw in the chickens’ roosts and restocked their feed troughs and freshened their water dishes and hosed down the porch floorboards.

  My house too was a bit overturned inside, the couches cut open strategically in several spots, chairs upset, my neatly typed pages of poetry disarranged, my clothes off the hangers, shoes mismatched, drawers pulled out.

  This mess could have been attributed to either the sheriff searching for something or credited to my neighbor Wellses making themselves at home or as payback if Jacob thought I had called the cops on him.

  I didn’t miss anything if it was gone. I think I’m getting to be more like that about things in general, which I take as a good sign.

  * * *

  There was a longish missive, crudely handprinted in pencil on the torn-off cover of a paperback, thumbtacked to the back door.

  “Deer Bob Rinald,” the note from Malcolm read.