Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem

by Karen G. Berry

  how many times has the man been told

  how many smokes have you got rolled

  eat your damn food or it will get cold

  I’m fuller of pee than I knew I could hold

  they found her rotten all covered with mold

  Another teacher might have scolded them for using the words and phrases they heard all the time at home. Melveena only listened. The rhymes were funny, grim, scatological, macabre. That didn’t surprise Melveena. Bone Pile was all of that.

  Her girls were all too thin, too scabby. Long hair and bare feet washed with water from bad wells meant ringworm and lice and giardia, in Bone Pile. Melveena Strange watched all that hair flying around in the wind behind her, floating like the hair of mermaids. She had fought the parents, the poverty, and the Right Reverend Henry Heaven to get those girls to school every day. And she knew that Granny Strange would be more than happy to have her Caddy used as a school bus for desert mermaids.

  THEY ARRIVED AT the schoolhouse. With a tip of his hat, Memphis drove on. Melveena pulled in, the potholes in the lot making her car buck and heave like a tormented leviathan. She watched her girls clamber over the side of her car and descend, barefoot, to that hot gravel. They flitted into her classroom like birds to a baited cage, unaware that the door might not open when it’s time to fly.

  She gathered them into a little circle around her desk. “The Right Reverend Henry Heaven has died, girls.” She looked from one face to the next. “Now, I’m sure your parents will find you other churches.” The girls stared at her. There was something obscene and provocative about those women’s faces balanced on top of skinny bodies with sharp hipbones and flat chests.

  She installed the two youngest in the block center and worked with the others in math. Bone Pile kids easily learned everything by eights, faltered at all other denominators. She made them stay in for the first recess, because “we have so many things to do, girls, and we’ve lost valuable time this morning.” The girls fixed her with their strange eyes, then redoubled their efforts.

  Melveena didn’t believe in reading groups. All her students read out loud, and together. They took turns, and it was like tag, the way one would pick up the last word of the preceding reader, then carry off the next sentence. Melveena looked at the array of children before her, and wondered how Ochre water would survive it when these beautiful girls hit Ochre Water High. She studied those faces carefully to see what was in those eyes besides the usual magic. She allowed herself the luxury of a very small smile.

  They were all doing better. Much better.

  While they picked through their lunches, served in the classroom because they had no cafeteria, she studied a pile of penmanship exercises that looked like sheets of paper covered with the tiny tracks of songbirds. Melveena’s eyes kept sinking shut in something dangerously close to exhaustion. “Lunch recess, girls.” While they played, she listened at her window, giving their words the same attentive analysis she’d applied to Emily Dickinson while earning her master’s.

  The girls rhymed, clapping hands.

  Shut the door and turn out the light

  grab that girl and squeeze her tight

  if there ain’t blood, it ain’t a fight

  I said I would but I only might

  my damn foot hurt and my boots is tight

  he’s always wrong she’s always right

  her heart is dark but her hair is light

  head for the left and aim for the right

  Melveena turned on a crocodile heel and walked swiftly to where Edana had been sitting. The girl, tired of practicing cursive in unforgiving ink, had dropped a metal-cylinder ball point to the floor and nudged it under her desk with a delicate, filthy toe. Melveena retrieved the pen. She held it for a moment. Her hand, so groomed and supple, began to stiffen. She looked down and watched the pen writhe.

  Melveena had no fear of snakes. A snake is simply a suggested thing, barely there, in reality. A snake is just a click and a whisper and a sting. But watch a blacksnake ready for battle. It will thicken, stiffen, harden into armor before it strikes.

  The pen was simply a pen. It rolled back under the desk. And Melveena Strange walked back to her post at the window.

  MEMPHIS STOPPED AT the store, first. The young man behind the counter had a mouth full of a Slim Jim and a can of Mountain Dew in his hand. Memphis knew this boy. A month before, Angus had taken out two miles of fencing while driving without a license in his cousin’s truck. Of course, his cousin had pretended to be the one driving, and had gotten off with restitution.

  Angus MacPherson. There were also some rumors about this boy and Melveena Strange. As a gentlemen, Memphis wanted to ignore those rumors. As a lawman, he couldn’t. “I’m out here looking for a little information.” Angus’ eyes turned blank as shale. “What do you know about the Reverend? I mean, personally.”

  “Oh, not too much. He don’t talk much to me.”

  “I sure would like to talk to a few of those folks who go to the Open Arms, Angus. Did you ever go?”

  “Piss on church.”

  “Whereabouts does your family live?”

  “Up in the hills.” He drank off his pop with audible gulps.

  “Could you give me directions?” Angus gave Memphis five minutes worth of detailed, talking-with-his-mouth-full directions. Memphis filled three pages in his notebook. “Let me read these back.” It took him another ten minutes to get them right. “OK,” he said, closing the notebook and slipping it in his pocket. “Thank you.”

  “No problem.” Angus opened up three tiny pecan pies and set them in a row on the counter. He threw down those pies one at a time, a single gulp for each. Like shots of whiskey. “Hey, you know my da won’t be there, right?”

  “He won’t?”

  Angus tore open a pepperoni stick. “Nope. Most of my kin went to that bluegrass festival up in Idaho.”

  “The men are still up there?”

  He took his time with the pepperoni and the answer. “Everybody in Bone Pile goes every year. I wanted to go, but I had to work. Still paying off that fence.” He smiled. “A few of my cousins are left back up to the trailer park, getting’ ready for the talent show.” He rubbed his rock hard stomach and let out a sharp belch.

  Memphis looked at the ratty boy in his overalls and polished boots, and wondered why in God’s name women went so wild over these Bone Pile characters. Lettie Tyson, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Hiram, his dimwitted deputy, had gone crazy over Angus when he arrived at Ochre Water High school. She had written him love letters, followed him around, broken into his locker, tearfully confronted him whenever he talked to another girl, and finally scratched his name into her forearm with a pair of nail scissors. The boy had not so much as called her on the telephone.

  The Sheriff sighed. The kid tore open another Slim Jim.

  Memphis, feeling the futility of any further conversation and unwilling to witness any more junk food carnage, drove up into the hills.

  IN HIS EARLIEST years on the reservation, before he and Tender had been taken to school, there had been rumors of towns that could hide. Older men with laughing eyes told stories of entire villages that would vanish at the approach of an interloper. Memphis never knew if he was being instructed or teased or both.

  His day in the hills around Bone Pile reminded him of these stories. He followed Angus’s directions carefully. He did find a group of railroad cars, four to be exact, all of which were absolutely silent at his approach. The rumor was they lived in these cars. He knocked on a graffiti-covered metal wall and heard nothing, not even a drawn breath, to let him know his knocking was heard by anyone within.

  He gave up and went back to the school.

  THE BUS CAME just as he was knocking on her classroom door. The girls looked up, saw the uniform and ran for the exits. It was a Bone Pile reflex and not to be taken personally.

  Melveena smiled in welcome. “Sheriff. Won’t you have a seat.” Memphis folded his long frame into one o
f the kids’ chairs. He felt like a lonely Indian boy a few grades behind, a boy so desperately in love with the young nun who taught them that he’d committed small acts of classroom disobedience just to be allowed to stay in at recess and study her.

  “I need to know the particulars of the Reverend’s rings. They’re missing.”

  “Those rings were trash.”

  “Well, someone took them, and I need to know what they looked like. And you notice things like this.”

  “Well, let’s see. One had fairly large stones set in the shape of a horseshoe. One was pavé, in the shape of a four-leaf clover. One was a lion’s head, with fake rubies for eyes and a fake diamond in the mouth, like, held in the teeth?” She made a claw shape with her manicured hands to demonstrate. “Another one had ‘canary diamelles,’ which is QVC lingo for big yellow zircons. He had two in the shape of the Cross. A big one, and a smaller one he wore on his pinkie. The other two were just great big ugly rings, Memphis. Monstrous type rings. And there wasn’t anyone in that Park who didn’t know they were fakes. No one.”

  Memphis thought about it. “That means that whoever killed him came from outside the Park?”

  “From Ochre Water, you mean? Or farther away?”

  “Well, what about Bone Pile?”

  “The folks around here loved him.” She flashed that smile.

  “How are the kids taking it?” Memphis could hear the kids in question outside, playing some kind of singing game. Their voices floated out the open bus windows.

  that goddamn pork done made me sick

  God hit that girl with the ugly stick

  her blood ran red his blood ran thick

  you can have them all or take your pick

  If the car don’t start then give it a kick

  she killed him with a big sharp pick

  the devil’s got a big horse dick

  I want your ice cream, give me a lick

  there’s that corn I need to pick

  “They’re heartbroken, of course.” Melveena strode over and slammed the window. “These girls are beyond devastated.”

  Memphis looked at her tall frame standing between him and the light of the closed window. He thought about that third-grade teacher. “Can you tell me which of these girls were members of the Church of the Open Arms, Melveena?” She listed their odd names, and he wrote them dutifully in his notebook. “Have you noticed anyone up here with new boots? It’s a long shot, but I’m looking for new boots.”

  “I probably haven’t seen a new pair of boots in Bone Pile in all the time I’ve worked here. There are boys in my school wearing their grandfathers’ boots. They just pass them down.”

  He stood then. “Good afternoon, Miz Melveena.”

  “Afternoon, Sheriff.” She shut her door, opened her window and watched him go to his car.

  HIS CELL PHONE rang on the way back to the office, with news. Gator had his hearing, and he was out. “There just isn’t enough of a judicial backlog in these parts to keep a man in jail with no legal reason,” Memphis complained to Hiram. “Even a man like Gator Rollins.”

  “Yes Sir, Sheriff.”

  He hung up and thought about Minah’s warning that a man got the death he deserved.

  Once, he’d arrived at the scene of a three-fatality accident scene. Marva Jean Delaney and her baby, Jonathan Junior, had been coming home from her parent’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebration when a drunk driver in a Chevy truck had strayed across the highway line, head on into Marva Jean’s Volkswagen Rabbit. She’d died instantly, the impact of her head to the windshield enough to shatter her skull.

  Jonathan Junior had been riding in the back, just like he was supposed to be, strapped onto a car seat, just like he was supposed to be. He didn’t have a mark on him. He looked like he was sleeping. He wasn’t. That old car seat from a tag sale in Ochre Water had bad straps. Just enough slippage to let that tiny neck snap like a wishbone.

  Oh, Memphis had wanted to cry out to the unfairness of a God that would take a young mother, an innocent baby. While on-duty, he questioned men, not God. So he made some notes, dried his eyes, and took a look at the other driver.

  Jarvis Headwall, a drunken no-account from Ochre Water, had bled to death after being cut to ribbons. It had taken him two hours to die, according to the ambulance driver. The folks who found him said he was hollering up a storm, the idiot, twisting around and making himself bleed even more. If he’d a held still, he might a made it. By the time we got here, we couldn’t save him.

  Memphis had looked at that place in the road, a place where the world lost a baby, his mother, and the man who’d killed them. He’d tried to see more than the horror of it. He’d tried to see the mercy in it. The innocent ones, at least they died quickly.

  When tears over the lost child started streaming down his cheeks, he knew he’d reached his limit. It was time to rest. He radioed the office. “I’ll be at home seeing to the animals, Hiram.”

  He drove the miles to his farm carefully. At one point, he woke just as his wheels hit the gravel shoulder. He whistled like a bird, sang the Tennessee Waltz, counted mailboxes out loud.

  Home had never looked so nice.

  John Lee, the ancient German shepherd sleeping in the kitchen corner, looked up, thumped his tail. John Lee was a veteran police dog, retired with honors from the force at age nine. His bad hips were nothing unusual in a shepherd, but he still made it in and out of the dog door when he needed to. Memphis filled his bowl, and noted with satisfaction that the old boy still had his appetite.

  He uncovered the cage in his kitchen and smiled at the little faun-colored heads poking out of the teardrop-shaped nest. “Morning,” he mumbled, embarrassed by his affection for this pair of finches. He fed the birds, blowing away the chaff, smiling at their angry scolding and hopping about. Guarding those eggs.

  He took of his boots, washed his hands, lay down on his couch, and went soundly to sleep. He dreamed of Tender.

  As young men, Tender had been a model of dignity, his hands on the strings of a fiddle or on the keys of a piano, his head cocked, his big ears held just so, so that his eardrums could vibrate with that sonic brilliance that only he could hear. Memphis didn’t understand the brother he had now, the way he swallowed hard whenever he sent his eyes up the street to Fossetta’s trailer. The way he let that little woman yell at him, as if he deserved it.

  That was not the brother who visited his dreams.

  In his afternoon dreams, Tender roamed the lanes and avenues of the Park in a navy blue robe, the crest glowing golden over his heart. His feet were bare and bleeding, his hair streaming away from his head. His silver eyes loomed huge. He shone as a visionary, a prophet, a mobile home Moses.

  I heard it, big brother, he kept saying. I heard it.

  Lord have mercy on us all.

  TENDER LACOUR’S MONDAY was no better than his Sunday, which had been pretty nearly as bad as his Saturday, though of course not as bad as his Friday. He’d awoken early to the sound of Rhondalee raging at her granddaughter. “Don’t tell me you’re wearing that!”

  Annie’s voice had sounded as husky and sullen as her mother’s had been back in the Gospel circuit days when she protested one of Rhondalee’s get-ups. “OK, I won’t tell you I’m wearing it, Gramma. But I am.”

  He’d stumbled in to the kitchen and stood quietly behind Annie, who modeled a pair of worn-out boy’s overalls and a child’s western shirt from the days of Tom Mix. Those, and her new boots. Rhondalee was throwing sparks. “She says she’s wearing that!”

  “She appears to be wearing it, yes.”

  “Don’t you tease me! I won’t have looking like that! She looks like a hobo! She ALWAYS gets like this when her mother is in town!” Rhondalee had grasped for her arm, but Annie Leigh had slipped out the door. “The devil’s business!” cried Rhondalee, shaking her finger at the child’s back. “She’s always up to the devil’s business!”

  “I’ll go get her.” Tender walked out th
e door and got into his truck.

  “You never back me up!” Rhondalee shouted out the door after him. “You always take her side!”

  Tender’s fingers found the keys in the ignition. So that’s where they’d gotten to, the darn things were out here in the truck. He fired it up and backed out of the driveway. As soon as he turned onto the highway toward Ochre Water, he saw her standing with her thumb out, storm clouds flashing in her eyes. She looked just like her mother.

  He pulled over next to her. “Where you headed?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would you like a ride?”

  She shrugged. “I guess.”

  They didn’t talk much as they rode. He put on a Dolly Parton tape. She turned it up and sang along. Her singing made the hair on his arms dance, and his heart threatened to fill his mouth. The song ended before she brought her old grandfather to tears. “Hey! I got an idea! Why don’t you marry Fossetta? She cooks real good, and she’s way nicer than Gramma. And she’s quiet. She looks real pretty with her clothes off, too. I seen her through the window.”

  “You shouldn’t be peeking in windows, little girl.” Thoughts of Fossetta, her two-colored eyes, her ample, shifting body, that honeyed glory of her hair, sent him onto a tailspin of longing and guilt.

  “Grampa, I hear somebody mashed the Reverend dead.”

  “So it appears.”

  “Do you think he’s in Heaven?”

  He cleared his throat. “Well, he’s somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “Good question.” The Reverend was there, now, the place where all the mysteries were revealed. Someone had sent him there with a knock on the head. Tender wished the Reverend could send back word, shed a little light on the matter. Just pitch back a ring from the Great Beyond, a note wrapped around it, something to the effect of, “It’s all true, Tender.” Something to give him a little hope, a little faith.

  “He was murdered, right?”

  “That’s right, Annie. But don’t you worry. Your uncle Memphis will figure out who did it. And until he does, I’ll keep you safe.” She made a sound that, to his tender ears, sounded like scoffing. “All right then. Perhaps you’ll keep me safe.” She smiled, then. A smile from his granddaughter might be all he could ask of a day.