Darkansas

by Jarret Middleton

  The frail body of Andridge Grieves lay slumped over, his long arms and legs duct-taped to a chair. Grieves had photographs and personal information. There were symbols, esoteric markings, charts that detailed the passage of the planets around the sun. He and Cob had meticulously tracked Jordan’s entire family for God knew how long or for what purpose. They knew intimate details about members of the Bayne family that Jordan never even knew existed. They spoke of things that he had just done, like talking to his uncle in Mountain Home. They even knew what they had talked about. Nobody could have known that except Jacob and his brother. They were fixated on Malcolm and Elizabeth’s wedding. He had heard Andridge talk about his father’s whereabouts as well, and he knew he had heard Cob tell him that the time was close. The time was close for what? Jordan rolled the question around in his head, which only made him angrier and more suspicious. He came to the conclusion that Andridge and Cob were planning to kill Walker, though he had no idea why. Regardless of the reason, Jordan resolved that there was no way he was going to let that happen.

  “You are going to tell me who you are and what you want with my family,” said Jordan.

  “I want nothing from you or your loved ones,” Andridge said. “I am merely a custodian.”

  “There’s pictures, maps, my birthday on a damn star chart.”

  Andridge smirked with half his mouth.

  “How long has that little man been following me?”

  “He goes by Cob, Obediah Cob. I assure you, he never intended malice. He only watched you for as long as was necessary.”

  “What does that mean, necessary?”

  “You are involved in a kind of process. The scope of which even I am unsure. I am caught up in it myself, you see.” “Caught up in what?” “A process,” Andridge repeated.

  Jordan lunged forward and punched him hard in the face. “Speak plain fucking English.”

  “I am. You’re not hearing it, boy. You are going around pulling together all these different pieces, hoping to figure it out, but all of the pieces will always add up to less than one because you are the missing piece. You are at the center. You think you’ve been lost your whole life. You are not lost, Jordan. You are right where you need to be. Funny, you consider yourself living by your own devices, making your own way, nobody caring whether you live or die. I know you want to do something, feel you must act. You sense danger but don’t know why. You are not supposed to know.”

  “You don’t know a thing about me,” Jordan said.

  “I know the prospect of perishing brings everyone closer together.”

  Jordan stormed onto the second-story balcony, shuffled down the stairs, unlocked his truck, and leaned across the seat to retrieve his gun from the glove box. He marched back upstairs into the room and pointed it at Andridge. “Now,” he said. “If you don’t tell me why you are planning to kill my father, I am going to shoot you in the face. Right here, right now. Your choice.” Jordan leaned over Andridge, his head bowed forward in the chair. He gripped the .38 to reinforce his ultimatum. “Better start talking.”

  Andridge hung his head and sighed. “Fine,” he said. “I hoped it wouldn’t come to this.” Grieves raised his eye at Jordan. “I am not going to kill your father. Your brother is.”

  At the Bayne house, Malcolm returned from a late run. After dinner with Elizabeth and his soon-to-be mother-in-law, he discovered two missed calls from Jordan on his phone, calls that had spanned the last ten hours.

  Elizabeth laid on the bed upstairs and pulled her legs on top of the sheets. “It’s too muggy. I had too much wine at dinner, too much of everything,” she said, faint. Malcolm took off her shoes, smoothed the damp hair at her forehead, and wrestled her under the covers. He told her to get some rest, then climbed from the bed and pulled a jacket from the closet.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “For a drive, need to clear my head. I’ll be back in a little while. You get your beauty rest, it’s our big day tomorrow.” Malcolm told her he loved her, turned out the light, and closed the door.

  The roadside parsed aged ruins across rolling acreage. Abandoned farms, grist mills, horse stalls, and outbuildings collapsed into the ground like discarded skeletons. Houses hid away behind stunted hickory and slash pine. Many of the farms had long ceased operation, disenfranchised by the new economy, but those that still clung to life limped into the twenty-first century any way they could. He came to the intersection at Buffalo Creek Road and pulled up the short driveway in front of Leah Fayette’s house. After two knocks, she peeked through the drapes and cracked open the door.

  “Hi there, Leah. I’m Malcolm, Jordan’s brother.”

  “I know who you are. Would you like to come in?” she asked.

  “No, that’s all right. Sorry to disturb you so late. Normally I wouldn’t be so impolite, but—”

  “But I’m guessing this has to do with your brother.”

  “I missed two calls from him today, which is more than he’s called me in ten years. Usually, he’s not even one to use a phone. It’s got me worried. Have you seen or heard from him?”

  Leah stepped barefoot onto the step and the screen door clapped behind her. “Not since yesterday, when he went all crazy.”

  “Crazy how? He wasn’t still drinking, was he?”

  “No, nothing like that. We were at Target picking up a washing machine for the house here. We came out of the store and Jordan swore he saw someone in an old car, watching us. I asked him what was up. He recognized him, said he had seen him before. I didn’t think much of it, but then we got on the road and I realized we weren’t coming back here. Ended up following the dirty ass end of that Cadillac for over an hour. I’m telling you, this place was way out there. Gave me a bad feeling.”

  “Do you know where you ended up?” he asked.

  “Way out on 16 West, we pulled off the main road and there were no signs after that. Followed some dirt road and came to a stop outside a cabin set way back in the woods, I couldn’t really see much.”

  “Did anything happen?” Malcolm asked her.

  “I stayed in the truck while he crept around looking in windows. I don’t know what the hell he was doing. When he came back to the truck, I told him if we didn’t get out of there that minute he could find his own way home because I was gone leave his sorry ass for the coyotes.”

  “So that was it, huh,” said Malcolm.

  “He dropped me off back here all by myself with the washer, then he left again. Knowing him, he probably went back,” Leah said.

  She and Malcolm leaned against the thin metal railing, ruminating on what Jordan could have gotten himself into. Leah reached into the pocket of her hooded sweatshirt and unwrapped the plastic on a new pack and lit a Marlboro Light. Malcolm stretched his back, looking at the houses across the street, then both ways down the deserted road.

  “I’m telling you, the whole thing was strange,” she continued. “One minute we’re making up, shopping, being fucking affectionate. Next I know we’re hightailing it down some back road to God knows where.” She pulled on her cigarette, incensed. “There was nothing I could say, and whatever he saw in that cabin only made it worse.”

  Malcolm thanked her and walked back to his car when she called out to him. “Congratulations, by the way.”

  “What?” Malcolm asked.

  “On getting married,” she said.

  “Oh right, that.” Malcolm leaned on his opened door. “I’ll have him call you when I find him.”

  “Yeah,” Leah said. “I’ll hold my breath.”

  As dusk turned to night, a nearby field danced with flashes from a brush pile set ablaze. Shirtless bodies half-submerged in dark hauled heavy stalks out of the woods. One of them swung an axe, splitting deadfall that the others dragged across the ground and heaved on top of the flames. A plume of sparks cascaded against an old house and burned out in the sky. Men with scars on their stomachs stared from the corner of the yard. As Malcolm approached, two of them
walked into the road sipping cans of Busch. The skinny one took a few steps up the pavement and lifted the dirty metal of a shotgun toward Malcolm’s car. The drunk clinched one eye closed to aim down the barrel and lost his balance, staggering off the roadside. Malcolm glared in the rearview as he gained control of the car.

  Slumberland was a bar nestled in the shell of an old mattress store that would have appeared abandoned were it were not for the cars angled in front and shadows curled around glowing cigarettes huddled together in clouds of smoke. Malcolm found Jordan at the far end of the bar, not so much nursing a pint as having a deep conversation with one.

  “Thought I’d find you here,” said Malcolm.

  Jordan patted the seat of an open stool. “Yeah, and how’d you come by that?”

  “Same spot I found you the last time nobody knew where you were, after you beat Carl Reese with a shovel and he came tearing after you.”

  Jordan let out a hiccup of laughter. “Never did catch me. I’m good at hiding, tired as I am of it.”

  The bartender brought Malcolm a light draught. He sipped the white foam off the top of his glass. “So,” he said.

  “So, what?”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Jordan.” Malcolm glanced down the barroom in the direction of the door. “Where’s your truck?” he asked. “I didn’t see it outside.”

  “I walked.”

  “What’re we doing here?”

  “I’ve been thinking about Mom.” He gulped a pocket of air and stacked it in his gut. “How is it I can be sharp as a tack with a list of shit I’d love to forget, but when it comes to dear old Mercy Bayne I can’t remember a damn thing?”

  “We were young, it was cancer. People die of it every day. I see it at work constantly. People work hard, keep their hopes raised, do their best to handle it as it comes, but whatever is meant to happen will take its course. There’s nothing we can do about that, just pray it ends up in your favor, I guess. Mom knew that and she accepted it. You should too. Just be happy with what you got,” said Malcolm.

  “Is that why you sell insurance?” Jordan asked his brother. “Car accidents, fires, suicides, people dying of cancer. I think you want to keep people from experiencing what you went through. It has a certain, what do you call it, fatalism to it. You want to help them.”

  “Elizabeth said that, too, tried to make a moral case for what I do. Honestly, it never crossed my mind. Just something I was good at that paid well,” said Malcolm.

  Jordan slugged back his beer, drowning in a thought. “Our family is cursed.”

  “Would you stop with that, sick of hearing it.” Malcolm slammed his glass hard on the bar. “Life is a death sentence, that’s the only curse. You know, you’ve been stuck on this since the moment we came home. Leah told me—”

  “When did you see Leah?”

  “Before I came here,” Malcolm answered. “When I say I was out looking for you, I wasn’t lying. I was worried, so was she. How long will it take to get it through your head that a real living breathing person, two of them, at least, care about what happens to you?” Malcolm drank, exhausted. “I’m sick of having to do this over and over. I am here to get married, God forbid have a little bit of fun. Instead, I’ve chased you around half the Ozarks while you piece together some theory that for all you know could be a rather impressive creation of your own imagination. She said you followed someone yesterday?”

  “I swear I seen him before. Turns out I was right,” Jordan said. “Son of a bitch has been following me since I left Texas, you too. This is what I have been trying to tell you, only I didn’t know the scope of it yet. They knew the moment you and Elizabeth left Little Rock. They have our home addresses, photographs of me and you, old ones of Dad and Jake. They know everything about us. I had a feeling something was going on, like we were being followed everywhere we went—that night in the grove, at the casino. So when I saw Cob—that’s the little one’s name—I followed him. He does the bidding of this guy named Grieves. Must be a hundred years old, taller than a tree. Real freak of nature.”

  Jordan dug into his pocket and spread out a folded-up bar napkin. “When I followed Cob out to their cabin, this is what I saw.” He pointed at figures scrawled in his messy handwriting, crudely drawn symbols, signs, and a sequence of numbers that could possibly have been dates.

  “Do you know what any of these mean?”

  Jordan tossed the napkin over on the bar and shook his head.

  Malcolm was more confused than before, but now believed that Jordan believed he was onto something. “I still don’t know how any of that relates to us. What is it you think they want?”

  “I think they’re planning on killing Dad.” Jordan sat back and threw up his hands. “Why? I have no idea.”

  Malcolm scoffed.

  The bartender checked on them. Jordan waved him off.

  “If you’re so serious, then we should go to the police, let them deal with it,” said Malcolm.

  “Yeah, that’s not going to happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because those pig fuckers won’t do a Goddamned thing but make everything worse and somehow I’ll end up back in prison.” Jordan sat, fuming. “You hear me? No cops.”

  “Okay, I get it. Pariah to authority, how could I forget,” said Malcolm.

  Jordan gulped down his beer and collected himself. “Besides,” he said. “Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t go to the cops.” He scanned the filthy floor as he chose what was proving to be some delicate phrasing. “Andridge, the tall one,” Jordan said quietly. “He’s tied up in a room at the motel next door.”

  Malcolm wrapped a palm across his eyes, shaking his head. “Please tell me you’re joking.” He leaned off the stool toward his brother, growling. “Are you insane? You were the one who was just talking about prison. Are you that eager to go back? You’re a convicted felon, Jordan.” He exhaled in disbelief and rocked his weight back on the cheap vinyl cushion. “What were you planning on doing with him?” Malcolm’s face sank as he thought the worst. “Wait, what have you done to him?”

  Jordan finally landed his eyes on his brother and explained how he had only asked Andridge a few questions.

  “Did he tell you anything?” Malcolm asked.

  “Not much. The man speaks in riddles.” Jordan trailed off, not wanting to proceed. “There was one thing, though.” Malcolm made an impatient face. “All right, God. He said you were going to kill Dad.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s bullshit, I know.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “That was it, I swear.”

  Without warning, Malcolm hooked Jordan rough under the arm and yanked him to his feet. “Let’s go,” he told him, tossing a crisp twenty on the bar.

  “Come on, man.” He shoved back Malcolm and straightened himself.

  Malcolm gathered Jordan’s coat that was spread across the seat of his stool and whipped it in his face. “I told you not to fuck with me,” he said.

  They kicked dirt through the parking lot as Jordan struggled to keep up with his brother. Dull light guided their way from bent posts. Solitary cars shot by in the opposite direction. They walked up the shoulder of the road to the motel, where two stories were split by a warped railing that wrapped around the inside of the court.

  Jordan asked Malcolm what he was going to do. “I’m going to find out what kind of game this son of a bitch is playing. Then you are going to act like you are part of civil society for once in your miserable life and let him go. Then we are going to go back home. Tomorrow, I am going to get married, and we are going to pretend that none of this ever happened.” Malcolm asked Jordan if he understood. Jordan nodded as he fumbled with the blue plastic triangle that swung from the key and opened the door to room sixteen.

  The bed was made square under the jaundiced hue that dissipated from the lamp on the nightstand. A whiskey bottle, cups, and a deflated bag of chili chips sat on the table beside a
legal pad filled with Jordan’s writing and a plastic tray piled with miniature mountains of ash. The muted television danced with thousands of floating dead fish. The chair was angled between the television and the door, ripped strips of duct tape torn in every direction. The empty chair pinned the room together with one resounding truth—Andridge was gone.

  Jordan rushed onto the balcony and searched the parking lot. Malcolm checked in the shower and behind the bathroom door, but knew this supposedly nefarious giant was nowhere to be found. Jordan came back in the room and watched the fish float and smoke rise from a fertilizer plant until Malcolm switched off the television. He dragged over the empty chair and dropped his weight in it. Malcolm unscrewed the cap on the whiskey bottle, righted two paper cups, and poured carefully until they were full. He reached one of the cups toward Jordan, shaking it a little to entice him.

  “Come over here,” he said. “Drink this.”

  FIFTEEN

  1886—THE FIRE

  The troubadours plucked mandolins and strummed parlor guitars, hoping to drive customers to their tents. Hand-painted signs advertised the latest cure-alls made from aromatic herbs, rhizomes of swamp grass, dried root bark, diuretics, and unknown amounts of morphine. Everyone recognized the town drunk as he stumbled through the carnival grounds. Sonny was a big man who staggered with a permanent slope in his back caused by a cracked vertebra. Rogue fragments of bone floated next to a ball of Union lead lodged close enough to his nervous cord that the field doctor at Wilson’s Creek refused to go near it for fear of killing him right there on the gurney.

  Sonny crashed through one of the tents, making a show of counting the coins in his hand, knowing they were not enough. He hoped one of the patent mediciners would take pity on him— a crippled hero of the Rebellion, vagrant split apart by tremors, he didn’t care which condition did the trick as long as he got a drink. He only needed enough to stop the delirium, which he knew would be coming soon enough. The sides of his vision were already swirling in clouds of pearl. After that, he only had a few minutes to react before his sight fell into a hole and his memory along with it. Hopefully, he would find a safe corner where he could sleep it off instead of ending up in the stockade, where local jailers took turns beating him with knotted ropes and pissing in his face.