Ain't Nobody Nobody Read online

  “He’s eighty-four!”

  “He’s a veteran!”

  “Union or Confederacy?”

  “W-W-2! We should be honored that he agreed to serve this community! And in his golden years!” She composed herself. “Just six more months and he’ll be the oldest living sheriff in Texas history. Right here in Pine County! Now that is an honor. You don’t go and tell me that ain’t an honor.”

  “I’ll pray his electricity doesn’t go out.”

  “Randy!” Her voice didn’t sound like breath anymore.

  “You gonna help me out or not?” Randy asked. “Help out an old friend.”

  They began to talk over each other, voices louder.

  "You haven’t talked to me since—"

  "He’s trying to turn this ship—"

  "After everything that happened with Van—"

  "You know more than anybody that—"

  "High school was a long time ago—"

  "But why would you—"

  Until Mayhill had had enough and yelled into the receiver, “Okaaaaaay, Gabby! You hug those girls’ necks for me!” and slammed down the phone.

  A sadness stormed Mayhill so violently that he kicked the wall. Pat Sajak, the dachshund, startled. There had been so much potential before interaction with live humans had derailed a perfectly good investigation, and the grouping of him with the common man—the public!—had been too much, as if he had called asking for her bra size and credit card number.

  Mayhill hobbled out the back of his house and grabbed a beaten five-gallon feed bucket off his back porch, then filled it halfway from a feed sack of corn he kept just inside the doorway. He walked back to the kitchen and got a stack of strawberry Kool-Aid packets. Personally, he was partial to blue raspberry (blue teeth and whatnot) but the hogs preferred strawberry—everybody knew that—so he mixed it into the corn and churned it with his arm, his right hand as red as Lady Macbeth’s.

  Mayhill ambled over the hill, navigating landmines of ant beds and bullnettle as the story formed in his head: the dead man must have tried to harm Birdie somehow. A hog trapper—no! a hog trapper rapist!—had come upon Birdie and Onie’s tiny house and spotted the innocent Birdie, and then, lulled by teenage beauty—clearly, he had never spoken to her—broke into her house, only to realize too late that Birdie was no ordinary girl as he sprinted across the pasture and into the woods, trying in vain to escape the long reach of her rifle. He turned to shoot in a panic…but alas, a fence! A gunshot!

  Fatherly pride swelled up in his chest. Van’s little girl taking things into her own hands! Van would have been proud. He hoped—God, how he hoped!—that Van would be proud of him too, because Mayhill owed Van, and guilt makes a man do troublesome things.

  The bucket was heavy and bounced against Mayhill’s bad knee. He walked past the burn pile and the south tree line, passing a small bunch of hogs sleeping in the woods before he reached the man. The buzzards still circled overhead, and two little bull shrikes still poked away at the dead man’s head. Grisly was the word, the blood soaking the man’s shirt, the slight stench baking in the heat as the afternoon sun beat down.

  Mayhill wanted no traceable record. He would take no pictures, no written notes, but he memorized the scene with his eyes like a good lawman does. The man had a small tattoo of a star on his hand, not like a patriotic star, ostentatious and sharp, destined for flags and Wal-Mart t-shirts, but delicate like a shooting star, a trail blazing behind it. He had a hunting knife, but no bulge of a wallet in his jeans, and for this Mayhill was relieved because then he would not be forced to look at it, to risk his fingerprints upon him.

  It was a familiar prayer for Randy Mayhill, said enough times to count on two hands: "Lord, forgive me for what I am about to do." But never one to surrender entirely, Mayhill always amended it. "But Lord, ye might also consider that sometimes men are left to clean up your messes and maybe thou shalt consider not creating such messes to begin with. Amen."

  Justice was not always pretty, and Mayhill had to practice sensitivity like he had to practice most reactions aside from bravado and severity. He knew it didn’t matter to anyone but him, but Mayhill removed his hat to pay respects to the dead man, whoever he was, and tried to think real, real hard of the dead man’s family and friends to remind himself that no matter the derelict the man had become, he had once been a real person who presumably would rather be alive right now enjoying a chopped beef sandwich, but Mayhill couldn’t shake it. For the first time in over a year, he felt what he could only remember now as happiness. Then he set to work at being a hero with a bucket of corn and two dozen packets of strawberry Kool-Aid.

  CHAPTER TWO

  What went wrong? Mayhill would contemplate the question like a Zen koan for the next few days.

  Perhaps the trail of corn had not been thick enough. Perhaps the hogs had not been starved enough. Or was it the Kool-Aid itself? Had the hogs not been sufficiently drawn to it? Had word spread among hog congregations that their favorite treat promised doom, like Halloween apples with razor blades tucked neatly inside?

  But really, really, if Mayhill was honest with himself—and every man should be—he knew what had gone wrong: he had left his post. Simple as that. Let’s be clear: Mayhill had been dutifully vigilant. He had dozed sparingly and slipped inside only a few times for Dr Pepper and jerky. But it was in these fleeting moments that Mayhill would miss the person who, under the cover of night and trees, removed the body from the barbed wire fence before the hogs even had a chance to go to work.

  The night had been dark despite a waning gibbous moon—half full except for a big dent on the side like a smashed orange. Try as he might, his eyes had not been able to adjust in the darkness, and through the binoculars, all he could see was a dim figure where the man hung. Mayhill propped up on the porch, dogs flanking him, and watched for movement. Around midnight, hogs advanced upon the pasture and ducked into a pocket at the end of the tree line, but hours later, Mayhill could still make out the dark, blurry image of the man through the binoculars. Around four a.m., seven deer ran from the thicket. Around 6:30 a.m., when the mockingbirds began to sing, Mayhill left his station and went inside for another Dr Pepper, turned on the scanner for a few minutes (drunk driver, corner store break-in), and then returned to the porch. High, thin clouds had moved in and the rising sun bathed the pasture in an orange glow. He checked his binoculars again and, at first, he thought it was a trick of the changing light, but truly, the man was gone. Just like Birdie had wanted.

  But it had not been the hogs.

  The signs of hogs are universal, like those of jaundice and lust. There were no rounded tracks pressed like giant coffee beans into the earth. The soil around the man was still intact, not rooted and freshly tilled. The corn remained entirely untouched, save a few pieces pushed into the ground by footprints. Tennis shoes.

  Mayhill had been watching the body. But someone had been watching Mayhill.

  Staring at the empty fence, he felt almost deaf, confusion plugging his ears like an infection. His brain raced to catch up. The next thing he knew, Mayhill was banging on Birdie and Onie’s door and popping his head in front of the side window. “He’s gone!” he barked through the windowpane.

  Birdie looked up, startled, from the breakfast table. Onie, looking older and frailer than this time last year, sat in front of the television. A car salesman screamed at her from the set.

  Mayhill paced the front porch and removed his hat, bumping the long red tube of the hummingbird feeder. He smoothed his right hand over the thinning rivulets that lined his scalp. He wiped the sweat from his hairline, and Birdie stepped onto the front porch. He leapt so quickly toward her that she flinched.

  “What did you do with it?” The words sounded more accusatory than he meant. “Where did it go?”

  “What?” Gone was the panicked girl from yesterday. She crossed her arms, her father’s indignation glossed across her face.

  Mayhill lo
wered his voice and looked around. He clenched his hat so hard that his knuckles turned white, the brim crushed like a flower in his hands. “The body, Birdie. The body.”

  Birdie tilted her head curiously and tucked a corkscrew of dark hair behind her ear. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Bradley Polk had an extraordinary ability to bury his big head in the sand. It was a defense mechanism he had learned early on, and the naiveté had served him well in many regards, primarily in that he was still alive, and if you really think about it, we all have to be a little naive to wake up every morning and think it’s worth trimming our neck hairs. His naiveté, however, like the high reproductive potential of the hogs, was a defense mechanism out of control. Despite the staring and the mouth breathing (broken nose, deviated septum) and the opinions of men like Randy Mayhill, Bradley Polk was not dumb. He had simply over-executed his naiveté. It was a misused tool, like a butter knife cutting a tomato.

  The night before he saw a body on a fence, Bradley smelled like a rotting sandwich and tried to stay awake as he drove the back way into the woods behind Birdie’s and Mayhill’s houses. He had slept a total of twelve hours over the past three days, spread out in improbable naps—one on a bed of sweet feed sacks. His head felt heavy on his thick neck, and his reflection in the rearview mirror was disembodied and unreal; it mocked him like a fun house attraction.

  Bradley needed sleep, but like all young men, he needed money more. He wanted to own his own land someday—timberland and cattle-freckled pastures stretched out like a palm slapped on the back of the earth. He would hire men like him, ranch hands and whatnot, like Van had done. Every leftover bit of money went to this dream. As it was now, there was not a whole lot of leftover money. None, actually. He was nineteen years old and still living with his mama, but his mama was thirty-eight and about to get kicked out of her house for not paying rent. She had kicked him out a few days earlier, said not to come back or she’d call the cops. While he didn’t care so much about his mother figure, her house was the only place he had to take a shower, and she had made it clear he could not return without cash in hand. Carol Brady she was not.

  He was beginning to smell so bad he had to keep the windows rolled down, and the few people he had interacted with, he talked to them at a leper’s distance. Buzzards eyed him while he worked. Four buzzards meant you’re gonna get laid, someone had told him, and Bradley had thought that anyone who would sleep with him in his current condition was not a girl to be slept with in the first place.

  The hogs had taken down a large line of fence at Rudy Lyon’s, and though Bradley couldn’t imagine how he’d have the fortitude to build the fence and then go to his night work after that, he couldn’t say no when Rudy, red-faced and drunk, had waved Bradley down on the main highway. Bradley’s night job hadn’t paid him anything yet, so he had worked all day on the fence—all cutting and digging and tying—and then he drug his overheated, under-slept body to his truck, and headed to his other job where he would work all night until morning when he would wake up and go to Birdie’s because it was Wednesday. He always went to Birdie’s on Wednesday and Saturday.

  ***

  Staying awake was easier on the back roads than on the sleepy snakes of blacktop highways. The late summer storms had washed out the dirt roads, and every few feet Bradley would hit a pothole, pop out of his seat, hover a good six inches in the air, crash back down, and then wince at the scraping sound coming from the underbelly of the truck. Even when driving slowly, thoughtfully, a concussion was not out of the question, the beer between your legs would certainly spill, your spit cup sloshing. Jerry Miller’s cur dog once popped out the backend of the truck. “Flew like a goddamn angel,” he told Bradley, and petted sad Roscoe, the dog’s leg in homemade cast of old t-shirt strips and Elmer’s glue. Even at the road’s worst, when it took a nail-biting, gut-jiggling forty-five minutes to drive only two or three miles, it never occurred to anyone to get out of their trucks and walk, any more than it would occur to a bird to take the bus to Cancun for winter.

  Bradley’s destination was remote, a series of eight or nine turns in the deepest part of the forest, marked only by memory because he had been forbidden to write it down. Bradley turned down an old, narrow logging road that had mostly grown over with a canopy of low-slung pines. During the recent storm, the oldest trees had lost several branches, which had fallen to the ground in limbs so giant they were almost trees in their own right.

  When he had started this job, the instructions he had been given were clear and paranoid: Bradley was to stop his truck just before turning onto the final trailhead, roll down the window, cut the engine, then listen for a good few minutes. Only when he was sure nobody was coming, he could get out, drag the trailhead branches aside, then turn and drive a little bit down the trail. He was then to place the branches neatly back in place, but not too neatly as to be suspicious. Then he could get back in his truck and head to work.

  The stench and tiredness had taken Bradley over like a handle of bourbon, and so the night before he saw a dead man hanging on Birdie’s fence, he did not follow instructions. He did not stop and listen before he stopped his truck. No, Bradley simply parked his beat-up blue truck at the trail, hopped out with the engine still running, and dragged the big branches out of the way. The branches were heavy, and the old bark dug into his hands in jagged pokes and tore at the fresh bruise on his arm, which made him cuss the uselessness and paranoia of the exercise. Suddenly, Bradley heard a vehicle coming down the trail, heading toward him into the woods, as if it had come from the main highway. At first, he thought it was his imagination, the tricks a mind played on a sleepless man, but then he heard the unmistakable scraping of a vehicle’s undercarriage, the thrum of an engine approaching.

  “Shit!” Bradley dropped the giant branch, then sprinted back to his truck as fast as he could, his heart pounding in his chest, sure his boss was about to catch him.

  He scrambled to his seat and placed both hands on the wheel as if he had just arrived at the trailhead and not skipped any steps at all. Just then, a small, black utility truck rocked around the curve.

  It was not his boss.

  The logging road was too narrow for two trucks to pass, so the driver hit the brakes and his truck came to an abrupt stop a few feet in front of Bradley’s. Bradley froze, not knowing what to do with a stranger here, a stranger who looked him right in the face, could pick him out of a police lineup. Bradley stared straight ahead with his hands gripped tightly on the wheel and scanned the ledgers of his mind for all the possibilities of his next move, but all Bradley could think was: This man should not be here. This man should not be here. What do I do?

  Bradley had been working in this part of the woods for six months and had only seen hogs and deer. It was safe here, comforting even. Despite the anxiety-clenched instructions to move branches just so and listen for so long, he had never been given specific direction in the unlikely event that he run across a flesh-and-blood human. Because what were the odds out here? Really, what were the odds? One human for every four hundred hogs? No, he had only been given the helpful guideline of, “And if you do see somebuddy…that’s when you call in the big dogs.” His boss had then curled his hand into a thumbs-up, turned it toward himself, and bounced his thumb against his sternum.

  Even now, Bradley couldn’t blame the Big Dog. The Big Dog hadn’t planned that far because the Big Dog’s mind had been on more important, more probable things than a random black Datsun finding its way into the winding log trails of dead, abandoned timberland south of the Trinity. It was safe.

  “Hey!” The man leaned out the window, his elbow resting on the frame. “You gonna let me by?”

  Bradley finally looked the man in the face. He was tan with dark hair, a face as welcoming as a buzz saw, and Bradley knew immediately he had met him before, but he couldn’t remember where. Think, Bradley! But Bradley had the kind of young man brain
that only registered girls and those who would give him money, so his mind spun aimlessly. Who was he? Was it possible the man was supposed to be there? Should he ask?

  “Hey!” the man yelled again. “You stuck or you deaf?”

  Bradley didn’t lean out the window to respond; instead, he just nodded dumbly through the windshield, and breathed out his mouth. (Make no mistake, Bradley would regret this later.) Almost without thought, he put his truck in reverse and edged slowly into the ditch. The man drove by and eyed him, a permanent scowl. Bradley’s heart beat in his ears as he watched the black truck in his rearview mirror. A big wire trap was propped precariously in the back of the man’s pickup truck. A rope or two tangled on the side. Two rubber boots stuck upside down where the cab met the bed.

  A hog trapper.

  Then he disappeared, just a trail of dust snaking around the curve.

  Bradley sat in his truck a good while and waited for the adrenaline to burn off. He racked his brain for how he knew the man. A black Datsun. His thoughts circled around Birdie and Van like buzzards—the man had worked for them, hadn’t he?—but the thoughts couldn’t find anywhere to land.

  Bradley then, in the dizzying haze of adrenaline and sleep deprivation, completed the routine. He cut the engine. He dragged the branches out of the way. Then he drove his truck onto the tiny trail and parked again. He dragged the branches back into place to obscure the entrance to trail.

  What if the man drove back by? Should he grab his shotgun just in case?

  Bradley climbed back into his truck and drove deeper into the trail. The trail was so narrow that the tree branches scraped the sides of his truck and poked in the windows like hands grabbing him. Eventually, he parked again, then walked about a half mile into the forest to the campsite, just as all the light from the day sucked into the trees.

  The campsite was sparse. It had a single pop-up tent for the nights when Bradley needed to sleep out there—and nights like these when he had no place to go—and two small camp chairs that slung low to the ground covered in dirt and chalky white bird shit. A beat-up blue ice cooler and an old rusted lantern sat beside the camp chairs. Bradley checked the cooler. One hot beer bobbed half-heartedly near the bottom of the water like a broken buoy. He popped the beer and slumped into the camp chair, exhausted but wired.