Ain't Nobody Nobody Read online

  Bradley wondered if he had done the right thing, just letting the man go by as if nothing at all was happening out here in the forest. For the rest of his night shift, Bradley sat in a camp chair with a shotgun at his side and stared into the dark. He tried to think about the lyrics to Pearl Jam songs, the land he would one day own, the silhouette of certain girls—anything other than the hog hunter he had let go freely into the woods.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Bradley had not shown up at 8 a.m. as promised. And a dead body was missing.

  When things go missing in pairs, it is logical to assume that said things are together. Two socks, for example. If two socks go missing simultaneously, no one imagines that one sock found itself in the wrong drawer and the other sock took a puppet show on the road. There was an order to these things, a law, and so it seemed perfectly clear that when Bradley failed to show up, he had proven himself to be a key player. Perhaps Bradley was helping Birdie, perhaps not. But to protect Birdie properly, Mayhill had to find both socks.

  The questions pestered him like flies. Who was the dead man? Who had watched Mayhill and stolen the body when the opportunity arose? Had the man done something to Birdie, or Bradley for that matter? And what had he done that was so heinous, so threatening that he found himself shot on a fence? Perhaps the worst question of all, and one he wasn’t quite ready to entertain: had something happened to Bradley that he hadn’t showed up? There were too many questions.

  The real question, of course, was this: what kind of man would attempt to destroy a corpse to save his best friend’s family?

  To understand why a man would go to such lengths for a girl like Birdie—plain as bread, pleasant as gout—was to understand the loyalty of Randy Mayhill to Van Woods. In the case of Randy Mayhill, the kind of man who would desecrate a corpse, he was the most upstanding man you knew, better than you, really. A man whose moral compass spun in frantic circles because he was the point where all forces of morality converged, and in Mayhill’s world, to destroy a dead body for his best friend’s daughter—well, it would have been morally corrupt to do anything else.

  Mayhill and Van were under contract, it seemed. They were born six months apart and to different parents, but they practically had been brought into this life together. To ignore their mysterious bond was to ignore the laws of nature. It was to be a bird and say, “I think I’ll stay righ’cheer” when the winter wind started howling and the instinct to fly south vibrated every feather.

  Mayhill didn’t understand it himself. It was a force beyond him, as if long ago, his heart had pledged loyalty to a family who was not all bad, depending on who you asked, but who was not exactly good either. He barely knew himself around them, or what he would do, an almost unconscious force taking him over anytime they were involved. It was an unfortunate affliction, even though Mayhill would never call it “unfortunate,” just as a cult member would never call his situation “unfortunate.” The bunker is clean! The dashiki sensible! Still, the outside world would look upon him, tilt their collective heads, and shake them in pity. What a shame, what a shame, Randy Mayhill.

  ***

  Back at his house, after leaving Birdie, Mayhill stood in front of the box fan and unbuttoned his pants, releasing his belly like a floodwall. At full capacity, the fan rattled so violently that it threatened to spring loose from the bolts, but it cooled him down and dried his clothes, which were soaked with sweat, his button-down shirt translucent like onion skin. Boo and Atticus stared at him tilt-headed and concerned through the screen door, and Pat Sajak, who suddenly appeared way too fat from pork and belly rubs, sniffed at his boots.

  He picked up the county phone book—half as thick as a legal pad and flimsy enough to roll into a tube for fly killing—and thumbed to the Ps. No POLKs, no POLK Bradley. Then Mayhill remembered that Bradley lived with his mama, who had a different last name than him (which tells you something right there!) and he found JOHNSON Lisa and dialed. Mayhill wasn’t expecting anyone to answer Bradley’s house phone, but he called anyway because that’s what you did—low-hanging fruit and whatnot—and it rang and rang into oblivion until the call disconnected and buzzed a fast, angry busy signal that signified nobody wanted to talk to him.

  He would have to drive.

  ***

  If ever anyone were to visit Mayhill, Birdie, or Onie, it would require coordinates and a working ability to navigate by stars. The county dump sat to the south, distant neighbors far to the east, State forest to the west, and the Trinity River to the north. Their closest neighbors were several miles away in every direction, and between them, a dense curtain of pine trees, dirt roads, and logging trails, mostly belonging to Van. One could easily get lost and stumble onto the next property over and not know it, the woods hypnotic and unceasing. There was a main highway that went through town, the kind of highway that was paved with slick black tar, the kind that a cartographer drew exactingly on a map with an inky pen. Then there were the roads that branched from that, county roads paved in cheap gray rock, and then the roads woven into the woods behind Mayhill’s and Birdie’s houses, which could only be called roads for approximately one-tenth of them. Then they required something else, a different kind of vernacular, a thesaurus, synonyms, variations on the theme of “road”: a path, a spoor, a way. As in this “way” to the army ants—their underground den is the size of a basketball court! As in this “way” to Earl Martin’s house—he lived here for eighty years then died when he left the city limits! We think he’s a ghost now! The remoteness of their locale, of course, made the dead man’s presence even more bizarre, as if he had dropped out of the sky, freshly shot, and then was retrieved by the spaceship from which he came.

  Mayhill would spiral out from Birdie’s house, staying on the dirt roads he guessed Bradley might travel, and look for any signs of where the man had come from. Pine trees six stories tall flanked him on both sides, giving way at times to pasture land or a cluster of dead trees. Pat Sajak, the dachshund, sat in the passenger’s seat on a folded towel matted with dog hair, a nice protective padding so he wouldn’t burn his hide on the hot leather of a truck in the sun. Pat Sajak had become Mayhill’s regular companion because he was the first totally useless dog he had owned, and he took him everywhere. Pat Sajak couldn’t hunt or guard like the big mutt hunting dogs, Boo and Atticus, but Mayhill swore to God the dog could smile.

  Mayhill came to a fork in the road and made a turn. Who were Bradley’s friends? The thought of Bradley made him white-knuckle the wheel. He used to know these things—the vague constellations of people who were connected in discernible ways, that if you needed Shane you went to Dan, and if you needed Lance you went to Nellums. There were hubs around which people orbited like spokes on a wheel. Van had been a hub, and had Van been alive, Mayhill could have found Bradley through him. Bradley had moved from Houston a few years back. Rumor was he had put a boy in a coma, and another rumor was that he had impregnated a gym teacher, but Mayhill couldn’t imagine Bradley having the virility for either.

  As sheriff, Mayhill had seen Bradley with the cowboys working cattle, slinging a rope like he’d been born with spurs on his feet. Another time, he’d busted up a party where Bradley was the only white guy there, wide-eyed with a red Solo cup in his hand as he edged sideways out the back door amongst a scrum of black kids. Bradley Polk was everywhere and nowhere. Who had he been hanging out with since? Was it possible Bradley was off telling what he’d seen? “Even if he did,” Mayhill said out loud, “nobody’d believe him because it’s Bradley!” Pat Sajak smiled back. Bradley was nobody to everybody. That was the beauty of Bradley, if there was a beauty to him. Mayhill’s grip relaxed on the wheel, and he leaned back and patted Pat Sajak on the head. The air conditioner was so high that Pat Sajak shut his eyes and his short hair managed somehow to blow back dreamily in the stream of air.

  Off to the side, Mayhill saw some hogs resting under a cluster of trees, the field around them plowed to soil, and for the first time sinc
e the hog plague, he felt an ire toward them. Y’all had one job to do…

  He looked in the rearview mirror and an old black Datsun truck bounced up behind him, brown dust hovering in a cloud around it. Mayhill thought it was Bradley for a moment: a white guy with a lot of facial real estate. He had never seen the truck before. While it was not unusual for trucks to be seen on the labyrinthine back roads of the woods, he knew most of them because one had to have a purpose to enter the maze to begin with.

  The tiny truck whipped around Mayhill, and the driver gunned it as he sped by on a road not meant to be sped upon. The Datsun hit a hole, screeched to a halt, and almost crashed forward. Mayhill slammed his brakes to avoid hitting him, his arm shooting out to protect Pat Sajak, but the dog tumbled into the floorboard with a whimper. The driver, whom Mayhill saw in better detail now, was not Bradley but another kid—practically interchangeable—who was also blond-haired and dirty and looked as if he drove straight there from his parole meeting. The black paint job on the truck was fading, the sides scraped and so beaten that Mayhill was unsure how the truck was still running at all.

  “Stay here,” Mayhill said to Pat Sajak, and opened the door.

  The boy frantically manhandled his stick shift back and forth, and then gunned backward out of the crater. He shot forward, a high-pitched wail as he grated the bottom of the carriage on the rock. Then the boy gassed it again, fishtailing as he sped off, but not before he raised his middle finger for a reason Mayhill couldn’t ascertain.

  Frank Frank Sam 614. Frank Frank Sam 614.

  Mayhill ran back to his truck, his knee stiff underneath him, but by the time he put it in drive, the truck was long gone around the corner. He thought about speeding after him but his truck wasn’t that fast, and the boy was clearly heading toward the main highway. There’d be no way to catch him from there.

  Pat Sajak hopped back up on his seat. Mayhill held the wheel with his knees and, on instinct, wrote FFS614 on a notepad splattered in Dr Pepper stains. Then he realized he had no obvious way to look up the delinquent, no way to bring the young man to justice, to talk to his parents, visit his girlfriend at work and suggest, politely, that she was dating a failure of a human being. He had no authority of any kind. He was just a fat man in a truck with his dog and Dr Pepper. He looked over and saw a sounder of wild hogs at work on what appeared to be a carcass. For a second, he was hopeful, until he saw that the carcass had antlers and again felt betrayed by the world.

  “Goddammit, Bradley!” he yelled. He slammed his hands on the steering wheel. Then he did a three-point turn to change direction and drop Pat Sajak off at the house before he went to the dump.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Randy Mayhill was the only person Birdie knew who would actually kill someone. He had been her father’s best friend and all, but even Van had said that Mayhill would never truly be happy until he saw the life drain slowly from another human being. "The heart wants what it wants!" Van had said, and winked at her.

  Case in point, Mayhill had been invited by the warden to witness an execution in Huntsville, but wires got crossed and Mayhill couldn’t get in, and he had spent the next hour waiting outside, which liked to have given him a heart attack because, as Mayhill said, he “couldn’t stand being with all the long-haired protestors who proclaimed the sanctity of life when half of them had punch cards at Planned Parenthood.”

  Birdie had not known what that meant at the time, but Van had guffawed, a hearty knee-slap of a laugh that made his big teeth fly from his mouth like piano keys. Mayhill was classy at least and did not bully his way through the prison door as he often did in situations of lesser import. Still, Van had said that Mayhill sulked around for a week afterward, as if he had been stood up for prom—which had also happened, but they were never to talk about Goddamn Gabby Grayson.

  So to understand Van, you had to understand the kind of man he had chosen for his best friend, a man fascinated with literature and execution instruments in equal measure. Randy Mayhill loved his parents, who died shortly after high school, and he loved Onie and Van like family, and by extension he loved Birdie, and she him, though she had never understood why. He loved his town and his dogs. He loved women but had never found one to settle down with, who wanted to be rescued to the infinite degree that Randy Mayhill wanted to save. Other than that, he was as happy as a man could be. Yet, the last time Birdie saw Mayhill and her father together, Mayhill had been anything but happy.

  It was a year or so before a dead man hung on her fence, and Birdie, Onie, and Van had been eating supper when they heard a truck pull up. Birdie remembered the evening vividly because it was one of the rare nights that Van had been home for a meal since his trees were devastated by bad luck and Southern Pine Beetle. That night, the three of them ate mustard greens and new potatoes that Onie had grown, and some beef Jimmy Nellums had given them. Onie and Van had nursed their Miller Lights, and Birdie relaxed for the first time in weeks because her father was finally at the table with them again.

  Van looked out the window and saw the dirty white truck rolling up, SHERIFF printed in yellow and black on the side.

  “Randy!” Birdie cheered. “I haven’t seen him—”

  “Dammit!” Van slammed his hands on the table and got up. “Randy.”

  “What’s wrong?” Birdie asked. “Why’s Dad upset?”

  Onie shrugged and raised her eyebrows, her old lips puckered over the beer bottle.

  “Stay in here.” Van shoved his heel in the boot like he was mad at it and shot out the door.

  “Stay in here?” Birdie asked. “It’s Randy!”

  “Stay in here.” Van spit into the crabgrass that had taken over the flowerbeds, then stormed toward Randy’s truck.

  Birdie couldn’t hear what they were saying but they went at it immediately. Van and Mayhill had always talked in animated ways because they were animated men, their stories flying like bullets, but today they were angry. Even at a distance, Birdie could tell it. They were both tall, all blue jeans and boots. Mayhill took off his hat and swung it wildly and gestured off into the woods.

  Their voices rose. Mayhill yelled something indecipherable, arms waving in the air, then pointing at Van, jabbing his finger at him while backing away defensively, as if his finger were a knife. Van swiped at Mayhill’s hand. Mayhill ripped his fist back. Then Van threw a punch, and Mayhill ducked. Van threw another punch right into Mayhill’s nose. Mayhill swung back and landed a blow to Van’s jaw. Van shook it off, yelling at Mayhill, and then, bizarrely, flashed his teeth. A growling dog. A maniacal smile.

  “Stop it!” Birdie yelled.

  Van front-kicked Mayhill in the knee, and Mayhill went down hard. An agonizing yell from Mayhill, and he scrambled to his feet, only to go weak in his injured leg again and grab at his knee. Mayhill stumbled quickly to his truck and then sped away in a plume of dust, the cats scattering like mice.

  Van fumed past Birdie on the porch, his breath heavy. His face was red, his jaw already starting to swell, a tiny split in his lip leaking blood. His nostrils flared like a bull’s.

  “Private land, private matter,” he said, but Birdie, pale with confusion, wasn’t sure who he was talking to.

  ***

  A few weeks later, Van would have the fakest of all funerals: a printed program with his name in calligraphy, a gaggle of choir ladies who thought he was now in hell for killing himself, a preacher who didn’t know what to say about someone like Van, so full of God and the Devil both. The entire town turned out as towns are wont to do. Onie and Birdie sat in the front row of the church and quivered like divining rods, knowing they were brushing up against something bigger than themselves. Mayhill remained at the back of the church with a brown elastic bandage wrapped around the knee, outside of his jeans. He looked sad and pathetic, and Birdie stood stiff like a utility pole when he tried to hug her because, for the first time in her life, she did not want to hug Randy Mayhill. He was a man who had tried to hurt her fa
ther, who could have stopped Van from doing this awful thing, and for that, she could no longer trust him. As he dared hug her then, it seemed that Randy Mayhill was the kind of person who could do horrible things and forget he had done them entirely.

  Afterward, Birdie saw Bradley sitting in his truck, just staring away at nothing, naiveté at work, and she wondered if he had ever even made it in the church or if he had convinced himself he was just there for the grape juice.

  Onie received Van’s ashes in his boot box, and never one for sentimentality, she emptied them as soon as they got home from the funeral. She didn’t even go in the house first, just popped onto the front porch, opened the top, and a gray cloud puffed into the air, just as when she had emptied the dust pan earlier that morning. Then Van settled for all of eternity into the crabgrass.

  CHAPTER SIX

  "Trash is the great equalizer," Van had always said. Even somebodies were nobodies at the dump! You paid for a permit, though it was more like a membership fee, like at the country club. Mayhill didn’t know anybody who was a member of a country club, but everyone was a member of the dump. Mayhill had burned his own trash since embarking on a career in hermitry, and trash burning was the only time he or any of the local men could be found in shorts. His own shorts were a ratty royal blue number made out of t-shirt material and holes, a relic from high school football. The task of burning trash left him sweaty, puckered, and red, and if it weren’t for the teeth and the coat of ash on his skin, one might swear he was a newborn baby who stood six foot five in jeans he had clearly outgrown.