Ain't Nobody Nobody Read online

  Virgil Fuller tended the dump and was missing three fingers on account of Desert Storm and friendly fire, and Van had said that Virgil tried to recreate the hell of war so completely that he decided to tend the dump and marry Patsy Fuller. The fire was the obvious reason for its comparison to hell, but the less nuanced reason was Patsy Fuller herself, who Van and Mayhill agreed was a less attractive, more aggressive version of Saddam Hussein.

  A year before, at Van’s funeral, Mayhill would overhear Patsy Fuller say that suicide was an offense that sent you straight to hell. "Straight to hell!" she said, her finger pointing the wrong way to the sky, and her underarms flapping like bat wings. She had said it with the same certainty that I-45 sends you straight to Houston, and Mayhill, who worshiped the law and Lonesome Dove in that order, for the first time considered hell as a real locale, an inhabitable destination like Puerto Rico or Salt Lake City. But all he could do was imagine Van at the dump, shoveling burnt egg cartons and junk mail into the embers, his white legs singed under tattered shorts, and Mayhill took comfort in knowing that, if hell was real, Van wouldn’t have minded the manual labor so much, though he would have minded eternity in shorts. Perhaps, Mayhill thought, that was the hell everyone was talking about.

  ***

  The dump on Thursday was not busy because of the recent rains—no lines of idling trucks, no chivalrous men scrambling to help spinsters unload. Most everyone was content with tending to their own trash, raking up their own pits of hell, but Mayhill reasoned that if Bradley had helped Birdie dispose of a dead man, he would be so unimaginative as to show up at the dump with a body-shaped sack. It’s exactly the kind of thing Bradley would do.

  Mayhill rolled down his window. Virgil Fuller walked toward him and waved his remaining two fingers (pointer and middle), a perpetual peace sign, and Mayhill had to admit the gesture comforted him. It was a good omen. Since he had last seen him, Virgil Fuller had grown a thick, graying beard, which made him look much older than his mid-thirties. A piece of ash stuck gently to it, as a snowflake might—a Santa Claus in Hell—and he removed it delicately like it was a glittering snowflake instead of the remnants of feed sacks and foil lasagna trays.

  “Sheriff!” Virgil cheered.

  And Mayhill cheered back, “Virgil!” so happily that it surprised Mayhill as much as Virgil. Mayhill leaned out the truck window and shook Virgil’s twin fingers, and it was all laughs, back slaps and where-ya-beens!—just a real nice reunion—until the smell of goodwill rose up like a pheromone and attracted the attention of Patsy Fuller, cueing her to come around the burning pit of trash in a miniature bulldozer to put a stop to all of it.

  “Randy Mayhill! Raised from the dead!” Patsy Fuller yelled.

  Randy nodded. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Patsy. How you been?”

  “How I been? You don’t give a you-know-what how I been. Where you been? You disappear off the face of the earth.”

  “Just taking a hiatus,” Mayhill said. “Catching up on my reading.”

  “Catching up on your reading!” Patsy Fuller had an annoying habit of repeating what people said. “That’s what they calling it now? Slinking away with your head between your legs?”

  “I’ve missed our little chit-chats, Patsy.”

  “Oh please.” She rolled her eyes. “Where you been taking your trash?”

  “Burnin’ it.”

  “Burnin’ it.” She eyed him suspiciously. “You gained weight too. Where’s your permit?” Patsy climbed out of the bulldozer and grabbed a rake. She was shaped like an apple and covered in ash so thick she appeared to be a coal miner.

  “I’m not dropping anything off,” Mayhill said. He watched as Virgil Fuller slinked away into a pile of burning diapers.

  “Didn’t ask if you was dropping anything off. Asked for your permit.”

  “Why y’all burning so much?” he asked. The hum of the giant trash compactor was notably silent.

  “Compactor jammed last night. Couldn’t even squash a cigarette this morning.” She studied him again. “We’s about to think you died. We see your truck now and again.”

  “I appreciate your concern, but nah, I’m alive.”

  “Well, I’d hide too if I was you. I’d never show my face again. I’d get my you-know-what outta town after what you pulled. But that’s just me.” She eyed him like a specimen. “How’s Onie? I heard she’s you-know.” Patsy pointed to her ear. “I’d lose my mind too. You still stuck in that old shed on Van’s place, right? Virgil heard you shacked up with somebody.”

  “Just my dogs,” Mayhill said. Then he regretted the slip because Patsy Fuller launched into a sob story—a real soap opera—about her dog who had disappeared a few months ago and she had six unused bags of Old Roy and what was she to do with a Dallas Cowboys dog jersey—it’s not like she could wear it!—and whatnot. Mayhill didn’t want to hear it.

  “Hogs ate him, I guess.” Patsy shrugged her shoulders but her eyes were uncomfortably wet.

  “Hogs not doing anyone any favors.” Mayhill wished that Virgil would come back, but he knew that Virgil was smarter than that.

  “You ain’t gonna believe this,” she said. “But about a month ago…somebuddy dumped a bunch of dead hogs out here in feed sacks. Just right in the ditch. My money's on Jimmy Cason. Feed sacks! That gonna cover it up? Like I’m stupid. Virgil may be but I ain’t.” She pointed the rake at the empty bed of Mayhill’s truck. “Why you here?”

  “Wondering if you seen Bradley Polk.” The words popped out without him thinking.

  “You wondering if I seen Bradley Polk.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Why you looking here?” Patsy eyed him. “Don’t he work out by you?”

  Mayhill nodded. “He was doing some work for me.”

  “You were the sheriff…at one time. Not anymore, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “So you know all about Bradley Polk…”

  “I know what people say.”

  “Dangit, Virgil! Three gone out! Three!” She jabbed the rake in the air toward a pile whose embers were fading into dark black. Mayhill guessed this was pile number three, and he tried for a fleeting moment to understand the dump numbering system, an almost algebraic order that he had chewed on for years, an algorithm of wood, metal, rubber, and oil.

  “Lemme get this straight.” Patsy turned back to Mayhill. “Bradley Polk. He doing some work for you, and you don’t know where he at.” Patsy took much joy from this revelation, as much as if someone had related that her child had been arrested or his lymphoma had returned. She propped the rake against her belly and wiped her forehead, the ash giving way to a stripe of hot red skin.

  “I just need to tell him something,” Mayhill said.

  “You need to tell him something. And you drove all the way out here?”

  Mayhill looked jealously at Virgil in the distance who pawed his rake at a smoldering pile. “Ain’t too far,” Mayhill said.

  “Yet you can’t wait around your own place for him? Must be sumpin’ real important!”

  “Hell, Patsy. Just thought he might have dropped off something he weren’t supposed to.”

  “Like what?”

  “If he weren’t out here, it don’t matter!”

  “Don’t get sassy with me. Not that I have an obligation to tell you anything. Because like I said, you ain’t the sheriff no more. Bradley was here first thing this morning. And normally I don’t notice him from Adam, but that boy was keepin’ a distance from me. Real suspicious. Real suspicious. Like he didn’t want to get near me. Stunk to high heaven. Almost felt sorry for him. I don’t know what’s getting into me. Tell you what, I almost feel sorry for you too. Been a ree-cluse all these years. Robbed by a delinquent. Your life took a real nosedive, Sheriff.”

  “Did Bradley drop anything off?”

  “A man’s trash is a private affair. I didn’t take this job to flap my lips about people’s goings-ons.”
She waved her arm in the air, her underarm swinging like chains. “You pay him for the day? 'Cause I wouldn’t hold my breath you see him again, ’specially if you pay him for the day.”

  “He’s lived ‘round here a long time. I can find him if I need him.”

  “I can find him if I need ‘im…you can’t find him now!” Patsy said.

  “But I got the pleasure of talking to you, Patsy, so it all works out, don’t it?” Mayhill put his truck in gear, and it rocked gently forward but Patsy kept talking. For a split second, he pictured himself slamming the gas pedal, just tearing off like when he was sheriff, rushing to see about a robbery. He imagined Patsy going down in a big thud (involuntary manslaughter, twelve-month minimum), freeing Virgil like an abused dog. Mayhill could be a real hero.

  He eyed a big pile of sacks towering next to the compactor. If the compactor jammed last night, the sacks must have been dropped off this morning. Bradley. Old sacks of Sevin Dust, fertilizers, and, curiously, old sacks of blood meal. Why would Bradley have that?

  “I’d have never hired him to begin with. That’s how you screwed up.” Patsy gestured the rake to the small house in the distance. “I wouldn’t have let Bradley Polk step foot on my place.”

  “Is that a toilet on fire?” Mayhill pointed to the fifth circle of trash where Virgil flittered near a black sulkiness of rubber tires. “Are you trying to burn a toilet, Patsy?”

  “You can burn anything if you keep puttin’ it in the fire,” she said. She looked back toward Virgil. “Everything breaks down eventually.”

  ***

  Much to his chagrin, Randy Mayhill had never investigated a murder. Sure, he’d had plenty of thefts, suspected drug dealers, cattle drive-bys, and some of those cases did require a modicum of detecting talent, deductive reasoning like an honor roll high schooler, but it was a small county, a rural county, and most people knew each other, and even when someone did go off the rails, it took all of thirty seconds to figure out who it was. As a result, Mayhill’s investigative skills had not had the opportunity to grow past, “Awww, don’t be like that, tell me,” and he felt in over his head.

  At one point when Mayhill was sheriff, a body had been found in the neighboring county. A forester cruising timber had stumbled across a dead woman in the woods, and Mayhill rushed to the scene, hemorrhaging at the words “possible dismemberment.” The body (fully membered, false report) was exactly fifty feet into the other county, so the investigation fell in their jurisdiction, and the other sheriff was quite smug about this, Mayhill thought, and paraded around as if he were Columbo even though the murder had been a domestic dispute during a hunting trip and required no more skill than asking, “Who’s that woman married to?” Yet Sheriff Columbo had CRACKED THE CASE!, the newspapers declared. Let’s throw a crawfish boil! Put him on the TV! Have a goddamn parade down County Road 1427! Mayhill ended up with a pile of paperwork and the charge of getting a statement from a lazy-eyed hunter who said only, “I seen her dead.” Sherlock it weren’t, but Randy Mayhill was nothing if not hopeful.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Birdie Woods, however, could never be accused of hopefulness. No, hope was not Birdie’s immediate feeling when Onie pointed to the circling buzzards the day before. And hope had not come to mind when Bradley disappeared and not returned her fifteen frantic calls. Nor was there a cheerful expectancy bubbling through her gullet that morning when Randy Mayhill accused her of disposing of the body of a man he thought she murdered—all with the top button of his jeans popped open because even denim has its limits.

  But, oh, how Birdie wanted hope! She wanted nothing more than to see possibility in the world without having to try. Wouldn’t it have been easier to be the kind of person whose legs get amputated and automatically thinks, “I reached my ideal bodyweight in an instant!” Still, there Birdie was, boringly dark and anxious and brooding, which appeared just as artificial as Wal-Mart checkout girls who punctuated their greetings with "blessed!"

  It wasn’t even optimism Birdie wanted after her father died. That would have been aiming too high. Aiming for the moon indeed, Birdie Girl! Birdie just wanted a hint that this world, with its unrelenting stream of accidents and premeditated tragedies, was worth putting on shoes for in the morning, that any of it was worth fighting for in the least.

  Her father and her. Everybody said they were just alike—erratic, testy—but he was funny, they said. Hilarious! What had happened to Birdie? All of the moodiness and none of the likability. Without Van, she wasn’t right somehow. She was angry. She was darker.

  If anyone had been watching, however, they would have been keenly aware that Birdie was trying to be Van. She wore his shirts (flannel, too big). She had started cleaning her ears with his pocketknife—the Russian roulette of hygiene—just like Van had done and all the other men continued to do. Their nails were perpetually black but their ears forever pristine, threatened into cleanliness by the dulled blade of a pocketknife. Birdie’s days had become a rehearsal in all things Van, and above all else, he had emphasized that theirs was a family that took care of its own business. “Private land, private matter,” he always said. “We fix our own problems.”

  Birdie locked the door after Mayhill left that morning—something she had never done before or even seen anyone do in person except for twitchy television families unfortunate enough to live in New York or L.A. She leaned her body close to the door, huddled over the knob, and blocked the view of the bolt while she turned it, as if Van could see her lock it and disapprove while she did. She looked at how dirty the floor was, the mud from her tennis shoes tracked back to her room. She needed to clean but her hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

  Onie’s television watching was especially tenacious that day, which meant the conversation would be especially poor. A once voracious reader and pianist, Onie had gotten depressed after Van died—caught it like a virus—so depressed now that it was as if all of her personality emptied into the crabgrass alongside her son. Some days, there were hints of muted conversation. But most days, she stared ceaselessly at the blinking box as if the Houston Honda commercials transmitted a secret code (they didn’t). The people in town talked. They mentioned the Alzheimer’s and the dementia, that grief could stun the brain so severely that it shut down. Wasn’t Birdie worried? But Birdie didn’t want to hear it. Her own memory moved like swamp water around the events of the past year. Still, Birdie watched Onie closely for clues, always challenging her, trying to get a rise. Birdie’s words and actions escalated higher and higher to the point of explosion, a plea for some reaction, for the goddamn raising of an eyebrow—anything to prove that the once-feisty Onie still existed behind the soundproof shell of grief—which was why it was downright shocking when Onie said, “Was that Randy?” as soon as Mayhill’s truck pulled away.

  Onie’s voice jolted Birdie. She realized then how long it had been since Onie had asked her a question of any kind, and with the television on since sunrise, the effect was not unlike someone waking from a coma and asking for a glass of juice.

  “Randy just left,” Birdie said carefully. “He’s looking for Bradley.” Birdie moved slowly across the room and next to Onie’s leather recliner so as not to startle her back into silence.

  “That’s why Randy was here?” Onie’s gaze remained on the television.

  “Bradley was supposed to show up. He didn’t, though.” Birdie felt guilty for the half truth, but she felt guilty for a lot of things and she struggled to get that much out.

  “Oh,” Onie said. It was a response at least.

  Birdie didn’t want Onie involved in any of it, but she didn’t want the conversation to be over either. She was buzzed with adrenaline and needed to be soothed. She picked up the television remote from the side table and turned down the volume, hoping Onie would find her just as interesting, but she just stared at the screen.

  “Randy’s looking for him.” Birdie looked at her expectantly. “I’m gonna stay here and wait for Bradley in c
ase he comes back.”

  Onie nodded and blinked at the screen.

  “Bradley’s never stood anybody up,” Birdie said.

  *Blink, blink.*

  “Isn’t that concerning?”

  Onie didn’t say anything to this either, and Birdie’s agitation spiraled. She wanted to trigger whatever had awakened Onie in the first place. She wanted to tell her everything that had happened, to tell her about the man who had died on their land in the middle of the night, to say, “Remember when you saw those buzzards yesterday? There was a body on the fence…by the tree line.” Instead, Birdie shook the remote at the TV and muted it entirely. She got right by Onie’s ear. “We think something terrible might have happened to Bradley!”

  It sounded halfway comedic.

  Onie’s eyes didn’t change but she grimaced slightly, a microscopic turning down of the mouth and eyebrows, a whisper of emotion anyone would have missed had they not been staring at her with the desperation with which Birdie was looking at her right then. Onie placed her hand on Birdie’s, her granddaughter’s angry fist still squeezing the remote. Without moving her eyes, Onie curled her fingers around Birdie’s hand and grabbed it so firmly it throbbed.

  For a moment, Birdie thought Onie was concerned, holding her tightly the way a child might grab the hand of her mother in the midst of uncertainty. Birdie squeezed back, touched by the display of emotion, no matter how miniscule. Onie slowly lifted Birdie’s hand high in the air, and then with her other hand, ripped the remote control from her. Then she turned the volume all the way up and settled deeper into her chair in time for Matlock.

  Birdie had the urge right then to scream, to hit someone, to run away, because this place wasn’t safe anymore. But she knew she didn’t have any place to go, so she went to her room because that seemed like something a normal teenage girl would do.

  Birdie’s space was small, a converted old tack closet with wood from floor to ceiling, but it held her bed (twin), a nightstand (bobby pins, ChapStick, a small pistol), and a bookshelf with a picture of Van and her sitting on the back of a log truck when Birdie was a toddler. She stared at the picture, not so much taking in the memory as using it to replace the image of the dead man in her head.