Ain't Nobody Nobody Read online

  Birdie recognized him. She remembered him very much alive, standing next to Bradley and her father.

  Birdie took Walden from the shelf and opened it to reveal a flat, pink piece of paper folded into a square a little bigger than a matchbook. The square had once been a feed store receipt, an old-timey one about half the size of a piece of notebook paper with two large holes punched in the top. Used properly, the paper would have been added to a ledger. The paper was thin like tissue, velvet-soft, and meant to be thrown away after a year.

  The fine, black ink had faded faster than Birdie liked, looking more like pencil at this point. The creases in the paper would not hold much longer because Birdie had folded and unfolded it so many times. Recently, she had vowed to unfold it only when necessary, always questioning if it was worth the risk of removing it from the book, like a genie she could access limitedly. She unfolded the right corner, then the left, and the note limped open, delicate and wilted, onto her bed. She was lucky to have any words of Van’s left, she knew it, but their fragility at her fingertips rattled her every time she opened it, like something dying slowly in front of her. Soon, the only thing that would be left of him would be memories, that he was funny and that his eardrums were probably covered in dozens of tiny scars.

  Onie had never said a word about the note, the pink receipt originally hidden in her Bible right there in the New Testament alongside, curiously, an old thank you note from Mayhill. Onie’s Bible was the one book Birdie was guaranteed not to open.

  “Sermon on the Mount is all you need,” Onie had said of the Bible. “Terrible editing. Don’t confuse the finger pointing to the moon for the moon!” Onie would then point her long index finger to the sky as if to accuse it of something, as if the moon had mistaken itself for Jesus.

  Still, after she found the note, Birdie could be accused of doing just that. If you pressed her on it, Birdie would be the first to say that she might have gone a little crazy, the way grief and anger make you do. The note had become her father in many ways, and she studied it like Onie and Mayhill had studied literature. There was something about the note that captivated her, one of the last things to touch his hands. The big I like a straight leaning pine, and the curious B of Birdie, with the humps not round at all, but pointy like two flags on a sail.

  When she first found the note, it bothered her because it changed everything she thought she knew—that her father had been so out of his mind with panic that he didn’t think of the consequences, that he had acted on purpose without honest-to-God forethought. The note proved something else entirely: Van had thought of her when he did it! The panic and the giddiness took her over, not knowing what to do with this reordering of her grief: I love you, Birdie. I’m sorry. He had been of sound enough mind to write a note! He was sane enough to say I’m sorry, and yet.

  Over the months, she came to love the note because it was another piece of her Van collection. She loved it so much she stole it from Onie’s Bible and hid it in her own sacred text (Walden), the triangle flags of the B waving at her, the last evidence of Van alive and so kind and so loving, a plea for understanding when he knew how angry Birdie would be. And when she held it, she couldn’t help but respond, as if they were in conversation again. "I know you were scared," she caught herself saying aloud, stifling the fury that threatened to break her open. "I love you. I love you." She began to learn, as all wise women know, that love and rage are intertwined.

  Birdie knew the paper still had traces of her father upon it—skin cells, oil from his skin, the sweat of his panic—and she laid with it on her pillow as if the ink could talk to her, louder than Onie’s television and louder than the hogs that scuttled by her window.

  ***

  Birdie had a difficult time remembering when Onie had much emotion about anything, even though it had only been a year since she got so depressed that she propped herself in front of the television. When she thought of Onie’s last spirited moments, she thought of ticks, oddly enough.

  When gorged on blood, a fat tick can well up to the size of a small grape. Birdie had plucked one of these epic ticks off Atticus, Van’s hunting dog, and crushed it with her foot, which created a cartoony splat of blood on the sidewalk, and Onie, who had never once cared about appearances, said, “Please don’t flick ticks in front of guests.” Then she smiled at the reverend as she ushered him into the house.

  Reverend Brown sat on the couch, hat in hand, and Onie brought him some tea in cream-colored china even though he hadn’t asked for any. Birdie had always disliked Reverend Brown. Van had insisted that Birdie’s dislike was due to Reverend Brown’s freakish widow’s peak. Most widow’s peaks were delightful and created a heart for the face to nest in, but Reverend Brown’s was severe and dictatorial. It touched almost mid-brow, as if guiding an imaginary aircraft to his nose. Birdie found it alarming, as if his face was ordering her to look past his eyes (the windows to the soul, no less!) to his mouth, which as far as Birdie could tell, could only recite Bible verses on repeat. In fact, Birdie had never heard an original line come from it, which, Birdie told her father, was the real reason she didn’t like the reverend.

  Birdie sat on the floor, the house cat she was, at the feet of Onie’s recliner. The reverend and Onie fiddled with their tea, as though neither of them had enjoyed such an exotic and toothsome a beverage as Lipton Regular from the Piggly Wiggly. It was midday, and the sun lit the room like a brightly-glowing greenhouse as if to suggest—mockingly, erroneously!—that this house was a place of life.

  “Van had no prearrangements,” Onie said much too loudly, as if issuing a challenge. “None. No prearrangements.”

  “That’s often the case in…these kinds of situations.” The reverend’s voice was bruised with reassurance, a forced sort of diction Birdie was sure he practiced into a Fisher-Price tape recorder. He drew out his sentences slowly, willing the words to slide down his widow’s peak into his mouth. “The cause of death will not…what I’m trying to say is…it will not be a problem in the Methodist Church. I mean, you and I know the Catholics just throw a walleyed fit about that kind of thing. But, Methodists, well, anything goes. In case that was a worry.”

  “You know, Reverend,” Onie said. “In the midst of all of this, I can’t say I’ve worried about the Methodist Church one bit.”

  The reverend and Onie bobbed their tea bags feverishly in their cups as if they were stabbing something to death at the bottom of them.

  “Good,” he said.

  “Good,” Onie said.

  Birdie smiled pityingly at the reverend. She had recently become empathetic to men who tried but failed in very public ways. “Good,” she said.

  “Van was baptized?” the reverend asked.

  “Every time it rained,” Onie said. Stab stab.

  It was only then that Birdie found it strange that, despite her incontestable emotional maturity, two adults were having this conversation in front of her. The silence grew thick except for the slurps, and Birdie longed for her own tea to murder.

  “Perhaps we should keep it simple, then. Psalm 23. Bucolic and all,” he said, emphasizing “colic” too much for Birdie’s liking.

  “You know he wasn’t much of a Bible man, Jerry,” Onie said.

  His widow’s peak dropped like a curtain down his face. “You’re saying he didn’t believe?”

  “He believed.” Onie placed her teacup carefully on the saucer. “I think it’s just a matter of what.”

  “I’m not entirely sure I—”

  “What about Thoreau?” Birdie asked quickly then.

  “He believed in…Thoreau?”

  “Thoreau was a favorite,” Onie said.

  “Thoreau is everybody’s favorite,” Birdie said.

  “Well, all right!” The reverend clapped, happy to grasp at this blessed new straw. “Thoreau does have some lovely eulogy poems…’Every blade in the field, Every leaf in the forest—‘“

  “‘Lays down its life in its s
eason?’” Onie interrupted. “I hardly think that’s appropriate in this instance. Lays down. Active verb. Implies choice.”

  “He’s talking about grass and leaves,” the reverend said. “Clearly, Thoreau wasn’t speaking about suic—”

  “Don’t tell me what Thoreau was speaking of.”

  “I would never challenge an English teacher on Thoreau, but my point is—”

  “I don’t want even the hint of a suggestion that Van would—”

  “But that’s not even what—”

  “We’re not using it!” Onie slammed her palm on the coffee table. The only sound remaining was the almost-undetectable trickle of Lipton hitting the floor until Birdie got up to get a towel.

  With that, they decided Reverend Brown would say nothing personal at all. He would only read a version of the Twenty-third Psalm that Onie had edited to her liking. Randy Mayhill would limp to the pulpit for a reading from Civil Disobedience that made the congregation side-eye each other, elbow their neighbors in the ribs: “I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion!”

  The organist would play Willie Nelson’s “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” partly because it had the word angel in it, which Onie thought would placate the good preacher who needed to believe that Van was religious in an outwardly recognizable way, despite Van having said that angels weren’t good for anything other than shitting on your head.

  Birdie walked the reverend to the door. “I’m sorry, Birdie,” he said. He wisely offered a hand instead of a hug. “Your daddy was a real firecracker. I loved that about him. I’m just sorry that…” he paused and considered, “…that it ended for him the way that it did.”

  “Passive voice,” Birdie said. “Good choice.”

  “Take care of Onie,” he said. “Losing a child…”

  Birdie wanted to scream, "What about losing a parent? I’m sixteen! He chose to leave me! He left me on purpose!" But all that came out was the compulsory, “Yessir,” as she pawed at the blood splat of the dead tick on the porch. She wanted to outline it in chalk. Death everywhere.

  “He was in a lot of pain. Desperate men don’t think straight.” The reverend shook his head sadly. “Your daddy was a good man.”

  It was a simple thing to say, not necessarily profound. Still, in the nightmare of the past few days, nobody had thought to tell Birdie that her father had been good. They had all simply avoided saying he was bad, tiptoed around the fact that he had done this supposedly awful thing, got caught growing plants in a dying forest. Van’s goodness seemed to be the one thing everyone had forgotten about him, and in her anger at her father, she had forgotten it too.

  In that moment, the reverend’s entire visage began to soften; his widow’s peak became holy, as if the finger of God rested perpetually on his forehead, choosing him, shushing his doubt, deeming him number one. For the first time in her life, Birdie wanted to leave her land, run away from Onie and the drama of her family. She wanted to jump in the truck with Reverend Brown and go live in a world of certainty and kindness. Take me to your world! Teach me the Bible! Show me boring, Reverend Gerald Brown. Point me in the direction of Kind! But off he drove, leaving her behind with an angry old woman and a tick carcass.

  “You were rude to him.” Birdie closed the door a little too loudly. “He was trying to be nice.”

  “He’s trying to check off a box.” Onie walked the teacups to the kitchen. “To come in here implying that Van—”

  “I think you’re in denial!”

  “And I think you’ve watched too much Oprah!” Onie lifted her head to the light coming in the kitchen window as if to gain strength from the sun, a pond turtle sunning on a rock. “I’m going to my room to lie down for a while.”

  Birdie wished for sunset—the sun less severe, an appropriate pall over everything, the chorus of buzzes and screeches, the whistles and croaks proclaiming night, anything to drown out the sound of Onie crying.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  After he left the dump, Mayhill drove into town and up onto the dirt lawn at Bradley’s house. Bradley’s house was one of the few in town. Like calling the roads “roads,” you’d be hard pressed to call the town a “town.” It was a loose constellation of buildings: an Exxon gas station, a corner store, a feed store, three churches, a school, and a sign pointing to the next town. A man from New York who wore a hat not of the cowboy variety came to town once—he was an investment banker researching timber prices—and Mayhill took him to the barbecue trailer that the black Baptist church had set up on the main highway because they had the best barbecue in all of Texas. This fedora-wearing man ate his drumstick with a knife and fork, and the blacks and the whites to this day would talk about the man in the hat who used a fork for his barbecue. "LA DI DA," they would say, and the rest would call-and-response a "LA DI DA," holding their unused but always present forks in the air—an inside joke that crossed racial lines even though real estate would not.

  Except Bradley’s house. The small cluster of homes belonged mostly to black families, a point which had escaped Bradley’s mother when she drove through the town at random and said, “This’ll do,” reaching for a celebratory Bartles & Jaymes. Bradley’s house was a small, white shotgun house not unlike Mayhill’s, and Mayhill knew this. However, driving up to his house, Bradley’s somehow seemed sadder and poorer. A dilapidated house surrounded by trees and hills was charming, bucolic, a relic of a fading rancher’s landscape, something city photographers would gawk at in the name of humble, Grapes of Wrath and whatnot. But transport that same dilapidated house—peeling paint and cracked windows—into town, next to a shiny Exxon station and a rusted smoking barbecue pit, and it just meant you don’t got no money.

  Like most of the neighboring houses, Bradley’s house had no proper driveway, just a dying area of the lawn that had been thinned with a short investment in goats and a truck broken down too long. Bradley’s truck was not there, but Mayhill drove up onto the lawn anyway.

  A thin, black dog lumbered from behind the house, panting hard in the afternoon sun. Mayhill got out and the dog trotted up to him, open-mouthed and dumb-eyed. Mayhill scratched her chin, which was beginning to gray through a once-black snout, and noticing no saliva coming from the dog’s panting mouth, Mayhill grabbed the scruff of the dog’s neck and pulled up gently, released his grip, and the skin remained standing in a soft hill on her back. In the art of pie making, soft peaks meant meringue that was close to ready, but in dog rearing, it was a sign of dehydration. Skin that didn’t snap back.

  Mayhill noticed a bend in the window blinds, a face pop up in the pocket.

  He knocked on the door and took off his hat, and a woman emerged, sunken and slow, dark-eyed. A body that screamed for a steak but breath rotten with fruit.

  “Afternoon. Ms. Johnson? Lisa Johnson?”

  “Yes?” Hers was a familiar face, not unlike that of a woman he had once arrested. The face of being caught somehow but she didn’t know for what yet.

  “Bradley Polk lives here, doesn’t he?”

  Her eyes scrunched into a tired concern. “What’d he do?”

  “Oh, no, ma’am. He didn’t do anything. I just need a fence and was hoping to talk to him about it.”

  Her body settled at this. She palmed the slick roots of her hair and patted it down, as if looking for something in the tangles. She wore a faded red sweatshirt with the arms pushed up, which revealed a deep black bruise on her right forearm that matched Bradley’s bruise from yesterday.

  “I’m Lisa.” She held out her hand, a sideways, flopping-fish kind of gesture that confused Mayhill. Do I shake it? Do I kiss it?

  He grabbed the tips of her fingers, bounced them slightly, and let go as fast as he could. “Randy Mayhill.”

  She smiled and opened the door as if settling into an old routine. “Come in and talk to me. You’re letting the air out.”

  The house was humid, and a thin stream of air hissed through the box u
nit in the front window. He was sure she and Bradley had lived there for years, at least since before his sheriffing days, but their house had the look of a dirty hotel room. Mayhill stood awkwardly in the living room, not wanting to sit on the couch. Their house looked like a temporary setup that could be abandoned as quickly as they had gotten the keys. There was a cheap metal bookshelf that held a Bible (Gideon, free), a Reader’s Digest Condensed Version of Old Man and the Sea (already short, lazy), and a school picture of Bradley from a few years before (chubby, pale, pre-Van). The picture wasn’t framed, just propped against the wall in a slouching paper curl.

  There was a hole near the doorframe.

  “What happened to your wall?” He traced his finger around the jagged hole, the exact size of a large fist. Lisa fiddled in the kitchen and ignored the question, so he raised his voice. “Know where Bradley is?”

  “He works.” She stared into the open refrigerator. It had nothing but a few wine bottles and a Styrofoam take-out container.

  “Thought he might have stopped in for lunch.”

  “Oooooh, yes!” Lisa said. “Hot buffet waiting for him!” The kitchen counter was sparse, save a shiny orange bag that read CHIPS on the side and a half-empty bottle of Kool-Aid-colored wine. Mayhill nodded, and she picked up the bottle. “So we can enjoy ourselves, can’t we? Drink?” She slid a glass across the kitchen counter, old crumbs gathering at the base, and Mayhill took it.

  “That dog of yours is thirsty.”

  “Me too,” she said, and uncorked the bottle.

  “You oughtta bring her in. Hogs’ll get an old dog like that, even in town.”

  She studied the wine bottle and sniffed it.

  “Gotta beer?” he asked. The last time he had had a drink was the night of Van’s funeral. He didn’t do well with downers.