Ain't Nobody Nobody Read online

  “No.” She whimpered every word as if it were her last breath, every utterance a song of lamentation. “Bradley stole half of 'em. Other half boiled in the car. Forgot to bring 'em in.”

  “I can’t imagine you’d forget such a thing.”

  “But this rosé is still good.” She sniffed the bottle again.

  Mayhill hesitated but held out his glass. “That’ll be fine, thank you.”

  “I sometimes drink right from the bottle. Saves dishes.” She put her lips to the bottle mouth as if to blow into it, an awkward smile meant to flirt. “Do you still want it?”

  “No, thank you.” Mayhill put down the glass.

  Mayhill had the sudden thought that she could be a prostitute, and with that thought came a wave of concern: that the house was being watched, that he could end up in the papers again, and he had psychic-like visions of being booked by the new, well-ventilated sheriff.

  They sat on the couch, and she put the bottle on the coffee table. Mayhill edged himself to the far end.

  She leaned back on the other end and crossed her legs. “What’d Bradley do?”

  “I said I need a fence, that’s all. He’s a good builder.”

  “Cut the shit, Randy.”

  “Cut the shit. What happened to your arm?”

  “Accident at work.” She pulled the sleeves of her sweatshirt down, a flash of pink suddenly in her cheeks.

  “Why aren’t you at work now?” he asked.

  “Why aren’t you at work now?”

  “I quit.” It was technically true. She searched his face. “I was about to get fired,” he said.

  “I’m about to get fired too,” she said. “Time clock don’t work right is the truth about it. I’m ‘on leave.’” She made lazy quotes with her free hand.

  “Paid leave?”

  “Oh, for sure! A paid vacation! I’m looking for something else, though. I’m lookin’…” She trailed off into thought. “Maybe I’ll get a real estate license.”

  Mayhill imagined a drunk Lisa Johnson in a suit made out of sweatshirt material, ushering around prospective real estate clients. And this trailer has all the amenities for the modern meth dealer: a stove with four burners, a smoke detector, removable paneling… “So Bradley’s paying the bills.”

  She waved him off. “He hasn’t slept here in months.”

  “He doesn’t live here anymore?”

  “Said he hasn’t slept here.” She seemed much drunker all of a sudden, her words vexed and slow. “Oh, but Bradley will shower here! He’ll use up all the hot water. Then I have to take a cold bath. A cold bath! Which does no favors for my dry skin, Randy! It’s Randy, right? Randy, he eats all my food…steals my beer.”

  “Sounds like he’s gotta girlfriend…” Mayhill thought of Birdie then. “Must be shacking up somewhere.”

  “Maybe.” She shrugged. “I dunno. He don’t tell me anything. He showered here last week, and all I was trying to ask about was his job—”

  She touched her bruised arm, and something about this exchange was enough to send Bradley’s mother into an emotional tailspin, from which she awoke to the pitiful state of her situation. Lisa began to cry, a long, slow wind-up of a wail. “And after all I done for him!” Mayhill stiffened and stood, though the cue didn’t stop her. Instead, it seemed to invite her closer until she pulled herself from the couch and moved toward him, her head finding its way to the shelf of Mayhill’s gut. She threw her head back—all agony and melodrama—her body still pressed to him so that he could see up her nostrils. “And he don’t even care for his mama!”

  Mayhill put a stiff arm around her and patted her open-palmed and awkward, a soft spanking to her back. She came up to his chest, and her chin dug into the protrusion of his belly. From this angle, the tears soaked through his white shirt and he could see his chest hairs clearly, worms rising to the surface of the soil after a hard rain. None of this was pretty, he decided, and he gave her a final pat-pat-pat and inched away from her—cautiously, teeth not showing—the way one might step away from a bear.

  She was the kind of woman who needed to be touched, and for a moment, Mayhill wished he were the kind of lawman who did such a thing, who felt perfectly at home in a strange woman’s embrace. Life is easier the more places you feel at home.

  She moved closer again and traced the wet spot on his shirt with her finger. “You could leave him your number. I’ll give it to him.” She attempted a smile, too spent to flirt. Her fingers pressed harder into him.

  “I heard he’s working at the Cason’s. I’ll go by. Gotta see Jimmy about something anyway.” Jimmy Cason hadn’t talked to Mayhill in over a year, but Lisa knew none of these people, nor that Jimmy Cason would never trust a man like her son to step foot on his land. But “Gotta see so-and-so anyway” was just the thing he would have said when Van was alive, when Mayhill saw people about things and goings on.

  She nodded and wiped her nose on her sleeve, leaving a dark comet across her faded red sweatshirt. She cocked her head lazily and stared at him. “You look familiar.”

  “I used to be sheriff,” he said.

  She nodded intently, though her eyes were vacant. “I used to be pretty.”

  Mayhill knew the right thing to say was, “But you are pretty,” but he didn’t feel like lying, and the difference was that he really did used to be sheriff. He nodded and her words hovered uncomfortably in the air like fumes until he put his hat back on and let himself out.

  ***

  In the courts of Mayhill’s mind, the evidence would be clear. He did not entice the dog in any discernible way. He definitively did not! The black dog—"On her own vo-lition, Your Honor!"—trotted up to the driver’s side just as Mayhill opened his truck door to depart, as if she knew something about him, as if she had heard rumors. The moisture in Mayhill’s mouth seemed to disappear at once, sucked away by empathy, and he smacked his tongue to the roof of his mouth to generate any sort of liquid while he searched his truck for an empty cup or a hidden well. All he could find were two hot six-packs of Dr Pepper and a roll of paper towels that had gotten wet and dried and were flaking now like papier-mâché. He considered the Dr Pepper for a moment but knew the sugar would surely dehydrate the dog more, and the familiar feeling of utter uselessness attacked him like mosquitos. He looked at the dog and frowned, and the dog, though open-mouthed, seemed to frown too. The dog reminded him of Birdie. "You," the dog said in so many non-words, "have thoroughly disappointed me."

  “Shit.” Mayhill sighed and patted his knees in two successive taps, an ancient cue the old dehydrated dog understood in her bones, if not in experience (because this was a dog who had never been invited anywhere), upon which the dog scrambled into the truck, ready to make a break from the horrors of insignificance.

  “I guess that’s how it’s gonna be,” Mayhill said, and stretched his puffed arm along the back of the seat, then looked over his shoulder to back out of the driveway. The dog sat in the passenger’s seat (Dog, yet again, his co-pilot! Ha!) while Mayhill made a concerted effort not to peel out, and he found that for the second time in two days he was smiling like someone who had something to be happy about.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Randy Mayhill had always imagined himself as front page news—heroic deeds, not unlike Batman’s, plastered across the front of the eight-page East Texas Telegraph, the same publication that Van had said was the only monthly newspaper to be published weekly, the same publication Onie required her high school English classes edit each week for homework.

  Van and Onie were right, of course, as they always were. The newspaper had problems of the hillbilly variety: a regular confusion of “their” and “there,” and more maddeningly, a confusion of “it’s” and “its” and “its’.” Its’, of course, being the jackalope of the English language. A legendary animal plausible enough to exist—a hybrid of real—but in the end, not a real thing at all, except to say something about the person who defended its exist
ence so fully. But it was among these pages that Randy Mayhill wanted to be celebrated.

  “I don’t know why you care so much,” Van would say, circling a split infinitive out of habit. “They’d spell your name wrong anyway.”

  ***

  A little over a year before he found a body on Birdie’s fence, Sheriff Randy Mayhill scrubbed the Telegraph for any mention of his name just as his secretary, Gabby Grayson, ushered a shifty-eyed hog hunter into his office. The man smelled like mud and had a Houston Oilers cap pulled tightly over his head, scraggly hair puffing out like duck feathers. A gold cross drooped from his neck.

  Mayhill sat in a large office chair with fast-moving wheels, and off-put by the man’s apparent nervousness, he attempted humor as he always did when out of sorts: “That cross of yours…it looks like it was built to scale.”

  But the hog hunter was in no mood for jokes. “I seen some plants. Hunnards of them. Illegal ones.” He leaned toward Mayhill and whispered. “Weed.”

  Mayhill stared at him, blank-faced, not sure he understood.

  “Marijuana, Sheriff.”

  “Marijuana?” Mayhill asked.

  “Marijuana.”

  “And you sure about that?” Mayhill swiveled the chair back and forth, feet dancing beneath the desk. A headline formed in his head. “You serious?”

  “I am,” the man said. “I wouldn’t joke about such a thing. Found it when I’s out settin’ a trap.”

  “Anybody tending it?” Mayhill asked.

  “No, thank God. And I mean that sincerely.” He touched his cross, then looked up and offered thanks to the stained ceiling tiles. “Didn’t see no nobody. Nobody seen me. All pine…dead mostly…then the land totally changed. Hunnards of bright green bushes. Green like poison ivy. But I thought that ain’t no poison ivy. And then I realized what it 'twas. And I thought, no, you ain’t seen that. But I made myself look twice. No way, you ain’t seen that. Then three times. And I thought, you seeing that! You really seeing that! I seen it, Sheriff, I did.”

  Mayhill scribbled “major marijuana farm” on a pad, then added an exclamation point. “How big a plot, ya think?”

  “Football field?” The hunter measured the air with mud-splattered hands. “Maybe more.”

  “Maybe two football fields?” Mayhill asked.

  “Could be three?”

  “Three football fields!” Mayhill slapped both hands on the desk. The headline should be simple, tasteful in one-hundred-point font: BUSTED!

  “But then I hot-footed it outta there,” the hunter said. “Because I know what them cartels do to a man like me. I seen that 48 Hours episode last year.”

  “‘Bout those hikers got killed?” Mayhill asked. “I saw that too. State forest near Brownsville?”

  “That’s it, Brownsville. Couple of hikers stumble across their operation. Shot dead right there…just for seein’ it, Sheriff!” the man said. “Them cartels are paranoid. They’ll shoot you dead just for being in the wrong place, wrong time.”

  “Mexican cartels…in our woods!” Mayhill drummed the desk and looked at his new friend, this muddy angel of good news. “You were trapping? Where were you exactly?”

  “South of the Trinity. Property bumped up against the state land."

  South…of…Trinity, Mayhill wrote on the pad. Then his blue pen trailed off the page, his words slowed as his brain mapped it out. Mayhill swiveled his chair to look at the map behind him.

  “That’s right,” the man said. “Off County Road 1427, I think.”

  The air in the room changed then, joy evaporated into the ether, headlines disappearing. Mayhill put down his pen and covered his mouth with his hands.

  No, no, the plants could not be there. No, no, they could not be having this conversation.

  “Do you have experience with illegal drugs?” Mayhill asked. He gripped his feet to the floor and tried not to fall out of his chair. “Is the smoking of marijuana a pastime of yours?”

  “Of course not!” The man’s face grew troubled. “A family man. A Godly man.” He looked up at the ceiling tiles again.

  “But you know the plant well enough to identify it in a thicket with, I dunno,” Mayhill smirked, “a million other green plants.”

  “There were so many of them,” the man stammered. “Like I said…three football fields.”

  “Or maybe just one.” Mayhill shrugged.

  The man looked around the room—for what, Mayhill did not know.

  “And who have you told about these alleged ‘plants’?” Mayhill asked, air-quoting with his fingers.

  “Nobody. Came straight here.” The hog hunter seemed proud of himself, overly eager, a quality Mayhill despised—the need for pats on the back and gold stars.

  Mayhill ran his hands over his chest and touched his gold star, then eyed the man. “Well, I’m not saying you’re lying.”

  “No, no, Sheriff.” The man got up quickly, walked behind Mayhill’s desk, and pointed to the map. He dragged his dirty finger across the line, then took a hard turn, and pulled it down the wall. “I parked right here. Then I saw the river. I know my maps.”

  “You a cartographer?” Mayhill asked. “Work for the highway department?”

  “Drove an ambulance in San Antonio for five—no, it was six years—”

  “Well, was it five or six?”

  “Before that, was a navigator in the Army. Two tours in—”

  “And we thank you for your service!” Mayhill said, standing so quickly that the chair shot from behind him and crashed into the wall.

  The man stared at him, confused.

  Mayhill looked up at the ceiling tiles, hoping to see whatever the hog hunter could see with that cross. But all he could think to say was, “Show me again where you crossed the river.”

  ***

  Mayhill loaded two plastic tankers into an old fishing boat in the dark. He scored the weed killer from a small job off of a neighboring county (stolen farm supplies). It was nasty stuff—old and industrial—the kind of poison that housewives had once happily misted on tomato plants but had been outlawed since the seventies (tremors, private part cancers). Even though he hadn’t opened the containers yet, just inhaling the residue on the outside of the bottle burned his nose hairs.

  It was hours after Mayhill’s and Van’s brawl in the front yard, with Birdie and Onie looking on, and the confrontation had gone just about how he predicted—Mayhill the only reasonable person ever present in any situation, and Van, defiant and stubborn, punching him right in the face and permanently injuring Mayhill’s kneecap in the name of HIS! PERSONAL! FREEDOM!

  Van’s words bore through him as he unhitched the boat. "Private land, private matter. It’s a plant. No different than a tree. You can get high off pine sap, if you think about it, Randy!" Van had swung and Mayhill ducked. "Did you know you can get high off pine sap? And nobody’s outlawing pine trees and whatnot. I’m not cooking meth, Randy. Do you see an exploding trailer? Do you? Look at my teeth! I have all of my teeth!" *SMILE*

  Randy understood then. Van’s teeth were magnificent.

  ***

  Mayhill wore waders and snake boots because the Trinity quivered in leeches and water moccasins, but these weighed down his bottom half like concrete shoes. He thought about Van and how he had clearly lost his mind, that he had caught desperation like a cold. Mostly, he thought about Birdie and Onie, how they orbited Van like planets circling the sun. What would happen if the sun went to jail for twenty years? Randy Mayhill wasn’t obstructing justice. No! He was preventing heartbreak! And if you wanna get sappy about it, preventing heartbreak is exactly what the law is for.

  RANDY MAYHILL PREVENTS HEARTBREAK

  The moon was silvery, and the frogs were loud.

  About a half mile from where the hunter said he crossed onto Van’s land, Mayhill stopped the boat and listened. He half expected to hear music blaring through the trees, a perpetual party to which he had not been invit
ed, all hula girls and drug pipes and whatnot. Instead, he heard the silence of the woods and the river, the slush-slush of the boat moving through water. He used his paddle to move slowly forward, his breath the loudest sound in his ears.

  Mayhill held a tiny flashlight, barely thicker than a pen, near his head and scanned the bank for pipes. The light slithered over loblolly roots and Budweiser cans. If Van were growing near the river, he was surely irrigating from it; it had been too dry otherwise. He paddled forward, moonlight-quiet, then stopped and shone the light again. He could hear something, the low whir of an engine. He saw the flicker of eyes and a jerk of movement: an alligator nestled on the edge. It was a young one, about three feet long, a lace of dark and yellow scales, its throat a whitish gray. It was maybe two years old, just the age that Mayhill wasn’t sure if it was on its own yet. Was the mother around? He shone the flashlight around the boat, farther up the bank.

  Then he saw them. Two tiny pipes sticking into the river, certainly not conspicuous, spray-painted dark brown to blend into the bank. Smart, Mayhill thought, but the paint had begun to chip off into the water. Just enough so that the flashlight caught a few inches of the shiny white pipe even in the dim moonlight. He flashed back to the gator, eyes flared red in the light. Then, Mayhill moved the light deeper into the thicket, and sure enough, saw a small irrigation pump the size of a mini-fridge, humming like an idling car.

  Lord, forgive me for what I am about to do.

  With an old hose, he connected the pipes to the tanks and sat impatiently in the boat—an eye on the gator, still scanning the water for its mother, scanning the bank for Van or hula girls or whomever. Mayhill imagined the poison going deep into the land, chugging into the plants. In the morning, and certainly by the next nightfall, they would be dead. Perhaps not dead, but damaged and sickly. A message Van couldn’t ignore. The party shut down, the dancing girls sent home.

  Mayhill unhooked the second tank of poison and tilted it backward to avoid spilling the dregs. Then he pulled the dirty white cap out of his shirt pocket and tried to screw it back on the tank, but his fingers were clumsy in the thick work gloves. He bobbled the tank and poison chugged off the side of the boat and into the water. “Shit.” Mayhill took off his gloves and worked the lid back on the tanker with his palm. He wiped the poison onto his jeans and could feel his legs sting where it soaked through.