Soil Page 20

  The white kid squealed out of the lot in his truck, and Jacob perked up and asked if it was Danny. “No, it’s not him,” she said. If she ever saw the deputy again, and she certainly wouldn’t go a millimeter out of her way to try, she would mention these unsavory negotiations behind her house. She had mentioned it casually during their first date, really just a simple meal together. But what if she called to thank him for the cake and berries and told him again about the troublemakers hanging around, let him know they really bothered her? Just to see if anything would come of it. Maybe all she had to do was say the word.

  Then again, she didn’t want to encourage him. When she’d first met him she was charmed. It was nice to be noticed by someone, especially the dreamboat deputy. Their first encounter at the football game hadn’t gone unnoticed by some of the other younger teachers, who embarrassed her and pushed for details that next Monday in the teachers’ lounge. “It was nothing, he was just saying hello,” she’d told them, but they still brought it up from time to time. They’d all heard about him stopping by her classroom to give a private pep talk to her students. She didn’t dare mention their dinner date. It made her anxious now just to think of it.

  Sandy fixed Jacob a plate—hot dog with mustard, potato stix, and a small cluster of grapes. “What food group are we missing?” she quizzed him.

  Jacob stared wide-eyed at the plate. “Dairy?”

  “That’s correct,” she said, passing him a tumbler of milk.

  She looked out the window. The black kid was pacing the lot, talking on his cell phone. Was he laughing or yelling? He was a few years older but could have easily been one of her students. She wondered what was involved in getting transferred to the elementary school. Perhaps she could catch and divert their criminal tendencies young.

  Jacob let out a rebellious burp and laughed. She scowled a soft reprimand and reapplied Danny’s card to the plastic container, placed it in the fridge, and then served herself a pile of roast and carrots. The easy soul groove on the radio clashed with the aggressive booming bass from the parking lot and created a crosshatch of dissonance that pushed back her appetite.

  “We didn’t say the blessing,” Jacob said with a mouthful of hot dog.

  “You’re right,” she said and reached over to take his hand and bowed her head. Somehow they still weren’t used to saying it.

  26

  He knew how to dispose of a man, how to break down a body to its basest elements and remove it from scrutiny. But how might one kill a man and disguise it as an apparent accident? Jay needed to know.

  Scenarios cycled through his mind all morning. There was no shortage of opportunities for serious injury around the farm. It was preferable to be impaled or crushed, anything certain and instant. But it was imperative that it look like an accident.

  Otherwise the insurance money wouldn’t kick in.

  Since returning from town, he’d spent his time figuring contingencies for the inevitable appearance of Shoals and his posse. Undoubtedly they were building their case, weaving their nets, plotting their raid, and justifying it all through legal chicanery. Surrender seemed despicable to him, but you started at your last resort and worked backward.

  Trudging through mud in the bottom field, he came upon one of the more lethal implements he’d used in his garden—the section of old wrought-iron fence he’d staked as a trellis for climbing cucumbers. The top edge brandished spear-point finials that would pierce a man clean through if he were so unfortunate as to fall on top of it. But how to stage such a fall onto a six-foot-high fence in the middle of an open field?

  Jay sat and studied the configuration. He could not get Tovis Boyers out of his mind. He kept seeing the photo from the newspaper and recalling the man’s bio. He’d been thinking about Boyers and his family, especially the consolation of an insurance settlement from his death. Surely a foundry foreman would have a decent insurance package. But a body would have to be produced in order to collect a settlement. What if by destroying Boyers’s body—if indeed the body had been Boyers’s—he had deprived the man’s family of compensation they were rightly due? Had his gesture of mercy backfired? And if he were being honest with himself, wasn’t his act committed more out of fear and self-preservation than mercy?

  The guilt was nearly too much to bear. He belonged here, pierced on a pike. But only if he could leave the family a nice bequest to ease their sorrow, something to remember him by.

  His best idea involved a ladder from the house and a couple dozen old CDs and fishing line. He unfolded the ladder and set it up on the soft ground. Every time he stepped on the first rung, the ladder toppled in one of four directions as the legs plunged into mud. He slogged up the hill and brought a sheet of plywood from the shed and laid it under the ladder to displace the weight. It would appear to investigators later that he was taking precautions, trying to be safe.

  He pressed his chest against one of the finials, in the little hollow there below his sternum. He judged how much pressure it would require to puncture the skin, how much guidance and effort it would take to stab through the old flubbing muscle. He didn’t want to mess it up and dangle there half-alive all day and overnight until some hapless Samaritan found him and called the ambulance in time for a miracle recovery.

  As he considered this drastic plan, Jay watched Chipper running the field, darting from scent to scent. The dog’s hyperactivity would be a likely cause of the knocked-over ladder while Jay was high up over the fence, stringing CDs through fishing line. His death might create headlines worldwide, if only in news of the bizarre and idiotic. He began to consider the legacy that would haunt Jacob. At least the kid would be financially comfortable . . . wouldn’t he?

  Jay had taken out a half-million-dollar policy on his life years ago, but now that he thought about it, he hadn’t paid bills in several months. He’d set up payments to draft automatically from his bank account, but he wasn’t even sure the account was still open. There was certainly no money in it. It was possible that Sandy had started her own account when she moved to town and let the old one go. This was all pointless if his wife and son weren’t active beneficiaries.

  Even if the policy was intact and Jacob stood to inherit a modest sum of money and the acreage, would it be worth the lifelong shame? Jay’s own father had left nothing, aside from the limping Bronco, but would it matter if he had? A few thousand dollars at this point would be nice. There might be forgiveness in that. At this point, a couple hundred dollars would change his life.

  A honking car in the driveway jarred him out of his daydream and nearly startled him off the ladder. He looked up to find the maroon hatchback with the revolving yellow light.

  Jay climbed down from the ladder and waddled through the mud to see what Purnell had for him. It was another certified letter, again from Sandy.

  “Looks like a project you got there,” said Purnell, passing him the letter and a pen to sign for it. “What are them shiny things?”

  “CDs,” Jay said. “You string them up, and when they twirl in the light, it scares the birds away.”

  Purnell didn’t seem to buy it, but it didn’t matter as long as he believed that Jay had been engaged in a genuine project and not intent on leaping to his death.

  “Hey, you know where this guy Weaver . . . Eugene Weaver lives?”

  Purnell stopped and squinted, rubbed his eye. “Ton of Weavers all together, like five houses on a dead-end county road,” he said. “Four eighty, I believe. Come off Turpentine Road bout a half mile past that Wooten woman got a hair salon in her house, know where I mean?”

  Jay nodded. “Yeah,” he lied.

  “It’s eat up with Weavers back in there. I can’t remember all their damn names, but I bet your Weaver is there. That’s where the Ohio boy was staying, the one that went missing.”

  “Is that right?” said Jay. It was stupid of him to mention anything related to the Ohio man
, but his curiosity was insatiable. “Did they ever find him?”

  “Aint no telling,” Purnell said, pessimistic. “They’s some straight-up thugs back in there. He might’ve gone native, or else crossed the wrong somebody and just got lost, if you know what I mean.”

  Jay looked back at the letter, signed for it reluctantly, and Purnell sped away.

  Jay sat down in the gravel and unsealed the envelope. There was no letter, just a hundred-dollar gift card from World-Mart. So she didn’t trust him not to blow through cash. Now he’d have to scavenge through that hell of overstock and trinketry to root out the few essentials he’d need for a weekend with his son.

  His mind tipped back to Boyers. He could’ve gotten “lost,” as Purnell suggested. Maybe it was a different person altogether who’d washed up in the field.

  In the newspaper, Boyers’s wife said he’d been suffering stress at work and home. Maybe he wanted to be lost. What if he gave his relatives a false lead, drove out of town, burned his own car, and walked away forever? The case would eventually be closed. Everyone would assume he was dead. His family would hold out that nagging hope, but in time even they would give up.

  There was something attractive to Jay about the freedom of such a decision. Just disappear off the face of the earth, and yet the world could still be yours. Start fresh, try and learn from past mistakes, make a conscious effort to be a better person without all the old reminders that you were a failure, that you were no use to anyone, just a burden or a bad memory, a mark or a suspect.

  It didn’t matter. Even if he decided to run—and he believed he was smart enough to get away, to go underground and remain incognito indefinitely—there would be no forgetting that he’d left his family holding the bag. His own father knew it.

  The only way to truly forget is to stay gone.

  27

  It was just past midnight and Sandy was still awake. Too exhausted to read and her mind still reeling, she’d been flipping channels for two hours. Jacob lay next to her in the bed, sprawled out in profound slumber, his mouth gaping open. If not for his little-boy snore keeping steady rhythm, he would have looked disturbingly like a corpse.

  Running through hundreds of hopeless options, she stopped on a program about competitive eating. The contestants were lapping up birthday cake in disgusting fistfuls. She wondered what made a person sign up for such a competition. Surely not for the love of food. They weren’t eating it so much as seeing how much they could shove down their throats. How could you taste or enjoy it like that? Was it all for money? She could see herself competing at leisure consumption, some last-man-standing event. She wouldn’t care if she grew to a quarter ton if there was no pressure, just limitless birthday cake. She could never have watched a show like this with Jay. Without saying a word, he would make her feel inferior for enjoying it.

  Watching them eat with such gluttonous intensity, Sandy found it difficult to breathe. And then she became hungry. She crawled out of bed and went into the kitchen for her third postdinner snack. In the fridge, she plucked off a few more strips of pot roast, and then went in for another sliver of trifle.

  There was a thump below her. She stopped and listened, heard it again, more pronounced this time. It was coming from the basement. She walked over and put her ear to the door in the little alcove between the kitchen and den. There was a definite commotion down there. She heard voices. More than one? Were they downstairs or on the TV? Next a distinct clatter, some piece of metal ricocheting off the concrete.

  Here they are was her first thought. She’d been expecting them sooner or later. One of the lowlifes from the playground or the ball field or parking lot. They’d climbed into the basement from the windows at ground level. Rooting around down there in all the useless junk that belonged to the landlord.

  It would be just a matter of time before they realized there was nothing down there and they would climb the stairs and try the door and see that a good swift kick or shoulder butt would release the flimsy lock. Whatever they had in store for her, she could handle it. But she couldn’t abide what they might do to Jacob, or even that he might see them doing to his mother whatever they had planned or that he be frightened even for a moment.

  Who to call? Of course not her father, alone in his hospital room, or Jay without a phone and half an hour away. 911? Waste of time. There on the counter, the answer to all her prayers, sat the empty Tupperware bowl with Shoals’s card attached. She scurried to the bedroom on tiptoes, careful not to draw attention by squeaking the floorboards. She dialed his number on the cell. He answered right away, said he was still in town and would be there in two seconds.

  She didn’t own a gun, not even a baseball bat. Her best weapon was a shower rod, which she plucked down and clutched to her chest. She closed and locked herself in the bedroom until she saw the silent blue light spinning from the dash of his car in the driveway.

  She crept back into the hallway and put her ear to the door. She heard him down there, through gritted teeth demanding, “C’mere, you son of a bitch.” A scuffle, more cursing, something heavy falling over. More grunting, cussing, and rustling feet. Then came the gunshot. Everything shuddered to a halt, the gun’s report capable of altering reality. She imagined someone dying beneath her.

  There came slow and careful footsteps up the stairs, then a knock. Who was the victor?

  “Sandy, it’s me.”

  Jacob walked in, sleepy terror in his eyes and his hair in shock. She unlatched the door and opened it. Shoals was there, glistening and huffing in a half-open, oatmeal-colored leather shirt, wearing a Mississippi-shaped belt buckle, holding up by the tail a very large, dead, and leaky armadillo.

  “It’s a good thing you called,” he said. “This is almost as bad as an intruder, really. These things carry leprosy. If he’d got up here and took a bite out of you, we’d be peeling you off the floor from now to kingdom come.”

  Jacob stared up at her, bewildered, verging on tears. He wasn’t sure if this was a dream or simply the new reality of their nights alone together. She pulled him close and buried his head in her nightclothes, which Shoals was carefully admiring.

  She invited him to dispose of the animal, and he carried it through the kitchen and out the back door. She ushered Jacob to the bedroom, coaxed him back to bed. On the television, cakes begat pies. She stared for a moment, lost in the corpulent smiles smeared red and blue.

  He appeared at the doorway, brazen in superfluous leather, a cocky, expectant look on his face. It felt strange and a little dangerous to have him here. She gave him a gesture to wait, pushed the door closed, and put on a sweater. She caressed Jacob for a moment, and he went back to sleep, seeming to believe it was all a dream.

  Part of her wanted to lock the door and call Shoals to thank him and ask him to let himself out, but she’d left the phone in the kitchen. The whole affair had a weird staged quality, as if he’d set the armadillo loose in the basement himself, knowing she’d have no one else to call.

  Another, far sadder part of herself wondered what it would feel like to let him have the reward he so obviously and clumsily sought, just lead him down in the basement and let him ravish her there atop a pile of old magazines, speckled with armadillo blood, then send him away forever. It might help her sleep. It might numb her emotions. But she knew it wouldn’t end there. He’d be back tomorrow with a lump in his blue jeans, hoping to save her again.

  He’d made himself comfortable on the couch in the living room. He leaned over, inspecting some family photos on a bookshelf, the weapon sticking out of the back of his pants. When she entered, he turned and smiled. “Sorry about the gunshot,” he said in a loud whisper. “He wouldn’t go quietly.”

  Her eyes were drawn down to his hand. She thought she’d caught him stroking himself through his jeans and gasped, looked away.

  “Oh, here,” he said and reached into his pocket to pull out a black cylinder.
“I got this for you.”

  He reached out, his gesture suggestive, or maybe it was her mind driven to this carnal regard. He offered her the tube. “This might make you feel a little safer. If God forbid anybody got in here, a dose of this in the face and they’ll be holed up in your shower for the next half hour spraying their head off, guaranteed.”

  She accepted the can of pepper spray, feeling a bit shameful. “Thank you,” she said. “I feel silly calling you over for that.”

  “Hey, it’s nothing,” he said. “It’s what I do.”

  “I swear, it sounded like someone down there.”

  “I bet it did,” he said, a breathy intensity about him, the soft taint of alcohol. She withered, just knowing he was going to make his move.

  “I heard voices.”

  “Oh, it was just a Hotdog and T-Bone marathon,” said Shoals. “Somehow the rascal turned on a transistor radio down there.”

  She shook her head in disbelief. What kind of hoax was this?

  “You look shook up,” he said. “I bet you could use a drink. I didn’t see anything in the cabinet.”

  He put a hand on her shoulder and bent his head down, trying to force eye contact like a hypnotist who could make her drop her night pants with just a look. “I’ve got a little stash in the glove box.”

  She looked into his eyes and saw an ocean of stupidity there. “I’m really exhausted, Danny. Maybe another time.”

  He held his mesmerist’s gaze. It was never over for a guy like him.

  “I cannot thank you enough for your gallant effort here tonight,” she said, giving him her best smile of finality. The last thing she wanted was to pepper-spray him. “Another ne’er-do-well has been silenced in Bayard County.”

  He smiled. “Well, I find it hard to sleep if I don’t shoot a varmint out from under at least one pretty woman’s house every night before bed.”