Soil (28 page)

39

Got to scrape that shit right off your shoe.

The first thing he heard when the buzzing subsided in his eardrum was the Rolling Stones playing deep inside the dead man's clothing. Jay rustled around and retrieved a lighter and keys before he found the phone, lit up from the caller “BayCo Sheriff Dep.” He let the song play until it chirped off.

Shoals was checking his trap. This guy had been telling the truth. The deputy could be on his way, or he might already be sitting up at the house. One thing was certain, they wouldn't buy this as a suicide.

He heard the faintest hint of a scream coming from the forest. It might have been the shotgun still ringing, but he thought it could be Jacob too. He fled the scene and doubled back along the river, frantic to locate his son before anyone else did. The phone sang again in his hand, “BayCo” checking in. He switched it off and stopped beside the river, hurled it into the current, and stood for a moment to listen.

“Dad!” came a panicked cry far in the distance.

He made difficult, barefooted progress through the woods. It took nearly five minutes to make it back to the mudhole, hollering out for his son the entire way, stopping now and again to listen for his reply. He overtraced their tracks from the wallow through the brush and finally saw him there, sitting in the leaves beside his lifeless pup.

“Jacob!”

“Dad?” the boy shrieked, unsure if it was his father or the riverside dog slayer.

Jay ran to the boy and scooped him up. Jacob tensed and looked up through red horrified eyes. It took a beat to confirm it was his dad, and then he burst into a sobbing wail. His little fingernails grasped and scratched like the claws of a scrambling, mewing cat. Jay locked his arms around the boy, convulsing with shock, and they both took tortured comfort from each other. “I'm so sorry.” Jay repeated it over and over. There was no explanation for any of it, and the boy sought none, just quietly shuddered.

When Jay went to kiss his head he saw blood on the boy's ear and jerked him out at arm's length to inspect for injury. “Are you hurt?”

The boy's eyes fluttered up. “It's you,” he spoke.

Jay touched his forehead, and his fingers came away red. Blowback from the dead man. He wiped his hands in the leaves.

They watched poor Chipper for a moment before Jacob began whimpering questions about the man. Who was he? Why had he shot his dog?

“I don't know,” said Jay. “He thought I was someone else.”

“Where did he go?” Jacob looked around as if the man might still be out there, waiting to unload on them.

Jay considered it a moment. This was a preview of the interrogation that awaited him back in town once the law followed up on the stranger. The pieces would start to click into place, and even if they couldn't recover any evidence of the Ohio man on Jay's place, they could take him in and put the screws to him, spook him and beat him until he confessed.

“He's gone,” Jay said.

“What if he comes back?” asked Jacob.

“He won't. But we should probably get home.”

“What about Chipper?”

Jay looked at the dog, keeled over, flies already finding his raw wounds. It wouldn't take long for him to stiffen and stink. “Tell you what, let's go up and get clean,” said Jay. “Then we can come back and bury him by the mudhole. He loved it there.”

Jay carried the boy in his arms. They came a roundabout way through the
woods, a light touch on the leafy floor so they could crouch and get a line on the house before they entered the yard. They watched and waited, and Jay shushed the boy when he began to ask what they were doing.

If he left the body where it lay, maybe it could still be an accident. He'd have to dig the dirt out of the dead man's mouth, wash it clean, try and remove any clues that would lead investigators to the ultimate cause of death, suffocation. Any good forensics team would see right through the charade. But the department would spare the expense of calling in experts if they could close the case neatly. It had to look like a convincing suicide.

If he threw the body in the river, it became murder, clear and simple. The corpse would wash up somewhere downstream and declare itself a homicide. Or maybe it would flush clear to the Gulf of Mexico, shark bait, as the man had said himself not thirty minutes earlier. Jay considered filling the skull with rocks and sinking the body. Would they bother to drag the river for such trash?

Jay knew he didn't have the grit to butcher and cook and grind and compost the man. He was no longer that guy. Maybe it just ended here. He could tell the truth and let come what may.

Convinced that no one was lying in wait, Jay made a beeline for the outdoor shower. The tank was empty, so he transferred several stagnant bucketsful from the open blue barrels. He let Jacob stand under the spray first. Instead of their old jovial water play, Jay scrubbed the mud off the boy, anxious and hurriedly, until his tender skin was red, and before he stepped in to rinse himself he heard a patter and detected movement in his periphery.

“What the hell?” a voice called.

Jay spun around with a bucket in his hands, the only weapon within reach. Hatcher loomed over them. The neighbor sized them up, taking the measure of their fear and guilt.

“Is that blood in your hair?” Hatcher asked.

Jay buried his face in the water and scoured it away. He searched himself for more, and saw there were several ruddy stains on his briefs that wouldn't wash out.

“Somebody shot Chipper!” Jacob cried.

“Do what?” said Hatcher.

“Some old guy with a gun down by the river,” Jacob confirmed.

“I heard the barking and gunfire. Where is he now?”

“He ran away.”

Hatcher looked to Jay for confirmation. Choked with confusion, Jay didn't know how to respond.

“I heard a second shot back yonder,” Hatcher said, gesturing toward the west and the high grass where the woodsman lay. “What happened, Jay?”

Jay told Jacob to go inside and dry off and put some clothes on, but the boy was too afraid to go in alone. “I'll be right there,” he said and walked his son to the mudroom entrance, pushed him inside, and shut the door.

Jay turned to Hatcher, who'd followed him into the carport. All he could think was that he'd been caught finally. Not by the cops, but by someone perhaps equally suspicious of him, someone who hadn't bothered to conceal his doubt. He wanted to tell Hatcher everything.

“Come on, son,” the old neighbor said. “Let me help you.”

There was really no choice but to trust him. Jay looked at the storm door and saw Jacob pressed against it. He turned his back to the boy and faced Hatcher and spoke in a low aside. “I ran into somebody down by the river, old dude with a shotgun. He said I killed his dog and wanted to take me in to see the sheriff. I tried to take his gun away, but when he snatched it back, it went off, blew out his forehead.”

Hatcher didn't flinch.

“It was an accident, man, I swear.”

“He's dead?”

Jay nodded.

“Did
he
see it?” asked Hatcher, gesturing toward the house.

“He didn't see the man, only the dog.”

“You know him?”

“Crippled guy on crutches. Bad hair and teeth. Camo truck. I've seen him on the road down here.”

Hatcher nodded. He walked into the yard and lit a cigarette, took a few thoughtful drags, and turned back to Jay.

“Where does the sheriff stand in all of this?” Hatcher asked.

Jay shrugged. “The sheriff, I don't know. But there's a deputy gunning for me.”

Hatcher crossed his arms and quietly puffed. He was probably trying to decide whether or not to turn him in, Jay thought.

“Clean up and get dressed,” the neighbor said. “I gotta show you something.”

Jay stood under his rain shower and rubbed the mud off his skin. He went inside and left his bloodstained briefs in the mudroom utility sink, something else to destroy later. He went to the back and put on a shirt and pants and an old pair of tennis shoes and helped Jacob get dressed. When they came back outside together, Hatcher was sitting in the Bronco. They climbed in and Jay cranked it, checked the fuel gauge.

“Is it far?” he asked Hatcher.

“Nope. You packing?”

Jay nodded.

“Let's go then.”

First they drove up to Hatcher's house, and the neighbor turned to Jacob. “Can you wait here a few minutes while your daddy and I run up the road?” Hatcher asked. “Just don't say nothing to the missus about that man shooting your dog, you hear, son? She gets scared easy.”

“Dad, what about Chipper?”

“It's okay, Jacob. We'll be right back, I promise. Then we'll go down and bury Chipper.”

Jacob nodded, and the neighbor took him inside to see Mrs. Hatcher, who set the boy up with a plate of cookies in front of the television.

They drove down to the Tockawah bridge, and Jay pulled off on the smooth shoulder, a bare groove worn down by bridge fishers. They got out and walked down the little foot trail that wound under the bridge and doubled back underneath the structure, walking up near the abutment around
the high water and then a short ways downriver along a trail beset with blackberry stickers and discarded beer cans and trashed minnow buckets.

Hatcher stopped and crouched, pointed to the far shore. Jay bent down to look but saw nothing.

“On the far bank there, right at the water's edge,” Hatcher said.

Jay squinted and finally discerned its girth, half-submerged, half-buried in mud. It seemed a reasonable part of nature until he noticed its pissed-off stare floating on the water's surface and the hind claws gripping the bank.

“Holy shit!” said Jay.

“Goddamn bull gator,” Hatcher said. “Saw it this morning, liked to shit myself.”

“I've never seen one around here.”

“That's cause there aint none. This one probably rode in on the flood. They're coming north more and more. State's got a season for em now. Folks got cause to breed em.”

“That's big, isn't it?”

“Looks plenty big to me. Ten, twelve feet, I'd reckon.”

It was still as stone. What kept it from swimming across and having them for lunch?

“They feed at night,” said Hatcher. He checked his watch. “Plus, it's late in the year for him. Probably not too swift once the sun goes down. Still, I wouldn't want to be defenseless around here come dark.”

It occurred to Jay only then why Hatcher had brought him to see this. He looked at his friend in silent collusion.

“Do you think . . . ?”

“I don't think shit,” Hatcher shot back. “I got no damn idea about nothing. And don't want to. I leave well enough alone and expect the same courtesy in reply, you dig?”

Jay nodded.

“I just thought that being a man of science and all, you might want to see such a specimen of nature,” Hatcher said.

They wandered back toward the truck. Jay tried to imagine how he'd fin
ish this business once and for all, if it could ever be complete and not at infinite loose ends. He'd need a boat but knew better than to ask Hatcher. Also, what could he do with Jacob? He couldn't leave him with the Hatchers. The neighborliness stopped here. There was only one place to go. Anywhere was safer than with him.

“Hatch,” Jay called. “Just one favor?”

His neighbor turned, looking grim and doubtful.

“Can I borrow your phone to call my wife?”

40

Here she was again, rocketing over country roads, running back to Jay. But this was the last time, Sandy decided. Once she had Jacob safe in her possession, she'd proceed with the divorce, make it binding and cutthroat, whatever it took to win full custody. They'd have no more of Jay and his aura of misfortune. She wouldn't sacrifice Jacob's innocence for one more paranoid notion.

Already this was too outrageous—a poacher accosting them in the woods, shooting the dog point-blank in front of them? Was he joking? Was this a ploy to lure her back and further humiliate her, in front of her son no less? She was no longer nervous, or hopeful, or apprehensive. She was simply fucking pissed.

He insisted she drive three-quarters of the way out to meet them, all the way to Grinder's Switch. It was the junction between Silage Town and Flintlock, where the railroad spur used to split the county. The train hadn't run this way in ages, and only the wrecked shell of an old general store remained there now. It was an ideal site for rural divorcées to swap their charges, someplace to argue in relative privacy.

She pulled into the empty gravel lot and found the Bronco parked far back off the road, obscured under the littered canopy of a withered mimosa. She approached and parked, left the engine running. She vowed not to fight in front of Jacob. If Jay started it, they'd just drive away.

Jay sat on the Bronco's rear bumper under the liftgate, and Jacob spidered in and out of the vehicle through the open windows. She busied herself cleaning fast-food wrappers out of the passenger seat to make room for Jacob.
Jay walked over frowning and rapped lightly on the window. She lowered it an inch.

“Come join us,” he said. “Family picnic.”

“What? You call and tell me to rush right out, Jacob just witnessed his dog being murdered. Now you want to sit and have a picnic?” She gripped the steering wheel, her eyes furious behind sunglasses.

“He was never in harm's way,” Jay insisted. “Just get out.”

She called past him, “Jacob! Let's go!”

The boy tumbled out of the Bronco and onto the gravel, kicking up a gloomy dust cloud. He shuffled over and met her with a wounded stare. “C'mon, Mom, it's okay now,” he said, affecting his father's condescension.

Jay bent down and spoke softly into the slip of window. “Let me make a peace offering.”

She switched off the engine and pried the door open. Jacob ran over and buried himself in her breast before she could get out. “Chipper's dead,” he whimpered.

“I know,” she said and clasped him to her. “I'm so sorry.”

Jay was anxious but let them have their moment. Soon they walked over to join him at the Bronco. The trees were nodding in a new-sprung wind, and mimosa trash floated down like ticker tape on their homecoming. They sat on the truck bumper, and Jay rolled a watermelon from the backseat.

Jacob tugged at her skirts. “I found that,” he said softly.

She smiled and Jay cracked the melon like a giant egg against the bumper. “Hmm, yellow meat,” he said. “Don't remember having those.”

He passed around the crude wedges and they all sampled the pale flesh. “Not quite sweet enough,” Jay observed. “Late bloomer. Too much rain. It missed the good heat this year.”

She sighed quietly. Always a critique, nothing ever living up to its full potential.

“Oh,” he said and went around to the front seat and brought back jelly jars and a bottle of tequila. He poured two drinks neat and passed one to her.

“Really?” she said.

“I've been saving this for our reunion,” he said. “This is a celebration I'd live to regret missing if it ever came to that, so I arranged it here. Maybe a bit premature, but oh well . . .”

For Jacob he'd brought along white grape juice, which he poured in a similar jar and served. Jay doffed his sunglasses in respect, raised his jar, and delivered a rehearsed toast: “To us. May the smoke of men blow way yonder, and let us once more see what is written in the stars.”

She rolled her eyes, finding it hard to follow his constant wayward gaze. She raised her glass. “To a good dog and a good friend,” she added.

Jay nodded and smiled. “Hear, hear.”

They all drank. She felt it trickle down into her pit, a sudden burst of warmth spreading out to her extremities. Jacob took his down by the gulp. She noticed Jay's foot bobbing nervously, his finger silently tapping against his glass, the mania barely contained.

“Before the unpleasantness, we had a good visit, didn't we, Jacob?” Jacob acknowledged by tipping his eyebrows.

“You should have been there with us, Sandy. We ate pancakes in the afternoon, we camped out, we shot the BB gun, we played in the mud. What else did we do, Jacob? We dug for worms, went fishing. We made s'mores! You would've loved it.”

“Jay.”

“I told Jacob how we used to sleep outside on Nutt Street sometimes, even built campfires there in the yard. Remember when we ran an extension cord and brought our TV outside? Remember we breathed in helium balloons and told ghost stories in those ridiculous pip-squeak voices?”

“Why are you telling us all of this, Jay? What happened today?”

His smile melted away. “I told you on the phone what happened. We don't really need to discuss it further.” He cut his eyes toward Jacob.
Not in front of the kid
.

She turned to her son. “What happened, Jacob?”

The boy described hearing Chipper bark and the man yelling at Dad, the
gunshot and the puppy yelp, the voices disappearing for a long time, and then going to Chipper, who was like a limp toy animal covered in blood.

Finally, hearing the six-year-old's account, she could believe the story without taking it for gross exaggeration. “My God, Jay, who was this person?”

Jay propped his elbows on his dangling legs and shook his head. “I don't know, just some country troll out poaching. Maybe Chipper scared him, or maybe he was weak and needed to feel strong by murdering a defenseless animal. I don't really know. We didn't press him.”

She turned to Jacob and gave him a skeptical look. The boy tucked his head.

“You start to see things different at the other end of that gun barrel,” Jay added.

He knocked back the rest of his drink, poured himself a few more splashes of reunion spirits, and offered her another taste. She covered her jar and shook her head and then gave in. He poured hers and they both tilted back, held it in their mouths awhile, felt the tingle that flared up through the nostrils and into the brain.

“Do you remember being up at the lake house, renting that canoe and finding that abandoned island, the bird refuge?” he said. “We were the only two people in the world.”

He cut his eyes up at her, a playful, cheating look. They'd made love on the beach, let themselves run free and gone thrashing into each other like the moon and tides had taken over their bodies. They'd always imagined this occasion as the boy's conception.

“I wish we could take Jacob up there and let him swim in that cold lake and roam those empty beaches,” Jay said.

Jacob was daydreaming, dead-eyed, his arms wrapped one each around his parents' legs.

“What if we dumped it all for cheap and left with the clothes on our backs, just went somewhere else?” said Jay.

She thought about it. She could leave the job without notice but not her father.

“Jacob, will you go and put your bag in the car, hon?” It took some haggling to get him to go alone, but finally he carried his things away, out of earshot, while she worked up the courage to confess something to her husband. She didn't know if he might flip out hearing it.

“I'm a little scared of you,” she said finally.

He gazed at her, incredulous. “Why?”

“I worry you've lost your mind.”

His face, all the angry lines and angles, clenched and shifted.

“Maybe I have a little too,” she admitted, trying to balance the accusation. “But when I look at our life, living in this shitty rental house and dodging every lowlife in town, I can't help but blame you. I trusted you. I did, and then you went off the reservation, worrying about things that haven't even happened and that we can't control anyway. And then you humiliated me in front of our child. You're no longer the person I know. Haven't been for a while.”

“Okay,” he said. “And is that why you turned your back on me for the goddamn common world?”

They sat in the fallout silence. Neither of them had the will to fight, for they both held valid grievances. They couldn't bridge, not even believe, the chasm that had come between them. It seemed undeserved and unnavigable, and it possessed the mystical finality of death. As in death there was still love, but there was no occasion for it outside of their imaginations or the boy.

“And there's still the deputy,” Jay said.

“I told you, he's nothing. I threatened to call the police if he came around again.”

He snorted a laugh and shook his head in disbelief. “Calling cops on cops doesn't work. Anyway, he's coming for
me
now.”

“Jay, he's not coming for you, he's—” How could she tell him that it was about her, that it had always been about her? If she told him the truth, there was no telling how enraged he might become. “What is it you think he wants from you? Does he simply want to destroy you? Him and all the rest of the world and the earth itself and God too, they're all coming for you? Don't you see how crazy it is to think that way? I mean certifiably crazy. Jay, I've tried
to speak reason to you until I'm blue in the face, and I can't do it anymore. I have a son to raise, bills to pay, a father dying in the hospital. It kills me to cut you loose, but you're dragging us down with you.”

He stared at her with nervous, tick-tocking eyes, with calculations and confessions, justifications and regrets. He stood up from the truck and looked at Jacob, who was in the backseat of the Maxima.

“Jay, you need help,” she said. “You have—”

“I killed a man,” he said. “That man back there, the one who shot Chipper.”

She must have shown him an expression of disbelief.

“I did, Sandy. I took his gun away and murdered him in cold blood.”

She stood.

“It was him or me,” he said. “Him or us.”

She looked at Jacob.

“Don't worry, he didn't see anything. The guy took me into the woods at gunpoint, and I waited until we were far away and I could get the drop on him. It was self-defense, yes, but mostly for Jacob. And for you. I was defending all of us. That's all I've ever done.”

“Oh, Jay . . .” She wished she weren't hearing this. Was there some way to make him take it back?

“The deputy knows. That's why he's coming for me. I have to go back and take my lashes.”

He appeared calmer, more focused, as if confessing this had cured him.

“Jay, you're not planning to—”

“The thing is, Sandy, I don't know if I can get out of this. I'm going to do my damndest to try, but the odds of this coming out in my favor . . .”

She couldn't reconcile what he was telling her. It seemed like a dream, even her response. “Come back right now, we can all go together. We'll leave, just like you said.” She was willing to accept culpability for him in this moment.

“Dad!” Jacob cried, running toward them. “I think someone is in the woods back there!”

Jay got up and walked slowly across the lot. The thought occurred to her to scoop up Jacob and run, get in the car and speed away. She clutched her son and they watched Jay approach the thicket. He stood before it a moment, clenching and unclenching his fist. He bent down and drew a handful of gravel. “Who's in there?” he shouted and flung the rocks. A couple of quail launched out.

He turned around with a smile on his face. It was the man they both knew. “You see,” he said, walking casually back to them. “It's okay, it was nothing.”

Jay touched his son on the shoulder and knelt down and fixed him in a gaze. “This is going to be hard, buddy, but you need to take one thing away from this today—don't be afraid. Not of that man back there. Not of me. What that man did back there, that was because of me, okay? Not you, not Chipper.”

“What do you mean, Dad?” asked Jacob, a little tremulous.

“He was getting back at me for something I did.”

“What did you do?” the boy asked.

“Listen. I hurt his dog. In a moment of weakness. It's because I was scared, and I made a bad decision. Now, your mom and I have taught you what's right and what's wrong, and when it comes time for you to make that decision, you can make the right one. Don't ever be scared to do what's right.”

The boy listened to his father intently.

“It's not easy. Usually doing what's right is the harder decision, so it's natural to be scared. But you need to swallow that fear. Just do it like that, okay, like you're chewing it up and swallowing it. You got me?”

He put a piece of watermelon in his mouth, chewed and swallowed. “Just a piece of food you grew yourself.”

“But what if he comes back?”

“He won't, Jacob. I promise. He'll never come back.”

The boy nodded, tears brimming. Jay kissed him and walked him over to the Maxima and put him in the front seat. He bent down and whispered to him softly, then fastened the seat belt and kissed him again and closed the door.

He walked back to Sandy and took the jar from her hand. She was crying. “I'm sorry,” he said. “You're right.”

“You can't come with us,” she replied, somewhere between a question and a statement.

“Did you keep my insurance going?” he asked.

“What?”

“The life insurance. It was drafting every month.”

“Why, Jay?”

“Did you?” he demanded.

She considered her finances. “Yes, I believe so. Everything switched to my account.”