Southern Fried (26 page)

Finally, on the opposite side of town—all of about six blocks from Garnet Mills—I found Palmetto Trailer Park. No palmettos, but there was a tidy stand of spindly pine trees and almost as much red dust as Heaven’s View.

As with the other parks, the trailers here had been parked in their spaces too long. Spots of rust, stains from the overhanging pines, faded paint, lopsided add-on porches, and tired houseplants hanging limply in plastic pots all spoke of folks hunkered in.

Number eleven had once been a pale blue rectangular box. Now it sat, paler still, with one end crumpled in like a half-squashed beer can. No one had bothered to add a porch or anything more than the narrow metal steps that had come with the thing, back when it was much newer and much less faded.

I cautiously tested the bottom step and reached up to rap on the metal door. After three consecutively more insistent knocks, the door opened and Nila Earling filled the doorway. She hadn’t first called out “Who’s there?”

“Miz Ear—”

“Why, Miz Andrews.” She blinked slightly in the afternoon sun like a mole peeking out its hole. “Come on in here.”

She stepped back and made a little space for me to enter. The television blared the boxed intensity of a talk show.

The room’s darkness wasn’t all a trick of light.
Weak sunlight filtered into the narrow room through the flowered, scantily ruffled curtains. But the dirt-brown carpet, lumpy flowered sofa, and dark chipboard furniture gobbled all the light. While my eyes strained to see, my nose begged me not to breathe. The dusty air swam with stale cooking odors and stale body odors and ripe cat-box stink.

“Have a seat.” She pushed a stack of newspapers off the sofa. A fruitcake-colored cat fell out of the papers and lay in the heap on the floor. I stepped over the jumble, eyeing the cat, hoping it wasn’t dead. I hated the thought of that stench being added to the rest of the potpourri.

“How nice to see you, Miz Andrews. Can I get you something to drink? Some ice tea?” She stood over me, smiling down and ignoring the cat.

“No, no, thank you. And I apologize for stopping in without calling first, but—”

“Better you stop by than you make me walk next door so you can tell me you’re comin’.” She slapped her thigh. “Sure I can’t get you somethin’ to drink?” She spoke loudly over the television’s noise.

I shook my head and she sank into the butt-sprung recliner that faced the TV. The chair sighed. From the folding TV tray next to her chair, she grabbed a sweaty glass of tea and gulped.

“Miz Earling—”

“Call me Nila, please. You come to my house, you call me Nila.”

“Nila. Thank you.”

Nila Earling did seem the queen of her castle, not the beseeching person who’d been in my office. A woman at home—with herself and her trailer.

“Nila, I have some bad news and I wanted to deliver it in person. I spoke with Mrs. Garnet about Nebo’s funeral—”

“And she said they wouldn’t pay.” Nila Earling took another gulp, wiped the corners of her mouth with two pinched fingers, and nodded. “Figgered as much. You gonna talk to Mr. Garnet?”

I shook my head. “I doubt seriously that’ll do any good. The Garnets—”

“Thought as much. So we gonna sue ’em?”

That one took me by surprise. “Um.” I rested my elbows on my knees, trying not to settle too far back into the sofa. For some reason, I kept thinking of Nila Earling’s neighbor and the Cheerios and Hawaiian Punch in her sofa.

“I really don’t think that’s an option, Miz, um, Nila. And, in any case, I would have a conflict of interest, carrying this any further. Perhaps I could recommend a lawyer you could talk to about your options.”

“Figgered as much. It just don’t seem right.”

Fortunately she didn’t seem inclined to beg me to reconsider. But I moved to change the subject.

“M—Nila, I was curious. You mentioned that your brother, that Nebo, had operated heavy equipment for Mr. Garnet.”

“Sure did.”

She didn’t look surprised at my question. I felt a
twinge of guilt. She probably thought my exploration would lead to finding her some cash.

“Tell me some more about that. When was it?”

She settled her head against the back of her chair and studied the leak-stained ceiling. “Lemme see. Probably some time about 1970, I reckon. It ’uz about a year after Mama died. He ’uz button-popping proud of that job. ’Course, Nebo never did ’mount to much. Pains me to say that.” She lay her puffy hand across her bosom. “But one’s got to speak truth, even of the dead.”

I murmured sympathetically.

“But he ’uz so proud of that job.”

“What—could you tell me something about what he did for Mr. Garnet?”

She shook her head. “Don’t know too much. They ’uz doin’ some expansion over to the plant. They had Nebo diggin’ holes and movin’ tree trunks and stuff like that.”

“Expansion?” I tried to keep my voice conversational.

She shrugged. “They cleared off that back part. Needed some more parking spaces. And they were building some kinda outbuildings. I’m not sure. Things ’uz goin’ big over there then. Lotsa people around here worked at Garnet then.” She shook her head, her jowls jiggling. ’Things hadn’t been so good for some time. Sad to see.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“’Course, Nebo set up his own hard times,” she acknowledged.

A surprisingly candid assessment, I thought.

“Nebo never did have right good sense. So gettin’ that job humpin’ that big digger around went to his head. Nebo always managed to mess in his own bed, if you’ll pardon my language. Had to go flip that back loader over down the creek bank. Now how’s that for fixin’ your own little red wagon?”

“Is that when he hurt his back?”

“Yeah. ’Course, he tole ever’body he lost his job because he’d hurt his back and had the permanent rheumatiz. But truth be told, his supervisor fired him. Stood over him there, upside down in the creek, screamin’ that he ’uz fired. Didn’ faze Nebo. Rode outta there on a stretcher, and probably worked out for himself how to turn a buck somewhere between there and the hospital. Nebo wasn’t smart but he could figger. Usually figger some way to get hisself into more trouble and more work than if he’d just done it the right way to begin with.”

I nodded. I’d been to law school with guys like that—smarter, maybe. But always “figgerin’” a short cut.

“He received a worker’s comp award?”

She nodded, her chins participating fully. Then she pursed her lips. “They keep payin’ on any of that disability that he got? Like to a survivor or anything?”

I shook my head. “No. I doubt that.” Figgerin’ must ran in the family.

She sighed and stared at the television screen. A local used-car commercial jerked across the screen. She’d muted the sound, but still couldn’t keep her eyes off the bucktoothed guy on the screen.

“Nila, did Nebo ever talk about building that parking lot?”

She blinked, breaking the TV’s hypnosis. “Lemme think. He did mention how they had to build up the back part of the lot, back toward the woods. It shelved off there. I ’member him tellin’ about it ’cause he ’uz so proud about bein’ the one to do the diggin’ and the movin’. Like it ’uz some manly thing.”

She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Seems like they used some stuff from the plant that they had to get rid of anyway—you know, junk they ’uz going to have hauled off. Scraps and trash and such. And he got to be the one to bury it.” She pronounced
bury
as an odd cross between
burro
and
berry
.

“Guess Nebo was one of the first recyclers,” she said and giggled, her hand flapping to her mouth, then back to her lap.

I smiled at her joke, hoping the bells clanging in my head weren’t sounds she could see reflected on my face.

“So Nebo stopped working for Garnet in the early seventies?”

“We-ell, not egg-zactly. He did get fired from his regular job and got the worker’s comp. But Mr. Garnet musta felt some soft spot for him. Which, truth be told, always surprised me considerin’ Nebo pulled that stunt about hurting his back and got the disability. But he kept giving nun odds and ends to do. And sometimes givin’ him a place to stay.”

She sighed another bosom-raising sigh. “Guess things come around. That free place to stay got him
kilt. And if Mr. Garnet hadn’t been so free and easy with a ten here and a five there, Nebo wouldn’t’a had to sleep it off up there. Some might think ill ’a me for this”—her hand went back to the wide expanse of her neck—”but I wouldn’t never let him sleep it off here. He knew that better’n he knew his own name when he ’uz drunk. Some might say my hard heart killed him. But I ain’t hearin’ none of it. Nebo picked his own path.”

“Yes, ma’am. I guess we all do.”

“We surely do. You sure I can’t get you somethin’ to drink?” Her glass sat empty and she was back to staring at the TV.

“No, thank you. I really need to get going. Again, I’m sorry about your brother. And sorry I couldn’t do more to help.”

“Ah-h.” She hoisted herself out of her chair. “I just didn’t want to be missin’ out on somethin’ that shoulda been comin’ to me. But…” She shrugged and picked up her tea glass.

I let myself out, since any other maneuver would have resulted in us both being wedged inextricably in the narrow door opening.

Leaving Nila Barling’s, I steered the car around the track through the trailer park, trying to avoid kids and dogs and those little orange and yellow plastic toddler cars.

At the exit, I stopped, my feet holding both clutch and brake to the floor. Where to next? Nila Earling hadn’t told me anything earth-shattering, but she’d told me enough.

I had a few more questions that needed answers. But the only place I could think to go ask them was a place nobody in her right mind would go. I sat, the engine throbbing, the sun soaking through the window glass into my bones, and tried to think of another option. Any option.

The horn blast behind me startled my foot off the clutch. I choked the engine and had to restart it, shift gears, and wave apologetically at the panel van that had come up behind me.

Fortunately, when I turned right, he squealed left onto the paved road. I drove slowly toward Main Street, trying to think through how I would approach them and what I would say. And whether I could fathom any other way to find the same information. After all, our last conversation had not been altogether satisfactory.

But at least it gave me a direction. I turned left and headed toward the old Heath house—the house that, much to the consternation of both the County Historical Society and the sheriff, had been purchased a decade ago by the Posse biker gang. For cash.

F
ew people in Dacus knew the Posse motorcycle gang personally. But everyone in town had known when they’d moved into the area. Admittedly, they were little more than a group of aging, husky guys with ponytails who frowned menacingly at grocery clerks and gas station attendants. They kept mostly to themselves.

That didn’t keep the town’s collective nose from sniffing around the edges of their affairs. If they engaged in anything illegal, they kept a pretty low profile because it never showed up on the arrest records printed in the newspaper. But as far as most people in Dacus were concerned, the gang’s unforgivable sin had been buying the old Heath place.

The historic Heath house sat far back off a rough-paved county road, out of sight in a thick stand of trees. Nothing more than a large white farmhouse, it had once presided over a sizable pre-Revolutionary War farming operation and had boasted amenities such as glass windowpanes and
more than two rooms long before such affluence became common in the upstate.

The rim of deep blue mountains overlooked fields now choked with slash pines and weeds. But, in the area’s backwoods primitive days, the house had hosted visiting dignitaries, including a French naturalist who’d extolled the Heaths’ hospitality in his 1780s travelogue. Thus the house had earned itself a spot in Camden County history back when few houses could boast of indoor toilets.

Having it fall into the hands of a motley assortment of questionable characters had drawn attention. The gang had ridden into town—reportedly from Charlotte or Miami, some city forcing out adult bookstores, prostitution rings, and mud wrestling. No one really knew what they did, how many of them lived here, or why they’d chosen Dacus. After all, they hadn’t joined the Chamber of Commerce. But folks still speculated.

I’d heard a rumor that, shortly after they’d moved in, a delegation of local ladies had paid a visit. A sort of stern, impassioned No-Welcome Wagon. The reports of what transpired had grown bigger and better as time went on. Best I remembered, Sylvie Garnet herself had been on that visit—probably led it.

I turned the long nose of my Mustang onto the rutted washboard dirt road—overgrown on both sides by an impenetrable tangle of brambles, cedar, broom sage, and saplings-and bumped the half mile to the house. I wondered how the ladies had
been received. Not that it mattered. Max and I were on a first-name basis.

Now that I was here, ten miles from town and too far from any hope of help, I strained to remember why I thought this trip so necessary.

I pulled into the weedy yard and around the circular drive. The house needed paint and the landscaping made a strong back-to-nature statement. It looked like a house where an elderly couple on a fixed income lived. After I turned off the ignition, I noticed the Harley chopper displayed on the second-floor porch.

No one stirred. No vicious guard dogs rushed out. No armed sentries pointed automatic weapons at my head. No questioning eyes peered around the Confederate flag that served as a downstairs curtain. Nothing.

Did one get out and ring the doorbell? Honk the horn? Start the car and drive furiously back to the road? The eerie calm of this place held their thunderous visit to my cabin in stark contrast.

I focused so intently on the front door that, when knuckles rapped on the car window beside my ear, I jumped. An embarrassing reaction, since it was my old friend Do-Rag.

He’d appeared out of nowhere, artfully sauntering up in my blind spot, which was amazing, considering his sheer size. I smiled up at him and cranked down the window, an awkward act in the little car. The air outside carried the faint smell of wood smoke and the customary late-November nip,
although the sun had warmed the inside of the car nicely.