Soil (14 page)

He winked at Sandy as he pulled the door closed behind him. Her relief at his easy departure was met by an inexplicable fondness for him, which must have been a result of his unfazed, doglike devotion.

She knew it was impossible, but Sandy thought it would be best if she never saw him again.

PART

III

Leavenger climbed into Hilltop Grocery on his crutches. The tinkling bell announced his arrival. The woodsman made a point to stop by midafternoon two or three times a week to catch up with the retirees who sought habitual relief from their lives in this dank outpost. His skin was too thin today to sit with the old heels, but he took the risk knowingly, in need of human contact. The scars were making inroads, and he didn't know how to handle the emotions this exposed. The pills, which he took more frequently than ever, numbed only so deep. He was a creature of the external and needed simple cruelty, even if it was self-inflicted.

He gave Fletcher the shopkeeper a gruff hello, and the old clerk grunted and rattled his newspaper in reply.

“Lookee what crawled out of the shit ponds,” one sipper cried in greeting as the embattled woodsman dragged himself to the table. “I thought I flushed you last week.”

“Don't you mean scraped out of your Pampers?” countered another.

There were four of them, all looking like they'd just fallen out of beds or climbed out of graves. It had been ages since any of them had seen a comb or a bar of soap. One had a sick bucket at his feet. They were all blind to themselves, each guilty of his own prejudices.

“Don't you never bathe, Leavenger, or you scared to go near water anymore?”

The laughter was implicit, for they rarely cracked a smile. Anything clever heard here had been said countless times before.

Leavenger poured himself a cup and took a pained seat. The coffee, famously bad, tasted like it had been steeping all day in a rusty skillet.

“If I had as much money as Leavenger, I believe I'd be up in some sweet cooch instead of sitting around with these bums.”

“Only way that's gonna happen is if you come back in the next life as a tampon.”

“Sign me up.”

“You got your government check this month?”

“They aint mailed em out yet, I don't reckon.”

“Jim Boise got his disaster money. He said thanks but no thanks, now I gotta do this shit again next year. Sumbitch
wants
to go bankrupt.”

“Leavenger, what do they pay you to limp around and drink beer? Shit, I'll pull my britches down right here and y'all can beat my ass with a hot iron for that deal.”

“I guess his modeling career didn't take off.”

“I might buy me a new shirt at least if I was on the government tit.”

“He says the only tit he's on is your wife's,” cried another, making up for Leavenger's silence.

“Be my guest,” the target replied. “She's down at the nursing home shitting her bedsheets. I'll forward you the bills.”

Leavenger sulked in his coffee, too aching and bitter to participate. There was no sympathy here, he knew not to come for that. They were miserable louts themselves, whose only comfort resided in their brief bull-market share of one-upmanship, or else the shame and suffering of those outside their coffee ring. He was no better than any one of them.

“What's a matter with you, Leavenger, you still got a bee up your dick over your dog getting killed?”

“You're lucky you didn't get your ass snatched by a gator. A boy up at the corps told me they were seeing two or three them scoundrels a day.”

“Horseshit!”

“Go fuck yourself then!”

The door jingled and Leavenger glanced up. There he was. His hair had
gone gray and he'd grown a ridiculous mustache, wore big sunglasses and a decent pair of pants, but those shitkicker boots and the limp hat placed him. Leavenger stood and strained to get a better look at the guy.

“What're you doing, shaking out a fart or what?”

Leavenger sat back down and leaned into the table. “That's him, y'all,” he said in a whisper. “That's the son of a bitch who shot Virginia and threw her in the river. Then he dumped all them frozen fish back.”

Silenced for once, the men turned to see the stranger for themselves. No one spoke. Their guns were in the trucks, and they didn't trust a man who shot dogs at random.

The stranger left as quick as he came and one called out to Fletcher, “Who was that fella?”

Fletcher ducked his head and glanced out the window, watched the man get in his truck and back away. “No idea,” the proprietor replied and went back to his paper.

“He shot Leavenger's girlfriend!” one cried.

They turned their loathing back to the woodsman. “Why don't you go after him?”

“I think it's all bull. You ask me, I say Leavenger shot that dog himself after she come up pregnant with his own man-pups.”

Leavenger stumbled to his feet and threw his seat back, then shambled away from the old goats, dropped a dollar at the counter on his way out.

“Uh-oh, he's gone to fetch his gun.”

“You're too late! He'll be on the other side of the county fore you get to your truck.”

They hollered after him as he left, the jingling of the door his only remark. They saw his shadow propped up there on the porch wondering what to do next.

19

The harvest sun drank up the rest of Mize's pond that first week of October, leaving behind a sheen of treacherous mud that reflected the light like chocolate glass. Eager to scamper out across it, Jay bided his time, spent his days readying plants, turning compost, and generally putting his house in order.

One of these windswept afternoons he sat in a rocking chair on the front porch, peering through binoculars at a flock of snow geese browsing the sticky terrain. On their way south, they'd landed in the field and were resting their wings, beaks down, sorting through the mud. He was pleased with their cleanup job. They were welcome to peck up every crumb of evidence.

He'd eaten everything from the ration box along with another charity plate left by Hatcher, but a nervous hunger had beset him again, and he had all but decided to fetch his gun and blast one of the geese for dinner when they erupted en masse. He whipped the binoculars down and ran into the yard to see them take to the sky, blowing over the roof and beyond the pasture.

From the road below came the sound of boiling engines and excited male voices. Jay focused the lenses and spied three young men standing by the side of the road, speaking feverishly, gesturing toward the field and up to the house.

Here they are at last, the sons of bitches
. Either the killers in their mud trucks and ball caps or a posse of yokel vigilantes. Jay watched them climb back into their high cabs, wheeling and pivoting in the road. The first one began to climb the driveway.

His arsenal was never far from hand these days, and in a matter of sec
onds Jay was in position, fully loaded, safeties off. He watched them make their slow, deliberate uphill crawl, one truck royal blue and pasted over with decals, the other so caked in mud its color could not be discerned. There was something official in their ascent. There was no other good reason for them to show up here uninvited. He trousered the pistol and moved to the back door by the carport. He set the .22 against the wall by the door and held the twelve-gauge in the crook of one arm, arranging himself so that he could observe their approach and then charge out blasting if the situation required it.

When they reached the house, both trucks idled in the driveway. He wondered if the deputy had sent them, his armored truck division of backwater thugs. If Jay acted out of turn here, it would get back to the law in some twisted incarnation.

The first young buck leapt down from the cab of the hot blue mudder. He had a scrubby face, young and tough in his backward cap and muscle tee and big lavender shades. He moved with an affected, tottering swagger and rapped unnecessarily hard on the back door.

Jay whipped out from behind the window, and the young hot-rodder jumped back. “Shit, dude, you liked to scared the piss outta me!”

Jay wrenched the door open, leaving the storm door closed.

“Hey, man, what's up?” the kid shouted through the door and over the gurgling engines. Jay sized him up, all acne and wiener arms. He could easily take him if things went to the brink. He peered out at the other truck, containing two beefier boys, caps pulled low over their eyes.

Talking through the door had put this scrappy one at unease. He chewed his gum heartily and kept his hands in his pockets. Passive gestures both. After a moment of silence, the kid spoke up. “I just need to ask you something.”

“Go ahead.”

“I aint gonna bite ya,” he said with greaser cheer.

Jay opened the storm door and stepped outside. The kid backed up, perhaps at Jay's crazed, disheveled appearance, accentuated by the gas mask pulled down around his neck and the shotgun dangling on a sling behind
him.

“Hey, dude.” He was all teeth and dark frames. “I'm from Old Indian Raceway, we got a mud course on the other side of the river up here about a mile. Our course got tore up by that tornado and we was wondering if we could use your field for our races on Friday night.”

The kid had forgotten his manners, if he ever had any. No name, no handshake. Just, what can you do for me?

Jay made a point of scrutinizing his buddies. “You want to race through my field?” he said in disbelief.

“Yeah, mud racing. Save you from having to plow it up in the spring.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Cause, we'll tear it up for you,” he said.

Jay shook his head. “You must not know shit about plowing.”

“Excuse me?” the kid said, his friendly demeanor gone in a flash. “My family's been farming here forever. I think
I
know a thing or two about plowing.”

“Oh, and I guess I'm the whack-job with all the engineering and strange configurations. I couldn't know a damn thing about farming since I can't lay a straight row. God forbid we use the vertical plane!”

The kid froze solid at Jay's harangue.

“I'm just out making yard art, is that what you people think? Do you know about sustainability, friend? Do you have a clue about what's coming down the pike? If you did, you sure as hell wouldn't be out racing your buggies. You need to be putting by for a long-ass winter.”

The kid smirked and turned to his buddies. He wagged his thumb at Jay and shook his head as if to say,
Get a load of this asshole.

“Let me ask you, what good does it do me to have you tearing ass over my land? It makes more work for me in the spring, it ruins the soil, and then I'm liable if anybody gets hurt.”

“Look, now, we aint like that,” the kid said. “Aint nobody gonna sue anybody, and we'll cut you in on the winnings. Everybody ponies up for the
jackpot. Sometimes it's upwards of three or four grand.”

Jay didn't budge. The money tempted him to be sure, but inviting these morons onto his property was like throwing away all he'd worked for and then calling the law on himself.

“Hey, at the very least it's a good show,” the kid added with a pothole smile. “Gonna be some pretty women there. Something about being out in the mud gets their sugar wet.” He worked his eyebrows. “Let's just say come Saturday morning you might've had your own bumpy ride.”

Something about the kid's presumptions got Jay riled up, sent a craze trembling through him. “Who are you?” he demanded.

“Hutch,” the kid replied.

“You weren't running waves down here a few weeks back, you and another guy in a motorboat, were you?”

“Do what?”

“Who sent you here?”

“Look, dude, it's a simple yes or no. We aint trying to pull nothing over on you, we just need a strip to race is all.”

Jay sighed and clenched his fist. He could raise the shotgun, walk the kid back to his truck. He could demand a thousand dollars up front.

“I'm married. What makes you think I'd cheat on my wife with some little redneck farm girl?”

The kid bowed up. “Listen now, my buddies out there in that truck sent me to do the talking cause I'm the friendly one.”

Jay sucked in a breath to let forth a stream of hellfire. The words were at his teeth. But he knew it would snap the kid's simple dignity. A squabble would turn into a brawl when his buddies came flying down from their perch, and then a brawl would turn into manslaughter, twenty years for each boy, maybe life without parole.

“I don't believe I'll allow it,” he said firmly, wielding the last grasp of his sanity. He retracted inside, closed and locked both doors, and crouched down in the mudroom, listening to the hollering hail of fuck-yous, the rumbling engines, wheels tearing ruts in his yard and slinging gravel as they maneuvered
around and lumbered back down the road. He heard them squeal and rev once they hit pavement, the engines bellowing in rage, storming off to find some new country to rut.

He waited for their clamor to die and then paced the hallway and thought of a dozen comebacks. He went back outside and around the house, down to the field, where he stared at the muddy expanse. What better way to stir up and disperse any lingering traces of the corpse than to have a bunch of mudders running through the field, tearing and mixing and taking it away caked in their wheels and undercarriages and smeared up and down their truck bodies?

Maybe he'd blown an opportunity just then, or else closed the door on a far-fetched solution. Rebuffed another potential ally. It wasn't doing him any good to sit here and stew and hide, hoarding all the shame for himself. There was a great guilty world out there willing to share, willing to ride him mad or roughshod. He was bound now and nearly courageous enough to go out into it.