Soil (19 page)

25

Sandy staggered in after four, her arms laden with groceries. She could barely get in the front door for all the gifts on the stoop. So much food, what would they do with it all? She tried to enlist Jacob to help her with the boxes and bags and foil-wrapped casserole dishes, but he was cantankerous this afternoon and shuffled off to watch television in the bedroom. The boy needed male companionship to relieve this aggression. He needed his father around.

After several trips she got all the packages inside and unfolded a pink note she'd found stuck in the door. A nervous hand had crafted a desperate plea:

Sandy

Had an emergency back home sorry couldn't stay. Can get Jacob Weds but need $ for supplies!!! Any chance you can loan some?

—J

What a heartfelt surprise, the asshole! Not even a sentiment for her father, rotting away in a hospital. She wadded up the note and let out a few angry sobs and then washed her face at the sink before putting the groceries away.

What was the big emergency that he couldn't stick around and see his son? She'd already given him gas money for that purpose, and now he was asking for more. It was strange behavior, and it gave her a sense of foreboding about the arranged visit next week. She considered calling Tina to see if she'd
like having Jacob around to entertain the babies. If it was too much, then maybe she could recommend a reputable day care at least.

Sandy was so aggravated by Jay's note that she caught herself slamming cabinets as she put away boxes and cans of food. Jacob came in and asked what was wrong.

“I'm sorry, dear, I had a hard day,” she said. “I shouldn't be so mad. Look at all this food! How lucky are we?”

Jacob rifled through the covered dishes. “Beans stink!” he proclaimed. She'd already mentioned to him about going to stay with Jay. He'd packed a bag and would be crestfallen if she changed plans.

“Don't mix up the labels,” she said. “I have to know where to send thank-you notes.”

They sorted through the spoils, mostly sweets. There was a tin of cookies and a homemade blueberry trifle that appeared to have suffered outside for some time. A foil-wrapped smoked brisket and the previously sniffed container of cowboy beans.

Something smelled heavenly. It was the deep crockery filled with pot roast, carrots, and potatoes swimming in onions and gravy. She tugged a strip of roast, and the meat dissolved on her tongue, the taste sublime. She felt like she'd been sucked through a portal back in time to her grandmother's table.
God, how wonderful
. She felt it in her chest, a delicious yearning, like watching a sad movie.

“Who sent all this stuff?” Jacob asked.

“It must be friends of your grandfather,” she said. “His church, I bet. They're so thoughtful.”

“Whoa, what's in the cooler?” Jacob lifted the lid and howled. The boy retrieved a brown paper bag, followed by a tub of whipped topping and a freezer bag filled with brilliant red berries. “Cool, it looks like blood!”

“Who sent that?” she asked.

“Beats me.” He handed her a card and opened the container of whip.

It was Danny Shoals's card with contact info. On the back, scrawled in red—“A little sweetening for a dull night.”

“Honey, don't eat that before dinner!” she pleaded. “And wash your hands before you go pilfering my food.”

“Aww,” he said, shoving the bowl of cream aside. “What's pilfering?”

“It's stealing,” Sandy replied.

“I'm not stealing!” the boy protested. “It's mine too.”

She had forgotten about the dessert discussion from their “date,” but obviously Danny had not. Perhaps he was more perceptive and shrewd than he let on.

“I don't want any of this stuff for dinner,” Jacob said, dismissing the entire goodwill of acquaintances and neighbors. “Can I have a hot dog?”

“Yes, just give me a minute.”

The strawberries went straight into the freezer. She drew a finger through the whip and tasted it, unwrapped a fraction of the foil and sniffed the cake. She'd save it for later. They had a ritual of watching competitive reality shows or the cooking network until Jacob fell asleep, usually around nine. Most nights she'd sit up and grade papers and make lesson plans until midnight. No doubt she'd get the hankering around ten.

She threw a couple of cold wieners in a pot, set it on the stovetop to boil, and then stared out the kitchen window into the lot of the city park. A young black kid in enormous denim shorts, a wife-beater tee, and a nylon head rag gestured wildly to a scruffy white kid in the cab of a patchwork truck. They were so loud she could even make out a few of their angry slurs. She worried Jacob would hear their curses and repeat them on the playground, so she turned on the radio and engaged him by making him sound out words on the cereal box. She explained how food cooks in boiling water and then asked about the details of his day.

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.