Soil (20 page)

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 stick
ing 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.”

She opened the front door. “Then you should sleep just fine tonight.”

On his way out, he stopped to give her one last chance. “I had to break one of your windows out, I'm afraid. I'll take care of that tomorrow.”

“You don't have to do that, really,” she said. “I'll have my landlord tend to it.”

“Trust me,” he said, leaning in. “I don't mind crawling under there and fixing you up.”

She hung her head. What shameless bargaining, what priceless insurance he could provide. If it was more than pepper spray she needed, and if it was tonight that she needed it, then here he was.

“Okay,” she said, closing the door quietly. “Let's go down and take a look. See just how big a mess we're talking about.”

A hint of a sly smile crossed his face and he knew better than to speak. She led him into the kitchen, stopped and gave a listen down the hall. She opened the cellar door and descended daintily ahead of him, her nerves pulsing, a slight blush in her abdomen. He placed the gun on the kitchen counter and followed, eager to go down with her to this secret place where strange bodies could be fed what they so ravenously deserved.

28

Two nights later, Shoals tried and failed to raise Sandy on the phone. She was busy, playing hard to get, whatever it was women did when they were suppressing their true desires. He began to ponder Baby George's offer. He wasn't interested in hunting ducks with the boys, especially while Dun Spiller was away. Dun was one of the city cops going on the trip, which created an opportunity that Shoals had been waiting a year or more to exploit. He'd done a little research and learned that Dun was taking both sons, the dogs, and the neighbor too. The circumstances were too perfect to ignore, his urges too dark to suppress.

Dun's wife was the beautician Rochelle, whose famous curves had all the boys wondering if the goods were genuine. He'd cased the house already, found a three-inch sliver of open bedroom curtain, but had never been able to set foot in the yard for the rambunctious dogs. Dun himself was no one to cross, a chiseled-out, six-foot-six musclehead, who lacked any sense of humor or mercy or even the capacity to appreciate and satisfy such beauty as lived under his own roof. With all obstacles removed, it was Shoals's scene to investigate.

He followed her Friday after work. She stopped for a drink with the girls and made it home by 7:30. Shoals was already there, hunkered down in a lawn chair out back in the shrubs right beside the window. She went straight to the shower. He couldn't ask for a better scenario.

She came out of the bathroom wearing only a towel turban. He watched her air-dry and decided she was all natural by the way her breasts wobbled
when she pranced and bent over. She stood and admired herself in the full-length mirror, the sheen down her butterscotch body, not a tan line in sight. She squirted up a palmful of lotion and began lathering her legs, reaching deep between her thighs. She kept things proudly mammalian down there, which surprised and delighted him, she being the professional groomer, always so polished and smooth in her exposed features. These were the details that excited him, the things only the most intimate loved ones or medical professionals knew about her. Holding this information granted him membership to an elite club, and it was being in the know, as much as the obvious sexuality, that excited him.

But Shoals got greedy and brought out the video camera, perched it on the windowsill and captured her lubricated hands as they moved over her stomach and ribs, kneading her breasts, those splendid orbs slipping and twirling through her fingers with the ease and pliability that only natural flesh can achieve.

Rochelle must have seen the pinprick of red light from the camera. She stopped cold as a wary doe in a scouted field, calmly wrapped up in her robe, and disappeared into another room. He thought nothing of it until she appeared around the corner with a high-beam flashlight and a baseball bat. He managed to scramble over the fence, but not before she recognized him and called him out by name.

Five minutes later he was doing ninety in the Boss, his heart racing the back roads toward Silage Town. If he could reach the mud races in time, he'd have an alibi. But then his uncle called and told him to get his ass back straightaway.

In his office, the sheriff was fuming. “Her husband is a friend of mine,” he said with characteristic stern calmness. “I practically had to beg her not to call the city to investigate this. She wants to press charges.”

“What has she got?”

“Invasion of privacy for sure. Did you expose yourself to her?”

“Hell no.”

“She said you were taping her, Danny. Is it true?”

“What, do you want to confiscate the evidence?”

“This is serious, son!”

After a dressing-down by his uncle, Shoals sought immediate counsel from another high school buddy, Jim Tom Fussell, the notorious local attorney, a few shades paler even than Shoals in his scruples. The deputy confessed his trespass while his old pal listened intently. “Okay, first off,” said Fussell, “are they real?”

“I believe them to be.”

“You lucky son of a bitch. And you couldn't convince her to let you stick around and finish the rubdown?”

“She didn't appreciate the interruption.”

Fussell took notes and asked pertinent follow-up questions. “This is a simple one,” the attorney assured his client. He telephoned the woman right then and there.

“Hi, Rochelle? This is Jim Tom Fussell. Sorry to bother you at this hour, but I heard you had an unpleasant run-in earlier this evening. . . . Well, I assure you I take this matter in the strictest confidence. Were you able to identify the prowler? . . . He's sitting right here in my office and swears to me he was not even in town at the time you described. . . . I see. Okay then, listen, Rochelle, I'll have to insist that you not pursue this any further, okay? . . . Because my client is a respected servant of the people with a clean record, and he did you no harm. . . . Well, then, Rochelle, this could get ugly very fast. . . . Because, dear, by law your curtains were open enough that my client was able to view, without obstruction, your nakedness and lewd behavior. . . . You exposed yourself to him and committed an indecent act in full exposure to the public. By law you have committed the crime, Rochelle, and I am not afraid to bring this to trial. . . . I assure you it could easily be construed as indecent. We have some pretty damning evidence. Pretty damn impressive at that. . . . What would you say if I told you there'd been complaints in the neighborhood that he was investigating? . . . Well, the scenario that concerns me is the eleven-year-old boy on the second floor of the Baptist recreation center behind you, innocently looking out the window and catching a view
through your open curtains of what you've been doing in your bedroom. He's too young to be exposed to that.”

Shoals squirmed in his chair. He'd been in a pickle a time or two stemming from his virile nature, but he had never felt like he was taking advantage of people he'd sworn to protect, even though this was technically outside of his jurisdiction. Bringing in his profession was a bad move. He knew Jim Tom was just trying to get control of the situation, but this seemed out of bounds. He tried to wave his attorney off, but Jim Tom gave him a thumbs-up and a nasty grin.

“Fondling one's genitalia in front of an open curtain within view of a church has always and ever will be considered indecent, at least in any community where I intend to live,” the lawyer said as he ran his hand over his own chest in lewd exaggeration, flicking his tongue out spastically over his prim goatee.

Shoals shook his head. Dun was going to murder him. Word would spread all over town by Monday afternoon.

“My client is willing to drop this completely and let it always remain an awkward incident between the two of you. No one else has to know. But if this gets out and his reputation is jeopardized, we're going all the way. I'd hate for this video to go live on the internet. Don't put your kids through that shame.”

There were several more painful minutes, during which Shoals could hear Rochelle screaming through the phone. Fussell mocked her anger with a chattering hand gesture. He was having a blast.

The negotiation ended in a stalemate as near as Shoals could tell, but Jim Tom assured him it was over. “She won't breathe a word, believe me. She'll cool off and realize she's got nothing to gain and everything to lose by starting a fight.”

“You know, I should be on top of the world right now,” said Shoals, “so why do I feel like everything is going south?”

“Forget about it, man,” Jim Tom insisted. “It's not
your
fault she's got the most bodacious tatas in town. Believe me, you're not the first man to try and sneak a peek. Hell, I might consider getting an injunction and rigging a camera up in the tanning beds.”

Shoals thanked his counsel, shook his hand, and told him good night.

“Ho, ho, ho. Wait a minute, pal. Let's see this videotape. That's your retainer, fella.”

“There is no tape,” Shoals lied.

He took the long way through the country, barely driving sixty, and he didn't have any particular place to go. He didn't want to go home. He'd be too tempted to watch the video. He certainly couldn't bear visiting his mother.

He wondered how this would affect his run for sheriff. The only proof was under his seat, a small unmarked cassette. It was tempting to stop on a bridge and throw it in the river, but that would be like dumping the
Mona Lisa
. He tried to convince himself that everything was fine, that it would all blow over. He could twist it any way he wanted. Neighborhood watch. He was checking on a fellow officer's family, all of it just a misunderstanding. But this sort of sensitive information, if it found its way into the wrong hands, could be devastating to him.

As he rounded one of the darkest curves on Silage Town Road, his headlights honed in on the ass end of a rusty Pontiac Bonneville splayed out in the lane. He swerved to the left to keep from hitting the car. A handful of black kids went wide-eyed in his beams. He ripped the wheel back to the right and just missed hitting a dog in the oncoming lane. The Boss spun around and nearly flew off into a kudzu gulley, but Shoals managed to glide it to a backward stop on the shoulder. He shuddered and inhaled as his heart swallowed a gush of adrenaline. The slalom stripes on the road painted a story of near disaster. He saw the motorists hooting and jumping.

A biblical rage flared inside him. He erupted from the car and gave them all a rawhide cussing. A wail of depravity and damnation that found everything about them to insult.

One of them with large bleary eyes and wild wiry hair charged back, “Who da fuck you think you is?”

Shoals ran over and got right in his face, threw back his vest with the shield. “I'm the goddamn sheriff, you spook motherfucker!” he cried, the
Colt on his leg offering silent validation. “And who're you? Was this your bright idea, to leave this piece of shit out in a blind curve?”

There came no response, neither from the tall bold one, nor from a string-bean teenager with nervous eyes pacing behind the car, nor from the cool woman with tight lips and a bandanna tied around her head, standing in the weeds. They were all young but wised up quick. They'd probably heard the stories of furious white men who should never be crossed alone on a country night.

“Don't you know what the shoulder of the road is for?” Shoals hollered. He put his finger in the big one's face. “Now get this goddamn wreck out of the road before I stomp a mudhole in your ass and walk it dry, boy!”

The kid off to the side ran into the woods. The big one turned to look and then shrugged. “Who gonna help push?”

The three of them tried to heave the car forward, but it wouldn't budge. “Put it in neutral, dipshit!” Shoals barked.

The woman hopped inside and put it in gear. At this point Shoals was so dosed he could have flipped the car into the ditch by himself. He helped push the whale out of the road and asked if they needed a tow. No one answered.

“Are you deaf
and
dumb?”

“Can't pay for no tow,” the man said, a bit too snippy for the deputy's taste.

“What's the matter, your welfare check hasn't come in?”

The man simmered.

“You could afford to put this stupid-ass spoiler on a goddamn Bonneville. That's a waste of good cash if you ask me.”

Everyone panted in the nervous dusk. A truck driving in the opposite direction barely slowed down.

“You live close?”

“Close enough.”

“Close enough to walk?”

No one dared give away the address.

“Wait here.”

Shoals stormed off, his arms churning, his scowl cutting deep into his face. “Your inspection sticker's out of date too!” he yelled, smacking the car hood. “And whose fucking dog is this?” Even the mutt, standing anonymously across the road, ducked his head in deference to the crazed deputy.

Shoals jumped in the Boss and threw a shower of gravel over the stranded motorists.

When he was back in range, he called a tow truck driver he knew out near the highway. The sheriff's department would be charged, but it was better than somebody getting killed. These country dopes didn't have the sense to operate precious machinery. The fact that they were ever granted licenses in the first place was proof of a broken bureaucracy.

Danny sped with sick urgency over the empty back road. He started to despair ever so slightly, having never spoken to citizens that way. Any other day he would have seen an opportunity to help, a lesson to impart instead of a fool to insult. He'd need several stiff drinks and some primo tail to come down from this angry high.

He turned onto the Tockawah Bottom road and let the engine unwind. Down near Mize's place he wondered if word of his indiscretion would ever reach Sandy. He could write her off if that happened. The night before she'd only offered him a taste, and now he wanted the whole pie. But she wouldn't come tumbling into bed with a back-alley perv. She was too smart and good. He needed her to reform him, if only just a little.

Across the river, a crowd had assembled off to the right in one of several acres of fields spread out and segmented by thin stands of river birch. He pulled over to the shoulder and got out, leaned against the warm car, and watched the scene in the bottoms below.

Two rented light towers, fed by a sputtering generator, stood at either end of the field, streaming down their halide glare on the track, which was a single muddy lane running the width of the field. Trucks were parked in semiorder along the turnrow, all the way to the road, and a ragtag rock band hacked out dubious classics while guys in jeans and tight white T-shirts clomped around
in the mud, their faces obscured by low caps. Some of them were draped with girls in snug jeans or hot pants, their wrists laden with bracelets and sloshing cups of amber desire.

Two large mud trucks were parked at one end of the track, waiting for sport. Men in coveralls fussed underneath, running from one end to the other, perched on step stools and peering under the hoods.