Soil (25 page)

“Dad!” Jacob shouted. He stood up as if to dive in after it. Tears welled in his eyes and his face crinkled in pain. “Why did you do that?”

“I'm sorry, man.” He put an arm around Jacob. “I'll get you another one. A better one.”

“But I loved that knife,” the boy blubbered, shoving out of his dad's embrace. “I never had one before.”

“Look, he's a bad guy, okay? It's not good to keep things that belong to bad guys.”

The lost knife cast a pall over the rest of the afternoon. Jay let Jacob fish off his cane pole, but their conversation was sunk. The boy pouted awhile and regained his enthusiasm only after landing his first fish, another crappie, and later a nice striped bass to end the excursion.

As a treat, and to make up for the lost knife, Jay took Jacob to the muddy wallow where he'd been making regular visits to scrub down. He encouraged the boy to take off his clothes and flop around in the mud, but Jacob was hesitant, as if it were a trick. Jay doffed his shorts and boots, pulled off his shirt, and launched himself into the pit with boyish glee. Jacob followed with caution, and soon they were wrestling and leaping, yelling and laughing, until the sun began to dive behind the trees and take its precious light. They emerged from the hole encrusted in mud, only their eyeballs and teeth shining white.

They walked home caked in river mud and enjoyed the sensation of it drying and hardening on them like a second layer of skin. Jay showed Jacob how to make white cracks appear by flexing his muscles.

“You look like you're made of chocolate, kid,” Jay said. “I'm getting kind of hungry!” He chased the giggling boy up to the house, where he'd repaired the cistern and rigged a gravity-fed shower with a tank of rainwater attached to it. They stood under it and braced themselves and let the bitter cold water run the mud off.

They wrapped in towels and returned to the campsite, where Jay built a fire. They sat on logs and warmed up in the gray dusk, listening to the tranquil rhythm of insects in the trees. Jay demonstrated how to clean the fish by flaking off the scales and cutting out the guts with a kitchen knife. “See, you can carve out the butt when you catch it yourself,” said Jay, making a V-shaped incision in one of the fish bellies and slicing off the offending orifice.

When the fire died down, he set the grilling grate low over the coals, greased a small cast-iron pan with shortening and fried the fish one by one. He showed the boy how to eat around the bone and how to get the tiny morsel of meat out of the head and how to eat the crunchy skin like a potato chip, not wasting a bit. They made up stories by the fire and built s'mores with the last of the chocolate, and as they had the night before, they crawled into the tent and under the blankets.

They both lay there awake for a while, their minds tumbling through the events of the day. Jay could tell the boy was awake, probably thinking about the knife. He couldn't bring himself to mention it or to justify his behavior. He wanted to tell Jacob everything, but a young and innocent boy didn't deserve to know such horrible secrets. Still, if things unraveled and the law came down on him, he would want his son to know the truth, that he'd done nothing wrong, that he was not a murderer.

“Jacob,” Jay whispered. He repeated it louder. His son was already asleep. Jay rubbed the boy's head, his hand following the contours of bone. He felt the tiny jaw and traced its juncture, remembered how the mandible is hinged around by the ear, and how the spine fits into the base of the skull. He knew these things intimately now. He even knew what force is required to wrench them apart.

Jay fell asleep to the mourning of doves in the grass and slept solidly most of the night. He woke first, in the steely hue of an undeclared dawn, to the sound of footsteps around the campfire. He opened his eyes and lay still, trying to rationalize the noise. Maybe a bird hopping in the grass, a squirrel, at worst a fox. But the steps moved with heft and slinking certainty, and he knew it was someone who'd stumbled upon them and lacked the sense to leave. His
heart tripped into a quick rhythm, and he reached into his pack for the pistol. He collected himself, then sat up with calm assurance, unzipped the flap, and slipped out to confront the visitor.

The buzzard stood over the pile of fish bones. They acknowledged each other gravely. Jay couldn't shoot it now. The noise would terrify Jacob. He stepped toward the bird, but it didn't flinch. He took another step, then another, and only then did the buzzard hop back a foot. They played this game, one step forward, one step back, until they'd moved away from the camp. Finally the bird stopped, and Jay stamped to chase it off.

It hissed.

“Fuck you,” he hissed back.

The bird shuddered and gagged and hacked up a wretched-smelling gray clod that splattered against Jay's bare feet. He rubbed his toes in the grass and drew his arm over his face to cover the devastating smell. The buzzard seemed to cackle at him, its mouth propped open in a gruesome taunt. He'd never hated an animal this much. He lunged for it, and the bird hopped backward, flapping its wings to take flight, but it was too slow. Jay had it in his grip and wrestled it to the ground, surprised to find the filthy thing in his grasp. It jerked and moaned. Jay bashed its head repeatedly with the butt of the pistol, punched it flat until the bird flopped over limp in the grass.

He might have kept on killing it had he not been afraid of waking Jacob. He looked back and could just make out the inanimate mound inside the tent. He knelt down and studied the bird. The beak was cracked, and its eyes were missing, bashed inside its skull, which leaked red and creamy white. The mushy head didn't look much different than it had alive, a disgusting fleshy red wad. He pulled it by its tail feathers over a ridge and hurled it into some brush. One more living witness gone.

34

Shoals had a sixth sense for when wives were home alone. No husbands, no children, no encumbrances. It was as if he were mystically attuned to the quiet longing that pulsed from their eager dwellings.

He felt it as he made the park loop near Sandy's house late Friday afternoon. He kept a block out of sight to remain inconspicuous. If there was a drawback to the Boss, and he would never admit to such a thing, it was that it made a lousy undercover car. There would be no hanging out in the parking lot behind the baseball field watching for shadows in the window. Not today, not ever again. And certainly there would be no peeping, even though he detected, through the small opaque square at the back of the house, the softest dancing orange light that generally heralded a candlelit bubble bath. No, if he was going to see her in all of her bare glory, it would be earned.

Surely he had earned it. His performance in the basement had to have piqued her interest. She'd been shy, waiting for the hanging bulb to go out before dropping her pj's below her knees, letting him explore, but only down there, with his hands and face. He was anxious to show her what other, larger-­bore apparatus he had in his tool kit. He had bided his time, been a patient gentleman, had fucked up and done penance. Now it was time to prove that he was a good and trustworthy man. No more prowling around, no more hitting every little kitten that raised her tail for him. He'd found the right one, and she was worth playing by the rules.

As for her husband, it was obvious that Sandy was done with him. After all, who did she call when she needed a man to rush over in the night?

He found the courage to pull right up in front of the apartment. He walked to the front door with a confident swagger, rang the bell, knocked on the door. He waited. Her Maxima was there, she had to be home. He regretted not swinging by his mother's house and plucking a bouquet of flowers, something rare and exotic, aphrodisiacal.

He sat on the front stoop and considered what he might say. How would he explain this visit? He'd always just happened by or had a delivery to make or been invited to exterminate some leathery rapscallion. He could be sexy forward, tell her he'd come to finish the basement job. Or perhaps it was time to come clean, to let her know how he really felt about her. She made him feel like becoming a new man.

He waited five minutes or so before Sandy opened the door, her robe pulled tight. He was shocked by her appearance. What had happened to the knockout MILF he used to know? She looked like a battered housewife with her puffy eyes and wrecked hair.

“Hey, girl,” Shoals said, standing up and brushing off his jeans. “Wow, you cut all your hair off.”

She said nothing, just stared at him through the storm door.

“I knocked and didn't get an answer. Figured you were taking a bath or something so I thought I'd wait here.”

“Were you peeping in the window, is that how you decided I was in the bath?”

Shoals hung his head.

“Did you get a good look? Did you videotape me? Are you going to post it online?”

“I guess you heard the ugly rumors about me,” Shoals said. “You can't imagine what I've been going through this week.”

“What
you've
been going through?” She was astounded, her mouth agape. “What about Rochelle? You threatened to post a video of that innocent woman—naked!—online. She has children! She's done nothing to you!”

Oh, she did something
, he wanted to say.
She did something every day
when she dressed that way and shook her ass just so.
He didn't lay a hand on her, just met her halfway. Why put it out there if she wasn't trying to lure?

“And do you have a tape of me too?” She looked around for eavesdroppers. “In the basement?”

“No!” he said. “It was so dark I barely saw anything myself.”

“So you would have, then, if the conditions had been suitable?”

“No, Sandy! I'm not that kinda guy.”

“You're no kind of guy, you're a child! Worse than that, because a child doesn't know any better. You are an emotionally stunted bully. What happened to you? Did something happen when you were fifteen that kept you from developing like a normally mature human being?”

“Come on, now . . .”

“It's like you're stuck in high school with your ridiculous car and haircut and clothes.” She was really having a time tearing into him like this. Her face twisted into painful contortions with every aspersion. “Your whole persona is an embarrassment. I wonder if you have one genuine bone in your body.”

His eyebrows raised and he inhaled to respond but thought wiser and swallowed his remark. There was nothing to say. He was indefensible.

“What a letch! The way you treat women is abhorrent, it's criminal! All to convince yourself that you're not a loser, but it's an illusion! You
are
a loser, Danny, you're a sad cliché. You are the saddest thing I know. There is no way in hell I would spend another moment alone with you. In fact, if you don't leave right now, I'm calling the police.”

The door slammed. He looked around to make sure there were no observers, and then he slunk back to the Boss, climbed in, and howled away. It wasn't far to the country. He wanted to get as far away as possible.

Weeks and weeks of careful work had blown up in his face. It was doubtful there was anything left to salvage. He thought of a wise old maxim—there's a thin line between love and hate. And then he thought how he'd like to drink an entire bottle of whiskey, so he whipped the car around in a
treacherous about-face and proceeded back to a little country bar hugging the city outskirts, an anonymous place to get shitfaced.

At the bar he demanded a tall glass of Dickel and sloshed it down. The room was too small, the women a little too bovine with their inbred beaus. The back porch was noisy with boisterous floozies and knuckleheads out for an early happy hour.

“Why don't you wrap that bottle up and let me take it to go,” Shoals told the bartender.

“That aint strictly legal, friend,” he replied, to which Shoals threw his badge down on the bar.

Two minutes later he was back in the Boss, rocketing ninety and sucking back a hot swig, managing the curves with one hand. The flesh-colored horizon vied for his attention, split in half by a mound of purple clouds. The sun was tucked underneath, and he just wanted to make it home in time to watch the lake swallow it up.

He lived out by the reservoir, a little A-frame cabin with a loft bedroom and a screened-in back deck. It was the most perfect place in the world to him, out on the far edge of the county, a place where he could hide out and where company felt they could be entertained discreetly.

He made it home as the sun was bidding the day farewell. He had half a bottle and plenty of heartache to unload. As he stopped to unlock the front door, he noticed a freshly pounded fist hole through the screen door. His neighbor, a flagrantly queer teenager, was sneaking a smoke out in the bushes and stuck his face through the hedge.

“Hey, Danny,” he called.

“What is it, Kelvin?” Shoals asked, perturbed.

“There was a cop here looking for you earlier.”

“Who was it?”

“Lieutenant Spitzer?”

“Spiller?”

“That's it!”

“Shit.”

Shoals went inside and locked the door. Suzie-Q was all smiles, tail wagging and legs galloping. At least someone was happy to see him. He turned the lights on and checked the messages. His mother had called, sounding foggy and distant. They'd been playing phone tag for a day or so. He didn't bother making a drink, just took it down in sober gulps from the bottle. It bothered him that Spiller had been here. The guy must be a real maniac.

He went out back to sit on the porch and watch the sun. He had a perfect view of the horizon and liked to prop his feet up on the coffee table, watch the sun fall between his legs like a starburst blonde. But it was gone already, somebody else's tonight.

He went into the yard for a whiz and watched the lavender sky glaze down over the treetops. “Screw this!” he said and took his bottle and got in the car and sped back to town.

He walked into the city police office and yelled, “I'm here to see Dun Spiller! I understand he's looking for me! Well, here I am—it's Danny fucking Shoals!”

Baby George appeared from one of the offices and came over to intercept Shoals. “Dude, what are you doing?” he said, clasping his old friend by the shoulder. “You been drinking a bit, buddy?”

“Naw,” said Shoals.

“Whatever's going on between y'all is a personal matter. Don't bring that shit up in here, please.”

“What's a matter with you, Baby?” cried Shoals. He was getting slurry. “You on Dun's side now, I guess. City boy solid, is that it?”

“Take it easy, bro,” said George. “You want some coffee?”

“Hell no, I just want to talk to Dun. He's griping my ass, leaving messages all over creation. I'd like to fix this one way or another.”

“Well, I'd watch my step if I were you,” said George. “He's a big ole boy.”

“What're you saying?”

“I'm saying if I was you, I'd get myself sober before I tangled with him.”

Shoals stopped and looked around. Heads were peering out of offices, cops pretending to be on phones watching it unfold. What a disgrace. He
would never work the city force. They were all a bunch of pencil pushers and citation writers. There was nothing he could say they didn't already hate themselves for, so he turned to stagger back out to his car when George called out, “Danny.”

Shoals turned back and George stepped to him, leaned in close like he was giving advice. He looked around to make sure none of the others were listening. He whispered. “Are they real?”

“Shit yeah they're real!” Shoals cried. “And you can tell the rest of the boys she's wild down below. Looked like she was riding a mink!”

He regretted giving that last bit away. Not one among them deserved to know it. He was just trying to hurt Dun. He felt like he needed to hurt Rochelle, and Sandy too. He wanted to hurt his mother and Uncle Bud, anyone who ever doubted him. He wanted to show Big Jack he had a swinging prick on him too, that he could do anything he damn well dared.

He shot off into the night like a loose bottle rocket, content to crash wherever his powder ran out.