Soil (3 page)

Finally he began to wonder who the corpse might be. He chased his memory for clues—strangers he'd seen, fishermen from the bridge, clumsy hitchhikers who might have tumbled into the flooded field or fallen out of
boats on the river. But this was all pretense, for he knew who it surely must be. He did not know him exactly, but it was someone he could imagine.

He craned his neck to the road, wondering what the idiot in the camo truck had seen. Meanwhile the buzzard had returned to poke at the body. Jay opened his knapsack and gripped the .38. He considered firing on the bird, but a gunshot might create a memory for anyone within earshot, a memory that might turn up later as a courtroom distortion.

Jay recalled isolated incidents from the past few weeks that now seemed to coalesce in light of this discovery. The composite was unflattering to him. It might not hold up in a court of law. He ran scenarios in his head and defended himself as his own character witness, as if to convince someone, possibly himself, that he was not responsible for this death. He wanted to row out and view the corpse and its broken skull again, just for clarification, but not as long as there was a glimmer of daylight in the air. Instead he sat in the boat, hidden beneath the willow, stunned until dusk.

The falling light made lavender waves of the clouds. Imagined traffic rose and died in his head, replaced by the menace of crickets and bullfrogs. The buzzard had flown away engorged.

Finally Jay climbed out of the boat, scrambled through the brush and over the levee, up the gravel driveway to the house. He turned back to the road, fearful of passersby, and then to the lake, where the dead man was just another dark ripple on fallen limbs.

3

The house was still when night passed into the mudroom, making only the slightest creak through the storm door, brushing curtains in the kitchen and snuffing out the candle on the counter. Even the banjo and fiddle on the crank radio had wound down to nothing, giving stage to insects singing their strange unison.

Jay jerked awake on the couch, opening his eyes to a darkness greater than sleep. He took in short fish gulps of air and listened through the liquid black stillness. Night had beaten him here.

He jumped off the sofa, cursed himself for falling asleep and missing his twilight ritual of locking down the house. Out here in the wilderness, meeting the night required preparation. After weeks without electricity, he understood how the mind functioned differently in prolonged darkness, how it intensified and overreached. Lights and air-conditioning afforded comfort where it didn't belong, and comfort was a luxury, good for sleep but not for survival.

Most nights, lying in the dark, he ran through a list of hypothetical dangers and resolved how to confront them—burglars and scavengers coming through the front door, the back, the bedroom window; a tree crashing through the roof in a thunderstorm; a wild animal rooting under the carport or entering from the basement; fires, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes. The list grew exponentially more dangerous. But never this. This was an unexplored contingency.

Jay felt his way through the blind house, bumping into walls, knocking over books and papers stacked all along the baseboards. He found the kitchen
and relit the candle. It took a moment to recall what had happened, what was day and what was night. He paced the room, his pond socks leaving crisscrossed footprints on the muddy linoleum.

There were dozens of explanations for what he'd seen, but he could conjure none of them for the sheer fact of dwelling on it—grotesque and demoralized, all blistered and septic in the middle of his peaceful lake. And to think, it was out there right now—a dead man dumped in a mudhole!—a whole life just used up and tossed away, left for him to decide how to dispose of it.

His first instinct was to hide it. He'd rather be rid of it and back in his malaise. If he left it in the field, the buzzard would finish it. There would be more of them tomorrow, making their high beckoning whirls, alerting anyone within view of the county road, all the houses and camps for miles around. The law would be called. Questions would be asked, answers would be presumed. They'd all seen him hanging out on the lake in his boat. There was no denying that he knew what was out there in the mud. Why had he not reported it unless he hoped it wouldn't be found?

Jay held the candle and rifled through kitchen drawers until he found the cell phone. He punched it on, but the battery was dead. In the unlikely event that it worked and the account was active and a signal could be found in this remote outreach, who would he call who might believe him? It was too convenient to think he had done this. Never mind logic. The world was ruled by convenience and stupidity, after all. That's the way of it, generally, before everything goes to hell.

If not him, then who else had killed this man, this stranger trespassing on the Mize property? Suppose someone had murdered this man and done it right there in the field. The killer could be down there now, hiding in the brush or just outside the window.

Jay snatched up the candle and took it to the foyer and looked out the window through the front of the house and into the field, but he saw only his own reflection staring back. He blew out the flame and tried again, cupping his hands against the glass. Nothing could be seen through the impenetrable black.

The only sensible recourse was reporting the body to the deputy. He didn't have enough gas to make it in to Madrid, and so he'd have to hitchhike into town or else walk across the road and tell Hatcher. Maybe his neighbor would make the call for him. Hatcher would love nothing more than to be the grumbling father savior to Jay's distraught child. He unbolted the front door and stepped out onto the porch, looking both ways to make sure no one was crouched there, and then squinted to find a flicker of light through the trees, some confirmation that Hatcher was still awake. There was nothing tonight, no moon or stars, not a ripple of heat lightning or even a firefly's neon blink. He sniffed the air for a sign of the body, but there was only a fecund heat. Invisible trees loomed in the darkness, pulsing with the screams of insects. Their screeching felt like a whetstone falling over and over him.

He retreated indoors, secured the front entryway, and made his way through the darkness to his bedroom at the back of the house. He took a flashlight from the night table and switched it on and searched the drawer until he found the deputy's card.

Shoals. He'd been here just two weeks earlier in search of a missing person. Jay had promised to notify him if he came upon any clues. He'd be charged with obstruction of justice if they found the body before he reported it. Even if he called them right now, the chances of sliding by without suspicion were slim. Too much water under that bridge. Jay knew that once he entered their system, the gears would turn too fast against him to mount a fair defense.

He took a change of clothes, dark pants and a black turtleneck, and made his way to the front of the house, waving the flashlight down the cluttered hallway. He nudged his way past a mound of fly-swarmed garbage bags in the mudroom. The room stunk of rot and mildew and fertilizer, a little soap powder and peat moss. He cast light into corners and bins filled with cobwebs and dirt clods, across surfaces filled with sketches and scribblings and dog-eared books crammed with notes. He found a pair of old sneakers. Wadded up beneath the utility sink were his brown rubber wading pants. All the while his mind raced—was there a way to float it out of there, to send it back toward
the river and let it wash up on someone else? Could he shift the blame to the bridge fishers, the man in the camouflage truck, the speedboat teens?

He opened the back door and went outside to search for answers among the piles of junk under the carport—paper bags with screws and nails spilling out, milk crates filled with dusty parts, a disemboweled engine. There was Jacob's bicycle, the batting tee and baseball and ruined mitt, the unused rod and reel hanging overhead on nails, all the birthday and Christmas gifts he'd never taken the time to show his son how to use. He imagined Jacob in town, blue street light streaming through his bedroom window, curled up inside his sleeping bag over the bedspread, fast asleep with a dead man's gaping mouth. And Sandy alone, glistening eyes awake, waiting on the sun.

Surely they would believe Sandy, a fine upstanding citizen without a blemish on her record, her character above reproach. He couldn't explain why he had not bothered to get in touch with them. What sort of stubborn point was he trying to make? Simply put, he was a fool to have cut them loose and probably deserved this.

He switched off the flashlight and lay back against the concrete and listened to the insects in the trees and felt others light on his face, scrambling over his skin and through his hair, thinking,
This is what it feels like to be left for dead
.

4

The greatest inconvenience the flood exacted was washing out the old Bogue Hoka bridge, the only covered bridge in the county, down the levee road that ran in front of the Mize place. The road wound south out of Bayard County, crossed U.S. 7, and ran straight into downtown Flintlock in the neighboring county. A section of the levee road itself had been flooded for two weeks, and when the water receded, it left behind a mud-caked surface littered with tree limbs, black brush mounds, the carcasses of fish and birds and rodents. The county supervisors came out and shook their heads at the mess. They'd get to work on the bridge, but no one could say when. Many in the bottoms were dismayed that a generic concrete bridge might be rebuilt in its place instead of the rare old-fashioned covered bridge, which had become a point of pride in this rural community and the only thing worth photographing aside from tumbledown shacks or the odd frenzy of mating cranes.

There were other, smaller disasters, no less consequential to those who were affected. Past the bridge and up the road a ways toward Flintlock, water flooded the rectory of the Lord's Spiteful Loving Grace Church, ruining the new carpet it had taken three years of collections to afford. A few mobile homes capsized into a gulley with the half-buried dwellings from previous floods. Near the county line, mud and water got into the ground wells of the Pump 'n' Dump service station, spoiling the fuel and unleashing a tsunami of household garbage from the adjacent landfill.

Out on U.S. 7, uphill from the flood, after the rains had stopped and
in the wee hours of the second Tuesday in September, an eighteen-wheeler from a Delta catfish processor plowed into four walking horses that had escaped their waterlogged paddock. The rig was bent up pretty good and the trailer overturned, dumping fish into the road. The horses had exploded all over the highway, scraps of meat on the asphalt, in the grass and in the grille, hanging from the trees. It was a scene of carnage that witnesses struggled to describe. The photo on the front page of
The Flintlock Repositor
, depicting a close-up fish head casting one baleful eye on the soft-focus devastation behind it, would hang on local refrigerators for months as a reminder that God was watching.

Danny Shoals, the sheriff's nephew and most privileged deputy, arrived late to the scene, the cleanup well under way. The state highway department had taken control, instructing the county's road crews and trusties to sweep up fish heads and horse hooves with giant push brooms. Firefighters followed behind, hosing down the pink blacktop.

Shoals inspected the scene, cool but good-natured. A one-man special unit with an ear to the ground and a bulge for keeping the peace, he had the air of a professional observer, just smart enough to keep his mouth shut. Everyone thought he knew the score, and he was careful not to prove them wrong, offering only gracious one-liners, off-color banter, a furrow of easy concern. He had classic quarterback good looks, muddy whirlpool eyes, and a crooked upper lip that made him smile even in rare anger. Nothing about him spoke protocol, from the tanned suede vest over the tight black security T-shirt to the cowboy boots and Western-style leg holster. The patch of fuzz under his bottom lip was a special touch. He was the only deputy out of uniform, an unspoken perk reserved for sheriff's kin.

He naturally sought out the highest in command, in this instance a highway patrol lieutenant named Keesler. They shook hands, and Shoals exchanged nods with another pair of patrollers standing around. The lieutenant described the accident. He hadn't seen such gore since 'Nam. The trucker was shaken up pretty good but not seriously injured. The owner of the horses,
Rakestraw, was an enormous, boisterous man making plenty of demands and complaining about the government. He was highly pissed, not just about his horses but that he might be held accountable somehow.

Shoals propped his foot up on the bumper of a cruiser and gazed over the debris-strewn roadway. “I don't know, Lieutenant,” he puffed. “Something seems fishy about this to me.”

The officers laughed obligingly, though the joke had been made several times already. Such was the deputy's devil-may-give-a-shit appeal, even among superiors.

“You ask me, those horses saw their chance and took it,” Shoals said. “I wouldn't be surprised if that big boy Rakestraw was raising them for meat.”

Before they could laugh, one trooper called him out. “Hey, that's my wife's cousin!”

Shoals cut him a side grin. “Relax, F-Troop, he's a buddy of mine too. I'm just messing.”

Keesler reassured Shoals that it was all paperwork now, which satisfied the deputy. He volunteered to sink back into the county. Disasters like this had a tendency to ripple in strange directions.

While the human costs of this incident were minimal, the accident had caused major traffic snares. Since the Bogue Hoka bridge was down, the most sensible detour around the collision was cut off. Traffic had been rerouted way the hell out—back west and then north along the reservoir highway, east over several hill roads, at least one of them a gravel private road straddling counties, down through Silage Town, and over several more winding county roads back to the highway, some twenty miles total distance. There weren't even enough Detour signs in the district to mount an informed route. Most drivers gave up and returned from whence they came.

Shoals had some business down the levee road and was vexed that his route had been cut off by the washed-out bridge. He yearned to give someone hell over this inconvenience and found one of the county road foremen sitting on the back of a pickup eating a sandwich and watching the scene.

“Look out now, is that a fish-head po'boy?” Shoals asked the foreman. “You better have paid for that.”

“Finders keepers,” the man mumbled.

“Y'all gonna start repairing that bridge after your dinner there?”

The man chewed awhile, wiped his mouth, and replied, “Naw.”

“What's the holdup?”

“Waiting for state emergency funds. Could be spring before we even get started.”

“Spring!” the deputy cried. “Well shit, can I get across?”

“Not unless you got a boat.”

“You got a ladder I can use?”

“Tell you what, Danny,” the foreman replied, “I'll have some of my guys bring a load of dirt down there and you can try and jump it in that pretty car of yours.”

“Hell, don't bother,” said Shoals. “It would probably be Christmas before you could get a requisition for shovels.”

The deputy sauntered back to his vehicle. Due to a lack of squad cars, Shoals had convinced his uncle to let him drive his unmarked 1970 Mustang Boss 302, a real conversation piece in its original Grabber Blue. It was known all over the county by its novelty tag, which read
SUGAR
. Wherever he pulled up in that sweet-ass ride he earned instant respect and authority. A lap around the block with a reluctant witness always loosened the tongue. It teased the hotheads out into the open, made ne'er-do-wells confess if only for a front-seat ride to the station. And with its horse team under the hood and his dashboard beacon, no one in the county dared outrun him.

Yearning now for a long, winding detour, Shoals quickened his pace until he passed something shiny in the tall grass. He doubled back and crouched on the roadside. “Be damn,” he said, plucking up a heavy iron piece in the weeds. One of the smashed horses must have thrown a shoe. He wiped a speck of blood off and tucked it in his back pocket, a bit of superfluous luck, and then carried forth toward his own waiting steed.

The Mustang roared to life like a beast lying long dormant, hibernating
in its own musk. It never failed to charge him like a squirt of gasoline in the heart. He grabbed the stick and threw it down, left a few marks for the county stripes to clean. No detour too far for a little plainclothes mischief.

Shoals made the most of his journey around the reservoir and down the back slope into Tockawah Bottom, gliding through curves and throttling the stretches, whipping around slow-moving vehicles and honking at penned-up cows grazing close to the road. By the time he came to the Mize place, he was a little giddy. He loved working the sticks and had been looking forward to making this particular civilian squirm.

He stopped at the foot of the driveway. Water from the nearby river had flooded the adjacent field and come up nearly even with the road. The last thing he wanted was to slide the Boss ass-down in a stagnant lake, at the mercy of an angry landowner and potential adversary. He eased his ride up the gravel drive, noting the house on the hill and the little yard with its high weeds and sticky mane of shrubs, the useless implements scattered along the side yard.

As he crested the drive, Shoals was startled by a long and unkempt piece of white trash lurching out from beneath the carport. The subject wore a gas mask, baggy shorts, and a Bermuda shirt. He looked like a tourist on some toxic adventure vacation package. Shoals stopped and let the Mustang rumble in the driveway. They each stared the other down, one waiting for the next to make his move. The subject lowered his mask to reveal a man in his thirties, possibly forties, with a scruffy beard and hard jittery eyes.

Shoals cut the engine. He didn't want to make a show of whipping his piece out from the glove box, but something told him to get strapped. Out here in the bottoms, any country boy in a gas mask was likely cooking meth and possibly high on it. He tucked a canister of pepper spray into his rear waistband and stepped out of the Boss.

“What's the emergency, buddy?” cried Shoals, drumming up swagger and friendly bombast.

“What emergency?” the man stammered.

“That's what
I'm
asking,” Shoals replied. He sniffed the air for the tang of certain chemicals, scanned the yard for a shed or trailer that might serve as a cookhouse. There was an aluminum shed set thirty yards back from the house, but it was crammed full of junk, no apparent ventilation. “I saw you in that gas mask there and thought we might have a toxic event on our hands.”

“Who are you?”

Shoals flashed his shield. “Deputy Danny Shoals. Detective for the county, sir. And you?”

The subject stopped to consider. Shoals used the opportunity to walk wide of him, trying to steal a view into the backyard.

“I didn't report anything,” the subject said.

“Well that's fine,” said Shoals, making a note of the dozen or more blue barrels scattered in the backyard. “Just a friendly visit. What's your name, friend?”

“Jay Mize,” he replied. He was adamant and possessive, sober all of a sudden. “Did someone call me in or something?”

“Naw,” Shoals said. “What for?”

“I don't know. Just not accustomed to cops coming around.” He pulled the mask from around his neck and tossed it into a nearby cardboard box filled with bottles of water and boxes of ammunition. “Thought my car tag might be out of date or something.”

Shoals laughed good-naturedly while he surveyed. “Mize, you say? I know that name.”

Mize shrugged and shifted uncomfortably.

The deputy asked of his origins, and Mize said he came from Memphis, that he'd married after school and recently moved to the country.

“Where's the wife?”

“Temporarily separated.”

The deputy chewed on this a moment.

“You any kin to Mitchell, by chance?”

Mize went cold and tense. “Does this have something to do with him?”

Shoals smirked. “Naw, I was just curious if you knew him.”

“Yeah. He was my granddad.”

“Really?” The deputy was impressed.

“He's dead,” said Mize.

“Well, yeah, of course. I know Mitchell Mize.”

“That's funny, because I never did.”

“Well, not personally.”

“A lot of folks
think
they know about Mitchell Mize,” the subject replied, glowering, but the deputy didn't flinch.

“I guess then you know he was a pretty famous fella,” said Shoals.

“Is there something I can help you with, Officer?”

“Deputy,” the deputy assured him. “Sure, sure. I don't want to take up too much of your time, but I
am
on official business. You'll have to forgive me for getting a tad starstruck.”

Mize betrayed nothing, but Shoals knew he'd gotten under his skin. “What is it you do, if you don't mind me asking?” the deputy asked.

“Organic farming,” Mize replied.

“Organic farming. Now what's that exactly?” Shoals was messing with him a bit. You always wanted the subject to believe he had the upper hand, an old trick he'd learned from Andy Griffith.

“It's farming without pesticides or chemical fertilizer.”

“So what's in them barrels back there?”

Mize turned to look. “Rain. I'm collecting it.”

“I can see that. All out front too.”

Mize snickered, a little condescending snort. “Yep, whole crop's lost this year. I'm pretty well pissed about it.”

The deputy nodded and gave a half-nod back to the fields. “I imagine so. You didn't bargain for this, I'm sure.”

“What do you need, Deputy?”

“Well, you'll be interested to know, I'm hunting a man who disappeared around here two, three weeks ago. You seen anybody fishy around here?”

Mize must have misheard. He became excited. “Hell yeah, everybody out here. They fish off these bridges every evening, all day on the weekends.
I liked to have hit one last week. He ran out in front of my truck. They're all the time just standing out in the road.”

Shoals nodded, considered the complaint. “Blacks?”

“Pardon?”

“Are they blacks? Whites?” the deputy clarified. He couldn't decide if the guy was slow. Probably just stoned. He seemed put off by the question.

“They're both,” Mize replied with a touch of righteous indignation.