Soil

  “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 seconds 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.

  20

  Sandy deposited Jacob at the Methodist Sunday school and told him she’d be back in an hour to attend church with him. First she planned to drop by the hospital. She believed her father took strength from her company, and in turn, she needed to borrow his courage to make her long-delayed return to Christian fellowship.

  As she pulled out of the circular drive, Sandy’s high school friend Tina Crump approached carrying a baby. Her slab of a husband, Dennis, waddled behind with two more children in hand.

  Sandy rolled down the window to say hello.

  “You doing a little drop and dash?” asked Tina, affecting a cute country lilt.

  “You caught me.”

  “What’s a matter, you too good for us?”

  The accusation stung a little, even though it was meant as a joke. Sandy thought Tina’s pious eyes and the high false register of her voice told the truth.

  “I’m actually on my way to the hospital. My father’s in a coma.”

  “Oh my goodness,” said Tina, clutching her baby. She softened and reached out to stroke Sandy’s arm. “Is he gonna be all right?”

  “We don’t know.”

  A look like genuine anguish came over Tina’s face. The red-faced baby in her arms looked up, its bonnet-swathed head teetering on its shoulders. “You know I’m just messing with you about skipping church, Sandy.”

  “Of course. I was actually planning to come back for worship.”

  “Do, Sandy. You can sit with us, and we’ll all pray for your daddy. I’ll get Brother Wiles to say a prayer with the congregation.”

  Sandy thanked her and waved good-bye and then whipped out of the parking lot toward the hospital. She couldn’t imagine going back to sit with Tina and her family and wait for the reverend to pray for the damaged Messlers and Mizes. She could see herself after the service, besieged by all manner of well-wishers with their questions and blessings and guilt-inducing blather. They weren’t bad people, they just wanted her to be happy and exactly like them.

  Why was it so awkward with Tina? Sandy still loved and felt indebted to her and all the other girls—Mamie, Hallie, Mary Laurel—but they’d lost everything they ever had in common. When she moved to Madrid after her dad married Miss Sue and uprooted her suddenly, so soon after her mother’s passing, those girls had welcomed her right into the fold. Throughout high school the girls had all stayed active together in the youth ministry, the choir, and volunteer work. Sandy still had fond memories of supervised sleepovers with boys in the church rec center on weekends and trips to Memphis for bowling, skating, and Christian rock concerts. She’d made a pledge to Christ before the entire congregation at seventeen and believed the rest of her life was right here among them.

  But during college she drifted, her priorities migrated toward new friends and different ideas, to road trips and hangovers and late-sleeping Sundays. Then came Jay, who’d been overchurched in his youth. To him it was all a country club scene. The Christians missed the point of a good history lesson and values system by dressing everything up in such ritual and hokum, he believed. He despised their blind faith. Salvation was something you had to work for, a personal struggle, not potluck dinners and musicals and fund-­raising for new church buildings.

  “I can’t believe you’re dating an atheist,” one of her friends told her, and aside from Miss Sue’s funeral, that was the last time she’d attended church. Nevertheless, she believed a child should have a spiritual foundation, and she would risk being seen as a groveling sinner if it would help Jacob find peace.

  Her father tried occasionally to entice her back to church, but she preferred talking matters of the spirit with him one-on-one. Every tragedy that befell him seemed to strengthen his faith. He believed there was a well of goodness in the universe, and our journey in life was to find it. It was hardest to find on earth but would get progressively easier, and the key was love. “It’s not about who you are or how you were made, but what you do,” he told her. “Help people, be kind, and peace will come, I swear it.”

  She believed he was a saint but doubted it was so simple. She was a nice enough person, and it had brought her no closer to peace. In fact, she seemed as far adrift from peace as she’d ever been in her life. And now the thought of losing him, even of seeing him cling to life in that sterile hospital room, was a prospect worse than walking into chapel and being deemed an apostate by all the faces from her former life.

  Sandy made a detour to check on his house, located in a wooded neighborhood tucked away in a quiet, older part of town. She parked in the driveway and gathered the mail accumulating in the box by the front door. Inside the rooms were cold, but it smelled like home. The cat came up squalling for food and rubbing off hair on the hem of her black skirt. She fetched the bag of rust-colored chow from the pantry, poured a panful,
and drew a bowl of water from the faucet. She dumped the litter box in a garbage bag with old food from the fridge and then took the trash to the curb and came back inside to tidy up.

  She moved quickly from room to room, straightening and dusting as she went, becoming intimate again with her teenage home. Miss Sue had won it in a divorce settlement from her previous marriage. It was low and sprawling, surrounded by trees and fortified on all sides with patios and decks and lounge areas. Sandy had considered it very posh during her adolescence, her own bedroom set off in a separate wing where she lived until her sophomore year of college. The room still held mementos of her youth, her corkboard of photos with friends she never spoke to anymore, the shelf of devotional books and chaste romance novels, her framed academic honors and church citations.

  She walked into the spacious den, swiping a dustrag across bookshelves laden with mystery novels and science texts and framed photographs charting their cobbled-together lives. It occurred to her that everyone was gone. Here was a photo of Sandy at six, sitting beside her mother, the quiet beauty. People told them they looked so much alike, but she couldn’t discern the resemblance. There was a multiframe display from her father’s wedding with Miss Sue, a casual backyard affair in autumn. Sandy was among the bridesmaids, a gawky girl of thirteen. Her mother would never have dressed her in that terrible paisley. Would she have been disappointed that her husband had remarried so soon? Sandy often wondered if he’d been cheating with Miss Sue even while her mother disappeared into the dementia that preceded her fatal stroke.

  There was a lovely shot of Miss Sue, herself gone almost two years now following a quick and difficult bout with lung cancer. She had the hard look of a 1930s movie star and lived by a two-drink, two-pack philosophy, always quick-witted and edgy, easy with the off-color remarks. She hadn’t a clue what to do for a girl except offer kindness and honest advice when solicited. Her previous husband still lived in Madrid, and together they had a son, Loren, a bachelor who had moved east. Miss Sue would always excuse her son, saying, “He just hasn’t found the right woman,” though now Sandy understood what that meant and why he rarely called or visited.