Soil

  He couldn’t imagine anything left to cover, only nature’s quiet rendering to finish his deeds. But there was still the nagging sense of something undone. His mind retraced the events of the last two weeks, constantly accounting for what had set them in motion—Who was this man? Why did he die? How did he end up here on my property?

  Suddenly Chipper bayed and shot up the hill and over the yard in a sustained howl. Jay jerked around and just noticed the car with flashing yellow lights pull to the top of the drive and disappear behind the house. He spread flat across the ground, his heart slamming against the wet earth. He heard two distinct car horn blasts, followed soon by three more, along with the continued yowling.

  Jay stood and darted up the hill toward the house, coming around the far side with his pistol ready. He scaled the porch and peered around the corner. Whose battered maroon hatchback was this? It announced itself with another series of aggravated honks. Chipper had gone quiet, nowhere to be seen. Jay slipped up behind the driver’s side with the pistol braced, but there was no one at the wheel.

  “Where the hell have you been?” called someone from the passenger seat. It was Purnell, the rural mail carrier. “Yours aint the only certified letter I still got to deliver.”

  Jay tucked the gun away and leaned in the open driver’s-side window. The portly mailman drove from the passenger seat, giving him convenient reach to the roadside mailboxes. In uniform shorts, his wide hairy leg was draped over the gearshift to operate the brakes and gas. A bucket of mail and catalogs rode in the driver’s seat, and at his feet a box of fried chicken. Chipper was up on all fours, licking the mailman’s slick fingers.

  “Here,” growled Purnell, a nub of cold cigar clenched in his teeth and a letter in his hand. “Need you to sign for that.”

  Jay took the grease-stained letter. It was from Sandy, postmarked yesterday. He scrawled an alias on Purnell’s form and turned away.

  “Hold on now, hold on,” Purnell called. “Don’t forget your chicken papers. Five-dollar liver and thigh dinner all week at Flash-in-the-Pans. Take your dog along.”

  Jay snatched a sheath of circulars and advertisements and watched Purnell perform a treacherous speeding reverse all the way down the driveway. He sat down on the Bronco bumper and opened the letter, scared of what he might find inside. It wasn’t like Sandy to send something this official.

  Dear Jay,

  Sorry I couldn’t call you or come to see you in person, but my dad is seriously ill. The doctors believe he’s contracted West Nile, and they are not sure at all about his chances. He’s in a coma. They’re concerned about his mind if he comes back at all. Memory and vision, even speech, are vulnerable as the fever persists. He can’t even get out of the bed to visit the bathroom.

  It’s a serious time, as you can imagine, and I need your help with Jacob. His fall break starts next Thursday, and he’ll be out of school until the following Monday. I have to be in meetings, and I don’t have anyone to watch him while I’m at work. I’ll have to be with my dad the rest of the time. Will you pick him up from school Wednesday at 3:00 and keep him with you until the following Sunday afternoon? I can drop by to get him then.

  I know it’s hard for you right now, but I have nowhere else to turn. The unknown is so terrifying. I’m very scared and out of options.

  Sincerely,

  Sandy

  He read the letter again, folded the yellow paper, returned it to the envelope, and stuffed it in his pocket.

  He was fairly stunned by this announcement. The professor in a coma? Was there a West Nile outbreak he hadn’t heard about, an epidemic brought on by the flood? He’d need to score plenty of mosquito repellent in town if the stocks hadn’t already been raided. And that was just the first of the provisions he’d have to buy. There was nothing to eat in the house, no heat. The nights were getting cooler. No lights or TV. And it would cost money to get Jacob’s room set up. The bed was gone, no dresser or playthings.

  Of course, his first instinct was to see Sandy’s dad about the money, but obviously that was off the table. Jay had always found him a quiet supporter of their endeavors, gracious with advice, easy with charity. They’d gone to him a time or two for a financial boost, and he’d always given it gladly, explaining to them why he was giving it and how it should be spent without scolding and never checking up on his investment. In hindsight, he should have gone straight to Sandy’s father during the summer to seek arbitration in their marital battle. He wouldn’t have chosen sides, only sat them both down and sorted their differences, made them roll it back and forth themselves until they’d settled it. It would be a terrible blow to lose him, especially for Sandy.

  But then, Jay considered, maybe this was his answered prayer. Sandy needed him. He was no longer a total waste and a burden. She’d want him back in the fold.

  If only he’d received this letter last week, he could have worked a deal with the raceway guys. If only he hadn’t dismantled the four-wheeler, he might have scored a few hundred bucks selling that. Now what?

  He resolved not to ask Sandy for money. She was under too much stress to stop and consider a grant request. It was enough that she’d made this overture. He could go into town and sit with Jacob at their shitty little rental. They could come up with plenty of things to do. He would watch the boy as long as she needed and would come back to the farm every night if she’d float him some more gas money. But maybe she would need him to stay. A shoulder to cry on, a bedmate after sleeping alone for so long. People need each other for electricity in the night.

  Perhaps these terrible circumstances were paving the way for a great reconciliation. Maybe the professor, in his usual selfless way, was giving Jay an opportunity to prove his readiness to be a husband and father again. He’d clean up and go to them, take a break from this country panic.

  He went inside and studied himself in the bathroom mirror. Looking into his sunken eyes was like staring at a stranger, the sallow face with cheekbones jutting out, thin lips, the wiry and filthy beard and bird’s-nest hair, sick and crazed. Would Jacob recognize him?

  He toted in water from the rain barrels to bathe, brought a jug in for shaving, and decided how to fix his appearance. There was not only the boy to consider when going into town. There was also the legion of security cameras and nosy watchers. A culture of surveillance thrived in town, and he wasn’t keen on playing into their hands. He snipped down his hair and beard, left himself a big mustache and chin scruff, and rummaged through cabinets to find a bottle of white novelty hair dye left over from Halloween. He sprayed it thick into his hair and goatee, aging himself thirty years.

  He brushed his teeth and found a clean white collar shirt and a pair of ill-fitting khakis he hadn’t worn in years, an old pair of wraparound aviator shades. He put on his hat and looked like a different fellow, someone clean and fresh if still not altogether sane.

  At last he retrieved the twenty-dollar bill Sandy had given him, wedged between two books on the hallway shelf, and the shotgun and .22 rifle, which he stashed in the backseat of the Bronco. The little .38 found a comfortable home in the small of his back. He locked the house door and opened the truck to let Chipper ride.

  The Bronco gave him a fit to start, but it finally came alive and bellowed. He eased out from the carport and pointed toward town for the first time in months. He said good-bye to the ghosts. He was going to his family now.

  22

  Shoals dropped by several times a week to visit his mama. Her house was nestled in the pines, the property butting up to state forestry land. It was an old county neighborhood that had been annexed and swallowed up by Madrid proper years ago. It was about as far removed and quiet as you could get and still pay city taxes.

  Often he stopped in on his way home, a quick visit between work and evening pursuits. Sometimes he stayed and ate dinner with her or sat out back in the screened-in garden and had a drink while listening t
o her unbottled thoughts. She was a city girl gone country and didn’t like to leave home except to the grocery and liquor stores, the beauty salon on Friday and church on Sunday.

  The house was an expression of her personality, the walls and shelves covered in folk art and magazine clippings and old photos from a lost carefree world. She listened to obscure folk rock and country on the stereo, speakers wired and stretched throughout the house. She couldn’t stand darkness. Candles burned in every room, so many he often feared she would burn the place down. They also helped to cover the aroma of exotic boas she kept in aquariums and lizards that were allowed to roam. It was nothing to have to move an iguana from an easy chair before sitting down.

  She dressed in cutoff blue-jean shorts and paint-splattered T-shirts under sheer robes and kimonos, wore tinted glasses, and smoked long cigarettes. Her skin was pale as cream, her hair dirty blond and wild. She moved with casual grace. It was a great tragedy to the bachelors of Bayard County that the lovely widow Shoals didn’t get out and mix with the populace. In a sense she had never reappeared from mourning, was closed for business except to her son, who enjoyed the special access he had to the strange and lovely recluse with her bevy of reptiles.

  He’d come to her today with a simple request—would she make him one of her miraculous lemon pound cakes? He knew she would do anything for him, but it was not a quick process. The eggs would have to rise to room temperature and the butter would have to soften. Perfection was slow and earned.

  They sat in the kitchen and drank iced tea and carried on easy banter while they waited. He learned about the goings-on of his cousins and aunts and uncles, information she gathered daily by phone. Then he related the more benign aspects of his work. He was careful to gloss over the seedier details. Even talk of a domestic disturbance or a bar fight made her throw up her hands and cringe. A little gossip was all she needed, just to feel like she wasn’t missing anything being holed up in her house.

  During their conversation, Shoals inquired about a rotten smell proclaiming itself through the dense perfume of candles.

  “I fear one of the dragons crawled behind that bookcase in the den and expired, dear,” she said in her smoky voice. “I would’ve moved it earlier but then I’d just end up toppling the whole thing.”

  It was an enormous shelf that filled most of the wall. Plenty of books with creased spines and framed photographs and trinkets and geegaws. Little glass and plastic reptiles, odd rocks, and mysterious mementos. Small potted cacti and a wild serpentine vine. He got low and canted the shelf away from the wall gingerly without knocking stuff off. But it was so top-heavy that some frames fell over and a delicate origami cat toppled from its perch. “Careful with Pickles!” his mother cried, scooping the paper creature off the floor and cradling it.

  Sure enough, wedged between the shelf and floor molding, a stiff orange lizard lay upside down, mouth agape, emanating a ripe funk. His mama squinted and shivered, trying to hold back the tears. “Oh hell, Geronimo!” she wailed. “It had to be you, my bearded warrior. I began to worry when you didn’t show up for dinner Monday night. I just assumed the owls got you.” She plucked him up with a pair of kitchen tongs and set him in a tissue-­paper-lined shoe box. “You always were a little adventurer. I should’ve known you could never be content in this tiny world of ours.”

  Shoals drove the shelf back into place, straightened the trinkets and frames. The photos were mostly of him as a boy. There was a staged prom photo of him and Mary Nell Ballas that always made him recall their midnight dalliance poolside at that hotel in Memphis. There was another, first year as a deputy in uniform, proud and sunburned, his arm around his uncle’s shoulder. And there were plenty of his father too, with his prismatic glare and his famous sly half-twist of a smile. He seemed to be observing Danny, sizing him up from the afterlife. He was the same age now as his father was then, and yet Big Jack seemed made of so much more.

  “How old was Daddy when he became chief?”

  She would physically cave in a little when talk came around to Big Jack. She often had to sit down from the intoxication of his memory.

  “Let me think,” she said to explain away this flash of quiet grief. “He must’ve been a couple of years older than you.”

  Danny knew he was chief at thirty-two, dead by thirty-five. She stretched the truth to give him some leeway. There was still time for him to make something of himself. She probably believed he was floundering, or maybe she was just happy he was still alive.

  “Quite a family of boys,” she said. “Handsome and doomed.”

  There were three brothers in all, Big Jack and Uncle Bud, the youngest, and the eldest brother, Donald, a decorated soldier killed in Vietnam. No one spoke of him. There were no stories of him, only a few photos of a nondescript child, an occasional shot of a stern-looking teen. The parents, both gone before Danny could know them, smoked and drank themselves away. They were a family destined to die young, all but boring Uncle Bud, the passive lawman who tiptoed through life lest Death realize it had missed one.

  “Not a one would be anything without their women,” his mama said.

  Danny wooed her back into the kitchen, where the afternoon light refracted wild through the jars of red jelly and green pickles on the windowsill. She deemed the ingredients temperate and enlisted his help creaming the butter and sugar. He tried to refuse, but she pushed him. “Just remember,” she said, handing him the spatula. “It’ll fall flat if you beat it too fast.”

  “You’re telling me,” he joked, but she was too innocent to acknowledge.

  He took the spatula and beat it as she’d taught him many times before, the old-fashioned way, feeding sugar to the supple mixture a bit at a time, followed gingerly with vanilla, lemon juice and zest. He cracked an egg and whipped—another egg, another whip, over and over, working in the white powders with splashes of evaporated milk or a dollop or two of sour cream, steadily stirring and stirring, reaching and pouring and stirring.

  “See there, you always could bake,” she said. “You’re just too stubborn and macho to admit it.”

  “Mine never turn out like yours,” he said, placing the cake in the oven.

  “Well, you oughta know my secret,” she said.

  She took him into the backyard, which she’d fenced in with fiberglass siding and turned into a greenhouse. It could get treacherously hot back there, but she had a huge fan at the far end and misters hanging from the ceiling, lots of wild tropical plants. They approached a spindly tree, the same height as him, yellow fruit hanging from the branches.

  “Take some,” she said. “Sour as you please.” She bent down and ran her fingers through the soil. The tree was sitting in an enormous tub, roots escaping through the bottom. “Love from the ground up,” she said. “That’s the only way.”

  It was really the oddest, most fascinating little garden, tangled with alien plants and vines that seemed to grow before your eyes, always a ceramic gnome or top-hatted frog peeking out from under the leaves. She had grown all sorts of peculiar fruits he’d never seen as well as big spiny flowers and broad jungle brush. The thought of loose snakes sliding through the greenery kept him on guard.

  They moved to the porch, where a pair of ceiling fans kept them cool. The six o’clock mist rained down from the ceiling and tickled their cheeks and forearms.

  “I love how you keep summer held hostage back here,” he told her.

  “Soon it will all go dormant,” she said. “I’ll miss them like friends, you know.”

  “You need to get out and meet some real friends, Mama,” Danny said. He told her this all the time. “The world aint such a bad place when it’s right in front of you.”

  She held a far-off stare, possibly recalling the handful of times when that simple assessment didn’t bear true. Then she looked at him and sighed, smiled and patted his hand. They sat in the cool quiet and enjoyed the mist, followed by th
e late-season steam and the sweaty glasses.

  He couldn’t tell if she’d moved on from iced tea to rum, but she was taking it down in gulps. Often she’d get tight quick and start talking about the old man. One minute he was a saint, a giver, a poet. The next he was disloyal, a loudmouth, always criticizing or making fun of her. She talked as though he were still around. Danny rarely stayed late enough for her to turn aim on him.

  A while later the timer buzzed and they returned inside to remove the cake. Only after it cooled on the wire rack did Danny tell her why he needed it. If she’d known she was baking for a stranger, she wouldn’t have put her full love into it. She might have cut some corners on purpose if she’d known it was for another woman.

  “Who is it you’re seeing, Danny?” she asked.

  He smiled at her shyly. “A lady I met in town, a teacher. She’s having a rough time. I tried to think of the most special thing I knew to give her. Your cake, that’s the thing.”

  “That’s your cake now, baby doll.”

  “It’ll always be yours.”

  She went quiet and absently removed a roll of wax paper from the drawer. “You don’t have to bring her over here, you know. You’ll probably just scare her away if you bring her over here.”

  “Mama, what are you talking about?”

  “I’m serious. I forbid it.”

  “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “Besides, we’re not even that far along yet.”

  She was silent, intrigued. “Well, I hope you’ve found one. I would love to see you settle down, maybe find a nice job, a nice kitchen perhaps. Raise some kids.”

  It was odd hearing her talk this way. She’d always quietly sanctioned his philandering, never pined openly for grandkids or urged a conventional lifestyle, as if she imagined every marriage would only result in tragic death, single parenthood, doddering seclusion with reptiles.