Soil

  “I’ve got the best job in the county right now,” he said.

  “Yeah, but for how long?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your uncle’s not gonna be sheriff forever, hon. He always said he wouldn’t stay in office past sixty. Next election he’ll be sixty-one.”

  Danny shook his head, unable to fathom this. He’d rarely considered the next day, much less an election, retirement, any change whatsoever. “When did he tell you this?”

  “He’s said it for years,” his mother replied, waving him off, tearing a sheet of wax paper to wrap the cake. “Wasn’t there some big to-do about it at his over-the-hill party?”

  Danny remembered the occasion last spring, a nice back porch get-­together at his aunt and uncle’s home on the lake. It was a rare outing for his mother, who even took a turn on the dance floor after a few drinks. A little bluegrass trio was set up, yodeling out the classics. He spent the party bird-dogging the fiddler’s girlfriend, a round-eyed brunette in cutoffs and a flimsy checkered top. She’d left her brassiere at home, and Danny couldn’t let it go. It was a rare dead end for him. Her eyes said yes, but she had a faithful country heart.

  “You don’t think I’ve got the stuff to be sheriff?”

  His mother laughed and wiped sweat from her forehead, took a long flustered gulp.

  “Well?”

  “You can do whatever you put your mind to, Danny boy, but I sure would hate to see you take on a responsibility that size. It’s not worth it in the end.”

  He felt embarrassed to have even mentioned it, just a knee-jerk reaction to news he hadn’t anticipated. Of course the department would keep him on as deputy, but how would it go for him without his uncle’s dutiful patronage? Would he have to put on the ranger suit, those horrible green slacks, and putt around in a county cruiser? That would be his tumbling fire bale, a fate worse than death.

  Maybe, though, what stung was the undercurrent. She would never have come right out and said it, and her implications were tenderly concealed, but he knew it was there. She didn’t have to say it. I love you like no other, Son, but as a man, you can’t hold a candle to him.

  He fixed his mama a fresh drink, kissed her on the head, and took his loaf with profuse thanks and love. He set out for home in the peaked evening, winding through the pine-swept neighborhood toward the highway, a high lonesome moan playing on a slow road.

  23

  There were two main routes into Madrid. The first was the old Silage Town Road. There was one rickety gas pump in Silage Town that sometimes worked, but Jay meant to steer clear of the village. Undoubtedly he would run into someone who would quiz him about his land, his wife, his white-dyed goatee. He decided to take the highway instead. Halfway to town there was a country store, Hilltop Grocery, where folks were less apt to know him.

  Hilltop was an old clapboard house with four gas pumps in the gravel driveway. Big cigarette placards and rusty oil drums sat out front. A neon sign for a discontinued beer flickered in the barred window. Out by the road, a portable yellow marquee with its flashing arrow advertised, TRUCKERS TAN FREE. What looked like a scenic lake off in the distance behind the house was instead the sewage treatment plant, and often, especially in summer, the air got so sour it was hard to stay and pump a full tank.

  Jay got out and uncapped the tank, removed the hose, and started filling. The pump hadn’t been updated since the eighties, with its spinning number wheel and the switch lever you flipped to turn it on. The price was modern enough, almost $3.50 a gallon. He wouldn’t be able to fill up, for damn sure. Barely enough to get to town and back.

  The proprietor was a crusty geezer named Fletcher, who looked like a badger in a guayabera. He was always propped on a stool behind the counter. His family lived in the back. His wife prepared brittle sausage and crumbly biscuits in the morning, and a lot of the old kooks from the county met in the cramped sitting area to drink coffee and discuss fishing or what politics they’d picked up from raving TV jerks. Jay preferred leaving his meager bill here than at the corporate pump in town, with their automatic doors and security cameras, their wall of inscrutable beverages and Siamese-twin fried chicken addendum.

  He stepped inside to pay for the fifteen dollars of gas he’d pumped. A harried lady stood ahead of him in line, and Fletcher yelled back at a teenage girl to get off the phone so he could use the line to run a credit card. Clutching his twenty, Jay chose a soda, a dusty bag of peanuts, and a mongrel sausage from a revolving display case. He noted the old-timers at the back of the room and obscured himself behind a display of music CDs when he felt them craning their necks for a nosy gander.

  Fletcher rang his purchases, which came to twenty-one and change. Jay sheepishly asked to cancel the nuts.

  Old Fletcher huffed. “Aww, just go on and take em,” he said with a cigarette wheeze. He nodded to the back table of geezers. “I got more nuts already than I can stand.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jay noticed the men whispering and appraising him from their dark corner. He hurriedly scooped up his dinner and thanked Fletcher, vowing to bring the extra dollar next time.

  “Whatever,” the old man croaked from his perch.

  Jay almost sprinted to the truck, jumped in and pushed Chipper out of his seat, threw it in reverse, and backed all the way out of the lot. He kept an eye on the front door. If they were so damn curious about him, then they could look all they liked, but he wouldn’t give them the chance to memorize his license plate. He whipped around in the gravel, masking his plate in a cloud of dust, and hung a right on the highway toward town. He drove a quarter mile down the road with a nagging suspicion. Had they mistaken him for one of their elderly pals, or had they seen right through his disguise?

  He pulled to the shoulder, made a U-turn headed back. He passed Hilltop and strained to see if anyone had come out to follow him. He saw no one but noticed, among the trucks parked off to the side, a pickup with camouflage detailing. “Son of a bitch!” He took the right toward Silage Town. The fool who’d stopped and asked him if any fish were biting! His heart skipped and dropped into his stomach. That was right before he rowed up on the body. Did this guy know anything? Had he seen it too? Why else make a big production about straining to see him and nudging his buddies?

  Jay swung right into what looked like someone’s driveway but was instead a little-known and rarely used third route into town. He urged the truck ahead, putting some distance between him and the grocery in case anyone had taken a notion to follow. If the guy suspected him or had some beef, he knew where Jay lived. Surely he would have sent the sheriff by now if he’d seen anything. It didn’t matter, Jay tried to reassure himself. The evidence was gone.

  The awkward encounter left Jay with plenty to obsess over as he disappeared into the back country. This remote gravel road cut through dense forest before turning to tattered, unlined pavement beset with shacks and mobile homes. The road ultimately dumped out in a fringe subdivision on the outskirts of Madrid and took twice as long to maneuver as the other preferred routes.

  He had time to kill before Sandy was off work, so he decided to do some detective work. He navigated a series of backstreets to the public library, drove around the block a time or two to scope out the lot and look for any cars he recognized. He parked away on a side street, under a shade tree for Chipper. He took a moment to adjust his disguise. If he saw anyone familiar, he’d play dumb or speak with a northern accent. He adopted an elderly pace, affected a slight limp. Once inside he shuffled around the dollar book sale in the foyer, thumbed through an old National Geographic before slipping into the periodicals room, where he sifted through recent back issues of the local newspaper, The Madrid Folk Standard.

  He found what he needed on the front page of the August 27 edition.

  Bayard Sheriff Hunts Missing Ohio Man

  SILAGE TOWN—The Bayard County Sheriff’s Department is searchi
ng for a 43-year-old Ohio man believed to have disappeared while visiting relatives in the Silage Town community.

  The missing person, Tovis Boyers of Dayton, Ohio, was last seen August 17 by his cousin, Eugene Weaver, 38. Boyers was staying at Weaver’s residence in Silage Town. “He said he was going to the boats,” Weaver said, referring to the canal-docked casinos ninety miles northwest in Tunica County. “Then we never seed [sic] him again.”

  Bayard County Sheriff Bud Shoals said his department is working closely with the Tunica County Sheriff to determine if Boyers made it to the casinos. Shoals said they are examining security camera footage and credit card receipts now to determine Boyers’s movements on the days surrounding his disappearance, but so far they have no leads.

  Meanwhile, Boyers’s family in Dayton has made a heartfelt appeal to Bayard County authorities to find their beloved member. Boyers is the father of four children, grandfather of one. His wife, Monika Boyers, described her husband as “a responsible person with everything to live for.”

  Boyers serves as a foreman at Gimlet Alloy, a Dayton foundry that casts automotive parts and other industrial machine components, where he has worked for the past 13 years. His boss, Jerry Banghart, describes Boyers as “a class act and hard worker. We really need him back.”

  According to his wife, Boyers had built up two weeks’ vacation time and decided to spend it visiting relatives in Mississippi. “We’ve been having stress at home and work, and he just wanted to relax awhile.”

  He enjoys fishing, dancing, and eating. His wife described him as “an especially good whistler.”

  Boyers drives a Dodge Dakota. He is five feet, nine inches tall and is missing half a finger on his left hand.

  Sheriff Shoals asks anyone who knows Boyers’s whereabouts, or has seen him or had an encounter with him, to please report any information to the Bayard County Sheriff’s Department, 226-4656.

  Instantly Jay thought of the missing half-finger. Which hand of his corpse had gone missing? He tried to recall. Playing it back in his mind, he saw it either way and couldn’t remember the truth. No missing fingers, he was certain. He remembered the charred bones, all five crispy digits. If Boyers had been murdered, the killer may have detached his hand to confuse identification.

  As for the height description, he didn’t remember the body being especially short or tall. Five-nine might have been about right. Jay studied the photo again, trying to remember the hair, the nose. None of it made a perfect match, but it was close enough to be possible.

  He flipped the pages forward, hoping to find updates. Sure enough, a follow-up appeared two weeks later.

  Vehicle of Missing Ohio Man Recovered

  The Dodge Dakota belonging to an Ohio man who went missing while visiting relatives in Bayard County was discovered stripped and burned on a county road near Mullins in Rayburn County late last week.

  The owner of the vehicle, Tovis Boyers, 43, of Dayton, Ohio, was reported missing on August 24 by members of his extended family with whom he was staying in Silage Town.

  No mention of an ATV. And how did he end up in Rayburn County? Maybe this wasn’t the same guy after all. Jay read on.

  Rayburn County deputies conducted a search of the woods near the vehicle’s location for the remains of Boyers. No clues were discovered, but the hunt goes on in the surrounding area.

  Jay tried to remember when Shoals had stopped by to inquire about the missing person from Ohio. He checked the date of the issue, September 11. A memorable date, but he had no idea when the deputy had visited. He’d become a man without a calendar. Before the missing truck was found, right? Otherwise, why waste time searching near Silage Town? Unless Shoals knew something he wasn’t telling.

  Mullins was well south, nearly to Jackson. It stood to reason that the body would be found near there, but evidently it wasn’t. And the fact that the vehicle was burned and stripped was odd. Boyers could have been killed and left near Silage Town, his car taken down to Mullins before being stripped and burned. Why go through all that trouble? Unless you were trying to cover something up. Jay was no detective, but it definitely sounded like foul play to him.

  He flipped forward several more editions, hoping he would find an update that explained the whereabouts of the missing stranger, but there was nothing. He went back and combed each edition page by page and still found nothing.

  He knew it was foolish, but he couldn’t resist accessing one of the library computers to conduct an internet search on Boyers. He found the Dayton Daily News website, punched “Tovis Boyers” into the search engine, but came back with nothing. There was little about the man in the search engine, just listings on the Gimlet Alloy site and a church newsletter. The Madrid Folk Standard online articles weren’t referenced. Jay searched the online phone directory and came up with a number, which he scribbled on a gum wrapper he found wedged into one of the hard-drive vents.

  He looked at the phone number on the gum wrapper. Why had he written it down? Would he really call, or had he just created a piece of evidence? He memorized the number, then scratched it out, tore the wrapper in half. He cleared the browser history and cache, wiped prints off the keyboard with his shirt, and left calmly. He threw one half of the gum wrapper in the garbage on the way out and popped the other half in his mouth and swallowed.

  Outside, he saw two kids standing by the Bronco on the street and got nervous. They were petting Chipper through the breach in the passenger window. “Hey, you kids, get away from him, he’s dangerous!” he called, expecting them to flee.

  “No he’s not,” said one, a pubescent boy. A younger girl echoed his sentiment.

  “Well, he’s got worms,” Jay said.

  The girl reached up on tiptoes. “I don’t see any.”

  “They’re microscopic. You can’t see em, but they’re on his tongue, and if he licks you, they’ll grow in your stomach and you’ll be crapping them out in a week. Big itchy worms, coming out of your butt.”

  The kids laughed.

  “Where are your parents?”

  “We’re not supposed to talk to strangers,” the boy said.

  “Go home then!” said Jay, climbing in and cranking the truck and screeching off as the kids waved good-bye to Chipper.

  It made him want to see Jacob. He knew his boy would be excited to see him, or Chipper at least. It would be good to hang out with his family again, start the process of reconciliation. If he timed it right, maybe they would feed him. He looked at the clock on the radio and thought it might be too early for them to be home. He could wait, maybe hide out in the park, the little wooded area behind the playground. No, someone might report him—a predator hanging out in the woods by the playground with restless hands in his pockets. Nor could he drive around wasting precious fuel.

  The park near Waller wasn’t far from the library. Jay had taken a roundabout way and approached from the rear. He saw the backside of the hideous teal house and then, out of the corner of his eye, caught sight of a familiar blue Mustang parked in the outfield lot to the left. He jogged his memory, trying to remember where he’d seen it. He came to the stop sign to turn onto Waller and saw the deputy standing in the driveway. Jay cut a calm right and cruised out of the neighborhood.

  His heart raced ahead. He kept an eye on the rearview. What the hell was Shoals doing there? Was it a stakeout? Were they waiting for him? If the blue Mustang pulled out, would he have enough of a head start to lose the deputy through the maze of neighborhoods? He turned off Waller just in case, plunged downhill into a residential area, and took turn after turn until he’d lost his way in a new development and feared being trapped at the end of a cul-de-sac.

  He wound back to the commercial district and pulled into the lot of Flash-in-the-Pan Chicken. He steered the Bronco around back behind a dumpster and switched off the engine to gather his thoughts.

  One thing was certain, he wouldn’t be s
taying in town to sit with Jacob. That would make a hell of a sight for the boy—his father spread out against a squad car, the flickering blue lights, the handcuffs and shouting and impounded Bronco. That image would define him for the rest of their lives.

  A fantasy unfurled in Jay’s mind, that the law had coerced Sandy into helping them lure him out with a fabricated story about Jacob’s fall break. Once in town, Jay was on their turf and more prone to slip up and reveal something. It was a good thing he’d come to town, if only to uncover their plot. His paranoia had been justified. They were, in fact, waiting for him. They were onto him.

  So where did he go from here? He wondered how much of Sandy’s letter was true. To ignore her plea might invite suspicion. He’d play along, offer his help. But it would be on his terms and his property. They’d need a warrant to search. He’d make them work for it.

  A rumble in the nearby dumpster gave him a start, and he slumped down in his seat. Chipper yipped, and Jay slapped him quiet with his hat. They waited a moment before Jay got out and peeked in the side hatch. Someone had deposited several bags of trash. He slipped into the otherwise empty bin and rummaged through the plastic bags. A lot of loose garbage, greasy napkins, half-eaten meals, empty drink cups. But one bag was filled with fried chicken. Whether it was scorched or too old to serve, it seemed like perfectly fine chicken. He took a bite of thigh. It was cold but still heavenly. He scooped up the bag and jumped in the truck to feast. He shared some with Chipper, then pitched the bag of gnawed bones back into the garbage and sat in the truck worrying over how to proceed.

  In the glove box he found an old pink carbon receipt from a long-ago car repair and crafted a note for Sandy, accepting responsibility for Jacob next weekend. Would he be playing right into their hands? Maybe so, but if this charade about fall break were true, he couldn’t deny his son.

  Jay cranked the engine and swung back around toward the park. He came in behind Waller again, but this time he pulled around by the dugouts and home plate, got out, and squinted to see if he could make the Mustang. It was gone. He closed in on the apartment with extreme caution, making a pass or two before he pulled up in front. He left the engine running as he ran to the house, stuck the note in the door, scrambled back, and hightailed it toward his country haunt.