Nail's Crossing

by Kris Lackey

  Maytubby made his way south through Coalgate, whose Main Street, some decades before statehood, had been a strip mine. He passed Ole Coaly Café, the Brandin’ Iron, and a good many empty storefronts.

  The little clapboard cottage Maytubby recalled Bates living in looked lived in. A mint-new Bass Tracker with a fat Mercury outboard, hitch cocked up on a cinder block, gleamed in the driveway. No other vehicle. No mail in the box, no answer to Maytubby’s knock. He could see the liquor store from the porch. He could also see a liquor bottle from the porch: Heaven Hill plastic magnum with a .22 hole in the neck. A “you might be a redneck if …” joke.

  Lorenza Mercante beamed at Maytubby when he walked in. Her big, dark eyes widened as if they had just lit on a brother home from the war. She ran her fingers through her long black hair on their way up above her head, where they clenched into fists as she yawned. She slid off her stool—a robust woman with big, saucy lips. “Well, good morning!” she said, motioning him forward with her fingertips. “You want to know who lives in that house? ’Cause I know you don’t want liquor.”

  “Wiley Bates?”

  “Hmm.” She smiled and tilted her head. It was clear she hadn’t run a liquor store very long.

  “He still a roustabout?”

  “Yeah. He done anything wrong?”

  “Not that I know of. I just wanted to ask him a few questions.”

  “What’s a Lighthorseman doing in the Choctaw nation?”

  Maytubby unfolded the mug shot. “I’m looking for this guy, Austin Love. He’s a member of the Chickasaw Nation.”

  She inhaled sharply. “Maledetto!” She waved the photo away, turned toward the rear window, and began biting her nails.

  “You know this man?” Maytubby folded the photo.

  “Five, six years ago, I was in a club in Shawnee. Out on the Kickapoo Spur. Got crocked, went outside to be sick. Walked into some powwow—oh, sorry.”

  “Clandestine assembly.” Maytubby smiled.

  “Yeah.” She squinted and smiled. “I think it was drugs. This joker”—she pointed to Maytubby’s pocket—“Wolf-eyes kicked my legs out from under me. I sat right down on that muddy chat. He called me an effing you-know-what. Then he pulled me up by my hair. My hair! Kneed me in the ass and told me to leave. Said if I tried to go back inside he’d wear me out.”

  “Probably a good thing you got the beast up front. He is said to possess some charms.”

  Mercante wrinkled her nose and lowered her face. “Ugh.”

  Maytubby waited.

  “I guess he had kind of a striking face. Hard, though. Like painted tin. And he was the alpha dog. Wiley mixed up with this thug?”

  “They ran together some years back. Not sneakers ran.”

  “Wiley is so totally a roustabout—the cowboy hard hat, the muddy pickup, the grass-stained pants and Farmer John tan—and yet he’s the shape of water. Like, he comes in to buy his, uh …”

  “Heaven Hill.”

  She slumped her shoulders and looked at him with mock dismay.

  “He shot one in his yard.” Maytubby tossed his head toward the front window. “Probably from inside his house.”

  She laughed. “His Heaven Hill. And even though he’s right there in front of me, it seems like he’s behind something.” She passed one hand in front of the other. “After he’s paid and left, he doesn’t seem to of been here.”

  “Evanescent.”

  “Mister, you can put words in my mouth all day.”

  “You by any chance know where Wiley’s working?”

  Lorenza Mercante shook her fine head and shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “Which direction he came home from yesterday?”

  She stared out the front window at Bates’ house and tapped an incisor with her thumbnail.

  “He comes from both directions, north and south.”

  “He’s a roustabout. That’s why I was asking about yesterday by itself.”

  She moved her hands as if they were puppets reliving last evening. “Judge Scarrett came in for his Springbank, four thirty-five. Court adjourned. Hm-hm-hm came in for her Stoli at four fifty-eight. Approximately. Jake pulled some guy over into my lot about five thirty. Wasn’t one of Wiley’s liquor days … South. He came from the south. If he had come in, I wouldn’t have remembered that.”

  “You knew he wouldn’t stop to make a purchase, but when you saw his truck you hoped he would, and you were disappointed.”

  “Yeah. Even a little pissed. Huh.”

  “Nice boat he’s got over there.”

  “Shame that nasty algae closed all the lakes. I don’t think he’s even had it out.”

  “Wiley ever spring for premium bourbon?”

  “You know, about the time he got that boat, three months ago, he bought Buffalo Trace. Three times. Went back to Heaven Hill. Drinkers mostly dance with the girl they brung.” She said “brung” country.

  A Beaver Express semi downshifted on Broadway. “What’s he driving these days?”

  “Red pickup. Few years old. Chevy, I think.”

  “Thank you very much.” Maytubby tapped his brow with two fingers.

  “Lorenza. Lorenza Mercante. Stop in again sometime. If you catch Wolf-eyes, kick him in the ass for me. He falls down, help him up by his hair.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  He was in what remained of Lehigh in ten minutes. A century had passed since this coal boomtown was an Anglo cultural hub in Indian Territory, with an opera house and a population of thousands, mostly Italian miners shipped across the Atlantic by the railroads that owned the mines. A pretty big French contingent, too. And Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Magyars. Choctaws owned the mineral rights, but KATY and its brethren owned the mines—and the miners, until they struck. Then the railroads brought in the freed slaves of Chickasaws and Choctaws, and freedmen from Alabama, to feed the maw.

  All that remained of King Coal’s sway was a single red-brick Romanesque bank building, stranded on Railway Street without a rail in sight. Maytubby admired its solemn perseverance.

  West of town, he followed the section-road grid at random. Renaldo had been right: everywhere wells and tanks, and maintenance roads leading to them. On the perimeters, taut new field fence on studded T-posts. Maytubby slowed at each fresh road cut and culvert. If trees hid a well, he peered down the maintenance road or drove up it to see if Bates was cleaning the site.

  The first three roustabouts Maytubby found at work drove red Chevy pickups. The fourth did, too. Maytubby could see only his back as he swung a gas Weed Eater along the perimeter fence. A tuft of red hair sprouted from beneath his tan hard hat, which was shaped like a Stetson and bore a Confederate battle flag sticker on the back of the crown. Maytubby found it amusing that Anglos deployed the Stars and Bars in Oklahoma, where almost none of them could truthfully play the heritage card.

  He didn’t want to startle Bates, so he leaned on the cruiser and let him work his way around the fence. Bates released the whacker throttle and stood staring through his tinted glasses at Maytubby, who gave him a friendly wave. He killed the little engine and leaned the whacker against the fence. In a second, he had disappeared behind a stand of young burr oaks.

  Maytubby watched the edge of the thicket, where he thought Bates would emerge coming his way. Too much time passed. He watched for movement in the thicket.

  “Help you?”

  Maytubby spun to his left and faced Wiley Bates. Hard hat in hand, dusty green bandanna knotted around his neck. His pale hazel eyes just failed to make contact, focusing on nothing. The pointy nose was disturbingly musteline—Renaldo had called it: ferret.

  “Hey, Wiley. You seen Austin in the last few days?”

  “Nossir.”

  “Any idea where he’s staying these days?”

  “No sir.” Bates was inching backward almost imp
erceptibly.

  “When’s the last time you saw him in Hoyt’s?”

  “Austin’s eighty-sixed from Hoyt’s.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Bates stared blankly. He seemed to be receding.

  “Hoyt said Austin was in his place this week,” Maytubby lied.

  Bates’ eyes clicked down, but his sight was trained inward.

  “If Hoyt was who told you Austin was eighty-sixed, he was lying to you or to me. And Hoyt doesn’t need to lie to either one of us—especially to me.” Maytubby entered his own lie in a fresh ledger so he could keep track of it. “If Austin told you, you’re lying to me.”

  “I just heard it. Around.”

  “Around” was the name of that brushy plain where gossips and snitches and troublesome friends wandered in the shadows, their indistinct voices fading in the air. “‘Around’ stopped working in grade school, Wiley.”

  Maytubby glanced at the back of Bates’ pickup and memorized the plate. When he looked back, the roustabout had retreated a couple of steps, though his body was still.

  “Who told you?”

  “I heard it when I was shootin’ pool.”

  Maytubby strained to hear him. “Where?”

  “Jeff’s, over in Wapanucka.”

  “Jeff got rid of that coin-op table before Austin went to Mac.”

  “I don’t know, then,” Bates muttered. Plumes of Indian grass swayed across his face. Somehow, he sank beneath the stems, though it shouldn’t be possible.

  Maytubby flinched when the Weed Eater’s two-stroke shrieked to life. A plume of blue smoke wreathed the cowboy hard hat and veiled Bates’ face. Maytubby felt the haintishness of the moment, but he didn’t waste the material smokescreen. He glanced into the roustabout’s cab, then replayed the image as he aimed the cruiser west.

  Chapter 9

  Drifts of Sonic and Braum’s wrappers and cups covered the pickup’s bench seat and floorboard. Flies fastened here and there on the fresher garbage—not bad for accidental camo, but not foolproof. Maytubby had glimpsed the edge of a topo map under a Tater Tots bag, a hardwood revolver grip, the spines of several Sudafed packets. But there in plain sight, a chartreuse dream catcher lay atop the mostly white heap like an abandoned pixie snowshoe.

  The dream catcher on the Cobalt had been violet. Then Maytubby recalled that he tended to misremember colors he had actually seen, as their complementary colors. He could think of no reason why Wiley Bates would have a dream catcher—much less one not hanging from his rearview mirror. He was a white male with no children and no visible girlfriend. Hell, there wasn’t even a place for a woman to sit in his truck cab.

  All he learned from the little patch of topo was that the contour lines were crowded and green. Rough forested country—not like what he was seeing out his window.

  As for the packs of suzie, Love—or some other meth cook—might pay Bates and twenty others to smurf for him. The gun didn’t necessarily mean anything. Everybody carried these days. Insecure people, scared people, and the people who scared them. Wiley was likely all three.

  Beyond Wapanucka, Maytubby found Hannah Bond under her favorite sycamore on the Blue. He pulled alongside her cruiser. “Brains and hash browns,” he said.

  “Even I don’t eat brains.”

  “You heard of Raleigh Creech, over by Sulphur?”

  “Gross,” Bond said, turning her face away.

  “So you’ve had the pleasure. He used to live with Austin Love’s little sister. Still just might.”

  “Lucky girl.”

  “One of the state narcs told me they thought she was Austin’s mule.”

  “If you have to go through Raleigh Creech to talk to her, you better eat first.”

  Maytubby held up a produce bag containing an avocado and a banana.

  “Eat, I said. Not …” She wagged a finger at the bag.

  “I showed you mine.”

  “I still ain’t sayin’.”

  “Heart of ice.” Maytubby saluted her as he pulled onto the highway and bit into the banana stem. He had it almost half peeled when a new white Lexus ES passed him going east. It wasn’t speeding. He phoned Bond, described the car, and asked her if she had glasses and could give him the plate without pursuit.

  She didn’t and couldn’t, except for an “X” somewhere in the middle. And it was not a specialty plate. “What do you want with the Lexus?”

  “It keeps showing up. Jill said she saw it somewhere.”

  “Yesterday he ignored my pursuit. I didn’t hit the lights. He wasn’t going fast, so I fell back and followed him to Boggy Depot. He’s got a country thing going on with a preacher from Tushka I had stopped before.”

  “Huh. Meeting a guy who rides around out here in a white Lexus is not exactly keeping it on the down-low. You get a plate on the Lexus?”

  “No. Too far away. The preacher gave me a tract.”

  “Are you the same Hannah you were yesterday?”

  “It said, ‘Satan is Waitin’.’”

  “The truth shall set you free,” Maytubby replied just before Bond’s siren let loose.

  “One-oh-eight. Lord.”

  * * *

  Maytubby wound southward through the Arbuckle foothills. A very recent wildfire had incinerated a cluster of mobile homes. Scorched trampolines littered the yards like burnt spiders.

  He was vaguely disappointed to see that Creech’s place had been spared. The same rusted yellow Datsun 720 pickup Creech had driven years before was in the yard, within reasonable distance of the driveway. Its front half rested atop a flattened hog-wire fence, and it lacked a tailgate. The bed was smeared with what was likely the dried blood of a jacklit deer. A balled-up tarp was roped to a makeshift cleat on a wheel well. Creech was a convicted poacher and wildlife scofflaw, and his pickup was a rolling slaughterhouse.

  There was no sign of the ’64 Falcon Patty Love drove back then. Hounds bayed from a run of kennels on the back of the property. A log chain was bolted to an iron post in the backyard, but no pit bull.

  Before Maytubby could knock on the door, Raleigh Creech appeared from behind a ramshackle outbuilding, zipping his fly. His jeans and T-shirt were stiff with filth. As he wove toward Maytubby, his face worked madly in a grotesque interplay of amusement and outrage. His thinning sandy hair stuck up like quills, and his blue-black irises looked like bullet holes. As he came nearer, Maytubby saw that Creech, not yet forty, had lost the few teeth he still had at thirty. His lips were outlined in tobacco juice.

  Halting an instant before Maytubby would have to warn him, Creech held up a stiff palm. “How!”

  “It’s wasn’t really that hard. I remembered where you live.”

  Creech dropped his hand and glowered. Maytubby saw that he was confused, and waited for him to speak. “Bad enough ten kinds of white law’s always stickin’ their nose in.” Creech pointed over his shoulder as if some of those law were behind him. “Now here comes the redskins.” He pointed at Maytubby’s face, then at himself. “What I deserve, shackin’ with a squaw. She’s the reason you’re here, right, chief? ’Cause last time I looked, I ain’t no Injun.”

  Creech’s putrid breath easily spanned the seven feet between them. Fighting the urge to back away, Maytubby held his eye. “Does Patricia Love still live here?”

  Creech opened his eyes and mouth wide and shook his head. “It boggles the mind! They can find me in the futherest dark canyon of the Ouachita Mountains, but they can’t find—what’d you call her?—Patricia Love.” He brayed, his purple gums shining with tobacco juice.

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “Roastin’ in hell, I hope.” Creech grinned and mimed turning a barbecue spit.

  “Did she pass away?”

  “Shit, I hope so, chief. I can tell you she passed away from here.” Creech swept his arms
and booted a phantom ass. The baleful glare returned. “’At whoredog was spreadin’ for them spawled Dallas boys up at Lake Murray. Said she was prettyin’ up ther yards. But I seen her through my rifle scope, sailin’ around on ther poontang boats.”

  Maytubby waited.

  Creech cocked his head and pointed to the log chain in his yard. “Stole my dog.”

  They looked at the chain.

  “You seen her brother, Austin, or you know where he’s living?”

  He spat loudly. The tobacco juice balled up on the sand. “Dope peddler. Indian dope peddler. You can’t get no lower’n that.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “I’ll tell you where he’s at. Serve her right. She sticks by her brother, even if he is trash.”

  Maytubby waited. A long time. Creech enjoyed having him on the hook.

  “The Kiamichi makes a bend just above Antlers. Soon’s you get through town on Three, leave it and go straight east on Ethel Road three miles. There’s a rusted old Prince Albert sign on a post, right side of the road. Make a left and toard the river about a mile and a half. On your right you’ll see a elk skull with lips painted on it, nailed up about ten feet in a burr oak. Take that right. He’s back up in there.”

  “Thank you for your time, Mr. Creech.”

  He said nothing, just glowered some more.

  As Maytubby drove away, Raleigh Creech stood in his rearview mirror, flipping him off with both barrels.

  Maytubby frowned at the bone-dry travertine streambeds. The bank thermometer in Sulphur flashed 111. The Prince Albert sign had “fool’s errand” written all over it. The joke was so old, even someone as stupid as Raleigh Creech used it. And what felon would draw attention to his house by hanging up a painted skull? A normal person wanting to deceive him would have kept a poker face and not acted like a jackanapes. But several counties lay between normal and Raleigh Creech.

  The Pushmataha sheriff’s deputy who took Maytubby’s call from the dispatcher at the Antlers courthouse told him yes, there was indeed an old tobacco sign out that way, shot as full of holes as a cheese grater, but on State 3, not Ethel Road. The deputy’s voice faded while he asked around the office about the skull. “Got two other deputies here besides me. We’ve seen other kinds of skulls nailed up, but not that one. You still lookin’ for Love? Wait … don’t say it. That deputy Katz’s been singin’ that damn song since you guys lost that cranker over by Ada.”