Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery

by T. Blake Braddy

  “I think that’s the way it goes after a certain age,” I said. “You just start to think about the thing that’s going to knock you out of your shoes. No matter how you anticipate it, it’s never the thing you imagine.”

  “Oh, it’s gonna be cancer, probably throat or stomach. Got my old man. All the drinking and smoking-”

  “And the womanizing.”

  “And I reckon that, too. All of it has got to be grinding me down.”

  “I see what you mean. But you’ve held it off this far.”

  “And there might be a tumor the size of a mango floating around somewhere in me. The fact that it hasn’t put me in bed yet doesn’t mean it won’t soon. Doesn’t mean it’s not working its way through me now.”

  We sat in silence - I guess to push aside the dangling thread of mortality just above us - and then the more vocal of the two, Lyle, shook it away. “But I guess as long as I’m upright, I should count myself lucky. Which is more than they can say about that old boy they scooped up from that old juke in them pines, I reckon.”

  Red said, “The Lord’s Grace keep us from something so bad.”

  I was surprised the story had gotten to them so quickly but no surprised that it had gotten to them at all. The two old-timers were fluent in gossip but weren’t idle about it. Red had spent seven years in Telfair State Prison for beating his sister’s abusive husband to ground beef with a piece of angle iron, just for hearing the rumor that it was happening. After that, he just sort of found himself in the middle of other local situations. Probably shouldn’t have kept it up, but round here, the cops wouldn’t let the letter of the law get in the way of their sense of justice.

  Word was, Arnie Hester paid them five hundred bucks to kick the shit out of her brother-in-law, Carter, for drunkenly breaking his wife’s jaw. Carter fled to North Carolina but unsuccessfully evaded Lyle and Red, who brought back a lopsided version of the man. A warrant was issued for them, but it was never carried out, which had only given them cause to continue their particular form of backwoods vigilantism.

  I tried to sound casual, but my voice betrayed me. It seemed a little too eager in my mouth. "You heard anything out of the Leland Brickmeyer camp recently?"

  In my dreams, I am a man without biases, prejudices. I am a man who can see the truth clearly. In reality, however, I’m just someone reaching for roots on the side of a mountain.

  "Neighbor trouble?" Lyle remarked, elbowing Red in what he - no doubt - thought was a sly move. The two of them chuckled and twisted onto the seats next to me. "He's richer'n hell, but that ain't news."

  Lyle was lopsided with drunkenness but showed no sign of slowing down. There was not one but two shot glasses resting on the bottom of his beer mug. He was fond of busting his beers up with whiskey, and the double he was drinking now would probably put most people at a tilt, if not on their asses.

  He thought for a moment and then snapped his fingers, as if he had stumbled onto something. "He’s thinkin’ about national government work. Might try his hand at a senate run. They keep their private lives tighter than a duck’s asshole, so you won’t find shit or shinola on him."

  I nodded, pretending to mull over the information. Anyone with half a heartbeat in this town knew that Leland Brickmeyer’s ultimate ambition was to spend most of his year in Washington. He’d done all he could to tip over this town in his favor. Like any kind of narcissist, he was always on the lookout for a new group to court.

  “I don’t think it’s the political run I’m looking for,” I said.

  “Then what are you aimin’ at? You think we can just read your mind, old boy, or are you hidin’ something from the likes of two broke-down old pokes like us?”

  “No, no,” I said, lifting a cigarette from the pack and slipping it into one corner of my mouth. “I’m not sure of what kind of wind is blowing around on the man.”

  “Same as it always is. Man’s looking to get his name tattooed on a building, no different from anybody who’s ever thought about the forever nap.”

  “You think he’s involved in any shady business?”

  With that, Lyle eyed his buddy, who jolted like a man snatched from a nap. “What? I don’t know. Whatever you say, Lyle.”

  Lyle leaned in. “Guy doesn’t get where he is without selling off a part of himself to the darkness.”

  “But who and what has hooks in him?”

  He leaned back, contemplating the question, and Red went on staring blankly. “His daddy cast a long shadow, and I reckon he’s spent most of his life trying to one-up the man.”

  “He’s not his father,” I replied. “But that doesn’t mean he’s palming cards or anything.”

  “You used to work for the police department-”

  “There’s still a chance I could be reinstated.”

  The old man smirked. “Anyway, so you used to work for the police department. You know he’s got that place wrapped up like a sailor on shore leave.”

  “Meaning that - what - he gets favors from them for being a ‘friend’ to the LJPD?”

  “Ask your father-in-law about it.”

  “Ex. He’s not my in-law anymore.”

  “Still, ask him. Fucking money. Fucking power. Think on what he’s able to get away with because he can get the station a new cruiser. Or whatever.”

  “Small-town politics usually don’t run that deep, or that corrupt.”

  “Few years ago, there was a town got embarrassed because the sheriff was skimming money to pay the woman he was having an affair with. Nobody would’ve found out, except that she fucked up and got pulled over up in Atlanta. Driving to a concert, just as drunk as a goddamn fish. Couldn’t say her name if somebody was working her like a doll.”

  “A ventriloquist.”

  “Whatever. Paperwork was out of order, in the man’s name. Ended up all over the papers. Anyway, if the hard rain ever started to fall on Brickmeyer, I bet he’d have a hard time getting it to stop.”

  He paused for a moment and then kept talking. “And that’s what he’s worried about. He’s had too many cloudless days. Thinks they should last forever. He’ll do anything to keep the sun shining.”

  “So you’re saying he might not have anything to do with what I’m asking about?”

  The old man smiled cannily. “Well, don’t really know what it is you’re talking about yet.” The way he was looking at me made me think otherwise, somehow. “But that’ the long and the short of it. He’s got too much riding on his life to let some piss ant like you fuck it up, especially if he thinks it’s just for spite’s sake. Is it?”

  “I’m just asking questions, for now,” I said. Something ineffable had stirred in me, but I couldn’t quite put a name to it, not yet. It’d have to have some time to mix up and roll over before I could lay it out on a plate and call it just what it was.

  “And them questions have to end up with answers, or don’t they?”

  “They do.”

  “Well, then, let’s get down to the business of layin’ out the pieces and seeing what’s in the box. Then, maybe, you can start thinking about the questions. There might be something you’re missing and don’t know yet. Give it all here.”

  I gave them the leanest version of the story, leaving out the fat - namely, any and all hallucinations on my end. They listened and nodded, occasionally grinning at inopportune times, but they did not joke. It was apparent they were trying to find an angle, an in. There wasn’t always a way for them to make a buck, but if there was, they wouldn’t let it pass them by. Also, I suspected they had it out for Leland Brickmeyer, too. Men like them always do.

  Once I was done, the break in conversation was filled by the last minute or so of Bell-bottom Blues, and I listened wistfully, drinking and watching the two pulpwooders think over what I had told them. Even though Vanessa had me listening to Clapton before I figured out who Son House was, there was something about the ghost of a memory associated with that song that I never could dislodge.

  Still, t
he tone he got out of that black Stratocaster made fine background music for heavy boozing.

  In the meantime, Lyle wrung his cracked hands, eyes squinting. "Goddamn," he said, turning. "Red, you got any figures on this?"

  "None," Red replied. He rarely did have any figures on things. He basically had to be shot directly at a problem for him to realize how to fix it.

  Lyle turned back to me. "You think the Brickmeyers are involved?"

  "Man's got too much to lose to have dead bodies turning up on his land. But - and this is a big but - if he didn't do it, he might know why somebody else did."

  Lyle twirled an unlit cigarette in his fingers. His laugh approached incredulity. "That shit ain't gonna get far in this town, 'less you catch him underneath the tree yanking on the rope, if you know what I mean."

  “It’s the rich man’s burden,” I said. “The world goes to hell, and it’s the rich guys’ houses we’ll be storming with our pitchforks and torches.”

  “If that ain’t the gospel, I don’t know what is. We was so poor when I was a boy, we had cornbread with every meal, sometimes as the meal. Had two of my pet labs one winter.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Hand to God. It’s not something I wish was true. Still can’t have anything too gamey these days. If you’d have given me the idea to kick down the Brickmeyers’ door back then, I’d have put them on a spit.”

  "Let's hope it don't come to that. I don't think me pointing a finger in the wind's gonna do much, but that won't stop me from driving up and talking to him."

  Red and Lyle passed a lighter between them to get the cigarettes going. The smell was dankly pleasant, something about smoke and beer mingling in a bar. "And he'd have no reason to admit boo to you. Like I said, he's looking to take up running for a U.S. senate seat in oh-ten. He'd probably offer you the whole Brickmeyer estate in hush money before he let something like this come to light."

  I finished off the beer and paid for two more for the pulpwooders. "Keep an ear out," I told them, and then I left. “Oh, and if you see any suspicious trucks around here, let me know.”

  Lyle said, “In my eyes, buddy, everybody’s suspicious.”

  * * *

  I put Screamin’ Jay Hawkins on as I drove home, turning the volume as loud as I could stand. He was a dude I listened to whenever I was out at night, riding the lightless backroads in search of something I might never find. For him, becoming a blues guy meant giving up on the dream of becoming an opera singer, putting his classical piano training aside. A guy who idolized Paul Robeson ended up performing “I Put a Spell on You” on television with a bone through his nose.

  Expectations and dreams don’t always match up with reality. But he seemed happy. I wonder if he was ultimately satisfied with the path his life took, or if he was just game for following it along until it ended. Kind of like the Frost poem where the guy thinks his choices made any sort of difference in how his life turned out.

  It wasn’t my intention to turn my inquiries into a reflection of my disdain for the Brickmeyers, but I had to start somewhere. Man had something to hide, if you asked me, and nobody had, but that was no matter. He’d have answers, or he wouldn’t, and then I could move on from there.

  Headlights appeared in my rearview a couple miles down the road. I had rolled down the windows to let in the smell of wet grass and honeysuckle. Once I saw I was being followed, I tapped the gas to give myself a few car lengths’ lead. If I couldn't avoid the situation, my .45 lay under the seat.

  I turned up “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard” and straightened in my seat. This was threatening to become something, and I was anticipating nothing for the rest of the night.

  The truck stormed up, so close I thought it might ram me, and I tightened my knuckles over the steering wheel so I wouldn’t be tempted to do something drastic.

  Sometimes I have problems with impulse control. Or so I’m told.

  In that moment, I hoped for him - or them - to find a way to get me out of the truck. I damn near gave in. My foot twitched on the gas pedal, and I thought about letting go.

  I became acutely aware of what would happen if I just popped out of the driver’s side door, holding my pistol. I wouldn’t fire on them, not unless they wanted to get real nasty, but it wasn’t a stretch of the imagination that I might put a few in the dirt with a good, hard smack upside the head, with or without the butt of my .45.

  It would seal some kind of door for me forever, but the fire bubbling beneath the surface told me to go ahead and do it. Going over the cliff may be a bad fucking idea, but the view on the way down can be beautiful.

  It’s not worth it, I kept telling myself. I was trying to recall whatever cobbled together twelve-step language people had recited to me whenever I was at my worst. Make a fearless moral inventory and give your powerless self over to a misunderstood God and all of that.

  However.

  Just as I was about to lay out a case for letting this go, the truck reared up and nudged my back bumper, just enough to make me fishtail. It didn’t send me off the side of the road, but it pissed me off. That was it for me.

  Sometimes I can’t help but drop the whole jug of gasoline into the fire to see what happens. It’s not an attractive quality, and it’s something I wish I didn’t take a perverse pride in, but maybe it’s just the long genetics of my southernness coming out, something that wasn’t bred out of my ancestors in the last two hundred or so years. It just tends to appear to fuck everything up, and I can’t help but see what it does to me.

  I waited for the perfect opportunity. When the high-beams reached into my cab and whited out the rearview, I clenched my teeth, feeling the temple muscles lock up, and then I let the brake pedal have it with both feet.

  I stamped so hard I thought the pedal might punch a hole in the floorboard. My tires squealed on the wet asphalt like wounded dogs, and the rear end veered drastically to one side. I waited for the inevitable, crushing impact, my whole body clenched like a fist.

  But nothing happened. Once my truck stopped, absolute silence was all that rushed up to meet me. The truck had somehow swerved and missed me, and it was now speeding off into the distance. It was the same truck, all right, and I caught sight of those hellishly red taillights disappearing yet again.

  I know what I should have done. In my head, it was an entirely simple decision. Watch the taillights disappear. Just give the dude time to disappear and then call the cops. That’s all you’ve got to do, son.

  Sad thing was, I wasn’t even in the mood for piling onto my misery. I just wanted to get the hell on with my life and forget about this shit, but there was something that wouldn’t quite untether me from the situation. Bullish stupidity is my cross to bear, I suppose.

  I’d suffered enough, or should have, even if I’d brought most of it onto myself. The temptation to be a fuck-up should have been easy to deny. No, no, I’ve had my fill of that for a while, but thanks. I’d peeked behind the curtain of my unquestionably grim future, so I should have been able to swear off risk, but I guess Hephaestus is a distant relative of mine. I’ve dutifully created the tools of my destruction.

  Sitting there, truck idling, watching the taillights become smaller, I had a choice. One voice was sound and calm, telling me to let it go. Chasing dangerous rednecks down a curvy patch of highway would only result in trouble, I knew that. And yet, somehow, there was a second, equally convincing voice, speaking in whispers about the discarded body I had found.

  Then a phrase came to me, one that was both beautiful and dangerous, one that had gotten me halfway to this point.

  “Aww, fuck it,” I said.

  I stomped the gas pedal on my aging Ford. What the other guy probably didn't know was, I'd put a low enough gear in the transmission that, completely wound out, it could top off at a hundred and fifteen, easy. Most modern vehicles have a switch that cuts the engine off at a flat hundred, and you have to get a chip override to disable that feature. Most people don’t go that far, and I hop
ed this guy was no different.

  Once I got up to speed, trees and road reflectors passed in a near-psychedelic blur. With no guiding moon and me outrunning the headlights, it was tantamount to driving with my eyes closed. I focused on the electric red rectangles, hoping I hadn’t forgotten about some hairpin curve ahead of me.

  As a police officer, I'd been involved in innocuous chases with people who found jail much more terrifying than running - or going through a windshield - but drunks and other common criminals will often have a moment of clarity and pull over. This fool had no intention of slowing down. The car veered dangerously on the country roads. One bad yank on the wheel, and the truck would go rolling across the landscape like a skier missing a jump.

  However, the diesel on that lead truck, a V8 GMC behemoth, could get up and go a sight better than I thought. In fact, the thing could flat-out scoot, but I managed to keep up. It topped a steep hill, and I accelerated through the next curve to make up ground.

  Over another hill, a reflection caught my eye, and for a moment I thought I saw a deer's eyes. They weren't out this time of year, not like in the fall, but they could be found here and there, and so it still got a reaction out of me. Hitting an animal that size at this speed would be catastrophic. I’d seen men tossed through windows or impaled on horns.

  I backed off, let the truck take a sizable lead. It dawned on me how crazy I was acting. I had the tag number memorized; all it would take was a single phone call.

  When I passed the reflection, I saw it wasn’t eyes at all but the text on the door of a Lumber Junction police cruiser, and I blew right past it.

  The lights went on immediately, and he pulled out behind me. Apart from the fact that I was speeding, I had been drinking, as well. Good a lawyer as Jarrell was, there was no way he could get me out of this. Topping a hundred in the truck after a shot and a couple of beers meant at least - at least - a few months in lock-up.

  You know: to think things over.

  The tail of something sinister was winding around me, and I somehow knew that struggling against it would only secure misfortune more tightly to me.