The Right Wrong Number: An Ed Earl Burch Novel

by Jim Nesbitt

  “I’m counting on that. It’s a new game, Savannah. My game. And the five mil doesn’t matter. Think of it as table stakes. An ante.”

  “Where’s this game gonna be played, lover? In that little white church?”

  “I knew you’d appreciate that touch.”

  “You know, Eddie gunning for us both gives us a reason to be partners.”

  “Not a chance, honey. Not a chance.”

  “Why don’t you tie me up someplace else, then? This chair is too hard.”

  “You sound like Goldilocks. But this ain’t a fairy tale.”

  “C’mon, lover. At least tie me up where I’ll be comfortable.”

  “Like the bed?”

  “That’s a start. Like old times. C’mon. Tie me up in bed. It might be fun. For both of us.”

  “Not a chance, Savannah. I’d rather yank my pud with a cactus glove.”

  “Needle-dick bastard.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Burch saw the smoky predawn mist snake through the draws leading down to the river, thought of a place half a continent away from here and felt the faraway pain of his dead daddy gallop up into his throat.

  Rulon Edward “Bill” Burch died four months after his seventy-fifth birthday, wasted by weeks in the hospital and years of a hateful disease that ate away his memory and storytelling wit and withered his workingman’s body into a shuffling spindle. Near the end, the best housepainter in Coppell, when sober, didn’t know his only son, wouldn’t speak to his only wife and called his only daughter by his wife’s name.

  In those last days, with his wrists tied to keep him from jerking the IV lines out of his arms and the food tube out of his nose, his hazel eyes would widen in anger and his big horsey head would stubbornly swing away whenever mama leaned in close to tell him she loved him and was glad he was still alive. At the very end, when he coded in the recovery room after doctors cut a hole in his stomach and inserted a food tube, he revived just long enough to ask the nurse to let him die. Then he was gone.

  She buried him in a peach-colored blazer, an off-white shirt and a navy tie peppered with daisies and other flowers. With his blotched, parchment-thin skin and shrunken features, he looked like an old light-skinned Negro waiter, ready to serve double bourbons and scotches at the clubhouse to the fat white money and its frat-rat sons, white folks slicked back and sleek after eighteen holes and a long hot shower.

  Resting in his copper-colored casket, daddy didn’t look like the man who could knock back bourbon and beer at the American Legion hall all night and knock out flawless trim work with a blinding hangover in the still heat of day, squinting through sweat and the smoke curling up from a Lucky on his lip. He didn’t look like the man who could make you laugh with long-winded country tales or stop you dead with a wild and murderous glare. And he sure didn’t look like the young man barely out of his teens who stood his ground with an M1 Garand in the frozen wasteland of Korea, firing clip after pinging clip of .30-06 at the endless horde of screaming, bugle-blowing Chinese charging the thin G.I. line night after flare-lit night.

  That man died long before the gaunt figure in the casket did. And when mama leaned in to tell him she loved him one last time, the stubborn fire was gone, his eyes were closed and he didn’t turn away. It was fine for mama but it stabbed Burch badly with the hard truth that he had put a lot of distance between himself and his father’s long slow decline, widening a gap he would never be able to close.

  Daddy’s final resting place was the third deck of an above-ground burial vault out near Farmers Branch, at the back end of a cemetery far from his home in the North Carolina mountains, miles away from the graves of his father and mother and two younger sisters who could backsass him until he was tongue-tied in anger, then stand back and sweetly call him by the Christian name no one called him — Rulon — and ask why his face was so red and he was stuttering so badly.

  Burch stood beside his mama as the preacher said all the proper words that made her cry and didn’t feel a thing except for the wide rivulet of sweat that ran down his back and into the crack of his ass, causing the fabric of his dark gray polyester blend suit to stick to his skin.

  The service ended and one of his ex-wives stepped forward to hug his neck. She was the second ex, the cocktail waitress he married between the one who tore up his heart and the one who got killed by the spade hit man with the high-pitched voice. This ex only stayed with him for three months. She never spoke to him after the divorce but loved his daddy and would flirt with him whenever he answered the phone when she called mama, who stayed friends with all his exes. He was surprised to see her but it was only a surface reaction. Nothing else rose up to break through his numbness.

  A week after the funeral, after paying the undertaker and the hospital and carting mama down to the lawyer’s office so he could send the will to probate court, Burch drove for two days to the little hamlet outside Asheville where his daddy, Korean War veteran, grandson of a Klansman and the great-nephew of a hanging judge, grew up.

  He walked what was left of the family homestead with his cousin George, a stumpy version of himself, cursed with the same belly, bald head, big eyes and beard as Burch, but about a half foot closer to the ground.

  It was a full-blown redneck kind of a day, one that started well before sunup but well after George’s usual wakeup hour. Burch remembered the year daddy got laid off from the refinery down in Texas City and moved the family back to North Carolina, settling into the old homeplace where Burch’s grandfather, Judson Earl Burch, still lived. It was a rambling house built of pegged poplar, with a pepperbox entrance and a long porch running down the front wall.

  George would wake up with his daddy Gus, who would rise at 3 a.m. to fix a breakfast of eggs, ham and red-eye gravy then call down to the Burch house.

  “Unc’ Bill, you up yet?”

  “No, George — just who in the hell do you think is talkin’ to you?”

  “Be down for breakfast.”

  By the time his daddy pulled on his trousers and headed to the kitchen barefoot to light the wood stove, George would be banging through the pepperbox door, wondering what was on the menu for his second breakfast.

  Burch’s time with his cousin wound through a silent rising light and a stand at the end of a sloping field of green, waiting for the smoky mist to rise out of the hollows and a groundhog to pop up into the crosshairs of his cousin’s varmint rifle, a stainless steel, bolt-action Ruger .223 with the 10x scope and the dull grey plastic stock. That same half-light mist was rising in front of him now, thousands of miles from the lush green mountains of daddy’s kin, with the sharper-spined peaks of the stark grey Sierra del Carmens as a backdrop. The memories rose to mind along with the mist.

  So did the remembered hours with his cousin — a huge roadhouse breakfast of eggs, flapjacks, grits, ham and coffee; a session in an old man’s garden, baiting Hav-A-Heart traps with grape jelly for the raccoons that were tearing up the corn and lettuce; an hour shoveling sawdust into a small trailer for another old man to use in his garden.

  It ended with a brush-busting walk along the line of the six acres that remained in the Burch family name, digging through the ruins of an old springhead that watered cows through the Depression years, spending a half hour picking ripe blackberries from a snake haven of thorny vines that was in the same spot where he and mama picked berries four decades before, back when he was five and the tiny pump house his father built over the wellhead he had drilled for his own daddy was shiny and white and seemed as big as the weathered outhouse behind the old homeplace.

  A doublewide stood where the old house used to be. The land belonged to somebody else. The pump house, splintered and stripped of shingles, was the only sign of his daddy’s hand on what was left of family land.

  Burch felt something move from his guts up into his chest and his eyes burned with hatred toward the white trash trailer violating the space where his grandpa used to sit in the shade, a dog at his feet, drawing stick figures
in ink on the brim and crown of a cheap fedora.

  But that moment passed quickly. They picked up the free and easy talk that had carried them through morning, joking the way only two middle-aged men who had seen a lot and were comfortable with each other will do. They picked berries until their hands were stained, then George took him home, gave him a shot of homemade blackberry wine, let him shower and walked him to his rig for the ride back to Texas.

  “Been too long, son. Seems like we only see each other at funerals.”

  “Yeah. Maybe I’ll make it back for deer season.”

  They both knew that wouldn’t happen.

  His legs and back were sore but he felt clean, fresh and buoyant from the shower and his time in the close, high land of his kinfolk, moving through a working Saturday with his cousin. There was that brief, dark moment at the old homeplace, but it passed quickly.

  Maybe he had said all his goodbyes to daddy through the five-year decline of the Alzheimer’s, he thought. Maybe all he would feel was relief — that his mother wouldn’t have to burn herself out trying to take care of a man angry about her trying to keep him alive, that his daddy didn’t have to spend any more time locked in his mind like a graybar lifer, that he wouldn’t have to feel so damn guilty about not pitching in any more than he did.

  What rode through the front of his mind wasn’t grief or guilt. It was the dawn mist, the humped ridgeline and the keening note that sang through his blood in the ancient, Highlander key, reminding him it didn’t matter he was born in the flatlands of Texas, that he and his daddy were of mountain stock and for a short time that he was stepping through the land in which his people were born to live.

  He headed west on I-40, pointed toward Knoxville, pushing his rig up through the hairpin mountain turns, punching up a college FM station playing bluegrass.

  He listened to Bill Monroe blaze through three of his standards, including “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and “Walls of Time,” the old man’s plaintive wail drawing a tighter line through the Celtic call that was already stirring in his chest. Whipping through a long set of downhill curves, he nodded his head in time to the Stanley Brothers’ “Rank Stranger,” barely noting the high-banked gravel of the runaway truck ramp that flashed past his window.

  Then J.D. Crowe, Tony Rice and Doyle Lawson sang “Model Church,” a song about an old man talking to the soul of his dead wife, telling her about finding a place of worship that “had the old-time ring.” The singing was accompanied only by a lightly strummed guitar and a standup bass, the lyrics carried by the tight harmony of the three men, recounting the old man’s joy at finding comfort in a church that made him feel like “some wrecked marine who gets a glimpse of shore.”

  The string in his chest broke and a black ball of grief rose up from his stomach and into his throat. Tears blurred his vision and he heard a strangled cry fill the cab of his rig, drowning out the song. He bawled all the way down the backside of the mountain pass. Cars and tractor-trailer rigs roared past, horns blaring. He howled for his daddy, barely able to see the road, never touching the brakes, not giving much of a damn if he flew off the four-lane.

  When he got down to a flatter stretch of highway, he turned off at the first exit and pulled into the gravel lot of a barbecue restaurant called The Pig Pit. He pulled out a bandana, blowing his nose and wiping the clear trail of tears and mucous from his beard and moustache.

  This is how it hits you, he thought. Not beside the casket, looking down at the dead body of your daddy. Not when an ex-wife hugs your neck at the graveside service and whispers her regrets. Not even when your own mama breaks down and sobs out her misery. You get nailed after a glorious redneck day with a cousin, rambling over the land of your father and his ancestors, the place of all the old family myths and experiences, your heart broken open by a bluegrass song your daddy didn’t even know while roaring down a mountain that doesn’t care if you live or die.

  And it hits you two years later, sitting stiff and sore on a brushy slope a mile south of the Rio Grande, watching mist that triggers memories. Of his dead daddy. And a dead friend, a death Burch knew would bring him another painful reckoning.

  They were in a cold camp that gave them a good view of the river, the town of La Linda, the thin iron bridge that crossed back to Texas and the short-browed and narrow mesa that rose above the sand and brush of the steep banks. In the center of this higher ground stood the white chapel, wood-framed and isolated from the abandoned mining company barracks, the wrecked and scavenged dump trucks and bulldozers of the motor pool and the hump-shouldered adobe huts of the town.

  Burch swept the vista with a pair of Bushnell pocket binoculars. He was alone with Mr. Slick, their horses tied to a picket line and hobbled in a brushy draw behind and below their vantage point.

  Dag and Silva were gone, their guide job done, their unwillingness to play any other role made clear on the other side of the river. Which was fine by Burch. This was his play. He didn’t even want Mr. Slick along but needed at least one gunhand who wasn’t hobbled by busted ribs and a taped-up shoulder. And while he was thankful for their expert escort, he didn’t trust the vaquero cousins — hell, he barely trusted Mr. Slick — and moved their stakeout a half mile from the place Dag and Silva put them to a place he spotted in the falling light of yesterday’s hideout.

  For breakfast, they had PowerBars, the modern-day substitute for beef jerky. Just as tough to chew. And not nearly as tasty. Washed down with canteen water chilled by night air that did nothing to wipe out the gritty alkaline taste. The pain Burch felt in the saddle was doubled by a night on cold rocky ground. It hurt him to glass the chapel and town. He did it anyway, careful to cup his hand over the top of the lenses to keep the rising light from bouncing off his optics, flashing a signal to anybody who might be watching for a watcher.

  “You want a pill?”

  “Naw. What I want is a cigarette.”

  “So fire one up.”

  “Not a good idea. This ain’t the city — smoke can be seen and smelled by country folk.”

  “Got some Levi Garrett in my bag. If you care for some.”

  “That’ll work. Didn’t know you chewed.”

  “I don’t. Not unless I’m on a job. Country folks aren’t the only people who can see or smell smoke from a stakeout.”

  Burch grinned then caught the pouch of chewing tobacco Mr. Slick tossed his way, clutching it awkwardly to his chest. He settled a ball of stringing tobacco between cheek and gum then glassed the chapel again.

  With his eyes on the chapel, he heard a twig snap somewhere behind him and a hiss from human lips. He turned his head, binoculars still frozen in front of where his face used to be and saw the blurry movement of Mr. Slick reaching for his Remington pump. Three shots roared across their little camp, blowing Mr. Slick off his spread bedroll and across the saddle he had used for a pillow.

  “Don’t make the same mistake as your friend, señor.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “Keep your hands where they can be seen.”

  He felt someone step up behind him. Two someones. They gripped him under the armpits and jerked him to his feet. He yelled out in pain and one of the someones slapped him across the face.

  “You sound like a woman, señor.”

  “You would too if you had some busted ribs and a banged up shoulder.”

  “Hombre, now you sound like an old man who is better off in a warm bed than out here in the cold.”

  Burch was forced to turn toward the voice. The man was tall but big-bellied with long black hair tied back in a ponytail. A blue bandana, folded into a tie-wide strip, ran across his broad dull-copper forehead. The man had a Beretta 9 mm in his left hand — the gun that killed Mr. Slick. He flashed a smile above a black goatee — gold teeth up front.

  “That was a good trick, moving from where Dag and Silva put you. We found you anyway. Took us some time wandering around in the dark but then we heard your snores.”

  “That was m
y partner, the fella you just killed.”

  “No, señor. It was you. We were close enough to tell.”

  “Which would make you part Apache.”

  The man shrugged.

  “Who can tell? We were quiet enough to slip up on you. If you want to tell yourself only someone with Indian blood could do that, be my guest.”

  “I’d love to jaw at you some more about whether you’re that good or whether I’m just a fuckup but I’m in some pain here. Had a bull throw me across a rodeo ring.”

  “Si, we heard of your exploits.”

  “So I’m famous on this side of the border. That will make you a big man by killing me.”

  “Kill you? Oh no, señor, I don’t need to kill you to prove I’m a man. Killing you would be like killing a fly. A little thing. Of no importance to me. Mi patron has another plan for you.”

  The man jerked his head with a silent order. Hands shoved him forward. Pain shot through his ribs as he took his first step. His football knees were stiff and throbbing. The man led, then Burch, then his two escorts. A fourth followed, stringing Sue Bee and Shorty.

  It was a long, slow, twisting walk down from the slope-side camp, down across a brush-filled arroyo, then up a hen-scratched switchback trail that scrabbled up the loose and gravelly face of the little mesa.

  At the top, there was a clear view of the white chapel, pure against the Sierra del Carmens. The chapel door was open. Standing in the door was a man.

  Jason Willard Crowe.

  THIRTY-TWO

  “Thank you my friends, for escorting my guest to this private little service. Tie him up in that empty chair and then leave us please, to worship in peace.”

  The sanctuary walls were whitewashed plaster, stained rust and tan by years of water flowing from a leaky roof. The pews, rough, unstained and backless, were pushed together toward the back, clearing a space in front of the altar that had been used as living quarters by squatters, with a fire pit in the center and a pile of mattresses to the left of the Madonna statute standing on a rough-hewn wooden wall bracket.