Treeborne

by Caleb Johnson

  She looked on every tabletop and desk. Not a newspaper to be found. The secretary was banging around in the breakroom, talking to herself. Janie didn’t have long. She opened several drawers. Nothing. Thinks he can motherfucking up and get rid of me for somebody else—the secretary was saying. We’ll just see about that shit. Janie made another pass through the showroom. Along the wall stood a dry aquarium bathed in warm orange light. The tank was filled with, at first glance, nothing but dead leaves and dirt and a flat rock. Odd, Janie thought. Then something moved and she saw a black chevron pattern among the leaves. She stepped back as if the glass did not separate her from the rattler coiled in the corner of the tank, its head as big as her clenched fist.

  When the breakroom door swung open Janie crouched behind a desk. The secretary turned into the bathroom and, a moment later, shrieked bloody murder. After the woman ran out the front door, Janie retrieved Crusoe from the stall. Heading out, she bumped into a trash can and it spilled. Along with the rotten black fruit peels and wet coffee grounds and boogery tissues were several copies of the Times-Journal. Janie grabbed as many copies as she could tote then hustled out through the garage before she could be seen.

  She spread the damp newspapers on the hood of the vehicle. The already dry ones she began to read. The first was printed before Peach Days. July 7, the banner said. Not far down the stack she came to an article about her aunt Tammy missing. She read every word then read each again. The letters mocked her like a child’s tongue.

  She went through every newspaper in the stack, then through the damp ones. A thunderhead peeked over the treeline. After a certain date there were stories about Janie missing too, but she came across not a single word about her aunt Tammy being found yet. Maybe there were copies she didn’t have. The thunderhead rumbled, flashed lightning, and fat raindrops fell from the blue-black mass. Janie had to know what else had been written. She got up to head back down into Bankhead. Crusoe begged her to wait till the storm passed, but she would not.

  From inside the cave Tammy could tell it was raining again. The water on the floor would rise. She stood and felt her way into the darkness. When the water got deeper she turned and walked another direction. The flow pulled at her as it drained off into a deeper unknown. When her feet found dry rock she shouted for joy. She got down on hands and knees and felt all around the spot to make sure she wouldn’t fall. She was shivering cold. She tucked her legs up against her chest and sat there trying to warm up. The rain kept falling, but the water did not reach her here. She had for the moment found higher ground.

  When the illumination Tammy’d been waiting for arrived it did not dawn with a rising sun, as she’d imagined, but leaped down into the darkness behind a clap of thunder so loud the rock she leaned against shook. The chair she’d been sitting in was now smoking and glowing blue from the lightning strike that’d snaked its way underground, and the water itself was on fire too. Tammy backed away from the heat. Behind her she sensed a drop-off and heard water pouring off into a deeper part of the cave. For a time she imagined going with it, her body calcifying with the wet pale stone waiting to violently catch her at some dark bottom. Slowly, the fire on top of the water died out. A ball of flame climbed the wall and burnt on the ceiling. Tammy walked over to the glowing blue chair and gazed upward. Later, she remembered being surprised the water was cool after being on fire. She could see a tunnel of fire overhead now. She stared as if it might allow her passage to somewhere else. Her eyes watered and it became difficult to keep them open. By the time she realized hounds were baying up above, the fire had all but burnt out. Then she heard voices on high shouting her name. A smoldering bush fell from the ceiling. Tammy dodged it, wondering if the voices calling for her were real. Remembering a story from the Bible about a burning bush. She wasn’t sure what to believe anymore—not even when a man who said he was Orville Knight dropped down next to her on a rope.

  If Janie had known her aunt had been found she might not of gone back into Bankhead that day and walked right through the front door of The Bird’s Nest with Crusoe in her arms. Every last table was full with the lunch crowd. Mostly miners. They stopped eating and watched the girl grab a newspaper off the rack. A few loose pages fluttered onto the floor. Janie bent to pick them up. She’d been biting her nails. Her heart went like a hummingbird’s wings. Finally she gave up, leaving the fallen pages, and turned to leave.

  Doing so, she glanced at the cash register. Behind it stood another waitress, behind her the corkboard. Where Tammy’s face had been now hung a drawing of Janie’s own face and the word MISSING written above it.

  A hand reached out and touched her.

  Somebody said, “It’s the one.”

  Somebody else got up from a table and moved toward her.

  Janie ran outside and into the road. The driver of a coal truck swerved to miss her. The truck flipped and smashed into the railing surrounding Big Connie Ward’s used-car lot. Chunks of coal scattered across the pavement. Janie’d dropped Crusoe. He’d broken apart. She picked up as much of him as she could—some coal mixed in—and used her dress like a basket. Everybody had come outside the restaurant to witness the commotion caused by the strange missing girl and the dirt doll they’d heard she toted. They called out for her to wait as she made for the woods.

  Back at the bluff Janie plastered newspapers up on the windows of the rusted-out vehicle she now called home. She tried keeping order, the newest hung last. This was, the banner said, the twenty-eighth day of August, 1958.

  Nearly a month her missing.

  Here’s What Didn’t Make the Paper

  1958

  Ricky Birdsong was in his garden when the patrol car pulled up. The garden was sorry with late-summer vegetables: purple Indian tomatoes, fat string beans, trucker corn. Ricky liked stripping off his shoes and going barefoot, crooked toes digging down into the cool turned dirt. His hip didn’t hurt near as much thataway. He heard the engine rattle off, the doors open then slam shut. He wasn’t stupid; he knew they’d come. He knew what he’d done was wrong; knew the moment Lyle Crews asked him to do it. So why? Jesus said it was because Ricky wanted to feel useful again. Jesus was always digging deep for reasons. All Ricky Birdsong could think about the moment the law showed up was whether Lee Malone would pick the vegetables before they turned. He wished he could just know. Ricky considered asking Jesus, but he was busy making toadfrog houses at the end of the row.

  When Sheriff Guthrie and Deputy Polk appeared at the side of the house, Ricky took off into the woods. He splashed down a nameless creek, stubbing his toes and bruising his feetbottoms. He hurdled dead logs like it was nothing at all and scrambled over algae-slickened ledges pouring clear cold water. On a good day Ricky could still move. All Birdsong men were athletes, folks said, because of Elberta Indian blood.

  His run ended at an old gristmill far down the nameless creek. Ricky’d stopped because he forgot for a second why he was running, then remembered and holed up in what was left of the mill. Doing so, he stirred loose a swarm of red wasps. By Doc Barfield’s count later that morning, Ricky was stung sixty-seventy-something times before the sheriff and the deputy pulled him out and dunked him in a pool below the spillway. Wasps lit them up too, and Ricky liked to drown them all. When they got back to the house Deputy Polk put Ricky in the patrol car while the sheriff began hunting the property for evidence.

  Aaron Guthrie didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. A body, a confession? Sheriff of Elberta County was an elected position and Aaron’s beginning qualification for the job was being able to chuck a football and have it land in the outstretched arms of whichever Conquistador was streaking wide-open toward the end zone. Over the years he’d learned some things about police work though. He noticed the busted bathroom door in Ricky Birdsong’s house, the flood mark on the hallway wall. The sink, he also noticed, looked backed up. He found a wrench in a closet then got down on his bad knees and opened up the pipe. Nasty water flushed out on him. He held his hand
underneath to catch whatever else might come with it.

  “I’ll be shit,” he said, when a peach pit landed in his outstretched palm.

  Deputy Polk was watching from the doorway. “That from a peach?”

  “Afraid so,” the sheriff said.

  “Want me to bring him in?”

  “I’ll talk to him,” the sheriff said. “Let’s get Ricky taken care of first.”

  On the way to Doc Barfield’s the sheriff licked wads of tobacco and stuck them on the worst wasp stings. “My pawpaw used to do this,” he said, pressing a wad onto the deputy’s fevered skin. “Us kids would poke a hornet’s nest and expect nothing to happen. Bunch of little fools, didn’t know better.” Doc Barfield gave all three men shots for the swelling. Ricky’s eyes drooped shut and he slept during the drive to the county jail.

  Wooten Ragsdale and Ren Treeborne were waiting out front.

  “Don’t fool with me now Woot,” the sheriff said. He could tell the men were drunk—looked like they’d been at it for a while.

  “We just want to see him,” Wooten said.

  Deputy Polk began helping Ricky Birdsong out of the patrol car. Wooten charged and hocked a wad of spit that landed in Ricky’s hair. The sheriff shoved Wooten, but he hardly budged. Ren grabbed his brother-in-law before he could swing at the law and dragged him toward his idling pickup truck.

  “Get the hell off me!” Wooten hollered. He got in the cab and beat the door panel with his bad hand till the plastic cracked. “Son of a bitch took my wife!”

  Time a paperman showed up, Ricky was locked in a cell. He’d sprawled out on the floor, cheek pressed against the cold concrete. The sheriff told the paperman all he could tell, crediting the arrest to anything but truth. Did it matter? After what Big Connie Ward told him he knew, the sheriff thought he had, in fact, suspected Ricky Birdsong all along. Made sense. Crime often came from affairs of the heart. The sheriff did tell the paperman about the peach pit he’d found at Ricky’s house—but off the record. Aaron Guthrie had held the position of Elberta County sheriff for thirty-something years because he knew what to tell, what not to, and when. No charges filed at this time. And no, they hadn’t found the missing girl with her aunt.

  After the altercation at the jail Ren and Wooten bought another bottle of whiskey from Delmar Rodriguez and drove around the county till dark. They wound up parked underneath the water tower. There wasn’t any chain-link fence keeping folks out—or at least discouraging them—so Ren and Wooten walked right up and climbed the steel ladder. The water tower was painted blue, not yet made to favor a gigantic peach. Blue as a bird’s egg, Ren thought, looking up at ELBERTA spelled in big block letters.

  The men sat on a metal-grating platform however-many-feet above the ground with their backs against the hollow tank. From there you could see Lee Malone’s house. Ren wondered if Lee knew they’d arrested Ricky yet. It was awful, but the thought occurred to him that maybe Ricky being arrested for kidnapping Tammy would distract folks from suspecting Lee had anything to do with Maybelle’s death. Ren knew Lee didn’t, knew he couldn’t … He’d read the letters and the songs Lee wrote to his momma when he cleaned out the cottage she rented in town. Words so pretty and true he’d cried. But Ren Treeborne also knew that when it came to questions like the ones surrounding Lee Malone and his momma’s relationship what one man knew mattered no more than a flea on an elephant.

  “Look there,” Wooten said, gesturing toward town.

  Ren passed the bottle. “That’s all of it.”

  Wooten tipped the bottle to be sure. He handed it back to Ren, who staggered to his feet and chucked the bottle far as he could then unzipped his blue jeans and started pissing.

  “They ought to of played you at quarterback.”

  “Too big and slow,” Ren said, shaking hisself dry.

  “Shake it more than twice you’re playing with yourself,” Wooten said, and laughed till he violently hiccupped. “Them was the days really. Boys in my class looked up to y’all seniors. Not a care in this fucking goddamn world did we?”

  “We got old.”

  “Shit,” Wooten said. He craned his head to look up the water tower’s tank. “I wanted a kid, you know.”

  Ren sat down by his brother-in-law. “I know.”

  “They’ll find Sister.”

  “I hope so,” Ren said.

  The men went silent. Then Wooten said, “I’ll kill him.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “I will,” Wooten said. “I’ll kill Ricky Birdsong’s fool ass myself. And if he laid a hand on Sister I’ll kill him twice.”

  After a while Wooten passed out and slumped against Ren. When he stirred in fitful rest his bad hand flopped onto Ren’s lap. Ren picked it up to move it. Skin cool and soft as silk. He never had seen so much blood coming out of such a big body as he did the day Wooten’s hand got ruined. Tammy had threatened to kill Doc Barfield if he didn’t save his life. They were all of them at the hospital: Daddy, Momma, Luth, Tam, Nita. How pitiful, Ren thought, looking back, something so awful needed to get them together. He could still remember how Wooten looked white as toilet paper as he lay in bed with somebody else’s blood pumping into his body. Up on the water tower, Ren petted Wooten’s bad hand. He turned it over and touched the scars to his cheek. Then he kissed it. His brother-in-law did not stir. The regrown underskin was smooth as face cream. They told that when the band saw caught bone it pulled Wooten farther into the machine. The blade ran up his wrist as if he was cake. Had the motor not overheated and thrown the breakers Wooten might of lost his entire arm. Ren tried imagining what it must of felt like being yanked into a machine—the force, the shock, that brief and pure instant when Wooten realized what’d happened, but nothing yet hurt. Like being held inside God’s mouth. Then the flood of pain. Ren laughed and kissed his brother-in-law’s hand again. It wasn’t kissing like he kissed Nita, or any other woman. He kissed Wooten’s bad hand everwhichaway he could think to kiss it, and doing so thrilled him to the bone, till all sudden Wooten snapped awake and jerked the beautiful thing away from Ren.

  “You was asleep.”

  Wooten hiccupped. The bad hand nestled in the good one like a caught bird. “We ought to get home,” he said. “Tammy needs me.”

  Ren let the pickup roll downhill. He’d forgotten to switch on the headlights, so he missed the turn and ran through a cattle fence. They stopped and tore loose barbed wire and a busted post from the undercarriage. The tires looked alright. They got back onto the two-track and at its end turned onto the road. Up ahead was Lee Malone’s place.

  “Pull in yonder.”

  Ren did then asked, “What for?”

  Wooten fell out of the truck and weaved across the yard like the ball player he’d once been, stumbling in holes Buckshot had dug sniffing out armadillos and moles. He disappeared around the house. Lee’s vehicle wasn’t there. All the lights were off. Ren sat half-in-half-out of the cab, wondering what to do. He hissed Wooten’s name. Then he heard glass breaking and saw Wooten sprinting around the house. He jumped in the cab and slapped the dashboard, saying, “Hurry, gogogogo!”

  Ren reversed out then shot down the road, fishtailing a little till the tires caught. He checked the rearview mirror and shifted into a lower gear. “Woot, you didn’t hurt nothing back there did you?”

  “Not no more than that nigger’s hurt,” Wooten said.

  They cut through the square, crossed Water Avenue, thundered across De Soto Bridge. Reflective tape sparkled on construction barrels, like jewels on the riverbed. When they reached the trailer it dawned on both men then that Tammy was staying at The Seven with Nita—not out here where she’d been kidnapped from. Doc Barfield and the sheriff’s idea. It was late. Wooten got out and went inside to sleep the remainder of the night.

  Before going to the dam Ren drove past Lee Malone’s house again. He slowed down. The old man’s truck still wasn’t there. He drove on, hoping he was the only one paying mind to Lee’s whereabouts that nig
ht.

  Earlier, Lee Malone had driven over at Ricky Birdsong’s place. He knew better than to come here. He parked where nobody could see his truck from the road and took a hammer out from underneath the seat then whistled for Buckshot to follow.

  The front door was unlocked. Lee found a flimsy butterknife in a kitchen drawer. Out back he leaned into the deep freezer and began knocking loose bloody ice and stiff clothes yet frozen to the bottom. He chucked it all in a sorry creek out back. Buckshot tried fishing out a piece of fabric and Lee called him off. They walked back through the garden. Lee resisted picking vegetables that needed picking, worried somebody would notice, though he doubted the sheriff or the deputy were that attentive.

  He checked the boy’s bedroom to see if there was anything else that needed hiding or disposing of. On a shelf were all Ricky’s football trophies and plaques. Lee picked up one: HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL PLAYER OF THE YEAR, 1948. Ran for nearly three thousand yards. They put Ricky’s picture in the Birmingham paper. Debra Birdsong never could stand the sight of Lee Malone, but he got ahold of a copy of that newspaper anyhow and, with Maybelle’s help, delivered it to the Birdsongs’ house. Debra had Ricky carry her down at The Fencepost the next morning so she could show it off to all the big-talkers and bullshitters and used-to-bes.

  He peeked in the bathroom where Ricky had tried drowning hisself a month ago now. On the floor he saw a wrench and a length of pipe removed from under the sink. His brain did that awkward churning of memory till it recalled the peach pit Ricky had swallowed and he’d fished out of the boy’s throat. The sheriff had surely found it there in the drain, which meant he’d surely want to talk to Lee Malone.