Soil

by Jamie Kornegay

  Shoals followed the sound of the storm door slam and burst through it. He just made out Mize in the glow of the half-clouded moon, hauling ass over the hill into the pasture, and cried after him, “You’re gonna rot like your granddaddy, Mize!”

  His instinct for pursuit was not on foot but astride his Mustang. He had complete faith in this beast and spun it through the backyard, up the hill at an angle, and whipped it back into the pasture, bucking over the terrain like a hell-bent steed or some spastic, tricked-out barrio lowrider. The bouncing headlights spotted the man in flight on the next ridge. Shoals found the path of least resistance and eased up, careful not to bottom out or rip the fender off. He made it over the next hill and found a level stretch, caught some speed and shrunk the distance. Mize was barreling for the tree line. The Boss hit a soft patch at the soggy bottom and fishtailed. Shoals let off before it bogged down. No sense fighting the mud. The vehicle wouldn’t make it into the woods anyway, but it put him back within fair reach. Shoals snatched a big flashlight from under the seat and yanked Luther up by the strap, fed it a few shells, and slung it over his back. He inspected his side, which had begun to itch and throb, and raced into the trees, trying to land his man before he hit the river.

  44

  His first night back, Jacob insisted that his dad would be home and they would take his new sleeping bag into the park and camp under the jungle gym. But Jay never showed. Sandy made a concession and let Jacob set up his pup tent in the living room. She spent half the night packing their clothes and personal things, stacking everything in the foyer, ready to load the trunk and backseat of the car in the morning. The other half of the night she spent at the window, watching for her husband or whomever else might show up and further disrupt their lives. At 4:00 A.M. she turned off the lights and sat on the couch and listened to Jacob snoring inside the tent, holding the canister of pepper spray in one hand and her cell phone in the other.

  The phone rang a little before eight. It was Shoals. She rejected the call and blocked his number. She knew it was time to go.

  She crawled in the tent and tickled Jacob awake. “Wake up, little camper. We’re going on an adventure!”

  “Where?”

  “Don’t you wanna know,” she teased him.

  She was convinced Jay wouldn’t show and loaded the car with their clothes and essentials. They would leave most of it behind, she decided, in order to make a clean start. Anyway, there was no one left to help her move the heavy furniture.

  She handed Jacob an empty cardboard box and told him to fill it with any personal effects he wanted to keep. He bargained with her to take all of his toys, but she said they were sticking to the one-box plan. He filled it easily with video games and toy cars and robots and stuffed animals, along with a plastic bag containing a few buttons and rusty coins. “Dad gave them to me,” he told her. “He found them in the dirt down in his field. We can’t spend the money though.”

  She opened the bag and dumped the coins into her hand. They were just small ancient currency with an engraving of a Native American in headdress. A few faded fancy buttons with vaguely militaristic insignias. One of the smaller pieces looked like a scorched lump of copper or rusted metal, filigreed with some design she had to scrub clean with her fingernails to read. Levi Strauss & Co.

  “I found that in Dad’s compost,” Jacob said.

  “It looks like a button off a pair of blue jeans.”

  “I know, I want it.”

  “Why would you want a filthy button?”

  “To remember Dad.”

  Useless ornaments and unspendable money. She couldn’t begrudge her son this pitiful tribute. She put the objects back in the bag and sealed it and tossed it in with the rest of his junk, which she agreed to load into a larger box.

  At the bottom of his things she found a sheaf of papers, more of Jay’s stuff. Here were all his farm diagrams and notes, including the map of his proposed underground complex.

  “Dad asked me to keep that for him,” Jacob said.

  Disconcerted, she tossed the packet back into the box. Was he getting rid of it for good or just passing it along to their son like some congenital obsession?

  “Mom,” Jacob said. “Where are we going?”

  “We’re moving.”

  “Is Dad coming with us?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He still has a lot of work to do at the farm.”

  “Don’t tell Dad,” Jacob said, “but I don’t think I want to be a farmer when I grow up. It’s too much work.”

  They’d left by lunch, carrying their things in one giant load. There was barely enough room to ride in the Maxima, and they looked comical, all crushed and contorted against boxes and bags and bins of their possessions, but it was only a ten-minute drive across town to her father’s house.

  Sandy filled her old room with their things. She didn’t want to impose on her father when he returned. It was a spacious house, but it could fill up quickly, especially if they had to make room for a day nurse to come in and help with his recovery.

  Sandy spent the afternoon tidying, and by early evening she and Jacob were set up comfortably. They ordered delivery pizza for dinner, which they ate in her father’s bed, snickering, sometimes laughing outright at a bloopers-and-pranks show on television. It was their first easy moment since Jacob had returned from the farm.

  After the show, she left Jacob in bed while she took a shower. She returned fifteen minutes later in pajamas, her spritely hairdo already dried, and Jacob said the hospital had called. “It sounded like an emergency,” he said.

  She called the number back but the line was busy. She called the front desk and got lost in reroute. Her heart sagged and seemed to pull free of its tether, just hanging miserable down there in her chest. She pulled on sweats and then decided on something less casual. She put Jacob in a pullover and jeans, deaf to his childish inquiries. She couldn’t breathe or find the words to explain where they were going.

  She didn’t remember the drive to the hospital. It was someone else driving, some transition between the real Sandy and the person who had briefly mistaken her life for something tolerable.

  At the hospital they walked the same sterile, fluorescent-lit maze of halls they’d walked a hundred times already, the passages mostly empty at this hour, only a grim, hopeless few left in waiting rooms they seemed unlikely to leave anytime soon, and down the oldest, most haunted corridors of the hospital with its outdated fixtures and depressing signage that hinted at worse possibilities (“Radioactive Medicine”), and they endured the same overly long wait for the aged elevator to groan and hoist them up to the third floor, where the same haggard faces at the nurses’ station and the same sharp whiff of antiseptic would greet them. No matter what was happening, why ever they had been called, she believed this would be the last time they’d walk this route.

  The halls were narrow here, the rooms on every side dark, until it seemed she was walking a whip-thin line of white. The linoleum, recently mopped, shone crystalline, and every clip-clopping step she took across it shouted back in amplified echo. She kicked off her shoes, left them in the hall, and glided over the floor as if over thin ice. She kept a hand on Jacob behind her, their march a quiet escape, as if they were trying to achieve an end without notice, trying to keep from wandering off into the darkness.

  The door to her father’s room was closed. She put her hand to the brushed metal handle, paused, reached for a squirt of sanitizing foam from the pump on the wall. One for Jacob too. The patient’s chart was missing from the clear acrylic sleeve on the door. Maybe the doctor had it inside. Was he recording the patient’s miraculous improvement or fulfilling the do-not-resuscitate request?

  Crossing the threshold meant a new life for them. Nothing would ever be the same. She bowed her head, said a quick word of prayer. She knocked once, perfunctorily, then pushed open the door. There were peop
le within, their backs turned, and she eased out, closing the door.

  She looked down at Jacob. “Maybe you should stay here for just a minute. Just let me find out what’s going on.”

  He took her hand. “It’s okay, Mom,” said her little man. “I’m not afraid.”

  45

  The rain passed and moisture fell from the trees, pelting the underbrush like a search party in the woods. Jay burrowed under an old wet stump and raked damp leaves and branches over himself for added cover. Chances were good he could wait out Shoals until morning, but if the deputy’s searchlight found him tucked under here, it was over. Straight to jail, with good reason.

  Life would never be the same. He’d fired at an officer of the law with the weapon of another man, a man whose disappearance the deputy had come to investigate, the same man he’d fed, just an hour ago, to an alligator upriver. Surrender was not an option, but how far would he go to ensure his escape?

  He’d lost the gun somewhere, probably dropped it back at the house for fear of using it again. If he wanted to take Shoals, it would have to be by bare-handed challenge, against whatever arsenal the deputy carried on his person. A suicide mission.

  If he could just get to the river, he might jump in and ride it down, all the way to the Gulf. What did he have to lose? His body was prepared for any deprivation. He felt the river close by and worked up the courage to rise and peek around. He saw a beam of light swinging to the south, the deputy off on a dead trail. This was his chance. He stood quietly and took swift rolling steps over rain-muffled leaves. The searchlight moon shone down on him in the clearing, and it was hardly a surprise when the first shot came like cannon fire over his shoulder. He sprinted ahead, feeling his way through the maze of gulleys and fallen limbs, his body exerting a foreign will and effort.

  He came to the riverside, where the brush was thick and concealing, and down the bank he found the familiar cleft torn out by the river. He kicked off his boots but didn’t bother removing his clothes, just slithered down into the mud, flat on his back until he was submerged. In the dark, he would be impossible to find unless Shoals climbed down and stepped on him, but by now he was so adept at maneuvering this formidable terrain he believed he could wrestle the athletic deputy to advantage if necessary.

  Shoals came along not far behind and stalked around the edge of the gulley, catching his breath. “Where’d you get off to, Mize?” he cried, puffs of vapor billowing from his exhalation.

  The flashlight beam played over the pit floor, down the bank, and all along the water’s edge. Jay could hear him gently cursing above.

  “I got those bloody drawers from your washroom, Mize,” he yelled, unaware his perp was just below, not twenty feet away. “Now you want to tell me just what in the hell is going on?”

  The wallow was soft from the rain, and Jay wriggled deeper until his entire body lay buried up to his lips, just a ripple in the mud, sucking air with the quiet, patient gasps of a beached fish.

  “What happened to Leavenger? I bet you know a thing or two about this Boyers fella too. Best to start talking, it’ll go that much easier for you.”

  Jay knew the deputy was telling the truth about the bloodstained underwear. He could admit that mistake, but it also confirmed every suspicion he’d ever had about the local law. It didn’t matter what had happened in the woods or in the field, they would invent their own story. Even as he lay there lamenting the farm and that his family would worry about him in the coming days, he felt a peculiar satisfaction that he’d been right all along. He wasn’t crazy or paranoid. It was the world, with all its lazy presumptions and cockeyed conclusions, that had gone insane. Was there a place in this world anymore for a reasonable man and his family?

  “Come out, you little chickenshit!” the deputy hollered toward the river. “You can’t get away so easy, Mize. You owe it to me to put up a fight.”

  Jay guessed the deputy wouldn’t come down to the wallow for fear of getting his jeans dirty. At some point he would lose interest and venture off, and that’s when Jay would make his getaway.

  “Okay, then, let me confess something to you,” the deputy called. “It’s over for me, all right? They’re done with me. You happy? They’re shipping my ass off in the morning. This is my last chance to be a hero.”

  Jay waited to learn if this might be his way out. Was Shoals suggesting a truce? A collaboration? Or was this one of his tricks?

  “Hell, I’ll let you shoot me,” Shoals said. “Just make it count. I can’t go out like a chump. It’s gotta be a fireball, Mize, you got me?”

  Either Shoals was coming apart or he was a good actor. It was hard to tell without looking the man in his eyes.

  Jay heard a scratch of leaves and a cough in the distance and thought Shoals had wandered off. He waited a few minutes and was preparing to stand up when he heard whimpering above him. It sounded like the deputy sitting in the leaves, mumbling to himself quietly.

  Finally he called out to Jay, “I’m not gonna lie to you, Mize, I’m scared to die. But hell, I’m almost scared to go on living at this point. How do you like that? I guess you feel pretty superior now.”

  The deputy sounded sincere, as if he might be speaking aloud to himself. “Come on, man. You already gut-shot me. Just finish the job.”

  “I don’t have a gun!” Jay cried out, inexplicably. The walls of the pit distorted his cry. His voice bent and echoed, and Shoals jerked his head from side to side, trying to pinpoint the source.

  “Where the hell are you?”

  Jay said nothing, just clinched his body, waiting for the cheap shot.

  “Here! Take mine!”

  The light beam tracked across the mud without finding Jay. He heard the clank and splat of the .44 Magnum as it landed an arm’s length away.

  “That’s my daddy’s gun,” Shoals said. “No one will believe I gave it freely. And if you ever get caught, you better tell them I put up a hell of a fight.”

  There was a long quiet spell, several minutes before Shoals spoke again.

  “Not gonna do it, huh?” He had a bit of the swagger back in his voice. “I didn’t think you had the stuff. I guess you’d rather spend the rest of your life in your grandpappy’s old cell. That’s fine. Well let me tell you a little story you can think about while you’re jerking your chain down there on Parchman farm.”

  He was up and scuffing through the leaves again and then he stopped. His voice came at Jay direct, as though he’d pinpointed his buried figure there in the slough.

  “The other night I get a phone call around midnight. A pretty little thing who lives down by the ballpark, says she has a prowler in her basement. Her husband is too much of a sad sack to deal with it so she asks can I come see to it. I show up, she lets me in, takes me down to the cellar. Well, of course, there’s nobody down there, and she turns to me and says, ‘How bout you investigate this, Danny,’ and wouldn’t you know it, she whips off her pajama pants.”

  He’s just trying to flush me out, Jay kept reminding himself. Trying to bring me to light and put a bullet between my eyes.

  “It was a trap, see? The best kind of trap. The kind you don’t mind falling into again and again.”

  The deputy circled and waited for a sign that he was making inroads.

  “I’m generally the one laying the trap, but now she’s laid one for me. And, buddy, lemme tell ya, it was one hell of a lay.”

  It sounded like the deputy was down there with him, his stale tequila pant and sweaty aftershave just inches away.

  “I don’t guess I need to give you all the fine details. We’ve been to the same place, done similar things. She said I was better at it, but that’s neither here nor there. All to say, we’re a lot alike, you and me.”

  Jay slowed his breathing and tried to achieve equanimity, to purge the anger. These were only tricks.

  “You ever slurp fresh oyste
rs, Mize?” Shoals said. “You gotta work to get that shell open. Buddy, when you do, it’s like wetting your tongue in the ocean after you done walked across the desert. Man, I can still taste her on my lips.”

  The deputy inhaled deeply, dramatic and satisfied. “Mmm, I can smell her too. Like a ripe muskmelon still warm from the field. You know what that’s like, don’t you, Mize? Well, maybe not.”

  It was difficult to keep from shooting him, but Jay rationalized it. Does a man deserve to die for wanting to love a good woman? If so, then the whole world deserved its apocalypse.

  “Sweet Sandy loves the candy. That was our little saying.”

  And yet there was a spark of vulgar truth in this confession that lit Jay’s fuse.

  “Oh, and don’t worry about Jacob. I’ll take him under my wing while you’re gone, teach him all the things you were too busy to teach him. Like baseball and hunting, all the things boys love to do. And when it comes time, I’ll show him how to be a man.”

  Jay bolted up and reached for the Magnum, his muddy fingers fumbling the hammer. Shoals gave a startled yelp and dropped his flashlight, and before Jay could get off a shot, there came a thunder and flare off the ridge. His hand lit up with hot metal, and he felt the sensation of angry yellow jackets swarming his arms and neck, the earth’s sucking gasp beneath him. The ground splayed open like whiplashed skin, and he fell through the cut, sliding backward and upside down into shallow water. Mud cascaded over him, driving him into the black river, and as much as he wanted to resist it, to fight and to save himself, he knew to just let it take him, that the river and the earth would decide.

  The young farmer found himself at last in the middle of the river. The water was so cold it clenched him to the bone, and when he gasped he sucked in the whole world. His senses tuned to everything around him—the sound of hurtling water, the wet taste of a wild fermented land, the white splatter of a million stars above him, and the heavens in splendid turmoil. He’d never seen it from here, spreading out in all directions, never-ending, capable of pushing him all the way to the Gulf and from there wherever after. The flood had not strangled this river but expanded it, pushed against the shores, tearing into the land to make a wider path, and now it ran with new purpose.