by Farris, John
But it hadn’t been Virgil who was responsible for Buster Dockins’s death....
Cheerio. Cheerio. CheercheercheerCHEERRRRRR-IIIIII-OOOOOOOO.
Layne heard the piping tune again. Oak Hill was well lighted, he could see up the street as far as the two-story New Orleans-style house where Glenda Battle, his on-again, off-again girlfriend during high school, had lived. But he didn’t see the ice-cream truck coming, and he didn’t hear the familiar tune again. The new Cheer-i-o entrepreneur, possibly as hapless as Buster had been, must have given up for the night.
He looked from the street to the nearly full moon overhead, and suddenly felt very tired. He wondered why he had lingered on the porch for a glimpse of a past he really didn’t care that much about. Cheer-i-o Ice Cream wouldn’t be the same without Buster to dispense it. Buster’s entertainment value had been just as important as the frozen treat.
He let himself into the house, paused in the kitchen to draw a glass of water and rinse his mouth, popped a Cloret to chase any residual beer taint (Angela was a teetotaler), then went upstairs, where he heard voices from MaryLyn’s room.
She was having a sleep-over. Layne knocked discreetly, then opened the door to sounds of girls rustling deeper into the sheets and pretending they’d been asleep for hours. The light from the upper hall fell across twin beds and the eight-year-old girls spending the night with his daughter. He felt a certain tension at his presence, as if he’d interrupted an intense and weighty discussion. What did eight-year-olds gossip about, anyway? Layne smiled and took a turn around the room, strewn with toys and clothing. He lowered the level of the air-conditioner.
When he closed MaryLyn’s door behind him he encountered five-year-old Toby in the hall, rubbing his eyes. He had a Paddington Bear in one arm.
“Sorry if I woke you up,” Layne said, giving him a kiss and guiding him back to his own room. Toby’s right hand was clenched. Layne lifted him into bed and touched the boy’s small fist.
“What’ve you got there?”
Toby opened his hand on a sweaty dime.
“For the ice-cream man. They said I could go, too, if I had my own money.”
“Who said?”
“MaryLyn and Aggie Burke.”
“Nobody’s going anywhere tonight, Toby. And you can’t buy ice cream for a dime anywhere. Those were the good old days, when I was your—”
“Can too! It’s what Aggie said. You can get a big drumstick with chocolate and nuts, and you can get—”
“Whoa, son, I don’t want to argue with you. It’s time to close your eyes and—”
“But I’ll miss him, Dad!”
“I’ll take you and MaryLyn for ice cream tomorrow after supper. Baskin-Robbins, how’s that sound?”
“No,” Toby said, with that stubborn bunching of the chin that was purely Angela. “I want to get ice cream from the man in the truck! ’Cause it’s the best ice cream in the world! Aggie says—”
“I don’t care what Aggie says. Good night, slugger, and don’t get out of bed again.”
Angela rolled over against him without opening her eyes when he got into their bed.
“How was your night out with the boys?”
“It was just Toot Embry. We had a few at the Cozy. Toot had a lot on his—he wanted to—I’m not sure what he wanted. Man’s not in the best shape I’ve ever seen him.” Angela snuggled her way beneath her husband and put her long legs around his waist. She was naked.
“Let’s play horsey,” she said.
—
The telephone woke Layne from a sound and satisfying sleep at ten past four. Angela was snoring on her back, but softly.
“Layne? Papa John. Can you get yourself over to my house right now?”
“Uh—sure. What’s—”
“It’s Toot,” Papa John said. “And I don’t think you’re a-gonna believe this.”
—
There was a hint of rosiness in the east and a lot of bird chatter in the trees when Papa John, at the wheel of his lovingly preserved ’62 Coupe de Ville, pulled off onto the shoulder of the paved drive that circled through Flat Shoals Park. Layne, in the pickup, stopped behind him. Papa John and his oldest son Bart, who played football at the local junior college, got out of the maroon Cadillac. Bart was almost as big through the shoulders as his bearded father. He had a six-cell flashlight in one hand.
“You tell him, Bart,” Papa John said.
“Well, I was driving Mr. Embry home from the Cozy in Papa’s car, and he was kind of lyin’ down in the backseat? Had the hiccups, so he didn’t say much until we got close to the park, and then he says to me pull over pretty quick because he needs to, uh, take a crap real bad? So I parked, right about where the Caddy is now. Had to help him out of the backseat, but once he was on his feet, he did okay. Tells me wait, and he goes weaving off into that big clump of dogwood trees yonder.” Bart aimed his flashlight. The trees were about sixty feet from the loop road. “It was real quiet. I hear him breathing pretty hard, but he always sounds like that. And I hear him takin’ his pants down. Then after a little while he hollers see if there’s any toilet paper in Papa’s car. I knew there was a box of Kleenex stashed in the front seat there, so I get me a handful and go on up the path to those trees. I couldn’t hear him breathing, fact is didn’t hear ’nother peep out of him. And when I get there, well, his clothes is on the ground, not scattered, just in a heap—pants, jacket, shoes. Must’ve been pert near everything, including those things you wear to hold your socks up—”
“Garters,” Papa John said.
“Yeh, well, like I’m sayin’, it was ever stitch he had on. But Mr. Embry, he’s gone. There was just some slimy stuff on the ground. Only it wasn’t—you know, it didn’t have no odor? Just looked shiny and slimy there in the light.”
“What color?” Layne asked.
“Oh, no color, actually. Like vanilla ice cream that’s melted, come to think about it.”
“Did you try to find Toot?”
“Yes, sir, I tramped around and hollered some, but I couldn’t raise him. Wherever it was he went, naked like that, he must’ve took off like a jackrabbit with an auger up its butt. I did see somebody else, though. Just for a second? Some old coot with a beard to his waist, like the hillbillies in those postcards they sell to tourists at Rock City or up there in Dollywood. Big mother. Kind of crazy eyes. I ain't afraid of nobody much but, you know, I wasn’t all that anxious to get close to him. Just had him in the high beam for a second, then he lit out. All I really seen was those eyes and a kick off of some kind of flashy belt buckle.”
Papa John pulled at his own beard. “So far he’s described Virg Constable, just the way he was looking last I laid eyes on him.”
“Good Lord. Virg is in that poor a shape? What do you suppose he was doing around here so late?”
“There ain’t no telling.”
“And what could’ve happened to Toot?”
“He surely ain’t showed up no place we might expect him to.”
Layne said, “It’ll be light in another twenty minutes. If Toot’s not playing some kind of game, then we ought to notify the police so they can get a good search under way.”
“Layne—I just don’t think we’re a-gonna find the son of a bitch.”
“Why? Where could he go, John? Drunk and buck-naked, something probably spooked him and he ran off, fell down, knocked himself cold. Yeh, we’ll find him.” But there was a tightness close to pain in his chest. A kind of panic. “Send Bart to call the cops, you and me’ll get to looking.”
“All right, partner. Reckon there’s nothing else we can do.”
—
Tri-State Auto and Household Salvage occupied five-plus acres of a narrow valley out on Thorn Town Road a few miles from the Georgia state line.
The man on duty was one of those thick-set thuggish rednecks who look old from wear and tear before they’re thirty. This one was dressed in overalls and a dirty Allis-Chalmers cap. He had no neck beneath a beard as to
ugh and wild as boar bristle. Most of his upper front teeth were gone. His eyes were yellow as piss. His wife or girlfriend was typical of her breed: scrawny, freckled, tattooed, reeking of tobacco. She packed a pistol in a shoulder holster. She did the talking. The man grinned hostilely.
“What would you want to be a-seein’ him for?”
“We grew up together. I’m lately back in town, thought I’d look old Virg up.”
“What would be your name?”
“Layne Bannixter.”
“Well,” the woman said, “he mought be around here, again he mought not.”
“You see, it all depends,” the man said with his wide, spacy grin.
“If he is here, though, maybe you could let him know, and then maybe he’ll want to see me.”
The jimmy-jawed woman grimaced. There was a biting fly on her faded pink tank top, and she slapped it away. She had the tits of an eleven-year-old child.
“Don’t want to be tramping all the way back up that hill, just to see if old Virg is in. No good hollering, neither, he can’t hear much. They done carved his left ear half off at Brushy Mountain, did a fair amount of damage to the eardrum while they’s at it.”
“I heard he got even,” the man said. “Old Virg always gets even. That how he was, when he was a younger?”
“That’s how he was,” Layne agreed.
“Well, go on, then,” the woman said. “Vaughn, what you done with that old dog?”
“Shit, she’s locked up somewheres. She ain’t no good for nothing nohow, three of her damn pups done died already ’cause she ain’t got the moxie to nurse ’em. I mean, you talk about worthless.”
A truck driver sounded his horn behind Layne. The man dragged one of the high rusted wire gates across the clay yard and motioned Layne inside.
“You just bear left up the hill, by and by you’ll come to that shack of Virg’s.”
“Obliged,” Layne said, and he walked in the heat and dust through the hilly junkyard, shadowless at noon. The yard had always been there, even when he was a boy. Numerous owners, several of whom had been imprisoned for running chop shops. Many autos had been so thoroughly wrecked as to be unidentifiable. There were piles of twisted scrap twelve to fifteen feet high. Rorshach blots in metal. Bats, dragons, ogres. Overhead, the fullness of clouds with underbellies of cool rain. From another part of the valley he heard a circular saw whine, then quit with the lunchtime whistle.
The door of the shack, when he came to it, was standing open. Layne didn’t venture inside.
“Virg? Virg Constable? It’s Layne Bannixter! Like to talk to you a minute!”
He looked at a couple of hawks circling below the clouds. He waited. He heard a grunt from behind the shack.
“Figured as how you mought be ’round one of these days. Come on back while I get my bath.”
Just hearing his voice raised Layne’s pulse, gave him that familiar tight feeling around the heart. He hadn’t been the only boy in the neighborhood who had devoted a lot of time to schemes for avoiding Virgil Constable. Only Papa John, Virg’s size and probably quicker, appeared never to be afraid of him. Virgil was always looking for a victim among the smaller, younger boys. He didn’t beat up on them; a little pain surreptitiously applied, a lot of intimidation, that was Virgil’s style.
There was a ’58 Harley-Davidson Panhead with orange and red flames painted on the dented tank parked beneath the overhang of the tarpaper roof. Layne didn’t immediately recognize the man squatting naked on bare ground, finishing a bowel movement. The tip of his scraggly beard was past his navel and the glans of his penis almost dragged the red ground. That part of him, at least, was familiar: he’d flaunted his dick often when they were kids. Familiar, too, were the high, perfectly flat shoulders. The rest of Virg’s body looked as neglected as a corpse on a battlefield. He had scars and permanent lumps and of course the crude jail-house tattoos that identified him as the hardcase he’d always fancied himself to be.
“You will excuse me if I don’t get up,” he said, pushing out his lips in a grin. Two yellow buckteeth protruded like Goofy’s in the Disney cartoons. Layne looked away until Virg grunted one last time, then rose and walked away from his pile and the flies buzzing around it and climbed into a sawed-down whiskey barrel he used as a bathtub. There was a spigot that came out of the ground, and streaks of green slime on the barrel staves. Layne wondered how often he changed the water in the barrel.
“Well now,” Virg said, sitting back with his knees up, shading his eyes in the sun. “Looks like you put some size on you since I seen you last. Been to the school of hard knocks, Mr. Bannixter?”
“There was a war some of us were in. The last fifteen years I spent building dams or bridges in places you can’t locate on too many maps.”
“Brings you back to the home place?” Virg turned his head sharply to hear the answer with his unmutilated ear.
“I wanted a comfortable, dull life. So far I’m not getting it.”
Virg slid down until his head was covered, came up with his hair plastered on either side of his bearded cheeks, a bald spot visible on his crown.
“Would I be knowing what you mean by that?”
“You might. Three—now four of us, Virg. Gone without a trace. But you were there last night. You saw what happened to Toot Embry.”
“That so?” Virg was gripped by a spasm of coughing. He brought up something brown and vile-looking, which he spat over the side of the barrel. Even the flies wouldn’t touch it.
“What were you doing in Flat Shoals Park that long after midnight?”
Virg’s eyes got very small. “You got a right to be asking me a question like that?”
“What I’m hoping for is some cooperation.”
“Maybe you’re just a little bit scared.”
“No maybe about it. Were you in the park last night, Virg?”
“There’s this little girl I meet there sometimes. But last night she couldn’t make it.”
“What about Toot?”
“I seen him. Then I didn’t see him. I reckon it happens that quick.” More coughing brought a deep flush to his cheeks.
“What happens?”
“That’s the part I ain’t figured out. So he’s gone? There ain’t no trace of him, like the others?” Layne nodded, watching him carefully. Virg seemed perplexed but not unhappy. Nor threatened. “How many’s that leave, of the West End Bunch? You and me and Papa John? What was the name of the freckled boy? Toes turned in like a girl’s?”
“Kent Bafler. Has a law practice in Tullahoma. I guess he’s all right, I don’t know.”
“Used to corn-hole him. Yeah, I done his sister and I done him like a girl, too. He never dared say a word about it.”
Layne suppressed his revulsion. Sweat was running down one cheek, but his heart was icy. He wanted to drag Virg out of the tub by his beard and whack his head repeatedly against the whiskey barrel.
“What did you mean when you said, ‘It happens that quick’? What did you see last night, Virg?”
Virg stuck a little finger into one ear. It came out black as oil. He studied the tip of the finger and said, “Maybe you ought to consider going off again and build a dam in a jungle somewheres. You’d be safer than you are here, guarantee. What it is, you see, he can’t get to me, and he knows it. Couple nights I seen him, parked down there by the fence, he just looked at me, what’s the word? Flustrated. ’Cause I never did get married and don’t have no kids, although I always was a hard dog to keep under the porch.” Virg paused, grinning, waiting for Layne to get it. “But you’re married, ain’t you, and there’s kids?”
It was difficult for Layne to speak. “Two. Virg, for God’s sake—”
“And all the others, they had kids galore. Especially old Papa John, the horny bastard. Now I’m not saying I understand the whole thing, although I got a pretty fair idea why he’s back, even if I don’t know how—”
“Who the hell are you talking—”
“Buster Do
ckins, the Cheer-i-o Ice Cream man! No, sir, I ain’t crazy one bit. He’s back. And he ain’t gonna be satisfied until all of you that give him fits is dead and in your own graves.”
Layne stared at him for several seconds, then flinched when Virgil splashed dirty water on him.
“Snap out of it, son. You’re safe until he shows up at your place. Last night he must’ve drove through the park and that’s ail she wrote, far as Toot Embry was concerned.”
“No—Bart Tredway—he was with Toot, but he didn’t hear or see—”
“Bart Tredway never had no part in it, he wasn’t borned yet. Or maybe he just couldn’t see what’s plain to our eyes. But sooner or later Buster’ll come around to collect Bart’s daddy. Because old John was sure enough there the day the truck rolled down the hill and run Buster over. Broke his neck, remember?”
“Having a good time at my expense, Virg? You’re still the biggest bastard I ever met in my life.”
“Fighting words. ’Cept I don’t care enough about your body and soul to take offense. If you ain’t seen the Cheer-i-o truck yet, maybe you still got time. Word of advice. Pack up your kids and get yourselves out of town. Do it today.”
“Why? What is it about the kids—our kids—”
“I ain’t sure. It could have to do with the ice cream Buster sells. No use to ask me any more, that’s all I can tell you.”