Ain't Nobody Nobody

by Heather Harper Ellett

  “Not as good as you.” She hugged him. “Surprised the hogs didn’t get all your melon.”

  “Put out some antifreeze…sweeter than sugar.” He winked at her.

  “Squirrels will eat it though.”

  But he didn’t respond. He just rapped his knuckles on a watermelon the size of two babies. “Sweet this year.”

  She knocked on it too, and it answered with a nice hollow thud. “You see Bradley Polk come by here?”

  From his truck, Mr. Boudreaux could see one of the three roads that fed into their stretch of woods, the way Bradley drove in from town. He was practically her doorman.

  “Most days,” he said. “Bradley Polk in and out most days.”

  “Most days?”

  “He still work for you, don’t he?”

  “Just Wednesdays and Saturdays,” Birdie said.

  He shook his head, disagreeing. “I seen him every day this week.”

  “You sure about that?” Birdie shaded her eyes with her hand and watched his face. “Bradley Polk’s going into the woods every day?”

  “Every day. Listen, these hard as a rock, but give ‘em a few days…it’ll be candy.” He rapped a cantaloupe. It was the size of a bowling ball and sounded like a door knock. He looked at her curiously. “You married yet?”

  “I’m seventeen, Mr. Boudreaux!”

  “You late, angel! Bethard married me when she fifteen!” Fireworks of wrinkles exploded across his face. God, she loved Mr. Boudreaux.

  “You got all that land to think about,” he said. “You a catch with all that land. But you ain’t doing nothin’ with it!”

  Birdie cringed, the guilt of letting her father’s land waste away, but she still thought it was his to take care of. Mr. Boudreaux sensed as much, and touched her arm. “But you got time, angel,” he said. “Ain’t no hurry. Ain’t no hurry for nothin’.”

  She looked in the back of his truck, the sweat creeping down his shirt in a dark eclipse.

  “I’ll take all of them,” Birdie said. “Cantaloupe too.”

  ***

  Twenty-three watermelons and ten unripe cantaloupe rolled around in the backend of Birdie’s truck. She didn’t know what it meant that Bradley was coming into the woods every day. Was he working more than she thought, secretly taking care of them as he had done after Van died? Still, as much as the new information added to the puzzle, it was something else Mr. Boudreaux said that held her captive and wouldn’t let go.

  “You a catch with all that land.”

  Bradley had said the same thing the month before Van died. They had been sitting on the tailgate of Bradley’s truck, sneaking a cigarette.

  “With this much land, you can do whatever you want.” Bradley looked longingly out into the woods. “You’re sitting on a gold mine. Look at Jerry Miller’s daughter. Everybody’s trying to inherit that ranch…got men in line for her.”

  “I thought it was her boobs,” Birdie said.

  Bradley, pink-faced, whipped his head to look at her and then away just as fast. “Boobs don’t hurt, I guess.” He stared at his feet and, like eons of men before him, scrambled to make it better for the woman in front of him, only to make it worse: “Well, at least you got land.”

  Birdie exhaled a dumpster fire’s worth of smoke and crossed her arms across her chest just as her dad’s silver truck pulled up. Van and two men got out and walked to the shed. One man she immediately recognized as Dale Mackey, a sun-dried wisp of a man who worked with her father for the past few years, and the other, a dark-haired man, otherwise unremarkable except for the surliness he radiated from yards away. The men returned with bags of fertilizer, which they loaded into Van’s truck, though none of them waved.

  “Where you going?” Birdie called.

  “Cruisin’ timber!” Van shouted.

  It was an odd response, she remembered now, since fertilizer was not required for such a thing, and the trees had largely been destroyed at that point. Still, always eager, Bradley jumped off the tailgate to help, and Van quickly waved him off—“Stay here. Don’t need you today. Stay here.”—at which point Bradley slinked back to the truck and watched the men closely.

  “Who’s that other guy with them?” Bradley nervously lit a new cigarette. “He doesn’t work on the crew.” In retrospect, she should have seen Bradley’s alarm as the first clue. A man he didn’t recognize, even though Bradley knew all of the men who worked with Van, and the fact that Van didn’t want Bradley.

  “I mean, do you know that other guy with them?” Bradley asked again.

  “I don’t know! Gah!” Birdie snapped, still reeling from the realization that the land she stood to inherit one day was as attractive to men as breasts toppling out of a child-sized tank top. She hardly thought of herself as a catch, and despite hundreds of acres of timberland, no male had shown her the slightest bit of attention. Bradley was the only boy who spoke to her with any regularity, and even that was strained—the look of a man treading lightly, the way her father handled rat poison with gloves and a dainty pinch at the top of the bag.

  And so in the way that teenagers register everyone over thirty as an amorphous blob of middle age, the importance of a man neither of them recognized would not land. A little over a year later, the dark-haired man would be dead on her fence. But at that moment, he would enter and leave Birdie’s brain as quickly as Mr. Boudreaux made a sale on a triple-digit day, only to re-emerge a year later as she drove away from a watermelon stand, melons slamming back and forth like a rock tumbler in the back of her daddy’s old truck.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  During his time as a hermit, Mayhill drove to Houston once a month for groceries, ammunition, and bulk Dr Pepper, though don’t ask him the last time he’d fired a gun or press him on his Dr Pepper habit. (He could quit anytime and whatnot.) It was a two-hour drive to Houston and worth it because, to this date and to his astonishment, he had never met anyone named Jimmy within the Houston city limits. Not a gas station clerk, not a grocery store bagger, not a homeless man—HOMELESS JIMMY, NOT GONNA LIE, NEED $$$ 4 BEER—nobody. The lack of Jimmies had come to be an important draw of Houston, like the Oilers and NASA, if you were into those sorts of pastimes. It was something to put on the travel brochure, because in this phase of his life, Randy Mayhill had not had much luck with men named Jimmy.

  At the funeral, Jimmy Cason, the game warden, had called Mayhill a drug dealer. However, his mouth had been so full of chew that Mayhill couldn’t understand him until the sounds decoded themselves in Mayhill’s brain on the long ride home after. The tribunal of Jimmies had stood there like a football team, wide-bellied and grim, and Mayhill, once their non-Jimmy adopted brother, had been sentenced to mockery, and unclever mockery at that, which Van would have agreed was the worst punishment of all.

  Still, as much as he tried to convince himself that he didn’t care about seeing anybody in town, Mayhill missed the people—and he thought of them every time he sped past the smoking Mt. Zion Baptist barbecue pit that signaled the city limit.

  Mabel, for example. Two years ago. May of ’94. Rumor had it she made a business out of lacing marijuana cigars with embalming fluid. He visited her house on possession with intent to sell, and Mabel—on the porch swing in a t-shirt down to her calves, breasts down to her thighs—had said he needed to loosen up, get laid, and then she lit up a blunt with a Tweety Bird lighter.

  “You’re a grandmother, Mabel,” Mayhill had said as he unclipped the handcuffs off his belt.

  “Great-grandma now!” Mabel shimmied her shoulders, all joy. Mayhill gave her his arm, and he lifted her off the swing. “Grandbaby knocked up.” Mabel frowned at the handcuffs. “Come on now. I worked with your mama.”

  “All right, Mabel, but don’t make me run again. You know I get mad if I have to run.” Mayhill put the handcuffs away and held his hand firmly on her back. “Which grandbaby?”

  “You know Jolene.”

  “Remind me,” he said,
maneuvering around the potholes and broken beer bottles in her yard. He walked her to the Sheriff’s truck.

  “Short red hair. Freckles,” Mabel said. She moved her swollen legs slowly forward. “Y’all met last year. Solicitation.”

  “Ah yes, nice girl.” He opened the back door, and Mabel grabbed the handles on the frame and pulled herself in with a groan.

  “You right, she nice,” Mabel said. “We proud of that one, Sheriff. She purdy, she smart. The whole package. Know what I’m sayin’?”

  Mayhill hadn’t known what she was saying because Jolene had a severe underbite and had dropped out of junior high.

  He had heard that Mabel died but he didn’t know what from and couldn’t bring himself to call anyone to ask.

  Also in town: Rudy Lyons. Drunk before breakfast but polite all day. He was a mindful alcoholic, a tasteful one. He never punched anybody, and he limited his drunk driving to the back roads. He recycled his beer cans obsessively. He had a face like a boiled lobster, red and shiny, and a perpetual smile. He had the correct kind of handshake (two seconds, firm without something to prove), and he was ambitious! Rudy Lyons had a dream! A dream to open a bowling alley/bait-and-tackle shop, which when pressed, Mayhill couldn’t say was a bad idea at all. “I’d buy that,” Mayhill would say.

  Rudy Lyons would sigh dreamily. “I know you would, Sheriff. Everybody would. Be goddamn crazy not to.”

  ***

  Mayhill hadn’t set foot in the feed store in over a year, yet somehow the doors were still open and they always would be. Should end times come as the Church of Christ said, the feed store would remain floating on an island of hot lava, doors open with an endless river of burnt coffee in Styrofoam cups so small they seemed to be made for the hands of infants.

  The feed store had your oats, your sweet feed, your pellets, your salt licks, your wormers (cat, dog, horse, and pig). In terms of supply, it would not disappoint, and one might even get more than he bargained for. For example, the miraculous crust of dust and dirt on every inch of every surface, even though the supply was largely new. Or opinions on why a man should marry or not marry a girl and how to let said girl down without retaliation in the event that the feed store men ruled against her. The feed store was an unofficial courthouse where one was tried and convicted, where marriages were made and broken, where all traffic was directed.

  When Van was alive, Mayhill, Van, and the three Jimmies met twice a day: before breakfast around four or four thirty in the morning, and at the end of day, just before supper, to discuss the day’s business before retreating back to the house, to get in bed before eight, and do it all over again. It was consistency, and every man knows that consistency is bliss.

  Today, the door to the feed store was propped open. A yellow fly strip dangled just inside like a welcome banner, and even though the sun shone brightly above, Mayhill found himself feeling guarded at the dark doorway as if he were entering a house with a burglar still inside. He wanted to grab the pistol in his boot and put it somewhere more accessible.

  Mayhill hadn’t expected the smell to draw him in, to transport him the way someone might be transported at a whiff of his childhood home. For a moment, he was every incarnation of his life: a young man with his daddy, then a patrolman, a deputy, and a sheriff again all in the span of the second it took for the smell of sweet feed and burnt coffee to hot-tail it from his nose to his brain. Then, he bristled at the realization that he no longer belonged there. The badge and the smells were not his.

  All at once, the tribunal of Jimmies turned to register his presence—Jimmy Nellums, Jimmy Cason, and Jimmy Miller—pointing their heads in the direction of the very large but not-so-much-in-charge Randy Mayhill, a bear of a man, with poor posture, backlit by the sun.

  Jimmy Nellums owned the place. He was the richest of the feed store men and had three ex-wives, one of whom who had been wealthy (Arkansas lumber mill) and died in a fishing accident (state champion swimmer, suspicious). The town whispered, but nobody made a stink because the whites around Jimmy Nellums’s wife’s eyes had shown—a full circle of white around the disc of color, without the tops and bottoms of the irises hidden like they were in normal people’s eyes. Everybody knew that this meant she was mean. His wife certainly wasn’t pleasant, but had the town had a chance to vote, Patsy Fuller would have been the one decked out in pink camo floating face down in a shallow lake. Patsy Fuller’s eyes were perfectly fine, it should be noted. Still, Jimmy Nellums had taken his good fortune and chosen to open the feed store, serve the town. He was practically a hero.

  Mayhill stood in the doorway, the sun illuminating the dust like beams from heaven. Jimmy Nellums rose slowly and walked toward him. Mayhill felt his body clench as if it were high noon, his breath notably absent.

  “Randy Mayhill…” Nellums said with an air of astonishment, as if Christ himself had resurrected before him. “I’ll be damned.” He held out his hand. The other two Jimmies remained in their chairs, barely a blink between them.

  Mayhill shook Nellums’s hand and took off his hat. “Jimmy.” He nodded to all of them, three Jimmies with one nod.

  Nellums, the chief priest among them, returned to his seat in the circle and left Mayhill to face them. If Mayhill had a flaw, it would be his zero tolerance for silence, which was why he and Van had gotten along so well, Van being able to fill up any hole like verbal Fix-a-Flat. The men stared him up and down, a bored, fixed look because Mayhill’s was a case they had already tried, the outcome known. He was trash—criminal trash—like Van, they had decided. Mayhill looked around for Barabbas, the thirty pieces of silver. He cleared his throat.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “It is amazing to me that you all have aged in my absence, yet I have remained so young and virile.”

  Silence. He heard Van laughing in his head.

  “You’ve grown though.” Jimmy Nellums gestured his chin to Mayhill’s belly. “You trick somebody into feeding you?”

  Mayhill was not given to nervousness—he wasn’t so weak of mind—but at that moment he wished desperately that he smoked or dipped or had a marijuana cigarette laced with embalming fluid, so he was forever grateful when Nellums pointed to the coffee pot in the corner and said, “Coffee’s old.”

  Don’t mind if I do.

  Mayhill felt the men looking at him as he walked. The grit crunch on the concrete floor beneath his boots echoed through the store. The coffee pot was burned on the bottom, and the black had inched halfway up the bowl in a grainy stain of smoke. The coffee was bitter against the perpetual aftertaste of Dr Pepper in his mouth, his tongue pickled in sugar. The chemical taste that the hot coffee released from the Styrofoam was apparent now.

  Nellums had mercifully added a chair to the circle when Mayhill returned with his coffee. Despite the failure of Mayhill’s opening joke, it was true: the feed store men had aged dramatically in a year. The lines in their faces deepened, their jowls padded as if saddling up for the long ride of middle age. Mayhill’s own face was not pretty, with his nose like a camel where Van had punched him the last time he saw him. It was barely noticeable in the landscape of his face but it was a reminder, like most scars, of a lesson learned too late.

  Mayhill sat in the folding chair. It squeaked beneath his weight, and he took his place in the circle.

  “Been a long while,” Jimmy Nellums said, suspicion smeared across his face. “To what do we owe the pleasure, Sheriff?”

  Mayhill snickered at the formality as if on instinct before realizing the intention of “Sheriff.” Mockery.

  “Just thought I’d stop by.” Mayhill sipped his coffee, thankful for something to do with his hands. “How’re the hogs treating ya?” he said to the coffee cup.

  “They ain’t helping me any,” Nellums said. The other two Jimmies shook their head in agreement, mourning their many hog-related losses.

  “Hogs done a real number at Birdie and Onie’s,” Mayhill said. “Trying to help them out. Thought this was th
e place to be.”

  Mayhill looked around the feed store. The supply had doubled since he was last here: large wire traps outside the door, bait on display, bags of corn. Brown bags with WILD BEAST ATTRACTANT written across the front in non-descript letters. “Appears the hogs have been a real boon to you, Jimmy.”

  The men looked at each other, a twinkle of bemusement in their eyes that Mayhill felt the overwhelming need to punch. Nellums got up and walked to the dusty checkout counter and lifted a big stack of papers. He returned and gave Mayhill a flier.

  “County agent dropped these off.”

  The flier was glossy, much too fancy for a piece of paper that said “Hog Trapping Tips” in the same sensitive font reserved for feminine products.

  Mayhill read it while the men watched him.

  HOG TRAPPING TIPS

  • Set up multiple traps in multiple locations.

  • Vary your bait selection among your traps.

  • Use small enough mesh to catch all hogs, even young ones.

  • Do not release trapped hogs.

  • Don’t give up! Persistence pays!!!

  It was condescending, like telling a dying person to eat more fruits and vegetables.

  “Who’s the county agent?” Mayhill asked.

  “Some young hotshot.” Nellums pulled out his pocketknife and began cleaning his right ear. “Couldn’t have been twenty-five. From Dallas. Got a degree in ecology or some shit.”

  “Y’all using anybody?” Mayhill asked. He looked at the paper.

  “When the hogs make me mad enough,” Nellums said.

  “I’d appreciate a few names if you got 'em.”

  “Trapper? Hunter?”

  “Don’t matter,” Mayhill said. “Anybody working out by me?”

  “You staying at Van’s place still?”

  “My place,” Mayhill said, “but yeah.”

  “Taking care of Onie and Birdie?”

  “I am.” Mayhill folded the flier twice into a square that would fit in his pocket.