“I’m sure you are. Man like you cain’t stop bein’ a hero overnight!” Nellums put away his pocketknife and pulled a pen out of his shirt. He took the flier from Mayhill’s hand. “Tell you what…” He scribbled on the back of the square. “There’s a fella named Tommy Jones. Been doing some trapping around the county.”
“County hire him?” Mayhill asked.
“Independent contractor.” He handed Mayhill back the paper. “County won’t hire felons.”
“Felon? Tommy Jones…I know that name.” Mayhill searched his memory for it.
“Didn’t Tommy Jones work for Van a spell?” Nellums asked to the group.
“The whole county worked for Van a spell,” Cason and Miller said.
Hearing them say Van’s name, Mayhill wanted to punch them in their collective guts.
“He’s good,” Nellums said. “Give him a call. Know he’s friends with Dale Mackey out by you. Passed him on the road few days back, headin’ out your way.” Nellums got up and refilled his coffee. “I’ll tell you what, he was carrying a trap almost as big as that truck of his. Teetering like a top! You cain’t carry a trap like that in a Datsun. Passed him fast as I could. Damn near blew out the back and into my windshield.”
“Tommy Jones drives a black Datsun?” Mayhill perked up. Had the hog hunter set a trap on Birdie’s land? “Young fella? Real rough looking?”
“He rough, but he ain’t young,” Nellums said.
“You’ll like him. Right up your alley.” Cason winked. It was barely perceptible, but definitively a wink.
“Why you say that?” Mayhill asked.
“Felon,” Jimmy Cason muttered, but Mayhill tried to ignore the implication.
“You really ain’t never heard of Tommy Jones?” Jimmy Miller asked.
“Should I have?”
“Well,” Nellums said, “people talk.”
“You the people who talk!”
The Jimmies laughed legitimately now. Hardy-hars all around! The joke had ruled in Mayhill’s favor, and he relaxed a bit, though he hated all of them more than he remembered.
“What’d he do exactly?” Mayhill interrupted the laughs. “Why’s Tommy Jones a felon?”
Miller shrugged.
“Beat the shit out of his wife,” Cason said. “Maybe his kid. Sumpin’ like that, but—”
“But they never proved it!” Nellums waved his hand to emphasize the point. His coffee splashed onto the concrete floor. “They never proved it. Tommy Jones’s the best hog trapper I ever seen. I hired him at my sister’s place, and I tell you what, give him a few weeks and—”
“Lemme get this straight…” Mayhill’s voice rose more than he could honestly control. “You hired a convicted felon who beats his wife, and you put him to work on your sister’s place?”
“They never proved it!” Nellums and Miller bellowed.
“You’ve got nieces!” Mayhill said.
“They never proved it!” Cason said, and then pointed at Mayhill. “What’s more, Sheriff, I’m not sure you of all people are in any position to come around here bestowing upon us your moral authority.” The statement was aggressive, but there was something in Jimmy’s eyes—a wariness, a steeliness—that made Mayhill realize much too late that he had been lumped into the category of mentally unstable. His best friend had gone nuts with desperation and killed himself, and Mayhill had gone nuts in his own way. And everybody knows that lunacy, like desperation, is contagious. As a result, the Jimmies thought that Mayhill was just as likely to come in petting an imaginary rabbit as it was for him to shoot up everyone with a sawed-off shotgun.
Mayhill closed his eyes at the revelation of this shifting social dynamic. Then, he swung his fist as hard as he could, and he knocked Jimmy Nellums out cold. Then Jimmy Miller leapt from the folding chair and Mayhill landed a roundhouse to his ribs. Then an elbow to the face of the attacking Jimmy Cason. He pulled the pistol from his boot and stood over the men, daring them to mock him or say Van’s name without a pope-like respect again. Three Jimmies! Writhing on the dusty concrete floor, regretting their underestimations of the intemperate and unexpectedly flexible Randy Mayhill.
However, when Mayhill opened his eyes, the three Jimmies sat in their folding chairs and stared at him steadily. They were perfectly still and silent, an air of superiority wafting around them like tailpipe fumes. They were not writhing.
Jimmy Nellums stood abruptly and held out his hand. “Good luck with your hogs.” He looked down at Mayhill. “I know Onie and Birdie have appreciated the enormous amount of help you’ve given them over the years.”
The men smirked and looked into their tiny, cold coffees. Mayhill stood too and understood that the judge was ordering him to vacate. The folding chair perked up from the relief, and Mayhill adjusted his belt where the buckle had stabbed mercilessly into the overhang of his gut.
“It was just real good to see you, Jimmy. Jimmy. Jimmy.” He nodded in each Jimmy’s direction. “Give all your ex-wives my regards.” Mayhill walked toward the sun that beckoned him outside, the smells of the feed store now absent in his nose.
“I’ll tell Tommy you looking for him!” Nellums called after him.
“That’ll be fine!” Mayhill did not look back. He waved his hat and walked back out into the sun, the infant-sized coffee cup crushed in his hand.
***
Shortly before he died, Van had bought all of the blood meal from the feed store and had told Jimmy Nellums he would have to even up later. In Nellums’s official statement to the police, Van had said that his trees were looking good and that they were selling some of the young ones to a German company out of New York for pulpwood. No longer did a forester have to wait for mature trees every thirty years. It was all getting better! No more borrowing! Pay day! Or at least Van had hollered as much as he ran out of the feed store.
Nellums wrote out 20 BLD ML $75 in chicken scratch, then licked his thumb to peel away the pink page on the receipt pad. He shook his head, perturbed by Van’s hubris, and placed the pink paper on the counter in the stack of unpaid receipts—receipts reserved for farmers who were a little behind here and there, for men whose animals had been injured at an inopportune time. Still, Van was rubbing him the wrong way.
Hours later, after a meeting with the cross-wielding hog hunter, Mayhill had run in looking for Van. “Haven’t seen him…” a Greek chorus of useless Jimmies bounced through the halls. Mayhill’s throat had seized and he could barely breathe, overtaken by a predictable outcome presenting itself. He had turned to leave, hurried and panicked, when Nellums grabbed his shoulder. “When you find Van, give him this.” He slapped the thin, pink blood meal receipt in Mayhill’s hand. “Van’s been borrowing too long. I know it’s just blood meal, but last month it was a bunch of lime. Then, a roll of barbed wire. Hell, it adds up. I don’t know what he’s doin’ buying all that anyway. Ain’t nothin’ gonna help his trees.”
Mayhill said nothing as Nellums continued to talk. He stared straight ahead and nervously folded the pink paper into a tiny square the size of a matchbook and slipped it in his shirt pocket. “I ain’t gettin’ anymore blood meal in, you know that! Government regulating the hell out of it. But do I sell it to him anyway? Of course I do. Because I’m a Christian. Van’s had a tough go of it. Timber ruined, lost his money and all, but a man’s gotta have a limit.” The other two Jimmies nodded behind him. “Take care of it, Sheriff.”
When the speech was over, Mayhill walked quickly to the truck. He tried hard to pretend that everything was in control, but he knew that it wasn’t. He clenched his hand to his shirt pocket, the blood meal receipt burning a hole right through him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Bradley, however, had always liked the feed store okay. He liked the Jimmies who all knew him and shook his hand, but mostly he appreciated the consistency of it. The same men up there every morning and again in the afternoon, drinking the same burnt coffee, sitting in a circle of chairs a
s if they were playing an imaginary game of Texas Hold’em or confessing their transgressions in AA. The feed store men could trace their roots back five generations at least, and they talked of their ancestors as if they had a daily close personal connection with them, as if they remembered sitting at their knees, learning how to wax a mustache properly. Jimmy Cason’s great-great-great-grandfather had fought at Appomattox and had his hand amputated using only whisky and a saw. Bradley didn’t even know his dad.
Bradley had moved to this speck of a town from Houston a few years back, and to live here without suspicion, a man needed at least two generations under his belt. The feed store men talked to Bradley how they talked to the black kids: polite and overly friendly, as if to prove to themselves that they were the kind of people who would talk to strange white boys and black kids. They would describe Bradley as a “class act,” which was only reserved for people who had been deemed trashy but so far had hidden their low society affliction enough for their tastes.
Six months before Bradley saw a dead body hanging on Birdie’s fence, a large bruise had formed on his arm. It had been a familiar scene at Bradley’s house that morning. His mother was drunk. Rent was due. He only had two hundred dollars to contribute, which he counted out in cash on the coffee table. His mother, dipping her head like an oil rig as each bill hit the stack, exploded into panic. She reared back and hit him as hard as she could with her rebar forearm.
“Two hundred dollars?” she yelled like an accusation—arms and legs detonating, hair swinging. “Three hundred is rent! Three hundred!” Bradley lifted his arm to deflect and cowered away, even though she was much smaller than him. The boney-ness of her arm struck him like a tire iron, and a deep ache ripped up his elbow. The whites of her eyes flashed like headlights.
Bradley scrambled away from her, but she picked up her purse and threw it at him—lipsticks and matchbooks flying like shrapnel. Then she picked up a pillow. Then a picture frame. She picked up an ashtray that hit the wall by the door. It left a hole the size of a baseball, the drywall jagged and open like a shark’s mouth. It hit the floor in a shatter. Bradley jetted out the door, joining the old dog on the lawn, and heard a loud crash behind him, and as he drove to the feed store, he mentally surveyed everything in their living room and wondered what possibly could have been left to throw.
***
Bradley loaded feed into the back of his truck for an afternoon job. Fumes of dust and oats puffed around him, and his arm throbbed as he shoved the final bags into the bed. The very little rent money he had been missing, of course, went to gas for driving to the jobs he did have. Birdie’s house was thirty minutes from town, for example. Jerry Miller’s was twenty-five. A back and forth trip to the ranch, then the feed store and back again. He tried not to think about the math.
Bradley slammed the tailgate and turned to see Dale Mackey emerge from the feed store behind him. He had known Dale when he worked for Van; they had cruised timber together with a steady rotation of other men with spotty résumés. Rumor had it that Dale had been involved with Van’s operation—the Jimmies said he’d been his partner—and though Bradley had never really thought much about Dale, he knew that Van had trusted him, so he automatically had too.
Dale was the opposite of Van: a pale man with sunken cheeks and stringy hair, thin and jerky-dry. His eyes were dark orbs, but darted like a squirrel’s, which mirrored his speech and twitchiness. Every time Bradley saw Dale, he had the urge to give him a sandwich.
Dale nodded at Bradley in recognition and walked over and shook his hand, and Bradley was shocked at how impossibly soft Dale’s hands seemed. Could a man use lotion?
“Where you working now?” Dale spit and scratched the ground with his dirty tennis shoe, then cocked his head to one side. He looked at Bradley through dark sunglasses.
“Here and there,” Bradley said. “Feeding cattle for the Millers today. They out of town.”
“Where they go?”
“Florida, I think,” Bradley said. “Disney World?”
“They pay you okay?”
“Yessir.”
“Aw, don’t lie,” Dale said. “You know they ain’t paying shit.”
Dale laughed big, and Bradley forced a nervous laugh too, sheepish all of a sudden and not sure what to say since he appreciated the work. He stared in the back of Dale’s truck: dog food, fertilizer, boots, and a Sam’s Club-sized box of candy that Dale always carried around—a quirk Bradley suddenly recalled from before.
“What’re your plans, Bradley Polk?” Dale asked.
Nobody had used his full name in recent memory, and it felt good to hear, like he was somebody whose last name mattered. “My plans?” Bradley asked. “Go to the Millers. After that, I dunno.” He thought of his mother, the ashtray like a grenade. He couldn’t go home tonight. He needed a girlfriend pronto. He could borrow her lotion and have soft hands like Dale’s.
“No, son,” Dale said. (Nobody had ever called Bradley “son” either.) “Your plans. Plans. You gonna be here forever? You gonna be forty years old building fences? Working for a bunch of sidewalk cattlemen who think they better than you? Sure, they put you to work, but you just try and date Miller’s daughter. You see what happens then.”
Bradley thought of Jimmy Miller’s daughter. She had a body like a porn star but a face painted in orange make-up that dripped in stripes down her white neck. She looked like a tiger.
This is not a problem, Bradley thought, but he understood Dale’s sentiment. “Yessir?” Bradley said, trying to fathom any appropriate response.
And then it happened.
Dale pointed at Bradley as if he were picking him out of a large crowd, instead of pointing at a lone young man in a dusty parking lot to whom he had been talking for five minutes. Dale’s tone became serious. “I could use you,” he said.
Those were his words. I could use you.
Bradley remembered them exactly. They danced in his head at night as he struggled to stay awake on his shift, a memory planted to help him make sense of it all later when he slept in the woods at night and kept watch over a garden surrounded by barbed wire.
***
Initially, Dale and Bradley planted dozens of baby plants. They had met at his trailer that first morning and loaded about twenty large cardboard boxes into the back of Bradley’s truck. Each box was filled with twelve small green plants peeking out of Styrofoam cups.
“Grew them myself from seed!” Dale said with the bright-eyed spunk of a third grader. This endeared him to Bradley because, one, Bradley Polk always liked enthusiastic people—see also: Van—and, two, it made the entire operation seem about as sinister as a science fair. They got in Bradley’s truck and navigated the winding trails near Dale’s trailer until they arrived at a remote part of the forest. From there, Dale instructed Bradley how to enter and leave the plot he had found. Roll down the window, cut the engine, then listen for a good few minutes and whatnot. They walked the rest of the way, each carrying one of the cardboard boxes, as if they were moving into their first apartment.
“I didn’t know all this land was yours,” Bradley said.
Dale had said nothing. He just trudged along and finished off his breakfast of a Moon Pie.
The plot was in the middle of a clearing where dozens of trees had turned brassy and died, so the light was good, but being in the middle of the woods, the plot was also well obscured. The March sun shone down in bright columns like a lighthouse, and though he had worked the woods plenty with Van, Bradley couldn’t remember being under the cover of trees when it was this sunny. He and Dale spent the day clearing debris from the forest floor and picking ticks off their ankles. They dug holes and dusted them with fertilizers, then planted the small plants in clusters about six feet apart that Bradley measured off in steps. They protected them with tomato cages and covered them in flimsy mesh blankets, like babies put down for the night. The arrangement was oddly domestic. Their conversations, simple and easy, about
the town (judgmental), sports (Oilers), women (difficult), politics (terrible). The risk of the operation was the one thing they never spoke of, Van the obvious cautionary tale, and Bradley had begun to think of Van’s name as a spell, as if saying it would incant his bad luck, put a bullet in his brain. But even then, even with Van’s last breath circulating through the trees, Bradley didn’t think about getting caught.
Dale instructed Bradley to divide a few sacks of blood meal amongst the five-gallon buckets. A fine cloud of plum-colored dust mushroomed into the air after each pour, and the smell of metal wafted between them. Dale waved a gloved hand in front of his face. “Dogs…hogs. They’re predators. Squirrels…deer…” Dale said. “Rabbits too…they’re all prey. Prey smells the blood. They stay away.”
“What about the predators?” Bradley could hear the hogs screeching across the river like a neighborhood riot. Buckets hung heavily from each of Bradley’s hand, and he teetered back and forth like a scale.
“Fence’ll do fine.” Dale walked along the north edge of the garden and pointed to the where Bradley should spread the blood. “Can’t hardly get blood meal no more.”
“Why not?” Bradley asked.
“Mad cow disease. Regulations. Blood gets in the feed, in your garden. Your brains turn to shit. Bunch of Brits died few years back.”
“Oh,” Bradley said. He looked around for something to tie around his nose. “Where’d you get blood meal, then?”
But again, Dale didn’t answer. He just kept walking the fence line and worked on a Twizzler, but when they got done for the day, Dale tossed him an old shotgun from the back of his truck.
“For the predators,” he said.
***
Dale had a manual, thin and floppy like a phone book, which he carried around with the reverence of a girl’s phone number. It was usually rolled up into a tight tube and tucked in the back pocket of his jeans. The cover and the spine had been bound with silver duct tape to keep the tissue-thin pages from tearing off into the wind and, Bradley guessed, to keep the book title safe from passing eyes.
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