Bradley would visit the site briefly every day to check the fences and fertilizer. Dale largely stayed away, save weekly or so inspections, and Bradley was struck by the trust Dale placed in him. In no time at all, the plants had grown to the size of a toddler, just to his thigh, and were just as demanding, despite being weeds. Dale would compare the caveman-like drawings of the silver instruction manual to the full, lacy plants in front of him. Then he would declare their needs of the week. They would need lime, for example.
“Pine makes acidic soil,” Dale said, and tapped the manual with his gloved hand. “We need lime to neutralize it.” Then he would hand Bradley five ten-dollar bills. “Get yourself some gas, and hit the feed store up before tomorrow. Lime. And don’t—”
“I know,” Bradley would say. “Don’t say it’s for you.”
***
Bradley could have worked at the lumber mill. Dale had worked there for a bit, even though his father died there. “When Daddy got killed,” Dale said. “I had to quit school and help Mama.” It was one day near the beginning, and Dale leaned against a tree while Bradley pruned. “Nobody thinks I’m smart, but I am. I had to take care of Mama, though. You know what I’m sayin’? She was grievin’.”
“I’m sorry,” Bradley said, and he was sorry, sorrier than he felt comfortable feeling. Dale’s father had gotten his head cut off at the mill, which sounds like a freak accident to office workers whose primary workplace hazard is changing the water cooler, but it was not an unusual occurrence at the sawmill. Bradley knew of another man who lost his head. It was an Alice in Wonderland kind of world. Don’t ask Bradley to count how many lost their arms or fingers. A man might as well hand over his pinkie when he signed his employment papers.
What they were doing now came with a different kind of risk, though in the cocoon of the woods, it hardly seemed a gamble. Bradley was thankful to be a gardener. He was thankful Dale had chosen him, and if he were honest with himself, he wanted to impress him. He never missed a day and was always early to work. He was meticulous with the plants, every bug that flew near the mint green buds a personal affront to Bradley and his devotion. Dale referred to it as their operation. The rains came, and the growing was effortless. No irrigation needed. Just the right amount of sun in a grove of dead pine trees. More and more plants popped up out of nowhere, like their entire venture was blessed—BLESSED! Meant to be! They would harvest early October. Dale could pay off a nagging debt. Bradley could afford an acre and a trailer. They would need another man probably. The promise of money grew.
“I know I said ten thousand dollars…” Dale would say, eyes big as the moon, flashing the long ta-da! fingers of a magician. “But what would you think of twenty?”
And Bradley, who hadn’t eaten all day and wondered if he could sleep at his mother’s house that night, was dumbstruck by the idea of twenty thousand dollars. “Yessir,” he would say. “I could do all right with that.”
***
The afternoon that Bradley saw a dead man hanging on Birdie’s fence, he headed to the garden for another round of pruning before the harvest next month. He tried to concentrate on the colors of the sunset so he wouldn’t have to think about the dead man. In Houston, perfect sunsets were a rarity, saved for special days when the sun and humidity mysteriously reflected just so off the smog. Sunsets in the country, however, were a daily religious experience. The tip-tops of the pine trees turned into black steeples, and the sky flooded with an orange hue the color of a sliced-open cantaloupe, shocking but friendly. The clouds were long, deep, and purple like the bruise on his arm. Still, as breathtaking as the sky was, Bradley couldn’t shake the image of the man on the fence. He fought to concentrate on the narrow road in front of him and swerved to avoid some hogs congregating in the road.
"You stuck or you deaf?"
Had those been the man’s last words to another human being? Would the man still be alive if Bradley had simply refused to move his truck? Would the man be pulling up to McDonald’s for a McRib right now if Bradley had yelled like a lunatic to get the hell out of there?
When he got to the trailhead to the garden, Bradley kept going to see if he might figure out exactly where the man had gone. He drove down the dirt road about five more minutes before he saw it: a small Datsun, faded black and crusted with pale mud, backed into the ditch. The black seemed somehow menacing against the brown of the tree trunks, even during a sundown as holy as this one. Bradley stopped his truck and white-knuckled the steering wheel. This was all really happening. It hadn’t been a dream.
But something of note: the trap in the back of the Datsun was gone. The hunter had set the trap somewhere in the woods.
Bradley had the urge to get out and inspect the truck, to follow the trail the man might have walked, the path the trap no doubt carved into the forest floor, but he couldn’t move. He sat there frozen for a few moments until a dark thought overcame him. If someone saw him there with the truck, they might think he was responsible for whatever fate had befallen the man. But who would see him? Who would have been in the woods in the first place?
The dead man had, for one.
Bradley put the truck in reverse and backed down the logging trail as quickly as he could before he hit the dirt road. He held his breath the entire time.
This isn’t your fault. It has nothing to do with you.
***
Bradley arrived at the campsite, and Jason sat under a lantern hanging from the low branch of a loblolly. Dale had recently hired Jason to join them since the plants and the work had exploded beyond Dale’s expectations. Jason was about Bradley’s age, but all talk and much too eager.
Bradley knew the work was not as glamorous as Jason imagined and that he had expected a Godfather kind of existence, a Smokey and the Bandit kind of existence. Theirs would be a dark world of intrigue—all danger, grit, glitz, money, girls. James Bond. Biggie Smalls. Bradley knew this because Jason had expressed his disappointment in so many words: “We’re just gardening like some old fucking ladies.”
Hiring him had been a mistake. First, he didn’t own a truck, and so Bradley and Dale had to shuttle him to and from work (forty miles round trip, three gallons of gas). Though Bradley had never been inside Jason’s actual house, he had driven him there plenty of times and knew the part of the county the way one knows hell, mostly a figment of one’s mind. It was a dismal place—a small community with cheap land that a developer had used to draw in poor people from all over the state. People would sell their belongings to start life over with “a little piece of land in the country,” only to find that there were no water wells, no sewage, or roads that could withstand a soaking rain. It was a community of stranded people, a desert island in the woods. Though he was regularly aware of the poverty in his own life, he was thankful he didn’t live there at least. He thought about the community of stranded people every time he drove Jason home, then went to his mother’s own tiny house in town and flushed a toilet and drove down the roads fancy-free when it rained. LA DI DA.
Secondly, Jason was unhinged. The kind of volatile young man you didn’t want around for a delicate operation. The kind of young man Bradley’s mother would have been had she been a young man. But Dale had felt sorry for him, Bradley guessed, and in his Robin Hood mentality wanted to share with Jason. Had Dale felt sorry for him too?
The light lit Jason’s head from above and fell perfectly on the long barrel of a shotgun propped against his chair. The lower half of Jason’s face disappeared into the dark. The bridge of his nose and his nostrils glowed almost white, slick with oil. Jason’s reddish-blonde hair was singed a pumpkin orange, all scraggly and stuck to his forehead, as if he had cut his hair himself with a steak knife.
Jason looked dirty. Disgust welled up in Bradley when he saw him—a full-on repulsion—mainly because Bradley knew he had no room to talk or even think such things about another man’s hygiene. Bradley hadn’t changed his shirt in two days. It was ripped and yellowed at t
he armpits with SUBLIME written on the front in a fancy font he had seen on tattoos. It had been one of his favorite shirts, though he hated it now with its saturating stench, its desperation. Bradley had mosquito bites on his neck and on his arms that had swollen into small, puffy mounds. The right sole of his tennis shoe had come unglued and the toe flapped like the mouth of a puppet when he walked, an airborne Jordan with one arm raised and legs splayed, flopping up and down against the pine needles.
Bradley grabbed a beer from the cooler. He would get drunk and wash the dead man from his mind, wring him out like a sponge.
“Where’s Dale?” Bradley pulled nervously at the pop-top and cut his finger on the metal.
“Dunno,” Jason said, spinning a pocketknife between his fingers.
“He been here at all?” Bradley asked. He sucked the blood running from his finger, and then took a deep swallow of the beer.
“Gone most of the day. Checked some plants earlier. Cleaned up some,” Jason said. “Be glad you missed him.”
Something about the way he said it twisted in Bradley’s gut. “Why?” he asked. “Dale in a mood?”
“Tweaked as shit.”
“About what?”
“How the fuck should I know?”
“Then what? After he left?” Bradley asked. “He leave? He go home?”
“Jesus, you my girlfriend?” Jason snapped. “Why you asking so many questions?”
Bradley said nothing and drank half of the beer in a few gulps, but it did nothing for him. Dread bloomed in his brain like overnight mushrooms. The dead man, the truck, Dale on edge. Bradley stared into the forest, which appeared much blacker than normal, the crickets like tiny screams in his ears.
“He wants you here at eight tomorrow,” Jason said. He pointed his knife at a pile of sacks and wire. “Need to haul all that to the dump and be back here at eight.”
Bradley was supposed to meet Mayhill at eight. Dale had never needed him that early. “Why can’t you do it?” Bradley asked.
“I got another job,” he said. And in the next breath: “You seen that truck?”
Bradley closed his eyes as if he had been caught, but he didn’t know what for. “No,” Bradley said carefully. “What truck?”
“How the hell you even get around?” Jason flicked the knife, and it cartwheeled into the dirt by his Nikes. “You don’t pay attention to shit.” He pulled a ring of keys out of his pocket and dangled them like a cat toy.
“Where’d you get those?”
“Glove box,” Jason said. “Always check the glove box.”
“Did Dale see the truck?” Bradley asked.
“Yeah, he saw it.”
Bradley stared at his hands, but they didn’t seem real somehow. Something was unfolding slowly in front of him, a picture taking form. Bradley knew then that he would not be meeting Mayhill at eight. “Dale say anything?”
“I thought he’d wig, but he didn’t say much.” Jason flicked the knife into the dirt again. “Said it ain’t a problem.”
“How’s he know it’s not a problem?”
“I dunno. He just said it ain’t.” Jason plucked the knife from the ground and wiped the blade on his jeans. “Truck’s been there a day.”
“What’s that mean?” Bradley asked.
“Means I’m gonna get me a truck, what it means.”
***
The next morning, Thursday, Bradley did not meet Mayhill. Bradley, always dutiful and obliging, especially to Dale, went to the dump as instructed. He talked to Patsy Fuller from a solid fifteen feet away, more flies on him than the trash, her eyeing him like a criminal for reasons he couldn’t ascertain. He didn’t mind it though, her suspicion a comforting constant in his life when everything was turned upside down.
Back from the dump, eight a.m., Bradley checked the plants and tightened some ties where the fence wasn’t snapped perfectly to attention. He heard the rumble of a truck, and without thinking, Bradley hid behind a tree. He had never done such a thing before—not in the comfort of the woods—and he was surprised to find himself doing it now. In a few moments, though, Dale appeared. Bradley, embarrassed, quickly walked toward the garden, hoping Dale hadn’t seen him hide. He pretended to zip up his jeans, as if he had taken a quick pee in the woods.
But Dale was too focused to notice the theatrics. He nodded to Bradley and walked the perimeter of the garden in small, quick steps. Dale had the controlled irritability of a man trying to remain cool, as if he had drunk too much coffee and climbed right into a straitjacket.
“You drive Jason home?” Bradley asked, taking up behind him.
“He got a ride,” Dale said. He stopped and pulled a plant close to him, inspecting the bud, taking a sniff.
“But he doesn’t have a truck.” The Datsun.
Dale kept walking. Bradley couldn’t tell his mood. He didn’t seem upset. He seemed controlled, focused, but something was off, something changing—Dale was more business than he had ever seen him.
“I heard there was a truck.” There was a body about a mile from here! This was what he wanted to say, of course, but Bradley couldn’t make the words real and connect the situation in any way to their garden. The outside reality was moving too quickly for his insides to catch up—just dread sowed into his brain, waiting for the signal to sprout.
“Hog hunter,” Dale said. “Far enough from here.” He squatted down to examine the fence, his knees snapping like sticks, and plucked the bottom wire with a long finger. It let out the low drone of a bass guitar. “Start taking all this down.”
“The fences? Still got a month to go. What about the hogs?” Bradley asked, not sure he understood. “Dale, is something—?”
“Take the fences down and watch for hogs.” Dale popped back up and started walking. “I got some things to do at the house. Be back in a few hours.” Then, just like that, Dale hurried away and disappeared back down the logging trail.
Bradley looked at the fence, stunned and unsure, and felt like a tornado had just touched down and dissipated. Dale had blown off the truck, but now they were taking the fences down a month early. Bradley expected to hear Dale’s engine rev after a few minutes, but there was only the sound of the birds. In a few minutes, Bradley walked down the trail to where they parked their trucks, and Dale’s red Chevy was still parked there beside his.
Dale hadn’t left. He was still somewhere in the woods.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mayhill had the license plate number of a juvenile delinquent and the phone number for a felon hog trapper, but he still didn’t know anything about the dead man, and so he could hardly call his venture into town a success. Still, he could guess that Bradley was alive and smelled bad, at least as of this morning. This was the bright side, and a wise man looks on both sides. Van always said, “If you got a shit sandwich, at least you got something to eat. Kids in Ethiopia and whatnot.” It made sense.
A few hours after Dale and Bradley talked hurriedly in the woods, Mayhill called Tommy Jones, the felon hog trapper, to no avail. The Feed Store Jimmies had said that he was friends with Dale Mackey and had been working in the area, so he decided to drop in on Dale. For his entire life, Dale Mackey lived far on the east side of the woods from Van, and one hot Dr Pepper later, Mayhill turned his truck right into Dale’s small driveway, which led to an open field that was green and golden like an apple.
Dale Mackey was a malnourished man. Not in the food pantry impoverished way. In the too-many-Mountain-Dews-and-barbiturates way—a man whose body rejected all that nourished and grounded but somehow managed to suck it away from others like a deer tick. After Van’s trees all went and died, Van became Dale’s latest host, an exposed ankle in the woods that Dale clung to. Rumor had it that he had been Van’s partner in the failed operation. Still, when drug agents raided the land, there had been no evidence of Dale Mackey being there at all—not a fingerprint, not a carton of Kools, nothing—which did not surprise Mayhill in the least,
because the only thing he could see Dale masterminding was anemia.
Dale had lived there all his life and was a few years younger than Van and Mayhill. His parents were now dead, and their old house stood crumpled right at the tree line behind Dale’s trailer. His land was probably three acres or so, all overgrown field, sliced down the middle by a large drainage ditch that could be called a small creek, depending on the prowess of the real estate agent and the cataracts of the potential buyer. In the right light, though, the land could be worthy of watercolors, feathers of yellow and green, patches of syrup-brown dirt the color of Coke.
On top of the small hill in front of the dilapidated house sat a yellowed hunting trailer with a brown stripe running through the middle, a paint job modeled after sandwich meat. A side window was missing, a cut blue tarp placed over the flap. The front door was slightly off its hinges, and the trailer was missing a wheel in the front. In its stead was a small cable spool, which was shorter than the rest and caused the trailer to sag slightly to the right. Mayhill imagined Dale walking perpetually at a slant, his beers sliding down TV trays, his Jell-O molds forever tilted.
A tawny cowdog, happy-eyed with white ears, trotted up to Mayhill. Mayhill leaned down to scratch the dog’s head, only to find that his fingers were now tinted a purplish red. Mayhill sniffed his hand, and then he looked down at the dog again and saw that the dog’s entire muzzle was red with blood.
A shed stood a few dozen feet behind the house, chickens skittering around it. Dale’s red Chevy was parked in front of it, and Dale unloaded something from the back end. Even from a distance, Mayhill could see Dale’s bones poking wildly from under his camouflage t-shirt like a bag of sticks. Dale stopped when he saw Mayhill and walked up the driveway to greet him.
“Randy Mayhill.” Dale took off his work gloves and tucked them in his front jeans pocket. “It’s been a minute.”
“Dale.” Mayhill stuck out his hand. “You’re looking gaunt.”
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