Dale eyed him a moment, then laughed, revealing in his mouth a cemetery of teeth, a mouth so wide and cavernous that Mayhill was sure he could see Dale’s toes.
Mayhill laughed too, and though he hated Dale almost as much as the Jimmy trifecta, he was relieved for someone to finally laugh at his joke.
“What brings you by?” Dale reached into his back pocket. “Twizzler?”
“Cuttin’ back.” Mayhill patted his belly. “How you been, Dale? Been a year, has it?”
“Long time, Sheriff.” He stuck a Twizzler in his mouth.
“Where you working now?”
“Shifts at the mill here and there,” Dale said. “Keep it simple.”
Mayhill nodded. “I’m sure the mortgage on this place is real reasonable.”
“What job you got?”
“I deal in antiques.”
“Come again?” Dale cupped his hand around his ear.
“Antiques.” Mayhill raised his voice. “Old things. Guns mostly.”
Dale smiled and worked the Twizzler back and forth in his teeth, a gummy red mess of a mouth, not unlike the bloody mouth of the dog that sat at his feet. “Not good to live in the past, Sheriff.”
“Depends on the profit.”
All of this was a lie, of course. Mayhill had never sold a gun in his life because he was the only person on this blue planet who could be trusted with a gun. Few people had the discipline, control, and mental fortitude that gun possession required. Plus, he loved the equipment of justice. Even Goddamn Gabby Grayson had pointed out that his zodiac sign was a Libra—the only sign that was not an animal. Instead, Libra was the scales of justice, always dangling precariously in balance.
“I’m needing a hog trapper, Dale,” Mayhill said. “Heard you might have a friend who’s doing some work out here.”
“Where you hear that?”
“I thought it was ridiculous too…you having friends,” Mayhill said. But Dale was done with laughing. “Jimmy Nellums said you knew a man named Tommy Jones. Real good trapper. I was hoping you could put me in touch with him. Birdie and Onie need some help.”
Dale’s face changed then, a dramatic sinking of his already-sunken cheeks, the blood draining from his already-pale face. He swallowed the last of his Twizzler and put the package back in the pocket of his jeans. “Why you coming to me, then, Randy?”
“Jimmy didn’t have his number.”
Dale nodded slowly, the look of a man who was calculating, who knew when he was being lied to.
“I can’t help you out either, I’m afraid. Haven’t seen Tommy in a long time.” Dale clapped his hands in front of him, then put on his work gloves. “It’s been real good seeing you, but I got to get on with my day.” He turned to go up the stairs, and next to a jar of sun tea, Mayhill noticed a stack of empty sacks. He thought of the empty sacks he saw at the dump first thing this morning.
Bradley.
Then Randy Mayhill made a guess. He made a guess—explored a hunch—because that’s what good lawmen do. And it was this hunch, this moment that all who heard the story later would surmise was what sent Dale down a rabbit hole, that tipped over the domino that sent the whole thing crashing into chaos. That if Mayhill hadn’t said what he said next, that this story would have ended with only one dead body. But that’s not the way the story goes.
“How long Bradley Polk been working for you?”
Dale turned around quickly. “Why you asking me about Bradley Polk?”
“Jimmy said he saw him with you.” Lie, lie, lie.
Dale appeared to think for a moment, his hands twitching, his lips redder than Mayhill preferred on a man, or a woman for that matter. “Bradley does things for me here and there.”
Mayhill looked at the dirty, cracked window on his house, overgrown grass, the tangles of mesh wire and tomato cages everywhere, even though there were no tomato plants. In fact, Dale had no garden of any kind to account for the number of gardening tools he had propped by the shed. He did, however, have an impressive patch of poison pokeweed growing on the side of the trailer, almost as tall as Mayhill, thick with purple-black berries that weighed the entire plant down in long arches.
“What is Bradley doing for you exactly?”
“And what exactly do you want, Randy?” Dale puffed up, smile-less, his tombstone teeth hidden. “Or are you just out of things to do today, thought you’d play sheriff again?”
“Didn’t mean to pry…didn’t mean to pry…” Mayhill held up his hands as if to surrender. “Just need some help with my hogs is all. Thought Bradley just might be the man to do it. Since you don’t know Tommy Jones’s telephone number.”
“If I see him, I’ll tell him you’re looking for him,” Dale said. He disappeared up the cinder block stairs into his trailer—Twizzlers in one back pocket and what appeared to be, curiously, a rolled up silver phone book in the other.
It had gone well, Mayhill thought. Dale was as friendly as he had expected, though he seemed off. He seemed physically ill. Mayhill turned to leave, and as he did, he noticed a bunch of hogs out by Dale’s shed, huddled around Dale’s pickup. They appeared to be at work on something, and Mayhill moved slowly toward them. The hogs, thoroughly unfazed by the presence of a lesser-being like Mayhill, did not stir at his presence, but were nosing furiously around a few sacks, their snouts the odd pinkish color he had seen on Dale’s dog. He walked closer. He glanced in the back of Dale’s truck. A Sam’s Club box of Twizzlers and a pair of broken limb cutters.
His gut dropped and his face twitched. He felt the butterflies of a first kiss, the kick in the groin of falling in love, because there it was, right in the back of the truck for everybody to see. Sacks of blood meal! Bright as day! Mayhill leaned over and stared right at them, unbelieving of his luck, because in 1996, blood meal was hard to come by, and it was just the thing that Van had used when he was so desperate as to think all of his problems could be solved by growing an acre of marijuana.
Mayhill was startled out of his euphoria by the cocking of a gun. He spun around to see a not-so-anemic, fully-iron-supplemented, downright formidable Dale standing next to his trailer. The gun was not pointed at Mayhill, though it was held firmly across his chest soldier-like, but anyone could see that it was a message, visible and blaring, a Surgeon General’s warning tacked on the end of their otherwise pleasurable experience.
“You need to leave right now.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Mayhill quickly scooted away from the well-armed Dale, left his property, and returned home just as thunderheads formed in the sky. A storm was coming. It was nearing night, his dogs needed to be fed, and he was tired. He hadn’t walked so much since he was sheriff, and he felt sore, achy, and alive, but still he contemplated the downright poetic offerings of the hogs. Really, didn’t it have to be the hogs that pointed Mayhill to a clue that blew the entire thing open for him? Watching a bunch of hogs devour a bag of blood meal like Fun Dip would mean nothing to anybody else, but it was 1996: the height of mad cow disease. Outbreak in Britain! Hysteria in America! Oprah goes on the television, says she’s not gonna eat hamburgers. Beef prices plummet! Cattle ranchers sue! No more blood in livestock feed. No more blood in fertilizers and whatnot.
Yet right before he died, Van had bought all the remaining bags in Pine County because blood meal was the best thing he knew for keeping rabbits and deer away from his marijuana garden. His suicide note had been written on a receipt for blood meal. Randy Mayhill knew all of this intimately, tucked away in the arsenal of his mind.
Now, let’s be clear. Blood meal was not impossible to get. Yes, it was possible that Dale had, say, driven to Houston and picked up a few stray bags, or bought some extras off an old farmer, but that wasn’t even the point. The point was: why would Dale even need blood meal? Dale had no livestock, no vegetable garden to protect. Had Dale ever eaten a vegetable? Was he even able to identify a vegetable on the food pyramid under t
he sugary pointed tip occupied by Little Debbie snack cakes and Moon Pies? There was simply no other reason why Dale would have blood meal.
Mayhill thought of the 48 Hours episode and the hikers who had been killed by the cartels. Dale was no cartel—he was barely a full man!—but it all made sense that the hog hunter had stumbled upon something he shouldn’t have seen.
God, what if it had been Birdie walking in the woods?
Standing on his front porch, Mayhill’s excitement nosedived into vexation as he stared out at the trees. The rain fell in thick, hard drops that sounded like his tin roof was being pelted with nickels. He was flanked by his four dogs, Boo and Atticus on the left, Pat Sajak and Vanna on the right, and for a moment, he had the urge to howl into the night. He was euphoric and overwhelmed. Hundreds of acres of land where Dale could be working—it mocked him with its vastness. It would take him a couple of days on foot to find anything. As sheriff, he would have ordered helicopters, walkie talkies, gear! Yet now he was charged with combing the woods as a singular man, and even then he risked hanging face-down on a fence in his own right.
Randy Mayhill, lest we forget, was not a man to be intimidated by much. Mayhill could call the game warden himself with a tip, a suspicion—oh, the irony!—but what about Bradley? Bradley had a pull over this entire ordeal that Mayhill couldn’t fathom. How inconceivable that the story hinged upon someone so impotent, so worthless—like NASA realizing that Earth had actually revolved around Pluto all these years!
Goddammit, Bradley! But Birdie would never forgive him if that boy went to jail. And if nothing else has been established in this story already, it is this: Randy Mayhill would do anything for Birdie.
***
Mayhill grabbed a sixer of Dr Pepper for himself and filled up an old red water cooler he had from high school football practice—the water being for Pat Sajak—and the two jumped in the truck to search for more information, despite the rain coming down in sheets.
He had never done a stakeout or followed someone in any meaningful way, and on his law enforcement bucket list, these two things were near the top. While this lack of experience may seem unusual for a man who had been sheriff, even if only for two years, the logistics of country life were not conducive to stakeouts or following. This wasn’t Manhattan or LA. For all of the space that the country offered in which one could lose themselves—Come to the country! Be a hermit and die without notice!—there really was no anonymity, no traffic in which to hide, no store fronts into which to duck. How would it be possible to follow a lone truck down a remote dirt road into a hidden marijuana field and the driver, assuming he had full faculties of sight, not see? At best, Mayhill could walk for miles and miles, only to duck behind a loblolly pine, which even at six stories tall, would offer as much coverage as a yard stick for a man as big as him. The predicament was real.
Mayhill sketched out a crude map of Van’s land and the surrounding area: the back roads that butted up against the river, Dale’s house, some old abandoned houses, and the dump. Mayhill knew a few of the old logging roads by heart, the tiny veins that had largely grown over now, where he had accompanied Van cruising timber. The logging trails were infinite and largely invisible to Mayhill, though the trails had popped out at Van without effort, like a dog following a scent that mere humans couldn’t fathom.
Mayhill would be systematic now. For the next few hours, the rain blinked in and out. He forewent sleep and drove the back roads, the endless branching of dirt road after dirt road that ended at abandoned houses, a bigger highway, or a curtain of trees. He backed in and out of old logging trails because they were too overgrown for his truck to get through. The rain came in waves, and Mayhill would stop to get his bearings while Pat Sajak drank some water. His headlights bounced off trees in a way that revealed new openings that the day curiously obscured. Everything looked suspicious, yet nothing did.
At one point, he turned off his headlights and crept by Dale’s house again. Dale’s truck was parked out by the shed, hogs rooting near it. The lights in his trailer were on, and Dale’s silhouette coasted by the window like a ghost. Mayhill drove on.
Mayhill put tiny Xs over all of the land he had covered. He circled spaces he had not yet explored. He would do them tomorrow. Then he returned to the road in which he had run across the Datsun, and drove the opposite way to retrace the path where the truck could have come from, just in case the Datsun had belonged to Tommy Jones, the hog hunter the Jimmies thought was in the area.
Eventually, the rain got so thick that Mayhill drove home. He settled into his chair and turned on the scanner, but he couldn’t sleep for all of the sugar and caffeine, and so around 6:15 in the morning, he found himself waiting on the side of the road where he had earlier seen the little black truck.
And just as the sun burned off the rain and cast the sky in a parade of colors, a tiny black Datsun rocked around the corner. It had come from the main road, but it was heading into the woods.
Mayhill gripped the wheel hard with his left hand, his knuckles white, and he held out his other arm to brace Pat Sajak against the seat. Right when the black pickup was about to pass, Mayhill gassed it, jerked the wheel, and spun his truck in the middle of the road. The Datsun swerved nose first into the ditch.
Pat Sajak barked furiously at the window, and Mayhill jumped from the truck. He ran to the driver’s seat to find the man—a boy, really—dazed, fear glinting in his eyes.
Mayhill jerked open the Datsun door, grabbed the boy by the shirt, and drug him out of the truck. The boy was dirty and blond—all youth and fury and swinging elbows, and though Mayhill was much bigger, he couldn’t hold him long, the boy fighting like a scared cat, twisting and thrashing in his arms.
“Whose truck is this?” Mayhill’s knuckles throbbed under the shirt.
“Mine!” the boy yelled.
Mayhill slammed him against the side of the truck. “Whose truck is this?”
“I said it’s mine!” The boy kicked and swung at Mayhill. “Let go!”
“Quit lying to me, son.” Mayhill pressed all of his weight forward. Mayhill’s knee was killing him, and he wouldn’t be able to catch the kid if he ran.
“I found it,” the boy said through his teeth. He was filthy.
“Where?”
“Ain’t telling you nothin’!”
“Where’d you get this truck?”
“Let me go!”
Mayhill slammed into him harder, and the boy gasped, his face red.
“Woods,” the boy said. He swung his shoulder away from Mayhill.
“You just take any truck you find? Where’s the license plate? What’d you do with the plates?”
The boy tore from Mayhill’s hold. Mayhill grabbed him again and threw him against the truck. Mayhill’s elbow caught the boy’s lip, and it blossomed in blood.
“You stole this truck,” Mayhill said.
“I didn’t!” The boy knifed his shoulder toward Mayhill again.
“Are you Tommy Jones?” Mayhill was getting tired. His strength would give soon. “Is that your name? Are you Tommy Jones?”
“Let me go!” The boy spit blood at Mayhill.
“Tell me!” Mayhill dug his forearm into the boy’s chest.
“You gonna crack my rib!”
“I’ll let you go if you talk to me,” Mayhill said. “This truck belongs to Tommy Jones, don’t it?”
“I don’t know!” He jabbed a shoulder at Mayhill. “I found it.”
Mayhill eyed the boy hard but couldn’t tell if he was lying. Mayhill loosened his grip, and the boy sloughed his shoulders, cracked his neck.
“Why you so dirty?” Mayhill asked.
“Why you so dirty?”
Mayhill looked down at the big pond of Dr Pepper on the front of his shirt, the boy’s blood fresh upon it. “Do you know Bradley Polk?”
The boy kicked Mayhill as hard as he could in the knee, then pushed by him. Mayhill grabbed after him, but the b
oy threw a fist to Mayhill’s eye and scrambled to the truck. Mayhill reached for the door handle just as the boy slammed it shut.
“That truck ain’t going nowhere! You stuck, boy.” He hit the window with his palms.
The boy jammed the truck into gear and slammed the gas. The wheels spat a shower of mud behind them, but the truck only shuddered in place.
The boy sent it in reverse and hit the gas. More traction, the truck about to rock free. Mayhill didn’t have much time. He ran to the other side of the truck and slung open the passenger’s door.
“Get out!” the boy yelled.
The boy gassed the truck again, and it lurched forward, then resettled in the mud. The boy leaned over and struck at Mayhill’s shoulder with his fist, the other hand on the wheel, then gassed it again.
Mayhill clawed the glove box open and grabbed everything he could from it. Papers, trash, a tire gauge.
The truck spun free and knocked Mayhill to the ground. The car door swung and hit Mayhill in the face as he fell back. Mud splattered over Mayhill. The truck jerked and peeled away in a zigzag.
Mayhill’s jeans were ripped. His leg was bleeding but he still clutched the things from the glove box. He sat in the road, legs splayed like a kid sitting in the sand. He was covered in mud, and his heart beat hard in his chest. Pat Sajak barked from the window.
Mayhill tried to catch his breath. He rolled to his side, then pulled up to his knees, a pain shooting through his bad one. He climbed into his truck, one leg still hanging out because he was too tired to bring it all the way in. He looked in the rearview mirror and examined his forehead. He had a good cut, and it was bleeding badly. Mayhill patted the dog’s head. “You scared him, Pat,” he said. “Good job.”
He felt older than he ever had.
The sun was fully up now. He squinted his eyes in the morning light, then right there in the truck, thumbed through the papers. An old receipt for tires. A flattened cigarette carton. Underneath it, curiously, a map, hand-drawn in thick purple marker. Mayhill studied it a few moments before he understood—the river, the highway, the woods shaded in big loopy scribbles—Van’s land. And there’s Birdie’s house…Dale’s house…Mayhill’s house.
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