Ain't Nobody Nobody

by Heather Harper Ellett

  Underneath the map, the truck’s registration. Thomas Reed Jones.

  Was that boy Tommy Jones? Or was that just his truck? Why did he have a map?

  When he looked ahead, the Datsun’s thick tracks were etched into the road. Oh, glorious mud! Mayhill had never been so thankful for mud! A perfect trail! He waited a few minutes to give the truck some lead time, then Pat Sajak and he inched slowly down the road and took turn after turn deeper into the forest, until he came to a logging trail far in the woods between Van’s house and the river, where another set of tracks joined the Datsun’s. A few more turns and he came to a small offshoot so narrow that Mayhill’s truck wouldn’t fit without getting stuck himself or scraping the paint job off entirely. He got out of the truck quietly, gun ready. He already ached from his brawl, and his eyes stung from the mud and blood. His head throbbed. He walked about fifty feet down the trail, following the tire tracks, which ended at a pile of dead branches. He scanned the trees surrounding him, but there was no sign of the boy or the truck, as if they had disappeared behind a curtain in the woods.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “We’re moving it tomorrow!” Dale made the declaration first thing that same morning. Thunderstorms had rolled through most of the night but the tree cover had made sleeping in the tent largely tolerable. Still, at some point very late in the night or very early in the morning, Bradley thought he heard a truck and saw the moon-white shine of headlights off in the distance. It had spooked him, and so he ran from his tent through the woods and slept in his truck. In the morning, he woke to Dale banging on his window. “You hear me?” he said. “We’re moving it tomorrow!”

  Bradley was damp and stiff-necked, his shoes still wet from the early morning run to the truck. Everything about him smelled like mold, and he itched beneath his clothes. A lacy rash like poison ivy had formed on his groin. He got out of the truck and popped his neck. The overnight thunderstorms had produced a light summer fog that made Dale, twenty feet away, look like a ghost—an impression of himself, an image on a cloudy roll of film. The air was so thick Bradley felt as if he were inhaling syrup, and the muddy forest floor, the bounce of wet pine needles, like walking on a mattress. All of it unreal.

  Bradley rushed to catch up with Dale, who trudged ahead to the garden. “Moving tomorrow? What’s going on?”

  “Where the hell’s Jason?” Dale snapped, a slight slur to his speech, eyelids hopping like crickets.

  And Bradley, aware now that he must tread lightly, didn’t know how to ask anything else. Something definitive had shifted in Dale overnight, the volume turned up, his nervousness contagious and suffocating, a neurotic second-hand smoke. Each breath seemed short, a countdown to an explosion. Dale grabbed a pair of work gloves from his bag and stretched his hands into them, his long fingers vibrating like guitar strings.

  Bradley had taken down all of the fencing yesterday, but Dale hadn’t returned to help as promised, and so the job had taken all day, slowed even more by the rain. With the plants all exposed and vulnerable, Bradley stayed up all night to make sure no hogs trampled them or deer ate them in the night, but the thunderstorms had sent all the animals into hiding. Bradley, however, had no other place to go.

  Now Bradley gathered up the remaining wire, while Dale, who rarely touched the garden directly, trimmed the dead leaves off the plants with a small pair of clippers. At the far end of the garden that butted up against the thicket, Bradley picked up one of the few remaining tangles of fencing metal and held it in front of him like a giant, rusted tumbleweed.

  Then Bradley heard a sound. A loud crack deep in the forest—a branch breaking, a skulking animal. He stopped for a moment to listen and heard the definitive slush of footsteps, the crunch of muddy leaves. You’re being paranoid, he thought. Dale has you rattled. Then, a flash of motion, something bobbing in and out of the foliage, probably a deer or a hog, but impossible to tell. He put the metal down and took a few slow steps into the woods. He thought he imagined it, but then he saw the flicker in the distance again. Definite movement. A low-flying buzzard? A trick of the eye in the otherworldly light of sun and haze?

  The figure moved through the trees, about a hundred feet off, a flash of white against the dead, brassy trunks. Bradley’s stomach dropped. He couldn’t move. It was a person, certainly a person, walking far off in the distance. Pale. Small.

  “What you looking at?” Dale suddenly appeared behind him, and Bradley flinched. Dale’s voice was urgent and tight. “You see something? You see something out there?”

  “No…” Bradley shook his head. “Hogs, I think.” He turned quickly to get back to work but Dale grabbed his arm.

  “Nah, I hear it.” Dale craned his neck.

  “Think it’s gone now,” he said too quickly, just as he heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps approaching—one-two, one-two, one-two—slush-slush on the wet mattress of the forest floor. “I’m gonna load the rest of this wire—”

  “Shhh,” Dale hissed at him, and then under his breath, muttered something that Bradley couldn’t be sure.

  Mayhill?

  The idea had occurred to Bradley many times that, in a terrible twist of fate, Mayhill or Birdie might stumble onto what they were doing, their land so close to Dale’s. Still, it was unlikely! Birdie never left the house. She didn’t go into the woods, much less wander as far as Dale’s property. He had told himself this at least. Now seeing a person off in the distance, he had to consider the possibility of her being in physical danger. We’re just gardeners. It was just a hunting accident.

  Dale crouched down low.

  Go away, Bradley thought, whoever you are. Please, go away. Walk away from here. He stared at the ground in front of his feet, Dale’s arm still firmly on him. Bradley prayed for a sounder of hogs to charge through the woods, to distract from whatever awfulness was about to unfold. “Hogs,” Bradley said, purposefully loud. “They were moving through here yesterday. There’s a rooting spot right through that thicket.”

  Dale didn’t say anything but inched backward toward his tool bag and retrieved a pistol.

  Jesus. Bradley held his breath. Dale took a few slow steps into the woods, crouching for the hunt, his gun ready.

  “Dale…”

  Dale was tracking the figure, blessedly indiscernible now through the trees. He cocked the pistol, then stretched his gun long and followed the sound. He squinted and moved the gun toward the footsteps, slowly winding the barrel through the air, stalking an invisible trail.

  “Dale…" Bradley’s voice shook. Dale didn’t look back, but Bradley realized then that Dale could use the gun on him, could shoot him dead right there, and nobody would ever know. Jason might stumble upon his body later. Jason would bury him where he fell in the forest and probably delight in getting Bradley’s share of the beer.

  He couldn’t ignore what was happening anymore. He should tackle him. He should try to wrestle the gun from his hand. Bradley’s entire body tensed, every muscle twitching to fire. He lifted his fist.

  Then, BANG! The sound of metal clanging, the tinny sound of a gate slamming shut. Dale jumped and swiveled his head, trying to find the noise. A fawn sprinted past them.

  Then, suddenly, in the opposite direction—the sound of footsteps behind them. In the garden. Bradley turned quickly toward the noise and back to the woods, not sure which way to look. Dale spun with his pistol outstretched, hand on the trigger.

  “Shit!” Jason ducked and jumped back with his arms over his head. His face was red and battered, a cut on his lip.

  Jason.

  Dale dropped the gun to his side. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Nothing.” Jason touched his lip and smeared blood across his mouth. “What I got to do?”

  Dale looked back into the forest, but the figure was gone, thankfully. Bradley blinked his eyes at the sun and tried to catch his breath.

  “You said you saw hogs?” Dale asked Bradley.

  “Ye
s, yessir.”

  “You start cutting on the end here. Keep watch on the thicket,” Dale said. “Jason and I gonna clean all this up, load up everything in the truck. Then Jason gonna cut too. We moving everything tomorrow.”

  Dale walked away quickly then, as if nothing at all had happened, but Bradley couldn’t move. He trembled slightly and looked down at his shoes. They were completely covered in mud, no Jordan peering through, the wetness soaking through the torn sole. He floated over himself, a full-on panic and disembodiment. He wasn’t sure how he had gotten there, how he had gotten to this point. He watched Jason and Dale moving around and chatting about the day as if Dale had not pointed a gun at him, as if Dale had not almost shot a person walking in the woods. He hated them. Bradley then had a vision—psychic almost—of ripping Dale’s gun from his hand, shooting them both Western-style, BANG-BANG. He imagined Dale and Jason falling to the ground, their faces in shock for discounting him.

  Bradley tried to shake the thought. He didn’t know who he was anymore. He loaded the rest of the fencing wire into the back of the truck and surveyed the plot for any trash, any remnant of them being there, except for the camp chairs and the lantern. Those would stay until tomorrow. He tried to lie to himself the way Dale had lied to himself so fully.

  “Tomorrow? What happened to October?” Jason grabbed a shovel from the pile of gardening tools, then held it close. “It ain’t ready yet. The buds aren’t emerald green yet. You said emerald!” Jason walked down a row of tall plants up to his eyes. He dropped the shovel and stared worriedly at the plants. He pulled a limb down to eye level, the bushy burst of leaves and flowers looking him right in the face. He grimaced and pushed the plant away in disgust. “Hell, these ain’t even avocado.”

  “Ready enough. It’s ready enough,” Dale snapped. He was a man trying to convince himself. “Tomorrow.”

  Bradley put on some gloves and grabbed some branch cutters. He crouched low at the base of the first plant on the row nearest to him. He nudged the leaves out of his face. Jason was right, they weren’t ready yet. Bradley was surprised at how proud he was of the plants after all the months of nurturing and pruning. The plants were gorgeous, the closest he’d ever come to ownership of any kind. It pained him, but Bradley opened the handles wide and edged the blades into the stalk of the plant. He squeezed as hard as he could, and the thick stalk cracked and fell over but was still connected by ropy fibers. He twisted the cutters back and forth, and the bush came free completely. He tossed the pale green plant to his left to start a stack, and even though Dale was watching him, he avoided Dale’s gaze. He didn’t want to look at him. It hurt to see what a man deluding himself looked like.

  The flash of white, pale and small. His stomach churned. He knew it was Birdie. Why had she been out there? Why had she gone so far? And then the realization shook him, his own stupidity punching him in the gut. Of course. Of course. They were on her land.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Just as Mayhill slammed a strange boy into the side of an old black Datsun, Birdie cut a slice of Mr. Boudreaux’s watermelon for breakfast and handed it to Onie in her recliner. Birdie stared out the window into the driveway and willed Bradley’s truck to appear. Across the pasture, Mayhill’s truck was gone. For a moment, she considered he had gone missing too, and an ache of concern sprung up like a fever blister, all surprise and annoyance.

  Onie’s television was off, which was a promising start to the day, but the sound of her slurping and gnawing at the watermelon was eerily reminiscent of hogs at a trough. It was like she was tasting it for the first time, all ruby-mouthed and happy. It was the loudest Onie had been in a year and had the welcomed side effect of making her look alive.

  “Do you remember a man who hung out with Dad and Dale Mackey?” Birdie settled on the arm of Onie’s recliner and watched her closely. “He started coming around after the trees died.”

  “Rudy Lyons,” Onie said, pink dripping down her chin. “He wrecked the bailer first thing one morning. Still drunk from the night before.”

  It was a surprisingly detailed response, though wrong entirely.

  “No,” Birdie said. “This man came up here with Dad and Dale.”

  “Rudy Lyons is a good one,” Onie said. “Could write pretty well, considering. His mama was totally illiterate. Good people though.”

  “Onie, I’m not asking about Rudy Lyons. I know Rudy Lyons,” Birdie said. “I’m asking about a very specific man. I don’t know his name, but he had a tattoo.”

  Onie wiped her hands on her skirt and turned on the television. This irked Birdie and she wondered if she should just drop it, but Onie was talkative, and in one glorious morning of them sharing a watermelon, the house seemed less tinted with loneliness. A back and forth exchange! An honest-to-God conversation, snuggled up on the recliner! She mentally noted to feed Onie watermelon daily. Maybe it was the sugar.

  “This man came up here one time with Dad and Dale,” Birdie said over the television. “Bradley didn’t know him. I had never seen him before.”

  “Cat on a hot tin roof,” Onie said suddenly.

  “What?” Birdie asked, not sure she heard right.

  “Cat on a hot tin roof.”

  Birdie searched Onie’s face, suddenly sure she was speaking in code. She scoured her memory. Yes, yes…Cat on a Hot Tin Roof…Tennessee Williams…or was she referencing an actual cat…there was a feral cat named Emerson…

  Then Birdie followed Onie’s gaze to the television. Wheel of Fortune. Six words. O’s bubbling up across the spaces.

  “The damn puzzle!” Birdie said. “CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF.”

  Onie grimaced but didn’t admonish her language, though Birdie desperately wanted her to do just that kind of thing right then, slap her face, say, "Watch your mouth, child!" To say a normal, predictable adult thing right then (though, let’s be honest, Onie had never said normal things). All Birdie wanted was a sane adult around, to be taken care of. She wanted her father, not this depressed shell of a woman who tightrope-walked the thin line of sanity. Hope be damned.

  Birdie stormed to the front door and shoved her feet in her tennis shoes.

  “Why do you look at me like that?” Onie called after her. She didn’t look away from the television, just commenced work on the white part of the rind.

  “Like what?” Birdie’s voice was bratty and caustic.

  “Like you’ve lost something.”

  ***

  The dead man had fallen oddly close to a break in the trees where a dozen inmates had entered to cut down Van’s garden on order of the County. A week after Van died, an unmarked white prison bus rolled up the driveway because that was the closest access to the main field that had been their agenda that day. Birdie had been surprised to find that the men were mostly white—the local pen, of course; black men being locked up for much longer in Huntsville on account of Birdie didn’t know what—and they were dressed in the neon orange that allowed escaped convicts to stick out like poisonous mushrooms in the woods.

  These were trustees, they were told, part of the community work squad—no murderers or rapists—so they were not chained, just heavy work boots in which nobody could run very far anyway. They were jovial even, laughing like a football team getting off the bus, and the realization of happy prisoners had torn her in two. That could have been Dad. Yes, imprisoned but alive. Alive! She could have talked to him. And Bradley, there on a Wednesday (because all of life seemed to happen on Wednesdays and Saturdays) walked briskly from his truck to stand beside her as if he could sense her outrage. He had never stood that close to her.

  “Did you know what Dad was doing?” Birdie whispered. Birdie’s gaze was fixed on the men, a blister of orange moving in a line across the field.

  “He wouldn’t let me near it,” Bradley said, then put his hand firmly on her back. She looked up at him, not offended so much as surprised at his hand on her, like he was propping her up. And he stayed that way until the
final trustee disappeared into the break of the trees.

  ***

  Birdie was thinking all of this as she marched past the burn pile and up the hill toward Mayhill’s along the tree line where they had found the body, repeating Mayhill’s taunt of “Do not go into the woods” like a mantra, rebellion hot in her blood. She was always her father’s daughter.

  I’ve lost everything, Onie. She touched her shirt pocket, pink note folded up inside.

  She broke through the tree line into the woods and beheld it with the same awe as if she had burst through a closet into Narnia. The thicket this time of year was lousy with ticks, which was one of the reasons her father had remained clean-shaven—that and women love a chin dimple. She pulled her socks up tightly around her ankles and kept Van’s shirt buttoned at the wrists. The trees were overgrown and cast lacy shadows on the ground, and in her head, her father was telling her they needed to be cut, the entire place cleaned up, but it was too much work for only Bradley and she didn’t have the energy or desire to call anybody else to do it. You ain’t doing nothin’ with that land. But in her mind, Van was somehow responsible for it.

  Standing in the woods right then—if you pressed her on it—she still believed Van was there somehow. In her weakest, most superstitious moments over the past two days, she had entertained the fact that the dead hog hunter was supernaturally connected to Van. A man who worked for him ended up dead on their land and then disappeared! It was the exact kind of thing that ghost stories were made of, that Van would have adored. Ghosts in the woods, rattling chains, and whatnot. Had this sort of thing been an option in the afterlife, like a college elective, Van would have signed up first day. He would have majored in it. Even dead, he couldn’t stay quiet.

  The thought simultaneously delighted and spooked her. She walked slowly and tried not to make a lot of noise, though the pine needles crunched like paper beneath her shoes. Off to her right, some hogs rooted in a small clearing, and she stopped to watch them. The clearing was a favorite rooting spot, the ground all overturned in patches, tilled-fresh, the dirt exposed that had long been covered by pine needles. The hogs were small animals, really, to cause so much destruction. Two or three feet tall, ears in jagged rooftop triangles atop their heads. All different colors, red, yellow, black, and white. All precious in Jesus’s sight. A whole United Nations of hogs. About three dozen of them, noses under the needles, followed an invisible line of grubs. Birdie’s gaze settled on the eyes of a larger black boar, which had stopped its rooting and looked right at her, eyes as black as its skin. They were glassy, almost cloudy, but her presence didn’t seem to faze it.