Ain't Nobody Nobody

by Heather Harper Ellett

  “Birdie, calm down.” Mayhill swooped up Pat Sajak and held him close to his chest. “Matlock’s a good show.”

  She spun away from him as if he had touched her shoulder, which he wisely had not. “And that’s why Bradley’s helping! Dale hired Bradley as insurance! He knows I’d never call the police on him.”

  “If you found out.”

  “If I found out. Gah!” Birdie threw her hands up.

  “Birdie…” Mayhill said. “If Bradley’s doing what we’re thinking, maybe he deserves—”

  “Don’t say it!”

  “Jail?” He put the dog down. “Don’t say that a man deserves jail for doing bad?”

  “So Dad deserved jail?”

  “It was his land. It’s different.” Mayhill tried to think of all the myriad ways it was different. “Van was good. He just got desperate, made a wrong turn, trusted the wrong people.”

  “What about Bradley?” she yelled. “He’s not good? What’s he got?”

  “You can’t possibly compare your daddy to Bradley Polk!”

  Birdie threw herself in Mayhill’s rocking chair and rocked so fast he thought she might take flight. “Why would Dale kill a guy and leave him there? It’d just draw more attention.”

  Birdie had a point. Dale and Tommy Jones were supposedly friends, and the body was a decent distance from where Mayhill guessed they were. Perhaps they had gotten in a fight. Maybe Dale hadn’t had time to dispose of the body before Birdie found it.

  “I mean,” Birdie said. “We wouldn’t even be talking about this if we hadn’t seen a dead guy. I’m beginning to wonder if we’re all…” She looked at Mayhill, and then mouthed, “Going nuts,” as if Onie could hear from across the pasture. “Maybe crazy is in the well.”

  “Big picture, Birdie. Big picture.” He leaned against the porch post, his knee still aching from before. “Hunter tracks some hogs through the woods. Comes across a marijuana field. Dale shoots him. Same thing happened on 48 Hours.”

  “Or Dale shoots Bradley.” Birdie brought her hands to her face. “That’s why he hasn’t come back.”

  Mayhill waved it off. “Dale shoots the trapper…scared to death…” He didn’t believe the words himself. He wasn’t sure why that boy would have Tommy Jones’s truck. “I’m working on it, Birdie. I’ll take care of you, you know I will.”

  “Do you know who the trapper is?” Birdie asked quietly then, but Mayhill could hear it. There was a knowing in her voice.

  “You knew him! Why didn’t you—”

  “I recognized him,” she said, “but Dad never introduced me. I don’t know his name.” Pat Sajak jumped into Birdie’s lap, and she paused for a moment to scratch his head. Looking at Pat and Birdie, Mayhill decided then that she needed a dog. A dog could fix this. At least four. Onie had given him Atticus, Van’s hunting dog, after Van died. She said it made them too sad to see him waiting for Van every night. Taking Atticus from them had been a mistake, but hell, Mayhill was waiting for Van too.

  “His name is Tommy Jones. Jimmies told me he trapped out this way. Evidently, he’s a real rough fella…got a record…” Violent to women, he almost said, but he stopped.

  “Tommy Jones,” she said, as if trying to conjure a memory.

  He pulled out the map he had found in Tommy Jones’s glove box and flicked his hand to unfold it in front of her face, like giving a hound a scent. “You know this map?”

  Birdie snatched it from him and studied it. “Why is it covered in mud?” Then a flash of understanding in her eyes. “This is our place. Where did you find this? This is a map of our place!”

  “Belonged to Tommy Jones.”

  “He drew a map of our place? And then he died?” The panic caught in her throat, and Mayhill wanted so badly to fix it right then, but he had no words. “Why was he mapping our place? Why, Randy, why?”

  But Mayhill, of course, didn’t know. He couldn’t fix it, and he had told her too much. Still, he couldn’t help but note that Birdie had trusted him enough to ask.

  ***

  Birdie drove back to her house, and Mayhill laid down for a short nap before Pat Sajak and he would commence their search for Bradley. He turned on the police scanner, which was a mix of fuzz and low beeps—a quiet day, a slow day, a day when Mayhill would have caught up on paperwork, driven lazily down the roads, checked in on the low-hanging criminal element. He fell asleep, as usual, and dreamed of welfare calls, paperwork, drunk drivers.

  So it was not so crazy that Mayhill didn’t stir when he first heard the sound of a siren—a man like Randy Mayhill regularly dreamed in sirens and alarm bells—but then he heard his dogs bark. He slowly opened his eyes and knew then it wasn’t a dream. Lights whirled through his window. Specks of blue and red bounced across into his tiny bedroom like a nightclub. Pat Sajak perched on top of the small gun safe and growled out the window, each bark lurching him forward, his small body casting an overlay of blue and red shadows on the wall across the room. Mayhill scrambled to the window and pulled down the blinds. The sheriff’s truck was parked outside his tiny house, lights blazing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Dale’s trailer made Bradley feel as if he were inside a gullet. The sun behind the tarp window cast a blue glow on the walls, not helping to dissuade from the gullet aesthetic, as if he swam in the innards of a cold-blooded frog, blue arteries and all. After they wiped down and unloaded all the remaining supplies, Dale and Bradley retreated from the heat into the trailer while he made some iced tea. Bradley didn’t want to be there. All he could think of was Dale’s pistol snaking through the air, tracking the figure through the woods. All these months. Birdie’s land…Birdie’s land…Birdie’s land. The words pulsed through him. He had never felt so stupid.

  He had been to Dale’s place only a couple of times before. First, when they transported the baby plants, and another time when he raided Dale’s shed for a shovel after some hogs had died near the grow site. Dale had charged Bradley with the gruesome task of moving them far from the garden because Dale didn’t want even buzzards drawing attention to their locale. Bradley hadn’t known what to do with them so he drug the smallest of the hogs into feed sacks and unloaded them at the entrance to the dump. He felt bad about this, he did, but where else was someone to dump a bunch of dead hogs in feed sacks?

  Bradley sat on the sunken tweed couch while Dale hauled in his gallon jug of sun tea off the front stoop. He watched Dale warily, his mind still back at the garden, how the gun had materialized from Dale’s bag. He wondered if Dale kept a pistol under the couch, nesting in the stick-brown cushions.

  In the kitchen area, Dale unscrewed the jar and poured the tea into a thermos. An economy-sized bottle of Pepto-Bismol stood like a vase on the kitchen counter. Dale took a swig, then turned back to the thermos and shoveled snowpiles of sugar into it.

  Bradley needed to understand what was happening, all the ways he had been duped into doing terrible things, betraying the only good in his life.

  Bradley opened his mouth to speak, to ask questions, but then—

  “When’s the last time you eat?” Dale called from the kitchen.

  “Uh…I dunno…” Even Bradley’s voice sounded gullible. He shrugged and stared at the photograph of a woman on the wall: flip hairdo, fifties glasses, all sunken cheeks and Indian-high cheekbones. She could have been Dale’s wigged twin.

  “You been workin’ hard.” Dale poured a bowl of Hy-Top Toasty-Os and put it on the small side table next to Bradley. Bradley looked at the bowl and back at Dale, confused at first that he was feeding him despite all that was happening. Dale eyed him pityingly. Right then, Bradley tried to refocus on the memory—Dale’s gun pointed at Jason, Dale’s face fevered but somehow natural, as if he had done such a thing before. But then cereal happened. Cereal! The milk now golden like hay. The Toasty-Os tasted name brand. It calmed him. The best thing he’d ever eaten.

  Dale hovered at the table and took another drink of the Pe
pto.

  “You doing okay?” Bradley asked.

  “Nerves.”

  “Nerves…” Bradley repeated. He breathed a choppy breath, as deep as he could. “Dale, we about to get caught?”

  “You worried about the truck?” Dale sat on the couch beside him. “Second time you said something.”

  Bradley didn’t realize he’d heard him before. “Just seems like things moving fast all of a sudden. Moving it tomorrow. But the plants,” he said carefully. “They need another month.”

  “You told anybody you here?” Dale asked.

  “Dale, I would never—”

  “Birdie doesn’t know you working here?”

  “No.”

  “Randy Mayhill doesn’t know you working here?” Dale raised his eyebrows, and Bradley saw it, that new paranoid look that had blossomed overnight like pokeweed, paranoia as thick as Bradley’s stench. Dale was testing him.

  “No.” Bradley shook his head. “Don’t know Mayhill too much. Nobody knows about me here. Nobody.”

  Dale studied his face. “Then we got nothing to worry about, do we?”

  Dale leaned forward, reaching for something in his back pocket. Bradley tensed, only to see Dale pull out a package of Twizzlers. He wrestled one out of the cellophane, and sucked on the end, his hands vibrating like an engine.

  “I’d say you remind me of me,” Dale said. “But I had my mama and daddy. You don’t have even that. Men like you and me don’t have a whole lot of options. Get decapitated at the wood mill, working for shit until we die. Ranch business dying. No skills. No education. You want a family? You think you gonna support a family on broke fences? You think you gonna support a family being a hand for some trust-fund rancher who treats you like a wetback? Or the Navy? Virgil Fuller lucky he only lost his fingers. Those our only options? Wood mill or military?”

  “Work at the prison, I guess,” Bradley said, confused. Why was Dale giving him a lecture? “More jobs in the city.”

  “It’s the same anywhere.” Dale got up and paced the room, hands shaking at his sides. “You know that. Janitor, cashier at the corner store. It don’t matter. The point is…someone else controlling your life.”

  “I do okay,” Bradley said, surprised at the defensiveness in his voice. He watched Dale in his periphery.

  “You do okay,” Dale said. “You a hard worker, I give you that. But you still here because you know.” Dale tapped the soft dent of his temple. “You know.”

  “I know what?”

  “You know your life is your own. You know some break is the only way to get your land.” Dale paused. “Is that why you still hang around Van’s family? You trying to marry his girl? You trying to marry Birdie? Get all that land?”

  He hated Dale saying her name. “I’m not trying to marry anybody.”

  Dale shook his finger in the air, a taunting, knowing thing. “That it, ain’t it? Not a bad plan, but I’d be careful if I was you. End up spoiled like Birdie. Sitting on all that land and ain’t doing nothing with it. Trees just rotting because Van didn’t know what he had. Van and them, they ain’t like us.”

  The bitterness toward Van surprised him. “But you and Van were friends…”

  “Van ratted me out the first chance he got. He coulda bought and sold me. I worked for him. For him. Someone dictating my life. It ain’t like what me and you doing. Y’all don’t get it. I’m giving y’all a life. A life.”

  Bradley realized then that Dale hadn’t just expected work; he expected gratitude. He’d worked for other men who’d never even spoken his name, and here Dale was feeding him cereal in the middle of the day, feeding him fried chicken on some nights, talking to him like he was a solider in his army. But Bradley didn’t quite know what they were fighting for.

  The hunter flashed in Bradley’s head again. Dale wasn’t just a man trying to get rich; he was a man with something to prove. A dead man near the paranoid, self-righteous Dale. An illegal operation on hijacked land. On one hand, it seemed obvious. On the other, Bradley stared at the cereal Dale placed in front of him. The thoughtfulness, the care. He wasn’t sure Dale had it in him. At the end of the day, they were gardeners. They were just gardeners trying to catch a break.

  But he had to know.

  “Dale…the day before yesterday, when I was at Birdie’s—”

  “I gotta tell you something.” Dale held up his hand to silence him. “Things looking a little different than we thought.”

  Bradley shook his head, not sure he understood. Dale was going to confess. About Birdie’s land, the truck, and…what else was there? What else had Bradley been so stupid about? He realized he was holding his breath.

  “Money’s not what I said,” Dale said.

  The money. Of course. Stupid, stupid. Bradley looked down at his hands, trying not to let the rage spill out of him. Of course Dale had taken advantage of him. Twenty thousand dollars had been a joke, a carrot he dangled with nothing behind it.

  “How’s seventy-five thousand?” Dale winked at him.

  And just like that, Bradley Polk disappeared. He wasn’t there anymore. He floated from Dale’s sad little trailer into a life that belonged to him. He couldn’t help it. He saw his land, the sprawling fingers of acreage and pine. Children (three), horses (a long-maned Palomino named Willow), a wife (she would make fajitas, Cheerios, those cakes with the hole in the middle), showers (indoor and outdoor).

  Seventy-five thousand dollars. He didn’t quite believe it. His life. All of it. Tomorrow. Less than forty-eight hours.

  And in the next thought: Birdie’s land, Birdie’s land, Birdie’s land. The dead man. Dale swinging that gun. Was that what had happened to the hog hunter? The hunter had set a trap too close to the garden, seen what they were doing. Dale with a chip on his shoulder.

  Bradley couldn’t speak. He finished his cereal quietly then, his own hand now rattling the spoon against the bowl. On those tree-trunk legs, though wobbly like a newborn calf, he stood up and walked the bowl to the kitchen. Dale’s gaze tracked him all the way to the sink, looking at him expectantly with the half-crazed look of a revolutionary. And in that second, with his breath gone and milk dribbling down his chin like a child, Bradley didn’t know if Dale was the most terrifying man he’d ever met, or the bravest.

  “Thanks,” Bradley said, coming back to the moment and the cereal bowl still trembling in his hand. “I mean, you know…in case I never said it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  To call him “the new” anything would have been a serious error in descriptor, yet the new sheriff made his way over the rocky driveway and up Mayhill’s porch stairs, toting a small oxygen tank behind him. Mayhill was in his boxer shorts but his shirt was still on, though the bottom two buttons were undone, his belly peeking out.

  “I knocked first,” New Sheriff said. He was very thin and had a slight Cajun accent. A sip of air hissed up his nose, the plastic cannula bobbing in response. “But you’s asleep.”

  “Quick nap,” Mayhill said.

  “Ain’t no quick nap. You was out.” The sheriff looked at Mayhill suspiciously, his deep wrinkles like war trenches. “What happened to your face? You look like hell.”

  “What’s this about?” Mayhill asked.

  He looked back at the sheriff’s truck and saw that someone was in the passenger’s seat. He squinted hard to wake up his eyes. A woman. Red sweatshirt. Bradley’s mother. Mayhill struggled to breathe. Bradley. Then his thoughts turned to Birdie, and he panicked. Where was Birdie? Was Birdie okay? Where had they found Bradley?

  “You look pale, Randy. I know this prolly ain’t real comfortable for you. But I’m guessin’ you know what this about,” New Sheriff said. “Ms. Johnson just here to ID.”

  “Where was he?” Mayhill said, the breath caught in his throat. “Where did they find him?”

  New Sheriff lifted his chin to the black dog sentried on the porch. “Weren’t too hard to find.”

  Mayh
ill looked around confused, and then rubbed his head with his hands. He closed his eyes, rage and relief duking it out in his brain. “You talking about Vanna?”

  “Miss Johnson has reason to believe you kidnapped her dog.” The oxygen puffed in his nose. “We’ll need you to come down to the station.”

  ***

  Goddamn Gabby Grayson.

  He hadn’t seen her in eighteen months, but upon catching her eyes, he felt that shock of attraction not unlike serving an arrest warrant.

  She had aged admirably well compared to their counterparts. A year and a half did not seem like a long time in the grand scheme of the universe, but among the forty-something set, the change seemed almost as dramatic as not seeing a kitten for that long. The feed store men, for example. Brown hair turned half gray in unpredictable patterns—some salt and pepper, some of the skunk variety. Faces picking up and moving an entire inch south. And the bodies…the bodies! His own body. He was supposed to be dead at thirty from a gunfight, saving women named Clementine and Maybelle. Instead, he was in this gray, sagging vessel he didn’t understand.

  Gabby, however. Goddamn. She had the same reddish-brown hair that fell in loose rings past her shoulders. Big, happy teeth that proclaimed the world to be trustworthy. A thin waist but big hips he happily rested his hands upon once during a school dance. She wore her self-imposed uniform of a white polo shirt and khaki pants that made her look like a softball coach, no matter the occasion. Gabby Grayson. All business.

  Mayhill could see New Sheriff talking with Bradley’s mother in his old office, his ancient face bobbing up and down in front of the billboard-sized county map. Mayhill wanted to yell out that Ms. Johnson’s son was missing.

  What about your son, Ms. Johnson? You gonna get Father Time on that case too?

  “We could have worked it out there,” Mayhill said too loudly. “He didn’t have to make me drive all the way down here.”

  “He gets out of breath when he talks,” Gabby whispered, and leaned over the desk. “I’ve seen it. That little oximeter goes down to eighty-five. Eighty-five, Randy. His oxygen levels should be in the high nineties.”