“But Van would just say Dale’s involved too.”
“Well, hell. Dale probably didn’t touch anything. Have you felt his hands?”
“And if Van is dead…” Gabby said. “He couldn’t rat out Dale. All of it’s on Van’s land. Just rumor mill then.”
“If Van is dead…” The implication hit him like a bullet. “Oh my God.” Mayhill couldn’t breathe. His chest was caving in.
“I tried calling you,” Gabby said. She grabbed his sleeve and pulled him back toward the truck. “You never picked up.”
He tried to catch a breath but all he could think was that Dale had killed Van himself.
“I didn’t tell you,” Gabby said, “because of everything you just told me. I thought it didn’t change anything.” She looked at him, as if to beg forgiveness. “You left. You left for a long time, and you didn’t come back. I didn’t know why. Not sure any of us knew why. I mean, yeah, you screwed up. But shame ain’t worth that. Shame ain’t worth losing your life over. You’re too good of a man for that.”
It was then that Mayhill finally breathed in deep. He walked back to the truck and sat on the tailgate next to her, not at a distance now. So close he could smell gardenias.
He looked out at the hogs that seemed to be multiplying in front of him. They congregated in bunches a hundred deep, a fast-motion propagation of the species. He felt like he could see the entire world fast forwarding on his VCR, everything unfolding in astonishing beauty and perfection.
He nodded and looked into the night, and he could feel her looking at him. Too good of a man, she had said. The words rung in his ears. The night seemed radiant then. His stomach flipped at the realization that he had been living out the wrong story all along.
That’s when it happened. It happened so fast he didn’t even register at first that Goddamn Gabby Grayson had taken his large, meat cleaver hand and squeezed it tightly in hers. Her hand was tiny and bird-like, and now it rested with his on his thigh, like he was a man worth caring about, like he was a man who deserved grace. Nobody had touched him in years, and Randy Mayhill’s throat caught at the realization that he had found something he had not known was lost.
Then they both turned and looked out at the hogs swarming like locusts around them. He stared at their hands a moment—intertwined, mismatched in size, and couldn’t think of a thing to say, his brain notably quiet. He had everything right then. They sat together like this on the tailgate in silence for a long time—this rare and glorious moment of physical contact for Randy Mayhill, this moment of grace squeezed by improbable loss—watching as the hogs rooted happily in the dark.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“I need to see Van’s gun.”
After Mayhill left the Glorious Gabby Grayson, he found himself on Birdie’s front porch. It was around eleven at night, and his head was so close to the porch light that the moths flittered near his ears, the shine of his bald spot beckoning them like a torch.
“Why was the sheriff at your place?” The worry on Birdie’s face was now a permanent fixture, something to work around like the hogs.
“It was nothing. Misunderstanding.”
“They had the lights on. Onie was worried.” But he could see that she was worried. Onie didn’t seem to worry about much these days.
“It was nothing, I promise,” Mayhill said. “I need to see Van’s gun. I really need you just to trust me on this one.”
“You’re knocking on our door at eleven at night,” Birdie said. “Police at your place this afternoon. Now you’re asking for Dad’s gun.”
“I know it’s—”
“And we still don’t know where Bradley is.” She cinched her arms over her chest, straitjacket tight.
“We’ll find him.” Mayhill swatted at the moths. “But it’s all connected…it’s all connected. Can I come in, please? I need to look at his gun.”
“And I need to know why!”
“I think something else might have happened to your daddy,” Mayhill blurted. “I don’t think he killed himself. I think he was shot.”
Birdie’s face changed right there under the porch light—bafflement and disgust making the slow trek from her brow to her mouth, now perpetually downturned. The look was not quite shock, but more of exhaustion, a bizarre submission to her life’s list of horrors. It pained Mayhill to see.
“I can’t explain it all right now. But Dale, the weed…” He looked around guiltily and whispered. “This Tommy Jones guy…he might be a hitman. All of it. It’s connected.”
“Why would a hitman be on our land? With a map.” She stepped back inside, pulling the door. “Don’t mess with me. It’s too—”
“I’m not messing with you!” Mayhill put a foot in the door. “Please!”
“You don’t have proof of anything! Hunches don’t prove anything.”
“You want proof? Then let me see Van’s gun.”
“Which gun?”
“The gun they said he…used.” Mayhill looked at her steadily, the sad reality of the statement wedging itself between them. “Just to put my mind at ease.”
He felt like a jackass saying it, that she might care about his mind, much less about it being at ease, what with the laundry list of worries piled on top of her. But like a miracle—the second one that night—Birdie moved aside, and Mayhill stepped into the dark of the house, leaving the moths on the porch.
***
The house was quiet; even the television yattered at a reasonable level. The cool, blue light of the screen reflected off the concrete floor and cast the room in a preternatural glow. Onie slept on the brown couch underneath a blanket Mayhill recognized from camping trips, and the remnants of two TV dinners sat on the coffee table. In the kitchen, Birdie slid open a drawer underneath the microwave. She returned with a tiny key the size of a quarter, then motioned for him to follow her into Van’s room. Van’s bed was made—an old plaid quilt—and Mayhill stopped for a moment to look at the books on the bookshelf by his bed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Walden. The Great Gatsby. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. They had almost the same collection. He wondered which of these Van had last read.
Birdie opened the door of a largish walk-in closet, and Mayhill stepped inside. A tall gun safe the size of a refrigerator stood on one side, and Van’s clothes hung like a thick curtain on the other. He and Birdie squeezed tightly in the middle, the chain from the light brushing his ear. Huddling next to Van’s clothes, he was hit with Van’s smell. His chest tightened at the unexpected memory.
Birdie handed Mayhill the key, and they shimmied past each other, switching positions. Mayhill sucked in his belly but it embarrassingly grazed her arm anyway. He opened the safe: a Colt Detective Special, a Beretta 1934, and Mayhill’s favorite, a Colt Single Action Army Revolver, a pistol that cowboys would have carried in their holsters in the late 1800s. It would be worth over a thousand dollars now, but Van’s was special because it had been passed down from Onie’s grandfather.
Then a plastic bag, deep in the back corner of the safe.
“This is what they returned?” Mayhill had never known what gun they found beside Van and even he wouldn’t dare ask Onie such a thing.
“It’s what Onie brought back,” Birdie said.
“Christ, she didn’t even take it out of the evidence bag.” It was a little Smith & Wesson 686 .357. Mayhill crouched slightly and looked through the sight, and then turned it back and forth in his hands. Three-inch barrel in stainless. An L frame. A little beefier to accommodate a seven-shot cylinder. Onie had given it to him when he graduated high school. “He carried it in his truck,” Mayhill said. “He wouldn’t have used this. He just wouldn’t.”
“Why are you doing this?” Birdie said. “We know he did it. Everybody said so.” But as much as Birdie tried to convince herself, they both knew Van wouldn’t kill himself with a gun his mother had given him. Even crazed with fear, Van wouldn’t do that.
She s
tared at the gun in Mayhill’s hand, a steely mixture of sadness and rage. “Who, then? Who did it? The agents? The police?” She looked up at him, pleading. She was barely able to say the words, her voice giving out as if she were being choked. Then she nodded, the revelation landing. “Dale,” she said.
“I think so.”
“They wouldn’t have made a mistake like that,” she said. “That can’t be what happened.”
“Not something you’d pay attention to unless you knew Van.”
“You’d notice,” she said. “Onie’d notice.”
“But I didn’t know what they found,” he said. “I wasn’t allowed…Jimmy Cason confronted me…next thing I know Van’s dead…I had no access to—”
“Why wasn’t someone looking for it?” Birdie’s eyes were turning red. “Why didn’t anybody suspect anything?”
Mayhill looked at the gun in his hand, baffled.
“Why didn’t the police ask around?” Birdie asked. “Why didn’t they investigate?”
“Nobody investigates a dead drug dealer.” The words sounded harsher than he intended, a buried anger toward Van escaped and run amok.
Birdie whipped her head around, gasping as if her breath had been knocked out. “Dad was not a drug dealer.”
“We know he wasn’t,” he said quickly. “In their eyes, he was though. He was just…disposable then.”
“You’re saying he didn’t matter.”
“To them,” he said. “Yes, I’m saying he didn’t matter to them.”
“Why didn’t you look into it? Surely you had some contact, you knew something…”
“I was out of it, Birdie. They kicked me out!”
She glared at him. He could tell that the questions in her head were coming too fast and she didn’t know what to ask.
“He was desperate,” Mayhill said. He eyed the gun in his hand. “Desperate men kill themselves. It made sense.”
Birdie slammed her fist into the wall, and Van’s clothes rattled on the hangers. Mayhill flinched. “It did not make sense! It did not make sense that he would choose to leave me!”
They stood there in silence, listening to the closet resettle.
“I know, Birdie,” he said more gently this time. “But what Van was doing was so crazy to begin with, nobody understood what was going on with him anymore.”
“He was not crazy.” She might hit him. Birdie was stone-faced now despite the wash of red that settled over her cheeks, her eyes filling. It scraped him raw.
“What he did was crazy,” Mayhill said. “Crazy and desperate are interchangeable.”
“He had lost all of his money! He was just trying to get it back. On his own land! Just like you said! That’s not crazy. That’s not crazy.”
“He was facing prison. Twenty-year minimum. Minimum. You ever visited the prison?” Mayhill asked. “And there for twenty years? You ask any of these men out here. You go up to the feed store and ask any one of them. Faced with prison? They all would have at least thought about doing the same thing. I mean, Van woulda gone to hell on his own terms than heaven on somebody else’s. So nobody really questioned…I think I might have—”
“But he left a note…” Birdie said, recalculating.
“Well, that’s just…” The closet felt impossibly small all of a sudden. He felt hot. “I wouldn’t think too much of it.” He turned to put the gun back in the safe.
She grabbed his arm, fingers dug deep.
“You know he left a note, Randy. It was in Onie’s Bible…where she keeps important things.”
“Just one piece of a big puzzle.”
“But you gave her the note.” She stared straight ahead into the gun safe.
“I found it…” Mayhill said.
“Where did you find it? If you weren’t involved…if the game warden or whoever wouldn’t let you touch anything.” Birdie’s fingers dug deeper into his arm. “Tell me where you found it, Randy.”
“It was with evidence.”
“Where did you find it?” The panic in her voice heightened.
“It was with his things. Gabby was able to—”
“But you didn’t even have access to his gun, you said…you didn’t have access to his records…”
“Birdie…” The implication was there now.
“You gave Onie the note!” She slammed her fist into the wall again, and a few of Van’s shirts dropped to the ground. All at once she materialized the note from her pocket. It unnerved him to see it.
“You.” She slapped the pink paper to his chest.
He fumbled to catch it but it floated to the ground at their feet.
“Birdie…" But he didn’t know how to finish the sentence. His eyes darted away from hers a split second, and when he looked back, he knew immediately that she understood. Still, he was surprised to find himself defensive. How could she think that I—? He wanted to disappear behind Van’s shirts.
She stared at the wall.
“Birdie, please look at me,” he heard himself saying. He hated the sound of his voice, the pathetic pitch, the inadequacy of words, but it was all he could think to say. If Birdie would just look at him, then he could still control the situation somehow. He could still retain the chance that she might love him like she had when her daddy was alive and they were all happy. If she could just look at him, she might still respect him or see that everything he had done had been with her utmost good in mind.
“We all just love you so much,” he said.
She didn’t acknowledge him. She was not going to let herself cry, to give him another second of emotion. Her eyes had gone steely and her face was yet again dead to him—not just annoyed and distant in that standoffish teenage way, but dead, all caring and regard for him ripped out by the seams. He wanted to hear Van’s voice in his head, to say it was okay what he had done, but Van was notably silent. He looked at Van’s clothes, limp and unworn, reminders of how dead he was.
They stood there—the note on the ground between them, Mayhill with Van’s revolver in his right hand—and he tightened his grip on the gun, suddenly afraid of Birdie. He wanted to leave, to run out of the closet and out the front door, but he was afraid to move. She could rip it from his hands, shoot him in the gut. Even with her rage and his fear circling each other like dogs, daring each other to make the first move, he couldn’t blame her for killing him. It seemed like the right death in a way. She was angry enough, and he was sad enough.
A thunder of final thoughts in his shortish life: Wondering what would happen to her if she killed him. The need to run from the house and dig his own grave to give her an easy cleanup. What would happen to Onie if Birdie killed a man?
“Give me the gun,” Birdie said suddenly, her voice cold, emotionless.
“I don’t think that’s…” Mayhill checked that the safety was on and held it firmly to his side. A surprising thought: he wanted to live. But only to make it okay for her.
“Give it to me.” Birdie did not appear angry. She was resolute. He wished she were angry, because calm people were the most deadly, thoroughly convinced of the sanity of their choices. She looked tired, resigned, much older than she should, holding out her hand.
He lifted the gun to give it to her and, in these seconds, considered acutely that these were his last moments. He spent all these years trying to save the world and this is how it would all end. A woman killing him for trying to save her. He wasn’t selfless; he wasn’t a hero. He might have been the most selfish man he knew.
Birdie grabbed the revolver much too quickly, and Mayhill held his breath. For a moment, she stared at the gun in her hand. Then she pushed past Mayhill, his back ramming into the wall. She placed the gun reverently back in the safe and closed its heavy, black door with the quiet clicking of the latch. Then she left.
Mayhill stood in Van’s closet, unsure what to do next. What had just happened? He had just confirmed that his best friend had not killed himself. What should he be fee
ling? Jubilant? A sense of victory that he had solved the mystery of what had happened to Van? Ashamed that he had never suspected it before? This was justice in action, wasn’t it? Goddammit, where was Van? He picked up the note and slipped it in his back pocket. Mayhill wandered out of the closet and stood unmoored in the living room.
Birdie was curled up in Van’s big leather chair, eyes on the blue glister of the television. M*A*S*H played on the screen. The sepia doctors were in surgery, all masks and laugh tracks in the middle of war. Birdie looked small, the same baby-bird fragility that had inspired Van to name her such a thing. Onie was still asleep on the couch, turned away from the television now, and purring like a lion. Mayhill didn’t know how to leave. If he left, he would never see Birdie again, not in any meaningful way. If he kept her in his sight, this family—Onie, Birdie, Van—they would still be his. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He walked to the door and let himself out, the latching of the doorknob severing his final connection to Van, but all the way home he whispered aloud to himself, as if Van could hear, as if Birdie were eight years old again and riding happily in the truck beside him, "I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
After Mayhill left, Birdie pulled herself off the couch. She couldn’t stand the sound of Onie’s snoring, and even though it was nearing midnight, she got in Van’s old truck and left. She needed to drive. Watermelon and cantaloupe rolled in the backend with all the silence of a bowling alley. The hogs swarmed in patches over the pastures, and she could hardly remember what the place looked like before they had taken over. She drove past the dead hermit’s abandoned house and remembered the ghost stories Van had told her every time they’d driven by. She’d hide in the floorboard until they passed. And a few miles past that was a large field with a dilapidated house that had belonged to an old black family, the Lewises—a rickety old shotgun house balanced like toothpicks, walls of dried out gray wood. When Van was young in the fifties, he saw a cross burn in the field right in front of it, all eight Lewises huddled together on the porch, horrified in its glow. Every time Van told her that story (many, many times; it clearly haunted him) she looked into the dark expectantly, nervous to see if the cross had reappeared—a memory so ingrained she almost thought it was her own.
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