Mayhill understood what was happening.
There is only ever one satisfying conclusion for a hero.
He didn’t know how he got there, but Mayhill found himself at his truck. He pressed all of his weight into the door handle and fell into the cab. He braced his forearms into the soft, worn bench and used all of his strength to drag himself in.
In the truck, his senses heightened again: mossy, wet, the smell of dog hair. He had stopped smelling pine a long time ago, having lived here so long, but he could suddenly smell its mintiness, fresh as Christmas. He felt oddly competent all of a sudden, more competent and in control than he ever had in his life. All of his past failures granulated and disappeared before him. I did it, I did it.
He understood what was happening.
And he couldn’t be here. He had to get off of Birdie’s land. He shifted into first gear and gassed it, hogs scattering like mice.
The breeze tore through his truck, and the gush of hot air made him feel like he was swimming, being taken into a current. He stuck his head out the window, willing the crash of air to keep him awake, and as he tore down the road, headlights bouncing wildly, for a moment, he could feel Van beside him, as if he were in the truck—then as if he were swimming through the air alongside him, as if he had surfaced from beneath the pine needles, his voice gasping from the undertow. He glanced in the rearview mirror, and for a second, the feeling of Van hardened into a person—but it was not Van, of course.
Because it wasn’t time for Van yet.
It was Birdie in the rearview mirror—Bradley beside her—and they were running, running, running. Their faces glowing red in his taillights, their arms pumping, their legs sprinting after him. Birdie screaming his name.
There is only ever one satisfying conclusion for a hero.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Tragedy, Van always said, was simply a matter of ending the story someplace else.
But where else could it end after all this time, this story of Randy Mayhill, a man who perfected heroics, whetted it down like the fine point of a knife, because the only thing better than being a hero is being a martyr? If she were honest with herself, and all wise women should be—respectfully disagreeing with Onie that a hero’s only conclusion is death and cheerfully siding with Van that a story keeps going—Birdie might have found that, even when a life as big as Randy Mayhill’s ended, there were no less than a hundred places for his story to conclude.
***
There could be an argument for his story ending the next day, when Birdie and Bradley inspected the garden and found it remarkably clean. No cigarette butts or spit cups or barbed wire or anything to incriminate—just a pair of gloves and a camping lantern with a surprisingly meticulous picture scratched through the paint on the bottom: a drawing of a hand giving the middle finger.
Near where Dale had fallen, they would find a barely perceptible scrap of a camouflage t-shirt and a shred of a Twizzlers wrapper—but no evidence of Dale’s body—because much to their relief and much to their horror, there was no evidence of Dale himself because, lest we forget—Kool-Aid, Twizzlers, Moon Pies, antifreeze, don’t matter what—hogs have a sweet tooth.
And also the next day, when Jason limped from his tiny house on his island of stranded people, after he had scrambled away from the scene, terrified, and treated his bullet-grazed arm with tweezers and hydrogen peroxide, he found seventy-five thousand dollars in his glove box. He immediately set to work sketching floor plans for his mama’s house on a flattened cigarette carton because it was the only paper he could find.
For seventy-five thousand dollars, I’ll forget you and everybody you ever know.
After all of that, the only evidence left would be tucked away neatly next to the gun safe in the back of Van’s closet: a red gym bag with a little over four hundred thousand dollars in cash.
***
Or this conclusion:
Onie at the front of the church, reading Thoreau: “Every blade in the field, every leaf in the forest lays down its life in its season.” The tragedy of active voice! Onie’s words rising up with the perfume of the peace lilies—with such power, such command—that nobody in that packed church could again doubt her sanity.
Birdie would sit on the front row with Bradley, who, in a sign of a newfound emotional maturity, did not hide in his truck as he had at Van’s funeral, but took in life as it was right in front of his face, the two of them passing around the word hero like a collection plate. Afterward, Birdie told him how Mayhill had resurrected now as a kind of Christ in her mind, all dying so she could live and whatnot, that for the rest of her days, when she considered Jesus on the oak-paneled walls of the Methodist church—blue-eyed, pale, gut notably absent—she would only see Randy Mayhill: Mayhill healing the sick, Mayhill pouring the grape juice, Mayhill staring right through her and blessing all she would do for the rest of her days.
When she described the scene to Onie, she would search for the words to describe the way a leaden-legged Randy Mayhill took flight with improbable grace to jump in front of Dale and the bullet meant for her. And Birdie, at a loss for such words, would land only on the unlikely descriptor that Mayhill looked “as triumphant as a cantaloupe ascending through the night air.”
And they would all marvel at this: how it was that in his dying moments Randy Mayhill had the foresight to drive away from the plot, off of Birdie’s land, into Dale’s yard to keep all investigations firmly away from Birdie and fully on Dale Mackey.
The story would be confirmed by a broken down Mrs. Baird’s truck caught on the way to Houston, and after finding all the gardening supplies and paraphernalia in Dale’s shed, the sheriff would conclude that Dale Mackey was long gone from here—probably to Mexico by now—escaped with the money.
Another nameless man they couldn’t identify. Drug deal gone bad. CRACKED THE CASE! In the end, they would question Birdie more about the cantaloupe than Randy Mayhill.
Except this: the pink note in Randy Mayhill’s back pocket. I’m sorry, Birdie. I love you.
“Do you know what this is, Ms. Woods?”
“It belonged to my daddy. May I keep it, please?”
Too tragic, all of it, but luckily, there is another conclusion.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The wet summer turned into an even wetter fall, and the flooding downgraded the hog plague to an inconvenient infestation. The weatherman credited one of the children down south—Niño or Niña—but a name didn’t help anyone fathom the hogs’ overnight decline any better, and they resented that the direction of equatorial winds could uproot their lives so completely. They could handle their own weather, thank you very much. They didn’t need input from the South Americans.
Onie ripped up the crabgrass in the front flowerbeds and put in some purple cabbage for fall. A small wooden sign with white letters bloomed overnight out of the front porch flowerbed: AIN’T NOBODY NOBODY. Bradley didn’t know what it meant or why it was there, but he liked it because it sounded like something Van would have said.
With a sudden windfall of money, Birdie hired a crew and was experimenting with a plantation of slash pine, which didn’t grow naturally west of the Mississippi, but was a hardy tree and would thrive on her acid-hot soil, and Bradley, the obvious choice for managing the crew—he knew the land intimately, didn’t he?—would need a place to live as he and Birdie directed the next phase of her acreage. Birdie offered up Van’s room. It was not an unpleasant arrangement, the small house busy with three spoiled dogs (Boo, Atticus, and Vanna), two moody women, and one very large man—a chaos Van and Randy would have adored, though Vanna, Mayhill’s stolen dog, did not.
Vanna was still skittish around human females thanks to Bradley’s mother’s violent outbursts, and so the dog took to hiding in dark spots around the house (closets, corners, under chairs, and whatnot). It was in this daily afternoon APB search for the dog that Birdie found herself in Onie’s room looking for Vanna under the b
ed. She got down on her knees and swept her long arm underneath, but instead of the soft give of dog belly, something hard hit Birdie’s hand. She felt around for a moment, trying to discern the object’s shape with her fingers, but then dragged it out into the light.
A hunting rifle, beaten up and well-used.
Birdie inspected it closely but did not recognize it immediately as one of Van’s or Onie’s, then held it up and looked through the sight, as one always does when getting to know a new gun. It was heavy, an old, cheap model, and Birdie turned the gun back and forth in her hands to study the stock. The wood grain was nicked and neglected. The polish had worn off and tiny cracks had started to form in the wood; overall, it was an unexceptional gun except for a design someone had scratched at the bottom of the stock near the butt. She turned the shotgun upright and found that it wasn’t a design at all. Initials. T and J scratched lightly into the wood.
Birdie froze—the breath leaving her—then she quickly pushed the gun back under the bed and instinctively held her hands open in front of her, as if to surrender to the imaginary person who had just caught her in possession of what could only be Tommy Jones’s gun.
Birdie looked around Onie’s room, and all at once, everything smoldered with meaning. An aerial photograph someone had taken of the land. Onie loved it so much she had it printed on canvas and hung it above her bed. The bookshelf. A picture of Van and Mayhill in high school. It stood in a gold frame on the third shelf. Onie’s desk where she sat and graded papers. Birdie scanned her brain for anyone else with those initials, but like Onie’s television as of late, Birdie’s brain had gone suspiciously silent. Of course Tommy Jones’s gun was there.
Birdie stuck her head out the door. Onie played a dirge at the piano, a haunting number that sounded like church bells, and Bradley listened from the couch. She smiled at Bradley and he smiled back—all hey-how-ya-doins, dinner’s-almost-dones—and Birdie nodded like a jackass—all yeah-that-sounds-great, love-me-some-dirges. She could barely breathe.
Birdie closed the door and slowly slid open Onie’s desk drawer. The old wood squeaked like a barn door, and inside was a fat purple marker. The map. She thought of the map Mayhill found in Tommy Jones’s truck. How had she not seen it? Those feminine loops that colored in the pasture. No self-respecting hunter would denote a pasture with purple loops.
Next to the marker, a few paperclips and rubber bands, and Onie’s Bible curiously puffed in the middle like a fat wallet. Birdie carefully took the Bible from the drawer and placed it on top of the desk, and there, smack-dab in the middle of Matthew, she found: newspaper articles from the past year—Prayers for Star, Local Woman in Coma, Raises $10,000, and Local Woman Unresponsive After Found in Car—Tommy Jones’s name throughout, the articles edited for grammar because old habits died hard; a glossy flier of hog trapping tips; a thank you note from Mayhill: If you or Birdie ever need anything at all, I hope you know I will be at your Beck and Call!!! I love you!!!—the B with pointy flags, the I like a pine tree; a scrap of paper with “Tommy Jones” scribbled on it, his phone number in Onie’s handwriting; and Van’s obituary, a tea stain like a waning crescent moon. Birdie stared at this blatant scrapbook of revenge and, trying to regain her breath, felt only shame in herself because you would have to be very dim indeed not to realize that she had misread Onie the entire time: she had not been depressed, she had been plotting.
Was Mayhill right that Tommy Jones had been a hitman? Dale, always paranoid, never got his hands dirty so it would make sense he hired Tommy Jones—beater of women, assassin of hogs and men—to take care of Van when he thought he was about to get caught. And there Onie was with a newspaper rap sheet of Tommy Jones’s transgressions, his phone number, and a ready excuse to invite him onto her land.
"I gotta hog problem. I need some trapping done, Mr. Jones."
But certainly she had something planned for Dale too.
“Bradley!” Birdie leaned her head out the door, the smell of bacon hitting her in the face. Onie launched into an arpeggio as Bradley hovered outside Onie’s room.
“What kind of candy did Dale eat?” Birdie asked.
Bradley looked at her nervously.
“Just tell me,” Birdie said. “What kind of candy did Dale eat?”
“Twizzlers mostly, Moon Pies…”
Birdie held the doorframe. She suddenly remembered Onie’s trip to the store, memories shaken loose like mulberries from the branch, Onie standing there—bags in hand, teetering like a tight-rope walker—the bags brimming with Twizzlers and Moon Pies, even though Onie wouldn’t let Birdie drink Coke in the house. The look Birdie had given her! The disappointment! The fear Onie was losing her mind!
But there was something else in those bags. In her memory, Birdie zoomed in on the detail. Antifreeze. Antifreeze in the summer. Sweet as sugar, so sweet Mr. Boudreaux used it to kill his hogs. Hog trapping tips: Choose the right bait. Persistence pays!!!
“Why are you asking about him?” Bradley asked.
Birdie wanted to say, “Onie hired Tommy Jones and shot him, and I think she was poisoning Dale slowly with Twizzlers.”
But instead she said, “Guess I gotta sweet tooth.”
***
Birdie closed the door and hustled back to Onie’s desk. She slid the Bible into the drawer and closed it, now acutely aware that her fingerprints stickied everything. She left Onie’s room and joined Bradley at the dinner table, guilt and jack-assery firmly affixed to her face. She tried to act normal. “Bacon!” Birdie said. “Haven’t had it since lunch!” Onie remained at the piano, and Birdie was glad because she wasn’t sure what to say to her yet.
Perhaps it was the dirge or the realization that Bradley could never know this thing about Onie, or maybe it was the stack of bacon for supper—pork for the third meal that day, a pork trifecta, batting a thousand in pork-centric meals—but Birdie Woods felt a sudden crash of loneliness that was almost unbearable.
She wanted desperately to talk to Mayhill right then—more so even than her father, her loss of him so familiar now it barely registered, like a fish feeling water. No, she wanted Mayhill. She wanted Randy Mayhill taking up too much room on the bench, sweating too much, knowing too much about everything. She wanted his too muchness. She wanted to see his too-much reaction the moment the puzzle came together, the realization that Onie—this killer of killers—had executed justice on her own. How satisfying he would have found it! He would have wept like a baby at the beauty of the entire thing, and then hemorrhaged right there on the floor. He would have died then anyway, she decided.
A joy that kills and whatnot.
***
Tragedy is simply a matter of ending the story someplace else. The mystery solved, Bradley and Birdie safe, Onie sane(ish)—this could be the satisfactory conclusion. But no, even by Van’s standards (and he does tell a hell of a story, doesn’t he?), such an ending would not suffice either. Because this is the legend of Randy Mayhill, and any story of his could not stand on two legs.
It must stand on four.
Because she had to, because there was no other way that Birdie could better honor Randy Mayhill than to tamper with evidence (ten-year maximum), as soon as supper was over and Bradley and Onie were yelling at Wheel of Fortune (Bradley always painfully wrong; Onie yelling fake answers so he wouldn’t feel bad), she marched Tommy Jones’s shotgun right out of their house. She put on gloves and wiped the gun clean (alcohol, Rem oil), then drove it like a ticking bomb to Dale’s abandoned trailer. She stopped and listened before she got out to make sure no trucks were going down the road and that nobody was there to see her. Then she snuck like a ninja into Dale’s shed. She propped the shotgun against the remaining bags of blood meal, and walked quickly back to her truck, ready to tear away as fast as she could.
And that was when it happened. Birdie Woods would remember it for the rest of her life as the moment when, despite the unstoppable torrent of tragedy and betrayals in this world, hope bub
bled up from her toes, took fire in her belly, and wouldn’t let go.
She opened the truck door to leave, and a tawny cowdog with white ears—much too thin from his low-protein diet of Twizzler scraps and Moon Pies, a sitting duck for hungry hogs—suddenly emerged out of hiding from Dale’s shed. He was scratched and bloodied, ribs like sticks. Dale’s dog. It had to be Dale’s dog, though he had been abandoned for months at this point, hadn’t he? How had he survived? Months of deprivation and starvation and loss and hogs and horrors she couldn’t imagine. The dog had lived through it.
It was then that the dog, seemingly out of nowhere, stretched his neck and began walking toward her. It was an unnatural lengthening of the scruff, as if he were being pulled gently on a leash, as if someone were honest-to-God leading that dog right to her. The invisible cue still at work, he scrambled up the step and into the truck cab. Then, noticing the plush accommodations of his new situation, the dog turned three times in a circle and plopped down beside Birdie. He nudged his snout at the softness of Birdie’s thigh, and looked at her as if to say, “Let’s go, Birdie Woods. I’ve been waiting for you.”
Author’s Note and Acknowledgements
This novel is a work of fiction, but several East Texas communities, including my wonderful hometown, inspired the characters and places found in this book. Growing up, I knew an inordinate number of men named Jimmy, and I’d feel guilty if I didn’t note that all the Jimmies I knew were kind and generous men. Further, of all my childhood haunts, I still think of the feed store as a magical place. My version of heaven smells like leather, sweet feed, and burnt coffee. And though this is not a political story, I hope it brings attention to our country’s history of questionable marijuana laws.
Ain't Nobody Nobody Page 23