Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories Read online

  “How do you reckon that?” I ask, because I sure can’t figure it that way.

  “What if he was speaking the truth when he said we’re the only three that knows about this,” the old man says.

  “I never said a word.”

  “I got no doubting about that,” the old man says. “Far as I can tell you don’t say nothing unless it’s yanked out of you like a tooth.”

  “I don’t think he’d have spoke about this,” I say. “There’s not many that would think good of him if he did, and some might even tell the law. I don’t figure him to risk that.”

  “Then I’d say he’s helped dig his own grave,” the old man says. “Stout as he is, I don’t notion you could get him out of there alone and I’m way too old to help you.”

  “We might could use a rope,” I say. “Pull him out that way.”

  “And what if you did,” the old man says. “You think you can drag that hunk of lard behind you like a little red wagon. Even if you can where you headed with him?”

  That’s a pretty good question, because here to the truck is a good half mile. I’d have a better chance of toting a tombstone that far.

  “It doesn’t seem the right sort of thing to do,” I say. “I mean for his kin and such not to never know where he’s buried.”

  “Those that wears the badges ain’t always the brightest bulbs,” the old man says, “but they won’t need the brains of a stump to figure what he and you was up to if they find him here.” The old man pauses. “Is that truck his or yours?”

  “His.”

  “You leave that truck by the river and the worst gossip on your buddy there is he was fool enough to get drunk and fall in. You bring the law here they’ll know him for a grave robber. Which way you notion his kin would rather recollect him?”

  The old man’s whittling it down to but one path to follow. I try to find a good argument against him, but I’m too wore down to come up with anything. The old man takes out his watch.

  “It’s nigh on four o’clock. You get to filling in and you could get that grave leveled by the shank of morning.”

  “It’s two graves to fill,” I say. “We dug another one up the hill a ways.”

  “Well, get as much dirt in them as you can. Even full up they’ll be queer looking with all that fresh dirt on them. I’ll have to figure some kind of tall tale for folks that might take notice, but I been listening to your buddy all night so I’ve picked up some good pointers on how to lie.”

  I look at the sword and think how the blade maybe killed somebody during the Civil War and in its way killed another tonight, at least the wanting of it did.

  “He was lying about this stuff not being worth much,” I say. “I need the money so I’m going to sell it, but I’ll go halves with you.”

  “You keep it,” the old man says. “But I’ll take what’s in your partner’s wallet. He’ll need it no more than the lieutenant there needs that sword.”

  I pull the wallet from Wesley’s back pocket, give it to the old man. He pulls out a ten and two twenties.

  “I knew that son-of-a-bitch was lying about having no more money,” he says, then throws the wallet back in the hole.

  I reach the sword and scabbard up to the old man and then the buckle and buttons. I think how easy it would be for him to rooster that trigger and shotgun me. He leans closer to the hole and I see he’s still got that shotgun in his hand and I wonder if he’s figuring the same thing, because it’d be easy as shooting a rat in a washtub. He gets down on his creaky old knees, and I guess my fearing is clear to him for he lays down the shotgun and gives me a smile.

  “I was just allowing I’d give you some help out of there,” he says and offers his hand. “Just don’t jerk me in there with you.”

  I take his hand, a strong grip for all his years, and reach my other hand over the lip. It’s one good heave and I’m out.

  I fetch the shovel and set to the covering up, dead tired but making good time because I’m figuring if it doesn’t get done I’ll have some serious jailhouse time to wish I had. Plus it’s always easier to fling dirt down than up. I get the hole filled and walk up to the other grave, the shovel and pickax in one hand and the sword and pillow sheet in the other. The old man and his dog follow me. I get it half-full before the pink of morning skims Bluff Mountain.

  “I got to go now,” I say. “It’s getting near dawn.”

  “Leave the shovel then,” the old man says. “I can fill in the rest. Then I’m going to plant chrysanthemums on the graves, let that be the why of the dirt being rooted up.”

  I have no plans to find out if that’s what he does do. My plan is not to be back here again unless someone’s hauling me in a box. I walk on down the hill. It’s Sunday so I don’t see another soul on the road. I park the truck down by the river, no more than a mile from Marshall. I get my handkerchief out and wipe the steering wheel good and the door handle. Then I high-step it, staying in the woods till I’m to the edge of town. I hunker down there till full light, figuring it’s all worked good as I could have hoped. They’ll soon find the truck, but no one spotted me near it. Wesley and me never were buddies, never went out to bars together or anything, so there’s none likely to figure me in his truck last night. I hide the sword and pillow sheet under some leaves to get later. When I cross the road in front of Jackson’s Café, I figure I’m home free.

  But I’m still careful. I don’t go inside, just wait by some trees until I see Timmy Shackleford come out. He doesn’t live far from me and I step into the parking lot and ask if he’d mind giving me a ride to my trailer.

  “You look like the night rode you hard,” Timmy says.

  I look in the side mirror and I do look rough.

  “Got knee-walking drunk,” I say. “Last thing I remember I was with a bunch of fellows in a car and said I needed to piss. They set me by the side of the road and took off laughing. Next thing I know, I’m waking up in a ditch”

  That’s a better lie than I’d have reckoned to spin and I figure I have picked up some pointers from Wesley. Timmy grins but doesn’t say anything else. He lets me out at my trailer and goes on his way. I’m starved and have got enough dirt on me to plant a garden, but I just fall in the bed and don’t open my eyes till it’s full dark outside. When I come awake it’s with the deepest kind of fearing, and for a few moments I’m more scared than anytime before in my life. Then my mind settles and I see I’m in the trailer, not still in that graveyard.

  Come Monday at work I hear how they found Wesley’s truck by the river, and most figure him down there fishing or drinking or both and he fell in and drowned. They drag the river for days but of course nothing comes up.

  I wait a month before I try to sell the Civil War stuff, driving all the way to Montgomery, Alabama, to a big CSA convention where a whole auditorium is full of buyers and sellers. Some want certificates of authenticity and such, but I finally find a buyer I can do some business with. A lady at the library has pulled up some prices on the internet and I’ve got a good figuring of what my stash is worth. The buyer’s only offering half what the value is but he’s also not asking for certificates or even my name. I tell him I’ll take what he’s offering but only if it’s cash money. He grumbles a bit about that, then finally says “stay here” and goes off and comes back with fifty-two hundred dollar bills, new bills so crisp and smooth they look starched and ironed.

  It’s more money than the hospital bill and I give what’s left to Momma. That makes what I’ve done feel less worrisome. I think about something else too, how both them graves had big fancy tombstones of cut marble, meaning those dead Confederates hadn’t known much wanting of money in their lives. Now that they was dead there was some fairness in letting Momma have something of what they’d left behind.

  The only bad thing is I keep having a dream where that old man has shot me and I’m buried in the hole with Wesley. I’m shot bad but still alive and dirt’s piled on me and somewhere up above I hear that old man laughing li
ke he was the devil himself. Every time I dream it, I rear up in bed and don’t stop gasping for nearly a whole minute. I’ve dreamed that same exact dream at least once a month for a year now, and I guess it’s likely I’ll keep doing so for the rest of my life. There’s always a price to be paid for anything you get. I wish it weren’t so, for it’s a fearsome dream, but if it’s the worst to come of all that happened I can live with it.

  The WOMAN at the POND

  Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present’s surface. A green birthday candle that didn’t expire with a wish lies next to a green Coleman lantern lit twelve years later. Chalky sun motes in a sixth-grade classroom harbor close to a university library’s high window, a song on a staticky radio shoals against the same song at a hastily arranged wedding reception. This is what I think of when James Murray’s daughter decides to drain the pond. A fear of lawsuits, she claims, something her late father considered himself exonerated from by posting a sign: FISH AND SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK.

  She hired Wallace Rudisell for the job, a task that requires opening the release valve on the standpipe, keeping it clear until what once was a creek will be a creek once more. I grew up with Wallace, and, unlike so many of our classmates, he and I still live in Lattimore. Wallace inherited our town’s hardware store, one of the few remaining businesses.

  “Bet you’re wanting to get some of those lures back you lost in high school,” Wallace says when I ask when he’ll drain the pond. “There must be a lot of them. For a while you were out there most every evening.”

  Which is true. I was seventeen and in a town of three hundred, my days spent bagging groceries. Back then there was no internet, no cable TV or VCR, at least in our house. Some evenings that summer I’d listen to the radio or watch television with my parents, or look over college brochures and financial-aid forms the guidance counselor had given me, but I’d usually go down to the pond. Come fall of my senior year, though, Angie and I began dating. We found other things to do in the dark.

  A few times Wallace or another friend joined me, but I usually fished alone. After a day at the grocery store, I didn’t mind being away from people awhile, and the pond at twilight was a good place. The swimmers and other fishermen were gone, leaving behind beer and cola bottles, tangles of fishing line, gray cinder blocks used for seats. Later in the night, couples came to the pond, their leavings on the bank as well—rubbers and blankets, once a pair of panties hung on the white oak’s limb. But that hour when day and night made their slow exchange, I had the pond to myself.

  Over the years James Murray’s jon-boat had become communal property. Having wearied of swimming out to retrieve the boat, I’d bought twenty feet of blue nylon rope to keep it moored. I’d unknot the rope from the white oak, set my fishing gear and Coleman lantern in the bow, and paddle out to the pond’s center. I’d fish until it was neither day nor night, but balanced between. There never seemed to be a breeze, pond and shore equally smoothed. Just stillness, as though the world had taken a soft breath, and was holding it in, and even time had leveled out, moving neither forward nor back. Then the frogs and crickets waiting for full dark announced themselves, or a breeze came up and I again heard the slosh of water against land. Or, one night near the end of that summer, a truck rumbling toward the pond.

  On Saturday I leave at two o’clock when the other shift manager comes in. I no longer live near the pond, but my mother does, so I pull out of the grocery store’s parking lot and turn right, passing under Lattimore’s one stoplight. On the left are four boarded-up stores, behind them like an anchored cloud, the mill’s water tower, blue paint chipping off the tank. I drive by Glenn’s Café where Angie works, soon after that the small clapboard house where she and our daughter, Rose, live. Angie’s Ford Escort isn’t there, but the truck belonging to Rose’s boyfriend is. I don’t turn in. It’s not my weekend to be in charge, and at least I know Rose is on the pill, because I took her to the clinic myself.

  Soon there are only farmhouses, most in disrepair—slumping barns and woodsheds, rusty tractors snared by kudzu and trumpet vines. I make a final right turn and park in front of my mother’s house. She comes onto the porch and I know from her disappointed expression that she’s gotten the week confused and expects to see Rose. We talk a minute and she goes back inside. I walk down the sloping land, straddle the sagging barbed wire, and make my way through brambles and broom sedge, what was once a pasture.

  The night the truck came to the pond, an afternoon thunderstorm had rinsed the humidity from the air. The evening felt more like late September than mid-August. After rowing out, I had cast toward the willows on the far bank, where I’d caught bass in the past. The lure I used was a Rapala, my favorite because I could fish it on the surface or submerged. After a dozen tries nothing struck, so I paddled closer to the willows and cast into the cove where the creek ended. A small bass hit and I reeled it in, its red gills flaring as I freed the treble hook and lowered the fish back into the water.

  A few minutes later the truck bumped down the dirt road to the water’s edge. The headlights slashed across the pond before the vehicle jerked right and halted beside the white oak as the headlights dimmed.

  Music came from the truck’s open windows and carried over the water with such clarity I recognized the song. The cab light came on and the music stopped. Minutes passed, and stars began filling the sky. As a thick-shouldered moon rimmed up over a ridge, a man and woman got out of the truck. The jon-boat drifted toward the willows and I let it, afraid any movement would give away my presence. The man and woman’s voices rose, became angry, then a sound sharp as a rifle shot. The woman fell and the man got back in the cab. The headlights flared and the truck turned around, slinging mud before the tires gained traction. The truck swerved up the dirt road and out of sight.

  The woman slowly lifted herself from the ground. She moved closer to the bank and sat on a cinder block. As more stars pierced the sky, and the moon lifted itself above the willow trees, I waited for the truck to return or the woman to leave, though I had no idea where she might go. The jon-boat drifted deeper into the willows, the drooping branches raking at my face. I didn’t want to move, but the willows had entangled the boat. The graying wood creaked as it bumped against the bank. I lifted the paddle and pushed away as quietly as possible. As I did, the boat rocked and the metal tackle box banged against its side.

  “Who’s out there?” the woman asked. “I can see you, I can.”

  I lit the lantern and paddled to the pond’s center.

  “I’m fishing,” I said, and lifted the rod and reel to prove it.

  The woman didn’t respond.

  “Are you okay?”

  “My face will be bruised,” she said after a few moments. “But no teeth knocked out. Bruises fade. I’ll be better off tomorrow than he will.”

  I set the paddle on my knees. In the quiet, it seemed the pond too was listening.

  “You mean the man that hit you?”

  “Yeah, him.”

  “Is he coming back?”

  “Yeah, he’s coming back. The bastard needs me to drive to Charlotte. Another DUI and he’ll be pedaling to work on a bicycle. He won’t get too drunk to remember that. Anyway, he didn’t go far.” The woman pointed up the dirt road where a faint square of light hovered like foxfire. “He’s drinking the rest of his whiskey while some hillbilly whines on the radio about how hard life is. When the bottle’s empty, he’ll be back.”

  As the jon-boat drifted closer to the bank, the woman stood and I dug the paddle’s wooden blade into the silt to keep some distance between us. The lantern’s glow fell on both of us now. She was younger than I’d thought, maybe no more than thirty. A large woman, wide hipped and tall, at least five eight. Her long blond hair was clearly dyed. A red welt covered the left side of her face. She wore a man’s leather jacket over her yellow blouse
and black skirt. Mud grimed the yellow blouse. She raised her hand and fanned at the haze of insects.

  “I hope there are fewer gnats and mosquitoes out there,” she said. “The damn things are eating me alive.”

  “Only if I stay in the middle,” I answered.

  I glanced up at the truck.

  “I guess I’ll go back out.” I lifted the paddle, thinking if the man didn’t come get her in a few minutes I’d beach the boat in the creek cove, work my way through the brush, and head home.

  “Can I get in the boat with you?” the woman asked.

  “I’m just going to make a couple of more casts,” I answered. “I need to get back home.”

  “Just a few minutes,” she said, and gave me a small smile, the hardness in her face and voice lessening. “I’m not going to hurt you. Just a few minutes. To get away from the bugs.”

  “Can you swim?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What about that man that hit you?”

  “He’ll be there awhile yet. He drinks his whiskey slow.”

  The woman brushed some of the drying mud from her skirt, as if to make herself more presentable.

  “Just a few minutes.”

  “Okay,” I said, and rowed to the bank.

  I steadied the jon-boat while she got in the front, the lantern at her feet. The woman talked while I paddled, not turning her head, as if addressing the pond.

  “I finally get away from this county and that son of a bitch drags me back to visit his sister. She’s not home so instead he buys a bottle of Wild Turkey and we end up here, with him wanting to lay down on the bank with just a horse blanket beneath us and the mud. When I tell him no way, he gets this jacket from the truck. For your head, he tells me, like that would change my mind. What a prince.”