Dirt Merchant Read online

  It was perhaps because of her upbringing or despite it that she came to be the woman she was. She threw off the ruthless upbringing of a silent, religious father and became herself despite the emotional turmoil I’m sure she endured as a young lady growing up on a farm in a small town.

  In that way, she was the inverse of my own mother, who was internally peaceful and free but outwardly chained. Though they had both been raised in domineering situations, they responded in vastly different ways.

  Such is the way of families.

  It should also be said that Aunt Birdie’s funeral, for all that freedom, was well-attended. In my mind, the rows and rows of people sitting in the pews stretched as far as the eye could see, though in actuality the number was probably closer to three dozen. Despite her somewhat light touch with regard to her attachment to friends and family, she garnered one hell of a final goodbye. And, despite my own reservations about being reminded of those bittersweet memories, I found myself reveling in them, if only for the opportunity to experience those genuine emotions at least one more time.

  I thought about both sides of my dreams as I smoked cigarettes and watched Old Man Willie bounce between his usual pissing spots. There was a cup of bourbon sweetened with a dash of Coke to keep me company, and I got entangled in the old darkness.

  I blamed The Red-Eyed Stranger.

  Long ago, I fended off the ever-present sound of my old man’s voice, which had at some point begun to burrow into my head and tempt me to…do things. It was a manifestation of that same impulse that makes you think briefly about stepping off the side of a tall building while you’re looking over the side or crossing the centerline when a particularly big 18-wheeler crosses your path. Except, instead of being a mere impulse, it was a series of horrible thoughts narrated by my dad.

  Tell that nigger to let you cut in line, or else you’ll hang him from the highest tree in the Junction.

  Women that don’t have any use for you don’t have any use to live. Just ask your mother.

  When I was in high school, I managed to fight it, to shove it all the way down into the depths of my unthinking brain. Every so often, a sound registered up where I could sense it, but it was like a tremor on the Richter Scale of my thoughts.

  Why it returned was what had sent me out to the front porch smoking and drinking at such an ungodly hour. It was barely seven in the morning, and already I felt lightheaded from drink.

  Again, I thought it was that red-eyed son-of-a-bitch from the swamp. He had grabbed ahold of my best friend, and I didn’t see any reason why couldn’t also be clinging to me a little bit, too. It explained Deuce’s quiet moodiness and my recent bouts with what I considered to be the gaping wounds in my armor.

  You don’t have to be smart to be stubborn, so I contemplated ways to fight back.

  The weirdness of it was, I no longer had the overwhelming feeling that the dead had their eyes on me. Seemed like maybe that part of my psyche was wearing off.

  Used to be, I could down a sixer of High Life and start hearing the far-off sounds of jangly guitar, maybe stepping too close to the spirit of one Blind Willie McTell to be good for me.

  Now, though, there was just emptiness, like a newfound atheist’s lack of God. Or, to put it more directly, a recent amputee’s phantom pain.

  For the most part, I was all right with the slow fade of the supernatural world, but with the funeral, I wanted to hear anything Taj told me about how he had ended up in a casket.

  His death was something out of some pulpy true crime book. He’d been found down an embankment near the river, cut into pieces. Not just dismembered. Not just taken apart forcibly by a shark instrument.

  No, Taj’s death was a signal. A sign for other people thinking of doing…whatever Taj had been doing. I tried to think of what, exactly, the dismembered body meant, but I couldn’t quite square that circle.

  Could have been a contract hit. Maybe Taj got too far gone in the drug biz and became a human warning sign.

  Or could have been he got too close to one of the gangbanger’s girls. People have been killed for far less, and Taj wasn’t a bad-looking guy. Deuce had told me he used to have a problem bedding girls he wasn’t supposed to, so perhaps it was a crime of passion.

  That didn’t quite make sense.

  I didn’t know Taj, but it didn’t seem like Deuce was apt to avenge him if he were that type of dude.

  Now, did I see him being pushed across a line he couldn’t come back from? Absolutely.

  Deuce ran a bond one time involved some meth donkeys who got into the stash and went off on a days-long bender. They missed their dropoff, and some tattooed skinheads in a black van, I don’t know, listening to The Misfits or Social Distortion, caught up with them in Macon. They were fucked up as football bats, didn’t even realize what was happening.

  Home slices from Lumber Junction with no need to be digging in on the dope biz, but there is no rookie league for fuck-ups of this magnitude. You can’t just get hazed and go about your business. It gets real on you. What the police found in the back of that van had to’ve ruined their lunch. The kind of shit you wouldn’t feed to dogs.

  Deuce and I went to school with them boys. They were especially frigged up, but they probably didn’t deserve what they got. But they got it, either way. Parents couldn’t identify them. Coroner had to rely on dental records, and from what I heard, even that was sketchy.

  Point is, it’s a code. Thing people living by society’s loopholes make up, and when you enter in an unwritten contract with them, what happens to you is what happens to you, whether or not you want it.

  I’m sure Taj didn’t want anything to happen to himself, and I’d venture to guess he didn’t think he deserved it, but he got it. He got every single inch of it, and then some. It was a fucked up crime scene, and so something told me he’d done something extraordinarily nearsighted and selfish.

  I also had begun to consider (and this was not something I’d tell Deuce) that maybe his brother had been dealing in some real shit. Not selling weed on the corner, anything like that, but something for real. Weed dealers don’t get dismembered on the regular, unless they run off with some money.

  Those were my working theories. Either he’d wheeled out of a situation with a sack full of money, or else he’d slipped some words to the wrong individual. Maybe a cop. I’d been wrong before, but the clear side of the crystal ball told me Taj was in over his head with some folks he thought could help him out.

  Or hell, maybe he was a titan of industry, a kingpin of the corner game who got caught up and stuffed into a wood chipper.

  The morning of Taj’s funeral was something of a bizarre experience.

  I dressed in dim silence and allowed myself to be carried in a cloudlike buzz through the day, run through a series of official gestures leading up to the viewing that evening. I was clad in a suit Deuce had worn in high school, feeling like a kid walking around in dad’s clothes.

  My hangover weighed on me like a burlap sack full of dumbbells, my head throbbing monotonously at the temples, my jaw pulsing with a vague but indefatigable tension. My knees hurt. My feet hurt. A pain lanced through my shoulder as though being pierced by an invisible spear. My throat and stomach burned. It was terrible. I felt terrible. Chances were, I was terrible, but I didn’t give in to that idea.

  And my fingers. Well, my lack of fingers. The vise grip clutching at the air beyond my knuckles was a constant reminder of the danger I put myself in.

  This accumulation of injuries had begun to hang like hooks from my flesh and my psyche. I was no longer able to drink in waves and expect to bounce out of bed the next day. The gutshot I’d taken back in Lumber Junction was only eclipsed by the stiffness in my back each morning. The drinking didn’t solve any of it, but getting a little unscrewed certainly helped.

  Deuce ignored how much I was drinking, due in large part to the fact that he felt like he needed me.

  But I knew something he didn’t: he didn’t need me.
No one did. He was using me like a comfort blanket, and sooner or later he’d figure that out.

  He was the new graveyard dancer. I was no longer listing side-to-side between this world and the next, but I had heard him, had seen the way he looked in the morning. I recognized the slightly distant look, the anxiety. He was becoming slowly unhinged, but he hid it well.

  Because of a last minute change in plans, I was asked to chaffeur Uncle Mino to a run-down pharmacy for his pills.

  He was content to stare out the window and reveal all the gossip he knew regarding Jacksonville’s development. His walking cane rested between his legs. He rested both palms on it as he talked. Occasionally, he’d pick it up and tap it on the car’s floorboard for emphasis, which was often.

  “…And them dumb sons-a-bitches in the local government, way back in 1970, thought they could build floating nuclear plants off the coast. Ain’t that just the stupidest damned thing you’ve ever heard of in your life?”

  “Uh uh,” I replied. “Every port city seems to have some problems with corruption.”

  “Talk to Joe Cury, if you want to know the whole story.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Course, he dead,” Mino replied, cackling. The dry sound of his laugh echoed through the cab of the car. “Died in the late seventies. But I ‘magine that don’t confront you none, does it?”

  He laughed again, a hacking cough of a thing that led to him beating his chest. He beat the rubber bottom of his cane on the floorboard.

  “This whole town,” he said, “is built around a few men rich as Cooter Brown trying to make themselves richer. There’s a word for it. Fella told me once. Like democracy, but it ain’t. It’s when a few people run everything.”

  “Oligarchy?”

  He seemed to consider it and then shook his head. “Anyway, you want to know who the real scoundrels of Jacksonville are, you best get in touch with them white bastards. They certainly know where all the bodies are buried.”

  “They the ones responsible for the nuclear plants?”

  “Plants never got built,” he replied. He tapped his cane. Once. Twice. “Newspapers should’ve been all over it, but guess who owns them?”

  I smiled. “The honkeys who run Jacksonville?”

  “Now you got the right idea, my young friend,” he said. He laughed, coughed, and spat the resulting phlegm out the window. “Everything in this city revolves around the pursuit of money.”

  “That doesn’t sound special to this city.”

  “Yeah, well. Can’t say it is. But the same bastards been running things here since the end of the second World War. And they don’t plan on letting the rest of us have none of it. Not a dime.”

  I turned right on a street full of run-down government housing and came to the pharmacy where I’d been directed to take the old man.

  “Drive-thru?” I asked, and Mino shot me a look of utter contempt.

  He said, “I ain’t dead or crippled yet. I can go in and get my own damned prescriptions.”

  I offered to help him out of the car, but he huffed and puffed until I gave up and let him go on his own. While he hobbled around the CVS, I listened to the radio and watched a group of kids riding bikes around an adjacent parking lot.

  Somehow, it reminded me of the first conversation I’d had with Uncle Mino back when Deuce and I had rolled into town. He’d been telling me a story of breaking out of jail or some such craziness, but he didn’t get to finish.

  I considered asking him to finish the tale of his daring escape, but he was having none of it when he sat back down in the car. He was already off on another one of his rants about being old, and since everything he said was insightful — or at least entertaining — I let him go off on his rant.

  “Wish I could say I was proud to be living this long,” he said, “but every day, life robs you of a little more dignity. The bastard.”

  He laughed, tugged on the overhead handle. Staring out the passenger side window, he said, “White boy, I like you.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You don’t mind taking an old man to the store.”

  “Shaw, man. No big deal.”

  “You ain’t even afraid to get liquored up to drive somewhere.”

  “Didn’t plan on driving today,” I said.

  “Now, don’t go and ruin my opinion of you,” he replied. “I was beginning to get a real bead on you, young man.”

  “I don’t think of myself as young,” I responded.

  “The hell you say,” he said. “You ain’t even forty yet, are you?”

  “I’m getting there,” I responded, “but no.”

  He tapped the cane. “See what I mean? No sense of perspective. You see sixty, then we’ll talk. Until then, you a young man.”

  “That so?”

  “It’s strange,” he said. “I was a young man for most of my life. I kept moving the goalposts back on old age, until I woke up an old fuckin’ man. Then I thought, ‘Nothing’s ever going to be all right ever again.”

  “How’d you know? How’d you decide, ‘Welp, I’m old?’”

  “Prostate went out on me. Started pissing all the time, on the hour every hour at night. Hurt to go to the bathroom. Hurt to get myself off. All the things that make you feel virile, like you got a claim to the world. That whole process, spending so much time thinking about my nether regions, took something from me.”

  “Spent a lot of time thinking about death, I bet.”

  “Oh, the whole time. When you’re young — when you’re middle-aged — somebody dies, and it brings your whole life, mortality and all that, to bear. It’s a tragedy. Somebody clocks out, and it throws you. Really throws you. But it makes you feel more alive, know what I’m saying?”

  “I think I do.”

  “You see life for what it is.”

  “And now?”

  “Now, death is just a constant reminder. Nothing more than that. You see? Death used to be like the stars. Gotta look up and really look to figure out that, oh shit, we’re just these tiny things on this tiny place. Buncha crazy shit to think about. You think about how time doesn’t stop when you do. You close your eyes, and that’s it for you. The world might as well be over. But it ain’t. I used to think that was a real tragedy. Now, I’m not so sure that’s true.”

  The family was cheerful in a formal way, smiling whenever their eyes met. Everybody sighed a lot, plucking at the hem of their garments or offering to help with this or that, carrying dishes or trash or whatnot. I was treated like a nearly visible ghost, and mere acknowledgement was enough for me. I snuck beers with regularity and was blissed out by the time we piled into the cars for the trek over to the funeral home.

  I took a seat in the back and tried to keep my head upright. My hangover was legendary, and Deuce had all but ignored me most of the day. A man possessed of his sins, he was especially delicate with the remaining family members, giving wide berth, even, to his cousin Reginald, who was surly most of the day. Both men hid behind dark glasses and calm demeanors, but something nagged at them.

  A few quick swigs from a plastic bottle of Old Turkey put me back in business. I sat between two old ladies outfitted in bright green dresses. They shook their heads disapprovingly at my choice of mid-service beverage, but the cracking ache of my skull meant I didn’t give a damn. I was sure I smelled like the underside of Jack Daniel’s boots, but it was better than the other side of it all. I wasn’t prepared to get good and sober. Who knew when that would even be? I’d been sober once, but it had to be on my terms. I wasn’t ready, knew I wasn’t ready.

  The service itself was calm but was covered in a devastated silence.

  I made conversation with the old ladies, but they didn’t really know anything. They occasionally went to church with Deuce’s mom and only saw Taj when he passed through the house on their post-Sunday School luncheons.

  I got up and moved. No help for the wicked, I supposed.

  The group I chose next was decidedly more…youthfu
l. I eavesdropped from the row behind them, careful not to be too obvious, but at some point I must have belched.

  I held the cup aloft and said, “Irish means of grieving,” and they went back to their conversations.

  “I mean, them niggas don’t play,” a kid in a black shirt and dark tie said.

  “I heard the reason they had to keep his body was because they had to log all the pieces of him,” a girl in braids responded. “Like, he was so fucked up, they couldn’t release him to the family until they were sure they had everything.”

  “Yo, it gets even more fucked up than that,” a kid in a vest said. “My boy Sam Money told me they cut off his dick and stuffed it into his mouth.”

  The others leaned in conspiratorially. “What, like he’s a snitch?”

  “Heard he was fucking somebody’s girl,” vest kid responded. “You know Taj — he was always chasing pussy.”

  “Pssh, Taj was fake as fuck and everybody knew it,” the girl said. “Love that boy, shit, but he was not hard. Pretty boy, coming from a family with a pro ball player.”

  “Shit, I wish I’d had his problems,” the kid in the black shirt and tie said. “He should have just kept his narrow ass of the streets. Is that true, though — the part about them stuffing his dick in his mouth?”

  The one dude made a gesture in the air. “Swear ‘fo God,” he said. “Them niggas fucked him up. His boy Reg been trying to pick up on who did it.”

  The guy in the vest smiled. “Like that big-headed mufucka’d do anything,” he said. “He more pussy than Taj, and half as hard.”

  The girl plucked at her braids. “Shit, he better watch it, or else he’s gone end up with a dick-mouth himself.”

  Just as the conversation was revealing something, however, the service began. I settled back and dipped into my 80 proof meds.

  It wasn’t that I was being disrespectful or self-indulgent, though I think you’d have a case if you suspected me of both. Truth be told, I was looking to pull some of the old mojo back out of my time from the Junction. Taj’s funeral was not the first one I had attended while under the influence. When a younger guy named Emmitt Laveau died some months back, I went to the funeral and ended up hearing licks from an old Blind Willie McTell song pulsing from the coffin like somebody had stuffed a ham radio in there with him.