Dirt Merchant Read online

  However, as I sat there, all I experienced was the growing sensation that the floor was spinning beneath me. I leaned back, as if preparing myself for a theme park ride, and drove my heels into the ground to put an end to the swaying.

  The young man in the coffin gave off no ghostly vibes. Not even the hint of sound. Instead, all I got was the subdued hum of the lights above us, intermittently broken up by the shrieks of inconsolable family members.

  I zoned out for a bit, hoping I wouldn’t be sick, paying attention to the pulsing of my head. It synced up with the swell of the preacher man’s voice. He was a passionate, sweaty man, even in November, and he had this habit of daintily patting at his forehead whenever perspiration slipped into his eyes.

  Halfway through the service, I excused myself to go outside for some private drinking.

  A young woman in a muted blue dress was smoking among a group of friends, down where the hearse was parked.

  “Spare one of those?” I asked, offering my flask in return. The young woman laughed off my gesture but gave me a smoke. She flicked her lighter, ran the flame over the end of my butt, and continued chatting with her friends, even after I’d walked away from the group.

  Her eyes were beautiful.

  I kept a good distance but listened in. They were talking local bullshit involving a beef over drug dealings. People getting killed over weed that was supposed to be “legit.”

  The young woman caught up with me at the graveside, as people filed out. I had been watching Deuce, waiting for him to give me the nod for our exit. We had talked briefly the previous night to check out leads low-level dealers had given us.

  “Enjoy that smoke?” she asked me.

  I nodded and smiled. “I did.”

  “Not much of a talker?”

  I said, “Not when I’ve got a mind as full as mine is right now.”

  She nodded, glanced out over the headstones. “Should be beautiful out here,” she said. “Everything around here is cold concrete, and it’s only getting worse. Hard to imagine the only green land in this town has to be full of bodies. Soon, it feels like, won’t be anywhere else to put them, so we’ll just end up stacking them right on top of one another.”

  “Morbid thought,” I responded.

  “It’s a morbid time,” she responded. “You and Darron good friends?”

  I nodded. “I would say I’m a family friend, but I’m not. Not really. I’m along for the ride, helping out an old buddy and all that.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “About as bad as can be imagined,” I said.

  “Has he told you anything?”

  “Just the bare minimum. He and Reginald said—”

  I looked over and saw Deuce watching me, then I tried continuing on. “He and Reg said Taj got dragged along in some shady business, spent the last six months of his life trying to hit bottom. I filled in the blanks.”

  “He don’t know the half,” she responded.

  She held out one hand.“My name’s Tyra,” she said, “and you are?”

  “Rolson.”

  “Well, Rolson, I know you want to help Darron out, but it’s a viper pit you’re walking into. Reg, I expect this sort of nonsense out of. He’s been walking dead since he stole his mama’s car when he was thirteen, but Darron, he’s always had a good head on his shoulders.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “And don’t think I don’t see him mugging us from way over by the casket. He asks you about me, you pass along what I said to you. He may be hurting about Taj, but he’d be best to leave it along. These aren’t just boys selling skag on the corner. They’re into way more freaky shit.”

  “Why don’t you pass along the message yourself?”

  “He and I aren’t exactly on speaking terms.” She paused, rifled through her purse, and brought out a half-finished pack of cigarettes. She handed me one and lit the both of them. “We had a falling out some time ago about his little brother, and I don’t think he ever forgave me.”

  “Y’all two date or something?”

  “Me and Darron? Hell no. He’s always been too quiet, too modest, like his shit don’t stink. Can’t stand a man like that. No, it was me and Taj. Back in high school, the whole first love thing.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because I know you’ll pass it along for me.”

  “What else can do you have on Taj, before we go and do something mighty stupid?”

  “Whatever he did to get where he is, it was probably enough to put him there.”

  She started to walk away, blowing a dissipating plume of smoke above her and ignoring an approaching Deuce. I quick-stepped to catch up with her.

  “If I need to call you, in case something else happens that brings up questions…”

  She smiled knowingly. “Sure,” she said. “Give me your phone.”

  I checked my pockets. Must have left it back at the house. “I guess I’m unprepared for a life in the modern world.”

  “Well, here,” she said, fishing a small slip of paper from her purse and writing on it. “Don’t go and lose this, because it will be the only one you get, you hear?”

  I tapped it against my forehead and smiled. “Thank you. I’ll be in touch.”

  6

  My dreams during this period were caustic and dark. In some of them, I hovered over bodies on fire, the smell of flesh so strong my nostrils burned even after I fell out of bed. I projected wild fantasies of the investigation into my subconscious wanderings. Dreaming itself was akin to wandering through a gallery of horror so intense I anticipated being shut of it.

  Those dreams terrified me. They twisted my day into a kind of lopsided proxy of reality, and I ended up dipping into the bottle far earlier than on most days.

  Or maybe that was my justification.

  Other dreams had me relitigating my past like a half-assed lawyer in a cruel, personal version of This is Your Life. Memories I thought had long been saved to the archive resurfaced and dragged me for a ride through my past. Everyone in my life, from my father to Vanessa and Deuce, returned to give one last curtsy before tap dancing off into the sunset.

  The most dominant and recurring image had to do with Aunt Birdie’s funeral. Recently, she had been on my mind, and I pondered the significance. Some of it was guilt, I knew. I had spent most of my life contemplating my mother’s place in it, all the while shutting out the woman who had actually raised me.

  With the fog of mama’s death slowly lifting, allowing me to view my earlier years with some perspective, maybe I was moving on to one of the elephant in the living room of my mind. I certainly wasn’t ready to tackle my feelings toward the father who had abandoned me for some rash self-denial of his own role in his wife’s death. Part of me hoped I’d never be forced to give headspace to him, or the required willpower to clean up all the mental trash cluttering up my mind.

  But Aunt Birdie, she deserved an entire wing of my memory, so the dreams involving her were not troubling. The most prevalent nighttime excursion dealt with the funeral, which had always weighed heavily on me.

  Aunt Birdie died, well, not unexpectedly, but news of her death was crushing to most everybody who heard it. She had always been a spirited woman, full of life and vigor and all the cliches people attach to women of a certain mentality. She wasn’t timid, but she also wasn’t vulgar. She lived the way I’m sure my mother wished she could live, unattached to the circumstances which had weighed her down.

  Unlike my mother, who married young and weathered the tempest of my father’s emotions, Aunt Birdie never married, never even got heavily involved with a man, so far as I knew, so she was possessed of a freedom that mystified her friends and galled her enemies. She owned a small business once, and traveled to the far corners of the continental states, which was something for a family which had scarcely left Georgia.

  It was perhaps because of her upbringing or despite it that she came to be the woman she was. She threw off the ruthless upb
ringing 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 danc
er. 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.”