Read Online Burn What Will Burn by C. B. McKenzie - Free Book Online

buried my mother and baptized me,” the lawman said.
    Baxter didn’t seem the baptized type.
    â€œYou know him and his grandson, the Retard, pretty good,” Baxter said to me, pointedly I thought.
    â€œI know his grandson, Malcolm, pretty good,” I said.
    â€œSo I hear tell,” Baxter said, as he braked in front of my place.
    *   *   *
    We sat the car for half a minute. I counted.
    The sheriff didn’t say anything, so I just waited, counted up and then counted down to calm my nerves.
    â€œMalcolm’s worried about his daddy,” I said finally.
    â€œHe has got good reason to worry,” the sheriff said. “Junior’s jumped bail, which was the Reverend’s last cash money lost. So if Mean Joe catches Junior he will surely tear his son a new asshole and then probably kill him outright.” The sheriff paused, then added, “and the bondsman in West Memphis has set the hardest hard-case bounty hunter in Arkansas after Junior’s ass besides.”
    â€œAnd you’re after him too, Sheriff?”
    Baxter looked at me.
    â€œThat goes without saying, Mister.”
    I fidgeted.
    â€œYou know where Joe Junior might be?” I asked for Malcolm’s sake.
    The sheriff cut his eyes at my house and raised his lip a fraction.
    â€œYou might want to check for him in a burn barrel, Mr. Reynolds. That’s where trash usually winds up around here.”
    *   *   *
    I bought the Old Duncan Place because it was cheap property and a lot of it, but the house was a crooked, unrighteous mess. Clapboard peeled and bucked off the frame like dried-out scabs. The tin roof was streaked with deltas of rust. Thick coats of dust turned the windowpanes into privacy glass. My chickens moved listlessly on a front porch that was canted as a loading ramp, behind bugscreen wavy and patched with duct tape Xs.
    The candy-apple red, fin-tailed Cadillac convertible I had bought my dead wife, a singular indulgence, a bribe, an investment, sat beside this wrecked abode like a reminder of better times.
    It was so hard to explain to people why I lived this way that I’d quit trying. Some of us were just not meant to enjoy money.
    â€œStill got your Texas plates on the Caddy,” Baxter noticed. “So you’re not planning on staying around here then, I take it. Little slow out here for you, Mister Reynolds?”
    I shrugged.
    I had no idea whether I was leaving soon, or staying put for a while. That depended. I didn’t like it here especially, but I didn’t dislike it either. I had local interests. It was someplace to be.
    Baxter drew hard on his cigarette, forced smoke out his nose, looked at me, at the house, at the Cadillac, then back at me. He shook his head as if all that did not add up. He chain lit another Camel, rolled down his side window and tossed the old butt on the road. That one cigarette, under the correct circumstances, could ignite a fire to burn my whole hundred acres, a thousand beyond, burn black the whole valley.
    He rolled his window back up.
    â€œYou letting me out here?” I asked.
    Baxter accelerated down the road.
    â€œSeems you said he was down this way,” the sheriff told me.
    A hot bead of sweat slid down my spine, dripped off my tailbone.
    â€œDid I?”
    Baxter aimed his gray eyes at me, lifted that corner of his mouth again.
    â€œI do believe it is what you said, Mister.”
    He sounded as if he was reminding me of a deal we had made a long time before.
    â€œI suppose I said he was a ‘he’ too.”
    I stared at my little hands, swollen fat by the heat. I clenched and unclenched them, twisted the tight wedding band on the heart’s finger of my left hand, felt a golden edge cut hard into the flesh between my knuckles, pressed my palm against my shirt front, felt the other wedding band, the dead man’s property hanging there against my skin.
    â€œI suppose you did say