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

it, Mister.”
    I nodded, stared out my side window. Half a dozen of Jacob’s sheep, shaggy and dirty as a junkie’s hair-do, grazed in my front forty like it was common ground.
    â€œHe is down by the creek,” I said. “I pulled him out of the water. He’s on the northside bank.”
    We were near the bridge. Baxter slowed the cruiser to a crawl.
    â€œHe better be,” the sheriff said. “Because I’d hate to come all the way out here for nothing.”
    *   *   *
    It seemed though that he had.
    The sheriff parked on the middle of the old bridge, but kept the cruiser’s motor and the AC running. We got out and I moved to the side of the bridge that would give view to the dead man’s resting place. The sheriff moved beside me, too close for comfort.
    The body was gone.
    Baxter sighed like he’d been holding his breath. His breath was like vaporized peppermint schnapps. He seemed relieved, but he could have been frustrated, hungover or something else. He was hard for me to read.
    He stared at the north bank of The Little Piney where I was staring, spat cleanly over the rusted rail of the bridge into the water below. With a thumb he pushed up the brim of his hat, just a hair.
    â€œHe was right down there, Sheriff.”
    The white oak in the creek clung to land with thick torqued roots. Green leafed, it was the livest plant around. Even the usually succulent kudzu vines were dry, fibrous as sisal rope wound around the trunks and limbs of heat-exhausted trees on the cut bank.
    When I leaned against the bridge rail and pointed at the spot where I had found the corpse, the ring on the gold chain around my neck slid over the collar of my T-shirt.
    The sheriff looked at the ring on the chain, not at where I pointed. He raised his eyebrows and frowned, which complex maneuver seemed the sort of facial move that lawmen must practice and which could mean anything from personal knowledge to professional curiosity. I tucked the chained gold band back under my shirt.
    When I dropped my hand I felt sweat cold in my armpit.
    â€œI suppose, Mister Reynolds,” he said conversationally, “that a rich fellow from Houston and Gulfport and wherever else you been, would just naturally get bored living out in this kind of Pure Country.”
    The sheriff had checked up on me.
    â€œI don’t think you understand Rural America. How it is out here.”
    Though the High Sheriff might have been aiming at informed sarcasm, his critique came off as canned. And he was clearly underinformed about me on these older counts, since I’d been born in a town not much bigger than Doker and raised in one no bigger than Bertrandville and only lived in Houston because that was the only place that would accept me in graduate school and only had traveled some of the world because my father drug me on business trips around the world only to carry his bags and tend to him when he was drunk, which my mother would not do for her husband.
    But I didn’t say anything. People think they know you when they know where you’re from or where you’ve lived or where you went to school or who your people are; but that is often not the case in the least bit and apples can roll as far from the trees that bore them as the grocery store, oftentimes many states and even countries far away from their place of origin.
    The sheriff turned back to his car.
    â€œShouldn’t we take a look?” I asked, because I felt I should ask, though I did not want to take a look with the sheriff.
    It was curious that the body was back in the creek or gone elsewhere, but I was relieved that it was.
    The sheriff made a big production of looking east and west and north and south.
    â€œTake a look at what, Mister?”
    Truthfully there was not much to see. Even the heel marks my walking shoes had made in the creekside mud seemed now smoothed to inconsequence.
    I looked over the bridge rail. In the