Burrows Read online

  I left him to his business, ran to the house, and yanked open the screen door. It slapped closed and the comfortable smells of fried meat and vegetables drew me to the table sitting square in the middle of the kitchen, surrounded by rough-hewn cabinets, a deep freeze, the ice box, and a homemade china cabinet.

  “Go wash your hands,” Miss Becky ordered without turning from the hot stove where she was frying my frog legs. The bun on the back of her head hung limp in the kitchen’s humidity, despite the time of the year. Two box fans moved the warm air around.

  “I ran into a bull nettle. My leg’s stinging like fire.”

  “Well, we’ll put some damp baking soda on it in a minute.”

  She kept the black plastic General Electric radio in the adjoining living room tuned to a station out of Chisum. The preaching was over, and the news and crop reports were on. Mostly background noise to me, Grandpa liked to listen to the local crime report, even though he was retired.

  By the time I washed my hands, the table was set. Grandpa stomped on the porch to knock the dirt and sandburs off his brogans. He came inside, went straight to the water bucket on the counter, filled the dipper, and swallowed hard several times. He always counted on Miss Becky to draw a bucket of cold water fresh from the well and have it ready. In the heat of the summer, she kept a big chunk of store-bought ice floating on top.

  He pitched his straw hat on top of the deep freeze and went to the bathroom to wash his face and hands, splashing water on the sink and wall like a duck.

  “Y’all sit down and eat now.” Miss Becky placed a pan of hot biscuits on the table within easy reach of Grandpa as he came in drying his face with a hand towel. He took his place and broke one open to cool.

  “Mama, y’all get ready after dinner and I’ll carry you to town. I need to go by the courthouse and you can get what you need at the store while I’m there.”

  There was always something to do in the tiny community of Center Springs where I lived with my grandparents after Mama and Daddy died in an automobile accident, but I was tickled at the idea of going to Chisum.

  Every now and then during dinner, Grandpa used his spoon to dip from the bowl of black-eyed peas in the middle of the table. He was never one to mind getting a bite from a bowl once he’d finished his meal. Some didn’t like that kind of behavior, but it was Grandpa’s table and he figured he’d eat what he wanted.

  Just to aggravate us, he’d even reach over and scoop from my cousin Pepper’s plate or mine. I knew he liked getting her goat, because his blue eyes twinkled while he watched her get mad and sull up like an old possum.

  “You know, Top, me and you need to go down to the creek pretty soon and catch us a stringer of white perch while it’s still warm. I’ve been thinking that a mess of fish might taste pretty good.”

  “Can we go…”

  He shushed me with a hand when he caught the last part of the newscaster’s description of a chase through Oklahoma. “Listen a minute.”

  All along he’d been half listening to the news and I only paid attention to the radio once we quit talking.

  “…multi-state crime spree by these three fugitives. Tulsa police and the state highway patrol think the two, Kendal Bowden and Albert Gantry, have killed four people in three states and aided in the escape of Kevin Jennings, who was also serving time in the Tulsa mental hospital. It is believed the trio might be heading toward the Kiamichi Mountains in southeast Oklahoma. At this time the highway patrol and local law enforcement agencies are assisted by a multi-state agency composed of more than one hundred officers. We’ll keep you updated on this murder spree as more information comes in. Hogs are up, fall is here and the stock report is next …”

  The sound of roaring engines and shrieking tires burning rubber on the highway drifted through the open doors and windows, causing Grandpa’s face to get red. I knew the reason. Right after he retired and Uncle Cody got elected as constable, local kids realized that the one-mile stretch of highway from the creek bridge to the turn at our house was open game for drag racing.

  For years, they knew better than to race right beside Grandpa’s, except when they caught him gone to Chisum or to pick up a prisoner in one of the other little nearby burgs. Now they easily fit in a couple of quick races before he could call the laws, who always showed up long after it was over.

  Miss Becky frowned, but before anyone said a word, the telephone in the living room jangled with one ring. Two rings would have let us know the call was for Miss Whitney, who shared our party line.

  Miss Becky rose from the table to answer. “Hello? Oh Hidy, Bill. Y’all doing all right? Oh, all right. Wait a second.” She laid the phone on the telephone table. “Ned, Bill Caldwell wants to talk to you.”

  “He knew I’d be eating dinner.” Grandpa frowned. “Bill’s old enough to know he oughta let a man finish his dinner before he calls.” He drained half of his sweet tea before he left the table.

  Miss Becky turned the radio down and whispered as he passed. “I heard Miss Whitney pick up the receiver.” She didn’t like it that Miss Whitney listened in, but there was nothing anyone could do about it.

  Grandpa didn’t tell us much when he was constable. The only way Miss Becky had of learning anything was to hear his one-sided conversations and figure things out for herself. She got to be pretty good at it, but unfortunately for her this time, Grandpa did most of the listening. “What time did you say you found him? Are you talking about east of where Sanders Creek comes into the river, but before the river bridge?”

  I chewed on a frog leg and watched his face through the open door.

  “Well, that sounds bad, but you know, I ain’t constable no more. Whyn’t you call Cody and get him out there.” He laughed after a minute. “Well, all right. He’ll probably get there before I do anyway, but I’ll be out in a little bit.”

  He hung up the phone and came back into the kitchen. “We’ll go to town when I get back. Bill caught a feller on his trotline, so I need to get on down there.”

  “My lands.” Miss Becky raised her hands. “Does he know who it is?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Well, that’s awful.”

  The phone jangled again, irritating Grandpa. “Does that thang ring all the time when I’m in the field?”

  “It’s usually for me.” Miss Becky hurried back into the living room to answer. This time it was her turn to be silent for a long while. Grandpa didn’t like it that she was in there on the phone during dinner time, but he couldn’t do much more than fidget. She asked a few more questions like “When did he do that?” and “I suspect he might.”

  She finally finished the call, but didn’t put down the receiver. “Opal May Whitney, I know you’re on the other end of this line. Now you don’t say a word to nobody or I’ll know who spilled the beans.”

  She came back to start clearing the table. Grandpa and I exchanged glances. I knew better than to ask questions, but he didn’t. “Who was it, Mama?”

  Miss Becky smiled and picked up my empty plate. “It was for me. I’ll tell you directly.”

  I didn’t like their adult talk one little bit, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Grandpa might buck and snort, but she wouldn’t tell anything until she was ready, so I changed the subject. “Can I go with you to see Mr. Bill?”

  “Naw, I remember the last time you were with me when somebody was found dead.”

  I recalled the blood-splattered living room in Powderly about two months before he retired. The radio call said he was needed pretty quick. We were feeding cows, and instead of taking me home first, we went straight to Arthur City, about three miles from the pasture. We pulled up in front of a little clapboard house to find half a dozen deputy sheriffs’ cars parked on the dirt road.

  A shook-up highway patrol officer was standing in the yard. “Ned, you need to see this.”

  Grandpa must have forgot I was with him, because he went up through the door with me following. He stopped at the thre
shold in shock. When he realized I was coming in behind him, he pushed me back, but not before I saw a slaughterhouse in the living room. I spent the next two hours killing time in a dead man’s front yard while every lawman in the county dropped by to sort out the carnage.

  “Besides,” Grandpa started toward the front bedroom, “bodies that come out of the river ain’t for young’uns to see. Come in here a minute, Mama.” Miss Becky followed him out of my earshot. Hootie came up to the table and I fed him a couple of bites of fried potatoes.

  I was disappointed, because I wanted to do something else besides hunt and fish, which was the main thing for kids to do in Center Springs. Around 1870, our little community was actually a pretty good-sized town. But now less than eight hundred people still lived just off the bottoms, barely enough to keep our cotton gin going, along with two general stores on the north side of the two-lane highway with the Domino Hall in between.

  Miss Becky told me that when she was a kid Center Springs even had a cobbler, a barbershop, a blacksmith, and an honest-to-god brass band. But after a long spell of rain and thunderstorms, the Red River drowned the entire valley under thirty-three feet of silt and water. Most everyone was washed away and only a handful of people returned.

  When the Depression hit, folks who didn’t have money worked the fields, chopping or picking cotton, or harvesting crops for pennies to buy food. Most of them lived close to the ground and raised their own vegetable gardens, barely scratching out a living in dirt floor shacks.

  Families still depended on one another for help and no one lived far off from the others. On my dad’s side, twenty families worked hard-scrabble farms within two square miles of one another. Each family had at least ten kids, and they all helped one another when times got hard.

  I was rubbing Hootie’s ears when Grandpa and Miss Becky came back into the kitchen. “You know, Top, I’d like for you to go to the courthouse with me after I get back.” He picked up his hat. “I haven’t seen O.C. in a coon’s age and it’d tickle him to see you, too.”

  “That’d be great…”

  Grandpa shushed me with a hand. Sometimes it was hard to get a whole sentence out around him. “Listen a minute.” We heard a car crunching up the gravel drive. I looked out the door and it was Uncle James and my cousin Pepper. She and I are the same age and people sometimes think we’re twins.

  I went outside and watched her get out of their Bel Air. She waved when I met them in the yard. Over the past few months I’d learned to read how she was feeling. Some days, when the weight of what happened to us in the river bottoms was heavy on her shoulders, she was a sad, quiet gal.

  Other times, like today, she bounced out of the car with a grin. Uncle James ruffled my hair as he walked past on his way into the kitchen and I rubbed his big belly. She motioned for me to follow her out behind the smokehouse where Miss Becky hung her clothes on the line. This time it was loaded heavy with drying sheets. I knew they’d smell good later that night. Once out of sight, Pepper reached into her jeans and dug out a couple of bent cigarettes.

  She stuck one in the corner of her mouth. “Want one?”

  I instinctively took the other and then panicked. Holding a toonie with my grandparents so close scared me half to death. I knew for a fact that Grandpa was going to come around the corner and catch us with them. It wasn’t that we hadn’t tried smoking before. She and I had been down at Uncle James’ pool with a couple of other cousins a few weeks earlier, trying our best not to cough our lungs out from a pack of Camels.

  “No! Golly-bum, they’ll smell the smoke when they come outside. Grandpa’s getting ready to leave in a minute and the wind is out of the northeast.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Titty baby.”

  “Why don’t you eat a booger?”

  “It don’t make any difference no-how. I don’t have any matches. We’d have to snitch one from the kitchen.”

  Miss Becky kept wooden matches in the dispenser on the kitchen wall, but I was already rattled and was sure as shootin’ that she’d know we were up to no good if we went inside for one. “Where’d you get them?”

  “Neal’s store. He had a bunch of singles for sale on the counter and I grabbed a couple when he was slicing pickle loaf for Miss Nelson.”

  “You stole them?” The thought of a theft was almost enough to make me swimmy-headed. Grandpa hated a thief worse than anything and thinking about her stealing from Uncle Neal made me feel bad. “You ought not have done that.”

  “Shit, titty baby. They aren’t but a penny or two apiece. It’s not like I robbed a bank or nothing. We’ll save ’em for later.”

  I heard Grandpa and we quickly stuck the cigarettes in our pockets and went back around to the front.

  “Pepper!” Miss Becky called through the screen door. “Come help me clear the table. Top, you need to burn the trash.”

  “Well shit.” Pepper stomped her foot. “I ain’t been here five minutes and she’s got me working.”

  When I went inside, Uncle James was sitting at the table, eating pinto beans. I picked a couple of matches from the dispenser and carried the trash to the burn barrel, thankful that I didn’t have to do dishes with the women.

  Chapter Three

  Ned sat at the telephone table and made a couple of quick calls while the kids were outside. White haired Judge O.C. Rains received the first. Judge Rains was a cantankerous Lamar County judge and had been Ned Parker’s good friend all his life.

  Thelma Lee Fletcher, O.C.’s secretary of forty years who wore her hair like Jackie Kennedy, answered on the first ring. “Judge Rain’s office.”

  “Howdy, Thelma Lee.”

  Knowing that a Saturday call from Ned meant trouble she was immediately curious. “What’s wrong, Ned?”

  “It ain’t none of your business, but it’s always good to hear your voice. Put me through to O.C.”

  He knew she was grinning into the receiver. “I’ll find out anyway.”

  “I know it, but that’ll have to come from O.C., so let me talk to him.”

  “All right, hon. Tell Becky howdy for me.”

  O.C. wasn’t as prompt in answering his phone. He liked to make people wait. It rang half a dozen times, and that irritated Ned, because he knew the phone was right next to O.C.’s hand. The only thing closer was the fly swatter he kept by the papers he was working on.

  O.C. despised a fly.

  He finally picked up the receiver. “What?”

  “Y’ought to say hello first, before you barge in with a bad-mannered question.”

  O.C. sighed and turned in his wooden chair to contemplate the screenless courthouse window. “If you wanted to visit, I’d expect to see you standing in my door, so something’s wrong. You want to tell me, or do I have to wade through five minutes of pleasantries before you get to the point?”

  “How’d you know it was me?”

  “I heard Thelma Lee.”

  “Then why didn’t you answer the damned phone when it rang?”

  O.C. chuckled. “Because I like to aggravate you. What’s the matter?”

  “I’m on my way down to the river. Bill Caldwell’s done pulled up a body while he was running his trotlines this morning. Said he didn’t know who it was, so he left it tied off to a snag and floated down to Cody’s honky-tonk and called from there.”

  The Sportsman’s Lounge was one of half a dozen mean beer joints clustered on the Oklahoma side of the river. Sometimes referred to as Juarez, a nod toward the Rio Grande far to the south, the joints offered sawdust floors, three-two beer, a juke box, a dirt parking lot, and a good helping of trouble.

  “That’s Oklahoma’s problem, Ned. Besides, Cody needs to run out there, not you. You remember you’ve retired.”

  “’Course I remember. My mind ain’t gone yet.” Ned watched through the screen door as one of the racers cruised slowly past on the highway and peered up the hill to see if anyone was home.

  “I know the river belongs to Oklahoma, O.C. Bill had his lines set
on the Texas side so he figured he’d let me know first.” Texas had no jurisdiction beyond the south bank’s drop-off to the water’s edge. “I’ll radio the sheriff there in Hugo and meet him on their side. We’ll need to ride back out in Bill’s boat. I don’t intend to slide down that riverbank on my ass to see a dead man. I’ve seen one before.”

  O.C. chuckled again. The image of Ned sliding the twenty feet or so down the steep bank cheered him up. “All right, then. Why’d he call you? Don’t he know you’ve retired? You ain’t the constable n’more.”

  “’Course he knows. But everybody out here’s called me for so long that it’s second nature. Cody’ll be there shortly. We kinda have to wean them off of me, and some folks don’t take to weanin’ very quick.”

  “All right.”

  “You gonna be in your office later this afternoon?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  Ned doodled with a pencil on a Harvey Holmes Insurance notepad. “I’m gonna bring Top by to see you. Becky talked to his teacher a little while ago and she said that even though he’s one of her best students, he’s showing out this year.” His voice softened. “I imagine it all has to do with the trouble we had last spring, but I’god, he’s been a handful lately.”

  O.C. sighed. “What’d he do?”

  He already had an idea his charge was getting dangerously close to what he called a butt-whoopin’. A reliable source reported that Top was seen down at the pool not far from the store, smoking with other kids. One of the smokers was Pepper. The virtual eleven-year-old twin was rough as a cob and cussed as well as any farmer in the county. Her daddy, James, was trying his best to raise her right.