Online Exclusive: “Steer Away from That Darkess” by Robert Busby

Robert Busby

Steer Away from That Darkess

Bradley steered his Chevy S-10 through the dark to the back of the Campbell property to drop off the deer. He saw Dewayne back there discussing something into a cordless phone, pacing across the open-aired shed where deer and other game were processed. In a past life the processing plant had been an abattoir where ancient Campbells of only a slightly better economic circumstance had possessed actual hogs to butcher. Now it was a front for a meth business that Peach Campbell had begun before Dewayne hijacked it. A single light shone off the back of the plant and elongated Dewayne’s shadow up the front of the camper.

Bradley reversed toward the shed then killed the ignition and stepped out of the small pickup to unload the deer from the truck bed. “Sup, boss,” he said.

Dewayne held up his hand. Bradley didn’t know how long he’d be so he lit up a Newport and leaned against the back of the truck. Twenty-four and still acne prone, a blonde chunk in his Atlanta Falcons Starter jacket, he’d done nothing but gain weight since he’d started the morning shift at Hardee’s when he moved out of the house at seventeen. Before he took to running meth, the steady job barely covered Bradley’s bills each month, which meant he would’ve been kneading biscuits another five years and fifty more after that before he could save up for community college.

He didn’t know what he wanted to be yet. Just knew he didn’t want to be here.

In the back of the truck was Bradley’s climbing tree stand that had rattled across the bed the whole way here, banging its welded aluminum against the metal walls of the truck bed, occasionally thumping into the flesh of a buck that Bradley had scooped up off the side of the road. A car had busted the deer up something good but the deer had probably gotten in a few good punches. In the morning someone would be getting their hood or windshield or bumper repaired. Bradley hadn’t cut into the deer yet to see how bad the damage was. One of the antlers had broken off though. Would’ve been about a six-point otherwise but the deer would still serve a purpose. Its meat would be broken down a few yards away in the plant then wrapped around baggies of meth and stored in the old vertical freezer in the shed, all of it packaged in marked boxes on Wednesday, two days from now, and driven by Bradley to a Kosher butcher shop in Memphis, in the back of Peach’s refrigerator truck parked up at the house.

Dewayne flicked a cigarette off into the dirt and searched the cordless for the talk button to end the call. Then he ducked in the camper and Bradley saw him saying something to Peach’s sister Lori who lived in the RV. Dewayne emerged with a store-brand coke and bee-lined to the passenger side of the truck carrying what looked like about a ten-gallon white bucket by a thin metal handle.

“What’s that?” Bradley said over the truck hood.

Dewayne grabbed at the passenger-side door handle. “Unlock the truck.”

Bradley struggled across the bench seat to open the passenger door. Dewayne set the bucket in the middle on what they called the bitch seat and set his bony ass in shotgun and closed the door. It was obvious Dewayne wanted Bradley to take him somewhere but Bradley had never been alone with Dewayne, had pretty much avoided their crank scientist like a boy dodging his drunk, abusive father. His head filled with thoughts and his chest got so heavy he believed his heart had stopped.

“Where we goin?” Bradley asked.

“Surgan on the phone. Said we got us a situation out at the lab.”

Bradley sat still for what felt like a damn eternity. He had been happy enough to keep poaching for Dewayne same as he had for Peach. But unlike Peach and Surgan, who manned the lab when Dewayne wanted to dip his dick in Peach’s sister, Bradley didn’t cook. At all. So he’d never had a reason to go out to any of the labs and wondered what the reason was now. Bradley had been using their contact in Memphis to procure some Vicodin to deal for himself. Not even dealing really because he only had one customer. But now Dewayne had found out somehow. Bradley was sure of it.

“You gonna crank it up or run us out there like fucking Fred Flintstone?”

“Uh, should we unload the deer first?” Bradley thinking if he could just get Dewayne out of the truck, maybe get Dewayne’s arms full of broke-gut deer, he could just take off running, his fat ass panting through the woods.

“No.”

Bradley nodded. “Aight.” He thought about just making a run for it anyway but he wouldn’t get far. Peach had told him how Dewayne had snuck up on their previous mule and done him in. Dewayne wouldn’t have much trouble doing the same to Bradley with or without a head start. He realized now that it had taken him too long to recognize that. He was a sitting duck next to Dewayne. He finally caught a grip on the key and when the ignition turned over, he damned the dependability of his truck. The certainty that it would start and carry him to the gallows.

Dewayne sniffed then leaned toward Bradley, sniffed again. “Them damn Newports you smoking?”

“Uh, yeah.”

Dewayne had already pulled one Winston from the pack in his shirt pocket and removed another now. The shirt was flannel and unbuttoned and the loose t-shirt underneath fell against a body deprived of all fat, just bone and muscle and tendon like spring-loaded traps. He tucked both cigarettes between his thin lips, cupped his hand around the lighter flame, touched it to each Winston. His arms were lean but the hand that offered Bradley one of the lit cigarettes was wide as a shovelhead.

“Can’t smell that menthol shit all the way out there,” Dewayne said.

Bradley accepted the Winston, trying not to think about those Looney Tunes where they gave Bugs Bunny a last cigarette as he faced a firing squad. At the least Dewayne wouldn’t shoot while Bradley was driving. He pondered different plans of escape for when they arrived at the lab. Really just different versions of the same plan: hauling ass by foot or tire in the opposite direction of Dewayne. The radio quietly murmured something about a cold front coming through in a couple days. Bradley stole a glance at the label on the lid of the bucket: phosphorus, red, 99%.

“It safe to smoke around that?” Bradley asked.

“I wouldn’t use it as a ashtray.”

 

#

 

Fifteen minutes later on the other side of the county, Dewayne told Bradley where to turn off County Road 211. Told Bradley to kill his headlights, and with only the red tinge of the running lights to see by, the dirt path got swallowed in the moonless dark. Bradley slowed to navigate the fire road which in its long disuse had grown a long tuft of grass like a mohawk between two worn lines of dirt that also sprouted patches of grass. The whole way Bradley had pondered a lot about how he could create a diversion using the red phosphorus. The big obstacle of course actually getting the bucket open without Dewayne noticing.

“I ain’t never been out here before,” Bradley said.

“Just follow the lines. Steer clear of the darkness.”

“Aight.” Then, trying to gauge what his own future looked like: “Y’all gonna be ready for me to run this batch up to Memphis on Wednesday?”

“You in a rush or something?”

“No.”

Dewayne pulled on his Winston. “Stop at the gate.”

Bradley wasn’t looking and had to slam the brakes before he barreled through a wall of kudzu stretching across the path. Dust coughed into the vines. Dewayne got out. Bradley looked for a flathead screwdriver to pry open the lid like on a paint can. All he found was a bicentennial quarter. Through the windshield he saw Dewayne with his arms elbow-deep in the kudzu wall. He tried to open the red phosporus but as a lever and fulcrum the quarter and the bucket rim both sucked ass. From the vines Dewayne pulled a chain. Bradley watched the wall of vines break from the bodock tree on the left side of the path and wobble toward the truck. He saw that the kudzu disguised a rectangular gate that had been fashioned out of two wood pallets nailed together. The hinges must have been affixed to another tree on the right side of the path. Bradley had the idea to use the keys in the ignition to pry open the phosphorus just as Dewayne waved Bradley through. Dewayne closed the gate behind the truck.

Only then did Bradley realize that he had missed the head start staring right at him: for a whole minute, Dewayne had not actually been sitting in the truck.

Another two hundred yards and they reached the lab, the outline of an abandoned doublewide stilted on cinderblocks and rotting away at the edge of a hollow. The path went out from under the truck and Bradley parked in some flattened bluestem grass. In the dark, Bradley thought again about the fate of the drug mule who had preceded him. Ludicrously early one morning Surgan, instead of Peach, had been shitfaced at the processing plant when Bradley dropped off a deer. Surgan had spilled all about it: Five months ago, Joe had died when the previous lab exploded, Joe had been the only one cooking that night, and they all would’ve considered it an accident except that when Peach got out there to relieve Joe the next morning, all he found was some dude taking a piss on the smoldering ashes, a semi-automatic M4 Bushmaster slung over his shoulder. Peach had told Surgan how this dude had his shirt pulled up over his nose and mouth and in the navy blue of early dawn he could only see those eyes devoid of any emotion, just some kind of depraved apathy watching Peach. He shook off and zipped up, walked towards Peach. Said his name was just-D-Wayne and that Memphis had sent him to shape up their little outfit. Started spouting all this chemistry that Peach didn’t understand but he caught the gist of it: Dewayne was taking over. If Peach didn’t like it, well. Look at Joe’s crispy fried corpse there.

Now Bradley was sewn to the cloth seat with fear. He butchered the recitation of the only prayer he knew. Then a flash of bright light filled the cab and Bradley’s whole shitty lonely life blurred before him, the half-siblings he didn’t know because he hadn’t stuck around after his mom got knocked up by someone in his own high school class and the singlewide where he slept now with the lights on so wood roaches wouldn’t crawl across his face. The associate’s degree he wouldn’t earn in a field of study he hadn’t chosen yet. Then he heard Dewayne stepping out of the truck, pulling the bucket of red phosphorus across the bench. Bradley opened his eyes, expelled an audible sigh of relief. A small circle warmed his boxers where he’d squirted some piss out. Not enough to dampen his jeans.

Outside the truck, Dewayne lit another smoke but didn’t offer Bradley one this time. One whole side of the trailer was covered in kudzu that seemed to be digesting the prefab house back into the earth. Even during the day, Bradley imagined the trailer difficult to spot. Not that this neck of the woods got much traffic anyway.

Peach was still sitting. “Where’s Surgan? Told him to fetch you after he got off the payphone.”

Dewayne said, “Honestly don’t give a shit what you told Surgan.”

Peach shrugged apologetically at Bradley. He and Bradley went way back to middle school. Peach had landed this gig for Bradley, Dewayne needing a new runner after he barbecued the last one. But for his part Peach had tried to keep Bradley from this side of the operation. Dewayne the scientist, Peach and Surgan the sous chefs. Bradley just muling the product to, and its ingredients back from, Memphis. He stood at the hood of his truck, still coming down off his scare. Between Peach and the trailer was a bare area of earth where the bluestem had been cut and burned. A propane tank sat beneath a two-eye camp stove in the dirt. On each eye a large pot where acetone was extracting the ephedrine. Bradley fought against his jittery hands to pick a Newport from the pack and steady it between his quivering lips to greet the lighter flame. That menthol filling his nostrils instead of the lingering acrid sulfur that hung about the place, the stench of boiling alcohol and cold medicine.

“I was at the plant when Surgan called,” Bradley said.

“What was you doing there?” Peach asked. From the flashlight Bradley watched him work his words up out of an underbite that gave the false impression of a strong chin.

“Dropping off a deer,” Bradley said.

“Told y’all not to call til that ephedrine been reduced,” Dewayne said.

“Huh? Nah, Dewayne. There something else.”

Peach wore a nylon coverall used for crawling beneath houses that crinkled as he led them to the rear of his ’83 Cavalier where a three-wheeler that Bradley was pretty sure didn’t belong to Peach had been parked. In the tall grass next to the three-wheeler lay an old man tied up and gagged, his wrists and ankles bound with rope.

Dewayne said, “Well that’s unfortunate.”

“We heard him ridin this way on that three-wheeler so we ducked and hid. Surgan waited behind that tree over there and knocked his geezer ass off his three-wheeler as he rode up.”

“He say anything?”

“He complained about us breaking his ribs or something. Said he owned this land.”

Dewayne nodded and smirked. “Found yourself some trouble, didn’t you, old timer?”

Dewayne kicked the man’s Velcro shoes which flopped lifeless in the grass. Bradley tasted a sick in his throat when he realized he was about to pay witness to whatever fate Dewayne had in store for the pathetic geezer bound and gagged in the tall wet grass.

Dewayne said, “He don’t say much.”

Peach popped the trunk on the Cavalier, pulled out a single-shot rifle where it lay atop the spare tire. “Here’s his gun. We can pop him and bury him off somewhere.”

“Nah. Last thing we need’s something that look like a murder or missing persons. Cops swarming this place, county going on lockdown or some shit.” Dewayne mulled over something. “Bring me that ether.”

Peach returned with a plastic jug labeled starter fluid and a gas mask over his face.

“Give me your shirt.”

“Ain’t got another one, Dewayne.”

“Not even at your house?”

Peach sighed and unzipped his coverall and pulled his arms out of the sleeves. Dewayne had pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, squatted and held the t-shirt over the mouth of the jug. He tipped the container so only a small section of the shirt soaked up the fluid. Then he turned the old man over and as the body rolled out from under the truck, Dewayne pressed the t-shirt against the man’s swollen, veined nose before they saw why the body hadn’t been making much noise.

“Hell. This sumbitch done croaked already.”

 

#

 

Six hours later. Bradley pulled into Rob-a-Lot, a two-pump Amoco out on a stretch of Old Highway 6. The hour was still dark except for false dawn on the horizon and the fluorescent lamp in the awning above the pumps humming and flickering, barely strobing its light over an empty lot. No other light between the pumps and the store, which made it an easy target for hold-ups, burglars following the shadows making it inside the store before the Syrian cashier could push the alarm.

Bradley had left the lab about three hours ago where Dewayne had boiled up a plan for disposing of the Colonel’s dead body. Bradley had only had a couple hours to sleep. But he had been too wired, his mind’s eye playing on a loop the way the old man’s body had flopped over lifeless in the tall wet grass when Peach had gone to loop a safety-orange hunting vest around the Colonel’s dead arms, so when Bradley arrived home, he just kept on his black slacks and Nike hightops and the red Hardee’s polo he had been wearing during his shift yesterday morning and brewed a cup of coffee, figuring he’d just make an all-nighter out of it. Now he parked on the dark side of the gas station, avoiding the lights until he reached the payphone in front of the store. He dropped in a quarter and dialed the number to the sheriff station, which he’d copied onto his arm in ballpoint ink from the phonebook the county had thrown against the door of his trailer a year ago. And while the line rang four times, Bradley inspected his hands where the blood had dried from when he carved the deer according to Peach’s instructions so that the carcass looked less like roadkill and more like coyotes had gotten hold of it. Then Bradley helped Peach load the deer onto the back rack of the three-wheeler, as well as his own tree stand and the old man’s rifle. Dewayne had been helping Peach set the Colonel on the seat, holding the limp body upright while Peach mounted the three-wheeler behind the old man, when Bradley pulled away from the scene.

The operator, a male voice, came on and stirred Bradley from the nightmare. For a moment, instead of calling in the report the way Peach had told him to—that he’d been on his way to work and saw some old bastard slumped in a tree stand at the edge of a big field and got out to check on him and reckoned he was probably dead—Bradley contemplated telling the operator the truth and then just high-tailing himself out of Bodock for good. But that was just a hope he latched on to in order to keep from sinking. Right now, looking off into the darkness as if on some quick stop on the moon, he felt that, even if he could make it all the way to Mars, where he could stare off in a direction opposite this strange planet he stood on now, straight off into the ever-growing abyss, it still wouldn’t put him far enough away to escape the old man’s dead face, his drooping flesh and stilled, still-open eyes looking off into another type of infinite distance, waiting on Bradley.

 

#

 

Two days later, Wednesday, the headlights of Bradley’s S-10 pickup splattered against the front windows of Hardee’s at 3:30 in the morning. He had a key and would have the restaurant to himself until the rest of the breakfast staff dragged in around four.

He brewed a pot on the Bunn and combined sugar, self-rising flour, baking powder, buttermilk, water, and solid vegetable shortening in a metal bowl and whisked the dry components together before cutting in the wet ingredients. Working in batches of twenty-four, he laid out the circles of dough on a sheet pan and stuck them in the fridge before kneading out another rectangle of dough and cutting two dozen more circles from it. Just keeping busy, trying to get his mind off whether their plan had worked. The weekly newspaper came out on Wednesdays, so he reckoned he could scan a copy at work once the issue got dropped off to see if anything had been reported. Bradley didn’t figure he’d be long for this world in prison. The thought of going to the Farm at Parchman caused him great anxiety, so he’d pulled another all nighter spotlighting. But no deer stumbled through the ravine behind his trailer so he’d come on into work even earlier than normal.

At four o’clock he poured more coffee and took a cigarette break in the last peace and quiet of the restaurant before he started baking each batch at four-thirty. Then, for nearly four hours, he struggled to keep up with the constant stream of customers swallowed into the restaurant and spit back out into the rain. Not until nine did the rush hour crowd die down. By then Bradley could feel the cold front through the drive-thru window. Still he continued to sweat, the long blonde bangs of hair matted to his pimpled forehead.

At ten-thirty his manager pulled him off of breakfast duty.

“Got a phone call, Brad.”

“Who’s it, Mr. Moorman?” Bradley asked, removing his visor, swiping his arm across his slick forehead. His gloves left a print of wet dough on the bill of the visor. Besides the one time his mother had tried to make contact with him, nobody had ever called up here.

Moorman seemed as surprised as Bradley by the call. “Said his name was Conlee. Anyway, make it quick. Ruthie called in, said she won’t make the lunch rush cause she’s gotta pick up her boys from their school out in the county. Says she don’t trust the buses to get ’em home before this ice hits even though schools’ll be out before that mess gets here. So when you’re done I need you to get started on lunch prep. You can take the call in my office. And tuck your shirt in.”

Bradley tossed his latex gloves, thick and padded with raw biscuit dough, and tucked in the shirt that his gut had pulled from his pants again. Done-lap disease they’d called it in high school, his belly done lapped over his pecker.

He heard what Moorman was saying about helping with lunch, but he wondered if his manager remembered he had to take off early on Wednesdays to run crank up to Memphis. Not that he’d told Moorman that much a few months ago when he asked if he could skip his fifteen-minute morning break and his lunch break to take off right at noon on Wednesdays for some odd job he’d picked up to help ends meet. Moorman had been reluctant but ultimately all right with it. He’d allowed it, at least.

Bradley went on back to the rear corner of the restaurant. He could count on two hands the number of times he’d actually been inside Moorman’s office during his six-year employment. It was a sort of controlled chaos, everything having a place or a tray but seemingly just thrown there. The phone was easy to find and Bradley held the receiver and pressed the first blinking light like Moorman had told him to.

“Need you to head up to Memphis now,” the voice said.

“Peach?”

“Who’s Peach?” the voice said. Then: “Don’t say my name, dumbass. Already starting to ice in Memphis. Stan’s afraid we won’t get him the venison he needs to serve his customers. So he need you to go on and take off now.”

“I’m at work, man.”

“You want to tell that to Dewayne?” Peach asked.

Bradley did not.

“Aight. Surgan fixing to meet you at the plant in thirty.”

Bradley wondered why Peach would use Surgan’s name but not his own. He said okay because he didn’t have much choice and hung up the phone.

 

#

 

Before heading out to the plant, Bradley made a quick stop at his place first to grab a coat and take care of a couple of things. It had been a muggy-ass seventy degrees when he went outside this morning but now the mercury had already dropped to thirty-eight. Weather would be even colder in Memphis and then back here in Bodock by the time he returned. He didn’t have much time to change so he left on his black slacks and Nike hightops and just threw on his Falcons Starter jacket over his red Hardee’s polo. He brewed a small pot for the road from the Mr. Coffee he’d taken with him when he moved out from his mom’s six years ago. He would’ve just poured a cup before he left the restaurant but he was pretty sure Moorman would’ve denied the request to take off. So instead Bradley had just snuck out, abandoned his shift. Pretty sure he could just kiss that income goodbye now, which pretty much sucked. He’d had the job since the summer after eleventh grade. Instead of returning to Bodock High for his senior year, the Hardee’s gig had allowed him to rent the singlewide so he wouldn’t have to keep coming home and finding his mom on the couch and her bare legs in the lap of someone the exact same age as Bradley, her filling his old man’s absence with a frequency of young bucks who took algebra and geography with Bradley but never said two words to him otherwise except to copy his work or steal a glance or three at his quizzes. Hardee’s and spotlighting deer had helped him make rent and the utility bills, keep some beer and groceries in the fridge and the lights on. But not much else. He could’ve crashed out at Peach but he didn’t want to be any more involved in that shit than he had to be. Without the Hardee’s gig, he’d have to find another way to make ends meet so he wouldn’t have to dip into his savings of drug-muling money, which he kept in an animal-crackers tin duct-taped beneath the carpet in his bedroom where a hole to the crawl space had rotted through.

Mostly though he’d stopped to put some food out for his dog before he hit the road. While the coffee finished brewing, he scooped some Kibbles ‘n Bits from under the sink and poured it into a plastic bowl outside, the rim of the bowl jagged and gnawed by Possum’s teeth. A wood roach and some flies lay in her water bowl so he slapped the bowl against his leg to knock out the exoskeletons and ran her some fresh water as well. She was a stray and he was afraid she wouldn’t ever return if she found an empty bowl for dinner. He didn’t get many visitors and she gave him something to look forward to. She had beechnut tan fur like George Jones’s hair, why he’d named her Possum, and he kept a bed of old towels in the crawl space beneath the trailer in case she preferred a warm dry place to sleep. He even had the thought she might be coaxed into sleeping inside tonight because of the storm. He’d appreciate that company, the noise to distract from the way that old man’s body had flopped over lifeless in the tall wet grass.

When the maker quit coughing, he poured the pot into a Hardee’s to-go cup stained brown on the inside from several reuses. Then he locked up and headed out.

 

#

 

Bradley cut over to Highway 9 South and hauled ass in the S-10. The wipers in need of replacing, just stuttering across the windshield. Peach lived on Coopers Crossing off Pontocola Road near the southeast corner of Claygardner County. When he saw their mailbox, Bradley swung into the driveway, following it past the white-brick shotgun on the left into the deep woods at the back of the property, the two-wheel-drive pickup slipping over the damp, sparse gravel that lay like broken teeth in the mud.

The refrigerator Ford truck had been backed in so it aimed down the trail and Bradley parked on the right side of the truck, where the words CAMBELL BUCK PROCESSING had been stencil-painted on the side of the cooler. He threaded the key to his S-10 off the ring and hid it for Peach under the floorboard mat. Around eight tonight, after Bradley arrived back from Memphis, Peach would drive over to Bradley’s trailer and exchange the S-10 back for the refrigerator truck loaded with the ingredients for next week’s batch.

Just like they’d done the last seventeen times.

The keys to the Ford would be in the makeshift desk inside the processing plant. Bradley pulled his Starter jacket closed and ducked quickly from his truck to the open-aired shed that only had two walls and a tin roof that the cold rain tapped against. He found Surgan reclining on a fiberglass bench pulled from an old school bus, his boots propped up on the desk, mud dripping from the soles onto the splintering plywood stained with grease and blood.

“Sup,” Bradley said.

“Nada,” said Surgan, whose family was from somewhere in the Middle East. None of them knew for sure. Definitely wasn’t Mexican. His father owned Rob-a-Lot where Bradley had called from the payphone two nights before. In high school, Bradley had bought smokes there whenever Surgan worked the counter. Surgan would pocket the money from any underage sales and had, at least on one occasion, been one of the burglars of his old man’s store.

“You ain’t bring us no biscuits?” Surgan asked.

Bradley shrugged. Surgan had a fat joint tucked behind his ear. On the desk in front of him was an opened Altoids can and a snorter the size of a masonry nail. Surgan hit the powdery substance, then offered the tin to Bradley. Bradley shook his head.

“Better not let Dewayne see you doing that, bro.”

Surgan grinned, put the tin away, lit the joint from behind his ear. “Dewayne’s preoccupied, amigo.”

Surgan laughed and pointed at the camper showered with flecks of mud long ago. In front of the camper was a busted grill and some lawn chairs. Cigarettes and random debris dotting the dirt. Peach’s sister, Lori, had been ostracized to the camper to contain her meth habit. Dewayne must have been thinking it foolish to have her shooting up at the farmhouse just off the road where folks dropped off their deer. Bradley figured Dewayne let her on the property so he could keep an eye on her and his dick never far from being inside her. Bradley thought he saw the camper bobbing some, its tires humping the cinderblocks bracing either side of the tires. Heard some low womanly moaning emitting from the camper. 

Bradley said, “What’s Peach doing?”

“He’s getting some beer for us right now. Mostly riding around pouting. He’ll come down here once he’s given em enough time to finish. Of course that in-bred fucker would probably know how long his sister takes.”

Next to the deep-freeze against one of the walls where they kept cuts of meat and scraps was a whole sheet of plywood that had been fashioned into a butchery table. Beneath the table was a blue cooler. While Surgan rattled on about how dumb Peach was, Bradley took two store-brand cokes from the cooler, one for each coat pocket for the haul to Memphis. Thought about breaking Surgan’s nose with a third one for talking about Peach like that but Bradley just popped open the can, chugged at it, got the extra pack of Newports out of his pockets that he’d grabbed on his way out of the trailer. Bradley thought he felt the air drop another couple degrees just in the time he’d been standing here. Nudging on closer to thirty-two, when the rain would become sleet and any precipitation that had already fallen would slick over into ice. Thought about that long drive up to Memphis he had to make in weather that just kept on getting worse. He wanted to get on the road.

When there was a lull in Surgan’s rambling, Bradley said, “The truck already loaded?”

“Yeah. I done took care of it. Dewayne wanted to get started banging Lori so I let him have at it. I mean, it makes sense that short-bus retard just let Dewayne come in and muscle him out you know? That shit wouldn’t happen with me though.”

Bradley said yeah but was thinking what was Surgan doing if not waiting around for the chance to get in on Dewayne’s sloppy seconds or something. He packed the Newports against his black Hardee’s slacks, ripped off the cellophane, let it flutter to hard-packed dirt.

“Peach’s keys behind there?”

Surgan pulled a set from one of the stacked milk crates that held up either end of the plywood desktop and tossed the keys to Bradley. Thought about that first drive he’d ever made and how, seventeen hauls later, he still hadn’t gotten over the nerves of driving meth two hours up US-78 to Memphis. If he had known ahead of time what all Peach’s offer would entail, Bradley liked to think he would’ve turned it down. But it was good money. Two thousand extra dollars a month for going on five months now had been a complete one-eighty for Bradley.

And he could leave Bodock. Not this second: If he left now, they’d immediately come looking for him. But he could buy himself a few days head start by completing this last haul. He hadn’t saved up as much as he’d wanted. But he had enough. In the morning, five hundred dollars would be awaiting him in the glove compartment, which would round his savings out to the nice whole number of nine grand. That had to be enough to set him up in some community college town farther away where he could find a shitty job and a shitty place to stay and pass the GED so he could enroll in some classes. Maybe Possum would come with. Maybe even the pretty older woman he dealt Vicodin to. She flirted with him some and had kissed him twice. Once with her tongue when he had expressed some doubts about all the risk he was taking. That was in the parking lot of Flick’s, in the dark beyond the utility lamp, after their first exchange. She’d offered to get in his cab and do more then but he’d never gone any further than a handjob in high school after the girl who’d administered it told her friends she had a hard time finding a rhythm because his fat stomach kept swallowing up his small, flaccid dick.

The woman hadn’t kissed him since that night she slipped her tongue between his reluctant lips. Bradley hadn’t been turned on much by the gesture, and if he were being honest, he reckoned she’d probably sensed that, too. Besides not trying to make out with him again, she hadn’t made a big deal out of picking up on him not being into her.

One time, he’d told her he was heading to college soon, and she’d told him she wanted to get out of this shithole, too. The hope he latched onto now was that she seemed just sad enough at times that even a friend like Bradley might could make her happy.

Bradley dropped the Newport and drove it into the ground with his Nike hightop, slurped some coke and jingled the keys as the moaning from the camper grew louder and the humping tires picked up their pace.

 

#

 

The Jewish butcher shop was squeezed between a Laundromat and a Mexican restaurant on Summer Avenue. Behind the shop, Bradley reversed the refrigerator truck within a few feet of the shop’s back door. The precipitation already a wintry mix of rain and sleet. Throwaway meat that had soured in a dumpster in the recent heat still stunk up the lot. Stan opened the door, pulled a red dolly behind him. The wrists of a calico sweater and an insulated wind jacket staggered from beneath the cuffs of his off-white butcher’s jacket. His apron covered in old pink bloodstains and fresh red ones. He wasn’t fat but carried the double chin of someone who used to be.

“You’re late.”

Bradley pulled on the Newport. “Got caught up in this storm.”

“You have to drive through Arkansas to get here?”

“Why would I be driving here from Arkansas, Mr. Kramer?”

“I dunno, Brad. How am I supposed to know these things?”

“I drove straight here from Bodock,” Bradley said. “You know this.”

“You stop anywhere? Even to take a shit?”

Bradley sighed. This fucking routine again. “No, Mr. Kramer. I didn’t make a stop to take a shit or for any other reason.”

“Aight.” Stan shrugged. “Just please don’t let me hear that you stopped somewhere. Not to take shit, not for no other reason. Cause the money I’m paying you to specifically not stop somewhere will buy a whole lot of clean underwear. Basically, Brad, I’m saying to shit yourself before you stop somewhere. It’ll be cheaper on you in the long run. You know, one call to Dewayne.”

“Aight, aight,” Bradley said. “I got it, Mr. Kramer.”

Stan looked the boy over and then smirked like he was just fucking with him. Before the first delivery, Peach hadn’t told Bradley what he would be hauling. Just gave him an address and told him not to stop anywhere. At the butcher, Stan signed for the shipment, the paperwork only itemizing the different cuts of venison so the delivery looked more legit in case Bradley was pulled over or had to go through a roadblock or something. Then Stan had asked Bradley if he had stopped anywhere. Bradley not knowing why so many fucks were being given about stopping. He admitted, because the evidence was sitting right there in the console, that he’d driven through a McDonald’s because he’d missed lunch. So Stan cut the tape holding closed the lid flaps of the nearest box, sliced open the pack of venison inside the box, and cracked apart two frozen tenderloins. There Bradley saw the several small plastic baggies that had been lined up between the loins. The bags contained what at first looked like aquarium rocks for some exotic species of fish, but then Bradley realized the flat, jagged pebbles he was staring at were meth. A whole week’s cook: one-point-six pounds already divided into teeners—one-sixteenths of an ounce—and spread across marked boxes of tenderloin, ground chuck, chuck roast, deer sausage, and ribeyes. That’s why you don’t stop, Stan had said, unless you want your own tenderloins disguising this shit. Stan might have just been fucking with Bradley but he also knew Stan was serious. The threat to call Dewayne was not an idle one. He had sent Dewayne to clean up Peach’s outfit. Even had Dewayne chemically burn the poor son of a bitch who’d held Bradley’s position previously so that his body looked more like lump charcoal than a corpse. Stan could just as easily get Dewayne to process Bradley, dissect him and cut him up same as any deer.

Which inspired Bradley to shut up and start loading Stan’s dolly with the boxes. It only took two trips but on the second load Bradley slipped some cash between the boxes. Bradley hung out in cover of the cold freezer while Stan opened the marked boxes inside the shop, unpacked and counted the teeners, and weighed the product. He wondered if Stan now knew about the old dead man. Probably if Stan needed to know, Dewayne was the one to do the telling. But really Bradley just wanted to talk to someone about it. He listened to the cheerful blare of mariachi music next door. Gearing up for happy hour. No ice storms in Little Mexico. Stan returned about fifteen minutes and another Newport later with two large cardboard boxes on the dolly, each with the word SCRAPS scribbled in permanent marker on its side. Each box contained dozens of forty-eight-count packages of ephedrine. A smaller box labeled GROUND CHUCK sat on top of the larger ones.

“You’ll find your Vicodin and muscle relaxers in the middle of the chuck,” Stan said. “Regarding the Valium, I’m not even curious so don’t share your weekend plans with me. I won’t ask you if Dewayne knows either cause I ain’t responsible for you. Oh and tell Dewayne I’m a couple ounces shy again.”

“Thought you was looking thinner, Stan.”

“Tell him I ain’t fucking around.”

Bradley thinking those couple ounces must be Dewayne’s price to get a ride on Lori. Bradley wasn’t curious or stupid enough to actually accuse that psychopath of skimming meth for Peach’s sister. Almost told Stan as much. But then he remembered this would be the last time he saw Stan. Last time he saw any of them.

He mustered up his best shit-eating grin and said, “Will do, Stan.”

 

#

 

Took Bradley over an hour moving through traffic that had slowed to a crawl over roads already patched with ice before he even got outside of Memphis, where Lamar Avenue stretched into US-78. Bodock still two hours away, probably closer to three this afternoon as he steered through sleet that loosened into a wintery mix the farther he drove into Mississippi. The last thing he wanted to do while hauling as much ephedrine as a small pharmacy was to wreck or stick the truck in a ditch or median. The digital clock on the console read 6:41 when he finally passed the Claygardner County sign. He exited off 78, drove down Highway 9, and turned left onto Twenty Mile Road, where home lay just eight more country miles away. Felt like he was close enough to hear the singlewide calling for him to come warm up, crack open a beer, watch some basketball or something. A magazine in his grip to hurl at the occasional moving pattern of a wood roach searching across gypsum walls painted the color of secondhand smoke.

But he didn’t have any beer in the fridge. He had drank the last tallboy the night before.

He’d been drinking a lot more tallboys since Monday night.

His watch said he had a few minutes before seven. Bradley figured he ought to play it safe, just go on and park the freezer truck in front of his house and wait for Peach to get here. Peach would switch Bradley’s pickup for the freezer truck and then, a few minutes later, Bradley could take the S-10 to the beer store and everything would be right with the world again.

But Peach wouldn’t be at Bradley’s until eight, and Peach had never been on time. What shape would the roads even be in after eight? There was no guarantee that Bradley could even make it to the store, so he ended up driving on past his driveway and kept on the dark two-lane that held the occasional slick patch but that had not started to ice over just yet. Telling himself he was doing this out of necessity. That he couldn’t tolerate sitting in that decrepit shithole all night without a drink or four to push him over the edge and away from that old man’s face, disfigured and frozen in his last agony, and on into sleep.

Four miles past the trailer he saw the utility pole in front of Flick’s Bar dousing the dark with its yellow light. The bar was a cinderblock building in a bed of dust and gravel five hundred feet across the Lee County line where the purchase of alcohol was legal. The place looked dead but the OPEN sign still burned. Flick had on more than one occasion let Bradley buy a six-pack from behind the bar to save himself having to drive to the beer store farther into Lee County, Flick not caring much about the legality of how the cash ended up in his register so long as it got there.

Inside the bar, the walls were slivers of bare plywood between NASCAR and Atlanta Braves posters and advertisements of heavy-breasted tan bodies in string bikinis selling Budweiser and Miller Light and a God-given right to tap the Rockies. Extension cords looped through wires twisted around the aluminum framework of the drop ceiling, the cork ceiling tiles yellowed with cigarette smoke. The cords ran to a couple of Budweiser billiards lamps that lit vacant pool tables below. The felt and wood of the tables scarred with use like dogs had been gnawing on them. A Corona sign hummed its electric glow over an empty bar and Cinderella screeched hair metal from the stereo about being nobody’s fool. From the music, Bradley figured Teej must be tending bar tonight before she even emerged from the walk-in refrigerator pulling an empty Igloo cooler behind her. She didn’t acknowledge Bradley before she resumed filling the cooler with an assortment of beers from the metal trough behind the bar. Her black curls looked wet and a sliver of pale stomach squeezed from beneath her t-shirt.

Bradley shook a Newport out of his pack. “Sup?”

Teej kept on filling the cooler with cans and bottles to return to the walk-in where the beers would be stored for the next night of business. She might’ve shrugged but Bradley couldn’t tell.

“Y’all closing down already?”

She said, “Yep, ice storm,” but still hadn’t looked up at him. Her tan, tattooed arm didn’t jiggle a bit while she raked her hand through the ice, searching for the necks of bottles.

“Need to grab some beer to take back to the house.”

She was filling a pitcher of hot water and looked up then. “You see us selling six packs in here?”

“Call down to Flick. He’ll authorize it.”

Teej shook her head and poured the hot water into the trough to melt the ice. The clock above the bar read 7:09. Wouldn’t take him more than ten minutes to abide the speed limit driving home but he’d already been in here longer than he’d meant to be.

Bradley said, “Guess I could just sit here and drink six beers with you then.”

“Flick already told me to shut it down.”

“He know you have a customer when he told you that?”

Teej sighed and filled a third pitcher with hot water. “Be ten bucks.”

Bradley stacked a five and five ones on the counter while Teej poured hot water into the trough again, the ice crackling and slurping as the runoff found the drain. Then Teej set the pitcher on the bar, pocketed the money, and rooted around in the beer that she’d transferred to the cooler. She pulled up a High Life that she set on the bar.

“Ten bucks for High Life is about like robbery,” Bradley said.

Teej smirked and dug around the Budweisers and Banquets for five more High Lifes. Scanning the bar so he wasn’t watching her, he glanced past a disassembled stack of today’s issue of the Bodock Post and towards the pool tables before he realized he’d lost track of the day and hadn’t checked the news. Teej had two more High Lifes on the counter and was still rooting around in the cooler, so he pulled the paper near him. The main story was about the coming ice storm, which Bradley took as a good sign. An ice storm wasn’t more important than a murder. At the bottom of the front page, though, he saw a story about a body that’d been found. His stomach dropped.

“Your lucky day,” Teej said.

“Huh?”

Teej had only found four and stood the Champagne of Beers in a Dos Equis carton along with the last beer she’d grabbed: a Corona.

“Said it was your lucky day,” Teej said.

“Oh. Thanks, I guess.”

Bradley stretched his legs and lit a cigarette for the road as he hurried the six-pack and the newspaper out to the truck. The temperature had already dropped again and he felt the transference in his arms. Light sleet pocked at his face, the sound of it muffled against the hood of the Starter jacket pulled over his head. He breathed in the icy stinging stillness of the county line tonight that smelled cold and atmospheric, folks all huddled in their homes with families and loved ones, buried under blankets. His hands were cold, so after he’d cranked the truck, he looked beneath the seat and found a pair of work gloves anchored beneath a filet knife and put them on.

He punched on the cab light above him and quickly scanned the story. The picture that accompanied the story was of a young man in some sort of soldier’s uniform. Bradley thought maybe another body had been found somewhere in Claygardner County sometime this week. But further reading informed that the old man had been a decorated war vet, a colonel in World War II, which didn’t seem like a good sign to Bradley. After some more details about the old man’s biography and the case of his death, the story got around to concluding that the sheriff didn’t suspect foul play, which seemed like a plus. But the department was still sending the body off to Jackson for an autopsy to determine cause of death.

Bradley wasn’t sure where that left them, but he felt a little relief in that, at the least, if his demise was inevitable, it was at least delayed for a while. His arrest one less thing he had to worry about at his empty place all by himself to endure a cold storm and the role he’d played in the life of the dead old man. He felt the need for a drink and twisted the cap off a High Life, deciding to save the Corona for when he got home. For when he heard Peach drive off. For when he would tell himself again that things would be better in the morning. That not even the cops would be out on a night like this one.

 

#

 

Twenty Mile Road coiled over ridges and dropped into hollows and ran narrow and pocked with potholes and washout that jarred the rickety spine of the truck’s long wheelbase. The beers were cold but the cab lacked heat. Bradley downed his first one too quick and sailed the bottle over the truck into an oncoming speed limit sign. The metal sign shouted at the truck as another mile shuttered on the odometer. Then Twenty Mile swung around a curve and straightened out into a hollow for a little over a half mile so Bradley took the opportunity to nab another High Life from the carton, guiding the steering wheel with his knee while he twisted the cap. The bottle sneezed and Bradley slurped the foam head before turning the bottle up. The needle held at thirty-five, but when he lowered the beer, Bradley noticed too late the curve in the road that loomed ahead. He tried to wedge the beer between his legs and resume control of the wheel but the front tire clipped the rim of a deep pothole and leapt the steering wheel from his knee’s grip. The beer tipped over, pooling cold in his lap. The pothole had also knocked the Ford out of the curve, Bradley having to pump the brake until the truck skated to a stop on the gravel shoulder. The shoulder was narrow and the grille of the truck overhung the edge where the shoulder sloped off steeply into a shallow ditch. The headlights burned against where the ditch sloped upwards again into a wall of kudzu that broke the light into a million shadows.

Bradley sat there in his soaked pants for a moment to curse his luck. He didn’t think Peach would give much of a shit if the truck reeked of beer. What worried him was that Dewayne might find out that Bradley not only stopped for a drink but had been drinking behind the wheel. He shucked off his jacket, pulled off the white undershirt from beneath his red polo, and used the shirt to soak up whatever beer he could from the cloth seats. Bradley checked his watch. About thirty minutes and change before Peach arrived. No time to collect some quarters and carpet cleaner and clean up the truck at the nearest self-service car wash. Some Lysol or whatever was under the sink would have to do.

The truck had stalled out but on the second try Bradley caught what he could’ve sworn was his first lucky break ever when the engine turned over. He shifted to reverse and was about to toss the quarter-empty beer bottle into the kudzu and give the truck some gas when a light flashed over him and filled the cab. His first thought: UFO. In his side mirror he saw the beam of a searchlight sweeping the trees before gathering its bearings back on the truck. The origin of the searchlight sat about a half a football field away from the road. Bradley couldn’t tell what kind of vehicle, could only see the searchlight and then a pair of headlights join it in the darkness like the wakened eyes of a predator. The searchlight flicked off and the headlights hovered forward toward the road. Bradley rolled up the window and put the cap back on the half-empty beer, which he placed back in the six-pack carton, praying the light was just some poacher he’d spooked who would turn the other direction.

But when the headlights reached the road, they aimed for Bradley instead. He heard the engine rev over that distance and the car came on faster, blue and red flashing now from the light bar on the roof, quilting the Ford and the trees that flanked the road. The cruiser squealed to a stop behind the Ford, which froze Bradley and slid his heart up into his throat. A black brush guard menaced from the grille of the cruiser but the glare of the headlights and flashing red-and-blues kept him from seeing much else of the car. Including the driver.

Bradley went over his options. He could chance the traffic stop and just hope the officer ignored the smell of beer and the vacant slot of the six-pack he was transporting into a dry county as an invitation to search the truck, eventually finding the ephedrine in the freezer.

He was only about a mile from his trailer. But he’d never outrun the cruiser.

At least not until the deputy approached the truck, putting some distance between him and his own cruiser. All Bradley would have to do then was disappear over the next ridge and run with his headlights off. Then he might be able to haul hell down the decline of his driveway and swing the truck around back behind the trailer.

Really that was the only option he could come up with.

Bradley watched the cruiser in the side mirror. The car door opened and a hulking figure stepped out and walked around the hood of the car, breaking the glare of headlights.

Fuck this, he thought, and wrenched the wheels to the left before he punched the damn gas.

Dirt and gravel pelted the chassis of the truck as it lurched backwards.

Bradley saw the needle still pointing at R and slammed the brakes but not before he felt the soft thud of a body against the Ford’s bumper.

Bradley yanked the truck into neutral and set the parking brake. When he stepped out, the cold wind chilled his beer-soaked crotch. The sleet picking up now. The officer lay between the cruiser and his truck, hips twisted in khaki cargo pants, his brown jacket unzipped, a thick slat of pale arm hanging limp from a short-sleeve black polo. A six-star badge clipped to his belt. And stitched just above his right pec was his rank and name: Deputy Phil Innes.

They’d graduated high school at the same time. Folks would joke that Innes was gay, would call him Phillip Innes but would say it like “Feel-a-penis” even though Phil wasn’t short for a longer moniker and no one had ever come forward with first-hand evidence of Phil giving hand jobs or anything like that. Still, when Innes joined the sheriff’s department, the same folks who’d called him a faggot in school and who spent their weekends shooting the shit and getting elbow splinters on Flick’s plywood bar said Innes was just using the badge to compensate for the fact that he woke up every morning from a wet dream where he got plowed by a prison cell full of bulls.

Innes’s barrel chest filled his black polo and throbbed up and down with his breathing. The asphalt had eaten his ass up pretty good, the skin on his forearms a road map of scrapes. He had dropped a small notepad. A license plate number had been written on the paper and Bradley had to compare it to the Ford’s before he realized it was a match. He crammed the pad into his back pocket and looked around. No one had seen them. No one was even coming down the road.

He tried to think of a plan fast. His first option involved some variation on him dragging the deputy’s body to the side of the road or propping him up in the car and him hauling ass home like nothing ever happened. The deputy didn’t have his name nor his driver’s license and Bradley wasn’t even registered to the license plate. Hell, the deputy hadn’t even seen him. But if the deputy woke up and remembered the plate number or the Ford refrigerator pickup truck then this would spray back on him like shit through a fan. Dewayne or Surgan wasn’t going to take the fall for him. Peach wouldn’t, either, and Bradley was stupid if he entertained a thought to the contrary.

He languished about leaving town in a day or two. About how he wished he’d already left now, how this little fuck-up would fuck up his larger plans to get far away from here and the old man and those stilled blue eyes that would not stop burning a hole in his mind’s eye. Bradley observed the musculature of the deputy’s thick throat and thought of the old rusting filet knife beneath the seat where he’d found the gloves he still wore. He guessed he could make it look like the deputy’s jugular had been severed during impact. He didn’t want to murder someone but he didn’t want to be murdered by Dewayne either. For sure didn’t want to go to jail. He didn’t see much other choice.

If the deputy was dead, he wouldn’t remember nothing. Couldn’t trace this back to him.

But Bradley would remember. Wasn’t like the Colonel had left him alone. And Bradley had only been a witness to that murder.

His watch read 7:36. Was twenty minutes long enough for him to convince a knife to another person’s throat, bleed a whole life out right there on the pavement?

Bradley steered himself away from that darkness.

If Bradley wasn’t going to slice the deputy’s throat, then he decided for the same reasons that he couldn’t really leave the deputy out here or drag him into the ditch or something so he didn’t get run over just to freeze to death either. What the deputy needed was a hospital. Bradley didn’t have a phone at his house to call from but thought that was probably for the best because he’d heard calls could be traced now anyway. He could call in from a payphone, say he had just been driving by, got out to check on the unconscious cop lying in the middle of the road but didn’t have one of those car phones or nothing. But there wasn’t a payphone close enough for him to use and still be at his house by eight.

Which was also why he couldn’t drive the deputy to the hospital himself. Not that there was an inconspicuous way to drop off an officer of the law in a Ford refrigerator truck, the name of the processing plant stenciled on one side.

But he could drive him in his S-10 after Peach dropped it off.

In the cab of the cruiser, he tried some switches on a small control panel and accidentally triggered the siren before he found the off switch for the light bar. After he turned the headlights off as well, the engine still running, he threw the cruiser in neutral then killed the ignition and pushed the car toward the roadside. He figured he’d just slide the cruiser onto the shoulder but it caught some momentum and got away from him and, once it hit the slope, rammed down into the shallow ditch. On impact the driver-side door bounced like it was about to shut but lacked the impetus and swung back open. He stepped into the ditch to close the door and hopped back up on the road where he hefted the deputy up beneath his arms, the tall fucker’s legs dragging as he pulled him over to the passenger side of the truck. His breaths hard to come by already when he lifted with his legs to push the body in.

 

#

 

At the trailer, Bradley parked the truck so that the passenger side door opened only a few feet from the front door. At night the only sign of any neighbors their porch lights burning from an acre away and the carry of their voices. The ravine was mostly quiet tonight except for the freezing rain, everyone huddled indoors where they wouldn’t see him carrying an unconscious hulk of a deputy uniform up the cinderblock steps and through the door.

Inside the sleet drummed a low roar against the roof that filled the singlewide in a vacuous echo. Bradley dumped the deputy on the bed, which was just a mattress and box springs that lay flat on the carpet and pinned a gold, flaking headboard against the wall. The deputy was still unconscious and hadn’t stirred at all and Bradley hoped he stayed that way until he could get him to the hospital.

He checked his watch. 7:49. He needed to remove everything from the truck before Peach arrived. First Bradley grabbed the beer-soaked t-shirt, which he had pressed against the back of the deputy’s head after he’d picked him up from the pavement and saw a little island of blood there on the road. Also grabbed the six pack and in the kitchen cleared a space on the counter and clanked the six-pack down next to the 30-30 rifle. He buried the t-shirt at the bottom of his dirty clothes and grabbed an old towel and some Lysol. He didn’t have time to deep clean the seat, definitely didn’t have the time for it to dry, so he sprayed lemon-scented disinfectant over the damp beer spot before adjusting the towel over the driver’s seat.

Then he grabbed the box of Vicodin and muscle relaxers from the freezer, locked the door again, and carried the narcotics and Lysol and keys into the bedroom where he set them on the dresser. The deputy was still unconscious. Still hadn’t moved. Blood matted a patch of thick black hair near the scalp where his head had bounced against the pavement. He wondered how bad the gash was but it wasn’t bleeding now and he was afraid he’d wake up the deputy if he touched it. A small v had been cut in the elastic arm of both the deputy’s short sleeves to accommodate the large muscles of his biceps and triceps, which only made Bradley hope the deputy at least waited until the hospital to wake up if he ever would.

After he took the bag of pills from the box, Bradley pulled the carpet back from the wall and removed the animal crackers tin from a hole in the floorboard. Inside the tin were eight thousand five hundred dollars. He stashed the painkillers and muscle relaxers in the tin. Then he realized there was a good chance he wouldn’t make it back here once he dropped off the deputy. If he had to get away quick, he figured he could take it all with him, but what if he got away with this whole thing only to get pulled over again with opioids and downers. So he only took the money from the tin, leaving the pills in there before he pushed the carpet back over the stash.

He set the roll of cash on the dresser next to the Lysol and keys and a roll of duct tape he’d used to fasten rabbit ears to the television-VCR combo. He shed his beer-soaked black slacks onto a dirty pile that spilled toward a garbage can, dug a pair of light baggy jeans from the closet floor, and slipped the cash and a pack of Newports from his sock drawer into his jeans pocket.

The time was closing in on eight. As soon as Peach exchanged vehicles, Bradley would drive the deputy to the ER in his S-10, drop him off in some shadow at the far end of the parking lot, and call in the deputy’s whereabouts from a payphone at the first convenience store he saw while gas pumped into his pickup. He’d carry his own damn self a hell of a long way from here after that. But then he thought what he really should’ve just done was to put the deputy back in his own car once he’d pushed the cruiser into the ditch. The simplicity of that plan compared to the one he’d chosen just made him want another beer and to vomit simultaneously. Instead of doing either, he waited in the bedroom in case the deputy woke up and removed the pistol from the deputy’s holster in case he startled and needed a longer time being convinced that Bradley meant him no harm.

Standing in the bedroom with the semiautomatic at his side, he listened to tires crunch gravel outside. Aluminum foil covered his bedroom window so he hadn’t seen the headlights. A car door opened and slammed. Bradley watched the deputy but the noise didn’t stir the body. Over the previous seventeen exchanges, Peach had had always insisted on being quick, never once coming up to the trailer. Bradley prayed this eighteenth time was no different. He heard the dry hinges of the Ford’s driver-side door creak open and thought he was in the clear. But in a quiet that went on too long he didn’t hear the Ford crank up.

Instead, a knock pounded on the trailer.

About ten thousand volts shot down Bradley’s spine, palpitating his heart along the way and pinching his asshole closed tight. He scooted out and got the door to the bedroom closed just as Dewayne pushed through the front door where Bradley stared mouth-gaped at Dewayne’s face in the doorway, all beard and angles, his eyes like bug zappers humming static energy, just waiting to strike. A red Razorback leapt across his cap.

Dewayne nodded at the pistol at Bradley’s side. “You expectin some troublesome company?”

“Nah, Dewayne.” Bradley had to work to keep his voice from cracking. Had to make himself pause before each sentence so the words wouldn’t just spill out. “Didn’t know who it was. Peach don’t usually come to the door.”

“He’s waitin in the truck. Where the keys at?”

“I left em under the mat.”

“Nah you didn’t.”

Bradley said okay and then remembered. He’d left them in the fucking bedroom.

“Must’ve brought em in and set em on the counter. Let me go grab em.”

“Leave the Beretta,” Dewayne said.

“The what?” Bradley said then looked at the pistol in his hand. “Why?”

“You need it or something?”

Bradley shook his head, said he didn’t guess, and watched Dewayne wrench the Beretta from his loose grip. His heart still pounding too loud for his brain to work out a good way out of this. He went on into the kitchen where he made it sound like he was rooting around for the keys.

“Know what?” Bradley said, turning from the counter. “Think I left em in the bedroom. You want a beer or something for the road while I grab em?”

“No beer for me. Might have to go through a roadblock or something. Smelt like you done left me one in the truck somewhere anyway though. Cops smell that and they gonna search the truck, find them a felon haulin Sudafed and several grand in cash. Ain’t exactly geniuses patrolin this county but even they could put two and two together. Can’t have it.”

Before Bradley could respond Dewayne pounced to the left and opened the bedroom door. Bradley felt like his heart had knocked itself out against his sternum. Dewayne took his time surveying the room then turned to face Bradley. His expression hadn’t changed. Had always unnerved Bradley how he could never tell what Dewayne felt or thought. Bradley could bring in a spike or an eighteen-point and Dewayne would wear the same mile-long expression either way.

Dewayne said, “So you bangin a deputy?”

“No!”

“Why else you got Innes knocked out in your bed,” Dewayne said, “if it ain’t cause you want to feel a penis?”

Bradley spilled what happened then. “No, it ain’t like that, Dewayne. I ain’t no faggot. He knocked his head pretty good. Don’t think he gonna remember anything to tell em at the hospital.”

“How he gone get to the hospital?”

“He needs to go don’t he?”

Dewayne shook his head. “That ain’t gonna happen. Should of left his ass out there. Made sure he was dead first.”

“Well what should we do now?”

“We gonna get you taken care of, Brad. Clear this mess up. Don’t worry.”

Bradley asked how but Dewayne held a hand up at him to shut up while he studied the bedroom from the entryway.

“You got a pair of gloves?” Dewayne asked.

Bradley had worn the work gloves inside. He fetched them from the counter. Dewayne slipped them on.

“Bring me your shoes,” Dewayne said and Bradley went into the bedroom and picked up the high tops Dewayne was pointing at. Dewayne took off his boots, set them on the stoop outside, held up a finger to Peach in the truck, then closed the door again. He slipped his small feet into the black Nikes and Bradley noticed how his heel bounced out of the size-12 shoes as he followed Dewayne into his bedroom. He felt a little like he was watching from underwater as Dewayne tore a length of duct tape and smoothed it over the deputy’s mouth then took a knee on the carpet next to the bed where he wrapped the duct tape around the ankles of the deputy’s black boots. The work gloves smearing printless shapes into the gravel-dusted leather. He looked in the holster then the Beretta he’d set on the floor. He held the semiautomatic up to Bradley.

“This his?” Dewayne asked.

Bradley nodded.

Dewayne wiped the pistol clean with a t-shirt he found on the carpet. “Dump out that garbage and bring me the plastic bag.”

“What for?” Bradley asked.

With a gloved hand, Dewayne aimed the Beretta at Bradley. Bradley nodded. The can was lined with a plastic takeout bag that overflowed with Hardee’s wrappers and the crusts of partially-eaten burgers and Kleenex he’d shot off into while watching porn on the TV-VCR combo. He spilled the trash on the floor, removed the bag, and handed it to Dewayne. When Dewayne had removed the handcuffs from the deputy’s belt, he used them to shackle only the deputy’s left wrist to the headboard. Then he removed one of the gold rungs from the headboard frame and duct-taped the wrist of the deputy’s free hand to the bar. Bradley watched him slip the bag over the deputy’s head and duct-tape the bag around the victim’s throat and leave what remained of the roll hanging from his neck. Bradley watched the plastic bag pulse along with Innes’s shallow breathing, contouring around his nostrils as he inhaled, the bag recessing from the deputy’s face when he exhaled. Bradley wanted to object but he reckoned with what authority. The 30-30 was in the kitchen. Might as well have been a hundred miles from here.

After Dewayne pulled back and released the slide on the Beretta, he picked up the deputy’s free hand that had the gold-colored rung duct-taped to his wrist and fit the Beretta into the deputy’s hand and formed Innes’s thumb and each of his fingers around the grip, except for his index, which Dewayne slipped between the trigger and its guard. Bradley felt sick.

“Whatcha doin, Dewayne?”

Dewayne aimed again at Bradley.

“Fixin a situation.”

Then he fired a round into Bradley’s gut. The impact felt like Bradley had taken the nose of a hard-thrown football just above his belly button. He looked down and took a breath and the wound started to burn like his belly had been opened and hot grease got poured in. He took another breath before stumbling backwards at the gut-shot pain. The discharge aroused the deputy then. He thrashed against the force of Dewayne’s sinewy forearm across his massive chest, but in his disorientation and deprivation of oxygen, he was no match for the Razorback pushing him down against Bradley’s rotten mattress. Meanwhile, Bradley’s back landed on the wall and something inside him broke loose a bunch of blood and hurt. He blacked out for a moment until the excruciating hurt of his next breath jerked him back to consciousness.

            Bradley watched Dewayne rip the deputy’s left arm up to the headboard with one hand and with the other hand slam the lamp from the milk crate next to the bed down on his head. His unconscious body sucked about the rest of the oxygen from the plastic bag. Then the bag stayed contoured to his face and the scene seemed all too distant to Bradley so he watched a puddle of blood form on the carpet in front of him. Watched it spill too quickly for the fabric to soak up. He didn’t wake up this morning thinking he would die.

            “Think I’m gonna need a hospital Dewayne.”

            Dewayne stepped over the blood and squatted down in the doorway just behind Bradley. Bradley waited for a shot through the back of his head and started crying. He could feel the stream of tears as they cooled on his face. The taste of salt gathering at the corner of his lips. Dewayne was digging through Bradley’s pockets now and Bradley felt the heft of the roll of bills remove from his pants and then the pack of Newports. Dewayne wedged one into Bradley’s lips and lit it for him. “Where them pills you been skimming off the Jew?”

            Bradley struggled to focus on Dewayne. “Huh?”

Dewayne sighed and calmly said, “Don’t fuck around. Soon as you tell me where they are, I’ll call you in a ambulance.”

“Just take me with you. Drop me off at the hospital. You ain’t even gotta go in.”

“Can’t do it, Brad.”

“I don’t wanna go to jail.”

“Ain’t gone let that happen,” Dewayne says.

The pain building in this stomach and the urgency that he may die made Bradley forget that it was Dewayne shot him in the first place. Bradley relented and watched as Dewayne threw the pile of clothes in the corner to the middle of the room and pulled back the carpet, reached in, and removed the Animal Crackers tin. Dewayne squatted there a moment longer staring into the bag he removed from the tin before he stood and kicked the pile of clothes back into the corner over the hole. He left the room and returned with the 30-30 and approached the bed. The rifle he dropped a ways from Bradley’s reach, about where Bradley was first shot.

While Dewayne slipped the hightops on Bradley’s feet, he said, “You got anything else in here that could incriminate me?”

Bradley thought about the black Burger King uniform pants that sat away from the clothes pile. Beer soaked, Dewayne’s license plate number scrawled on the yellow paper from Innes’s notepad. He shook his head. “You call that ambulance, Dewayne?”

“They was busy. Sorry about all this, Brad.”

Dewayne walked out. Bradley knew he was about to turn to nothing and slip on off into the blackness flickering in front of him. He felt so shitty about damn everything. He yelled for help. Yelled and yelled and yelledyelledyelled.

He stopped yelling when he began to black out.

He had the thought to crawl to his beer-wet pants and remove the lined yellow paper from the back pocket where the blue numbers, hopefully not too thick with smudge, spelled out a plate number for a truck other than his own. Just to make sure it got found. To clear his own name.

But then he remembered he wouldn’t be alive to clear anything. All that would do was ensure that Dewayne and Peach went down with him.

He searched out the deputy on the bed. Couldn’t tell if it was his own blurring vision or if the plastic bag around Innes’s face was really lifting. So Bradley pulled himself through his own blood and puke and chipped a molar gritting at the pain. At the bed he had to hold his insides in with one hand as he reached with his other to grab at the bag which his palm slipped against at first, trying to find a grip against the plastic stilled against the deputy’s face.

A fingernail caught a pocket of air where the plastic rose from his jaw to his ear. When Bradley was sure of his grasp, he rolled his body away from the bed, the bag stretching and tearing away from the deputy’s face.

He blacked out then but came back to, unaware how much time had elapsed. Innes hadn’t moved and Bradley tried to steal a glance to see if the deputy was breathing now. If his chest rose with inhalation. But the prior exertion had spent him for good. Bradley didn’t see himself making another move ever. With the spittle of his own sick slick against his lips, he apologized aloud to Innes that it had come to this. That he backed into Innes. That he didn’t just radio in for help. That he placed a monetary value over the life deflating in front of him. But his remorse felt insignificant. So he settled in for whatever came next, the pain of weakening breaths too much to let him steer off into that darkness just yet.

 

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Robert Busby writes, runs, and raises two humans with his wife in Memphis. His debut story collection, Bodock: Stories, was awarded the 2024 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize and will be published by Hub City Press in June 2025. His fiction has appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies, including Arkansas Review, Cold Mountain Review, Flash!: Writing the Very Short Story, Footnote, Mississippi Noir, PANK, Sou’wester, and Surreal South. You can find him on Instagram (@robertbusbywrites) and Twitter (@bobbusbywrites).