A knock on the door awakened me at 9am sharp. The motel manager stood outside my door, smiling. “You asked for another room, we got one ready – just two doors down. Sorry about the wait.” He sniffed the air. “Wow, it does stink in here.”
I gathered my belongings and dragged them into the new room – two doors down, as he said – and rejoiced in the subtle changes in the room. The sheets were clean, the air didn’t smell, and the bathroom looked decent. I locked the door and hopped into the shower.
At 9:45, I realized Hutto didn’t know that I had switched rooms. I stood outside the cabin to wait for him. By ten o’clock, the weather had warmed up enough to render my shower useless. Sweat was running down my back and neck by ten-after-ten, and by ten-fifteen I made the move to go back inside. I had my motel key in the door lock when I heard a cruiser – not Hutto’s cruiser, but a newer, swankier one – pull into the parking lot. It parked in the empty spot directly outside my cabin.
A young police officer, uniformed and armed, poked his head out of the window. “Chief sent me – said he had business to take care of. I’m supposed to take you to the wrecker lot. Also, you hungry?”
Hutto didn’t tell me that he had a deputy. I guessed things slipped his mind last night at dinner. Or, maybe I had thought he ran this town all by himself without any need of deputy assistance at all.
“You can call me Skip – that’s what I’ve always gone by,” Deputy Aaron Shill explained. “Not sure why. I ain’t never been on no boat in my life. I also ain’t never skipped no day in my life, neither.” I contemplated his double negatives while he laughed. “My whole family has stupid nicknames. I’m Skip, my brothers are Opie and Hoss. My dad is – well, was – Boomer and my mom is Kitty. None of that makes sense. How do you get Skip from Aaron? Or Opie from Ronald, Hoss from Stephen? Mom’s first name was Katherine, but she hated Kate and Katie so I can see where Kitty comes from. And Dad got his nickname in the military so…” Aaron “Skip” Shill blushed. “Sorry. I talk a lot around new people.”
Headline: The Mysterious Origins of Unwarranted Nicknames.
“You like the Chief at all? He can be a hard man sometimes. Stubborn. But he’s a good man. Pushes me around a lot. But I’m used to it – I got two older brothers. Plus, he’s a good man. Don’t mean nothin’ by it. His son Bill Jr. – you met him, right? – he’s a friend of mine. We went to high school together. He’s just like his old man – stubborn, focused. Likes to bust chops, y’know? Hell, Corrine’s like that too, bless her heart. Likes to throw her weight around. Not that she’s fat or nothing – don’t tell her I said that. She’s just like her daddy.” He grinned. “Mrs. Hutto on the other hand, she’s just so nice, ain’t she? Just give her some construction paper and a few crayons and she’s happy.”
Shill had strikingly blonde hair – flaxen, nearly. I couldn’t see them, but I suspected his eyes were cornflower blue behind his sunglasses.
“Moe’s a good man, too.” Shill said, pulling down a grooved dirt road. “He’s a bit out of his mind, but he’s a good man. I went to school with his son, too.” He laughed again. “Damn, you must think we’re all related. No wonder yankees is always callin’ us inbred rednecks. It sounds like we are!”
Moe’s Wrecker Lot had been built on a sea of red dirt. The machine shop sat back on a lot of approximately fifty acres and wrapped in barbed wire. The sounds and smells of hot metal radiated from the shop as we approached. The garages were open and two cars – an Escort and a Cavalier – sat up on the lifts. Two dirty young men worked away on the Cavalier’s underbelly. The Escort looked long abandoned.
“Hey, Skip!” One of the men spotted us. “You comin’ by for a tune up?”
“Royce.” Shill shook hands with him. “Nah, not today. Got a favor to ask your dad. Where is he?”
“He’s inside doin’ the books.” The mechanic spotted me. “Oh, is this about the rent-a-car?”
“You heard?”
“Yeah, the Chief called earlier. I don’t know. Dad’ll tell you about it.” He clapped Shill on the back. “Good to see you, man.” To me, he said, “And nice meeting you.”
The mechanic – who I deemed to be no older than Shill – walked back to his cohort and joined him in hysterical laughter. Shill beamed and walked a head of me. “They’re not usually that nice,” he explained.
There was a black, greasy hand print on the back of Shill’s uniform.
Moe, grizzled and bearded, scrawled the directions to the rental Taurus on a pad of yellowed paper. He had thick gauze wrapped around his right middle finger. Judging from the dried blood, the bandage hadn’t been changed in a while. “Tore the nail off reaching into an engine still spinning,” he explained. “Hurt like a motherfucker.”
“You still got that Charger out back?” I hadn’t pegged Shill as a gear head, but then again I didn’t peg him for a very good deputy either. “Still got that rusted exhaust?”
“Needs to be rehung and it needs a cat to make it roadworthy.” Moe didn’t look up. “But yeah, I got it. Why? You interested?”
“Don’t know. Might could arrange somethin’ with Bill Jr. Might like to take something to the mudbog this year.”
Moe laughed. “I have about as much faith in you getting’ that Charger workin’ that I do Bill Jr. getting his Mustang running.” He ripped the directions off the notepad and stuffed them in his shirt pocket. “And that ain’t saying’ much for either of you.”
“Well, damn Moe. That’s awful nice of you.”
“Shit, boy. When the hell you gonna work on that?”
“I can find time. I can get my brothers to help me out.”
Moe laughed again. “That’ll be the day. Look, Skip – you want that Charger? You can have it. Take it. Drive it off here by the end of the day. And hell, if you get it running by next Friday, I’ll bet the odds for you.” He scratched his chin. “And shit, if you win — you get free maintenance for a year.”
Shill grinned. “You promise that?”
“Hell yeah I do. But first, you gotta get it off the lot.” He grinned with yellow, crooked teeth. “And bad news — I can get the car today, but I can’t work on it ’til Monday. We’re closed tomorrow. And technically we’re closed this afternoon, but we’ll still tow it here. You lucky you ain’t payin’ for it.”
That didn’t mean I wouldn’t pay for it later.
I needed to tell my boss the bad news – that I’d be stuck in this town until Monday at the very earliest. I also needed to cancel my hotel reservations in Mobile – Mo-beel – and hope they had something for Monday or Tuesday.
“I can take you back to the station and get coffee and a bagel if you want,” Shill offered. “I know you’re hungry.”
The junkyard behind the mechanic’s shop was vast and wide. Empty husks of cars and trucks, new and old littered the ground for several square miles. Though the lot was overgrown with weeds and grass, I had to give Moe credit for keeping his junkers in neat rows and columns. Shill and I walked into the junkyard as if it were an alloy labyrinth of scrap metal.
“There she is. Ain’t she pretty?” Shill gestured to one of the husks – a seventies model Charger with the hood missing. “That’s my new science project. I can get my brothers to help me pull her off here later.” He smiled. “She used to be Bill Jr’s, you know. He wrecked her muddin’ and burnin’.”
I knew of a kid in high school who tried passing a car on a hill and had to dodge another car coming the opposite way. He wrapped his car around a telephone pole. Doctors said he might have survived had he been wearing his seatbelt. Instead, he painted his brain matter all over the crash site. Someone started the rumor that he had been impaled through the eye on a tree branch. I had forgotten his first name, but the journalism club came up with our own mock headline about the incident: High School Senior Poled, Brained on Backwoods Road.
If “muddin and burnin” was anything like “poled and brained,” I would regret leaving my notebook in the motel room again.
“Muddin’ and burnin’,” Shill explained, leaning over the open hood, “is a custom down here. We used to do it all the time as teenagers – not so much anymore. It’s dangerous. In fact, we’re supposed to break up kids that are muddin’ and burnin’. I feel so bad about it. Hypocritical-like.” He frowned and poked the rusted engine. “I can get her runnin’, but it’ll take some time.”
He looked at me. “You wanna hear a dumb story?”
South of Bottom Hill are two dirt roads: Route 223 and Blueberry. Their intersection is a popular hang out for high school kids who don’t have much else to do on a Friday night. From 9:00 until 3am, nearly twenty of Bottom Hill High School’s greatest minds gather in their dad’s beaters and attempt to race on the wet, muddy ground. These weren’t new cars or even racing cars. Most of the time, these were simple family vehicles – station wagons, minivans, occasional SUVs – not suitable for racing but all that the kids from a small rural town could drive. Their unsuspecting parents, thinking their sons and daughters had gone out to smoke marijuana, have sex, or both had no idea the kids were actually running the cars into the red and getting them stuck in sinkholes filled with fresh Alabama mud.
This was muddin’.
After a few hours of this, or until one kid broke the rear axle hitting a sink hole to hard, the kids pulled their cars out of the road and walked from the intersection of 223 and Blueberry to an abandoned farm. If they had ever walked the extra two miles around to the front of the property, they would have noticed the No Trespassing sign in the driveway of the old farmhouse. But they didn’t. Instead, they walked up the back of the property, and gathered around the amateur fire pit. Some of the young men would go off to collect firewood – that is, rotting, moldy splinters from the destroyed barn – while the rest passed around a joint and six packs of their dads’ cheap beer. When the group returned with the wood, they all lit small stakes and created a bonfire. After about twenty minutes, they tossed in their beer cans, bits of paper, plastic and anything else they could find around them.
This was burnin’.
Shill answered a call about eleven thirty one Friday night about a shotgun blast near the intersection. He knew this place well, since he himself had gone out multiple times muddin’ and burnin’ as a teenager and figured the caller mistook a car backfiring for someone firing a shotgun. Not that either happened too much – kids were rowdy and rebellious, but rarely did anyone steal their dads’ firearms.
He took Blueberry to the intersection, knowing kids would be racing on 223. He planned on telling them all to go home for the night and he wouldn’t search their cars for contraband. But the intersection was dark as he pulled up to it. There were cars parked along each side of the road, but there weren’t any kids. Curious, Shill made a right down 223 and crept down about a quarter of a mile where he found a car wrenched into a sinkhole. He got out of his cruiser, turned on his flashlight, and shined it over the car — it was Bull Hutto Jr’s Charger, and it didn’t look good. The front left wheel was turned in, indicating serious damage to the suspension and quite possibly the transmission. The driver’s side door was severely dented that the frame could have been damaged as well.
Across the field, he saw the bonfire. He drove along 223 until he made it to the front of the old farmhouse and pulled into the driveway. He could hear the kids shrilly yelling at each other before he even got out of his cruiser.
“My daddy owns this property! You get the fuck out of my face!”
Shill approached the bonfire to see a group of fifteen-to-twenty high school kids circled around two shadowy figures by the fire. Both figures were tall and skinny and at a distance he couldn’t see what either of them were holding. He walked about twenty yards before a few from the crowd recognized him and began calling to him for help.
At once he recognized the two figures as a young kid – sixteen or seventeen – and an old man. The young kid was tall, spindly, and red-haired; the old man was gaunt, toothless, and holding a shotgun at the boy’s head. Shill withdrew his sidearm.
“Put the shotgun down, sir,” he warned. “That’s just a kid.”
“LITTLE FUCKING FUCKS WAS TRESPASSING!” The old man wailed, refusing to drop his weapon. “YOU TELL ‘EM THEY NEED TO GIT OFF!”
“This is not his property!” The boy screamed back. “My daddy is Owen Tyrone McClure and he owns all abandoned property in this goddamn county!”
At once, Shill felt his stomach drop. The skinny red-haired kid was Russell Owen McClure, youngest son of the wealthiest family in the region if not the state (or so rumored). He was right – Owen McClure did own every tract of abandoned land in the county. He bought up as much land as he could and occasionally developed real estate on it. Some abandoned lots, like the farm, weren’t too important to develop for the time being and stayed abandoned for years. Shill could not have the McClure’s kid blown to shards on his dad’s property. The other kids would be traumatized. Their parents would sue McClure and win. Then McClure would see to it that certain police officers were given desk duty for the next ten years.
“Sir!” Shill snapped. “Put the rifle down, now!”
The old man’s rheumy eyes turned to him and back at the kid. He muttered something and lowered the shotgun. “You tell this boy,” he said, “to git his ass off my goddamn land, or I will shoot him and his little friends.”
“The hell you will you old fuck,” Russell McClure fired back. “My daddy’ll –”
“Stop, both of you.” Shill holstered his gun and snatched the shotgun away from the old man. “Sir, what’s your name?”
“I ain’t gotta tell you my name!”
“Sir, if you’re going to make things difficult, I’m going to have to put you in cuffs and take you down to the station.”
The old man suddenly began spitting vulgarities and accusing Shill of being a government agent sent to take away his freedoms. The kids, who were first afraid, were now starting to snicker.
“Alright, look — Russell, you get over there. I’m going to talk to this man alone for a minute. Don’t go nowhere, k?”
Russell muttered something and began kicking dirt into the bonfire. Shill took the old man away from kids to speak with him privately. The man insisted that the farm was his – it belonged to his family when he was a child and now he wanted it back. It had been unfairly taken from his father in 1934 – when the man was just three years old. He didn’t go into specifics, nor did he give his name. Shill rolled his eyes.
“Sir, unless you can show me a deed to this house and land, you don’t have any proof that it’s yours. Do you have that with you?” The old man said nothing. “Ok. Then you need to get off this property and go back to wherever you came from. You can’t be shooting little boys around here – especially not little boys with rich daddies.” The old man grumbled again. With another word of warning, Shill unloaded the shotgun and gave it back to him without the shells. “Now get out of here.”
The old man stalked off. Russell was enraged.
“Skip, you let the sonofabitch go! Goddamn it, you should have arrested him!”
“Now Russell, that’s just a crazy old man. He ain’t gonna hurt you.”
“He tried to blow my fuckin’ head off!” Russell jabbed his temple for emphasis.
“Watch your mouth. He’s a sick, crazy old man who wandered away from the old folk’s home. Or maybe he was drunk – he smelled like Wild Turkey.” He opened his hand to show the kids the shells. “I unloaded his gun. Y’all get out of here before he comes back with more.”
“I said this is –”
“This may be your daddy’s land now, Russell, but y’all are in some serious shit if he finds out that y’all are drinking around here.” He saw a young girl tuck a can of beer behind her. “Now, the way I see it, y’all have two options. One, I call this in as a car backfiring and say the kids ran off when they saw me coming by. Or two, I take all of y’all in for minors in consumption, call all y’alls parents, have them call your daddy, Russell, and all of y’all stay at home on Friday nights to watch Lawrence Welk with your me-maws.”
The kids fell silent.
“I thought so. Now the rest of y’all go on home. Russell, you answer me this. What the hell is Bill Jr.’s car doing in that –”
Before he could finish his question, his brain did the math for him. Shill whirled around and saw Corrine Hutto, Russell’s girlfriend, creeping out of the darkness.
“Oh goddamn, it.”
Shill slowed beside the farmhouse. It was a tall, stone house with a large front porch and shattered front windows. Behind it was a small, wood-paneled well-house with a mangled roof. Further back was a giant two-car garage, probably used to house a tractor or plow. Nearby was a single white silo, worn with age and weather, standing amidst the remnants of a collapsed barn.
The pebbles in the driveway cracked and squished under the tires when he pulled in. “I asked about it off-handedly a few weeks later on,” he explained. “No one actually knows about it. Everyone’s been here before – either for muddin’ and burnin’ or for neckin’. No one’s ever been inside the farmhouse that I know of — too scary.”
As he backed away, I could have sworn I saw a face peeking behind the sheer curtains of an upstairs window.
“Anyway.”
Corrine had been dating Russell McClure on and off all through high school. Her father liked the boy because he liked his father; Arlene Hutto thoughtfully encouraged her daughter to date around and not settle on one boy so soon. It was her polite way of saying, ‘that boys means trouble.’
And he was trouble. Aside from the spoiled rich brat nonsense, Russell had a bad habit of hunting without a license – and not just wild game either. He targeted anything outside – dogs, cats, rabbits, goats, and even squirrels and birds. Neighbors complained about coming home with their family pets lying dead on their front stoop. Being the son of a wealthy family, there wasn’t much neighbors could do except keep their animals inside.
Russell was also still in high school when a lesser child would have been expelled. He grabbed the breasts of a student teacher. He lit a cherry bomb in the boy’s bathroom. He was rumored to have been caught jerking off in the soap dispenser. Yet he was still in school, despite his behavior issues and his genuine lack of interest in anything academic. Yet Corrine found him irresistible.
She snuck under his arm and buried her face into his side. Russell rubbed her back protectively. “I took it out,” she insisted. “It was my idea.”
Shill eyed Russell. “I didn’t say you didn’t.”
“Please Skip – don’t tell Bill Jr. He’ll get mad and –”
“Well, who would you rather I tole, Corrine? Your brother or your father? I can guarantee one of them will be less mad than the other.”
Corrine seemed to think about it. “What do I do?”
“I’ll take you home in the cruiser. Russell can tow the car out with his pickup – yes, you will, Russell, don’t gimme that look. While he’s doing that, you and your brother will have plenty of time to get your stories straight. Ok?”
It didn’t seem like Corrine had much of a choice. She was silent on the way home, but that didn’t stop Shill from asking her questions. He asked her if it was actually Russell that goaded her into taking the Charger, and then was the one who crashed the car. “The last time I checked, you couldn’t drive a stick,” he reminded.
She turned her head away.
“As far as I know, Bill Jr. took the blame for wrecking the car. He said he was out muddin’ and burnin’ and it was his fault. Bill Sr. tore him a new one — got so angry he had the car towed to Moe’s and it’s been there ever since.” Shill stirred a plastic cup of coffee with a swizzle stick. “Corrine never admitted to anything and Bill Sr. never suspected her. I hear she even left her hair Scrunchie in the back seat.”
“Corrine and Russell broke up for good after that. Did them both good. They was bad for each other. That old man ain’t never been back I don’t think. No one has. No one goes out muddin’ and burnin’ anymore these days because of it.” He smiled. “My finest police work and I ain’t never been able to tell nobody until now.”
Hutto walked into the department not long after as Shill and I finished our coffee. He saw me and slapped his forehead. “Sorry about leaving you high and dry this morning. Had some business to take care of.” He smiled. “Moe get to the car?”
“Chief, do you mind if I take a few hours off today? I wanna go get something from the wrecker lot before it closes. I need my brothers to help me out.”
“You helpin’ out my boy then?”
“Yeah, kinda.”
“All right. Well, I don’t care. Have fun – tell Hoss and Opie I said hi.” He glared at me. “Suppose that means I gotta take you back to the hotel. Well, I won’t be off my shift for a few hours. You’ll have to look for something else to do in the meantime. You hungry? Go to Maw’s. Tell ‘em I sent you and you’ll get free pie.”
I was hungry, actually.
Main Street was busy for a Saturday afternoon, but I had no real basis of judging a small town’s business on a weekend. I walked from the police station past the small store fronts – a drug store, a general store, a quaint pizzeria and a stationery shop. I soon discovered that I was at the only stop light in town and facing Winkee’s, the IGA, the flower shop, and Maw’s Restaurant. I went inside.
I took a seat in the back, by the window and opened a menu. By opened, I mean I unfolded it. I recognized the font and lamination and knew Arlene Hutto had stuck her gaudy fingers in everything craft-related around Bottom Hill.
“Let me guess — burger and fries, and a water.” The waitress grinned at me. She didn’t have a notepad with her; her hands were in the pockets of her pink, floral uniform. “Yankees always order water.”
Across the tiny restaurant, I noticed Corrine Hutto at a table with three other girls. She caught me looking at her, blushed, and lowered her head.
“You’re Arlene and Bill’s yankee, aren’t you?” The waitress extended her hand. “I’m Laurie Arnold. Arlene’s one of my best friends. We’re on the Baptist Women’s Aesthetic Society at Rose Swamp. And my little boy goes to school with CarolAnn.” She rocked on her heels. “Gosh, it’s so nice to meet someone new. Never see to many new faces around here. It’s refreshing…oh, I’m sorry hon – you ready to order?”
I did order the burger, but I threw her off by ordering sweet tea. I had had iced tea before, but I knew that Southern sweet tea and Northern iced tea were as similar as Manhattan and New England clam chowder. Laurie bounced away from the table to get my order, and I took my time watching Corrine and her friends trying not to look at me. One of her friends giggled and Corrine poked her as punishment. A minute of shuffling around later, they got up and left the restaurant. I couldn’t see if they had paid.
The week before our final exams, McPherson announced that he wanted to take us out the night before final exams. There was a new Italian restaurant in Midtown called Il Posto in Acqua that had delicious antipasto. None of us wanted to go – we had his horrible test to take in the morning and he wanted to celebrate the night before with bleached flour and alcohol. He told us that going to the dinner was optional, but he promised there would be help for the test the next day if we went. McPherson’s test help usually consisted of quotes from Rupert Murdoch and William Hearst and nothing about the test it self. Out of the fifteen graduating seniors, only eight of us went – those that trusted McPherson a little too much and didn’t have enough money for dinner anyway. Everyone else stayed home to study.
We dressed up and left the apartment around 8 o’clock. By 9 o’clock, the wine was flowing and so was the conversation. McPherson stood and held his glass up. He toasted the eight of us and reminded us that we’d be taking the hardest test of our life soon. For the next half and hour, we pressured him to tell us what would be on his exam. He dodged all of our questions with “you’ll see, you’ll see.” We started to get mad. Here we were wasting our time in a restaurant with our asshole professor who refused to give us the help he promised. When we voiced our rage, he rolled his eyes and threw down his napkin. You win, he said. I’ll give you the help I promised. Let me go use the restroom first.
He left. No, he really left. Instead of using the bathroom, or maybe after he used it, he walked out of the restaurant and left us there with no money to pay the $300 food bill. It took us twenty minutes to discover that he had abandoned us and we panicked. None of us had more than twenty dollars – someone had broken her lease that morning and didn’t have a cent in her bank account. Some of us wanted to dine and dash. The rest of us wanted to confess our problem with the restaurant manager.
The manager wasn’t happy. Rather than let us work off the debt by scrubbing dishes, he called the police. Of course, that drew the attention of the other patrons in the restaurant, which made the manager nervous. Eventually, the police officer ticketed us all for trespassing – charging us each $45, which would cover the cost of dinner plus a 20% tip. The manager didn’t argue about gratuity.
We did scrape together some change to call McPherson to demand answers. Congratulations, he said. You eight passed the test.
Laurie slid into my view. “Here’s your lunch. Hope you enjoy the sweet tea.”
I didn’t, but I never enjoy guzzling syrup.
Hutto was upset about something. He spoke in little more than grunts and huffs on the way back to the motel. For a moment I thought my presence in Bottom Hill and his unsworn duty to drive me around was grating on him. He wouldn’t have to do that tomorrow or Monday – I had that covered.
I left the cruiser and he honked the horn to catch my attention. He stuck his head out the window. “Need a favor. If you hear ’bout anything unusual or strange around here, you come to me first, ok? Don’t go to Skip. He’s a nice guy but he ain’t got two brain cells in that big jug-eared head of his.”
So that must be it. Hutto knew about the Charger, or at least had some idea.
I stuck my key in the door lock. The room to my right — which was the room to my left last night — had a television on as loud as it could go without shattering the already vibrating windows. The curtains were pulled shut, but there wasn’t any light on in the room. I couldn’t even see the television flashing, but I heard the noise. My neighbors were watching white noise.
The parking lot was empty. I pressed my ear against the door and the sound stopped, turned off, or fell dead. I stepped away from the room.
One thing at a time.
I called my boss.
“Monday? Monday. You can’t get out of there before then? You’re staying in that shitty little town until Monday. Are you comfortable with this or are you mourning in your own way? If I were you I’d be screaming my fucking head off right about now. Do you even have a fucking internet connection around there?”
My phone still had no signal either.
The sun was setting but the weather was still achingly hot outside. The air conditioning in the room was pitiful and opening the windows and doors only brought in freakishly large insects inside. I knew urban roaches well; these were their giant, inbred cousins. One roach ran inside and darted underneath the bed and disappeared. This was strange since the bed had an enclosed bottom and I didn’t think anything could go under it.
I turned on the television, honestly curious to find out what constituted entertainment in Bottom Hill, besides muddin’ and burnin’. I was in luck that both channels came in clear and sound and I had the choice between a COPS ripoff or a re-run of an old sitcom. At seven o’clock, I grew bored of the sitcom and turned on my laptop.
I thought for a minute or two before I opened a word processing document. I thought for another minute or two before I began typing. Shill’s story came back to me in chunks and the rest trickled in as I wrote. Before I knew it, it was 9:30 and I had noticed the cicadas screaming outside. I saved the document under the filename “BOTTOMHILL.”
After I shut off the laptop, I took a shower and got into bed. Sleep was easy to find, since I had spent the day in the heat and eating my weight in carbohydrates. I needed to be up early for Laurie Arnold anyway.
I had church in the morning.