A hand in the deck was one thing. Waltzing into Robbie Douglas’s trailer was another. Taking Robbie’s belongings and raking them out thick as manure in the Cabe brothers’ place was damn near crazy, but that’s what I decided to do. “Best if you’re the one dealing out those cards,” Daddy’d said, and the way I figured, it was my turn to shuffle. If that burnt-up son of a bitch ever did wake up, he wouldn’t have to mutter more than a few words for me to be skinned. I imagine a few of those first words might be “Jacob McNeely.” I couldn’t leave it up to that kind of chance. Better to just water that seed Daddy’d planted in the deputy’s mind and let that story grow.
Robbie Douglas lived way back in a damp holler that had rusted that old tin box just as soon as the tractor unhitched and pulled away. From where I crouched in the laurel, it looked like rust colored everything in the yard burnt red: an old push mower, the pull cord rotted in two and dangling; a children’s tricycle, chrome pitted, plastic handlebar streamers bleached pink; a wheelbarrow that had a grate thrown over the bucket for grilling, a hole burnt slap through the bottom. The whole lot was in dire need of a tetanus shot.
I’d parked the pickup on a four-wheeler trail cut high on the hillside above his property and hiked down to that small nest in the laurel thicket to play lookout for a while. Nothing stirred at the trailer, only a murder of crows that swooped down low over the property and cut up into a tulip poplar across the way. The crows cawed and cackled back and forth between limbs. Still I knelt there and scouted. I wanted to make damn certain no one was around. The story that was unfolding with Robbie Douglas was one that no soul would want to be tied to, so I took my time and gave myself plenty of room to run.
The coast clear and daylight burning, I made my way through the snagged curls of laurel and trotted down a steep bank that flattened at the front steps. Algae slimed the wood green, slicked those steps like creek stone, and the planks mushed and warped under my weight. A blue tarp had been tacked from the roof of the trailer and held in a droopy bend over a small deck by a pair of sawn two-by-fours. Brown-tinged water fattened the place where the tarp sagged, and from underneath I could make out leaves and twigs, pine needles and a crescent wrench stagnant in that water and illuminated by daylight. The front door didn’t sit square, but rather at an angle like might have been found in a fun house or a maze of mirrors, a shape my geometry teacher had called a parallelogram way back in my learning. I never knew why I remembered shit like that, but those funny words a man never had use for were the only thing that stuck from all that schooling.
The door wasn’t locked but still required jimmying to break loose from the frame. The thin door bowed under pressure and slapped against the wall behind when it finally budged. The smell hit me first, the smell of clothes soiled wet and dried and soiled again, a sour stench that clung like armpit stains. Whatever storm had come through that holler had skipped the yard altogether and manifested right there inside. It had slung everything Robbie owned into an ankle-deep pile that had to be waded.
I slipped a pair of leather work gloves onto my hands, the thick, rough kind never meant for anything delicate, but the only thing I had to hide my prints. I first filled the black garbage bag I’d brought for toting with tangled wads of clothes, but realized about the time that bag started to bulge lumpy on the sides that those clothes could’ve belonged to anyone. It wasn’t like Robbie Douglas had scribbled his name on the tags of his underwear with permanent marker. It wasn’t like the Cabe brothers were doing his laundry either. So I dumped the clothes back onto the floor, T-shirts and shorts piling into a little knoll of an island in that sea of trash and filth. I did keep a flannel shirt, one of those bricked-off red flannel shirts that held a few hairs off Robbie’s head from the last time he wore it. I figured the law could run those hairs and get about as much guarantee of Robbie Douglas as an ID card, and that was the type of shit that needed collecting.
The main living space of the trailer led right into the bedroom, only a side door to the john acting as a hallway between the two rooms. The mattress sat cockeyed on box springs and thin cotton sheets were ripped away from the elbows of the mattress, the sheets crinkled wavy where it bunched. The mess from that front room bled over the threshold into the bedroom, but fanned out and stopped like a high-water mark near the bed. A tall stack of mail, bills left unpaid, teetered on a side table, and I checked the little plastic windows on the fronts of envelopes for his name. All of the envelopes held that certainty, so I shoved them down into the bag.
Sticking out from under the bedsheets was the edge of a leather-bound book, the corners worn round and shabby. I pulled the book from under the pile, HOLY BIBLE pressed in all caps and gold leaf across the front. The book was old and tattered, thin pages transparent and yellowed. The front page had been scribbled like a ledger, all different kinds of names and dates in all different kinds of handwriting and ink. Only one thing held similarity down the page: every name, no matter the front, ended in Douglas. A folded photograph had been shoved about two-thirds through the book to serve as a marker. It was a picture of Robbie smiling and holding that Bible when he was twelve or thirteen. His folks stood proudly at his sides. It must have been taken at some sort of confirmation or religious dunking at the Baptist church, his hair seeming wetted and slicked in the photo.
I looked that picture over and seeing him brought on the same paranoia that shook me from dream each night. I could feel the sweat beading on my temples and my palms going clammy. I shut the photograph back in the book and chucked the Bible into the bag, but that image of him stayed taped up on the backs of my eyelids. My mind warped that still image and melted away at his face, melted it just how I’d seen, and the screaming rang back deep in my memory. I wanted it gone, but it was all so fresh. I could still smell his skin burning, see the way that skin peeled and held to the tarp as we drug him through the woods. Those types of things don’t just fade away. They are the worms of the living and eat at a man for as long as he’s breathing. I reckon I deserved what burrowed in me just as Daddy deserved his.