Buddy Done It

Buddy would rot in jail the rest of his life. Unshaven, he smirked and slouched his three hundred fifty pounds of fat in front of the bailiffs. In the hot, airless county court room, his parents, Will and Clara, were dwarfed by the oversized oak chairs. They waited, shriveled and alone in the front row.

Soon Judge Holmes would end the nightmare of Buddy’s trial. The onlookers’ eyes stoned Will and Clara. Morning heat mugged the court. Sweat droplets escaped on Will’s pasty, hairless head only to be exposed and dried by the overhead bulbs. Will’s feet just touched the floor. He gripped the armrest and braced himself. Towering beside him, his wife Clara fussed with an errant wisp from her braids, grayed and tightened against her head. Her thin skin seemed to almost crackle like butcher paper when their hands brushed. She stiffened, honoring an unspoken truce. They crossed their arms. Will tensed the muscles of his shoulders, arm and face. Those muscles once carried heavy weight over oilrigs and pummeled men twice his size.
An overhead fan rattled off-balance in the otherwise silent room.

Clara blurted, “Gonna cage him like a badger.”

Clara had spent long years alone on her ten acres, gnarled with trees and rocky soil. Cats and chickens were her closest companions. She’d learned to feed her hunger for conversation with spurts of words.

“Cain’t do nothing, Clara. Just a different cage. Your skirts trapped him. Any scrape and there’s mama, soothing him. Like when he about got drafted. You made him watch that loony brother of yours till he learned to act crazy and fool the draft board. Sorta funny Lester Homes and Sharkey Goldberg were on that draft board. Lester being the judge today and Sharkey the jury foreman. I should of run your brother off when I paid off your mother’s debt on that land. Was making good money then.”

“You’re cold and mean, Will. Can’t run anybody off. Mama left that land to me. Brother came back after he fell off that windmill in Oklahoma and he wasn’t right till he died. You’d never corral Buddy even when you were around. If he’d been drafted, he’d have got shot. Ten Slaughter County boys got killed by the time Buddy turned eighteen.”

“Got shot anyway, didn’t he? They caught him twisting that little Missouri kid’s nipples with vise grips. Besides, you were tickled pink that I was away in the oil patch. Just another damned cat. Come and go, long as I wasn’t in the house. ”

“More like a drunk tom cat, Will.”

“Just hush. Lester Holmes is gonna talk. Something finally got him off the golf course to play judge?”

Judge Holmes spoke. “In the sentencing phase of “The State of Arkansas vs. J.T. ‘Buddy’ Cole", I have reviewed the jury’s guilty verdict on counts 1, 5 and 8. I have also read the renderings of counsel. Occasionally, Mr. Cole, I am particularly struck by unseen victims of crime. These victims are your parents. They will be reminded of your sordid deeds each time they come to this town. They will be ostracized and shunned. Your mother and your father did not commit these heinous acts and it is you who must repay society. I hereby remand you to the Arkansas State Department of Corrections to serve in accordance with sentencing guidelines. The Arkansas Sentencing Commission allows this court voluntary compliance with guidelines and this sentence is not subject to appeal. The following incarceration is accorded you with no parole: Count 1 – twenty years, Count 5 – twenty years, and Count 8 – twenty years. These sentences are to be served consecutively. Court is adjourned.”

Buddy sneered and flipped off the judge as he was led away.

“How long is that, Will?”

“Sixty years, Clara.”

Will scooped his hat from the floor and stormed to the door. Clara shuffled behind. She called out to Will.

“He’ll die, Will. And we’ll be dead. Buddy would’t even look at me! Why won’t you look at me, Will?”

Will barged on, fifteen steps ahead of her. He rammed his compact body through the exit door. The walls shook and the door slammed. The few onlookers moved from the foyer.

What red paint remained on the 1955 International Pickup had faded pink. The pickup grumbled alive and Will waited for Clara. Clara’s braids stuck up above the high, rear, side by side window as the truck roared from the cold, marble courthouse.

“Will, I need to sell my eggs at Bogart’s.” Clara’s chickens had gotten them grocery money for twenty two years.

“O.K., I’ll get my tobacco at Beckner’s.”

Will parked in the delivery space by Bogart’s General Store. He walked two blocks to Wool Street. Beckner’s Pool Hall was a narrow room next to the green bank clock. Beckner’s sold the Kentucky snuff that Will had chewed and spit since he was ten.

Clara pulled off the tarp shading the eggs and carried them to Bogart’s store counter.

“Good morning, Mr. Bogart.”

“Good morning, Mrs. Cole.”

Herzel Bogart was a brute. The khaki short sleeved shirt wrapped his bulging biceps like a tourniquet. From his command position behind the ornate, hand-cranked cash register, he glowered at Clara. For years, he’d bullied Clara and refused to speak to Sharkey Goldberg since the draft board declared Buddy Cole unsuitable for military service. Sharkey was chairman of the draft board. A year after the decision, Herzel buried his own son.

Near Da Nang, Herzel’s son, walking point on a night patrol, had fallen into a pit carpeted with sharp bamboo sticks saturated in human feces. The infection killed him in three weeks. Herzel buried him facing west in the extra family plot in the Slaughter County cemetery. Herzel refused to bury his son in the traditional position facing the rising sun. Religion was a moneymaking scam and Herzel tolerated no religious convention.

After immigrating, the Bogart family had continued their German merchant tradition. They bartered and sold an ever-changing array of merchandise including foodstuffs and dry goods. The store also sold large bales of hay and sheep feed in heavy burlap bags. Sweet alfalfa mingled with the odor of motor oil and rotting fruit.

“Only brought eight dozen eggs this morning, Mr. Bogart. This heat is making my chickens lazy, I guess.”

Clara was formal in business matters, but this morning, she giggled at her joke. She tried to avoid Herzel, but his wife was not in the store. As he’d done long ago when they swam with other teens, Herzel leered at Clara every time she entered the store. That day at the pond, he’d tried to take Clara from her slender, bookish, boyfriend, Sharkey Goldberg, now owner of a restaurant. Also swimming was Lester Holmes, now a judge, and Will Cole, a drifter with a wad of oilfield money. Will saw an opportunity to fight. When Herzel made his move on Clara, Will bloodied him near the black lava rock that served as a diving board. That day, he stole Clara’s loyalty from the younger boys. Desperate, with a dying mother and brain-injured brother, Clara married Will the following month.

“We don’t need eggs this morning, Mrs. Cole.”

“Mr. Bogart, I’ve sold eggs here every week for twenty-two years. I sold them to your father.”

“Well, we just don’t need them any more, Mrs. Cole.”

“It’s my grocery money! What do I do with them?”

“Well, you might take them over to Willow Creek.”

“Mr. Bogart, that’s eighteen miles!”

“That is about all I can suggest, Mrs. Cole.”

The egg cartons shook as she replaced them under the tarp. Back in the hot pickup cab, she slumped and waited for Will. Forty minutes passed while Will finished his beer at the pool hall and played a game of snooker. He learned snooker on a British Petroleum/Shell oil platform in the North Sea. Every week, he bet two or three dollars with those who didn’t know his skill. Sometimes a snooker game paid for the beer and Kentucky snuff.

Spewing tobacco juice, Will returned and pointed the truck home.

“How much you get paid, Clara?”

“He didn’t buy them. Said he didn’t need them anymore. Said I could sell them at Willow Creek.”

Will swore and spit. “Willow Creek is eighteen miles! Besides, your mother used to sell eggs to Bogart’s old man.”

“That’s what I said, but he said he couldn’t think of anywhere else to sell them.”

Will braked the truck to a stop at the intersection of Wool and Main. He chewed and spit. He swallowed the wad of snuff, jammed the truck into grandma gear and spun it in front of a Cadillac with Texas plates.

“Will!” She grabbed his arm.

When Will fed the sheep, he used this grandma gear, a low ratio gear that moved the truck at a snail pace. He’d walk to the back, and toss the feed as the truck moved. Then, when finished, he’d walk to the front.

Engine roaring, but moving slowly, Will honked to announce his arrival at Bogart’s store. He backed the truck and parked on the sidewalk, blocking all but a small space in the entrance. Bogart looked up and gripped the old cash register.

“Good morning, Herzel. Clara brought you eight dozen eggs. Under the tarp in my pickup. My back hurts, so you’ll have to get them from under the tarp. I am gonna shop for a thing or two.”

Bogart’s tendons strummed his reddening neck. His grip flexed the massive forearm muscles.

“Will, I already told Clara we didn’t need those eggs.”

In a single move to the counter, Will crashed the cast metal machine on Bogart’s fingers.

“Damn, Will.”

“Herzel, while you’re getting your eggs, I gotta find a thing or two back there next to the ice cream.”

Bogart stood to his fullest height. His split fingers spurted blood. He towered above Will by twelve inches. Will strolled back around several aisles and puttered in the cloth and liquor sections. Sweating and white, Bogart steadied himself against a keg of fence staples.

Will came back to the counter and said, “Now eight dozen eggs should be twelve dollars for Clara. Take this five dollar bill and give me a brown sack for this stuff and we’re square.”

Bogart’s color returned. He swore, but took the bill and pushed a sack at Will.

Will set the eggs on the curb. He clinched the sack between his legs and drove to Wool Street.

“Did you get my money, Will?”

Will pushed snuff between his bottom teeth and lip.

“Yep. Had to break Herzel’s fingers again. Like when he undid your top at the swimming pond that time. Used your money for something, Clara.”

“Hope you’re not gonna drink it up again, Will. I need flour, and my calico cat cut her ear. Need ointment.”

Will spit.

In silence they drove to the wooden gate at the ten acres. The place was fenced for sheep, with small squares of interwoven wire. As sheep do, they grazed with all heads pointed towards the barn. Will splintered the gate and drove to the barn.

“Will, Buddy’s horse will get out. He’s all I have left of Buddy’s”

“No, he won’t, Clara.”

“He always rushes for the gate if it’s open.”

“I shot him this morning. Buddy never took care of him.”

“You’ve always been mean, Will. Has this thing with Buddy ruined you?”

Clara’s eyes clouded and teared.

“That horse was gonna starve anyway. Plus he was costing me whiskey money.”

Will slammed the truck door, jammed Bogart’s sack in the bib of his overalls and flung open the barn door.

“Have to get my gun,” he said over his shoulder. He spit again.

Clara remained in the truck. Finally, she summoned strength to trudge to the creaking front porch. She slumped into the wooden swing. Her weight broke a slat. Gray paint flecks curled on the swing and waited for the wind to blow them away. She stared, unfocused. Her damp, faded blue-green flowered dress hung on her bones.

Later, Will tossed the sack in her lap, cradled the gun and rolled a bullet between his thumb and forefinger.

“I don’t want your liquor, Will.”

She tossed the sack aside.

“Now Clara, I am gonna say this once. Only once. Buddy done it. I didn’t. Buddy done it. You didn’t. Now it is Saturday tomorrow and I want us to go to Sharkey’s for a steak. ”

“Sharkey won’t serve you, Will. You can’t pay.”

“He will serve me. Herzel goes in there on Saturday and when Sharkey sees those fingers, he’ll serve me. In fact, Lester Holmes eats there on Saturday, and he will see them fingers. Sharkey was on that jury, remember? Besides, I didn’t buy Jack Daniels today.”

Will stood, leaned against a porch post and stared at the fat sheep in Clara’s pasture. Their heads were lowered to the ground headed away from him. He whistled at them, but they ignored him.

“Clara, I got your cat ointment and a yellow dress in this sack and I want you to wear the dress. Come with me to Sharkey’s every Saturday and have a steak."

He tore open the sack and held up a canary yellow dress. A lace-fringed scarf fell into Clara’s lap. She moistened her lips and buried her face in the scarf.

Finally she said, “You never bought me anything before, Will.”