“It sure is,” he said. “And teakwood ain’t easy to carve. It’s hard. You need a mallet and chisel. You can’t even cut it with a regular blade. Got to be carbide.”
“Oh, yeah?” I whistled again. As he reached for his forty on the ground, I saw the muscle and sinew shift under his skin. He was tanned as only a man who all but lived outdoors can be. I took him for about a decade older than me, but he still looked like he could take just about any man in a fight.
After another gulp of beer, or malt liquor, as I realized when I saw the label, he asked, “So what all you come down here for? We don’t get a lot o’ lawyers round here.”
From inside the trailer, I heard his brother laugh. Tim turned and hollered over his shoulder, “We don’t, though, do we? Hey, when you come out, bring me my T-shirt with the, uh, the tuxedo printed on it. We got a fancy guest, and I want to dress appropriate.”
Inside, his brother cracked up.
“You dress how you want,” I said. “This is your property. I just came by to see what I could figure out about the situation.”
He squinted at me, hesitant. “You from the insurance?”
“No, sir. I don’t got a dog in this race as of yet. I’m just trying to understand what happened. If there was a wrongful death situation, if there was insurance, we can get there in due time, and I can refer you to somebody, but first I got to understand how your poor brother lost his life.”
“Huh.” He went to set his liquor down on the arm of his chair, then paused to flick a fly out of the way. It was so hot even the flies didn’t move unless they had to. When it had crept off around the side of the armrest, he turned to yell back at the trailer, “This here lawyer don’t even know how Karl died!”
Pat yelled, “What? That’s crazy.” He stuck his head out the window and told me, “Whole town already knows Jackson killed him.”
With a slow nod, Tim said, “He sure did.”
“Huh,” I said. “Now, you’re sure about that? How come?”
“Well,” he said, and took a swig of liquor. “He said he was going to kill him, and now Karl’s dead. It don’t get much more case-closed than that.”
“Huh,” I said. “Now, when exactly did he say that?”
“What was it, now,” he said. “Thanksgiving?”
“Christmas,” Pat said from inside. “Hang on.” The flimsy trailer shook as he walked. He pulled the door open, leaned against the frame, and said, “There was an ornament on the Christmas tree shaped like a red Mustang, and Karl said he’d always wanted one. I remembered that after he got the car.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Tim. He asked me, “Speaking of which, who gets a man’s car, if his normal heir is who killed him?”
“Well, that would depend on a whole lot of things,” I said. Brothers like these two made me happy Noah was an only child.
Tim was still staring, waiting for an answer.
I said, “Sir, I can’t tell you for sure without seeing the title and so forth.”
Pat, whose knuckles were rapping a rhythm on the doorframe, said, “Aw, he probably left the convertible with that stripper he was banging. And you know possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
“Huh,” I said. “Well, I could look into that, if you’d point me to her.”
Tim said, “Ain’t she a waitress?”
“Might be,” said Pat. “Works at the Broke Spoke, anyway. A waitress there might as well be a stripper.”
“Jackson didn’t like her none either,” Tim said. “No, sir. Said something about her too, that same night when he told Karl he wanted him dead.”
“Speaking of which, what was it exactly he said?” I asked.
“Let me think,” Tim said. “We was all up at Mazie’s. And Karl was drunk as shit. Drunk when he got there and just kept on going. Every drink he had, you could see Jackson looking at him meaner.”
“I don’t blame him,” Pat said. “It’s a hard thing for a boy to see.”
“But I mean,” said Tim, “if he ain’t got used to it by now, when’s he going to? You can’t change what you can’t change.”
“Well, sure,” Pat said.
“Anyhow, Mazie had made a pecan pie,” said Tim. “She makes a hell of a pie. And Karl stuffed it in his craw, and he got to choking. I mean, like he was gonna die, turning blue, bent over the table…”
“I thought that was it,” Pat said.
“We all did. But Jackson did that thing from the TV, where he grabs him—it’s like a punch to the stomach, but you punch from behind. And it worked! Damned if that pie didn’t come right back up!”
Pat said, “He saved his life.”
“He did. But drunk as Karl was, and eating like he had, getting punched brought everything back up. He barfed all over himself, and on the table too. He was too drunk to even know Jackson had saved his life. He just popped him one right in the lip.”
“That kid bled everywhere.”
“Yeah, he’s a bleeder. Always has been. But he said right there, in front of everyone, that he shouldn’t have saved him, and matter of fact he’d put him six feet under if he ever got the chance.”
“He did,” Pat said. “Can’t blame him, though.”
I said, “I guess anybody might get hotheaded in a situation like that.”
Pat shook his head. “He wasn’t hotheaded at all. He was just… dead calm. Like he meant it, you know?”
“And that wasn’t the only time,” Tim said. “I recall Jackson saying more than once that he’d like to see his daddy dead. Whenever Karl fell off the wagon, which was a lot, he said something like that.”
Pat agreed. “Christmas was just the, you know, that’s the one
