Careful What You Say
by Craig Donegan
part 1
Randall Anderson had mud on his face. The muck was not from digging for artifacts as he did daily in his swampy backyard. Rather, it came from telling his wife, Freda, that he would not move from their home in Bison, Texas to Houston for any reason. Not even to salvage his wife’s widowed stepmother, Agnes, no matter how many times the old lady or her dog, Sylvester, begged them to move nearby.
“That woman’s never begged anybody for anything, least of all us,” Randall said. “If she wants us closer, she can move to Bison, where the chance of being shot down in the street is virtually zero. But if it’s the dog that’s talking, then he can move in with us any time. Move in and be welcomed.”
“So, what makes Bison so safe? What about Frankie Harold and that little intern? His wife found out, and then what?”
Randall screwed up his lips and gazed out the living-room window while cleaning his teeth with his tongue.
“Out came the butcher knife, that’s what,” said Freda.
“But she didn’t kill him. She just cut off his manhood, what little he had.”
“Yeah. Well. That’s not nothing.”
“Almost, though. But the point is, she didn’t use a gun.”
“But then she gave Frankie’s junk to that poor girl, like it was a voodoo doll. And she’s still in the hospital you know; in shock, from what I’m told,” said Freda. “That’s pretty big-city if you ask me. You keep talking like that and something bad really will happen. I’ve seen it a million times.”
“Okay, then,” said Randall, “I’ve also been saying that pirates used to come through this part of the country. Well, pirates bury stuff. Lots of stuff. Probably some of it in our back yard. Now there’s words for you, words that me and my metal detector will prove right.”
“Screw your metal detector,” said Freda. “Chances of finding treasure in this backyard bog are slimmer than my stepmother softening her heart and forking over what I’m certain Papa left behind, but that Agnes and her criminal lawyer stole.”
“Just wait,” Randall interrupted. “I’ve been putting aside a penny here and a penny there, doing some handy work for Osiris down at the Doc-In-The-Box. Soon I’ll have the biggest, most powerful metal detector on the planet, and we’ll be rolling in treasures worth a fortune. This piss-ant detector I’ve got now hardly scratches the surface.”
“You’ve lost your mind, Randall Anderson. I don’t know to laugh or cry.”
“You’ll be laughing with joy once I get my new detector.”
“You can suck on that pipe dream all you want, but I’m taking action.”
“Uh-oh. Houston,” he replied, looking down at his feet as if willing them to remove him from harm’s way.
“We’ve been writing back-n-forth lately, old-fashioned letters, and I think I’ve made a connection. Partly because, like me, she’s a coonass, and so’s Sylvester, who was only a yearling pup when Papa died. Both Agnes and her lawyer claim that Sylvester dictates about half the letters they send, which works to our advantage. I know I can at least trust the dog. Anyway, both Agnes and Sylvester are coonasses, and once a coonass, always a coonass.”
“I don’t care what kind of ass she — or that dog — is. The only way to soften her up is with a tenderizer, one of those meat mallets you swing like a hammer.”
“I’m smarter than you think, Randall Anderson. I turned Daddy from an alligator poacher into a landman in the oil fields of Louisiana.”
* * *
This was true. If it hadn’t been for Freda, the old man would have lived and died a subsistence poacher. She was, after all, the one who convinced him to use his swamp and bayou network to recruit locals willing to lease their land to drillers for oil and gas.
So, without her, he never would have made any kind of money. And without the money, Agnes certainly wouldn’t have married Freda’s daddy, whom she met at what Freda called “the dancehall,” but which Randall proclaimed a “strip joint” when not using its proper name, Swamp Scat.
When Freda turned fifteen, the same year her father and Agnes married, her stepmother took her to the so-called dancehall where, as the story went, she’d once served drinks at tables scattered between strategically placed brass poles. And there she entertained the bar’s male patrons with clever stories and anecdotes. But on this day, Agnes, well retired from Swamp Scat, approached the bar as a paying customer.
“A Shirley Temple for my young friend here, with a shot of bourbon,” she told the bartender. He poured young Freda her drink, after which Agnes added, “For me, how about a pint glass of vodka, to the brim with an umbrella on top.” The bartender tried to comply, but he only provoked Agnes’s wrath when he delivered a naked vodka, telling her termites had eaten the bar’s toothpicks and that roaches as big as mice had devoured all the paper umbrellas.
After that disappointment, Agnes walked Freda to the back room, which was lined with ramshackle booths and festooned with pop-bead curtains and scented candles. Between the last booth and the pungent restrooms stood a serve-yourself popcorn machine with an alcove behind it. Agnes led Freda around the machine, to the edge of the alcove, and pointed to the spot where she and Randall first made “sweet sweaty love” less than a month after they first met, and only two months after Freda’s biological mother died from a rare case of dengue fever.
Freda then made for the dock out front where she spotted a gator poacher who’d once worked with her dad. She waved her hand over her head and called out, “Monsieur. Monsieur Fauchet, a ride home in ton bateau, s’il vous plait?”
Twenty minutes later, Mr. Fauchet delivered her to the crumbling front porch of the old swamp shack where Freda and her father once lived.
“You sure you want that I leave you here all by your own self?” he asked.
“My daddy’s coming soon. I’m just saying goodbye to the old homestead for the last time. Papa’s finally selling the place.”
“Sorry to be knowing dat. But change also is good. Is different, no? His life, I mean. And so for you, too, I’m guessing.”
“You guess right. But different is not always good,” she added.
“Ah, dat’s true for sure, now ain’t it?” he replied.
* * *
Agnes had lived in Houston’s Glory Retirement Village for three years. To that point she’d received no help from Randall or Freda, not because they didn’t try, but because, as she told them, “I don’t need it. I don’t want it. I won’t have it.”
“And no wonder,” Freda had replied. “You stole what was rightfully mine: my father, his fortune, my legacy. Of course you don’t need anything.”
Still, Freda pled with God to change Agnes’s heart so she’d alter her will and then, sooner rather than later, die. Freda even thought they could help the process along if she and Randall moved to Houston and set up regular visits. They’d bring her presents, sneak in whiskey — lots of whiskey — and some of her favorite foods, which included sauerkraut, crawfish, ketchup, and New Orleans-style bread pudding.
“Houston’s too dangerous,” he told Freda yet again, as he leaned against the scorched living-room mantlepiece. The hearth below was barely big enough to hold a modest two-foot log. Anything bigger risked setting the shag carpet on fire. “It’s got more than two million people. All kinds of people. So, you never know who to trust. It isn’t cheap either. Not like here in Bison. We’d have to live in an apartment, lose our yard, our history.”
Freda swiveled her eyes toward him and then fixed her gaze on the metal detector.
“Your field of artifact dreams, you mean,” she said. “Our back yard is a mud pit. Like some old South African diamond mine. But with no diamonds.”
Randall glanced down at his scuffed brown loafers. Okay, what were they: Chicago, Houston, Washington, D.C.? The murder capitals of North America. These facts had appeared on the news so many times. And the bloody crime novels he liked to read were full of it, too.
“Damn!” he hissed and then eyed the ceiling where three years worth of watermarks from their leaky roof had gathered. The source of the seepage was still undiscovered. Some days, the stains formed a dog’s head; on others, an ostrich, which lasted only seconds before they turned into what looked like blobs of mold, or giant slugs stuck to the ceiling. Randall never knew what he would see, but he knew this: if it was mold, it might kill him slowly over time, but it wouldn’t suddenly jump to the floor and stab or shoot him to death.
“Don’t look at me,” she said, when he turned and glanced toward where she sat on the couch’s foam-rubber bench-seat, which shot up at the far end like a seesaw with no counter-balance. “I don’t have a brother like yours who does roof work. Why don’t you get his raggedy ass over here on a rainy day and make him crawl through the attic until he finds where it’s coming in? Oh, I know. He’s a drunk. He’d fall through the ceiling and kill the dog.”
“We don’t have a dog,” said Randall.
“Well, we ought to. And if we did, it’d be in mortal danger of your brother falling on it. Or now, since you’re retired, maybe you can crawl yourself up into the attic and find where the water’s coming in. I bet you wouldn’t charge ninety dollars an hour like your brother does.”
“Why not have Sylvester come fix it? If he can talk to Agnes and that lawyer of hers, then surely he can swing a hammer,” said Randall, folding his arms across his chest and setting his chin while Freda went glum and silent.
“I mean, look at us,” he said, unfolding and raising his arms like an orchestra conductor. “Fourteen thousand people. where almost everybody knows everybody else. Why, you can hardly walk down Main Street or push your cart through Grendel’s Grocery and not be able to call each person you see by name. Houston’s different. It’s a confusing mixed-up place. On any corner you can be stabbed or shot. And for what?”
“I told you what already,” Freda said while Randall watched her grind out a cigarette stub on the inside of an aluminum lid from a jar of pickled jalapeños, the peppers she’d eaten like poppers before bed the previous night. Their fiery capsaicin was an endless source for Freda’s gastro-gurgling, which kept Randall up nights. Acid reflux, over time, had worn her tonsils down to nubs.
* * *
After supper that evening, Freda scraped left-over spaghetti, habanero marinara sauce, and garlic bread from her cast-iron skillet into the mud pit out back. As the refuse plopped into the mire, she caught sight of a half-eaten meatball as it tumbled through the air. Quick as a mongoose, she snatched it back from the edge of darkness with her basting spoon, flicked it above her upturned face, and caught it in her mouth.
“What’s taking so long?” Randall shouted through the kitchen doorway. “I thought you might want to light a fire.”
“I do. It’s frosty out,” she said, as she slipped a fresh cigarette between her lips.
“So,” shouted Randall, “are you coming or not?”
Freda took a final drag on her cigarette and then flicked its glowing remains into the bog. When it hit the surface, the cigarette’s hiss quieted a pair of bullfrogs whose sullen eyes shone in the yellow bug light that beamed from the outside kitchen wall above the patio. She shivered and pulled her sweater tight at the neck.
Inside the kitchen, she set the skillet onto one of the stove’s cold burners and rubbed her bare arms where goosebumps had raised tiny hairs that probed the air like minute sea creatures sifting cool bottom currents for microscopic bits of food.
In the living room, Randall sat on the floor at the coffee table using his laptop to search for violent crime statistics. The tabletop he’d made from plywood and the legs came from four different chairs he’d found during expeditions to backstreet trash pickup sites near their neighborhood. The laptop’s screen glowed.
* * *
By the time Randall reached the drainboard in the kitchen, and Freda slapped the drying towel into his hands, she’d washed the tableware and was leisurely smoking a cigarette. Randall knew the look. She was basking in the glow of having snatched that meatball from mid-air.
“Well, you’re looking self-satisfied,” Randall said.
Freda leaned back against the edge of the kitchen counter as Randall dried the forks and knives. Then he went for the uncleaned skillet, an SOS pad in one hand and a can of Bab-o in the other. That’s when Freda grabbed his arm and yanked him up short.
“What’s wrong with you?” she said, as she shoved a container of salt, a bottle of vegetable oil, and a role of paper towels toward him across the drainboard.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked, holding up the salt and oil. “Start cooking again? I thought we were done eating.”
“Salt it. Scrub it. Scrape it. Oil it. Wipe it. Then you’re done,” said Freda, “You season a skillet; you don’t soak it.” She gave a grimacing smile around the cigarette that dangled as if pasted to her lips.
“A pan that can’t be washed is a pan that’s not worth having. It’s just a petri dish for growing germs that’ll kill us,” he said. “And I’m not in the mood for suicide tonight, or any night. I’ve got enough to worry about with your stepmother angling to get me killed. You, too, if you’re not careful.”
Ignoring him, Freda plucked the cigarette from her lips, pinched it between her middle finger and thumb and, as quick as a cocky gunslinger, fired it across the room, into the corner where another coffee can sat on the floor. The object moved too fast for Randall to track as the butt struck the can’s inside wall, exploded in sparks, and fell to the sand where it faded to gray and black.
Randall had seen her do it a thousand times, and each one amazed him. He’d never seen her miss. But still, the retired risk manager in him worried that someday there’d be an error in judgment, she’d miss, and then “Poof,” all would go up in smoke.
A few minutes later, Randall produced something about the size of a squirrel wrapped in an old rag, which he set on the coffee table.
“What is it?” asked Freda, as both squatted and sat on the floor.
“It’s a real gun,” he answered. “It came from the bog. Osiris, down at the Doc-In-The-Box, x-rayed it for me.”
“And?”
“From the size and shape, it might be a forty-four-caliber, Union Army, 1860 Colt pistol. Could be worth some money.”
“Or a hole in the head,” she said.
“You wait and see. It could come in handy.”
“Oh, I’m sure it will, Wyatt Earp.”
Randall’s thoughts turned to Osiris.
“I hope you don’t plan on using this thing,” Osiris had said.
“Because?” said Randall.
“This much I know from the x-ray. It’s almost certainly a cap-and-ball black-powder monster. Not an amateur’s gun. And you’re not a gun guy. Right?”
“Well, I’m not a gun illiterate guy, either. I grew up with guns as a kid.”
“You have to hand-load it,” said Osiris. “A measured amount of powder into the cylinder chambers. Wadding. Gun grease. Wax. Whatever. Then the ball. The bullet. All poured and packed just right. Even then, you’re lucky if it doesn’t blow up when it fires. This is a very dangerous tool in the wrong hands.”
“What gun isn’t dangerous? Especially in the wrong hands? Like a Houstonian murderer.”
“I warn you,” said Osiris, as he reached out and pulled Randall close. “This is not amateur business.”
“Look. I can do things. Ever since I was a kid, I fixed stuff. Hell, I made stuff,” he said, pointing at the secure table-top cabinet he’d built for Osiris to store the few opioids he kept in the office that he shared with three other doctors. “So, if I can’t load a gun, I deserve to be shot.”
“Don’t say such things,” Osiris warned. “It’s said that words have legs. Set loose, they go where they please to become what they are.”
“You sound like my wife.”
“Wise woman.”
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Craig Donegan
