A Flake Falls in Woody Creek

This is what I was writing the very moment Hunter Thompson shot himself.

It’s a fun little thing, like a finger-painting. But when you put a finger-painting up on the wall beside a masterwork like...say...Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, you see it for the simpleminded scribbling it is.

If I’ve enjoyed my scribbling, simpleminded though it may be, it’s because I could look up and see Thompson’s masterworks hanging there.

Writers don’t leave suicide notes. They shoot themselves because words have failed them. But Thompson’s words have never failed me. I got many words from him, and here are a few. I wish I could give them back in better style. I’ll keep trying.

A Big Pile of Ostrich Shit

Grateful Ed

Bax dropped the last sack of dog food next to the others and puffed like the brakes on a county school bus. “There, fifteen,” he said.

I pushed the old register keys carefully. “Let’s see. Seven hundred and fifty pounds of Alpo and one stick of beef jerky. Beef jerky, Bax? Why’s an ostrich farmer buyin’ cow meat?”

He fumbled bills onto the faded rubber change mat and squinted across the counter. “You ever smell a big pile of ostrich shit in the hot sun, Ed?”

“Can’t say as I have.”

He shuddered. “It’d drive a crow off a road-killed possum.”

I broke the tape on a new pack of ones and gave him his change. “Ah. Well, I’ll help y’get that outside.”

He folded the ones into his wallet and stooped for one of the orange sacks. In the parking lot we bucked them into the bed of his battered GMAC. He’d hit a trifecta of bumper stickers that was unlikely to be reproduced anywhere else in the world: a bad caricature of Bill Clinton with his head buried in the sand, Calvin pissing on a Brahma bull, and an ostrich standing over the words: “My other car is a Struthio.”

We finished loading and as we were shaking hands, tires crunched the gravel behind us. Bert Darby’s Lexus was a silver galaxy of sun-sparkles and he wheeled it into the handicapped space. Bax’s lip curled.

The door opened and the bell dinged softly as Bert labored himself out of the car. He’d lost a leg to a corn combine a few years back and gotten a big settlement from the manufacturer. He and the little Atlanta gold-digger he’d married had spawned about forty yard-apes, and now she was fat and he was a big shot with the County.

“Ed, Bax,” he said, thumbing his Stetson.

Bax spat and pulled his cap down low over his eyes. “I gotta git.” As he pulled out of the parking lot he fishtailed his truck and sprayed gravel all over Bert’s car.

“God-dammit!” Bert hollered. His knuckles were white against the ebony handle of his cane as he wobbled around the car surveying the damage.

“What’s that about?” I asked.

He flicked a chip in the mirror-bright paint and looked up from the car door. “Aw, hell. School procurement committee turned Bax down for a contract and now he’s all worked up over it. Thinks we oughtta supply the schools from locals since they’re the one payin’ the taxes.”

“It wouldn’t bother me none to get more business from the County,” I said. “I run this place on a damn shoestring. But let me get this straight. He wanted to sell ostrich meat to the school system?”

Bert looked me straight in the eye. “Yup. Said he could supply about three hundred pounds of ostrich-burger a week, delivered to the junior high at a dollar forty a pound”

I held my stomach. “Bert, my daughter goes to the junior high. You wanna make her eat ostrich? Seriously?”

He shrugged. “Leaner than beef, great source of protein, low cholesterol. Sure, why not?”

“I don’t know, Bert…seems a little Reagan to me.”

Bert chuckled. “Times they are a-changin’. Bigger problem was Bax’s askin’ price.”

“How so? A dollar forty’s as cheap as it gets for meat. And jeez, Bert, Bax is broker than I am. Help him out.”

He grimaced. “It’s not that simple, Ed. We priced it and Aramark bid a dollar twenty-two. So we signed with the low bidder.”

I nodded. “They undercut him. No wonder he’s pissed about his taxes. He pays for a subsidized lunch program and the program goes and subsidizes his competition.”

“Well, he’d best catch up. The sole proprietorship’s a thing of the past, Ed.” He glanced at the peeling sign over my door—Ed’s Hardware—and he cleared his throat. “Um, no offense. Anyway, what’ve you got for pistol shells?”

I scratched my temple. Arrogant prick or not, his money was good. “Come on in, I’ll show you.”

A few days later the siren on the courthouse started whooping at around three in the afternoon. It startled me awake and I jumped up from my chair behind the counter. I hadn’t had a customer since ten and I locked up for the day and jogged across the street to the VFD. The Chief and Melba Sue and I climbed into Number Nine, our pumper-tanker. “Route three, one-forty-one,” the Chief barked at Melba Sue.

I was in the back seat zipping into my bunker coat and I paused when I heard the address. “Bax Haskell got a fire at his place?”

Melba Sue gave Nine the gas. The Chief hooked an arm behind the seat to steady himself and looked over his shoulder at me. “I wish. Somebody phoned in a murder.”

I was relieved to see Bax waiting on us by his mailbox. Jimmy Nalber’s squad car was parked beside the house, lights looping, and Jimmy was walking across the stockpen towards the barn, gun drawn. The ground in the pen was an inch deep in what I took for dirty snow, at first, until I realized it was ninety degrees out and Jimmy was wading through feathers.

“Whatcha got, Bax?” Melba Sue called.

“It’s a fuckin’ slaughterhouse in there!” Bax yelled. He had a raw bruise on his cheekbone. His hands were covered with blood and there was blood on the knees of his overalls and the toes of his boots. My armpits grew damp.

There was a high thin scream from inside the barn. Melba Sue set her jaw and stomped down and we accelerated up the driveway and broke through the pen fence with a loud guitar-string twang. She almost ran Jimmy over as he bolted out of the barn being pursued by…well, by a screeching fiend so horrible that at first my mind wouldn’t even process what I was seeing.

Jimmy ran straight up Nine’s bumper, hollering. He scrabbled up the windshield and onto the roof, out of our sight. We heard his boot heels crinkling the metal.

The ostrich (for that’s what the hell-fiend was) strutted around Number Nine. The black bird was every inch of seven feet tall and its beady eyes glared with mean hatred and stupid suspicion. Its feathers were clotted with blood. We sat there, shocked and silent, and it suddenly lunged and whocked a dent into the hood with its beak.

A gunshot roared from above us and a puff of dust lept up at the ostrich’s taloned feet. It arched its neck and hissed like a cobra.

“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” It was Bax, sprinting towards us.

“Get back!” Jimmy shouted down.

“No, no!” Bax reached the ostrich and threw his arms around its ropy neck. “Poopty-Doo won’t hurtcha! She’s just scared!”

“Poopty-Doo?” I repeated. “That thing’s name is Poopty-Doo?”

Bax stroked the ostrich’s head and whispered into whatever passed for her ears, and Poopty-Doo came over all docile. She blinked her long eyelashes and lowered her head bashfully and butted her forehead into Bax’s chest like a love-starved kitten.

“Aw,” cooed Melba Sue.

The Chief craned his head out of the window. “You can come down now, Jimmy,” he said, his voice just a tad bit dry.

Jimmy’s voice was tight. “---- that.”

The stench in the barn was worse than anything I’d ever smelled before, including when I’d lived in New Jersey. Bax was right, it was a slaughterhouse. There were nine ostriches lying in limp-necked lumps about the barn. Spatters of black and red and grey patched the rough wooden walls in a tarry quiltwork. Poopty-Doo darted around her stall in a restless circle, cheeping nervously.

“I’m ruint,” Bax sobbed. “These ones were my breedin’ stock. Eight-thousand dollar birds.”

“You’re seriously accusing Bert Darby of this?” the Chief asked.

Bax sniffled. “He kilt my birds! You wait ‘til I find his sorry ass.”

“Hey, check this out,” Melba Sue said. She was in one of the stalls pointing at a window. Something had drilled a neat hole through it and the glass around the hole was a spiderweb of cracks. “He shoot your birds?”

“Uh-hunh!”

“Oh shit,” I said. “Yeah. He bought a box of shells from me the other day.”

The Chief played a good grouch but he had a soft spot for young kids and harmless simpletons. He patted Bax’s shoulder. “Don’t worry too much about it, son. If he did it, insurance’ll pay for it, or either he will.” And then he bellowed at a simpleton of quite another flavor: “JIMMY! GET YOUR ASS IN HERE AND TAKE THIS MAN’S STATEMENT!”

That night it took three showers to exorcize the smell from my skin. I was helping my daughter with her algebra when the phone rang.

It was Jimmy. “Ed, reckon you can ride down for a few minutes?”

“Well, I’m sorta tied up. Can I see you tomorrow?”

“No, sorry. It needs to be right now. It’s important.”

“What?”

He sighed. “County Hospital rang over ‘bout a half hour ago and told us Bert Darby’s dead.”

“Shot?”

“No, somebody beat the shit out of him. Can you come down?”

At the station house I sat across from Jimmy in the dayroom. There was a big mess on his desk and the coffee he poured me was terrible. I set the mug amidst a ream of loose papers and noticed a plastic bag marked with Bert’s name. It held keys, cigarettes, some pocket change, and a big roll of cash. Bert’s cane leaned in the corner.

Jimmy tapped his pencil on his bony chin. “And you’re prepared to say you heard Bax threaten Bert’s life?”

I spread my hands in the air. “I guess so, but just ‘cause he said it don’t mean he did it, right? I mean, I’ve known Bax my whole life. He’s dim but he ain’t a killer.”

Jimmy leaned back in his chair. His flat eyes and sinewy neck reminded me of Poopty-Doo’s. “Did you see how savage that sumbitch that chased me was?” he asked, as if he’d read my mind.

“Yeah, I saw.”

He pointed a finger at me. “How many of those bloodthirsty things you think Bax kills in an average week?”

“I get your point. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Are you gonna arrest him?”

“It’s a good bet. The sheriff and the PA are meetin’ first thing tomorrow.”

“Well, let me know what you find out, would you?”

“‘Course.” He looked down at the desk and started fiddling with the plastic bag. “Damn, that’s a lotta money, ain’t it? You think a man like Mister Darby carries a bankroll like that all the time?”

“Wouldn’t know,” I said. He started counting the bills out. I was thinking of my house payment and how much a math tutor would cost when something caught my eye. “Can I see that one?”

“This one here?” he asked, holding up a dollar bill. It was stamped up the left side with blue ink:

Conway County Farmers’ Bank

“Thanks,” I said. “Never mind.”

Jimmy looked confused. “All right,” he said, and went on counting.

I bought a six-pack and rode out to Bax’s place. It was sunset but he was still working in his pasture, scooping out a big hole with an old yellow backhoe. Beside the hole was the body of an ostrich, wrapped in the trace chains he’d used to drag it down from the barn.

“Hold up, hold up,” I shouted over the diesel, waving the beers.

He disengaged the drive system and shut the engine down and climbed off the machine. “Hey, that looks good.”

I cracked one for him and he drank deeply and wiped the cold can across his forehead. We sat down and let our legs dangle in the hole.

“Somebody beat Bert to death,” I said, watching him.

He pooched out his lip, thought for a while, and nodded. “Well. I s’pose he deserved it.”

“Did he?”

Bax leaned over and put his hand on the neck of the dead ostrich. “Yeah, he did. Are you gonna ask me if I did it?”

“No. But I think somebody’s goin’ to, pretty soon. I’ve got a different question.”

“What’s that?”

“I want to know why a man in your dire financial straights was givin’ money to Bert Darby.”

His eyes went wide. “Who said I did that?”

“Nobody. But he had a dollar bill on him that I think I gave you in change a few days ago. Remember that deck of ones I had to break open? I get one of those from the Farmers’ Bank every week or so.”

He stared into the hole for a long time.

“How’d you get that bruise on your cheek?” I asked gently. “Ya’ll fight?”

“All right, all right,” he said. He crushed the can between his palms and threw it into the hole, and he told me his story.

Jimmy called me the next day. “You’re not gonna believe this, Ed.”

“Prob’ly not,” I agreed. I was reading the Crier’s help wanted section and wondering how a career in fast food management could possibly be as rewarding as the ad promised.

“I knew that bastard was savage,” Jimmy said.

“Bax?”

“No, that bird. Poopty-shit.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“Bert Darby wasn’t beaten to death, he was pecked.”

Hell. It sounded like he was getting close to the truth, but I didn’t have to make it easy for him. “You know, Jimmy, I really think you’d be happier on the job if you’d make a habit of explainin’ yourself more clearly.”

His voice turned sour. “Fine. Bert Darby died of internal injuries resulting from repeated blows to his gut with an object about the size of…oh…an ostrich’s beak. You with me? Somebody or some thing hit him over and over again like a triphammer, and he bled to death later. Slow, inside his belly.”

“So Bax didn’t kill him, then.”

“Well, yes he did. Indirectly. If I sic my dog on you and he tears out your throat, it’s the same as if I shot you point blank.”

I closed my eyes. “Your theory is that Bax sicced an ostrich on Bert?”

“Exactly!”

“Oh, well, good luck with that in court.”

Jimmy chuckled. “We got one other thing. We listened to the 911 tape and Bert is the one that called in the murder.”

I sat stock still for about three seconds. “Wait a minute. Bert Darby phoned in his own murder? How? They got phones in hell now?”

“No, no, no,” Jimmy said. “He called from Bax’s house. Said he wanted to report a killin’ and dropped the phone. And now we’re gonna do what we gotta do.”

After Bax had been in jail for a few days Doyle Martin asked me to come by. He was a Methodist attorney who took on pro bono cases every now and again and he’d agreed to take on Bax’s. His office was paneled in pine and the number and names of the books on his shelves made me dizzy.

“It was a box of nine millimeter,” I told him. I slid the receipt with Bert Darby’s signature on it across his desk.

He curled a hand over his mouth and looked over the tops of his reading glasses at me. “And that’s all you know?”

“I don’t know what to say. Is there somethin’ else?”

He stared at me.

“OK,” I said. “Bax told me what really happened.”

“Did he?”

Now I stared at him. “Well, maybe not,” I finally said. “I guess all I have to go on is what he told me.”

“I need you to tell me the version you heard,” he said. “It’s best for Bax if I know how the story has changed since the incident. It’ll help me in front of the jury.”

The thought of Bax up against a jury made me see red. “Come on, Doyle, the whole town knows Bert Darby was crooked. Find twelve people who won’t be glad he’s dead.”

Doyle held his face still, and I wondered if Methodists played poker. I shook my head. “Bax had it figured that he could bribe Bert into changing his mind about the contract for ostrich meat. So they met and Bert tried to hit him up for a few hundred bucks extra to repair some damage Bax did to his car.”

“Damage caused at your hardware store.”

“Right. So some things got said and they started in yellin’ and Bert socked him. And that’s when the ostrich jumped Bert. Bax said it was ‘cause they’re social birds and they attack the common enemy. I guess Bax is part of the flock. The ostrich trampled Bert pretty good before Bax could drag it off him. Bert drew his gun and shot all the birds and fled the scene. End of story.”

Doyle reached for a notepad and scribbled a few lines.

“Is that the same version you heard?” I asked. “Because it’s got more holes in than Bax’s ostriches and I hope you’re helpin’ him fill ‘em in.”

He stopped scribbling. “I have to protect my client’s confidentiality and I can’t address that question.”

I chewed my lip. “Do you think it’ll stand up in court?”

Doyle put his pen down. “If Bert provoked the animal Bax won’t serve manslaughter time. Beyond that, I couldn’t say.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Ed, I’ll give you some free advice. If you ever get tempted to burn down your hardware store, don’t.”

At three AM I sat straight up in bed. So that’s what Doyle had meant.

Cassidy was sitting at the kitchen table in her Yoda PJs. She had a glass of milk and her algebra book was open. Her eyes were red.

I sat down beside her with my own glass.

“Algebra sucks,” she said. “Listen to this: ‘In any matrix an individual’s value is dependent upon its position.’ That’s so stupid.” She looked up. “Why are you smiling at me?”

“Algebra’s stupid, but you ain’t,” I said, ruffling her honey-blonde hair.

On Sunday afternoon I locked the store and drove over to the county jail.

Prisoners and their families milled about in the sun. Bax and I sat at one of the picnic tables in the fenceyard. The orange jumpsuit fit him like a dog food sack. He put his elbows on the table and buried his face in his hands. “I hate this place,” he choked.

“I’m gonna bail you out,” I said. “You need to be back out at your farm, gettin’ ready for those new hens when they come in. Is that the right term, hens?”

He uncovered his face and looked at me like I’d plucked him from the ocean. “Yeah, hens. You’d do that for me? How?”

“I’m thinkin’ I’ll take out a mortgage on the store. I own the property outright, so there’ll be eighty grand or so. We can pump the extra cash back into the farm. But you have to drop your insurance claim.”

Doubt crossed his face. “Drop the claim? Why would I do that?”

“’Cause you killed your own birds. After Bert killed the one that attacked him and took off for your house to call the law. He left his gun behind and you shot the rest thinking you could blame it on him. Insurance fraud, and besides, you shot your breeding stock. Not very smart.”

His eyes narrowed. “You said ‘we.’”

“You and me. And Cassidy. We’re gonna raise ostriches together.”

He smiled for the first time I could remember. “You ever smell a big pile of ostrich shit in the hot sun, Ed?”

I took a deep breath. “Well, the hardware store is bust. And if it’s a choice between ostrich shit and a career in fast food…”