Free Burn What Will Burn by C. B. McKenzie Page B

was seven thirty-three and would be forever if I kept that watch on.
    I slipped the cheap Timex off my wrist.
    I’d worn a watch, every day and every night, since I was in grade school, usually a cheap Timex, so without a watch on my wrist my whole arm felt strange, even more insubstantial than as per usual.
    But maybe it was time to quit keeping time and quit worrying so much about dead bodies and such.
    I had the unsettling feeling that the lawman Baxter did not much appreciate me ruining his morning with what he perceived to be a false alarm and that he and I had business as yet unfinished; but I was tired of keeping track of who I had business with, quick and dead.
    I threw the wristwatch as far upstream as I could and watched the cheap piece of plastic float almost instantly under the bridge.
    But maybe I was imagining the sheriff’s rancor toward me. I had been accused of paranoia before, officially and unofficially.
    And I should have had something better to do with my time than stand on a bridge in a backwater of northwest Arkansas wondering why a local county sheriff had gone to the trouble to make general inquiries of me and lower my self-esteem.
    But I didn’t.
    Apart from my garden and my chickens nothing in the world depended on me in the slightest. Even my money took care of itself, multiplied even as I stood staring down at water that appeared deep and cool but was really not much deeper at its deepest than a tall man standing and was as warm along the edges as blood.
    *   *   *
    I thought of what to do.
    Do Nothing made a very persuasive argument. Most of my life I usually Did Nothing, so it was a familiar activity I was successful at.
    I was probably in trouble already.
    *   *   *
    County Road 615, as a maintained public road, terminated at the old iron bridge.
    I strolled to the south side of the bridge and examined tire tracks in the dust of what CR 615 continued to be past its legally maintained limits.
    No matter my other flaws, I will say I am rather meticulous in my observations.
    (There are seventy-six teeth on one side of the zipper of my favorite short pants, for instance. Thirty-five nylon bristles per tuft on my toothbrush, forty tufts, fourteen hundred bristles altogether.)
    I noticed one particular set of tracks that ran under the gate of the fenced field and aimed south at the empty stone house one way and in a vaguely southeasterly direction down the rutted two-track road into the deep woods another way, all headed away from Civilization (as we knew it locally, at least).
    I handled the pair of padlocks on the gate. Two locks on two chains. One chain on the ground.
    There had always been three rusty locks on three lengths of rusted chain. I searched in the weeds until I found the third lock, in a mole hole, under a leaf, a rusty affair, sheared in two, by a small explosion probably, so not bulletproof as advertised. Then I noticed that the locks remaining on the gate were new, still slick with packing grease.
    Somebody had shot the old padlocks off the gate, replaced two of them with new locks. Somebody in a hurry to get inside or somebody not supposed to be inside.
    Behind me brush rustled. I threw a rock, more or less across the road in the general direction of the brush rustling.
    â€œLet that one be a warning!”
    I picked up another rock, one with better balance, I hoped.
    Briefly a pale face appeared under a tree limb. The face was vaguely familiar.
    â€œHello?!” I yelled.
    The face disappeared.
    â€œI know it’s somebody over there,” I said, in a more conversational tone, I hoped. I was not a threat to anybody at that moment and did not want anyone to be defensive toward me.
    It wasn’t the dead man over there: that I was sure of.
    â€œMr. Pickens?” I guessed. “Are you Joe Pickens Junior?”
    Nothing.
    â€œI’m a friend of your boy’s,” I said. I don’t know why I was proceeding,