Chapter Fifteen
Bubba Gets Rid of Miz Demetrice
Saturday
Thump. Thump. Thump. It was, Bubba Snoddy determined at a later time, the most amazing dream he had ever had. Even in the days of adolescence he had never had a dream like that one. There was Lurlene Grady flapping her eyelashes at Bubba in the most provocative manner. Her burnished,-blonde hair wafted back from her face by some sultry breeze. Her soft brown eyes stared at him as she affected a seductive pose not dissimilar to the one Miss Annalee Hyatt took in her infamous portrait at the Red Door Inn. Then Deputy Willodean Gray came striding into the dream like a Grecian goddess, her black hair streaming behind her, twice as long as it was in real life, and her luminous green eyes flashing. Then the two women proceeded to wrestle half naked in a ring full of Jell-O pudding.
Chocolate flavored, Bubba decided. It looked pretty tasty to him. The pudding, that was.
It seemed as though Lurlene had the upper hand, for she had Willodean in a half nelson, and was about to stick the law enforcement officer’s head under the Jell-O pudding in a decidedly unsportsmanlike manner. But somehow, perhaps with the aid of the slippery substance in which the two women were grappling, the splendiferous Willodean oozed out of the blonde’s grasping hands and turned the tables on the other woman.
It seemed astounding that in the dream, although each of the women’s bodies was concealed with fudgy, chocolate sliminess, their hair was blowing free in that same sultry, sweet-smelling breeze. In mere seconds Willodean had Lurlene pinned to the Jell-O laden floor of the ring, and the referee, none other than Miz Demetrice, Bubba’s own mother, was screaming, “One! Two! Three! Four!” even while she flipped her hand down once, twice, thrice, to indicate the count.
Then, oddly and very fishily to Bubba, something was hitting the back of his head. Thump. Thump. Thump. It was as if someone was walloping him with a wooden paddle in the direct center of the back of his head, a few inches beneath what had been his fontanel. He thought that dreams never really made sense, but this was ludicrous. He opened his eyes and discovered, to both simultaneous disappointment and relief, that he was no longer dreaming.
His long body was encased in a blanket, and someone was dragging his body, wrapped up in that same blanket, down the stairs, causing his head to hit each one of the risers. Thump. Thump. Thump. “Hey,” he protested, but all that emitted was a strangled squeak. He could hardly breathe, and he could hardly see because of the viscous, black smoke that almost completely enveloped the stairs and the two people on it.
The person dragging him let his legs go so suddenly that they hit the steps with a loud bang. “It’s about time, dad bless it,” Miz Demetrice snarled. “Do you know how big you are?” She coughed in the thickness of the smoke, waving her hand in front of her face as if that would dissipate the murk. “You were a big baby, I’ll say, but Jesus Christ Almighty, you weigh a ton now. I know that you aren’t fat, but my God in heaven above, I never realized how much of you there is to try to drag down the stairs.” She paused to cough again. “And in case you haven’t noticed, your house is on fire!”
Bubba fought to escape the trap that was the blanket that was wrapped around him. The air was heavy and full of noxious, suffocating fumes. That sure would explain a lot of things, he thought inanely. My house is on fire. Gee golly whiz. “Get this blanket offa me!” he croaked.
Miz Demetrice reached out one hand and yanked, tumbling her son down the remaining five stairs to the ground floor but retaining the blanket in her sure grasp. For a moment she looked dismayed but then brightened, muttering, “I should have done that to begin with.” Her voice got louder as she called, “Are you all right, Bubba darling?” She went down the stairs, nearly tripping on her son as she reached the bottom.
Bubba didn’t know how much more abuse his poor body could take. He had been hit, bruised, and now battered by a fall down the stairs, and who was going to believe that his mother had done that last thing? Not to mention that he was breathing in enough smoke to kill him. “Where’s my dog?” he rasped.
“She was smart enough to head for the hills as soon as I tumbled her out of bed,” Miz Demetrice said urgently. Then she pinched her son’s ear by one slender hand. “We’re leaving.”
“Ow,” Bubba protested, crawling to his feet, gasping in the smoke that surrounded them. “I’m going. I’m going.”
Outside he simultaneously rubbed the back of his head and his ear. He could hear the fire trucks in the distance and police sirens, too. He stood beside Miz Demetrice clad in his blue Smurf-covered shorts watching as the caretaker’s house burned readily. “I liked that house,” Bubba muttered, still coughing occasionally.
Miz Demetrice draped the blanket around Bubba’s shoulders. “Me too, dear.”
“Uh-thanks, Mama,” he said, hiding his sentiment with a coughing hack. The back of his head hurt, and his ear had been twisted half off, but hey, she had saved his life. Who was he to dispute that?
His mother shrugged. “You know, Bubba, I never would call you fat. But my Lord, son, how much do you weigh?”
Bubba, who hadn’t weighed himself in years, shrugged back. He knew what pants size he wore. His belly was as flat as a wash board and had just about as many ripples. He could bench press two hundred pounds if he was so inclined. He still went running in the mornings when he wasn’t being investigated by the Sheriff’s Department for murder. He was a big man. Besides diet was a four letter word.
Besides all of that, Miz Demetrice wasn’t exactly expecting an answer. After all, she knew a great many four-letter words that she would have readily used if someone had asked about her own weight. Instead, she said, “Arson?”
“Yeah, but why not the big house?” Bubba said back.
“You know why.”
“I ‘spect I do,” Bubba sighed.
The fire trucks ripped onto the property as if they were late. Miz Demetrice had called them from the big house before she had rescued her only son and his only dog from a house fire. Precious showed up to bark at the fire trucks as they pulled in beside the mansion. A county car pulled in behind the fire trucks, which contained a young sheriff’s deputy that Bubba did not know. Roscoe Stinedurf wandered over from his property to see what in the blazes was going on and found out it was exactly that, blazes. One of his wives and two of his teenaged children had come, as well, gaping up at the burning house and the firemen spraying hundreds of gallons of water on it from a tanker truck.
About an hour later, Bubba was still wrapped up in a blanket and watching from the big house’s kitchen door as Sheriff John Headrick pulled up behind the rest of the government vehicles to add his two cents worth. Miz Demetrice had made her way to a shower to alleviate sore muscles and was going to bed, in that order, having resolved that intruders would not be returning to the Snoddy place anytime soon. Bubba was waiting until the firemen had the fire at the caretaker’s place put out.
The caretaker’s home, his residence, wasn’t burned as badly as he had feared. Someone had splashed gasoline, or something equally ignitable, on the backdoor and around the exterior of the back of the house. Then they had lit it. The smoke had poured upward inside the house and certainly would have killed Bubba and Precious by carbon monoxide poisoning, if not by fire directly, if Miz Demetrice hadn’t interfered in the most motherly way she could have.
As Bubba stood there, about six firemen were puttering around the house, going in and out of the front door. A bit of watery smoke could still be seen wafting up from the rear of the house. Things were just about wrapped up for that fire.
Sheriff John stepped up to the kitchen door, underneath the porch light, which had been replaced by Bubba himself the previous evening, before he had had chicken supreme with his mother for supper. “Say, Bubba,” Sheriff John said in a neutral fashion. The shadow caused by the porch light caused the big man to appear a little meaner than usual.
“Hey, Sheriff John,” Bubba said, his voice still hoarse. No words
to be wasted here. He didn’t have a lot to say to Sheriff John, and Bubba suspected that the sheriff didn’t have a lot to say to him either.
“Chief Andrews says that fire is plumb near out,” Sheriff John said casually. He most certainly was not casual.
“Someone was trying to kill me,” Bubba opined genially. He, also, was not genial.
“You see anyone?”
“I was asleep,” Bubba said. “Would have stayed asleep, too, for a real long time, ifin my mother hadn’t dragged me out of bed.” His hand returned to rubbing the sore spot on the back of his head. Any more bumps, scrapes, or bruises and he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. He wouldn’t be in worse shape than if he had jumped from an airplane without a parachute. And he didn’t even want to think about the effects of the smoke-related lack of oxygen that Miz Demetrice had rescued him from. He’d be expelling black-tainted goop from his lungs via his membranes for the next month.
“That’s what the fire chief said.” Sheriff John stared at Bubba’s face in the bright light of the porch. “You look like hell.” Bubba did. He had black streaks of soot running down his face, all over his hands, and his hair stood up straight on half of his head, kind of like that kid from The Little Rascals. Not only that, but Sheriff John could smell Bubba as if his nose was glued underneath his armpit. It wasn’t a pleasant smell either. Finally, there was the fact that the other man was standing in the doorway in a pair of boxer shorts with what appeared to be little blue critters on them and only a blanket draped over his shoulders to cover himself up with.
“It’s been a long few weeks of late,” Bubba agreed.
“Fire chief says it’s arson,” Sheriff John also said, casually. He still really wasn’t casual.
“Said someone was trying to kill me,” Bubba said stubbornly. He was really stubborn. He’d learned it from the stubbornness master of the universe, Miz Demetrice.
“You said that,” Sheriff John concurred. “But I’m thinking that maybe you set the fire yourself.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Insurance money?”
“Miz Demetrice only has insurance on the mansion.” Bubba nearly grinned at Sheriff John, happy to prove him wrong on some account. That would be easy to verify with Miz Demetrice and with their insurance agency. The Snoddy Mansion was a historical relic with a whole lot of old, historical stuff inside it. It didn’t matter that the place was falling down but that almost everything inside it had some kind of significant value to it. The caretaker’s house was just a little house on the same property, changed from stables less than a hundred years before. Nothing historical about it, unless an individual counted the time that Miss Annalee Hyatt’s daughter visited and spent the night there back in the early 1900's, in order to be honored by the town for the 40th anniversary of her mother’s heroic exploits.
“Deputy Gray says you’ve been having all kinds of problems out here,” Sheriff John said.
Bubba considered this information. Evidently, Willodean had let the cat out of the bag for whatever reason. It wasn’t a secret, but Bubba didn’t think that Sheriff John would be receptive enough to receive such information or take much credence in it.
“That equipment that you found, that stuff she was checking out for you, had been purchased by none other than Neal Ledbetter,” Sheriff John offered. “At Radio Shack. And some at a specialty shop up the freeway about twenty miles.”
Which explains why Willodean told you, thought Bubba. Murdered fella just happens to be the one who broke and entered the same mansion as where one murder suspect named Bubba lives, or lives real close to. She couldn’t keep that to herself. Not legally, not even morally. He couldn’t even feel the least bit sore at her. But maybe that’s because she’s so damned cute. His mind went blank for a second. Stop that, he chastised himself, thinking of chocolate Jell-O.
“Told you I thought he was trying to scare off my mother,” Bubba said. “Walmart Supercenter, my lily white ass!”
Sheriff John chuckled. “Now that would be a real trick. Neal Ledbetter wasn’t the cleverest of fellas, was he?” He was referring to the fact that someone trying to scare Miz Demetrice off would like be trying to put mascara on a wild elephant.
Bubba didn’t say anything.
“He wanted the land for a Walmart,” Sheriff John said, answering his own unasked question.
“A Walmart Supercenter,” Bubba grumbled, but Sheriff John went on.
“But why not just pick another site. There’s plenty of land around here that would be a good spot for a Walmart. Plenty of people willing to sell, even to a little dickhead like Neal Ledbetter.” Sheriff John considered. “Good spot here, though. Prolly the best spot.
Now, Bubba knew it had been more than just the Walmart Supercenter. Now he knew. Then, he hadn’t. Sheriff John didn’t know. Bubba didn’t think he would ever get it. “You find anything interesting at Neal’s place?”
“Like what, Bubba Snoddy?”
“Chains, old papers, a written confession of why he might have killed Melissa,” Bubba said very seriously. He pulled the blanket close around his shoulders.
“Sorry,” Sheriff John said insincerely. He almost smiled. “Just because Neal Ledbetter might have wanted the place as a Walmart doesn’t mean he up and shot Melissa Dearman in the back.”
“Walmart Supercenter,” Bubba said and then added, “But you think I did.” It wasn’t a question.
“I think you could have.” Sheriff John’s voice was coolly objective. “I cain’t dismiss you because you some laid-back good ol’ boy who putters around as a mechanic down at Bufford’s Gas and Grocery most nights, dates a waitress, brings her back before ten at night, and don’t drink ‘til you pass out every Friday and Saturday night.”
“What in the hell does that have to do with the price of tea in China?” Bubba resisted the almost overwhelming urge to slam the door shut in the sheriff’s face. “You think I go around acting the way I do because all the while I was planning to commit a murder, maybe years in the future. Hot damn, I didn’t know I was that smart.”
“A lot of people around here don’t know you have a college degree,” said Sheriff John. He hooked one hand in his belt loop, just like Deputy Steve Simms did. Now Bubba could plainly see where the deputy had gotten the habit.
“Who would go and tell you such foolishness as that?” Bubba knew when to play dumb. A fella went and got a degree from a university, then all of a sudden he was some kind of nerd, and didn’t that look bad around a place like Pegramville? Even if his degree was in something mundane and dull as history, which was about as non-committal as a college student could get, except for maybe liberal arts.
“Your mother spilled the beans,” Sheriff John said.
Bubba made a face. Miz Demetrice had the biggest mouth at the most inconvenient times. Sure, she could run an illegal gambling ring, keep that secret, keep the local police right off of her back but a little thing like a degree, she had to share to every cotton-picking body in the world. “So now I’m a citified fool, who coolly planned the death of my ex-fiancée for three years. How’d I get her here?”
“Don’t know. The Dearman’s nanny says that Mrs. Dearman told her that she needed to take care of some personal business in Texas and she would be back in a few days, at most. There’s a record of a phone call to the Dearman residence from the mansion. You could have told her a bunch of lies to get her here. That you still loved her, that she was the center of your universe, that maybe you’d just up and kill yourself if you didn’t see her one more time.”
“Then why did I leave the body out in the open for everyone to see?” asked Bubba. Just when he thought he was getting ahead, Sheriff John blindsided him with another theory that calmly put him as the cruelest man set on revenge that ever lived in Pegram County. “A meaner man never existed,” they would say for years to come,” thought Bubba. “He was so mean that he even...gasp...kicked his poor old Basset hound.”
“Because Neal showed
up unexpectantly,” Sheriff John answered, victoriously. He had that answer all ready to go. “He saw you just before you were going to cart that body off to hide it somewhere. God knows that you have a hundred or so acres of land, not to mention half of it swamp. And perfect for hiding a body. Hell, your father and about a hundred others dug enough holes on it to plant a thousand bodies in.”
“Jesus Christ, I am one bad son of a bitch,” Bubba said bitterly.
“Then you set the fire on your own house as a diversionary tactic,” Sheriff John said, “in order to occupy the investigators with the so-called individual that’s been trying to scare you and your mother off the Snoddy lands.”
Bubba let out a deep sigh. He wasn’t about to suggest to Sheriff John that maybe Bubba himself snookered Neal into buying that fancified equipment to make sounds in the mansion, too. Even if it was sarcastic in nature, it would be like handing his head over to the Sheriff on a silver platter. And he wasn’t going to bring up Melvin Wetmore, Mark Evans, and the elusive Mary Bradley because Sheriff John would probably blow holes in those theories, as well. “I guess you got it all figured out. Now what?”
“I’m waiting for some ballistics on the bullet that killed Neal. We dug it out of the Donut Shop beside Ledbetter’s Realty. We’ll need to confiscate all of the weapons in the house, Bubba, for comparison.” Sheriff John smiled widely, kind of like what Bubba imagined the grin of a great white shark would be like, right before it ate someone.
“You got a warrant?” Bubba asked nicely.
Sheriff John patted his shirt pocket. “You want to read it?”
“You know what?” Bubba was as tired as a man could be without falling on his face flat out on the floor. “I do.” And he did, much to Sheriff John’s consternation, from front to back, and in slow excruciating detail, pausing to look up every third word in the family’s oversized Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. By the time Bubba finally finished the warrant he could hear Sheriff John’s top teeth grinding away at the bottom. An hour later, Sheriff John left the mansion with every single gun in his legal possession. Miz Demetrice had been woken up and followed Sheriff John around the house, saying, “You going to leave us without protection, Mr. Sheriff Man? This is just another example of po-lice harassment. Just wait until I talk to Lawyer Petrie. He eats people like you for breakfast and poops ‘em out at lunch. I’m going to call every congressman from Texas about this morally deficient outrage! Did we wake up in the Soviet Union this morning? Do we live in communist China now? This is exactly the reason that we have the Constitution of the United States of America! We have every right to bear just as damn many arms as we can buy!”
To Bubba’s amazement, Sheriff John didn’t even lose his temper once. He merely collected all of the weapons, which included some that Bubba didn’t know about, much less even knew what to call them, placed them in a box, wrote out a receipt for them, and presented the paper to Miz Demetrice.
She leaned out the kitchen door, dressed in her scarlet robe, and screamed at the county car as it pulled away, “I bet you don’t do this right next to an election year!”
Bubba went to the telephone in the kitchen and held the receiver in one hand, while he flipped through the yellow pages.
Miz Demetrice watched him with something akin to astonishment. She was so furious that she couldn’t believe that her son was so calm. She had figured that everything would be just hunky-dory once Sheriff John figured out that her son, Bubba, was just the most innocent man on the face of the planet. All they had to do was wait it out, and then, Sheriff John would say, ‘Okey-dokey, you can go on home. Sorry about all the accusations, and name-calling, and general defaming that went on. We’ll print a retraction in the paper.’
But it didn’t happen. And even worse, it didn’t look like it was going to happen. Then there was her son, looking like nothing had happened to him, and although he was as black as a coal miner he was going down one page of the telephone book with his index finger. He made a call, poking on the numbers as if he had all the time in the world. He waited and then asked, “I sure would like to know when the next train to Dallas is?”
Miz Demetrice’s mouth dropped open.
“It is? Well, that’s just great. Can you tell me if you have any seats on it? You do. Yes, it’s an early train, isn’t it?” Bubba tapped on the cover of the telephone book absently. “I know the weather has been a little mild here...thank you, I think I’m a nice fella, even at five in the morning. Good-bye, now.”
Bubba disconnected the line with one blackened hand. He dialed again and listened to the phone for a long time before someone answered on the other end. “Miz Adelia? Yes, I know what time it is...a dream about what...Tom Cruise...Is that right?...No, I ain’t never dreamt about Tom Cruise...Maybe Sylvester Stallone once...but that was completely innocent...Listen, we had a fire out here...No, everyone is okay...Ma is her normal self...That’s right, as mean as hell...I’m a gonna put her on a train to Dallas this morning, and I don’t want you to come to the house for the rest of the week...I’ll give you a call...Consider it a paid vacation.” He looked up as Miz Demetrice started to say something loudly and then abruptly shut her mouth. “You just rest up for the week, and when Miz Demetrice comes back, we’ll all be ready to take on her orneriness then. Bye, Ma’am.”
Miz Demetrice stared at her only son with what he termed the glare of doom. It was a look perfected over years of sheer biliousness, practiced on hapless shopkeeper, card cheaters, and mayors who didn’t toady to the Snoddy matriarch as the rightful ruler of her own universe. She had used it on her son on the odd occasion when it was warranted, until her son had figured out that it was only a look and nothing that could hurt him personally. Unless one counted the grudge Miz Demetrice could hold for months, and in some cases, years.
Bubba gave her back a look, measure for measure. “You’re going. If I have to carry you kicking and screaming.”
“You don’t think I’ll kick and scream?” she asked slowly, dangerously.
“I don’t care if you tell people I beat you with a big stick, you’re going. So you might as well get dressed and pack your clothes. I’ll call Aunt Caressa.” Bubba would have smiled at the expression of utter disbelief on his mother’s face, but he knew that if he did, he would suffer for the remainder of his natural life, if he even had one after that.
In the end, Bubba escorted Miz Demetrice to the Amtrak station with minimal fuss. He smelled like smoke, dressed in jeans rescued from his blackened bedroom, and Precious wanted to fight over the passenger’s seat. But he passed his mother onto the train conductor like he was presenting the Queen of England to the President of the United States of America.
Miz Demetrice took turns scowling at her son and the train conductor, who was clearly flustered.
At the train station there was at least ten families seeing someone else off on the seven AM train to Dallas. Half of them couldn’t wait to call someone about Bubba’s mother escaping his clutches to run off to Dallas. By the time the news got back to Mary Lou Treadwell, operator of the emergency line, the story was that Bubba himself had hijacked the seven AM train with an Uzi submachine gun and taken one hundred screaming hostages.
It was all the same to Bubba. He had gotten rid of Miz Demetrice. The angels very nearly wept.
~ ~ ~