Eli and Vernon Browbridge rolled The Fat Man's body from the
trunk of their 1987 Pontiac Grand Prix into the hole in the
ground they had just dug.
Eli spoke first. "I wonder if a dead fat guy smells worse'n a thin broad been roasting in a hot car trunk?" He
grabbed a dirty handkerchief from his back pocket, blew his
nose and wiped the sweat from his face. Dirt and snot streaked
his cheek.
"You got me," Vernon replied. "Ain't
never had no dead broad in my trunk before."
Eli put a dirty hand to his chin. "Sure
makes you think. One day you think you're hot shit and
the next day you smell
like it."
Vernon nodded, but he paid little attention to his brother. He was enjoying the cool breeze drifting down from the North Georgia Mountains. As a child, he'd spend nights in his sleeping bag on the back porch falling asleep to the sound of chirping insects. Even with the skeeters, Vernon preferred nature to the room he shared with his brother, who would spend half the night asking him questions he had no idea how to answer.
"Vern," Eli asked. "How we gonna get
The Fat Man into this little hole?"
Vernon circled the overstuffed grave. He tried bending Fat Man's legs, hoping the stiffening limbs might snap off. No luck.
"We gotta dig more. That's all there
is to it. We gotta push The Fat Man on his side and dig
this hole deeper."
It was hard work digging through roots and Georgia's hard clay. When they finally pushed the body towards the deeper side, Eli wondered if that was enough.
"No," Vernon said, the body still stuck up on one side. "We
gotta fit him in and cover him up good or we won't get paid."
Eli spit a mouthful of dirt. "Why's
Georgia dirt get so hard in the sun?"
"Iron," Vernon said. "Georgia soil's gotta lotta iron in it. That's what makes it so hard." He always felt proud when he had an answer to one of Eli's stupid ass questions. "That's why it's so red. The iron rusts when it mixes with rain." He paused to let Eli appreciate his smarts. "I
sure like the way these woods smell in the rain."
"Yeah. Me, too. Remember how when
we was kids we'd run through the wet woods nekkid? Give
Mama a fit."
They continued digging. It was noon and the sun took no pity on them. Their T-shirts stuck to their bodies; their jeans looked like they'd have to be scraped off.
An hour later they had dug The Fat Man's grave almost four feet deep. There was still a little hump along the middle of the hole, but the brothers decided it would do. They laid out The Fat Man's body until he looked almost comfortable and began shoveling dirt and leaves over him. A mound formed by The Fat Man's belly remained visible, but they covered the hole with more leaves until the mound evened out.
"You think we should say a prayer
or something, Vern?"
Eli was back with his damned questions. "Wouldn't do no good," Vernon said after a few seconds. "Only
prayer I know is 'Now-I-Lay-Me-Down-to-Sleep.' I reckon it's
too late for that one."
"Vern," Eli had on his serious face, the one where his forehead wrinkled and his eyebrows met. "Are
we bad people for doing this?"
Vernon answered immediately. "No, sir. The man deserves a grave, don't he? We're giving it to him. We didn't kill him. Now that'd be wrong. We just doing a honest day's work for a honest day's pay, just like Mama always says." He leaned on his shovel. "When
we get the money, we'll give her some and she'll give part
of it to Reverend Atwater. So the way I see it, we doing
God's work."
Proud of himself, Vernon topped off
the grave with more leaves and tree branches. "I reckon
this here's as fine a grave as The Fat Man deserves.
The two brothers stepped back to admire their work, threw their shovels into the back of their car and drove off to collect their pay.
In less than two hours, a pack of dogs happened on the shallow grave and uncovered most of the body. Soon after that, a young couple driving down the deserted dirt road searching for wild blackberries saw the mangled corpse and called 9-1-1 on their cellphone. An hour later, Sheriff Erskine Calloway identified what was left of the body as Horace Latimer, aka The Fat Man, a local loan shark. He specialized in loans of twenty to one hundred dollars to illegals and gamblers, often demanding twice that if the loan wasn't repaid within twenty-four hours.
"At least we won't have a problem finding folks who wanted to kill him," the sheriff told his deputy. He sniffed at the body like a bitch in heat. "Sure is getting ripe out here in the sun. Don't reckon he's been dead too long, though. Can't see no gunshot or stab wounds, but it's hard to tell with all these dog bites. The man's so fat he just might have ate himself to death. But I doubt seriously he buried his damn self." Sheriff Calloway looked at his deputy who was writing furiously in his ever-present notebook. "You
getting all this down, son?"
"Yes, sir."
"We won't know nothing for sure till Doc Robbins has himself a look-see. Probably won't know much then, if Doc already drank his lunch." He turned to his deputy. "It
sure ain't like that CSI on television."
Eli and Vernon collected their five-hundred dollars for a good day's work and visited their mother. LuAnne Browbridge had the sturdy, no nonsense look of a woman who raised two boys by herself after beating her drunkard of a husband nearly to death with a frying pan. Nothing surprised her, least of all Eli and Vernon. When they handed her one-hundred dollars in twenties, she asked no questions. She just reached under the top of her faded housedress and stashed the money safely into her bra.
"You boys gimme that kind of money,
you got plenty more. Hand over another fifty."
The boys complied without a word.
She separated twenty dollars from
the money. "This here's
for Reverend Atwater. I'll ask him to pray for your sorry
asses. Now y'all wash up good and you can stay for supper."
The next day, Dr. Robbins said he
couldn't determine cause of death for sure until the autopsy,
but it seemed natural
enough. The dog bites, at least, were post mortem. "From what I can tell it looks like his heart gave way," the
doctor concluded.
"Well," Sheriff Calloway said to his deputy. "We
got ourselves a di-lemma. If The Fat Man here died of natural
causes, why'd
someone go to the trouble of burying him in the woods?"
The deputy wrote the question in his notebook, adding three question marks.
Sheriff Calloway waited for an answer.
When none was offered, he spoke. "My guess is someone didn't
want us to know they was with him."
The deputy nodded.
"Off-hand, I don't know anyone who'd want it known they was with this sad excuse for a human being. So we got ourselves a whole mess of folks to question. Or we could look at it another way." He
paused for the deputy to turn the page in his notebook.
"If you had a dirty job you wanted
done, like burying a body, who'd you get to do it?"
The deputy looked up, his eyes flashing
wide. "The Browbridge
brothers."
"And who would do the job so half-assed
the body'd be discovered before the devil had time to cart
it off to hell?"
"Eli and Vern."
Sheriff Calloway smiled. "What say
we have ourselves a little chat with the brothers Browbridge?"
Mrs. Browbridge wasn't the least surprised
when she saw the sheriff's car pull up in front of her
house. "Eli! Vernon!" she shouted to her sons who were watching stunt bowling on ESPN. "The
po-lice is here. I don't know what y'all did this time, just
keep me out of it."
Sheriff Calloway and his deputy removed
their hats as they entered the surprisingly cozy Browbridge
abode. "Ma'am," the sheriff nodded. "Your
boys home?"
Eli and Vernon were trying to figure out how to record their show, but their mother's TiVO system might as well had been rocket science. They were pushing buttons and cursing when the sheriff walked in.
"What you boys up to?"
Vernon and Eli looked up from the
remote. "Nothin'," Vernon
said.
His brother added. "This danged recorder
don't work."
"You boys trying to record this here bowling show?" the
sheriff asked. When the brothers nodded, he took the remote
and pressed the red record button.
"There. Now y'all do something for me. I got The Fat Man's body in the morgue. Found it out in the woods." He looked Eli and Vernon in the eye. "You
boys know anything about it?"
"No, sir," said Vernon, speaking fast
So Eli didn't say something dumb.
Eli still managed to get in a few
words. "We don't know
nothin' bout buryin' no body."
"Who said the body was buried?" He turned to his deputy. "You
taking this down? We'll need this when we go before the judge."
"Judge?" Eli asked. "Why we need
a judge?"
"Because murder and kidnapping and burying a body without a permit are crimes, that's why." The
sheriff went silent, giving Eli and Vernon time to understand.
In less time than it would take a
hungry fox to devour a chicken, the boys told him how Missy
Taggert had hired them
to put The Fat Man's body in the trunk of their car and bury
him. "He was already dead," Eli explained. "We was just
doing Miss Missy a favor."
"How much she pay you for this favor?"
"A hundred-and-fifty dollars," Vernon said. "We
already give it to mama."
The deputy wrote furiously.
Sheriff Calloway took one look at
the death stare LuAnne was shooting at her boys and figured
they'd be punished enough. "Don't go spending that money or leaving town," he
said, as he and the deputy walked out the door.
Missy Taggert had been good-looking enough in her youth to have made a comfortable living as the town prostitute. When her looks went south along with her other assets, she married Darnell Grimes. Still, everyone in town knew her as Missy Taggert, especially the men. Darnell worked construction when he could get on with a road crew and tuned up cars when someone felt sorry for him or Missy. He wasn't home when the sheriff knocked on Missy's door. Since Sheriff Calloway had a personal relationship with Missy dating back to her former line of work, he had arranged for his deputy to meet him at the stationhouse.
Missy knew by the expression on the
sheriff's face that this wasn't a friendly call, but she
tried stalling. "Erskine,
I haven't seen you since Tina Mae had her baby. How old is
your granddaughter now?"
"She'll be two this coming winter, Missy. But I ain't here to talk family or old times." He wished he hadn't mentioned old times. "It
seems we have ourselves a di-lemma. The Browbridge boys tell
me you hired them for a certain job not long ago."
Getting Eli and Vernon to confess took more time than it took Missy to explain how she had been doing favors for The Fat Man to hold her over while Darnell found work. This time his heart couldn't take the excitement. She didn't want her husband to know, so she did what everyone in town did when they had a cesspool that needed unclogging or snakes under the porch that needed shooting. She called the Browbridge bothers and paid them with half of the money The Fat Man had in his wallet. She kept the rest.
"A hundred and fifty dollars?" Sheriff
Calloway asked.
"Is that what they told you? The
boys may be smarter than they look."
After coffee with a shot of rum, he agreed to keep the incident on the hush and hush if the final coroner's report confirmed it was a heart attack. After all, The Fat Man had no family and no friends who'd miss him.
Sheriff Calloway had one more point of business to take care of before this whole mess could be wrapped up.
"Vern. Eli," he said, wrinkling his
forehead to look as paternal as possible. Missy told me
the truth and you boys
are in the clear this time. There won't be no murder charges
against you."
In unison, the boys blew air out of
their puffed up cheeks. Eli wanted to shout "Yehaw!" but
he thought better of it.
"But we still got ourselves a di-lemma." The sheriff rolled his tongue inside his mouth for a moment. "It
seems Missy says she paid you five-hundred dollars and you
say one-fifty. Since I believe her, that makes your statement
to me--that my deputy had wrote down for the judge--what
we call lying to a officer of the law. Now that can get you
jail time."
Eli and Vernon just stared at the Sheriff. Even Eli couldn't think of anything to say.
"But we can work something out. Say
you give me two hundred. You boys keep the rest and we
won't talk no more about this."
The Browbridge brothers readily agreed. Vernon reached into his boot and took out a wad of wet, smelly twenties. He counted out two hundred and handed it to the sheriff.
Sheriff Calloway took the money.
Before walking away, he said, "You boys stay out of trouble
now, y'hear? I can't always be bailing you out."
As he slipped into his car, he smiled
and put nine twenties in his wallet. The other one he placed
in an envelope on
which he scrawled, "Rev. Atwater."
Feeling the spirit, he mumbled, "Aw, what the hell," and added another twenty to the envelope. "Somebody
got to do God's work."
