Read Burn What Will Burn for Free Online Page B

big fat zero and some help from Social Services.
    I stared at my financial statements. I had nearly enough money to burn a wet mule, but you usually can’t buy what you want.
    Maybe that’s why I lived like I did, like I didn’t have anything. Because I couldn’t have what I wanted anyway. Maybe I was just genetically cheap. That accusation had been made.
    â€œSo what were you doing downtown, Malcolm Ray?” I flipped our conversation from the financial page to the gossip column.
    Nobody in our little enclave ever ventured much farther from home than to Doker for gas and groceries or to the Walmart at Bertrandville for larger purchases, unless they were making a beer run to a wet town across some county line or headed to the nearest hospital.
    (Tiny and isolated as our “community” was, the Rushing Valley people still seemed to get up to regular excitement—Faith Sue and Jacob Wells were in constant domestic dispute and their twins, Isaac and Newton, were perpetually on the way to the emergency room at Northwest Arkansas Regional Medical Center; Malcolm was always falling in some hole and needing to be rescued; and I was … Well, I was in constant existential crisis—making the Rushing Valley, even small as it was, a microcosm of the world as much as anyplace else, I suppose.)
    Malcolm did not like to get farther north than the store or farther south than the creek or go much beyond the hills that narrowly defined the Rushing Valley on the east and west. But he did once or twice a week have to drive Mean Joe’s old Buick into Doker when the reverend needed something from town he didn’t have at UPUMPIT!, like a fresh supply of live bait.
    â€œCricket s’posed to come in.”
    His granddad kept crickets in a ventilated plywood box in the back of the store and pint containers full of nightcrawlers in the Coca-Cola cooler. Fishermen on their way west to The Little Piney State Park bought them, occasionally.
    I tapped the crystal of my watch again, but the sweep hand was not stirred. So, it would stay seven thirty-three, which would at least be accurate one more time that day.
    I finished my Coke, which was tepid already. The tranquilizers made me woozy.
    â€œYou see anybody strange around downtown lately?” I asked after a while.
    Malcolm didn’t answer.
    â€œWell?”
    â€œMay be I did.”
    He looked off, avoiding my stare.
    â€œYou did.”
    Malcolm shook his head.
    â€œBible says not to tell a lie, Malcolm Ray.”
    â€œI know ’bout the Bible more’n you, Bob Reynold,” Malcolm said, sore on this point with me. “Ain’t telling no lie.”
    â€œSin of omission,” I said. “Leaving something out is just as bad as making something up.” I did not believe this, but it was a useful axiom to weaponize on occasion against people who actually occupied and operated on moral high ground like Malcolm.
    Malcolm glared at me.
    â€œYou tell me why you’re calling up Sheriff—I tell you who I seen downtown,” he bargained.
    It would be common knowledge soon anyway, what I had found in The Little Piney.
    â€œWhen I was taking my walk this morning I saw a man in the creek,” I said. “Drowned.”
    Malcolm’s jaw went slack. He held his breath.
    â€œWho was it, Bob Reynold?”
    â€œBig white man, maybe late thirties or forty years old. He had a Marine tattoo right about there on his arm.”
    I touched the kid’s forearm and he jerked back, stepped away from the truck, looked up at the sky, let out a big halitosis sigh.
    â€œThank You, Jesus Rising Star,” he whispered, clearly relieved, not talking to me.
    I waited.
    â€œMalcolm Ray? You know the fellow?”
    â€œIt wudn’t my daddy,” he said. “He ain’t got no tattoo like that. His tattoos all ladies or monsters.”
    â€œWas the big, dead white man maybe who you saw downtown?”
    The