Soil Read Online Free Page B

Soil
Book: Soil Read Online Free
Author: Jamie Kornegay
Pages:
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over the field. A six-foot wall of tangled scrub and young trees barely shielded him from prying eyes. Any nosy passerby with a pair of binoculars and a pestering, fool-sighted curiosity could observe and jump to conclusions. Next thing you know, the entire sheriff’s department would be on the scene by nightfall. It was not outside his own rational line of thought that he might spend the night in county lockup.
    Jay thrust his racket under the water and shoved himself furiously toward cover. He wasn’t getting anywhere fast enough, so he tumbled out and waded through the sucking mud with the sensation of running away in dreamlike suspension. At last, towing the boat behind him, he made it to the safety of low-hanging willow tree branches on the far side of the field, up near the gravel driveway. He tied the boat to the tree and climbed back inside. He dumped his boots and sat with wet socks for a long time, watching the heap at the far end of the lake.
    Finally he began to wonder who the corpse might be. He chased his memory for clues—strangers he’d seen, fishermen from the bridge, clumsy hitchhikers who might have tumbled into the flooded field or fallen out ofboats on the river. But this was all pretense, for he knew who it surely must be. He did not know him exactly, but it was someone he could imagine.
    He craned his neck to the road, wondering what the idiot in the camo truck had seen. Meanwhile the buzzard had returned to poke at the body. Jay opened his knapsack and gripped the .38. He considered firing on the bird, but a gunshot might create a memory for anyone within earshot, a memory that might turn up later as a courtroom distortion.
    Jay recalled isolated incidents from the past few weeks that now seemed to coalesce in light of this discovery. The composite was unflattering to him. It might not hold up in a court of law. He ran scenarios in his head and defended himself as his own character witness, as if to convince someone, possibly himself, that he was not responsible for this death. He wanted to row out and view the corpse and its broken skull again, just for clarification, but not as long as there was a glimmer of daylight in the air. Instead he sat in the boat, hidden beneath the willow, stunned until dusk.
    The falling light made lavender waves of the clouds. Imagined traffic rose and died in his head, replaced by the menace of crickets and bullfrogs. The buzzard had flown away engorged.
    Finally Jay climbed out of the boat, scrambled through the brush and over the levee, up the gravel driveway to the house. He turned back to the road, fearful of passersby, and then to the lake, where the dead man was just another dark ripple on fallen limbs.

3
    The house was still when night passed into the mudroom, making only the slightest creak through the storm door, brushing curtains in the kitchen and snuffing out the candle on the counter. Even the banjo and fiddle on the crank radio had wound down to nothing, giving stage to insects singing their strange unison.
    Jay jerked awake on the couch, opening his eyes to a darkness greater than sleep. He took in short fish gulps of air and listened through the liquid black stillness. Night had beaten him here.
    He jumped off the sofa, cursed himself for falling asleep and missing his twilight ritual of locking down the house. Out here in the wilderness, meeting the night required preparation. After weeks without electricity, he understood how the mind functioned differently in prolonged darkness, how it intensified and overreached. Lights and air-conditioning afforded comfort where it didn’t belong, and comfort was a luxury, good for sleep but not for survival.
    Most nights, lying in the dark, he ran through a list of hypothetical dangers and resolved how to confront them—burglars and scavengers coming through the front door, the back, the bedroom window; a tree crashing through the roof in a thunderstorm; a wild animal rooting under the

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