Side by Side

27

Dixie Smoot opened her mouth and snapped it closed to click her porcelain teeth loudly-something she did out of habit when she was really pissed off.

Buck said he’d left the twins to take a turn digging, and that he had just been gone for a “few” minutes to go and check on something. She couldn’t imagine what he had to check on out in the plumb middle of nowhere. Now Buck was gone off to the Utzes’ store down the road to use the pay phone to call Peanut about the twins. Her daddy would be fit to be tied if things weren’t going smoothly. It wouldn’t be the first or the last time he had needed to punch out Buck. When it came to discipline, her daddy didn’t spare a rod.

Dixie figured she’d find the twins before Buck got back and joined her, because whenever he could get by with it, he’d get back too late to do any work. Buck was worse things than lazy, but what he did to others was between him and whoever he did it to. It was mostly the lazy part of Buck that complicated Dixie’s life.

Dixie’s four-wheeler was one of several that Peanut’s people had found inadequately attended and had brought out to the house for hunting and chores. You could do a lot more with the 400cc Honda four-wheel-drive ATVs than use them for getting yourself and your gun into the woods, and bringing deer back out when you killed one. The roads on the thousand-acre property were really just trails and a challenge for the most rugged four-wheel-drive vehicles.

There was only one real road onto the land, and it was hardly more than a dirt path with some gravel scattered on it so you could get vehicles to the barn. You could get around the land on a tractor, and they had one in the shed, but the ATVs were a lot faster. The tractor had a winch on it, and if you wanted to get around on the land to work with it you spent more time pulling it up out of the steep and eroded creek banks than working.

The rain was an annoyance, stinging her face. She wished she had remembered goggles so she could open her eyes fully.

If Dixie didn’t miss the turnoff and have to double back, Buck’s clearing was about a mile and a half away.

As she sped along, the ATV would go airborne when she hit a mogul or a rut, and rain in her eyes or not, she couldn’t help but smile. If the snotty little bitch stayed put, like Dixie warned her to, she’d be all right till Monday. Dixie doubted she’d try anything, because she was a soft little nothing. If women like that didn’t put it out, there’d be a bounty on them.

Anyway, if she didn’t stay put, she had her a real nice surprise coming that wouldn’t be nobody’s fault but her own.

By following Buck’s directions, Dixie found the spot where the twins had started digging the hole. She drove the ATV around the field and soon picked up the tracks of the twins’ four-wheelers. Soon she spotted their Hondas and stopped beside them.

She found them seated in an inch of rainwater with their broad backs against opposing ends of the hole. Burt and Curt Smoot looked like a pair of fat baby birds in a shoebox. They stared angrily up at Dixie, who stood in the loose dirt at the grave’s edge with her hands on her hips, shaking her head.

The ground was torn up where they had tried to claw their way out of the steep-sided grave. A section of aluminum ladder lay five feet away. The hole was deeper than it needed to be by two feet, but her father had said that the hole should be deep enough to prevent anything from digging up the Dockerys, and it certainly was that.

Since Burt and Curt weighed about three hundred pounds each, and the grass was wet and covered with the dirt from digging, there was no way they could get out without the ladder, or by one holding his hands for the other to climb out and get the ladder for the other. She didn’t have to be told that neither had been willing to depend on the other to get the ladder for them.

“You’re dumb as sacks of barn owl poop,” she said.

“It was him,” Burt said, pointing at Curt.

Curt said, “You started it.”

“You pulled me in!”

“You pushed me and I just grabbed hold of you and we both fell in. I said I didn’t do it on purpose, you dumb mule.”

Dixie spat into the standing water between them. “I swear, if the good Lord swapped possums’ brains with yours, the friggin possums would get the short end of the stick.”

“Please put the ladder down, Dixie?” Curt pleaded. “It’s cold in here.”

“I ought to leave you in there,” she said. “Buck told me y’all was left to dig, but he came back and found you hadn’t dug anything. I saw back yonder where you started the hole. How’d you end up way the hell over here? If you hadn’t left the four-wheelers in plain sight, I never would have found you.”

“It wasn’t a good place to dig where he said to,” Burt said. “Where he said to dig was rooty as hell, and we didn’t have a pickax.”

“We’d a needed a damned backhoe,” Curt said.

“Dirt’s better here,” Burt said.

“Daddy’s gonna be pissed,” she said.

“You gonna tell him?” Curt chimed in, fear coloring his voice.

“It could have happened to anybody,” Burt said.

“It happened to a pair of idiot fools.” Dixie got the ladder and jammed it down in the grave between them.

“You don’t have to tell Daddy,” Curt said, standing.

“I sure don’t.”

“Thank you for not telling Daddy.” Curt climbed out and stood up, offering a meaty hand to his brother.

“Don’t thank me,” Dixie said, walking to her Honda and climbing on. “Buck went to call him.”

When the engine caught, she sped across the clover field like she was late for something.