Burning Bright - By Ron Rash Page 0,12
out while Wesley’s Ford Ranger is pulling in, a big rebel flag decal covering the back window. Wesley’s always been big into that Confederate stuff, wearing a CSA belt buckle, rebel flag tattoo on his arm. He wears a gray CSA cap too, wears it on the job. There’s no black guys on our crew, only a handful in the whole county, but you’re still not supposed to wear that kind of thing. But with his uncle running the show Wesley gets away with it.
“You want to make some easy money or not?” he says to me later at our lunch break. He grunts and sits down in the shade beside me while I get my sandwich and apple from my lunch box. Wesley’s got three Hardee’s sausage biscuits in a bag and scarfs them down in about thirty seconds, then lights a cigarette. I don’t smoke myself and don’t cotton much to the smelling of it when I’m eating. I could tell him so, could tell him I like eating my lunch alone if he’d not noticed, but getting on Wesley’s bad side would just get me on my boss’s bad side as well. It’s more than just that, though. I’m willing to listen to anyone who could help me get some money.
“What you got in mind?” I say.
He points to his CSA belt buckle.
“You know what one of them’s worth, a real one?”
“No,” I say, though I figure maybe fifty or a hundred dollars.
Wesley pulls out two wadded-up catalog pages from his back pocket.
“Look here,” he says and points at a picture of a belt buckle and the number below it. “Eighteen hundred dollars,” he says and moves his finger down the paper. “Twenty-four hundred. Twelve hundred. Four thousand.” He holds his finger there for a few seconds. “Four thousand,” saying it again. He shoves the other page in my face. It’s filled with buttons that fetch two hundred to a thousand dollars apiece.
“I’d of not thought they’d bring that much,” I say.
“I’ll not even tell you what a sword brings. You’d piss your pants if I did.”
“So what’s that have to do with me getting some money?”
“Cause I know where we can find such things as this,” Wesley says, shaking the paper at me. “Find them where they ain’t been all rusted up so’s they’ll be all the more pricey. You help and you get twenty-five percent.”
And what I figure is some DOT bulldozer has rooted something up. Maybe some place where soldiers camped or done some fighting. I’m figuring it’s some kind of flimflam, like he wants me to help buy a metal detector or something with what little money I got left. He must take me for one dumb hillbilly to go along with such a scheme and I tell him as much.
He just grins at me, the kind of grin that argues I don’t know very much.
“You got a shovel and pickax?” he asks. “Or did the bank repo them as well?”
“I got a shovel and a pickax,” I say. “I know how to do more than lean on them too.”
He knows my meaning but just laughs, tells me what he’s got his mind scheming over. I start to say there’s no way in hell I’m doing such a thing but he puts his hand out like stopping traffic, tells me not to yes or no him until I’ve had time to sift it over good in my mind.
“I ain’t hearing a word till tomorrow,” he says. “Think about how a thousand dollars, maybe more, could put some padding in that wallet. Think about what that money can do for your momma.”
He says the words about Momma last for he knows that notion will hang heavy on me if nothing else does.
I go by the hospital on the way home. They let me see her for a few minutes, and afterward the nurse says she’ll be able to go home in three days.
“She’s got a lot of life in her yet,” the nurse tells me in the hallway.
That’s good news, better than I expected. I go down to the billing office and the news there isn’t so good. Though I’ve already paid three thousand I’ll be owing another four by the time she gets out. I go back to my trailer and there’s no way I can’t help pondering about that money Wesley’s big-talking about. I think about how Daddy worked himself to death before he was sixty and Momma hanging on long enough