Page 119 of Poison Wood

“Those historical-preservation ladies should have left well enough alone. Let those people tear it down,” Bones says. “Build that eco-lodge thing. Woulda been a lot better than all this mess.”

Bones slides off his stool and takes his drink to a table near the back. I watch him for a second, then refocus on the bartender.

“What’s your name?” I ask him. He sets the glass down, rubs his hands on the side of his pants, and then holds a hand toward me. “Name’s Big Al.” He doesn’t offer his last name.

“Nice to meet you, Big Al.”

He exhales. “What the hell is going on around here?”

“Whatever it is, it’s only starting,” I say.

“Great.” He leans his large arms on the counter. “Papers are saying you went to that school.”

I nod. “I did.”

“So seems to me, you know ever’thing that happened there.”

“You’d be surprised.”

He looks down the bar, then back to me. He nods toward my phone. “You gonna record this or something?”

I clear my throat. “No. Someone else will eventually find you and do that. Today I’m just a patron asking a few questions.”

The wrinkles on his forehead scrunch up. “What kind of questions?”

“Were you here when Heather Hadwick went missing?”

“Yes, I was. I was here for the searches, for the trial, everything.”

I wonder if he knows who my father is. I’m guessing if he knows I attended Poison Wood, he knows who my father is.

“Do you know anything about gas wells in this part of the state?” I say, shifting gears.

The two guys playing pool start hollering about one of them cheating.

“Cut it out,” Big Al yells at the men. He looks back to me. “What about them?”

“Has the Haynesville Shale played out down here?” I ask.

“Haynesville didn’t make it this far south,” he says. “Nobody down here got any of that money.”

The door opens to the bar, and a new patron comes in, bringing with him a waft of fresh air. The man sits at the opposite end of the bar and motions for Big Al.

“Hang on,” he says. He goes to the other end to help his new patron.

When he comes back I say, “What about the Adairs’ land? I heard they have a lot.”

“Yeah, they got a lot. Their granddaddy left it to ’em. Been in their family for generations.”

“What do you know about Rosalie Adair?”

He scratches his beard. “She’s a crafty one, that one.”

“Crafty?”

“Everybody around here felt bad for her after Johnny went away. They had all that land, and she was left to figure out how to take careof it. So we raised some money for her, but it wasn’t near enough. But she never lost the land, so she paid those bills somehow. Then all these rumors started. You know how it is in a small town.”

I nod. I know exactly how it is. That’s why I’m in a bar at eleven in the morning. “What kind of rumors?”