KEN TEUTSCH, William Gay Memorial Prize Runner-Up

Ken Teutsch is a writer, performer, and filmmaker living in central Arkansas. His stories have appeared in anthologies including Old Weird South, Strangely Funny, and Rowan Prose Publishing’s After Dark, as well as such diverse publications as Mystery Magazine, Andromedan Spaceways Magazine, and Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature. His short story, “The Storm on Promise Land Road” was chosen in The Best of Halfway Down the Stairs. His novella, S-10 to Valhalla, is available from Shotgun Honey Books. He also records music in the guise of perennially failed country music “star,” Rudy Terwilliger.

Marylou Birdwell’s Bequest

Rinner-up, William Gay Memorial Prize in Short Story, 2025

I hadn’t seen Merle in a long time, and I was halfway wondering if he was back in jail, when one Friday evening right after I got home from work I heard somebody honk their horn. It was Merle. When I came out, he hollered, “Hey, boy! Let’s go for a ride! I’ll buy you a Coke!”

“That your car?” It was a flat black Dodge Charger with a dented front fender.

“Yeah,” he said.

“When’d you get it?”

“Couple weeks ago.”

“Where at?”

“Shreveport.”

“Who did you—”

“Will you,” he said, “shut the fuck up and get in?”

So I did.

He headed into town to the Sonic, because their Cokes have the best ice. Between my house and there he started telling me about the dead woman.

Merle is what I guess you’d call my oldest friend, but he’s also my cousin. He’s just three years older than me, and we neither one had a brother-brother, so we sort of made little and big kinda-brothers out of each other. Not that we look like brothers. Merle is big and curly-headed and good-looking. Sometimes he wears a beard, though he didn’t have one right then.

I’m nothing special to look at, and when I tried to grow a beard, it just looked sad. I’m starting to go bald in the back, too, and I ain’t much past thirty.

They say my uncle wanted to name Merle after his daddy, Merle’s granddaddy, but my aunt Jean wasn’t having none of it. Aunt Jean is a big Merle Haggard fan. They divorced not long after Merle was born, and she got custody, so I guess cutting the husband’s family out of the naming was the right call. Aunt Jean wanted Merle to grow up and be a singer like Merle Haggard. She even bought him a guitar when he was about twelve, but he didn’t take to it. Said it hurt his fingers. Then one night we took it out and used it to bat walnuts at cars, and it never did play right after that, anyway.

Merle kind of resembles a young Merle Haggard, come to think of it. And he turned twenty-one in prison, so there was that. He’s been in and out since. Mostly car-related.

The dead woman he started telling me about was Marylou Hogarth Birdwell. I’d heard of her, of course, and I’d seen the ginormous house her husband had built for her to live in. The Hogarths and the Birdwells each alone was richer than God, and when Marylou, the last of the Hogarths, married Walker Birdwell, between them they must have been richer than two Gods.

You didn’t hear so much about the Hogarths no more—all of them being dead now except for Marylou...who was dead now. But if anything anywhere in the county has a name on it, chances are the name is Birdwell. Either Walker or Marylou, but sometimes both: there’s a Marylou Hogarth Birdwell Nature Trail in Walker and Marylou Birdwell Park. There’s a Birdwell Annex,whatever that is, at the county hospital. Even the little shed in front of the courthouse where the carolers sing every Christmas is the Birdwell Gazebo.

Walker is a real geezer, but Marylou was a good bit younger. Young or old though, she came down sick with something so bad it even kills rich people, and she went ahead and died of it. Big write-up in the paper. Funeral procession shut down traffic like the Christmas parade.

“Here’s the thing about Marylou, though,” Merle said. We were coming into town.

“Marylou had some strong opinions.”

“Hey, Merle,” I said, “Slow down.”

“Real strong opinions about some of her belongings and what was to be done with them.”

“You see that truck?” I checked the lights on the dash to see if my airbag was operational.

“Pay attention, man!” Merle hollered, and he zipped through a stop sign and straight across Main Street into the entrance of the Sonic. All the horns honking on Main Street alerted a carhop crossing the lot, and she was able to skip out of the way. Good thing they don’t make them wear roller skates no more. The Charger kind of slid into one of the spaces and Merle jammed it into park and turned it off. It had a button instead of a key. I never had a car with a button like that.

“She might or might not be taking the engagement ring old Wally gave her with her to the Promised Land,” said Merle, rolling down his window. Button for that, too, but that ain’t such a big deal. “Diamond in that ring the size of a Goddamn golf ball. But for sure she’s wearing her grandma’s necklace.” He jabbed the red Sonic talk button.

“OK,” I said. I was still kind of unclenching things and prying my fingers out of the dashboard. “So what?”“So,” said Merle, but right then the girl in the box said something. “Want some onion rings?”

“Yeah,” I said. He ordered two onion rings and two Cokes.

“So,” he said again, “that grandma necklace come over on the Mayflower or some shit.

It’s kind of a net thing.” He dragged his fingers criss-cross all over his chest. “About as big as a medium-size seine. And it’s all made up of diamonds on gold wires, with emeralds scattered here and there.” He raised his eyebrows and bit his lip and nodded at me like, Uh huh. You get me?

I didn’t get him. “So what?”

Merle rolled his eyes. “So, dumbass,” he said, “it’s worth thousands and thousands of dollars! Tens of thousands of dollars! Shit, maybe hundreds!” I still didn’t see so what. “And,” he went on, “it’s all just stuck in a hole in the ground.”

I guess maybe you see right off what he was getting at. If I did, I wasn’t ready to let on to myself that I did. Because this wasn’t some kind of pirate treasure he was talking about. I mean, the thing is, if something is stuck in a plain old hole in the ground, then sure, that’s one thing. If what a thing’s stuck in ain’t just a plain old hole in the ground, then it’s stuck in something else.

“In a grave,” I said. “Stuck…in a grave.”

Merle frowned. “Which,” he said, “is a hole in the ground.”

I just looked at him. For quite a while, it felt like. He seemed like he expected me to say something. “Yeah, but,” I said, “it’s a grave.”

He reached out and smacked me upside the head. “Quit saying that!”

So I did. “Damn, boy! You gotta get past this ‘grave’ thing.” He sounded all reasonable, or what would have sounded reasonable if he was talking about something reasonable. “Look at the big picture.”

I didn’t want to look at that picture, big or small. I rubbed my ear and said, “How do you know about all this stuff?” Merle narrowed his eyes and kind of looked around a little bit. “I just know,” he said. “You trust me on that. I know.”

“All them thousands of dollars, and they’ll just put it in there with her and shut the lid?”

“Shit,” said Merle, and a more normal, pissed-off look came back into his eyes. “These sons-of-bitches, these Birdwells—” He halfway spit out the name. “They think they’re like the God damn fay-roes. What’s a few thousand to them one way or another?” He fumed and twisted his hands on the steering wheel. “They lose that much in their fucking couch cushions.”

The girl with the bag showed up then, which calmed him down a little. He automatically tried to sweet talk her, but it was the same girl he nearly ran down, so she was less susceptible than she might have been otherwise. The conversation then turned to how they used to bring your food on a tray and hang it on the window, and to how they apparently make their onion rings nowadays with the same batter they use to make their corn dogs, which clearly ain’t right. We decided too late that we should have ordered mozzarella sticks.

This was fine. Everything was all normal and typical there for a while, and I started to hope that other topic had been some kind of wild hair. Pretty soon though, Merle started up again.

Years ago, after the first time Merle got me tangled up with the law—he had stole the high school principal’s car and took me for a ride…to the Sonic then, too—my daddy told me to stay away from that boy. That he was bad news. But you couldn’t stay away from Merle. Or I couldn’t, anyway. Merle has this way about him. I don’t know what it is. All I know is, before I could turn around, it was the next night and I was putting the shovel and the crowbar in the trunk of his Dodge. It was like I was in some kind of dream. I was mighty uneasy, not least because if there was only one shovel, there wasn’t much question as to who would be doing the shoveling.

I went back in the house, and Merle sat up on the couch, looked at the clock and turned off the TV. “All right,” he said. “Time to go.” I didn’t say nothing, and he kind of sighed.

“Look here,” he said, “I know this is some pretty weird shit.”

“Oh,” I said, “I don’t know… I mean…” I shrugged.

“But let me just say a couple of things,” he went on. “First off: this is what you call a victimless crime. OK? We ain’t doing nobody no harm, and we’re gonna put everything back just the way we find it. That’s why we can’t wait around. Gotta get in there before they landscape it and put up the stone and everything. In, out, nobody can tell we were even there, and anything taken, nobody is gonna miss.”

Almost nobody, I thought.

“Second: About the...you know. When it comes to that, you don’t have to be there. I need you to help with the vault, but I’ll… You won’t even see it.”

I guess that ought to have made me feel a little better. It didn’t.

“And third and most important: All that money.” He slid out to the edge of the couch and leaned toward me. “Think about it.”

I thought about it. “I can put a new roof on momma’s house,” I said.

Merle jumped up off the couch. He gave me a shove that nearly knocked me over. “New roof!” he laughed, “Shit, boy! You can get her a new house! Now let’s go!”

The graveyard they put Marylou Birdwell in was its own free-standing graveyard, so to speak. I mean it wasn’t for Methodists and next to a Methodist church or for Baptists and affiliated with a Baptist one. It was all alone out in the country on a landscaped hillside. I guess it was set up just for rich folks, rich folks forming, as they do, their own denomination. The clouds were coming in ahead of a sixty percent chance of rain, so there was no moon and no stars.

Merle had gone by there early that morning and shot out the mercury light by the road with my .22, so the whole place was so dark you wouldn’t even know it was there from the road except your headlights might light up stone pillars and the statue of the sad angel at the entrance.

I don’t know what the angel had to be sad about. Everybody in there was dead sure they were going to heaven. Maybe the angel knew something they didn’t.

Merle had got real quiet on the drive out, and Merle was not somebody who typically stayed quiet for long at a stretch. When he pulled into the graveyard, he turned the headlights off and rolled down the window so he could lean out to hear and sort of half-way see the road to steer by. This cemetery’s drive was covered with chips of some kind of white stone, shiny and bright.

I guess it was the kind of place where it was somebody’s job every now and then to polish the gravel.

Pretty soon Merle stopped the car and turned it off and it got sure enough quiet. I mean, really quiet. We sat there and listened to the quiet for a minute, but there was nothing but the car motor popping every now and then as it cooled.

“Ok,” Merle said. He pointed off into the darkness to the right. “It’s right up there on top of that rise. You can’t miss it.”

“I can’t—

” My voice was so loud it scared me. I started over more like a whisper.

“What do you mean, I can’t miss it? What about you?”“Take it easy, dumbass!” Merle hissed back at me. “I gotta go get the backhoe, don’t I?

You go up there and when you hear it crank up, you shine the flashlight at me. Now if you can quit crapping your pants for a minute, get going. Jesus! What are you, five years old?”

I had been mighty wound up ever since back at the Sonic. Now I come unsprung. I couldn’t really see Merle. He was just a shadow in front of another shadow. I took a hard punch at the shadow and caught him on the side of the face.

“The fuck?” he grunted.

“Don’t you talk to me that way, you son of a bitch,” I whisper/yelled at him. I took another jab. This one got him in the forehead, or somewhere on the skull anyway, because it hurt my hand probably more than it hurt him. I didn’t care. “Drag me out in here in the middle of the damn night to rob graves! And then call me five years old?” I jabbed again, but he had his guard up by now, and he punched back at me. So I punched back at him. All of a sudden we were slapping and flailing at each other across the console, cussing something terrible, but still whispering. Then somebody’s elbow or something hit the steering wheel, and the horn gave a horrendous honk like the trumpet at the end of the world—the last thing you’d want to hear in a graveyard.

We both froze, holding our breath and listening. There wasn’t nothing but a little hiss of the breeze, so we both sat back panting, leaning against our doors like boxers in their corners.

Finally, when I caught my breath, I said, “This is bullshit, Merle. We ain’t digging up that dead woman. That’s crazy.”

Merle shifted his weight, and I put my arms up in front of my face in case he come at me again. He didn’t. He didn’t do nothing for a while, then he said, kind of slow and draggy, “I’m sorry I called you five years old.”I put my arms down. I’d never heard Merle sound so sad. “I’m sorry I sucker-punched you,

” I said. We sat there another minute. I heard a car go down the road but couldn’t see the lights from where we were. I could hear and kind of see Merle moving around and putting his head down on the steering wheel.

“You can just wait in the car,” he said.

“Merle!” I said. “Merle! Listen to yourself a minute! I believe you’re on dope. Are you on dope?”

“I ain’t on dope.”

“Then listen to yourself a minute! One: it’s a grave. Two: You don’t even know for sure that necklace or whatever is even in there…”

“It’s—” he began.

“...and Three: It’s a grave!”

“She wanted me to have it, Pete,” he said, and his voice sounded real small now. “She told me…” He blew out a bunch of air and flopped back in the seat. I could almost see him now.

What he said took a second to sink in.

“Do what?”

I could hear him moving around, and then the world was blinding bright. I nearly about pissed myself. He had opened his door, and the dome light had come on. He climbed out and shut the door. I opened mine and stumbled out. I shut the door and everything went black again, but I heard his feet on the gravel as he came around the front of the car. I could tell he was looking up the hill.

“Are you saying you knew Marylou Birdwell?”

“Yeah,” he said, and he kind of sighed.I moved closer to him. I wished I could see his face, but we’d left the flashlights in the car. “How did you know Marylou Birdwell?”

There was a thump and a creak and I knew he was sitting on the fender of the Dodge.

“Last year,” he said, still with that sad, draggy voice that was Merle but didn’t sound like Merle.

“When I come out of jail that last time. I went to work for B. D. Hall.”

B. D. Hall owns a big landscaping and lawn care business. Does a lot of the commercial lawn stuff—banks, hospitals and so forth. You see his trucks all over the place, and you can’t miss his people, because they wear bright yellow t-shirts.

“Clipping hedges, cutting grass, all that shit. Me and about a hundred Mexicans. Three weeks in, they had me cutting back the crepe myrtles in the parking lot of that big medical office building over north of the interstate.”

“Medical Arts Plaza,” I said.

“Yeah. Arts. Anyway, I was clipping them damn trees and I spotted a car one row over.

It was a deep blue Lexus LS. Eighty-ninety-thousand dollar car, man. No shit. So I started

walking around it, looking it over. Then I heard somebody say, ‘Do you want to drive it?’”

The Dodge’s shocks creaked again as Merle stood up. The lights of town were sort o lighting up the low clouds over that way, and my eyes were getting adjusted. The tombstones seemed to glow, being the lightest-colored things around, and I could halfway see Merle now, though I still couldn’t make out his face. He had his hands in his jacket pockets. He walked across the gravel path and started up the hill. I followed him.

“It was her,” he said. “Marylou. ‘Course I didn’t know who she was then. She was wearing a blue dress that matched the Lexus. I could tell she was a nice-looking woman, but she didn’t look all that great right then. Had her hair pulled back, and her make-up was kind ofsmeary around the eyes. She was looking at me really funny, and she said it again. ‘Want to drive it?’ I thought she was smarting off. You know, pissed at the ‘help’ for standing so close to her expensive car. So I put on a smart-ass smile of my own and said, ‘Sure. Let’s go. I’ll buy you a Coke.’”

He stopped and I stopped behind him. He seemed to be looking around at the stones, picking his way. He turned, and I could just make out the glint from his eyes. “She reached in her purse and the car went chirp chirp and she walked up and got in the passenger side. I was standing on the driver’s side. I leaned down and looked at her in the window and she said, ‘Well?’ So I pitched my clippers, and away we went.”

What had happened was that Marylou Hogarth Birdwell had just come out of the doctor’s office that day, where she’d just heard a bunch of test results. Merle found that out after him and Marylou had gone up and spent the night at the Birdwell lake house. Or maybe it was later, one morning in that ginormous house that Walker Birdwell had built. They stayed there at first when Walker was out of town doing whatever he did to gather in even more money, but later sometimes even when Walker was around. Because them test results had caused Marylou to re-evaluate her priorities. That’s what Merle said she told him she was doing: “re-evaluating her priorities.” One of the priorities she majorly downgraded was giving a shit about what Walker Birdwell thought about her activities and who she carried them out with. Merle was around Marylou most of the time, he said, for the next several months—all that time when I thought he might have been back in the pen—right up until she got down so bad that they had to put her in the hospital.

“I tried to see her,” Merle said. “Hospital rent-a-cops threw me out.” I heard his jacket rustle when he shrugged his shoulders. “‘Bout like you’d expect. ”It wasn’t what I would expect, because I didn’t expect any of it. I just said, “You and Marylou Birdwell.”

“She said running around with me was the happiest she’d ever been. I was pretty damn happy, too. And it wasn’t just ‘cause she was paying for everything.” He stopped and took a hand out of his jacket pocket and ran it all back through his hair a couple of times. “It wasn’t that.”

I don’t mind telling you, this whole business was making me dizzy. Marylou Birdwell and my cousin Merle? And now he was out here in the graveyard with a shovel and a crowbar aiming to dig her up and steal her necklace? I felt like I wanted to sit down, but there wasn’t nothing to sit on but tombstones, and you can’t do that, right? You can’t sit on a tombstone.

That’s what they call a taboo.

“Well, hell, Merle,” I said. “I mean… Well, hell. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

Because I didn’t.

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “Me, neither.”

He walked on. We were getting close to the top of the rise, and up ahead I could tell there was a kind of low stone fence. Inside the enclosed area was something that rose up above the other stones. It was a special monument that the Birdwells had set up there in the middle of their personal patch of graveyard. It was pointy and twenty feet or so high and made of marble so shiny I could make out BIRDWELL carved out on the base even in the dim glow. I guess they did think they were like pharaohs. We stopped at the iron gate in the fence and Merle laid a hand on it.

“One night...toward the end...I was at her house. She said she wanted to show me something. She went in her closet...big damn closet, bigger than your living room...and openedup a safe. She come out with that necklace. Put it around her neck to show me. All them stones sparkling on her skin. Said it had been in her family forever, and since she never had a kid, she was gonna be buried with it. Had it wrote down in her will or something. I guess she didn’t want old Walker’s first wife’s kids to have it. That bunch of jackals…”

He swung the gate open. It didn’t even creak. Somebody must keep it greased. Probably same fellow that washed the gravel.

“Hell, I just laughed. I said if it was mine, I’d bust the damn thing up and sell the stones. Take the money and go round the world.” He gave a little laugh at the memory. “I told her, no offense to your great-granny and all that, but what I think money is for is to go places and do things with, not to hang around your neck. She liked that. She said I was right. What good was it? She throwed it in my lap. Said she wanted me to take it. Go round the world for her. After she was gone.” He stepped inside the gate. “I throwed it back at her. I didn’t want to hear that ‘after I’m gone’ shit, you know. I don’t know how to talk to somebody talking like that.”

In the dim light from the clouds, I could tell that over on the left side of the big spike thing was a place where the nice, manicured grass was torn up. Merle started over that way, and I kept following him. I was sort of mesmerized or whatever. I never had heard Merle go on like this. He stopped next to the patch of torn-up dirt and gave a clump a little kick.

“She ought to have fixed her will, then,” I said. “Left the necklace to you.”

Merle gave another one of them not-quite-a-laughs. “If she did, the old man’s lawyers would have beat it some way. Shit, they doubtless beat the first will, far as that goes. You were right, what you said. They’re too greedy to stick that much money in a hole.” He gave the clump another, harder kick, and it rattled away in the dark. That laid another coat of confused on top of all the confused I already was. The necklace was what this was all about, wasn’t it? If he didn’t realy think it was in there, then what were we doing standing out here in the graveyard with a shovel in the trunk?

I said, “Then what are we doing standing out here in the graveyard with a shovel in the trunk?”

Merle moved some more dirt around with his shoe. I could hear the scratching. I heard his clothes rustle and creak and could tell he had squatted down there next to the grave. I tried to puzzle it out, but didn’t have no luck, since it appeared that Merle had lost his mind. Or if not lost it, at least rearranged it to the point where he wasn’t Merle no more. Not my Merle.

“She said she loved me, Pete,” he said.

“And then she died.” He kind of shifted, and I heard some more of that scrabbling in the dirt. “But if she hadn’t been dying, she never would have even talked to me!” He give another little laugh, and that laugh was the least like Merle of anything he’d said or done all night. His voice had got really weird now. Like he was in a trance or something.

“They run me out of the hospital,” he said. “And I couldn’t go to the funeral.”

I started getting scared. Remember, I was standing in the middle of a graveyard in the middle of the night.

Right at that moment off in the west, lightning lit up the clouds, and right when the lightning lit up the clouds Merle stood up, turned, and took a step—a black, blank man-shadow looming toward me.

Every scary movie I ever saw went pinballing through my head. The shadow got closer and closer, and I found myself backed against the icy marble (or granite or whatever) of that stone pillar, my heart going like a jackhammer. The shadow stopped right in front of me, and he spoke.

His voice wasn’t weird no more. He just sounded tired again, as tired as anybody ever sounded.

“Aw shit, Pete,” he said. “Let’s go.” Then he brushed on past me, out the gate and down the hill.

Merle dropped me at my house, roared off up the road, and I ain’t seen him since.

~~~~~~~~~~

Two days later I came out of the house in the morning and that flat black Charger was setting in the front yard. The title was signed and laying on the driver’s seat. What do you know?

He owned it legal after all.

Just the next day I was at the barber shop getting what little hair I have left trimmed, and I picked up a newspaper. There ain’t really much local news in it no more. That went away about the time Sonic stopped hanging trays on your window. But I always skim over the police report section. I seen the name “Birdwell” and took another look.

It seems that local pillar of the community, Walker Birdwell, had been the victim of a heinous crime. Somebody broke into his garage and stole a blue Lexus LS sedan.