Interview With the Redneck

"Wait," Beth said, staring at Merle with bewilderment. "That doesn't even make sense."

He immediately became defensive. "The hell you mean it don't make sense?"

"If you don't remember anything about your death, then how d'you know somebody killed you?"

He rolled his eyes, as though this were something she should've already known. "Darlin', I been dead fer weeks. I went around an' found out everythin' they said about my murder. And I know it's all a buncha horseshit. Lazy policework, if ya ask me."

"Who would wanna kill you?" She stopped herself when she realized what she'd said and smirked. "Nevermind - that's a dumb question. More like, who wouldn't wanna kill you…"

"Uncalled for," Merle frowned.

Beth laughed and shook her head. "Whatever. Yer so full of it."

"I ain't, though."

"You probably overdosed on dope or somethin'. I hear about that kinda stuff happening ta guys like you around Senoia all the time."

"Hell nah! I ain't no dumbass - I never woulda OD'ed. Got awful close a couple times, but I always knew my limits."

"Then maybe your dealer killed you."

"No way. Me an' Jesse was tight. And my tab was all paid up. I know it wasn't him."

Beth lifted her eyebrows and gave him a look, debating on whether she should throw out her next suggestion or not. But then she figured, what the hell. "And what if it was your brother who killed you?"

She half-expected him to lash out in anger and call her a stupid bitch. But he didn't. Instead, he laughed so hard that his beer gut shook and tears formed in his eyes.

"Tha's a good one, blondie," he said, still grinning and wiping away tears. "Shit. I almos' wish he did. Maybe I wouldn't be stuck here with you right now if that was the case."

I guess that makes me feel a little better about having to meet this guy, she thought. At least I know he won't murder me.

She sighed and crossed her arms over her chest. "Okay… so how did you die?"

Merle sucked his teeth for a moment, gazing downward with resentment. Then he grumbled, "They said I hung myself."

Beth's eyebrows shot up and her eyes widened. "Sounds pretty cut an' dry to me…"

He gestured negatively, shaking his hands and head in denial. "Nah, nah, nah - it's not! It's bullshit. I ain't no fuckin' pussy, I wouldn'ta gone out like that. Never."

"People who kill themselves aren't pussies," she snapped. "Who knows, maybe the drugs made you so depressed that you felt like you had no other choice."

He scoffed. "You don't get it, girl. Them drugs was one a my only reasons ta keep livin'! That an' my brother. 'Sides, if I was gonna take myself out, it woulda been a helluva lot cooler than just danglin' from my goddamn bedroom ceiling."

"Oh yeah? And how would you have done it?"

He shrugged and the corner of his mouth slowly curled into a smirk. "Shit, I'ono… maybe I'd've driven my car off a cliff an' went out in a big ol' fiery explosion. Or jumped off the tallest building in Atlanta - somethin' real messy that somebody else would have ta clean up." He let out a cold laugh and shook his head. "The options are jus' about endless. Ol' Merle can be real creative, I'll tell ya what."

She regretted asking.

Then an idea hit her and she reached over to grab her phone from the console between the seats. "Why am I even asking you? You said you can't remember anything, I should've just Googled it in the first place," she said, staring down at her phone's screen and quickly typing in a search. "So let's just see what the official report has ta say about it."

He grunted in disapproval. "What're you lookin' up now? You really think that bullshit report is gonna tell you anythin' I can't?"

Beth shrugged and ignored him. She continued focusing on her phone, scrolling through the results until she'd found what she was looking for. Merle seemed to be waiting patiently and she knew he was just as curious to hear what the internet had to say about his death.

There was only one article about his death from the Senoia newspaper, and then an obituary that had been published about a week later in the same newspaper. She realized he'd told the truth about being dead for a few weeks - three weeks and four days, to be exact. She also realized that the picture in the article was the exact same man sitting next to her right now.

It was real. Now she had absolutely no doubt: Merle Dixon was a very real man who had very much died and Beth had very much never seen nor heard of him once in her entire life. Yet somehow, he was with her at this exact moment, and everything he'd told her thus far added up to what she was reading. There was simply no way that her brain could've conjured up this whole experience out of nothing.

At least she knew she wasn't insane. Yet. Though she was afraid that spending much more time with Merle might drive her there.

"What's it say?" He asked impatiently after several minutes.

She finished reading his obituary and shrugged, looking up and meeting his gaze. "Your brother found you hanging from your bedroom ceiling after like, four days of not hearing from you. They did an autopsy an' found a bunch of drugs but they said you died because of the rope around your neck. Plain and simple. There wasn't even evidence of another person being present till yer brother came to check on you."

He narrowed his eyes and scowled. "Bullshit," he growled. "It's all fucking bullshit." His hands clenched into fists in his lap.

Beth blinked and gave him a deadpan stare. "Even your brother believes you committed suicide. Why should I try to tell him any differently?"

Rage flashed in his blue eyes and he pounded a fist on the dashboard, causing her to jump in surprise. His voice rose until he was all but screaming at her, "You said you'd fuckin' meet him, you said you'd talk to 'im! We had a deal! You can't go back on a deal, princess, this shit ain't gonna work that way!"

She reeled, taken aback by his outburst. She was growing accustomed to them but this one was different. He wasn't so much angry as he was… desperate.

"Calm the hell down!" She yelled back, waving a hand in dismissal. "I didn't say I wouldn't. I just need some really good damn reasons because at this rate, I'm gonna sound like a friggin' lunatic."

His anger subsided and he scoffed. "Why the hell you care so much 'bout what other people think? You don't even know Daryl."

"Because I'm alive, Merle. I still have to deal with consequences. If enough people think I'm goin' off the deep end, I'll get put into a hospital. And - like I already told you - I can't help anybody from there, least of all you."

He chuckled. "If you say so, blondie."

She clenched her jaw and muttered, "It's Beth."

"Whatever. Can we go now? We can catch 'im at work if - "

"Uh, no. You still have a lot of questions to answer before I'm goin' anywhere else."

He let out a long sigh of exasperation. Then he pulled out his crinkled pack of cigarettes and shook one into his palm, placing it between his lips and lighting it. He pulled in a long drag and as he exhaled a cloud of smoke, turned his head to Beth and smiled wickedly.

"Alrigh', Miss Wannabe Barbara Walters. Ask away."


Beth sat in the parking lot and talked to Merle for at least two hours. It was easily the longest span of time she'd ever spent actually listening to the things he said as well as making direct eye contact with him. And though he continued to be rude and annoying, he didn't make the conversation any harder than it had to be - for a change. She hadn't realized just how many questions she needed answered until now. Admittedly, she hadn't seriously entertained the idea of meeting and talking with the mysterious brother until now. But she could accept that she was out of plausible ideas of her own, just like she could accept that she had no remaining option but to resort to Merle's brilliant problem-solving.

And of course, she wasn't the type to go back on a deal. Even if it was a deal with a dead guy who could maybe possibly be a demon. She kept reminding herself of her dad and how she would never be able to live with herself if Merle literally haunted him to death. That was more than enough reason to keep her end of the bargain.

She learned a lot of new and valuable information. Merle explained that he was ten years older than Daryl, giving a brief description of their alcoholic father and their battered-soft mother and the "white trash trailer park" childhood they'd experienced. He said he'd joined the military and went away for a few years when he was 18 and Daryl was barely 8. And when he came back, their mother was dead - a housefire, he explained. She was a smoker and she had a bad habit of falling asleep with a lit cigarette in her hand. Apparently the life insurance money helped their father to buy a nice little cabin out in the boonies, though Daryl was left neglected and alone while Merle was away. By the time he came back, Daryl was grown and different. Though not so different.

"He was always a mama's boy," Merle scoffed. His tone softened, "Even when Mama weren't around no more. He's always been the sweet one... my baby brother."

During several points in his stories, Beth got the feeling that Merle had a genuine soft spot for his only sibling. She could tell that there was only one person in the world he cared about half as much as he cared about himself, and it was his little brother. When he spoke of Daryl, she heard real emotion and deep fear and repressed heartache. But she didn't point it out; she simply nodded along and stored away every bit of information for later use.

Their daddy was nothing like Hershel. She felt sick while she listened to all the awful things Merle told her - and for once, it wasn't because he was making her sick. It was because the man he described sounded like a monster. Yet he'd been a father to two boys and had helped shape them into the men they became. It was horrifying to think about.

Will Dixon had never held a steady job in his life. The only professions he'd successfully managed were bootleg moonshiner, drug dealer, and thief. To put it simply: criminal. And the worst kind of criminal, from what Merle told her. The kind of man who had most likely killed a person or three in his lifetime. Instead of buying clothes or food for his kids, Will Dixon invested in his own moonshine still with the remaining life insurance money (and a little meth lab on the side that Merle didn't know about for several years) and proceeded to make his living completely illegally, all the while operating an extremely dangerous business from the comfort of his own home. When he wasn't beating up on his kids, he was drinking himself blind or getting high on crystal or fighting with other doped-up criminals. Thankfully, after a particularly nasty fight between Will and Merle not long after returning to Georgia, Merle got Daryl out and away from their dad.

Though, as Merle explained it, the lives he and Daryl went on to lead weren't much of an improvement. They'd never been anything close to their "piece of shit pa," as Merle put it. But they certainly weren't angels. Not even law-abiding citizens. They spent over a decade "just drifting around, getting lit and getting laid, just trying to survive." Though they worked odd jobs here and there, Merle admitted that the Dixon Brothers had spent the majority of their time committing a fair share of crimes - mostly victimless misdemeanors, and mostly his ideas.

From the way Merle talked, Beth surmised that Daryl was a follower. He sounded like the kind of man who had no real direction except to follow Merle, his only family, his only guiding light and the only person he'd ever been able to truly trust. And it seemed that all the stupid little anecdotes of their hijinks usually consisted of Merle being a reckless jackass and Daryl being the guy who had to either suffer the consequences or clean up after him.

Once again, she didn't voice these observations aloud. She just nodded and urged Merle to go on, asking any and every question that popped into her head.

From the way he told it, Merle and Daryl had drifted apart shortly before their father died less than a year ago ("got his throat cut like a dumbass"). Merle didn't seem to have any definitive answers as to why - all he said was that Daryl had changed and kept changing to the point that they disagreed on nearly everything and fought daily. Beth had to purse her lips tightly to hold back the comments she wanted to make. Like, well maybe he realized you're a complete asshole and that his life would be better without you getting him into trouble all the time.

He said they were still close; they had to be, they were brothers. He repeated his statement from earlier, "I was all he ever had. He was all I ever had. Couldn't ever trust nobody else. Can't nobody understand how a Dixon works 'cept another Dixon."

But Merle didn't remember anything from the day he supposedly took his own life. According to him, the last thing he'd done was "chug a fifth of vodka, smoke a fat bowl, and pass the fuck out." Everything past that was completely gone.

No wonder you don't remember anything, Beth thought, suppressing the urge to roll her eyes.

He went on to explain that he knew for sure he'd woken up the next day and gone on to have nearly twelve hours of something before he died. He pointed out that the autopsy said he'd been dead for four days and the last day he remembered was six days before he'd been found deceased.

Then he told the story of how he'd 'woken up': how he'd tracked his brother down and followed him and had done everything in his power to get Daryl to hear him. How he'd gone and found all his friends and tried to talk to them, to yell at them, to get their attention. How he'd returned to Daryl over and over and made attempt after attempt after failed attempt to communicate with his brother. How he'd become so furious and fed up and completely forlorn that he'd finally given up and wandered toward the horizon, off into the woods and away from everyone and everything. How he'd walked for days and grown to accept his current state of directionless death - his current state of being completely invisible.

And then Merle explained that he'd been all but hopeless when he happened across Beth. How he knew - he just knew - that she was the only one who could help him because… well, he'd walked for days and she was the only one who could see him.

"Jus' too damn bad the only person who can help me is some stubborn bimbo," he concluded.

Beth rolled her eyes and sighed. "At least I can always reassure myself that yer grateful."


"Okay - does yer brother have Facebook? I'd like to at least know what he looks like before I try to track him down."

"The fuck if I know. Don't waste yer time - let's go. You'll see 'im when we get there."

"Yeah, no. I'm lookin' him up. You can wait thirty more seconds."

Merle growled low in his throat and lit another cigarette. Beth ignored him and focused on the phone in her hands while the keys remained in the ignition, waiting to be turned.

A moment later, she was scrolling through Daryl Dixon's scarce Facebook profile. He didn't have any public info except his birthday and that he lived in Senoia. She looked through all of his photos, finding only a few that actually showed what he looked like. To her surprise, he didn't resemble Merle.

He's actually kinda cute, she thought.

Then she lifted her eyes and found Merle glaring at her impatiently. She shot him a scowl and set her phone down.

"Find what you were lookin' for, sweetheart?" He taunted as she started the truck.

"Well he has a Facebook, if that's what yer asking," she replied, backing out of the parking spot and driving toward the street.

Merle grunted and exhaled a thick cloud of cigarette smoke in her direction. "And?"

She shrugged. "An' now I know what he looks like. So I have more of an idea what to expect - ya know, along with the life story you told me."

There was a beat of silence. She expected another smart-ass retort but instead, Merle cackled. Then he said, "Oh - you already got a big fat crush on 'im."

Beth laughed and nearly swerved off the road. "What?! You've gotta be kidding me."

He responded with a louder laugh and as she slowed to a stop at a red light, he insisted, "Girls like you always think li'l Darylina's 'cute,' I bet you - "

"Oh my god." She'd been partially listening but as soon as her eyes landed on the neon sign down the block, her heart leapt and she'd forgotten what they were even arguing about.

"What? I'm right, huh? Yeah, 'course I am - "

"No, shut up," she snapped, pressing down on the accelerator and turning on her blinker as soon as the light turned green. Her eyes were locked on the neon sign. "We're makin' another stop."

Merle groaned. "Fuckin' where?"

She merged into the other lane and turned, all in silence with her gaze set on the destination ahead. Before she could open her mouth to answer or explain, he'd noticed the sign.

"A psychic?! I thought you said no Satanic shit!"

"It's not Satanic, moron. It's the one option I forgot about - a psychic… Maybe they can hear you."


The flickering green neon sign above the tiny building read: PSYCHIC. And posted in the only window was another neon sign, this one flashing smaller pink letters that declared, Expert in the Paranormal. The building itself looked like a repurposed private law office, a bit run-down and clearly maintained by no more than one or two people. The only parking was curbside, so Beth carefully pulled into one of the three open spots and shut off the truck.

Her heart was racing. How could she have forgotten such a viable option? It should've been her first visit. She should've been Googling "paranormal experts" rather than "places of worship." Nonetheless, the sign had caught her attention and reeled her in at the last minute. And no matter how much Merle bitched about their deal and how he wanted to get the hell back to Senoia, she wasn't going to change her mind. Not before she at least tried.

He huffed and puffed and finally gave in and followed her once he realized she wasn't backing down. The smell of cigarette smoke seemed to follow her just as closely as he did.

"I'll bet she's a fuckin' fraud," he grumbled as they approached the front door. "Ain't a single one a these psychics that knows anything 'cept how to swindle money outta gullible folk."

"Well I guess we'll know soon enough, won't we?"

He grumbled some more from behind her. "Waste a my damn time."

Beth rolled her eyes and opened the door to step inside the small building. She was immediately assaulted by the pungent mixture of a dozen different burning incenses, and her eyes burned from both the smell and the drastic change in lighting. The entire place was dim as late evening, all the windows blacked out and the lights heavily draped. Wispy clouds of haze and smoke floated through the air and she had to blink rapidly before she could adjust and see anything. It was completely silent. Even the sounds of the outside world were quieted.

She expected more remarks from Merle at any moment but he remained tight-lipped behind her - oddly enough. She stepped forward and realized she was staring at a huge black curtain that separated the room into two halves. To her left was a small end table with a single bell sitting atop it and a sign that read: Ring Bell For Assistance. Please Be Patient: Only One Spiritual Connection At A Time.

Beth furrowed her brows in confusion as she read the sign but shrugged and double-tapped on the bell with two fingers. The high-pitched ri-ing echoed throughout the room. And she waited.

Merle remained silent. She glanced behind her and saw that he was still there, though he was scowling and shifting from foot to foot uneasily. His head was on a swivel and he seemed the most uncomfortable she'd ever seen him.

She was about to ask what his problem was, but then the big black curtain rustled and she whipped her head back around to find someone emerging from behind it.

"Good evening."

It was a middle-aged woman with narrow eyes the color of rich soil and thin dark eyebrows. Her hair was half-blonde and half-brown, cut short just above her shoulders and lying flat with straight bangs that covered most of her forehead. She had a long neck, a pale and narrow face, thin red lips, and high, sharp cheekbones. She wore a flowy black dress that practically hung off her rail-thin form, the back hem trailing along the floor behind her despite the fact that she towered nearly a foot over Beth. The long sleeves covered all but her dainty wrists and bony hands. She looked like she hadn't been out in the sun for years.

She blinked slowly with heavy eyelids, smirking as if she knew something no one else did. Her eyes scanned the room and the front door before settling on Beth. "I am Lady Jadis, Seer of All. What has led you to me today, my dear?"

"You're a psychic, shouldn't you already know?" As soon as it slipped out, Beth snapped her mouth shut and shook her head.

Lady Jadis looked taken aback and her smile disappeared for a moment.

Christ, was Merle already rubbing off on her? No, Beth assured herself, she was just irritated from a long day of running around in circles and listening to obnoxious commentary from a dead man.

She quickly apologized, "I'm sorry, that's not what I meant - I know it probably doesn't work that way. I um, I saw your sign. That's what led me here."

The other woman's smile returned and she nodded, waving a limp-wristed hand in forgiveness. "Well then, Fate Itself brought you here. How mysterious." Her carefully sculpted eyebrows rose into a curious arch. "It's true: I may have The Gift, but not all forms of The Gift are received in the same manner. Tell me more about why you seek me out today, young lady." Her voice was low and menacing with an air of assumed superiority.

Beth hesitated. Then she told herself, It's okay, this is the one person I don't have to worry about thinking I'm crazy. 'Cause even if I am, she's probably been crazy for years.

She licked her lips and quietly asked, "What d'you know about… talking to dead people?"

Jadis's face took on a very serious expression and she replied, "Contacting the Other Side? I'm well-versed with nearly every aspect. Is there someone you wish to reach today?"

Beth nearly laughed. She shook her head and reiterated, "No, I mean like… dead people who are still here. With us. Who can't cross over to the other side without uh, help."

The 'psychic' appeared a bit puzzled but tried to retain her confident and all-knowing attitude. "Oh - oh, of course. Yes, it's far less common but I've had my fair share of experience with such things."

The spark of hope Beth felt must've shown on her face because Jadis smiled and gestured toward the black curtain. Before Beth could ask another question, the older woman suggested, "Shall we step into my Room of Sight and tempt Fate? Perhaps I have the answers you are so desperately seeking."

Beth paused and eyed the black curtain.

Sure, she wasn't getting the best feeling about Lady Jadis being a genuine psychic, but she'd come this far. She might as well see what the woman had to say. What did Beth have to lose?

As she took a step forward, Jadis's bony hand reached out and stopped her. "It's twenty dollars upon entry and another twenty-five after a successful Connection."

Well, what did she have to lose besides twenty bucks...

to be continued...