by Larry Brown
He stood up and turned around.
“When you gonna stop making excuses for him, Jewel? Can’t you see how he is by now? What’s it gonna take to open your eyes?”
“If it was him he’d have knocked on the door, wouldn’t he?”
“Well maybe so since he’s got an open invitation here.”
She stood up too.
“You don’t understand nothing,” she said.
“Maybe I understand a lot more than you think.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What do you want me to do? I can go ask him. If I can find him. All he’s gonna do is say no.”
She stood there and he didn’t know what else to say. He wanted to hold her but he couldn’t let himself do that. Not now. He didn’t want to go off and leave them but he had to get on to work sometime.
“Do your windows lock?” he said.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “They lock. I just had em up last night because it was hot in the bedroom.”
“Well,” he said. “Tonight, I suggest they get locked. I got to go home now and eat breakfast.”
She took a step forward.
“I could fix you something.”
“I got to get ready for work. It’s gonna be a long day. Have you got a gun?”
“You know I ain’t got no gun. I wouldn’t know how to use one if I did.”
He walked down the steps until he stood on the walk and he turned to look back at her.
“I’ll see if I can find you one,” he said. “I’ve got another pistol at the house, or the jail one. Looks like you may need one.”
“Don’t leave like this, Bobby. I didn’t do nothing wrong. I’m just trying to …” She stopped. She turned and went in the house and she shut the front door. He heard it lock. He went on out to his patrol car and got in it and left.
He told Mary what had happened while she fixed his breakfast. She was strangely quiet, moving around at the stove, making biscuits. He drank coffee at the table and got up long enough to go into his bathroom and shave. He didn’t like looking into his eyes in the mirror, but he watched his face watching him while he lathered the soap and put in a new blade and drew the safety razor carefully around the curves of his chin and jaw. Even so he cut himself twice. He took little pieces of tissue and plastered them there, leaning on the sink and waiting for the cuts to dry. He dressed in a clean uniform and shined his boots and went back to the kitchen for one more cup of coffee. It was only seven o’clock when she put breakfast on the table. They ate in silence, the sun continuing to rise outside the window and lighting the kitchen while the birds sang. He finished and thanked her and leaned over and kissed her on the cheek because he loved her so much and then he went out to the front room and strapped on his revolver and got his hat.
The dawn had not lied. He could feel the places where he was starting to sweat through his shirt by the time he reached the jail. The heat in the parking lot leapt up and hit him in the face when he got out and put his hat on. He took it back off as soon as he got inside.
He kept looking at his watch as he worked at papers on his desk. On the weekdays he had a secretary named Mable and she brought him coffee when she came in. He kept working.
At nine o’clock he had to take Byers over to the courthouse and he walked him up the sidewalk without talking, crossed the street with him, and took him up the granite steps to the cool and dark interior, the old high halls. He stood in the courtroom and the judge turned down the bond as he knew he would and set a date for the trial. Byers was claiming self-defense, so a county attorney was appointed and it was all over. He walked him back to the jail and put him back in the cage himself, then went again to his desk and worked the morning away, trying to keep his mind off Jewel. And David. And Glen. All he wanted to do was get in the car and go find him, but he told himself there’d be time for that later. There were other things he had to do today.
He didn’t eat lunch at Winter’s. A new cafe had opened two blocks down the street and he went there and had chicken and dumplings, sat lingering over a cup of coffee. By one o’clock he was out at the funeral home and he sat with Dorris and his family for a while. His mother came in. Most of the people from the house on Sunday came in and when it got too thick in there for him he went out and stood on the brick walk in front of the building and smoked. The minutes dragged by and he had to make small talk with people. Then it was time to go out to the church.
He stood in the road beside his newly washed patrol car with the lights blinking as the procession pulled out, all the highway traffic stopped behind his car and him holding his hat over his heart. The downturned face of Dorris going by, suit and tie, a prisoner behind tinted glass. After they had all gone he got in behind them and finished out the escort. The procession drove in no particular hurry to a little church called Wildwood Grove ten miles out in the county, a small white building of neat wood, ancient and nestled under a canopy of old oaks. He stood with his hat in his hands as the casket was carried in by young boys with men helping. Then he stood against the back wall of the church while the minister said his words and wasps hung droning above the crowd, while Dorris and his family wrenched this muted gathering with their anguished noises and tried to listen to the promise of perishable flesh that would be kept forever safe. The choir sang, voices that rose to the rafters and made the hair prickle on the back of his neck. The flowers were many and they were beautiful with their ribbons of inscriptions and their little blue handwritten cards.
He stood graveside under a portable tent and saw the mound of earth with a cheap velvet robe covering it, the yawning hole in the grass.
He stood around after it was over, people trickling away in little groups and singly, the sun burning down upon the women in their black dresses and the farmers and carpenters bound up in their stifling coats and ties. The grave diggers hung back in a line of trees, smoking cigarettes and waiting to fill it back up. He saw his mother from a distance.
He talked to Dorris and promised to visit and he hugged the boy’s mother. She was ashen-faced and out of it from tranquilizers. The sun flashed on the windows and the chrome of the heavy old cars as they pulled slowly down the little dirt lane and away to the blacktop road.
He stood there until everyone was gone, squatting under a big tree at the crest of the hill as the men with their shovels came forward from the woods and began to take down the tent, uncover the dirt, pack up the folding chairs and the drapes that had hung over them. Some of the flowers were trampled and trod upon now, great colorful sheaves of them bundled up on the earth where the bees and yellow jackets came to weave among them and clamber over the blossoms wilting quickly under the murderous eye of the sun.
When they started throwing the dirt in on top of the coffin he got up and walked through the graveyard, slowly, twisting a stem of grass between his thumb and forefinger, pausing here and there to read the names of the dead and regard the times in which they’d lived. Here born 1839, there died 1934 or 1899. Old tombstones carved by hand from sandstone and their crypts cracked from time and weather, little hollows of burned grass a haven for the lizards and snakes. Ancient marble or granite turned near black by rain and sun and their dates unreadable, even the stone carver who engraved them with his chisels long gone now too. Smiling dead young marines from the first wave at Iwo Jima and soldiers and sailors with their likenesses rendered in a porcelain chip, their brass forever shining. Old people he remembered just dimly from his time as a boy now only names on stone above passages of scripture. Here was Virgil’s wife, dead in her grave. He stopped and studied it. He didn’t know that her name was Emma Lee and he had to bend close to read the little card. And there lay Theron too. Nobody left to take care of Virgil now but Randolph. Mary if he’d let her. He remembered Theron, the tall boy with black hair and the way he made the bat crack on the field when he stood and watched him play, the swiftness of his legs rounding the bases and the old men yelling and clapping on a hot dusty afternoon. Mary had t
old him that Glen had climbed on top of the barn a month after he shot Theron, that his mother and Virgil saw him before he could jump and made him come down. All the fights he’d picked in school, the things he’d stolen and all the early trouble with the law, broken store windows and vandalized buildings and joyrides in cars and hurled beer bottles and the beatings he gave boys smaller than him and how they’d finally kicked him out of school and said good riddance.
He turned away from them and went on through the grass and the stones. Where babies were buried and flowers had died. A little vacation of nostalgia, idling his time away. He didn’t want to go back to town but he knew he had to.
Arriving last he hadn’t been able to find a tree to park his cruiser under and it had been sitting in the sun for over an hour and the seat burned his legs when he sat down in it and put the keys in the ignition. He wheeled it around and headed out, grateful for the wind that came in the open windows.
When he got back to the jail he went inside and spoke to Mable, who nodded and kept talking on her telephone. They had finally let him buy a couple of air conditioners and it was cool in the front part of the jail and in his office. He took off his revolver and placed it on top of his desk and then bent low to a drawer on the right and opened it. Among the loose papers and fishing lures and a snarled reel and a broken stapler lay a small brown leather holster. He pulled it out and unsnapped the hammer strap and seized it by the walnut grips and looked at it. He frowned at the rust on it, but he found some oil and a cloth and cleaned it, opening the cylinder and oiling the parts, adding a drop or two behind the hammer, dry-firing it in his hand over and over. In another drawer he found cartridges and loaded it. He carefully snapped the cylinder back in and left an empty chamber under the hammer. He changed his shirt and put his revolver back on and carried the other handgun with him when he walked back through the dayroom.
“You heading out, Bobby?”
He stopped to look at Mable where she was leaning up over her desk.
“Yeah. I’m going to see Dan Armstrong and then I’ll be on the radio if you need me.”
“Would you sign this before you go?”
She came around to where he was with a form and a pen. He put the gun down on the desk and took the pen from her.
“You get you a new gun?” she said.
“Naw,” was all he said. He scribbled his name and laid the pen down. He turned and went out the door carrying one gun and wearing another.
Armstrong had his office in the old library building, a small space squeezed in between the county agent and the health clinic. Small black children lined one side of the hall, their mothers in chairs stiffening visibly as he walked past them. He spoke to them, said Good afternoon and went on by them and turned in at the end of the hall. The door was open but he reached in and rapped on the glass. Dan was bent over a bookshelf crammed with files and he turned to look at Bobby with his pipe in his mouth. He had a way of looking up over his eyeglasses at people.
“You open for business?” Bobby said.
“Come on in,” he said. “Have a seat.”
Bobby sat down in the chair in front of the desk and took off his hat. Through some system of his own devising the probation officer selected a space among the thousands of files on the shelf and pushed the one he was holding in among the rest of them. His forearms were covered with tattoos from his years in the navy. Palm trees with hula girls and a screaming eagle diving with talons full of arrows. He sat down in his chair and reached for a pouch of tobacco and started loading his pipe.
“What can I do for you, Sheriff?”
“I’m just checking on Glen Davis. Did he come in this morning?”
He tamped the tobacco into the bowl and from his desk picked up what looked to be a hand grenade. “He was waiting on me when I got here.”
“He was?”
Dan struck the lighter and held it over the bowl of the pipe, making wet sucking sounds as he puffed and tried to get it going. Bobby set his hat on his knee.
“Standing out there in the hall.”
“How’s his attitude?”
“All right, I guess. Better than a lot of em come in here.”
“What did he say?”
Dan had the pipe going by then and he set the lighter back on the desk, held the pipe near his jaw.
“Nothing much. Said he’d learned his lesson. Didn’t want to go back. He was highly cooperative. I was impressed.”
Bobby leaned back in his chair and looked out the window. He could see some leaves on a tree and part of the courthouse.
“You want to see his papers, Sheriff?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
He handed them over and swiveled around in his chair to look at his files while Bobby scanned down the field report. Glen was supposed to come in weekly, every Monday at 8:00 A.M. Released early on good behavior. Served two years and eleven months. Two prior convictions for simple assault. One drunk driving. Outstanding warrants: none. Everything seemed to be in order. Except now he was crawling around in people’s houses.
Bobby closed the file and handed it back. Dan took it and dropped it on his desk.
“Well,” Bobby said. “How did he look?”
“About like everbody who comes in here. A little nervous. I probably would be, too. Some come in with a chip on their shoulder. Want to blame me for their troubles I guess. But no, he was fine. I gave him the regular speech. You know. Get a job, stay out of the bars. Stay out of trouble.”
“And what about a job. Is he looking for one?”
“I believe he said he was going out to Chambers. Said that was where he used to work. I told him he could go by the unemployment office too and sign up to draw until he gets on somewhere. He should, really.”
Dan seemed serene. His day’s work was probably over. His eyes flicked back up. “Have you got some concern about him?”
“I was just checking,” Bobby said, and he stood up. “Just like to keep my eye on em when they come home.”
“Well I certainly appreciate your interest, Sheriff. Makes my job easier.”
“Let me know if he gives you any trouble, okay?”
“I’ll do that. And you have a good afternoon.”
Bobby put his hat on and got out of there. Some of the children were still in the hall and some of them couldn’t walk too good yet and he almost got a few of them tangled up in his legs. He lifted his arms and kind of waded through them and then he was back out on the street in the sunshine and the traffic of the town and most of the day was gone. He looked at his watch. Jewel wouldn’t get off until six but there would be a couple of hours of daylight left after that. He figured she was probably still pissed off at him. He walked back up the sidewalk to the jail but he didn’t go in. He got his keys from his pocket and got into the car and started it. There was still a load of paperwork on his desk but he didn’t want to mess with it now. He backed out of the parking lot and drove around the square and headed south, down the wide street lined with big oaks and old fine houses, just driving. Looking in particular for Glen. He didn’t know what he’d say to him this time if he found him. There wasn’t much left.
He turned the volume up on the radio and put his hat on the seat. He couldn’t just stay up all night or watch him twenty-four hours a day waiting for him to do something. Or even try to keep up with his comings and goings. And what if he was wrong about everything? The only thing he knew for sure was that he’d been to see Jewel one time. But no matter what Armstrong said, he knew the pen hadn’t changed him. Not him. If anything it had probably made him worse. Armstrong didn’t know him like he did. Armstrong hadn’t grown up with him.
He drove down toward DeLay on a back road, cruising along about forty and looking at the crops, the cotton and the corn. Four-thirty. Still another hour and a half before Jewel got off. Somebody was building a new barn, a bright arch of pale lumber that rose up into the air where men stood handling shining sheets of tin that flashed in the sun. He slowed, looking at it.
He thought that probably wouldn’t be a bad job, being a carpenter. You could work with your hands. You wouldn’t have any problems with your job after you finished working each day. Go home, drink a beer, eat supper, read the paper. Let somebody else worry about all the headaches. Just drive the nails and saw the lumber. You wouldn’t have to be on call and you wouldn’t always be seeing the bad side of people.
He almost didn’t see the car. He was driving slowly over the river bridge and he just happened to glance down to the right. It was nosed up into a stand of cane on top of the bank and he could see a man and a woman struggling against the hood. Bobby slammed on the brakes and shoved his car up in reverse, squalling a tire and going quickly back across the bridge and a little past it, where a sort of dirt trail led down beside the bridge. It was deeply rutted but he pulled off down in there, dust rolling over and through the car. They had stopped what they were doing by the time he pulled up beside them but the woman was crying. He left the car running and got out. The man was just standing there, weaving unsteadily. He had on a ripped shirt and a pair of cutoff jeans. Beer cans were scattered over the ground. Two small children squatted beside the remains of a fire.
“What’s going on here?” Bobby said.
“Arrest this son of a bitch,” the woman said as she wobbled toward him. Her black hair was knotted and tangled and her bare feet were dusty. She had on a baggy pair of shorts and some kind of elastic top that stretched over her breasts. He could see her rotten teeth.
“This ain’t none of your goddamn business,” the man said. “This between me and her.” He put one hand on the car to steady himself but it didn’t do much good. He seemed to be trying to effect a casual air now that they weren’t alone.
“You better watch your mouth, mister,” Bobby told him. “I’m gonna ask you again. What’s going on here?”
The woman had come up beside him by then and he could smell her. One little whiff that almost took his breath away. It was not the first time he had seen folks like these running loose out in the county.