Father and Son (20 page)

He tossed it down on the porch and looked up at her. She had her robe on and she was barefooted and lovely and now he was scared and mad.

“And you didn't hear nothing?” he said for the second time.

She just shook her head and sipped at her coffee without raising her face. The boards around her feet were littered with cigarette ash and she'd even thumped some on her robe.

“Well hell,” he said, and stood looking at the side of the house. He looked at the drive. There was a beer bottle out there and he walked over and picked it up. He held it in his hand and studied it while she watched him from the porch. He turned the bottle upside down and not one drop came out of it. It didn't make any sense.

He walked back over to the porch and set the bottle down. There was nothing else that he could see, just the bottle and the screen and the tracks. He sat down on the top step and stared at the yard.

“Why don't you get David to come out here?” he said. “I want to talk to him.”

Behind him the chair she was in creaked.

“I don't know if I should, Bobby. He's scared enough already.”

He turned and looked over his shoulder at her.

“How do you expect me to do anything if I don't ask some questions?”

“He don't know nothing. He didn't move until the car started.”

“You mean he just laid there?”

“That's what he said.”

“Well bring him out here. I can't believe you didn't wake up.”

“I can't believe it either,” she said, and she got up and dropped her cigarette into one of the flower beds. Then she went to the screen door and
called for the boy. She waited there for a moment and he came out in a pair of red shorts and eyed Bobby warily, looked at the gun. He sidled up against his mother's leg and hung one hand in the folds of her robe.

“Hey, David,” Bobby said gently. “Come on over here and set down with me for a minute.”

Still the child hung back. She bent over him and stroked his head and told him it was all right and then gave him a little push. Bobby held his arms out to him and he came over and sat in his lap. Bobby put his arms around him. He picked up one of his hands and looked at it, turning it this way and that, and then he looked at his face. That small version so much like him sitting there on his legs, the same hair, the same nose and eyes. Jewel sat down in her chair and leaned forward with her chin in her hands.

“Did you sleep good, David?” he said.

The boy shook his head. He wasn't looking at Bobby. He lowered his face and watched something on the ground.

“Did you get woke up?”

The small head nodded.

“What woke you up, David?”

He looked up at Bobby and squinted in the early morning light. “Somebody.”

Bobby just held him. The thought of them lying in there like that. Not even a dog around the place to bark.

“Did you see the car, David?”

“Yes sir.”

“Could you tell who it was?”

The boy looked at his mother and she put her hands together. “It's all right, David. Talk to Bobby.”

The boy shook his head.

“Can I eat now?” he said.

“Sure you can,” Bobby told him. He picked him up and set him on the porch. The boy went back inside the house and closed the screen door softly. She waited for a moment, until she heard him move toward the back of the house.

“You think it was Glen?” she said.

“Who in the hell else would it be?”

“It could have been anybody, Bobby.”

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 told 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.