proudly carried around. “From my granddaughter and my son and his wife.”
She stared at the picture of little Lois, and he saw something in her face melt.
“You must be very proud,” she said.
Valentine said that he was.
“Not to change the subject, but the house goes for six hundred a month, plus a security deposit. What do you say?”
He started to tell her he wanted to think about it. But a noise from outside got his attention. Over the sink was a window with peeling paint that looked onto the wooded backyard. He opened it with both his hands and stuck his head out.
The screeching sound that can only be made by a wayward electric guitar was tearing a hole in the chilly night air. Polly stood next to him at the sink, and he pointed at the ramshackle house on the other side of the trees. “It sounds like someone’s torturing a cat.”
The real-estate agent grimaced. “It does, doesn’t it?”
He pulled his head back inside and shut the window. “I’m going to have to think about it.”
She followed him through the house. Reaching the front door, she grabbed the knob, then stopped. “I can have a talk with him, if you’d like. Ask him to turn it down.”
“Who?”
She opened the door, and the screaming guitar invaded the quiet interior. “The moron who likes to play his music so loud.”
“You know him?”
“Name’s Ricky Smith. He’s my ex-husband. He likes to play his stereo loud enough to wake the dead. Especially his Stevie Ray Vaughan bootlegs.”
Somewhere in the woods a dog was howling. Throughout the neighborhood other screaming mongrels joined in. Unsnapping her purse, Polly dug out a Kleenex and began to blow her nose. Suddenly the guitar stopped being a guitar, the CD player stuck on a screaming high note. The neighborhood mongrels shredded their vocal cords, and Valentine realized she was crying. He touched her arm.
“You going to be okay?” he asked.
“Who knows?” she said.
They returned to the kitchen. Hiding in the ancient Frigidaire was a can of Miller Lite. Polly poured it into a tall paper cup, which she tapped against Valentine’s water glass. While crying, she had inadvertently wiped away her mascara and makeup, and now resembled an eighteen-year-old, her eyes puffy and soft.
“Sorry about the waterworks,” she said. “Ricky and I didn’t part on the best of terms. We dated in high school; I dumped him, thought he was a jerk. We got back together a few years ago. I thought he’d changed, or that I could live with him, or whatever. Stupid me. Any idea what it’s like being married to someone who’s convinced he’s a born loser and has no self-esteem? It’s like watching someone circle a drain. I finally dumped him.”
“Did he always play the stereo so loud?”
“Yes. I thought it was cute in the beginning, like he was rebelling against something. When I complained he gave me earplugs.”
“Any kids?”
“I couldn’t see him as a father. I think that was what drove us apart. He didn’t have the backbone.”
“You still talk?”
“We went to this marriage counselor after we split up. Slippery Rock being a small town and the two of us having to cross paths just about every day, the counselor suggested we keep a dialogue going, you know, keep things civil. Hah! All we did was vent our spleens at each other. One night we had drinks at the Holiday Inn and I ended up punching his lights out.”
Her cup was empty, and Valentine watched her search the refrigerator for more beer.
“Any regrets?” he asked.
“Yeah. I wish I waited until he had some money to divorce him.”
Valentine didn’t say anything, and watched her slam the refrigerator hard.
“He stuck me for ten grand when we split up,” she explained.
“Oh,” he said.
“Ricky’s rich now. He won a million bucks out in Las Vegas, and this afternoon I heard he picked a fifty- thousand-dollar lottery ticket, if you can believe that. But to tell you the truth, I don’t think all the money in the world could get us back together. Ricky isn’t the type of cat that’s going to change his stripes, know what I mean?”
He walked Polly to her car. As she was climbing in, her cell phone chirped, and she answered it while firing the engine up. “Hey, Kimberli. Yup, everything’s fine, I’m just leaving. Thanks for checking up. Bye-bye.”
Valentine took a step back from the car. The Holiday Inn in town wanted a hundred and thirty bucks a night for a room. With all the hidden taxes and charges, it would come to a hundred and fifty bucks easy. Times the four nights he expected to be here was six hundred bucks. Taking his wallet out, he removed six crisp hundreds, then tapped on Polly’s window with his knuckle. The window came down, and she stuck her head out, an expectant look on her face.
“Here’s six hundred for the first month’s rent,” he said.
“You want the place?”
“It will do.”
“There’s also a security deposit,” she said.
“For what? The house is practically falling down and there’s nothing worth stealing. Six hundred, and that’s my final offer.”
He shoved the money into her hand. She considered it for a moment.
“You’ve got a deal,” she said. “You want me to call Ricky, tell him to turn the music down? He will if I ask him.”
“He won’t get mad?” Valentine asked.
“Oh, he’ll yell and scream, but that’s typical.”
“Why don’t you give me his phone number? He starts yelling, I’ll go over and punch him in the nose.”
She giggled, the alcohol giving her voice a little squeak. “It’s 555-1292.”
He memorized the number and watched her back down the drive. Growing up with a drunk for a father, he’d learned to hate what alcohol did to people, and he brusquely motioned for her to come back. She drove back to her original spot and lowered her window.
“You forgot to give me the keys to the house,” he said.
8
While his father was getting settled in Slippery Rock, Gerry was traveling to Gulfport, Mississippi, determined to find Tex “All In” Snyder and have a talk with him.
It had been a long day. He’d flown from Key West to Atlanta that afternoon, taken an eight-seater to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and rented a car. By the time he’d actually gotten on the highway, it was growing dark, and he’d wisely gotten in the right lane. A lot of tall white trucks were on the highway, and they roared when they passed him.
He found a radio station that wasn’t country, and jacked the volume up. He was tired, but it was a good tired. His father had bailed him out, given him fresh wings. He’d never been in prison, so he didn’t know what it was like to get sprung. But he had a feeling that the euphoria he was feeling right now was something real close.
He looked at himself in the mirror. That morning, at Yolanda’s suggestion, he’d gotten his hair cut. He liked to wear it longer than most, and his wife had reminded him that he was heading into Dixie, where Yankees were not always welcome. So he’d gotten his ears lowered, and decided he liked the way it made him look.
He turned his attention back to the highway. It ran north-south, with a fifty-foot median planted with hundred-year-old pines. The night seemed very big, the stars illuminating the farthest corners of the universe. It was too good not to share, and he flipped open his cell phone and called his wife.
An hour later, he passed a junior college, then a milling operation where acres of forty-foot-long trees stood
