top of the damp grass. A beer bottle had been dropped in the mud. Beside it was the print of a man’s shoe, an impression that hadn’t yet begun to fill with water.
I felt the fear. Night was coming fast, fingers of fog wafted across the land, and Amy was alone in the house.
I splashed along the road with my lights off. I could see a flickering light in the trees ahead. It took on bulk and form and became a car, idling in the clearing.
I stopped and reached under the seat where my gun was. I clipped it to the front of my belt near the buckle. I got out of the car and walked up through the trees.
Headlights cut through the mist at the edge of the porch. Two men sat there in the dark.
I started across the clearing. A voice came at me from somewhere.
“Hey!…Where you going?”
I looked at them across the gap. “Going to see Ms. Harper.”
“Ms. Harper’s dead.”
“Ms. Amy Harper wasn’t dead, when I left her here half an hour ago.”
“That’s
“She’s having a re-yoon-yun with her old man,” the other one said, and they both laughed.
I started toward the house. They got out of the car. They were punks, I had seen their kind many times, I had sweated them in precinct rooms when I was a young cop working burglary. When they were fifty, they’d still be seventeen.
The one riding shotgun had the James Dean look, dark, wavy hair over a fuck-you pout. They thought they were badasses and I was an old fart. That made two surprises they had coming.
“This asshole don’t hear so good,” the James Dean act said.
His partner said, “What’ll it be, Gomer?…You wanna walk out of here or be carried out strapped over the hood of this car.”
“I’ll take the hood, stupid, if you two think you can put me there.”
I veered and came down on them fast. I caught little Jimmy a wicked shot to the sternum that whipped him around and juked him across the yard like Bojangles of Harlem, sucking air till he dropped kicking in the mud. His partner jumped back out of range. My coat was open and he’d seen the gun, but he’d already seen enough of what went with it. I stepped over Little Jimmy as the ex loomed up on the porch.
“Who the hell’re you?” he growled.
“I’m Rush Limbaugh. Who the hell’re you?”
“I don’t know you.”
“I’m taking a poll to see who’s listening to the Asshole Radio Network. Maybe you’d better get out of my way.”
“Maybe what I’ll do is come down there and kick your ass.”
“Maybe what you’ll do is shit, if you eat enough.”
He started to launch himself off the porch. He balked, almost slipped, and stood tottering at the top.
Then he came, with too little too late. His pal yelled, “Look out, Coleman, he’s got a gun!” and he balked again, missed his step, and splashed face-first in the mud.
I went around him in a wide circle. “So far you boys are terrifying as hell,” I said. He struggled to one knee. I asked if he could sing “April Showers.” I hate to waste a line like that, but I know he didn’t get it. I walked past him, close enough for him to grab my leg, but he didn’t. I knew he wouldn’t. By the time I got Amy to open the door, they were gone.
Amy stood at the window and watched them go. It was the last vestige of her childhood, the beginning of a long and wonderful and fearsome journey.
“
I thought about the woman in Irwin Shaw’s great story of the eighty-yard run. I told Amy to read it sometime and take heart.
She had never heard of Shaw. I felt a twinge of sadness, not only for the fleeting nature of fame but of life itself. I told her what a powerhouse Shaw had been when he was young, and how the critics had come to hate him and had made him the most underrated writer of his day. She didn’t understand why people would do that, so I explained it to her. Shaw made a lot of money and they never forgive you for that. She asked what the story was about and I said, “It’s about you and the damn fool you married, when you were too young to know better.” I didn’t want to
