“You can’t prove that.”
“Come with me,” I said. And we left the tethered cowboy dreaming of money that he would never collect.
“DID YOU PLAN IT from the beginning?” I asked her on the long drive back to Laurel Canyon.
“What?”
“Did you plan to steal your sister’s business when you were writin’ her from down Texas?”
“No. I didn’t even know she had nuthin’ when I was down there. She’d just write and say how she lived with this old man Mofass and how they loved each other. She said that he was too sick to work but she loved him anyway so I thought that they was poor.”
“So when did you get in with the plan?”
“I left Crawford a note tellin’ him that I was comin’ up here. He called Clovis an’ told her. He wanted her to talk me into comin’ back.”
“Yeah?” I prodded.
“She told him to get up here and then they all met me at the bus stop in San Diego.”
“How they know when you gonna get there?”
“They’s on’y one bus a day to L.A. from Dallas.”
“But why would you let them turn you against your sister?”
“I told you already.”
“Told me what?”
“She lied makin’ me think that her an’ her boyfriend was poor. She never sent me no money or tried to help me get on my feet. An’ she stole Clovis’s money in the first place.”
“So you wanted to steal it back from her?”
At that question Misty went silent.
For the rest of the ride she stared out of the window.
“WHERE WE GOIN’?” she asked when we turned off onto JJ’s road.
“Where you think?”
“You said to the police.”
“I figured I’d skip the constabulary and go straight to the judge,” I said.
When we got to Mofass’s door, I expected to have to pull JJ off of Misty. But there were no fireworks, no waterworks either. JJ grinned when she saw her missing sister. The smile faded when I told her what was what. JJ didn’t ask why and Misty offered no excuse.
“Well I guess that’s it,” JJ said when I was through explaining.
* * *
I TOOK MISTY back down to Compton and dropped her off about six blocks from her hogtied cowboy.
On the way home I thought about JJ. She must have been brokenhearted over her sister’s betrayal. Money, I thought, is a harsh master in poor people’s lives. It warps us and makes us so hungry that we turn feral and evil. If Misty and JJ had stayed back home in their poor shacks, they would have been friends for fifty years baking pies and raising children side by side.
JESUS HAD BOUGHT a sleeping bag with money he’d saved from work. We sat up late into the night talking about my experiences camping out in France and Germany with the small troop I belonged to.
“Did you kill a lotta Germans?” the bright-eyed boy asked.
“Yes I did.”
“Did you hate ’em?”
“I thought I did–—at first. But after a while I began to realize that the German soldiers and the white American soldiers felt the same about me. I used my rifle a little less after that.”
“How come?”
“Because I didn’t really know who it was I wanted to shoot.”
“So you didn’t kill any more?”
“I didn’t kill except if I absolutely had to.”
I showed Jesus how to camp so that nobody could see you. I cautioned him to stay low when he heard something in the bushes.
“Be careful out there, son,” I said to him. “You know I love you more than anything.”
* * *
THE PHONE RANG at two thirty-five.
“Yes,” I said, expecting it to be Bonnie.
“Easy,” she cried. “Easy, come quick. They’re dead. They’re all dead.”
I filled an empty mayonnaise jar with water and then drove the car I’d borrowed from Primo toward the
