few odds and ends. I’ll bring you some more food and some coffee.”
“Any ideas yet, Uncle Hank?”
“My instinct is to tell the police, tell them what you’ve told me. I don’t care how you feel the frame looks. You tell it the way you told me, and no matter how the evidence is presented, I think you got a better than average chance. I’ll see you get a good lawyer. I’ll do everything I can.”
“I don’t know, Uncle Hank. It looks bad. I start talking about a fat man and a stinky guy with a cobra painted on his head killing the Doc and the Disaster Club, who’s gonna buy that? I mean, that sounds like some comic book shit. Know what I’m saying?”
“Well, I’ve thought about it from that angle too. I swing from one feeling to another, but I figure whatever I decide it’ll come down to you going to the police. So, you can get ready for that. But before we go, we got to get our game plan together. For now, I’m going to see if there’s anything on the news about this, anything in the papers tomorrow.”
“All right.”
“I’ll be back after while. I’ll bring you some clothes. Mine’ll be big on you, but you can get by.”
“I appreciate it, Uncle Hank. Really.”
“Watch some TV. Jack off. Take another shower. Whatever, but relax. Sleep if you can. You didn’t kill anyone, Bill. You never had any intention of killing anyone. Your biggest crime is you’re a dumb asshole.”
“Beverly’s going to [’atch some love this,” Bill said.
“I might not tell her everything right off. We’ll ease into this one.”
I got the photo album off the table. “I’m going to take this with me. You don’t need to look at it anymore.”
I started for the door, paused. “I don’t know if I’m being melodramatic or what, but you lock this door behind me. And don’t go anywhere.”
“You don’t need to tell me that,” Bill said. Then: “Uncle Hank?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
“I haven’t done anything yet.”
“I love you. I’m not just saying it. I’m not trying to con you or nothing.”
“I love you too, you moronic little shit. Now shut up and lock up.”
“Sure.”
“Uncle Hank?”
“Yeah?”
“Would you get me some cigarettes?”
6
I started out with home in mind, but didn’t keep thinking that way. It was like I didn’t know what I was doing, least not on a conscious level. I begin to feel the way Bill said he had felt. Driven. Not really wanting to do what I was doing, but doing it anyway.
The direction I took wasn’t even near home. I live east and I went west, right on out of Imperial City, out into the country.
The trees thickened and the roads narrowed. It had started to drizzle and the wind had picked up. Oak and maple and sweetgum leaves blew across my path so thick it was like a colorful snow storm. The wet ones stuck to my windshield, and I turned on my wipers to bat them away, but that only bunched them up.
I drove until I came to the blacktop I had been looking for all along, went down it until it broke into an unpaved road that wound its way into the depths of the east Texas woods.
I cruised along for a short ways until the trees grew thick enough to drape over the road and wind their limbs together. I went along that way for a while, then pulled over to the side of the road underneath a massive oak. I sat for a moment with my hands on the wheel, letting the lint inside my head spin around, then I looked at the photo album lying on the seat beside me and felt a chill jump up my spine and spread to the base of my skull.
I got out of the truck and didn’t slam the door. I walked around front and got hold of the leaves bunched on the windshield and removed them, even as more swirled out of the woods and twisted over the truck and planted themselves on the glass.
I pulled my collar up against the wind and drizzle and leaned on the bumper of the truck. About a hundred yards in front of me the trees were less thick and there was a partial clearing. In the center of the clearing was an ugly double-wide mobile home with a shiny aluminum skirt that went all the way aroun ^’atal cd the bottom, except for a large gap beside and underneath a set of black iron steps that led up to the front door. Jutting out of the opening at an angle to the steps was the rusty handle of a lawn mower.
Arnold’s place.
The home had once been brown, but was now grey with weathering and age and the little flagstone walk out front of it had dried weeds sticking up on either side of the stones. Underneath a carport/shed that had been built against the home was a dirty white Dodge pickup and a hooded barbecue grill that looked well used.
Hung by string, dangling like fruit from the branches of a barren iron wood tree at the edge of the car shed, was a batch of beer bottles. When the wind blew and went into the bottles, they gave out with a shake and a sound like haints moaning.
I had seen trees fixed up like that before. Mostly in the yards of old black people. Someone had told me the story behind the bottles when I was a kid, but now I couldn’t quite remember what it was all about. Something to do with spirits. I certainly hadn’t a clue why Arnold had fixed his tree up that way. That seemed out of place for him.
Beyond the double-wide, I could see the woods. It was very thick near Arnold’s place, because that’s where the creek ran through. I figured, come summer, the mosquitoes would rise off the water and muddy banks in a mass so thick and black they’d look like a fishing net being lifted, about to be dropped over the property.
Behind, and to the left of the trailer, at an angle from the woods, was a couple of acres of junk cars and car parts.
Way out back was a large, old-fashioned red barn that looked newer and cozier than the mobile home. That would be where Arnold’s wrecker lived.
I wondered what Arnold was doing inside his double-wide. Most likely sitting around in his underwear drinking beer, watching the wrestling matches, maybe racing the dial with his channel changer, scratching his belly, listening to the wind blowing through his bottle tree.
Or maybe he was having an early supper. Eating beanie-weenies out of a can. Spearing the weenies with his pocket knife, sucking the beans and juice straight from the container, wiping his mouth with the back of his arm as he watched thumb-sized roaches run out and around an oily-bottomed, brown paper sack at which he tossed his garbage.
I was taken aback by these thoughts. If that’s how I thought of him, then why had I driven out here to spy through the trees on Arnold’s trailer and suddenly wonder what he was doing after not speaking to him for ten years and not having the urge to?
When I was a kid, Arnold had been my hero, and I grew to love him the way a younger brother should love an older brother. He came around to our house some, but my mother was never relaxed with him. She tried to treat him right because of my father, but you could tell she wasn’t comfortable with the idea. My father didn’t know what to do about it. He loved Arnold, I know, but his firstborn was from a time when Dad had been a boy himself; hadn’t had the experience then that he had with his new family. I think seeing Arnold made Dad feel like a failure. When they talked to each other, it was around things, and Dad always had a kind of desperate look about him when Arnold was about, as if there was something he wanted to say, but c togs, the language in which it needed to be said was unknown to him.
One night, when I was twelve, a noise in the kitchen woke me up, and I got up and found Dad in there breaking up some cornbread in a half glass of milk, eating it with a spoon.
I got a glass, went over and sat down by him and took cornbread from the pan and broke it into my glass and
