front door. Had Larry caused this section of town to dry up? Fulsom had moved east, sure, but why? Silas tossed the keys in the air and caught them. Then he got back in his Jeep, smell of hot dogs, and pulled past the gas tanks and parked where Larry did each day, over that Ford-shaped rectangle of dead grass, noting the lack of an oil stain. Larry’s vehicle must be the most cared-for in the county, a patient with its own full-time doctor, Larry riding along, ear cocked for any rattle, hoping for a knock, a belt to squeal, the brakes to whine.
He selected a key, and when he pushed the office door open a slab of light, punched through with his shadow, fell into the room. He reached in and clicked the light on. Smell of grease and old dust, not unpleasant. The office was small, a desk to the right, a few chairs along the wall under a calendar, an ancient Coke machine and crates of empty bottles, bookshelves.
Of course, he thought. Books. They were everywhere, double-stacked and dog-eared, novels among automotive repair manuals in brown binders. At the other end of the room another door led into the shop. He left it open and fumbled along the wall for a light switch, finding it and splashing the shop into view, a large room, high ceiling with exposed wooden rafters, car bumpers and long pipes and hoses stored up among the beams. The back walls were hung with tools and belts. There was a shelf of Interstate batteries. A metal worktable with a gutter along the back for collecting oil. There were fifty-five-gallon drums stacked in one corner and a large hand jack in another beside a tall red toolbox on casters. He came forward and opened the top drawer, the smoothest bearings he’d ever felt.
He pulled the chain that raised the bay door and stood watching the highway, struck by a memory. When he’d heard about his mother’s death several years ago, he’d driven down from Oxford. On the way into Fulsom, he’d gone right past here and from the car window seen Larry standing where Silas stood now, in this spot. Silas had kept his eyes forward, as if Larry could’ve seen him, as if he’d been standing there all those years, watching for Silas to come back. It had bothered him, and he’d tidied up his mother’s affairs quickly, ready to get the hell out of south Mississippi. She’d already paid for her funeral and the little plot out in a country graveyard, already done the work to get ready for her own death; all Silas had to do was sign some papers and collect her few belongings, which included Larry’s old rifle. He’d taken it all, the gun in a carrying case, back with him, passing Ottomotive on the way out of town, too, Larry standing there, again, Silas facing forward.
AT LARRY’S HOUSE he got out and stood in the sun. He looked at Larry’s piece of sky, his view of trees, his house. He breathed Larry’s air.
Glancing down, he saw something twinkle among the rocks and dirt of the road. He pushed his hat back on his head and took off his sunglasses, knelt. Glass. Without touching it he lowered his face toward the road, which already gave off heat. Little square pieces, thick. Windshield, or a window. Not many pieces, a few here and there, as if somebody had cleaned most of it up. Now on all fours like a dog, he eased his eyes over the road.
He got a few evidence bags out of the cardboard box of things he’d brought from his Jeep and used tweezers to pick up several pieces.
Next he gave the yard a thorough walk-through, circling the house once, again, finding nothing, not even a cigarette butt, telling himself you couldn’t go too slow, that anything might be the piece that solves the puzzle.
French came on the radio, asking did he have news. Silas said negative.
“You been to see him? Ott?”
Silas said he hadn’t and felt French waiting.
“He ain’t awake yet. I’ll go when he wakes up.”
“If,” French said and rogered off.
Far in the distance the growl of a motor. Silas had learned the difference between the chain saws you heard most of the time and four-wheelers you heard the rest of the time. This was the latter. He walked over the field past the barn, firewood stacked neatly along the wall, the larger pieces split with an axe, all of it shielded from the weather by the high barn eave. Out at the edge of the trees he saw a few stumps, trees Larry had cut down to burn, and somehow he knew the only trees Larry would take were those dead or dying, that he would never kill a healthy tree. He turned toward the barn. The ground was soft and he looked down.
Then knelt. Four-wheeler track. He studied its treads. There. Getting up. And there. Walking. There, there, there. In the print of the tire was a perfect circle at regular intervals, probably a nail the four-wheeler had run over. He had one more of French’s mold kits, didn’t he?
An hour later he was sitting on the porch, sweating, waiting for the mold to dry and eating Marla’s hot dogs, when he saw something in the grass. Just a speck he’d missed from his other angles.
Roach end of a joint, dewy, dirty, probably useless, but still.
He tweezed it into an evidence bag and realized this alone was worth his morning. If Larry Ott smoked weed Silas would shoot his badge. Somebody else had been here. He laid the bagged roach alongside the twin bags of glass and circled the house again. At the chicken pen the birds all ran over to him.
“Yall hungry, ain’t you,” he said, taking their clucking and muttering for hell yes, feed us, dipshit.
He noticed the wheels on the back of the cage, frowned as he walked its width and turned and walked, the chickens shadowing him, its length. He toed the trailer hitch. Why would Larry want wheels on his pen? He looked out over the field and saw several brownish spots in the otherwise bright green weeds and wildflowers, each spot the size of the cage beside him. Walking, he imagined Larry tractoring the cage over the land, the chickens fluttering along inside. He paused at the dark spot farthest from the barn, where the weeds and grass were flattened into mud and speckled with shit and feathers, the square where the pen must have sat most recently. Coming back toward the barn, he saw that in the second spot a few sprigs were raising periscopes. In the next, the grass looked better and the shit had begun to smear away in rain and dew. Then more grass still and weeds full throttle, here and there a dot of blue salvia or goldenrod, his elongated shadow falling on the time read in grass. Within five or six days the field had recovered: you couldn’t tell the cage had ever been there.
Back at the barn he stepped under the yellow tape and let himself in, taking a moment to gaze at the old tractor he’d sat on so long ago.
He heard the chickens griping so he went along the wall where a scythe hung and other instruments he didn’t recognize, one a heavy iron spring coiled around an iron bar. The kind of thing the Rutherfords would hang on their den wall for decoration. He dipped his head into the coop, the chickens scattering out the door. For a moment he stood, puzzling over the twin feed sacks, one full of gray grainy pellets and the other dusty corn. Finally reckoning it was better to overfeed than underfeed, he poured a quarter sack of each onto the ground amid the trident tracks. The chickens began to peck up the feed, and Silas remembered how he and Larry had overturned logs to catch beetles and cockroaches and pushed them through the wire for the chickens to chase down and eat.
In the barn, he looked in the tack room and saw an old chain saw and Larry’s fishing rods neatly laid over big nails in the wall, his tackle box in a corner moored to the floor in dusty spiderweb. He knelt and opened it and sifted through the lures and hooks, still clean, some familiar, smaller in his hand than they’d been those years back. He remembered fishing with Larry, the boy always talking, full of information about snakes or catfish or owlets or lawn mowers and dying for somebody to tell it to.
Back at Larry’s house he blasted the window unit air conditioner. Wearing gloves, he spent a long time looking at the spines of books, the old titles and plots he remembered so well from Larry’s descriptions. In the kitchen he opened the refrigerator and it smelled sour. The case of Pabst. Several bottles of Coke and a few Styrofoam containers from the Piggly Wiggly grocery store. He got a Coke and used a Jesus refrigerator magnet to open its lid and drank it as he opened one kitchen drawer after another. Forks, spoons, knives. He got on a chair and looked in the high cabinets, many of which had become reservoirs for old mail. Catalogs, circulars, newspapers, flyers. Silas took a stack down and blew the dust off its top and looked for the date. June 11, 1988. Another stack was from the early 1980s. One was a stack of monster magazines,
He went into the hall and stood over the gun cabinet. Sighing, he began sifting through the stacks of mail, circulars, and the book club catalogs,
Silas had gotten stiff, and when he tilted his neck to uncrink it, he noticed the attic trapdoor.
He brought a chair from the kitchen and stood on it and pushed it open. With his flashlight, he climbed into the hot darkness that was a city of boxes. He sneezed. Spiderwebs in the high corners and light through a single
