“Told him hell no. I ain’t no answering service. She can call him her own self whenever she wants to.”
“Well, you might not have to worry about him again. Somebody shot him. That’s why I’m here,” he said.
HER ROOM WAS a double, two hospital beds with recliners beside each, TV on a rack high on the wall. In the far bed, by the window, an ancient black woman lay gazing outside. The room smelled like somebody had forgotten to change the bedpans. Mrs. Ott sat in her recliner watching him like he was a lamppost that had just walked in. Overhead, on the wall, a television played
From behind him Brenda said loudly, “Miss Ina? This Officer Jones. He want to talk to you about your son.”
She looked at him vacantly.
“Call me if you need,” Brenda said, touching his arm. “I’ll be right out here.”
“Thanks.”
“Who are you?” Mrs. Ott asked, mild alarm in her voice, the left half of her face frozen, her mouth in a permanent frown. She looked past him where Brenda was examining her nails in the hall. The sight of her seemed to relieve Mrs. Ott.
Silas barely recognized her as the woman who’d given him and his mother coats so long ago. She wore a robe untied down the front and a gown beneath. She had no breasts to speak of and a neck thin as his wrist. He pulled a rolling stool over to her chair and sat, holding his hat, trying to slump so he wouldn’t seem so big. She’d watched him the whole time with something like suspicion in her eyes.
“Clyde,” she said. “Tell them others to stop.”
“I’m not Clyde, Miss Ina,” he said. “My name is 32. I used to know your boy, Larry.”
“Who?”
“Your son,” he said gently. “We were friends together, a long time ago. You give me a coat one time.”
“Clyde?” she said.
“No, ma’am. 32. My name is 32.”
“32?” She looked alarmed. “I’m much older than that.”
“No, ma’am. My real name is Silas.”
“How’s Eleanor Roosevelt?”
He frowned and glanced out at Brenda. “That’s one of her chickens,” she said.
“Oh.” Turning back to the old woman. “She’s fine, Mrs. Ott. All the chickens are fine. I fed em yesterday.”
“Rosalynn Carter’s the best layer.”
“I speck so.”
“But Ladybird Johnson’s prettiest.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Who are you?” she asked.
He told her again.
“Clyde?” she said.
He sat awhile longer, unable to convince her he wasn’t Clyde, then he said good-bye and rose. In the hall, he offered a card and asked would Brenda call him if Mrs. Ott had a good day. She said of course she would.
In the parking lot, shaded by a big pecan tree, he sat in the Jeep, elbow out the window, his hat on the seat beside him. The day he’d spent at the Ott house, so long ago, kept coming back to him. Catching lizards with Larry. That giant snake. Those chickens in the barn. At one point, as they’d assembled what Larry had called their herpetarium, a row of Mason jars full of wary reptiles, Silas had spotted a lawn mower, pushed under a low wooden rack.
“You get to cut the grass?” he’d asked.
“Get to?” Larry said. He set his jar down, the lizard inside watching him. “You mean have to.”
“I ain’t never cut none,” Silas said.
“You want to?”
They rolled the push mower out of the barn and into the sunlight and Larry showed him how to check the oil and gas and how to prime the pump, how to pull the cord to crank it. Then, yelling over the noise, Larry showed him how to adjust the motor speed and push the mower in rows, narrowing toward a center. Silas snatched the handle and said okay, his turn. He loved it, the buzz of the motor, hot fresh cut grass in the air, between his bare toes, wild onions sizzling on the frame, the bar vibrating in his fists and the occasional mangled stick flung from the vent. When he was a kid one time, Larry yelled, walking alongside Silas, Larry’s daddy was cutting grass and Larry watching and his daddy ran over a rock that shot like a bullet and bounced off Larry’s bare stomach and left a red imprint of itself. Larry’s daddy had laughed real hard. Even took a Polaroid and laughed every time he looked at it. You had to be careful of where you let the vent aim, was Larry’s point. You didn’t want to spray any rocks out toward any cars or toward people, see? Silas turned and left Larry standing and mowed rows and rows and kept mowing, loving the progress through the grass, the design he was making. It felt good, like combing his hair. Larry wandered to the front porch steps and picked up a book. He watched for a while, not even pretending to read, then abruptly dropped the book and ran into the yard and pushed Silas away and turned the mower off.
Silas shoved him back as the motor sputtered to a stop. “Don’t be pushing me.”
“Sorry,” Larry said as they looked at each other, Silas’s palms still vibrating.
“I don’t like nobody pushing me.”
“It’s just,” Larry said, “we ain’t got much time left.”
“I don’t care.” Silas cranked the mower again and began to push it. Larry watched for a while then went back to the porch and sat, his hands on his knees.
A moment later he was jumping and pointing. It was getting dark now, lightning bugs floating over the fields, and Silas had nearly finished. He saw headlights coming through the woods. He left the mower running and darted across the lawn kicking up grass. He leapt the fence and was gone into the woods. Behind him Larry ran to the mower, still puttering, and began to push it. The lights were Carl Ott’s, and he got out of his truck with a bag of ice and a brown sack. He was greasy from his day’s work but he looked over the yard and began to nod.
“Good work, boy,” he called to Larry.
Silas knew this because he’d crept back through the cornfield. Mr. Ott said something else now, something Silas couldn’t hear, and then walked inside. Larry turned and pulled the mower toward the barn, looking over to where Silas had run, staring, it seemed, directly at him.
Silas remembered it. He had felt, at that moment, most acutely in his life, the absence of a father. He’d walked home that night, through the darkening woods, aware that all this land-over five hundred acres, Larry had said-was theirs, which meant it was Larry’s, or would be. And Silas, who had nothing, looked up to where the sky had been, now he couldn’t even see the tops of trees as night peeled down along the vines. He started to run, afraid, not of the darkness coming, but of the anger scratching in his ribs.
When he got home, his mother’s car was there. Inside, his Styrofoam box from the diner sat on the small wooden table between their beds where they ate each night, a carton of chocolate milk beside it. His mother still wore her uniform, her hairnet. Her cat was on her lap as she sat on the end of her bed.
“Boy, where you been?”
“Out in the woods.”
“Out in the woods, Silas? After dark?”
“Sorry, Momma,” he said, the lie coming easily. “I got lost.”
For a moment, rubbing that cat’s neck, she’d watched him, wondering perhaps whether to believe him or not, maybe too tired not to believe it, because what she’d said, finally, was, “Eat your supper. It’s already cold. And the milk’s done got warm.”
Now he cranked the Jeep. He backed out of his parking space. So he’d had a father all along, and not some deadbeat black man who’d knocked up Alice Jones and left, but a white man who’d slept with his maid and then sent her off to Chicago when she got with child.
His windows down, he cruised the highway among the log trucks and SUVs, heading back toward the Ott property. He wondered, leaving the city limits, traffic more sparse, if that old cabin was still there.
When he turned onto Campground Cemetery, he saw a four-wheeler riding in the center of the road. He came up behind it, the thing going about forty miles an hour, and flicked on his headlights. The boy on it, white, skinny, looked behind him and tossed a can into the weeds and waved him around, but Silas stuck his arm out the window