and pointed him off the road.
The kid was sitting on it with his leg over the gas tank lighting a cigarette when Silas got out and walked up. When he saw Silas’s uniform and gun belt he straightened on the seat. “Hidy there,” he said.
Silas said, “You ain’t supposed to have that thing on the road.”
The kid looked up at him.
“You got a driver’s license?”
“You a game warden?”
“Chabot constable. Where’s your license?”
“Must’ve left it home. You’re 32 Jones. I heard of you. What’s a constable?”
“Police officer. What’s your name?”
“Wallace Stringfellow.”
“You live out here, Wallace?”
He cocked a thumb behind him. “Few miles yonder ways.”
“You hadn’t been drinking, have you?”
“No, sir, Officer.”
“You didn’t throw a beer in the weeds back there?”
He shook his head.
“You mean if I went back there I wouldn’t find a can with your fingerprints on it?”
“You might would. I probably threw lots of em out, always been a litterbug, but never when I was riding.”
Silas noticed a dirty pillowcase stuffed back in the cage behind the seat and wondered should he look inside it. Wondered for a moment would it have eye holes, though in truth today’s racism seemed less organized than when he’d been a boy. He said, “You carrying a gun?”
“No, sir.”
“You ride out here a lot?”
“Sometimes.”
“This is Rutherford land, most of it, and if you’re on it you’re trespassing.”
“You mean it’s against the law just to ride?”
“If the land’s posted, it is. And fenced off.”
“Well, you learn something ever day. I appreciate you telling me.”
“Where you going?”
“Nowheres in particular. Just enjoying the weather.”
Silas watched him but he was thinking of the hunting cabin. “Well,” he said, “I’ll let you off with a warning this time. But you ride that thing on the side of the road all the way home, hear, and if I see you on the highway again, drinking or not, I’m gone write you a ticket. Or worse.”
“Yes, sir. Preciate the warning.”
He watched the kid kick-start it and rev the engine. He gave a little salute and motored off, bumping along the side of the road, the pillowcase flapping. Silas stood shaking his head.
THE JEEP TICKING in front of Larry’s house, Silas slipped off the lanyard with his badge and, to cool down, removed his uniform shirt, hung the lanyard back over his neck, and tied the shirt around his waist. He fanned his face with his hat walking over the field toward the trees, stooped under an old fence row, careful not to snag his T-shirt on the bobwire. He didn’t relish the thought of red bugs, ticks, mosquitoes, or snakes and kept a careful eye out as beggar’s lice stuck to his pants legs and briar barbs lodged in his shirt.
His mother had had to work two jobs plus clean houses to pay for the trailer home she’d bought in Fulsom. Back then he’d told himself she just wanted him out of the way. That was why she’d sent him off. Lying to himself even as he opened the letters she mailed him in Oxford, unfolding the limp five- and ten-dollar bills she sent each week so he could go to his classes and play baseball without having to get a job. He knew now she’d loved him despite his never writing her back, despite the trouble and fear he caused her, despite the thing missing out of him. He’d returned her love by rarely coming home, and when he did she’d doted over him, as if every meal was his last, or hers, straightened his paper napkin and laid another chicken leg on his plate and filled his milk glass or his iced tea so much he could barely stand it. He’d refused to see the truth, that she was starving from loneliness. In fact, he could barely look at her. All he could do was eat quickly and squirm away and go out into the night (driving her car) and find M &M and his other high school friends while she sat waiting for him to come home.
Now, as he walked, slipping through leaves and vines and ivy and spiderwebs and arcs of briar, he noticed how different the land was, how quickly it could change, such a ragged jungle now, scarred with white deadfall, no longer the brief paradise two boys had had those years ago. He topped a hill and descended to the bottom of a hollow, stopped to rest by an old magnolia tree, black trunk so big it would be hard to reach his arms around, something familiar about its knots and whorls, good places for feet, hands. He looked up and saw two boys in the branches, one white, one black. He hurried on, ducking a fierce shuck of briar, soon saw another familiar magnolia, this one buffeted smooth at waist level by a boy’s old baseball. Using his hat to rake down the briars, he was breathing hard and nearly bumped into the wall of the cabin before he saw it.
Smaller somehow, darker wood, more weathered. Vines and kudzu had nearly overtaken the place. It seemed the heart of some struggle, as if the vegetation were trying to claim the structure back into itself, pull it down, the earth suddenly an organic breathing mass underneath. Silas could almost feel the friction, hear the viscous grumble of digestion.
In front he eased up the steps, soft as moss, the porch like a cave, vegetation on all sides and bees boiling out of white blooms, live vines constricting dead ones, hanging from the roof. An enormous gray moth cupped to the wall. Gently, he moved coils of ivy aside and peered through the snakehead kudzu leaves to where the front door was secured with a rusty padlock.
He stepped backward and hooked his hat on a limb and pushed around the side of the cabin, a layer of wet leaves under his feet, the walls mummied in kudzu and constricted by hundreds of vines thick as chicken snakes. At the first window he angled his light through the dusty glass, probing the shapes of the headless single bed he’d slept on and the bed his mother had used, the table between them, the rusting iron hulk of a stove in the corner where they’d huddled for warmth in those first coatless days and nights.
He tried the window and found it locked from inside. Looked like it hadn’t been opened in years. He wormed his way through the foliage along the side of the house and turned the corner to the back wall, that window locked, too, leaves tickling the top of his neck, spiderwebs with bug husks and the skeletons of leaves and twigs snagged in their lines. On the third wall he stopped and looked closely. Someone had raised this window. He could see where it had been forced up, the wooden runners lighter and splintered, one of the four panes of glass broken, pieces on the floor inside. An arm through, turning the rusty lock. He resisted lifting it, shone his light through the broken pane instead, a much clearer view without glass, the side of his once-bed, its mattress sagging in the middle, coils of rusty spring through the filthy cloth. On those first nights, his mother had slept with him, crossing the dirt floor in the darkness, her breath visible in the dim stove light, saying, “Slide over, son, fore we both freeze.”
Somebody had been inside, he saw now. There was a long smear over the floor. He imagined the intruder dragging his feet to erase his tracks. His pulse quickened as he fixed his beam beneath the bed. There it was, a shadow image of the bed cast in rumpled dirt, a place where someone had dug, he realized, a grave.
nine
WHEN HE WAS thirty-one years old, not long after he’d taken his mother to River Acres and ten years before Tina Rutherford would vanish, Larry began to notice things amiss in the barn. Those were days when Ina Ott was more alert, her Alzheimer’s in its earlier stages, Larry visiting her each night on his way home from work, longer on weekends, a silent black lady in the other bed snoring gently or gazing out the window. His mother would always ask if he’d had any customers and he’d say, “Oh, one or two.” Then she’d ask about her ladies and he’d tell her about Eleanor Roosevelt. “Laid a big speckled egg this morning.”
When he noticed that somebody had been sneaking in the barn while he was at work, he told her this, too, how one evening he found the back door ajar, and another the pitchfork down from its nail. She was alarmed and said he
