“Painting houses?”
“Yeah. Getting in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Fighting in a bar.”
He’d brought a case of beer this time, bungee-corded to the back of his four-wheeler, and had gone through much of it, getting so drunk Larry had begun to worry. It was cooler, leaves in the air and scratching over the road, geese formations overhead pointing south. Larry sat wearing his uniform jacket and a cap, Wallace a sweatshirt with a hood he kept pulling on and then pushing back off. Long pants, frayed at the bottom. He had pictures of John Wayne Gacy the pit bull on his phone and showed them to Larry.
“He’s mean-looking, all right.”
“Boy you know it. My momma’s boyfriend? He keeps saying I ought to shoot him, but I always say, ‘Jonas? You shoot that damn dog it’s libel to just make him mad.’” He sipped his beer.
“Wallace,” Larry said. “You was the boy I surprised that time, wasn’t you? In the barn?”
He looked over his shoulder and grinned. “Yep. Guilty as charged. You bout scared me to death in that damn mask.”
“I just didn’t want you getting hurt in that old barn.”
“Well, it kept me away, that’s for sure. For about a week.”
“You came back?”
“To that barn? Hell no. But it’d take more than that to stop me from fishing in that creek over yonder. Even found your spot, Larry, that old five-gallon bucket you set on, seen a beat-up cork stuck out in the tree over yonder where you couldn’t get it back. I’d brang my rod and reel, pull me a purple worm through the same water you did, but I never did catch nothing, figured you’d done fished it dry.”
“Naw, I didn’t fish it dry. It’s downstream from all the lumbering and it’s so full of silt there ain’t been nothing in it for years.”
“I used to pull off my clothes and swim in it,” Wallace said. “Nekkid. You wanna know the first time I ever heard of you? It was at school. Fourth grade. All the kids talking about it, that creepy fellow that went there same as us, that sat in some of them very desks we was in, how you abducted that girl and done away with her.”
“That’s what the kids said?”
“Some of em. The teachers, they’d all say, ‘Yall just forget about him. Just let him alone, he might be dangerous. Don’t go bothering him.’” Wallace grinned. “So here I am, bothering you, right?”
“You ain’t bothering me.”
“Well, I never was much good at doing what they tell you at school, anyway. It was one teacher, though, liked you. Mrs. McIntyre? Taught English and art. She used to tell us what a good drawer you was. She’d show us your pictures. One of a little truck, which she said was a perfect example of prespective.”
“
“But the first time I ever
“The DIRECTV fellow?”
“Hell no. This one was a machinist. He’d come fetch us for the weekends. That fat sumbitch-I can’t even remember his name now-he didn’t go to church but Momma always did, no matter where the man she’s seeing lived she’d haul my sleepy ass off the couch and borry his car and drag me to whichever church it was, Baptist she could find it but we’d try a Methodist, too, in a pinch. Anything but a nigger church. Or the Catholics. I always liked the Methodists best, though, cause you’d get out quicker.
“Anyway,” he said, “I’s out front fore the preaching, talking to some boys my age, little younger, and one of em goes, ‘You thank he’ll come back?’
“ ‘He better not,’ another one says.
“ ‘Thank who will?’ I asked em.
“ ‘Scary Larry,’ first boy said. ‘You know who that is?’
“I said I shore did; we went to the same school, me and him. In Chabot, Mississippi.
“ ‘No you ain’t,’ he said.
“‘How the fuck you know?’ I said and they was all impressed I cussed right there on the church porch.
“Bout then one of their mommas stuck her head out the door and said we better get on in, the singing was fixing to start. So we all went in and they sat with their mommas and daddies but I took me a seat right there in the back. My momma, she didn’t care I sat with her or not, long as I was quiet.
“And sure enough, they’d just launched into the first song, and I hear the door open real quiet-like and shut and look over and there you are. I knowed it was you right off even though I hadn’t ever seen you. Way you come in. Way you wouldn’t look at nobody looking back at you. You’s wearing a suit and a tie. Sat across the aisle, in the back row like me. Other folks recognized you, too, turning their heads and whispering, and I could tell they didn’t like you being there and I thought you was smart, coming in late like that.” He paused to tap his ash onto the porch and said, “I watched you the whole time, way you stood up and sung the songs, knew all the words, sat down and listened to the preacher, following his Bible verses in your Bible, closing your eyes in the prayer. And I knew you’d leave fore anybody else did, and sure enough, right after the last amen you was up and out.
“I was right behind you. Went out the door and seen you walking off real fast holding your Bible and I yelled, ‘Hey!’ at you but you never even looked back. Just about run to that red pickup, same one setting right yonder.” Wallace leaned forward. “You remember that?”
He did. He remembered Wallace, saw in his face now that same boy’s face. The boy who’d followed him out, called “Hey” in a way he’d not heard before, not angry but curious, a boy with small eyes and stringy hair and ears that stuck out, a scruffy kid in clothes not quite nice enough for church, who’d been sitting alone during the service, opposite him in the back, fidgeting, sneaking looks at him. Because of that boy, more than anything else, he hadn’t returned.
“Well,” Wallace said, “it was a long time ago. We went back to that church next week? But you didn’t come. Them boys said if you had? Somebody was gone write you a letter saying you wasn’t welcome in their ‘fine Methodist church.’”
“I guess not,” Larry said. “You can’t blame em.”
“Naw,” Wallace said. “But fuck em anyway.”
Then he said, “Trouble with beer? You can drank it all night and it don’t do nothing but make you piss. But I got something else,” he said, patting the zippered pocket of his short pants, “that’ll get my head right.” He unzipped the pocket and pulled a Sucrets tin out and laid it reverently across his knees, pressed together, opened the tin and removed a plastic Baggie and a bent pad of rolling papers.
Larry hesitated. “I wish you’d wait till you got home to do that.” He looked at his feet.
Folding one of the papers in half, Wallace began to dribble in crushed green bud. “How come?” Without looking up.
“I just don’t need any trouble. With the law.”
“Man with your rep? Scared of a little Mary J. Wanna? Shit. Fuck the law, Larry. You see em anywhere? Nothing out here but us dropouts and them buzzards. But we can go inside, it makes you more comfortable.”
Rolling the paper between his fingers, he glanced at Larry and winked, then licked the edge of the paper and then put the whole thing in his mouth and brought out a bent white joint. The first one Larry had ever seen. The boy dropped his half-smoked cigarette and toed it out and with his Bic lit the joint and took a deep toke, holding it, and extended it toward Larry.
“No thanks.”
“You sure, hoss?” Breath still held, smoke in his teeth. “It’s good shit from that nigger over in Chabot. Call him M &M. You know him?”
“No,” he said, but he did, from school. One of Silas’s teammates.
Wallace blew a line of smoke into the air. “I always say, ‘M &M? You plain or peanut?’” He toked again then offered it to Larry. “You sure you sure?”
“Yeah.”
Wallace sat there, the smoke coiled around him. He looked out across the field. He seemed to have forgotten where he was, and for a while Larry rocked, bats fluttering over his view and crickets chirping in the monkey grass along the edge of the porch and his mother’s wind chime jingling, delicate notes too tender to be metal, more like
