she’d peer at him over her glasses, worry he might fall asleep at the wheel and ram his Jeep into a log truck. He imagined her saying he couldn’t burn his candle at both ends, or, for his own good, telling Mayor Mo.
But Angie was Silas’s main problem. Aside from being worried about him herself, she said she’d gotten so used to him staying over she had trouble sleeping without his long arms and legs all up in her space, not to mention his other long thing. They slept on their left sides, spooning, his left arm under her neck and reaching around so he could cup her right breast, his right arm over her side, cupping her left breast. He loved feeling her heart beat through it. He hadn’t seen her since their lunch at the diner, and knew he was using his guard duty as an excuse to avoid finishing their conversation. She called on his cell each night as she lay in bed and talked in his ear, detailing her day of wrecks and heart attacks, of Tab, an old hippie, ranting against the war in Iraq. She had one sister over there in a base east of Baghdad, working in the pharmacy. Oh, and her other sister was pregnant again, by a different man. She told him the movies she’d watched, how much she liked the pastor at her church. She was on nights Saturday and Sunday, so Silas promised to take Monday night off and knew he’d have to tell her something and worried it might be the truth. The rest of it. He’d avoided it so long himself it sometimes didn’t even seem real, what had happened in 1982. He wondered how it would feel to tell her everything, say who he really was, and he worried that if he did, she might start to see him differently.
When he nodded off in his chair he’d get up and pace the hospital hall. Sometimes go into Larry’s room, stare at him where he lay twined in among his machines and wires and tubes and cords. And the leather restraints on his wrists. He looked helpless and weak but was, Silas had been told, stable. His chest wound clear of infection, healing accordingly. Draining well but Larry still using a catheter, still on fluids.
But he was big news.
After the initial reports, before and after the funeral, the vans from Jackson, Meridian, Mobile, and even Memphis had camped out in the hospital lot, their satellites aimed at the sky, but now they were gone, this news fading as Larry slept and the world continued to supply new horrors, crashing planes, suicide bombers, kids shooting other kids. He supposed when-if-Larry ever regained consciousness, the parking lot would fill up again.
Each evening when he arrived, already yawning, he asked Skip, the deputy on evenings, if anybody had been by. French, the deputy reported. Old Lolly, the sheriff, once in a while. Doctors and nurses. Patients. Now and then a reporter.
“They feeding him through a tube,” Skip said. “You ask me, they ought to just let the cocksucker starve.”
Silas had unfastened Larry’s leather restraints the first night, like undoing a belt, but Skip told him the next evening that one of the shift nurses had complained and that the restraints were to remain on.
Sometimes when the nurses were gone Silas would stand over Larry and watch him, his IV machine flashing its faint lights and the heart monitor beeping or whistling, the ventilator inhaling, exhaling. He wondered how broken Larry was by the events of his life, how damaged. What would Silas tell him if he ever woke up? Sometimes he couldn’t help but wish he wouldn’t.
“Larry?” he would say.
No response.
“Larry?”
The second night as rain fell outside the window he glanced at the door. Then whispered, “I don’t know if you can hear me, Larry, but when you wake up it’s gone be bad.” He came around the bed and rolled up a stool and put his face near Larry’s and spoke directly in his ear. “Don’t tell em nothing, Larry, you hear? Hear? They gone try to get you to confess, but don’t say nothing, Larry. Hear? Nothing.”
On his way out of the hospital, somebody called, “Hey, Constable Jones?”
The information desk.
“Jon without an
“Thanks. I thought you was afternoons.”
“I fill in when they let me. Take my word for it, son. Don’t ever retire. You’re young, it ain’t enough hours in the day and you sleep through most of em anyways. But once you get to be my age, sleep’s a memory and you beg just to get to work for free.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“No, you won’t. Or when you do it’ll be too late.”
Silas yawned, checked his watch.
“You asked about anybody else coming to see Mr. Ott, didn’t you? Well, one of the other volunteers, he remembered it was somebody came by, not long after you did that first day. Before all this brouhaha. Reason he didn’t tell me sooner is that some of us are a tad on the senile side. If I could remember his name I’d tell you.”
He waited for Silas to smile. “Reporter?”
“Naw, it’s been plenty of them, but that wasn’t what you wanted, was it?”
“No.”
“This fellow, didn’t say who he was. Just asked if Larry-used his first name-had ever woke up.”
“What’d he look like?”
“Marlon, that was the other guy, he said he was early twenties, skinny, white. Said he was, what was the word he used? Oh, he said he was ‘kinda stringy-looking.’”
“Thanks,” Silas said. He glanced behind him. “Yall got cameras in here? Maybe a video of him?”
“Supposed to. But it’s been broke awhile. They tell me it’s in the budget to get it fixed, but you know how budgets work. Get money for one thing, takes it from another.”
“Got that right,” Silas said.
When he went by Larry’s that afternoon, a new deputy and a plainclothes officer from the C.I.B. were in the house going through Larry’s papers. Both men came out and watched him feed the chickens as if it were an exhibition. Each day was different at Larry’s, different lawmen, French there the next afternoon, shaking his head at the farmer constable.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Flinging in the feed. “What you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
Silas just shrugged and went to get the eggs. He looked out at French, regarding him from the other side of the wire, and told him about the stringy-looking man. French said without more than that, the tape, say, or an ID, it sounded like a dead end. “Stringy-looking?” he said. “Hell, that’s practically a goddamn demographic in southeast Mississippi.”
The next day, when Silas drove out, he found the house and barn deserted, Sheriff’s Department seals on all doors, including the barn’s, warning intruders that this was a crime scene.
“How am I supposed to feed yall?” Silas asked out loud. “Or get them eggs?”
No answer from the chickens, gathered across the wire, waiting, clucking, scratching. They seemed used to him, all right, looking at him their sideways way, and he was beginning to think he could tell them apart.
He drove that evening to Wal-Mart and bought two bags of chicken feed and put them in the back of his Jeep and was out there that night slinging in the moonlight. He filled an old milk jug with water from the spigot at the back of Larry’s house and sloshed it over in a bowl so they could drink. The egg dilemma was still unsolved.
Fuzzy days found him asleep in the Jeep while speeders went unabated on the highway below. The Jeep took longer and longer to crank. One day he swung by the auto shop at the mill and the mechanic opened the hood and whistled. “If this thing was a horse we’d a done shot it,” he said. He told Silas to bring it in early next week and leave it a few days, he’d see if he could order parts from the salvage yard. “Carburetors,” he said nostalgically.
After his evening patrol, Silas would roil semiconscious in his sweaty sheets waiting for the alarm to buzz so he could go the hospital and watch Larry sleep. One night he sat dozing in his guard chair and woke himself by snoring. He blinked and looked down the hall and saw a stringy-looking shadow standing watching him. Then it was gone. He rose and ran past the other rooms to the end where the hall was empty. Somebody down past a Coke machine moved and Silas said, “Wait,” and began to run down the hall.
He turned the corner and nothing. More halls. Door to stairs. He eased a bit farther along the hall, then turned and went back to Larry’s room, shaking his head, wondering if he’d made it all up.
The rest of the night he stayed awake.
NOW, MONDAY, HE finished the traffic. Yawning, he hoped Mrs. Ott was still having a good day at the nursing home.
