unfed, dead in their pen? A nurse came in and he said in his cracked voice, “Will you help me, please?”
Not looking at him. “What you need?”
“Somebody,” he said, “to please feed my chickens.”
THEY WERE BACK next time he woke. French and Lolly. Watching him.
“We’ve sedated you,” Dr. Milton said. “If you want to do this later, I’ll send these gentlemen off. It’s up to you.”
He shook his head. Thought it was later the same day, the men in the same clothes.
“You want them to stay?”
A weak nod.
French came to his side. “Doctor,” not looking at him, “can you give us a minute?”
“Well-”
“Preciate it.”
The doctor rose off the wall where he’d been leaning and opened the door. “I’ll be right out here.”
French clicked his recorder on again and cleared his throat, said who was present and the date, time, and place.
“How you feeling, Larry?”
He gave a weak shrug.
“We’ll try not to take too long, put you out too much. The nurse in yonder said you asked about your chickens. Well, I can tell you they’re all fine. It’s your old schoolmate 32, he’s been seeing to em. He went out to see your momma, too. She’s bout the same.”
“Why,” Larry asked, “would he do all that?”
“Well, I don’t try to understand people’s motives until
“First thing,” he said, “I’m sorry bout the restraints.” He unfastened the left one, then leaned over Larry to undo the other. “That was the hospital’s request,” he said as Larry brought his heavy arms up to his chest and rubbed one wrist, then the other, both sweaty from the lambs wool lining.
“Not something we normally do,” the sheriff said. “Specially for a man’s been shot in the chest and had a heart attack in the same day. I speck you’re too weak to pull them IVs out, much less get up and escape.”
Larry nodded, still massaging his wrists.
“Anyway, Chief Inspector French yonder, he told you I was a deputy sheriff back in 1982, when Cindy Walker disappeared. Been on the force bout two years at that time, out riding around serving warrants, picking up drunk drivers, things like that. Rookie stuff. But I remember those events real good, Larry, cause it was the biggest thing to come along in my career, at the time.
“Reason we never arrested you back then’s cause we never did find a body, and you never confessed. Without no body or confession there wasn’t any way to prove you killed her. Just what we call circumstantial evidence. You had, if memory serves, bout three and a half hours when you was unaccounted for, which would’ve give you plenty of time to have took her somewhere else. But your story was you let her off and left her and went to the drive-in, was supposed to pick her up at her road. Only she never showed up. Just, poof, gone.”
Larry opened his lips.
“You want to say something?”
“Can I talk…” He swallowed. “To Silas?”
“Who?” The sheriff looked back.
French said, “He means 32.” The chief came forward. “He’s not part of this investigation, Larry. This is what we call out of his jurisdiction. Why you want to talk to him?”
“Cause we used to be friends.”
French nodded. “He mentioned something about that, but didn’t sound like yall was friends. More like you just went to the same school.”
“We
“Okay. We all remember things different, I guess.” He stepped past the sheriff, who eased back and lowered himself into the chair by the window. French glanced at his tape recorder. “Now I’ve rode you pretty hard over the years, Larry, I know. But we ain’t never found nothing to let us convict you for that Walker girl or any other girls. Till now.” He was shaking his head. “I reckon it ain’t but a handful of people in the world knew about that cabin out in your woods-”
“I’d clear forgot it,” said the sheriff.
“Cabin out in the last part of them woods you ain’t been willing to sell. And then one of our men stumbles onto her, out there where, odds are, she ought to never been found. It gets me to thinking, Larry.” French scratching his head as he talked. “I’m thinking, fellow with your history might’ve just got fed up with the world. World’s a awful small place, specially here in southeast Mississippi. Maybe you just got tired of ever body thinking what they been thinking about you. Hell, maybe we all partly to blame, whole county ostracizing you. Maybe you just wanted some company, she may of even seemed like she come on to you, way these young girls dress, belly button rings, all that. Tattoos. You with your own kind of, well, local celebrity, I guess. Maybe she was messing with you, all I know. Your biggest fan. There she is, you see her at one place or another, the dairy bar, post office, Wal-Mart, young girl, pretty, long hair, and maybe you resist awhile, maybe a long while.
“But then a man can only resist so long, right, once his rut gets up, and maybe you drank a passel of them Pabst Blue Ribbons we seen in your fridge, or smoked a little dope, got out of your head, and next thing you know you’ve taken her. Just to talk, for all I know. Little companionship. Man gets lonely. But then, you know, way girls can get, all hysterical, maybe you got scared. Maybe she hit you. Threatened you. Tries to run and you didn’t mean for things to happen like they did. Maybe it was all a accident, her winding up dead. You might not even remember exactly what happened or how it happened. It’s one fellow I knew, started drinking with his air force buddy and when he woke up in the morning it was a butcher knife sticking out of his buddy’s chest.
“Maybe that’s why you shot yourself, Larry. All that guilt, adding up. Nothing you meant to do but suddenly it’d done got out of your hands. And you can bury the past but it always seems to come back, one way or another. There’s her face, on the news. In the paper. Whole damn world out looking for her and you alone know the truth.”
French talking on in his calm voice, making rape, murder, logical, Larry listening with his veins full of airy drugs and his head afloat, how reasonable if he had done it, strangled the girl and buried her, how these men understood his life so thoroughly and knew how people were in the world, in their hearts, brains, what they were capable of doing when they drank a passel of Pabst Blue Ribbon beers and smoked a heap of dope, how you could stick your best buddy with a knife, how sometimes women wanted to be raped, they were asking for it, you put on the mask so it wasn’t you doing it, it was somebody else doing what the women wanted anyway, French was saying that, maybe she was asking for it and he was trying as French talked to see into that space where his mother looked, where the truth of memory hid. He could feel the truth waiting for him, floating like a ghost in the room, but his brain the doctor said had been deprived of blood so there might be lapses or delirium and he remembered the mask and remembered the gun, he seemed himself the man in the mask waiting by his door for the other him to come home, watching as Larry got out of his truck and crossed the yard and came up the steps and over the porch and let himself in with his keys and then coming in the house and turning, Mask Larry marching up to Face Larry, pushing the gun against his heart and the two Larrys merging to one with one heart and it’s him holding the gun to his own chest, thinking how good it would feel to confess, to please these reasonable men doing their reasonable, necessary work.
“Larry?”
He blinked French into focus. “Do you think I did it?”
French glanced back at the sheriff. “Yeah. I do, Larry. I think you done away with both girls. Tina Rutherford and Cindy Walker. The sheriff here, he does, too. We don’t know why you did it, but if you want to tell me, it’d sure help us.”
“I don’t know why,” he said. “Why I would’ve done that. I didn’t even know that Rutherford girl. I don’t know anybody except my momma and she don’t know me. I used to go a week sometimes without talking to anybody except the girls in Kentucky Fried Chicken.”
“Well,” French said, “sometimes we do bad things without knowing the reasons, that’s surely possible. Like I
