But right now, it’s real important that we get this mess with that dead girl cleared up. The Rutherford girl. They think you confessed to it. But we both know you didn’t do it.”
“How you know I didn’t do it, Silas?”
“Same way I know you didn’t shoot yourself.”
“How? Cause you knew me for three months, twenty-five years ago? What makes you think you know anything about me now?”
“Just tell me who shot you. I got a good idea that that person may be the one that killed her.”
Outside, thunder. Larry turned toward the window.
“You called me,” Silas said, that note of pleading in his voice, “right before you got shot. You said it was important. What was it you wanted to say?”
“You never called back.”
“I didn’t get your message in time.”
“Those other times.”
“I’m sorry about that. But-”
“The thing,” Larry said, “that I wanted to tell you that first time, when you didn’t want to talk to me, was that I was sorry. About what I said, when Daddy made us fight.”
“That’s okay, Larry. It was a long time ago.”
“But now,” Larry said. “I don’t know what to think. Or even if I’m still sorry.”
“Fine,” Silas said, “but do you know who it was that shot you? Why’d you call me?”
“32?” Skip from the door. “What you doing?”
“Nothing,” Silas said. He looked again at Larry, who’d turned back toward the window, shut his eyes. Silas waited a moment, then left the room and closed the door.
“The chief just called,” Skip said, a puzzled look. “You off nights?”
“Guess so.”
“How come?” he asked. “What the hell?”
Silas turned to go. “Long story,” he said.
HE SAT AT a plastic table in a plastic chair in the back of the Chabot Bus, tracing his fingers up and down his Budweiser bottle wishing he had a glass. The mill crowd had gone home, loud, dirty, and he had the place to himself. He’d been wondering what you felt when you learned you’ve been robbed of twenty-five years of life, Larry like a convict exonerated by DNA evidence and Silas, the real criminal, caught at last.
It was 11:00 P.M. The rain had quit. The bartender, Chip, a white dude with a goatee, sat on his stool behind the counter cutting limes into wedges and putting them in a bowl and fanning mosquitoes with his knife. He’d tended bar long enough to know when to let a man alone, bringing Silas a fresh beer when he needed and taking his empties and clinking them in the garbage can. Shannon, the police reporter, had called his cell phone again but he didn’t want to talk to her.
Out the row of windows in front of him were more tables and chairs and, beyond, the gully overflowing with kudzu, trash caught in it like bugs in a spiderweb. Silas remembered riding the school bus as a boy, after they’d left the cabin on the Ott land and moved to Fulsom, how the landscape blurred beyond the windows as you rode, him on his way to school, baseball, his future. Maybe, before its recruitment to bar service, he’d ridden this very bus. Now look out. Nothing but a gully full of weeds and garbage. Everything frozen. Was that what childhood was, things rushing by out a window, the trees connected by motion, going too fast for him to notice consequences? If so, what was adulthood? The bus stopping? A man in his forties, slammed with his past, the kudzu moving faster than he was?
“Hey, cop. Where’s your hat?”
He looked up, ready to grumble he wanted to drink alone. But it was Irina, from White Trash Ave., standing with her hip cocked and a little snarly smile, her pale skin glistening from rain.
“Any more snakes in your box?” he asked her.
“I been scared to open it. And them boys has got it staked out, hoping whoever it was’ll try again.” She’d streaked red into her blond hair. She wore a short denim skirt and red cowboy boots, wet too. A low-cut tank top that showed her tattoo. Was it a pot leaf? He was wary of looking too hard. She had a lot of plastic bracelets jangling on her wrist and a cigarette in her hand and red nail polish. “Had to carry my damn phone bill down to BellSouth to pay it. Can I join you?”
He nodded to the empty chair next to him.
“Hey, Chip,” she said. “Budweiser.”
“You ready, 32?”
“Sure. Both on my tab.”
Silas pushed the chair out with his boot and she eased into it, a snake crawling in his own mailbox now, if Angie happened in. He’d half expected to find her here. They hadn’t talked since the night before, his interpreting her not calling as a point she was making.
Irina leaned forward to look into his eyes, the low neck of her shirt inviting, the cups of a lacy black bra showing, its tiny straps. “You okay, Officer?”
Chip’s arms appeared between them, two bottles. “Enjoy.”
“Cheers,” she said, touching the neck of her bottle to Silas’s.
He cheered her back and they sipped together, her putting her cigarette out in the ashtray.
“What you doing?” she asked. “Getting drunk?”
“Getting?”
“I better catch up, then.” She ordered a shot of tequila, no salt, and when it came she downed it and set the glass on the table. “That’s better” she said, her eyes watering. “I was on my way to a party when I saw your little Jeep outside.”
“It’s hard to miss.”
“It’s cute. Hey,” she said, pushing at his arm with her knuckles, her bracelets rattling. “I got a tip for you.”
“I’m off duty,” he said, “but go ahead. I can always use me a good tip.”
Irina took another slug from her bottle and sank even lower on the table, her breasts resting on it.
“Evelyn? She’s my other roommate? She was at work when you came over, so you didn’t meet her. But we got to talking the other night, the snake and all, and she gets all apologetic, something she hasn’t told us, how she used to go out with this weird guy. Before she moved in with us. So one night Ev goes over to his house, and they’re partying, you know, and this guy has all these guns. Pistols. A rifle in the corner.”
“That’s your tip?”
“Guns? Hell no. Ev’s fine with guns. She loves to shoot. But the other thing is, he also has all these live snakes. In aquariums. On shelves. The kitchen table. Right in his living room. He told her he collected em.”
Silas watched her as she talked. Her pupils were dilated. Weed. Maybe pills.
“So they start fooling around and she says it’s weird, you know. Necking, with snakes watching. How they don’t blink? So by then it’s getting too heavy, she tries to stop but he won’t. It starts getting ugly, she’s really scared. Now Evelyn’s second ex-husband, he gave her this little pistol. Single-shot. For her purse. She manages to get it out and threatens to shoot this guy if he doesn’t let her go. She said for the longest time he just looks at her, this weird smile, easing his hand toward one of the pistols on his table, like daring her to shoot, and she thinks, God, she might really have to nail the son of a bitch. But finally he just calls her a cunt and tells her to get the fuck out.”
“She make a complaint?”
“Not really. Evelyn’s not, you know, the complaining type.”
Some part Irina wasn’t telling him, drugs probably. Maybe this Evelyn had thought he’d flip on her if she reported him.
Irina tapped a cigarette from her pack and he took her lighter and lit it. “She just barely got out of there. Had to call somebody on her cell phone. Come pick her up.”
“So this guy. You think he mailed the snake?”
“Maybe. She admitted she left her other place cause of him. He kept riding by. Calling.”
“What’s his name?”
“Wallace. Wallace Stringfellow. Lives over on past the catfish farm.”
He felt his pocket for a pen and scribbled the name on a napkin, stuffed it in his jeans pocket. It rang a dim bell.
