The deputy nodded and left.
Larry was going to tell what he knew. Until today, he’d have preferred Silas. But now he would tell French how, a few nights after the Rutherford girl had vanished, he’d opened his eyes and sat up in bed, awake for no reason. He’d reached for his clock and held it out to see the time. Three-fifteen A.M. Risen from bed in his pajamas, he’d gone down the hall closing his robe, standing in his living room. For a moment he considered his pistol, but then he unlocked his front door and went out without it. Wallace was sitting on his steps smoking, his back to Larry, head down, looking very small in the dark. The moon was low but still cast Larry’s truck shadow in its light and, beside it, a sedan parked in the yard.
“Wallace?”
“Hey,” he said, not turning.
“You drunk?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“I done something.”
“What?”
He didn’t say, just inhaled, exhaled his smoke.
“How long you been out here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where you been all this time?”
He didn’t answer. Larry went to his chair and eased himself down, sat leaning forward with his hands folded on his knees. His bare feet on the porch floor. “Is something wrong, Wallace? What’d you do?”
He didn’t answer.
“How’s John Wayne Gacy?”
“Mean as ever. I moved out of Momma’s house cause she’s scared of him. That DIRECTV bastard’s shacking up with her now. I rented me a place up near the catfish farm. Ain’t got no neighbors but catfish. They got a fellow rides a four-wheeler tween the ponds but sometimes I can sneak up in there and fish.”
“Like you used to fish in my creek?”
“Yeah, but now I catch one once in a while. Some big ole sumbitches in there.”
“They’ll let you fish on that place, you know,” Larry said, “if you’ll just pay a fee. Got a special pond, I heard. People take their younguns. Cost by the pound, I think.”
“You know me, Larry. I’m a outlaw. Can’t do it legal or it’s no fun.”
“You get a new car?”
“Yeah. Don’t run worth a shit though.”
“I had an idea,” Larry said.
“You did?”
“Yeah. Would you like to learn to fix cars?”
“What you mean?”
“I mean, would you like to come work at my shop?”
Wallace quiet.
“You could be my apprentice.”
“I don’t believe it’d work out, Larry.”
“How come?”
“Cause I ain’t worth a shit.”
“Why you say that, Wallace? If I could learn, anybody can. My daddy, he used to say I was mechanically disinclined. But then in the army, they taught me and I found out I was pretty good at it. Just needed a chance.”
Wallace ground his cigarette out on the step. “Anybody else been by bothering you?”
“Not for a while.”
“Not since me, huh?”
“You never bothered me, Wallace.”
They sat awhile.
“You can think about it,” Larry said. “The apprenticeship.”
The visit hadn’t lasted much longer, and Wallace never said what he’d done, but after Larry watched him go, he’d spent the rest of the night on his porch as daylight crept through the trees like an army of crafty boys.
WHEN FRENCH GOT to the hospital, Larry decided, he would talk. Tell what he’d remembered. Tell how, at first, he’d felt a kind of protection for the man who’d shot him. Who’d been his friend. But he’d thought Silas had been his friend, too, hadn’t he? Maybe Larry was wrong about the word
But no more.
This fellow, he’d tell French, saw him at church once. He used to come around when he was a boy. Larry saw a little of himself in him, maybe. This strange lonely kid. Maybe, to this kid, in this world Larry hadn’t caught up to, Larry was even a kind of hero.
But watching its images, he was catching up to what the world had become. No more the world of green leaves where his father had carried a shotgun to school, left it in the corner by the woodstove, walking home shooting squirrels for dinner. Summers Carl Ott had gone shirtless and grown dark brown from the sun and found ticks in his hair and chiggers fattening with his blood. Now the land had been clear-cut. Mosquitoes infected you with West Nile and ticks gave you Lyme disease. The sun burned its cancer into your skin, and if you brought a gun to school it was to murder your classmates.
I’ve been lying here a long time, Larry would tell French. I got a good idea who shot me. And who killed the Rutherford girl.
He drinks Pabst beer, Larry would say. Rides a four-wheeler. He buys marijuana from a black man named Morton Morrisette, nicknamed M &M. He has a mean dog named John Wayne Gacy. He gave me the pistol he shot me with. He said girls wanted to be raped, they liked it. He came to my house and said he’d done something. I saw his eyes in the mask he wore. My mask. And it was only four people alive who knew about the cabin where that Rutherford girl was buried. Me. My mother, who can’t remember anything. Silas Jones. And Wallace Stringfellow.
Larry unmuted the television. Changed channels. Tried not to think of Wallace anymore, or of Silas, or of Cindy. When he did his chest hurt in a way that had nothing to do with the bullet they’d cut out. Nothing to do with the scars raked over his heart, that sad little muscle.
Somewhere he’d read the solution to people slamming mailboxes with baseball bats. What you did, you bought a
fourteen
SILAS WOKE IN his clothes and boots, only a few minutes late, and stood in the shower until the hot water ran out. He spat foul mouthwash in the sink and opened and closed his lips in the mirror, his head shady with fuzz. The idea of buzzing his razor over it was appalling so he set his hat on gently and finished buttoning his shirt going out the door and took his headache to work, bumping along in the Jeep that smelled
