Silas remembering Larry’s breezy mother, so different from now, saying how Alice should have no trouble accepting the coats because she’d never minded using other people’s things.
“He wished you’d been the white one,” Larry said.
Silas thinking how Mrs. Ott had driven away and Silas had put on his coat and zipped it to his neck and buried his hands in the pockets, which were lined with fur. But his mother had continued to stand in the freezing air, holding the coat she’d been given, looking at it. “Ain’t you gone put it on, Momma?” he’d asked as they started to walk, her carrying the long gray coat as if someone had handed her a dead child. At some point Alice slipped one arm and then the other into the coat’s sleeves, she buttoned its buttons, starting at the top. Silas had followed her, still not seeing what an emblem of defeat, shame, loss, hopelessness, the coat was. With such gaps in his understanding, he saw very clearly how the boy he’d been had grown to be the man he was.
“You think it was better,” Larry said, “living with him?”
“No,” Silas admitted. “I speck it wasn’t.” Then he said, “It wasn’t easy without one, either. I used to wish I was you, all that land, all them guns. That warm house, that barn.”
“Bet you don’t wish it now,” Larry said.
Silas didn’t know how to answer but it didn’t matter. Larry was thumbing his buzzer.
The nurse walked into the room. “Yes?”
“How much trouble would it be,” Larry asked her, “to move me to another room?”
She blinked and then closed her mouth. “You. You want to change rooms?”
“Yeah. Please start whatever paperwork you have to. I’ll pay whatever extra it costs. I just want my own room. Please.”
“Well, he’s out tomorrow,” the nurse said, nodding to Silas, “he’ll be gone before we could move you. But if you want me to go to the trouble of starting the paperwork-”
“I do,” he said.
seventeen
WHERE LARRY’S ONLY visitors had been law enforcement officials, Silas had a stream. Not long after Larry asked to change rooms, a pretty black girl in a paramedic outfit came in, smiled quickly at Larry then went to Silas’s bed, her fragrance settling over Larry like a whiff of honeysuckle bush. He’d requested that a nurse draw the curtain between the beds, so now he heard but didn’t see.
“Baby,” she said, “you okay?”
“Yeah,” Silas said. He cleared his throat.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “bout the way I been.”
“You ain’t been no way,” he said, “but right.”
Rustling, sheets moving.
“Look at your arm.”
“It’s a mess ain’t it.”
“They gone put you on disability?”
“Say they are.”
“Full pay, 32?”
“Say so.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it.”
They talked about the dog, the girl telling him she was glad she hadn’t been the first responder. She didn’t know what she’d have done, something happened to him. He kept assuring her he was fine. She said she knew a great rehab tech, she’d make sure 32 hooked up with him, he’d get his arm back, wait and see. Then their voices lowered and Larry figured they were talking about him. He had the television on overhead, not too loud. Though Silas had a remote control on his bed, too, and though they shared the set, Larry maintained control. There were other sounds and he knew they were kissing.
A moment later she stuck her head around the curtain. She had a high pretty forehead and big eyes, a little smile.
“Larry?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m Angie Baker.” She came forward and touched the back of his hand where it lay in its leather belt. Her nails weren’t painted; he could tell she bit them. She looked into his eyes so frankly he glanced away. “I’m 32’s girlfriend,” she said, bending to get back into his sightline.
“You the one who found me,” he said.
“32 sent us.”
“I thank you,” Larry said.
“I just wanted to say,” the girl said, “that I’m sorry for all you been through. Silas told me. And I wanted to tell you if you ever wanted to come to a church, the Fulsom Third Baptist on Union Avenue would welcome you.”
Larry didn’t know how to answer. It was a black church. Finally he said, “Does Silas go there?”
“You ain’t got to worry about Silas,” she said. “You can’t get his black ass anywhere near a church. Less you shoot somebody in one.”
She stayed much of the night, was there when Larry drifted off.
Next morning she was gone, replaced by a heavy woman with a bouquet of daisies, nodding to Larry as she got water for the flowers and tidied the room. Silas called her Voncille and thanked her for sending the deputies after him. And for the flowers.
Then a man Larry recognized as the mayor of Chabot came and joked could Silas still wave cars with that cast on? And could he learn to use his right arm to aim the radar gun and his right hand to fill out his reports? But all joking aside, the mayor said, they sure were proud of him.
Later a couple of other deputies came in and talked with Silas. They’d taken Wallace’s snakes for evidence, and there’d been a moment of dark comedy when a heretofore unseen boa constrictor slid across the kitchen floor and was shot to death. They’d also found an aquarium of rats, food for the snakes, in a back bedroom. A debate had ensued over what to do with them. Let them go? Flush them? They’d decided to turn them over to a local pet store, the bunch of them currently in the back of Deputy Parvin’s Bronco.
Leaving, the deputies both nodded to Larry.
French came by around nine, looking spiffy and wearing, for the first time, to Larry’s knowledge, a shirt with buttons on it and khaki pants. He looked rested and ruddy as he stood at the end of the curtain between them, where he could see them both.
“Gentlemen,” he said.
Silas said, “You must got more TV today.”
“So do you,” the chief said. “On your way out. That pretty anchor wants to talk to you.”
“First,” Silas said, “can you undo Larry?”
“I can,” said French, coming down Larry’s side of the divider, undoing the right restraint and then rounding the bed to do the left. “I apologize for that,” he said.
Larry rubbed his wrists and looked past the chief at the television, a cat food commercial.
“Well.” French moved around the curtain to Silas’s side. “We got a fellow doing your traffic.”
“Thanks.”
French reached past him and pulled the curtain aside, Larry swept into view, his eyes on the TV.
“I’m gone talk to yall both a minute,” French said. “Mr. Ott, will you turn that thing off.”
Larry clicked it off.
French said aside from the Rutherford girl’s wallet, they’d recovered eleven firearms at Wallace’s place, pistols, rifles, shotguns, and ammo. Also, most of an eight ball of cocaine, pills, an eighth of marijuana and a pipe and a one-hitter.
That sounded about like Wallace, Larry thought.
French went on. The zombie mask had a spot of blood on it that matched Larry’s blood, which, bolstered by Larry’s testimony, left little doubt that Stringfellow had pulled the trigger. Also, because of the information from
