Larry, Stringfellow had been linked to M &M, so they could now investigate that case in light of this new evidence. French’s guess? Wallace had shot M &M, too.
“Now you fellows,” French said, looking one to the other, “have got some history. But what else we got is a whole shebang of reporters and cameras, even CNN, and now Fox News. They all want the story, when each of you gets out, and I don’t see no reason to hold things back now. The parents have been told, and they send their apologies to Mr. Ott,” nodding to Larry. “And their thanks to you, 32. But I warn you both against getting too personal. They’ll sink their teeth into anything you give em, try to make this a damn human interest story. I don’t know about yall, but I don’t want no humans interested in me.”
Not long after, Silas was taken away in a wheelchair, discharged, saying as the nurse rolled him out the door, “I’ll come see you, Larry.”
Now the nurse appeared with another wheelchair, this one for Larry.
“Your room’s ready,” she said.
“Never mind,” he said. “I’ll stay here.”
eighteen
ANGIE HAD BROUGHT his cowboy hat and two of Marla’s hot dogs. She couldn’t stop touching him as she drove him to the Chabot Town Hall, and he finally took her nondriving hand in his good one and held it. His arm, in a cast and sling, hurt like hell and he was tired, but it felt good being out of the hospital and into his hat. He’d just come from a meeting with Shannon, the sole reporter he intended to speak to about any of this. Let her scoop CNN and Fox. They’d met at the diner and she’d recorded his story, growing more excited as he talked, already writing, her photographer moving around the room, standing on chairs, squatting. The article, Shannon said, scribbling, would run Thursday. “It just might get me a Pulitzer,” she’d said. “Will Larry Ott confirm all this?”
“You’ll have to ask him,” Silas had said.
Angie was chatting, and he could tell she was happy. Their plan was for him to go by his office and then to her place where she was going to put him to bed and baby him for the next few days.
She pulled into the parking lot across from the booming mill. “You want me to come with you?”
“Naw,” he said, opening the door. “I speck the mayor’s gone reprimand me, and I wouldn’t want you to see that. Might lose all respect for me.”
“Might?” she said. “I’ll be here when you ready.”
Mayor Mo and Voncille were waiting in the office, her at her desk, him at his. Neither spoke as Silas came in, taking off his hat with his good hand. He tossed it on his desk and turned his chair around the way he usually did for town meetings and sat down. They were both watching him in a way he couldn’t decipher.
“Let me go first,” Silas said. “I got something to say.”
“About what?” The mayor looked down at his legal pad. “Neglecting your traffic duty? Putting us in the hole in our little budget with a whopping, what, three citations in the last three weeks? Harassing the receptionist at River Acres? Enormous ER bills? I could go on, you know,” tapping his pad.
“He’s always been a list maker,” Voncille said.
“All of it,” Silas said. “Look-”
Mayor Mo tossed the pad behind him and stood up. “What are we going to do with him, Voncille?”
“You could fire him,” she said. “But who’d you get to replace him on that salary?”
Silas looked from her to him.
“Only thing I can think to do,” the mayor said, “is hire him some part-time help. What you think, Voncille?”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling now. “I been working up an ad for the paper. ‘Somebody’ “-quoting from her own pad-” ‘to direct traffic,’ for starters.”
Silas didn’t know what to say.
“Mr. Rutherford,” Mayor Mo said, “has authorized it. He thinks we’d all be better served with you doing more patrols. What he called real police work.”
“He said that?”
“He did. And I told him we might start thinking about getting you a better vehicle, too. Next year. Maybe, what, a new used Bronco?”
Silas sat looking from one of them to the other. “Thank yall,” he finally said, “but I can’t take none of it. Not yet. You got to wait till the paper comes out.”
“Why?” the mayor asked. “What’s in the paper?”
“You just got to wait,” Silas said. He got up. “For now, thank yall. I need to go home and get to bed.”
HE CONVALESCED THE rest of the day and into the evening, Angie pampering him, propping his arm up with her big throw pillows, bringing him his grilled tenderloin in bed, taking the day off from work in case he needed anything. He sat studying her little catfish as it probed along the bottom of the tank. That night they watched movies in bed and slept close and he woke in the dark thinking of Larry.
The next day, he asked Angie to take him to Larry’s house and then by the hospital. She helped him dress, lingering at his zipper, and they took her Mustang with her hand on his knee.
At the hospital she helped him with the box of mail he was carrying. Tough with one hand.
“You want me to come up with you?” Angie asked, balancing the box for him.
“Naw, thanks,” he said. Standing in the parking lot by her car. “I just don’t know what to say up there.”
“You ain’t got to say anything,” she said. “Just go and sit with him. See what happens.”
HE DID JUST THAT, came in the room and sat on the edge of the bed. Larry wouldn’t look at him, just gazed at the television, which was showing the Cubs on WGN, losing, as usual. He’d put the box of mail on the foot of Larry’s bed but Larry wouldn’t acknowledge it.
“I used to go there,” Silas said, pointing to the television. “Wrigley Field. When I was a boy.”
Larry raised his arm and changed the channel. Geraldo.
“Yeah,” Silas said. “They ain’t no good anyway.
“I’m still feeding the first ladies,” he said. “Getting them eggs. You know what I do? Take em to Miss Marla over at The Hub in Chabot. You know that place? She calls em ‘free-range eggs.’
“Need to hire somebody to cut your grass, it’s getting pretty high. I’d do it myself but, you know.” Raising his sling.
He sat for nearly an hour and then pushed himself up. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Bring the mail.”
AT RIVER ACRES he sat with his knees crossed so he could rest his cast on it. Motherfucker was heavy. His elbow ached all the time, but he’d decided to stop taking the Lortabs. He didn’t fool himself: the pain was penance. Were his visits to Mrs. Ott more penance?
As she sat in her chair, gazing at him as if he were a broom, he dug up memories, telling her about him and Larry and them chickens, how that one afternoon long ago, when they’d been let to be themselves, they’d bounded through woods and over grass, invincible boys, snagging grasshoppers out of the air and capping them in jars with air holes nailed in the lids, overturning logs for the fleeing beetles and cockroaches they yielded, stealing spiders out of their webs, taking the jar to the chicken pen where the birds zipped right over-
“Who’re you?” Mrs. Ott asked.
“Silas,” he said, hefting his arm.
“Oh,” she said. “Who?”
Later he stood with the Jeep ticking behind him, watching the Walker place. Kudzu and privet had overtaken most of it, given the house another layer of mystery. Something moved past his foot and he looked down, a slender black pipe slid away from his boot. He caught his breath. The weeds twitched and it was gone. He took off his hat and stood holding it, looking where her window was, behind its boards and vines, and wondered was her ghost in there, leaving a trail of smoke dissolving as she passes one room to the next.
NEXT DAY HE tore the Sheriff’s Department seals off Larry’s front door and stuffed them in a garbage bag. Behind him Angie, in a head rag and old jeans, came up the porch carrying a bucket with a brush and Ajax in it. She got to work cleaning the blood from the floor and Silas went to the gun cabinet and started moving catalogs and
