“And I you, and no maybe. More and more and more.”
“Sugar, I’m about to cry, and I don’t want to.”
“I’ve got to hang up now. Will you be all right out there in Hoolihan’s Addition all alone?”
“I don’t intend to be alone very long. I promise that you’ll be back almost before you know you’ve been gone. You just wait and see.”
“Apparently I’ll have to.”
“And you tell that bastard McBride not to come sneaking around here picking my brains again if he doesn’t want to be shot as a trespasser. I’ll tell him myself if you’ll only put him on the phone.”
“I’ll tell him. Good-by, Sid.”
“Good-by, sugar.”
That was about it. I put the phone in its cradle and pushed it away from me. It had been bad enough, as it had to be, but not as bad as it might have been.
“Tell who what?” Cotton said.
“You’re who,” I said, “and what is that you’d better not come sneaking around picking Sid’s brains again if you don’t want to be shot.”
“What the hell’s the matter with that woman? She can’t be threatening an officer of the law in line of duty.”
“She also called you a bastard. That makes two people in ten minutes. I’m beginning to think there must be some truth in it.”
“She wasn’t responsible,” Hec said. “You’ve got to realize, Cotton, that it puts a strain on a wife to learn that her husband’s going to jail. Did she say anything about me, Gid?”
“Nothing much. She concentrated on Cotton.”
“Well, I suppose she’ll never speak to me again after this.” He stood up behind his desk and looked strong and resigned and slightly noble. “It’s one of the penalties of a job like mine. You do your plain duty, no matter how much it may hurt you inside, and someone always hates you for it.”
“As I see it,” Cotton said, “my plain duty right now is to take the prisoner over to the county jail, and I’m going to do it.”
“That’s right, Gid,” Hec said. “It’s Cotton’s duty to do it.”
So he did his duty, and we went. I had tried to be brave and assured and all that prideful stuff, and maybe I managed to make the picture pretty well, but I didn’t feel it. Inside, like Hec, I was hurting.
I have a notion I was hurting worse.
CHAPTER 11
The county jail was located in the oldest residential area of town, a red brick building erected near the turn of the century in the center of a square block of grass and trees and flowering shrubs. A brick walk led up to the building from the street, a pattern of moss in the cracks between bricks, and the walls of the building were covered with ivy. It had not changed in appearance in my time, and I suppose it had not changed appreciably in fifty years or more, except to age and mellow and acquire as the years passed a soft deceptive air of being something better than it was. Inside, the floors were darkened by innumerable applications of varnish and sweeping compound, and the air was heavy with the scent of cedar. Entering, I had for a moment the captured feeling of being a kid again in another time, say ten or twelve a quarter of a century back, and I was coming into school on my way to the room for grade four or six.
The building was two stories high, and my accommodations were second floor rear, northeast corner. There was a narrow barred window in the east wall and another narrow barred window in the north wall, and thus I had the luxury of double exposure, which was something, I learned, that no other cell in the whole place had, and I think this was in deference to my status as a murder suspect among petty offenders. There was a bunk for sleeping attached to a wall. There was a lavatory for washing. There was a commode.
In the middle of the afternoon of that first day, I was standing at the north window looking sometimes down through bars into the side yard where the dark grass was patterned by shade and sun, and sometimes out levelly into leaves of oaks and maples and sycamores. It was an old and quiet and beautiful yard in which kids might have played for hours on summer days, much too nice a yard for a jail to have, and there were, in fact, two kids playing there at this time, two boys in jeans. They were sitting cross-legged on the grass, facing each other and deeply intent upon what was happening between them, and what was happening, I saw, was a game of mumblety-peg. One of the boys would take the pocket knife and go through as many of the tricks as he could without missing, and then the other boy in his turn would do likewise, and I began to try to remember as many of the tricks as I could of the game as I used to play it. I found that I could remember most of the tricks, how they were done, but only three of the names for them, and the three names I remembered were Dropping the Devil through the Well, Spanking Baby’s Bottom, and Jumping the Pasture Fence. This was one way to keep from thinking of Sid and the trouble I was causing her through idiocy, but not a very good one or a very successful one, and I kept thinking of her in spite of boys in jeans and mumblety-peg. I had been in jail four hours, but they seemed like four weeks, and the four had become five when Harley Murchison, the jailer, came up
