'Good-bye, Billy Bob.'
After I hung up the receiver, I stared at the telephone in the fading light through the window, as though I could will it to ring again. Then I walked outside, under an empty dome of yellow sky, into a sand-bitten wind that shredded leaves from the chinaberry tree. I got into my Avalon, the wind buffering the windows, and drove to Pete's house.
'You're by yourself?' I asked.
He stood on the porch in a pair of pin-striped overalls and a Clorox-stained purple T-shirt.
'My mother don't get off from work till nine,' he replied.
'Did you eat yet?'
'Some.'
'Like what?'
'Viennas and saltines.'
'I think we'd better get us a couple of those chicken-fried steaks at the café.'
'I knew you was gonna say that.'
It was dusk when we got to the café. We sat under a big electric fan by the window and ordered. Down the street, the sun was red behind the pines in the church yard. Pete had wet his hair and brushed it up on the sides so that it was as flat as a landing field.
'You have to be careful, bud. Don't talk to strangers, don't let some no-count fellow tell you he's a friend of your mom,' I said.
'Temple done told me all that.'
'Then you won't mind hearing it again.'
'That ain't all she told me.'
'Oh?'
'She said for a river-baptized person you been doing something you ain't supposed to. What'd she mean by that?'
'Search me.'
'It's got to do with that lady from the sheriff's department. That's my take on it, anyway.' He bit off a bread stick and crunched it in his jaw.
'Really?'
'Temple talks about you all the time. She said she feels like going upside your head with a two-by-four.'
'How about clicking it off, bud?'
'You gonna come to my ball game this weekend?'
'What do you think?'
He chewed the bread stick and grinned at the same time.
In a candid moment most longtime cops and prison personnel will tell you there are some criminals whom they secretly respect. Charles Arthur Floyd was known for his scrupulousness in paying for the food he was given by Oklahoma farmers when he hid out on the Canadian River. Clyde Barrow finished a jolt on a Texas prison farm, then went back and broke his friends out. Men who have invested their entire lives in dishonesty do max time rather than lie about or snitch-off another con. Murderers go to their deaths without complaint, their shoulders erect, their fears sealed behind their eyes. The appellation 'stand-up' in a prison population is never used lightly.
But the above instances are the exceptions. The average sociopath is driven by one engine, namely, the self. He has no bottom, and his crimes, large or small, are as morally interchangeable to him as watching TV with his family or walking back to a witness at a convenience store robbery and popping a.22 round through the center of her forehead.
Darl Vanzandt pulled his '32 Ford into my drive the next evening, then saw me currying Beau in the lot and drove his car to the edge of the barn and got out and stood in the wind, his face twitching from the dust that swirled out of the fields or the chemicals that swam in his brain.
He approached the fence and lay his forearm on the top rail, studying me, his unbuttoned shirt flapping on his chest. I hadn't noticed before how truncated his body was. The legs were too short for his torso, the shoulders too wide for the hips, the hands as round and thick as clubs.
'Say it and leave,' I said.
'Bunny Vogel quit his job at the skeet club. My mother got him that job. He walks in yesterday and tells the manager he's finished bagging trash and cleaning toilets. Big fucking superstar. He's gonna dime me, that's what he's doing.'
'Who cares?'
'It's Bunny who started it all. I'm talking about Roseanne. You listening? Bunny pretends he's a victim or something. Believe me, 'cause he's got a messed-up face doesn't mean he's a victim.'
'Not interested.'
He made an unintelligible sound and his face seemed to wrinkle with disbelief.
'I can give you Bunny, man,' he said.
'I'm not interested, because you're a liar, Darl. Your information is worthless,' I said.
He inched farther down the fence rail, as though somehow he were getting closer to me.
'You want Garland Moon? I can do that too. I got stuff on that geek can make you throw up,' he said.
'Nope.'
'What's with you?'
I pulled Beau's left front hoof up between my legs and pried a rock out of his shoe with my pocketknife. I could hear Darl's shirt puffing and flapping in the wind.
'You and Marvin Pomroy got to work some kind of deal,' he said. 'The judge said I fart in the street, I'm going to the Walls. I'm still a kid.'
I put down Beau's left hoof and stooped under his neck and picked up his other front hoof. The wind blew my hat across the lot into the barn.
'My old man,' Darl said.
'What?'
'That's who you're really after. You want him, I can give him to you.'
I stood erect and stared at him. No shame, no expression except one of expectancy showed in his face. I folded my pocketknife blade in my palm and walked toward him and placed my hand on the smoothness of the fence rail next to his. His skin was sunburned inside the peach fuzz on his cheeks; there was a small clot of mucus in the corner of his mouth.
'I don't want anything you can give,' I said.
'Wha-'
'I'm going to take it from you on the stand,' I said.
I turned away from him and stroked Beau's face and took a sugar cube from my shirt pocket and let him gum it out of the flat of my hand. A moment later I heard Darl's car engine roar, then the dual exhausts echo off the side of the house and fade away in the wind.
chapter twenty-eight
The evening before opening statements I drove to Lucas Smothers's house and took a new brown suit, white shirt, and tie off the clothes hook in the back of the Avalon and knocked on the door. Lucas appeared at the screen with a wooden spoon in one hand and a shot glass in the other.
'You got your hair cut,' I said.
'Yeah, just like you told me.'
'What are you doing with a whiskey glass?'
'Oh, that,' he said, and smiled. 'I'm baking a cake for my father's birthday. I use it for measuring. Come on in.'
I followed him into the kitchen, the plastic suit bag rattling over my shoulder.
'What's that?' he asked.
'It's your new suit. Wear it tomorrow.'
'I got a suit.'
'Yeah, you've got this one. Tomorrow, you sit erect in the chair. You don't chew gum, you don't grin at anything the prosecutor or a witness says. If you want to tell me something, you write it on a pad, you never whisper. You do nothing that makes the jury think you're a wiseass. There's nothing a jury hates worse than a wiseass. Are we connecting here?'
'Why don't you carve it on my chest?'
'You know how many defendants flush themselves down the commode because they think the court is an amusement park?'
'You're more strung out about this than I am.'
Because I know what you'll face if we lose, I thought. But I didn't say it.
He stood tall and barefoot at the drainboard, measuring vanilla extract into the shot glass. Outside the screen window, the windmill was silhouetted against a bank of yellow and purple clouds.
I watched him pour the vanilla extract into the cake bowl, his long fingers pinched lightly on the sides of the shot glass.
'Why you looking at me like that?' he asked.
'The first time I interviewed you at the jail, you told me you and Roseanne were "knocking back shots",' I said.
'Yeah, Beam, with a draft beer on the side.'