She was walking toward her car and James was walking along with her, shortening his stride so it matched hers.
“I don’t like coming to your house because your uncle feels sorry for me.”
“That’s better than him thinking you’re a creep.”
“I’m not so sure. It gets old, having people think you’re nothing to worry about.”
They rounded a thicket of bamboo and started down a long row of glinting chrome. All the disturbed dust of the morning was hanging static in the air. James knew about Sofia’s past. She hadn’t told him the details but he knew the gist. He seemed to regard it all as an exotic happenstance of her formative years, like if she’d lived in Africa as a diplomat’s daughter or something. Like Uncle Tunsil, he didn’t speak of it unless she brought it up, and she rarely did. Sofia didn’t feel like telling him about the interviews she was planning; she didn’t want to know what he’d think about that. He’d find out soon enough, the way news spread.
James believed in things — in ghosts, in God, in spontaneous human combustion. He’d once said he didn’t understand the point of not believing in things. He made a lot of declarations and they didn’t all jibe.
“So this concern you have about the sowing of my wild oats,” he said. “It’s valid as a concept, but it doesn’t really apply to me. I don’t think I’d be breaking a big story, saying I’m not your average dude. If I have any wild oats, I’d just as soon sow them with you. In you? I don’t think I have a mastery of that metaphor.”
“Of course you’d say that,” Sofia said. “But I’m only the second girlfriend you’ve ever had. There could be plenty of girls out there you’d like better than me and you’d have no way of knowing it.”
James scoffed. “First off, I’m not going to dignify that with a response. Second, isn’t it my choice whether I want to date any other girls? Isn’t that sort of up to me?”
“We have no brakes. We wind up spending every minute together. It can’t be healthy.”
“You need breaks from me?”
“No brakes. B-r-a-k-e.”
James gently brushed a moth away from his pant leg, then watched it zip up toward the treetops. “I guess I don’t see the problem. I guess that sounds like an ideal situation, spending every minute together.”
Sofia tried not to feel flattered, tried not to feel like she was fishing for loyalty. They reached her car, an old Datsun the color of sweet-potato flesh, and she fished around in her purse for her keys. Her purse was tiny and she still could never find anything in it. She could see the cover of James’s book now. It said THE BRITISH ROYAL NAVY. He started walking around to the passenger side of the Datsun.
“What are you doing?” Sofia said.
“What? Getting in the car.”
“No way, James.”
“But I need a ride.”
“What about your car?”
“It’s back at my apartment. There’s something not right with it. The intake or something.”
“How did you get here?”
“Rode the bus.”
“From Lower Grove?”
“Rode like four buses.”
“You rode the bus here thinking I would be forced to give you a ride back.”
“You sure make things black and white.”
“I’m not giving you a ride. It’s not fair what you did.”
James ticked one eyebrow up and then released a shallow sigh. “Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
He pressed the corner of his eye with his fingertip, blinking. “So I guess that means I’ll take the bus again,” he said. “No, it’s okay. It’ll be good. I’m interested in buses. Bus routes. Bus transfers. Stuff like that. Interesting people who smell like gas stations.”
James came back over to Sofia’s side of the car. He kept his distance. His hair was a completely different hue in the sun than it was in the shade.
“You’ll let us be happy one day,” he said. “I just hope I’m not bitter by then.”
Before Sofia could answer, James turned on his boot heel. “Bus to catch,” he called over his shoulder.
Sofia watched him walk off and then lowered herself into the driver’s seat, the vinyl warm on her back and legs. She was staring into a swath of jungle. She wound down her window and then leaned over and wound down the passenger window too, hoping for a cross breeze that wasn’t to be.
***
She sensed nothing out of the ordinary, felt nothing, face to face in the interrogation room with this wiry guy wearing a brand-new T-shirt and brand-new ball cap. They were conversing stiffly, like distant acquaintances who had bumped into each other at the grocery store. His name was Spencer. Sofia couldn’t tell where he was from, whether he had hidden scars. She couldn’t sense anything more than what she’d known coming in.
Spencer was a half-brother of Barn Renfro, the murdered man. When they were younger, the two of them had inherited a boat repair shop on a small lake. Barn had bought Spencer’s share with money he’d made dealing pot and Spencer had blown through that money in the span of several months. Barn had run the business for the past twenty years, while his brother shuffled from odd job to odd job.
Spencer told Sofia that he’d found Jesus a few months ago, that in his old life he got depressed if he didn’t get into a fight every couple weeks. There’d been only so long he could march knees high with the program before he needed to get punched in the face. That was his old self, he said. Sofia knew all this. Everyone in town did. Spencer had been a prize for the congregation that had tamed him, a feather in the cap of Lower Grove Church of Christ. He sat at the table with his back straight and his shoulders loose, his fists resting on the dull metal surface. His nose leaned to one side, which had the effect of giving his face character. Sofia’s uncle was watching from behind the mirror, along with his lone deputy. The session was being taped. The floor was linoleum, but for some reason the air smelled of old carpet. Sofia was hoping for any flash into the life of this man before her, a glance at anything incriminating. She was getting flat nothing.
“I finally started wishing Barn well, then he goes and gets himself shot,” said Spencer. “I really was. I was hoping prosperity and peace on him. That’s the lesson of my life: if I’m betting against you, you can feel pretty optimistic. If I’m rooting for you, you better watch your ass.”
“I guess we all feel that way sometimes,” Sofia said.
“Now God is supposed to tell me what to want and not want, so that simplifies things.”
“Do you think God wanted Barn dead?”
“I got no idea.” Spencer took a moment. He was tapping a spot on the tabletop with his finger. “I have a hard time seeing why He wants me alive. They say He loves me, though. They keep telling me that.” Spencer closed his eyes as tightly as he could, then opened them and refocused on Sofia. “I can’t believe in your ability,” he said. “The Church of Christ doesn’t acknowledge any of that as valid.”
“Well,” Sofia said. “Policy is policy.”
She ran her fingernail along the edge of the table. There was a whiteboard in the room but no markers. And a smoke detector on the ceiling, its green light pulsing tirelessly. When she looked at Spencer again, he had drawn inward, into his own mires and impasses. Sofia wasn’t supposed to feel let down at the futility of the interview, she knew. She was supposed to be a disinterested party, awaiting truth about the crime and about herself.
Uncle Tunsil took a paring knife to a couple of lemons, whistling softly while he worked, then got out the little pot of sugar and miniature spoon. Sofia was nibbling at some peach yogurt. Her uncle hadn’t acted a bit discouraged yesterday after she’d yielded nothing at the station. In fact, he’d seemed relieved. He hadn’t thought Spencer was guilty, she knew. He had made sure Sofia still wanted to go through with the other interviews, giving her an out while not openly pushing her in either direction. He probably didn’t know what to think. If she kept coming up empty it would be bad for the investigation, which seemed to be stalled or close to it. But if she hit on something, that would be a whole other can of worms. Sofia knew it was him who was helping her, as usual, not the other way around. He wouldn’t admit to that. He would insist he was running a thorough operation, utilizing all resources.