She was clearly imitating Sheriff Aiken.
“Said ‘that boy over yonder don’t know his pecker from a parkin’ meter, you can bet on that. He hated Peter, but had to keep up appearances. He said he couldn’t ‘do nothin’ unseemly’.” She said, and a chill ran across my shoulders. “I don’t hear no water movin’ around in there, boy,” she said. I leaned down and splashed my hand around a little. “So, one night I went out to meet him. Must’a been about midnight or so. God, I was just a girl, then. Just a girl. Just a girl,” she said, her voice getting softer each time, trailing off.
The room was quiet for a while, then I heard the sobbing start. I was frozen. For a second, I felt like I really was a little boy, again. I’d never heard my mother cry, and for some reason I’d never even thought that she had or would. This woman in the other room was not my mother, but there was something that connected us. I stood up, and walked around the partition wall. She was slumped over herself, bent at the waist. Her head rested on her knees. Her back and shoulders were shaking violently in long, racking sobs. I was frozen. I sat down on the bed next to her. Her sobs let out in tiny breaths from between her teeth, as if she were trying to clench them back.
“Oh, Johnny, what are we gonna’ do? What are we gonna’ do?” she whispered, her throat closed up by her crying. She lifted up just enough to turn her head toward me, and her face was a wreck. “Johnny, it’s your’n. It’s your’n, and he’s gonna’ know. What are we gonna’ do?”
Her eyes pleaded with me for some action, and I didn’t know what to say. Who was Johnny? I put my arm around her back, felt her bird-frail shoulder blades under my arm each time they rocked from her sobbing. She moved herself to fit into my side. Her head went onto my lap. She kept saying “It’s your’n” over and over again, but only bits of it would come out at a time. The rest was choked off by a sob or an inhale. After a while, though, the crying dyed down. She looked up at me, and sat up a bit straighter. For a while, we sat there, side by side. She would sob, then wipe at her eyes, then go quiet. I only looked at her out of the corner of my eye.
“You’re not Johnny, are you,” she said. “Don’t lie. I know I ain’t well. I know you ain’t Randolph, neither, so don’t try that.”
I didn’t move. “No,” I said.
“Don’t try to tell me who you are. I ain’t gonna’ believe nothin’ you say.” She wiped at her eyes again.
“Okay,” I said.
“I know Randolph ain’t comin’ home ever again. Somebody done took him. I know that.”
I nodded. After a while, when it seemed that she was stable again, I stood up to leave. I wanted to tell her everything I came here to say, about Randy, about the bones, about how I knew, but I couldn’t. I tried to the entire time we sat there.
“If you are who I think you are, then let me ask you somethin’,” she said. I turned toward her. She seemed to be waiting for me to say something, so I nodded. She looked down at her own knees, then back up, “Where’d you take him?” When I didn’t answer, she asked “My boy. Where’d you take him off to? I know it was you took him, else you wouldn’t’a come here. I just want to know where he is. I just want to be able to put him in that little box out yonder.”
I turned for the door, and she whispered something else as I turned the handle, but I didn’t hear it. I closed the door behind me, and locked it. I stopped, and almost turned to look in the window, but didn’t. I had just managed to put the key back in the box, and close the door to it when Kevin emerged from the room I’d heard noises in. The nurse was adjusting his shirt. Kevin looked at me, and his eyes seemed empty. I nodded. He looked down at the floor.
The nurse glared at me. “Hey, what are you doing?”
“Nothin’. Snooping around. Bored.” I couldn’t make my voice find a whole sentence.
“Well, get away from that. Shit, for all I know, you’re some perv come to fuck one of the ol’ ladies or somethin’.”
“Nah,” Kevin said, “he ain’t no perv, are you?” he asked, turning his gaze back to me. “Give us a sec?” he said, and his eyes moved quickly from my face to the elevator. I walked that way, but I already knew what was going to happen. As the door dinged open, and I stepped inside, I saw the nurse pull out his wallet, and the wad of cash he handed to Kevin.
TWENTY-NINE
The ride was silent for a bit. From time to time, I glanced over at Kevin while I drove. He’s staring out the window, or maybe at his own reflection in the glass. Just past his face, the stars twinkle. The streetlights do their best to block out everything else. The radio was off.
“Did she tell you?” he asked without turning.
“No,” I said, “but she—I don’t know—dreamed or something.”
He nodded, and kept staring. “Randolph,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time with her,” he said.
“What?”
He huddled himself up tighter, drawing his legs up onto the seat. “She wanted someone to mother. Someone to fill the empty back up.”
“So you—you—what?” I asked.
“I let her talk,” he said. Something in his voice meant more than that, though.
“Is that how you know all of this?” I asked.
He nodded, but said nothing for a long time. We were almost to the turn-off into his subdivision when he asked “what was he like?”
“Who?”
“Randy,” he said, and turned his head some.
“I dunno. He was a kid,” I said. A picture formed in my head of him, his head barely above the water, the first time I’d tried to teach him to swim. Another picture flipped over on top of that one, as if they were actual photos, of Randy on my bike. Then I thought of the coffin, and how narrow it was. “Just a kid,” I said.
He shook his head, “he had to be more than that.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Because you’re in love with him.”
I pulled the car up into the dirt area near the front of the trailer. I turned it off. We sat for a while, not looking at each other or saying anything. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
He moved his feet down onto the floorboard again, leaning his side against the chair so that his head rested. He stared at me, then blinked slow, saying “You wanted to know what to do. That’s why you went to see her tonight.”
“Wanted to know what to do about what?” I asked, turning away from him.
“You know that there is no way the Sheriff can allow those bones to be named as Randolph McPherson.”
“What? You’re not making any sense,” I said. In his eyes, there was a distant gleam. He was looking somewhere far beyond me, far beyond the car’s window behind me.