Jeff said, “Aw, Jesus Christ” to something in the game, and Danny took a drink of his beer.
“I heard she got married,” he said. “Had a kid. A little girl.”
“That what you heard?”
“Ma wrote something, a few years back.”
Jeff took a drink and set his beer down again. “Had the kid but never got married. Guy was a total douche. Left her high and dry.”
Danny shook his head, in real sadness. “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said, and Jeff shrugged again and said, “It is what it is, man.” And saying this he looked at Danny, as if to give greater weight to the words, and Danny held his eyes—eyes of childhood, eyes of boyhood in the face of this man sitting at the bar drinking his beer, a man still in his mechanic’s jacket and smelling of the garage.
Jeff turned back to the game. Then he gave Danny a backhanded swat to the arm. “You wanna sit at a table? This game is killing me, man.” And they took a table far enough from the bar that they would not be overheard by the men at the bar but not so far that the men would wonder what it was they had to move so far away to discuss, and when they sat they arranged themselves so both had a view of the game, as if that were still their top priority. The man who’d sat to Danny’s left watched the move dull-eyed over his shoulder, and Danny and Jeff returned his look until at last he swung his head back around and lifted his glass and drank, the back side of his skull gleaming under a few dark strings of hair.
“Saw you out there talking to Wabash this morning,” Jeff said. He’d put his boots up on one of the empty chair seats and crossed them at the ankles and likewise crossed his arms, and his eyes were still on the game.
“He felt like a chat, I guess,” Danny said.
“What’d he have to say?”
“He seemed mainly to want to tell me what a small town it is.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I guess I might just want to think about that.”
Jeff picked up his glass and before taking his drink said, “Well, maybe you might.”
Danny looked over but Jeff kept his eyes on the game.
“You got something on your mind, Jeff?”
“Just saying,” Jeff said. “A man might wonder what you’re doing back here, Dan.”
“I don’t know why a man would. I’ve been back plenty of times.”
“I know it. Big Man always tells me. Christmastime, usually. But then you go back to wherever. You don’t go driving him to work. You don’t go parking your truck in the lot and walking right in. Standing around jawing with Wabash all day.”
Danny looked at him, then looked away.
“I guess I shouldn’t have bothered you, Jeff.”
“Aw, shit.” Jeff brought his boots to the floor, and the man at the bar with the stringy hair glanced back at the sound, his brows bunched up over the dark mound of his shoulder. Jeff waited for him to turn away again.
“It ain’t about that, Dan, and you know it.”
“What it’s about?”
“You know what it’s about.” Jeff leaned forward, and Danny turned, the better to face him, and they looked into each other’s eyes—and finally with a smirk Jeff said in a lowered voice, “It’s about what everybody has always said every time they’ve seen you back here and what they’re gonna say now—especially now.”
“Why especially now?”
Jeff looked at him. “Seriously?”
Danny waited.
“Not two weeks since those two girls went into the river down in Iowa? One of them dead and the other the sheriff’s daughter. What sheriff? The sheriff who let that son of a bitch Danny Young go scot-free and who is now dead himself in the ground.”
Danny stared at Jeff, Jeff staring back.
“I gotta say, Jeff. I thought you of all people would cut me a little slack.”
“Why me of all people, Dan?”
Danny looked at him. Sitting there waiting. All tensed up like some kind of animal. Spring-loaded. It made him so tired, suddenly. Then in a voice only Jeff could hear he said, “We drove right by her, Jeff. We both of us drove right by where it happened. Where they say she went into the river.”
Jeff shook his head and laughed but there was no humor in it. “That ain’t what you mean.”
There was a disturbance at the bar and they both turned to watch as the man with the stringy hair righted himself and stood blinking glassily at the room. At the two of them sitting there. He let go of the bar and made his way step by step to the dim hallway, then pushed his way into the men’s room and forced the wonky door shut behind him.
“I was the one they wanted,” Danny said. “That’s all that’s ever mattered to anyone.”
Jeff said nothing to that. They sat staring at each other. So many years to their friendship. All the years up to that night ten years ago—years of play, of school, of hockey on the frozen lake, summer camp. Of secret hideouts and talk of girls and then the girls themselves. And then all the years after when they said nothing more about it and did not see each other or even talk on the phone but just got on with their strange, separate, suddenly adult lives.
“What,” said Danny. “You think I’d come back here to say something now I never said back then? That I’d just suddenly start telling some other story?”
“Maybe you figured enough time has passed nobody’d do nothin about it now anyhow. Statue of limitations or some such shit.”
“There ain’t no statute of limitations for that, Jeff.”
“Well, that’s a fuckin relief.” He drank his beer and looked at the TV, and Danny looked too but the game had ended and the news was on. The bartender had gone somewhere out of view. The remaining man at the bar appeared to be asleep on his forearms. In all the time they’d been in the tavern no one else had come in or left. As if the world outside had stopped for that time. As if the last of the world were right here in this dark and random place.
“What I told them was the truth, Jeff. I was out there chasing down that goddam dog and I didn’t see anything else. Not a God damn thing. End of story.”
Jeff took a breath and let it out and all the fight seemed to go out of him with the breath.
“Shit, Dan. It coulda been either one of us. They had us at the bar and they had me as the old boyfriend but they had you in the park. But it coulda just as easily been me.”
“You weren’t the old boyfriend. You didn’t even date her, technically.”
“She didn’t date anyone technically.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
Jeff ran his thumb down the curve of his beer glass. “I had a thing for her, though. You know I did.”
“A lot of guys had a thing for her.”
“You knew I did, though. And you knew how drunk I was. Shit. I’d be sitting in jail right now. And my Ma would be in the state hospital in a paper gown with all the crazies. Or dead. Which would be preferable, actually.”
“They had no case, Jeff.”
Jeff shook his head. “That sheriff, Sutter, and that deputy, what was his name?”
“Moran.”
“Moran. With those bug eyes of his. They sure didn’t like nothing about either one of us, did they.”
“No, they did not.”
Danny looked into his beer. Jeff sat pulling at the whiskers on his chin. Then he said, “Tell you one thing I never could figure.”