“How’s that?”
“Why did the boy wait till now.”
“Well, to hear him say it, he just didn’t know what to do when he was a kid. He was confused. Now he’s older and he’s tired of being blamed, I guess, so here he’s got something he’s held on to all these years and it’s something only a crazy person would show now, so either he’s crazy or he’s telling the truth, and he’s hoping I’ll think one thing and not the other.”
“To what end?”
“How’s that?”
“To what end. What does he expect you to do?”
“God damned if I know. Stop blaming him, for one thing.”
Moran sat there. He rubbed at something on the lip of his mug.
“Have you got it with you?” he said. “The pocket?”
“No. He kept it.”
“Ah.” Moran frowned into his mug. “I wish you’d held on to it, Gordon. That’s evidence of a crime. If he panics, or runs, we might never see it again.”
“Is he crazy?” Gordon said.
“What?”
“Is he crazy, or is he telling the truth?”
Moran looked at him with sadness in his eyes. Sorrow even. “The fact that you’d even ask is discouraging,” he said.
“I don’t think I’m asking that much, Sheriff. A man…” he began. “A man just wants to know the truth, that’s all.”
“I understand. But you’ve already put me on a level playing field with that son of a bitch and that just doesn’t sit too great, I have to say.”
“I wouldn’t say level. I wouldn’t say level by a long shot.”
Moran stared at him. Then he picked up his phone and lit up its face and stared at that, then set it down again, facedown, on the tabletop.
“Something else just occurred to me here, Gordon.”
“What’s that.”
“It’s that for you to even consider his story might be true, you’d have to think some other man—this man who pulled him over—had that pocket on him for one reason only. You realize that?”
“I realize that.”
Moran sat searching his eyes. The color had come up in the sheriff’s face. A light in his eyes that had not been there before.
“Well, I just don’t even know what to say to that, Gordon. I truly don’t. You come on down here, into my town. Walk into my office. All the while thinking this.”
“I’m sorry to do it, Sheriff. Like I said, I had a long night and I thought about a lot of things. And one thing I thought about… something I’d never really thought about before, was those times you brought her home. You remember that?”
“I brought a lot of kids home to their folks, Gordon. Brought them home drunk, high, beat-up. But alive. Always alive.”
“I know it. But she never talked about it.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“When you brought her home she wouldn’t talk about it.”
“Why would she? Would you?”
“Maybe not. Just, thinking back on it, it seemed she was more than embarrassed. Seemed she was more than that.”
Moran’s hands had been flat on the tabletop and now he lifted one in the air, palm out, as if to halt traffic. “All right, Gordon. Let’s just—slow down here a minute.” He leaned forward and said in a low voice, “Can you hear yourself, Gordon? Do you know what you’re saying?”
Gordon did not look away.
“Because I’m having a hard time believing what I’m hearing.” He sat looking into Gordon’s eyes. As if he might read there some other story altogether—or else the madness that would explain this one. Finally he shook his head and looked down at his hands on the table.
“I’m trying real hard to stand in your shoes, Gordon, but it’s difficult. I’ve never gone through what you’ve gone though and I pray to God I never do. I just don’t see how a man would ever be the same after something like that.” He took a breath and looked off and let the air out slowly. “So I’m sitting here asking myself what’s the best thing to do right now, and there’s two or three ideas going around. But I think the best thing for me to do is just get on back to work and let you be.”
He picked up his phone and gathered his jacket and his hat.
“You never said,” Gordon said.
“Never said what.”
“If he’s crazy or not.”
“Well, Gordon, you might ask yourself this: What would you expect me to say?”
He stood from the booth and put his hat on. He got into his sheriff’s jacket, then pulled his wallet from the inside breast pocket, removed several bills and dropped them on the tabletop. He replaced the wallet and stood looking down on Gordon from under the hatbrim.
“Crazy has got a way of spreading, Gordon. I just hope you’ve got sense enough not to be the one goes spreading it.” He held Gordon’s eyes, then he turned and made his way toward the door. He called, “So long” to the waitress and he clapped the old man on the back and yelled to him, “Seeya, Harold,” and then he pushed out through the door into the daylight and was gone.
43
WHEN GORDON BURKE came home the sun was just down and she was sitting on the edge of the porch with her boots on the step below and a mug of hot tea in her hands. She was wearing her father’s canvas jacket and a pair of faded Levi’s and a billcap she’d found in the downstairs coat closet. Under the jacket she wore a red fleece pullover and under that a white cotton tank top that smelled faintly of perfume. Or so she believed. His headlights swept through the trees, and she watched as he pulled up to the garage or whatever it was across the way and got out and walked to the rear of the van, opened the back doors, collected a large black garbage bag in one hand and several plastic grocery bags in the other and closed the doors again with his shoulder. He paused at the sight of her, then came along the path with the bags and stopped just short of the porchsteps and stood looking at her in the dusk.
“You shouldn’t be out here in the cold,” he said, and his voice was strange. Like he himself was sick, or had talked himself hoarse. She looked at him more carefully: the unshaved, ashy face, the shadowed eyes.
“Are you all right?” she said.
“Am I all right?”
“You didn’t catch it, did you?”
“No, I didn’t catch it. I just didn’t sleep too good last night.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault. Had nothing to do with you.”
She sat looking at him. His eyes went to the billcap on her head but he said nothing.
“What day is it?” she said.
“Friday.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Two days, two nights.”
She nodded. “Thank you. For bringing me here. For taking care of me.”
He adjusted the bags in his grips, then set them down on the path. “Wasn’t just me,” he said. “Doc Van Allen came out and looked you over. You remember that?”
“No. I didn’t think they did that anymore.”
“Did what?”
“House calls.”
“They don’t.” He looked up at the sky, then at her again. “Anyway your fever broke, so I thought I’d take off for just a little bit.” He nudged the large garbage bag with the side of his boot. “Drove on down to post bond on your clothes.”
She said nothing, and he said, “That’s a joke. There wasn’t no bond.”
Her eyes began to sting. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I had to talk to a man down there anyhow.”
An owl hooted from the woods and he looked toward the trees as if he might see it, but there was nothing there to see. The trees. The snow. The cold early stars in the purple sky.
She said, “I hope you don’t mind I found some clothes.”