Driving on the Rim

18

MY MOTHER DID NOT CARE TO HEAR war stories. She thought they were bad luck, and I suppose they were. For all my father had been through, she was really the tougher individual and she had the backing of her Big Ally. She thought that God worked in mysterious ways and if He said the War was Over, the War was Over. She saw impiety in ongoing talk about the War. After she died, my father began to have a few fellow soldiers over for drinks or meals. There was a substantial stream of them through his VFW membership, only recently revived, and as I heard the stories of their experiences and tried to relate them to the humble civilians retailing them, I experienced a profound suspicion of appearances. When mild Johnny Markovitch who worked for the rural electric company described how, when taking prisoners to the rear, an officer’s command to “hurry back” meant execute the prisoners, I could never again see Johnny — who had been so kind to me when I was a little boy — in the same way. Albert Cassidy served under Theodore Roosevelt III in North Africa and described him as just a fellow infantryman, dirty, unshaven, and reliable. Out went my views of Hudson River aristocrats. The most peculiar was Arthur Boyle, who had gleefully watched the massacre of Germans at Falaise Gap. He later joined my father’s unit at St.-Lô and was with him on a day of deep snow when the first German King Tiger — the dreaded Königstiger — burst from the woodlands. With all the pine trees falling before this monster, Arthur Boyle lost his mind and, again according to my father, never got it back. My father, sharing my genetic predisposition to detachment, had been transfixed until the seventy-ton behemoth wheeled forward under the roar of its gasoline engines, locked down, and began firing the 88. His fascination lasted until long after the war, when he drove to the Patton museum at Fort Knox to view a captured King Tiger on display there, surrounded on a hot day by schoolchildren in short pants. After explaining his past, he was allowed to sit at the controls. He enjoyed telling me it was built by Porsche. Arthur Boyle blew up when my father told him of his adventure with the Königstiger and ruined a nice barbecue. This proved to be the occasion for my mother’s outlawing war stories; she had been dragged along on the Fort Knox trip and then had to endure Arthur going nuts in her house on what she described with accusatory inflection as “a perfectly lovely summer day.” Fortunately Arthur and Johnny Markovitch had enough interest in sports, especially baseball, to successfully circumvent the war in my mother’s presence and continue to visit.

Arthur was the custodian in a grade school in Helena, and he’d had that job since coming home. He had never married and was an anxious person, institutionalized more than once at Warm Springs State Mental Hospital, where he got, in his words, “a much-needed rest.” My mother got a few nice rests there too. For my part, listening to too many veterans’ stories was liable in peacetime to give a boy the feeling of worthlessness.

We had just had supper in the backyard in the shade of the old burr oak. My father was helping my mother clear the dishes, and that left me alone with Arthur Boyle, who was looking at me fixedly. From household hearsay I knew that “poor Arthur” was crazy, but at this moment he looked as if he had something urgent on his mind. He kept rebuttoning the shiny suit coat that stretched across his narrow chest and sliding his pale plastic eyeglasses back up his nose. His meager hair was combed over a high round dome, and he was nervously vigilant about stragglers. He leaned close to me and said, “Someday you’ll see through your father and his happy stories about over there. He was a deserter. Did he ever tell you that?”

From the back door, my father heard him and said, “Not yet, Arthur. I will in time.” And helping Arthur to the door with a firm grip on the back of his suit coat, he added, “It’s an interesting tale, Arthur. When he’s older he’ll enjoy it.”

After Arthur Boyle was helped into the night, I heard him wail, “But where will I go?”

* * *

I went to see Niles Throckmorton at his office on Calender Street, right around the corner from the post office. A broad flight of steps led to the porch of what had once been, in the 1920s, a manorial home but which now served as home and office to Niles, the first floor given over to the latter. I had no sooner caught the eye of his receptionist than I heard Niles explode in his office behind her desk. She waved me in with the faintest possible rolling of her eyes before an indifferent return to papers in front of her. Niles was behind his desk, rooting through a cardboard box and throwing handfuls of excelsior onto the floor. “I just don’t believe these bastards,” he said, addressing the box. “I ordered a wheel of very expensive Canadian cheddar and they forgot to put it in the box. Instead, they send a CD explaining all the things you can do with the cheese. What a country.” He held up the CD. “Give this to Maida and have her put it on her computer. Have her tell me if there’s anything on it I need to see. And have her get online and track the cheese.”

Maida wrapped one hand around her forehead as she received the CD and said, “I heard.” I went back to the room.

“Close the door,” said Niles, and I did. “You’ll be pleased I got you reduced to negligent manslaughter.” I started to open my mouth. “Oh, not too interested? No death penalty for manslaughter. Most people in your position would see that as a good thing.”

He made up a small plate of cold cuts from the mini-fridge alongside his desk. They were welcome, as I had not had a substantial meal all day. We went through most of it before our discussion even began. Finally, Niles looked squarely at me, holding my gaze for a long moment. I was anxious to know what might come. Slowly and deliberately, his hand drifted my way, stopping over the nearly empty plate between us; his forefinger opened and pointed to a piece of ham rolled around a black olive. He said, “You gonna eat that?” I shook my head. I guess that was it.

Presently he wiped his lips and began: “I don’t think these charges are likely to be reduced below where they’re at, i.e., negligent manslaughter, and if you abandoned yourself to jubilation over this news I’d be the first to understand.” I remained impassive. He stared at me, awaiting an answer. I didn’t want to let him down.

“Niles, remember, I’m pleading ‘no contest.’ ”

“I see. Well, in that case you, sir, are an idiot.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Some jurors will see that as a guilty plea. In any case, nolo contendere has the same standing as a guilty plea for sentencing purposes.”

“But it’s not a guilty plea,” I said. “The jury will decide if I am guilty.”

“The jury will note that you are not putting up a fight.”

I said, “This is my fight, Niles.”

Throckmorton stood up from his desk, eyes gleaming, and told me he was still famished, adding, “But I won’t be able to eat until you’re gone.”

I was reluctantly fond of Niles and admiring of his intemperate love of life. He ate too much, lived with more than one woman at a time, cynically asserting that one or the other was his housekeeper. At one time, he had smoked a lot of marijuana, and not too covertly, so it was more than local legend that illegal smoke poured almost continuously from his office. He would take on any case at all — murders, divorces, business malfeasance. His best-known case was his pro bono defense of a family of Assiniboine Indians who had lived for more than a century over the last resting place of a dinosaur which a well-funded group of archaeologists wished to excavate. By encouraging the family to hang tough, he was able to milk a wide array of society dinosaur buffs and sufficiently enrich the family that they could depart for Phoenix in their new motorhome. Niles knew the law with rare erudition, and the many judges who despised him knew him to be their unwelcome transportation to appeals court, where they were likely to end up with egg on their faces.

Their faculties notwithstanding, my reasons for pleading no contest were, I knew, well outside his ability to understand them; therefore I spared him the explanations, especially since I was still devising them. With all my regrets, I saw this as an opportunity for equitable review: I would accept the consequences. Niles said that even though I had tied one hand behind his back and we would probably draw a judge who hated him, he would, per usual, fight like a junkyard dog. I said, “Thank you.”

When I explained all this to Jocelyn, she said I just didn’t want to be a doctor anymore. My mouth fell open. “What do you think I want to be?” I demanded. I had, as requested, put on a clean shirt and taken her someplace nice — to wit, the Grand Hotel in Big Timber, where remarkably good wine and cigars could be had by anyone knowing enough to ask for them.

She said, “A house painter.”

“A house painter. I needed to find something to do. I’m not going to twiddle my thumbs.”

“As you wish.”

“So let’s just get the waitress over here and order something.”

“I’m for that.” Jocelyn said, pretending sudden interest in the other diners. I needed to start over.

“I’ve spoiled things, haven’t I?”

Jocelyn smiled and said, “You may have a bit of work to do.”

I could see that I was attracting some attention. I caught a few eyes, forcing them to get back to their food. Possibly some jurors there: we’d see. I didn’t think they could be disqualified for seeing me eating. It would be otherwise if I brandished a bottle or displayed my privates, but just dining, I didn’t think so. And why did I think there would be jurors, anyway?

Whatever problems we might have had were gone by the second bottle of nice red wine, a Medoc I’d never heard of but which the waiter assured me was from the Commune de Pauillac and had appeared in Napoleon’s 1855 Classification. Jocelyn wanted to know what that was all about, and I told her in the form of song that I mistakenly thought only she could hear:

I got a nickel, you gotta dime

,

Let’s get together and buy some wine!

Drinkin’ wine spodee-odee

,

Drinkin’ wine

.

Drinkin’ wine spo-dee-odee

Drinkin’ wine!

She said, “You’ve had enough. Shall we?” She waved for the bill, which I paid with my head down, and we went out the door into the cold air with a nearly full white moon lighting up the mountains to the north. When we shortcut through the alley to my parked car, Jocelyn detained me, and leaning against the old brick wall of the hotel, we kissed for a long time. I slid my hands down her lower back, feeling the heat from her face against mine. She began panting and said, “Let’s go to your house. I want you to see me.”

We were hardly through the door before Jocelyn undressed. I wouldn’t say that I was taken aback, but this was no striptease: she just wanted to show me something. She was lean and fit and well made, but it was hardly erotic. She seemed proud of herself in a guileless way. “Where’s the bedroom?” she asked. I pointed, without saying anything. “We go there,” she said.

Jocelyn’s ardor proceeded from one extreme inspiration to another. I couldn’t imagine what dark place needed such fulfillment. I was hoping I’d held up my end, but I honestly wasn’t sure. When she sat up on the bed, I asked, “Who exactly is Womack?”

Jocelyn arose and dressed. She said, “I thought you knew better than that,” and left. I looked at the doorway as though she was still in it.

I slept for a few more hours, got up, ate breakfast, and went to the paint store for rollers. When I got to the Haineses’ house, formerly amiable Mrs. Haines was waiting for me. Her husband, agog with worry, watched from behind the screen door.

“You scoundrel,” she began. “Are you ever going to finish painting my house? You’ve been scraping and showing up when you feel like it and leaving the ladder leaning against the front. The neighbors think we can’t afford to pay and a half-painted house is going to ruin their property values—” I looked over at the husband, probably for support. “Don’t look at him. He can’t help you. I’m in charge here!” She gazed at my hat and seemed to be spelling out the words, “Don’t be slippin’ in yo pimpin’.”

So my hope of correcting the poor impression I had left with Jocelyn — and doing it that day — went up in smoke. I slaved away until sundown, when evening shadows crossed the surface upon which I was rolling Chantilly Pearl enamel — never saw either of the Haineses — and headed straight to the pharmacy for aspirin. I could barely move.

I was in something of a bad mood. Bad moods for me usually consisted in being unable to grasp the meaning not of life necessarily — that was hopeless, as witness the thousands of years of philosophical mishmash — but simply of the way people lived. Happily, this terrible impulse only surfaced occasionally. Today, with a bottle of aspirin in hand, I strolled the neighborhoods that usually cheered me, and arrived at the sort of overview I hoped would soon go up in smoke, even as I conceived it.

Staying in one place long enough, you saw the rise and fall of domestic arrangements and the physical appurtenances that accompanied them. At a certain hormonal stage, tempered by moderate practical knowledge, the couples formed and began to construct the cheese ball. The cheese ball consisted of a building known as the home, the transportation equipment, the sustenance gear including heating and cooking facilities, the investments and liquidity that kept the cheese ball from rolling backwards and ruining its owners; then, in most cases, the eventual collapse of the agreement that had generated the cheese ball in the first place and the subsequent deliquescence of the cheese ball itself into its component parts, to be reconstituted in the generation of new cheese balls by less-fortunate couples or, in some cases, the complete vanishing of the cheese ball entirely.

Only at the end of this rumination did I recognize that I myself had no cheese ball and, moreover, that I had always wanted one. Perhaps I was needy. Needy was bad. I knew needy was bad, but I embraced needy. Needy was human. My principle in life so far had been to avoid dying with a grievance on my lips; maybe that was not enough. Maybe I needed to change. I had two more days’ work painting the house for that poor old man and his asshole of a wife; after that I was hanging up my roller.

When I first saw the judge, Daniel Bowles Lauderdale, I thought I recognized him, if dimly. For a moment I wondered if he was a relative of some sort, or a friend of my parents. I was able neither to rescue his face from memory nor get it out of my mind. Until I heard his voice: this was the Billings lawyer of my school days who had declined to pay me for painting his cabin in Harlowton! He still had the perm but it had gone gray. I supposed the secretary he’d been squeezing in the cabin had been replaced with a fresher one. I don’t think Throckmorton had gauged the potential bellicosity of Judge Lauderdale. When he, Throckmorton, opened up the matter of Tessa’s previous brushes with the law, Lauderdale exploded. “That’s enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” And we went to recess. Throckmorton slumped briefly in his seat and said, “That’s the only piece of rhetoric the old turd ever learned. Nevertheless, I think I got us off on the wrong track, which I shall undo: crow is best eaten when it is still warm.”

Once we were before Lauderdale again, the judge said to Niles, “Attorney Throckmorton, I too survived law school at Missoula. I too endured life among woebegone professors and hippie degenerates. But that does not make us soul mates.”

“Of course, Judge, of course you’re right.”

“I’m going to wind this up until I can speak to and/or depose some of Dr. Pickett’s colleagues. Otherwise, I am obliged to listen to you, Attorney Throckmorton, and you are unreliable.”

As we sat in Niles’s Audi, ruing the day, his phone rang and he answered it. After he listened for a moment, he told the caller the police were taping the call. Then without further comment, he hung up and said, “Disgruntled husband. Idle threat. Stock item in the trade.”

When I was a boy, I made a few trips with my mother to Arkansas. My father stayed behind. Our trips to Arkansas were mostly taken up with Pentecostal doings which included my maternal grandparents and involved the usual strumming, staggering, falling out, and most alarming, “holy laughter.” To me, that was Arkansas; imagine my surprise when an Arkansan became president of the United States. A fellow medical student, a reasonable young woman with whom I fornicated purely as a relief from our studies, theorized that my experience in Arkansas surely left me with religious longing, a theory I tested by attending several churches, starting with the Catholic church, which astonished me by its morbidity. When I told the pleasant young priest that I thought I’d try some of the others, he said that I was wasting my time and that those churches were “spin-offs.” I tried them anyway and was briefly tempted by an Episcopalian congregation whose pastor was a lesbian in a tuxedo. I thought the discourse was at a higher level, featuring such concepts as “ecumenical” and “ecclesiastical,” but in the end it seemed bloodless. It was too bad that I found the Pentecostal church absurd, because that’s really where my heart lay. As insincere as my occasional episodes of falling out and jerking on the floor may have been, the approval I got as a child who had been touched by the Holy Ghost was transforming, even if my father, learning of it, called me a bullshit artist.

I remembered a conversation I had with Alan Hirsch about our work. He remarked that there was a fine line between a rut and a groove in a way that suggested we were in a rut, and that professional life necessitated recognizing that you were in a rut; but most pointedly I recalled feeling that this didn’t ring a bell at all and that I badly needed to get out of my very satisfying groove and broaden my life with travel, romance, etc., because I liked my work too much. Now that work was somewhat withheld, this was a painful thought.

I wished this recollection had waited, because little old Mrs. Haines was closely supervising my work as I prepared to scrape and mask around the window frames. “I’m just not going to put up with careless work,” she said. I hung on the ladder with a gallon can dangling from my other paw trying to find a place for my scraper, my sanding blocks, and my masking tape. I didn’t really need the paint yet; it had been a mistake carrying it up here imagining I had a place for it, but I was reluctant to let Mrs. Haines see me reverse course and return to the ground. I should have suffered that loss of face, because in attempting to rest the bucket on the shelf at the top of the ladder, I lost control of it and it fell to the ground, followed by my tools, making a big, terrible splash of Spicy Chrysanthemum exterior paint and setting off the most god-awful caterwauling from Mrs. Haines, as well as the barking of Mr. Haines, who asked, “Do you know what you’re doing?” That was the first I’d ever heard from him.

“I’ll replace this myself,” I cried out to the old bat.

“What about the grass you’ve killed?” the vicious old whore inquired. I told her that it would recover in no time. “Why did we ever decide to trust you to paint our home?” she wailed.

“Yes, why?” the husband inquired from behind the screen.

“I quit,” I said. This brought them to their senses. The hubby emerged.

“But what will we do?” she asked, eyes wide with fear of the current half-finished project. The spineless hubby suggested that we let quieter heads prevail, which brought out the obsequious side of the devious banshee, who allowed she thought I was doing the best I could. I told her she could bet her ass on that one. The old couple tried laughing at my careless vulgarity. I aimed the bristles of the brush, still miraculously in my hand, at the bargain-hunting couple and said that I would proceed to finish the job if I could do so without supervision and that I would do the best job I was capable of in accordance with our original work agreement. “Now let’s see a couple of smiles.”

What actually happened was that I finished the job in what I thought to be an adequate fashion. I did not stop by for my paycheck or even reimbursement for the paint, on the grounds that these dim bulbs had suffered enough in my pursuit of folly and sublimated frustration. I accepted that my nostalgia for plain folk was challenged by the experience and acknowledged that by any ordinary standards I was flailing — yes, flailing and making a fool of myself.

Because of her faith, my mother faced mortality with something approaching glee. At the end, she had so many things wrong with her that I, her physician, and other doctors ended up lumping them under some lupus-like autoimmune disorder that produced terrific suffering including joint pain and widespread rashes. Then the adult-onset asthma and bacterial infections in her lungs started her down the road to the end. I had called in Blake Cohen, an internist who died several years ago, and Blake did everything in his power to help my mother; he was at her bedside more often than I. My mother accepted her suffering as little more than the clarion call of approaching Rapture. Making the rounds of other sick, even terminal, people, I had to consider the great emotional protection my mother’s faith had provided her. In my then scientific turn of mind I wondered whether biology and evolution hadn’t produced this endorphin engine. However, I was tempted to exempt my mother from my scientific worldview. In fact, I did exempt her. That is, I concluded that her physical discomfort was cured by death though she died contradictions intact, with her last breath calling solicitous Blake Cohen a kike. I regarded her corpse as a troublesome object she was well rid off. The most important aspects of my mother seemed to have gone on, flitting about with all those waves and signals I held between my hands. Her voice, that semiliterate Arkansas twang, was clear as a bell.

I tried to understand why the fiasco of house painting triggered such a painful state of mind. It felt very much like loneliness, but I didn’t think it was, and I was nearly bent over with an aching heart that manifested itself in all sorts of ways, loss of appetite for one and a conversational style that turned casual encounters into occasions for gruesome discomfort and stampedes of fleeing acquaintances. I locked all my doors, drew the shades, selected the room closest to the center of the house, sheltered by the most walls, and abandoned myself to a kind of objectless grief. This proceeded on a futon in a storage room. It was far easier to acquire a futon than to get rid of one, and this one had languished in an unused room for a long time. A leak only recently repaired had soaked it, and the damp seeped into my clothes, discomfort overcoming my grief. This turned out to be an excellent thing, since grieving over apparently nothing was disorienting me and suggested that in terms of my mental health I was a pickle short of a jar and had better get a grip before my large problems became even larger. I did have one commonsense thought, which was that I just wanted to go back to work. I stood on the futon and said “work” out loud, bestriding the waterlogged pad with a defiant air. I was imagining myself useful again.

I actually caught family members of Ernest Leeteg, b. 1928, d. 1989, moving the flowers I had planted at my parents’ graves to that of Mr. Leeteg. I made sure they saw me arrive before I went over to stand wordlessly before them, two women old enough to be the sisters of the deceased, rural in appearance and handy with their trowels. One looked ready to argue but the other, sharply elbowing her in the side, directed the restoration of my flowers into the uncovered holes the pair had left behind. I did not say a word.

I was not much for prayer, though as admitted, I did sometimes give it a try, but my reason for regularly visiting the graves of my mother and father was to think about them. I felt that so long as I did this, they continued to exist in some way and of course I still loved them. So many people did likewise that it must have been instinctive. Contrary to appearances or the sort of representation such activity might get in books or movies, we did not stand before the final resting places of our parents eaten up with lugubrious and undifferentiated piety. What we did was try to figure out who they were and what they were doing together. I doubted anyone was deterred by realizing we’d never get to the bottom of it, that their lives and our inquiries would travel on parallel courses until no one remained to pursue the matter. But all this flower tending at the cemetery seemed to help a lot of people with their sadness, as though death was a jeweled bower through which you skipped on your way to glory.

The woman I found at the graves of Cody and Clarice turned out to be Cody’s mother. I thought I’d breeze by with a few absorbing glances, wiggling my fishing rod absently, but just as I passed, she said firmly, “Hey.” A pair of picnic chairs faced the headstones. “Have a seat.” I looked again at the direction in which I had been arbitrarily traveling, as though I had other business than passing this way. But I sat down and learned that the woman, who looked to be about my own age, was named Deanne. She seemed slightly mature for the clever T-shirt she wore: “Make Awkward Sexual Advances, Not War.” Or the open-toed shoes and the tiny stone in her nostril.

Staring at the words “Cody” and “Clarice” cut in stone as I sat with Deanne felt like entrapment, not helped by Deanne’s saying, “I know you.”

“Do you? Maybe you’ve seen me come to look after my folks’ graves.”

“I’ve seen you when you come over here for a look.” Deanne was quite tall, as tall as me, and had becoming gray streaks in her thick dark hair. She might have been fifty. She wore some kind of insulated jacket over a black turtleneck shirt and Carhartt work pants with a loop for a hammer above her right thigh. She lit a cigarette and left it hanging from her mouth as she talked. “Naw, there’s more to it. You were at Cody’s funeral. You’re the doctor?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You were there.”

“I was.”

She took away the cigarette. “I don’t want details.”

“Of course not.”

“My only child. My boy. I don’t know what the matter with him was. Do you?”

“I wish I knew.” I promised myself to give no hint of what a vicious little bastard Cody was. “There’s nothing stranger than our own children.”

“Do you have kids?”

“No.”

“Then why did you say that?”

“Well, I—”

“That’s a doctor’s job, isn’t it? To have some half-assed comment on every aspect of life.”

Since it was she who was suffering, I simply agreed. “That does seem to end up being part of our job. I’m not surprised you’ve seen right through it.”

“I wish I hadn’t. I wouldn’t mind being comforted. Even if it’s phony. I’ve got a great big hole right in the middle of me. Smoke?”

“No. Thanks.”

“I didn’t mean to show bad manners.” She gestured weakly toward her son’s headstone with the cigarette. “Deal like this doesn’t help your manners. To have good manners, you have to give a shit, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, sometimes I do. Depends. Obviously I didn’t do the greatest job in the world with Cody, but I didn’t mean for it to be like that. I loved him with all my heart. He didn’t know who his dad was, that didn’t help. I wasn’t a whore, I was single. It’s not the same thing. But them other kids, their moms, it might have been they was jealous.” She ground the cigarette out in the dirt and ran her finger around the inside of the turtleneck.

“Crazy.”

“I mean, I know who was starting it. I went to PTA and read their attitudes. Once I figured it out, I went after the husbands, and believe me they was ready. I only did it for the boy. I was on a mission. Those moms, they brought it on themselves. Which I should of never did. Everything got worse for Cody. I guess the facts show he had it in for women. Wise commentary, please.”

“I think you’ve already said it.”

“I ain’t said shit. Why don’t you fill in the blanks? You’re the doctor. Where’s the bullshit when you need it?”

I could have skipped the bullshit, also known as wise counsel, and told her how I urged her son on. I could have said, “Good riddance,” but I didn’t have the guts. Furthermore, this conversation had acquired a squeamish intimacy. But I was at the scene, and she knew that: couldn’t change it. I did try asking her where she worked. She said, “I don’t.”

“Oh.”

“I’m a homemaker.” With this, she began to laugh, loudly and at length. “I married one of the husbands. The ex lives alone. My husband thinks it’s a good deal. He writes ‘thank you’ on every alimony check.”

It began to dawn on me that it was possible Deanne could handle the truth. If I told her the truth, maybe I could change my plea to not guilty, yet I was unsure that I could do it. When she found out my part in her son’s death, I would face her at last: I would be shriven. I would begin to pay for my sins.

I tried the idea four days later. I had a meeting with Throckmorton scheduled for late afternoon, and I was milling around doing errands, paying bills, walking to the post office. I spent an hour reading magazines while a chip was removed from the windshield of my increasingly unreliable Oldsmobile 88. Jays and pigeons were getting all the bird food I put out, so I bought a special feeder for thistle seed that would serve the smaller birds, the finches, titmice, white- and rufous-crowned sparrows, wrens, and nuthatches that had been run off by the bruisers who sprayed sunflower shells around my lawn. I installed a bracket intended for hanging plants above deer level but in sight of my bedroom, hung the feeder, went over to Boyer Street and knocked on Deanne’s door. Her husband answered, and I was surprised to see that it was the owner of the grain elevator, Jerry Perkins, who I knew slightly but cordially. “Jerry,” I said, making no secret of my surprise. He smiled and drew the door back invitingly.

“Come in, come in,” he said. “Deanne said she’d seen you.”

I was in the hallway, the door closed behind me, before I learned Deanne was out. Jerry was a warm and forceful guy and before I could arrange to come back, he had me out on his enclosed back porch drinking coffee and admiring his own arrangements for feeding birds and his heated birdbath for winter. “That sucks them in more than the feed ’long about January.” Jerry was such a big, powerful brute, bulging in his blue dashboard overalls, that his enthusiasm for birds seemed remarkable. His widow’s peak of close-cropped red hair and his big hands made everything he said emphatic.

“What a coincidence,” I said. “I’ve just bought a hundred pounds of Nijer seed. It’s in the backseat of my car.”

“They’ll go right through it. That’s about all the company you have, isn’t it?”

“Pretty quiet.”

“Think you’ll get off?”

“I don’t know.”

“I assume you’re innocent.”

I laughed mirthlessly. “I’m waiting to find out.”

“You’re waiting to find out?”

“I mean, they’ll let me know, I guess.”

“I’m not sure I’m following this,” said Jerry.

“I mean it’s anybody’s guess how these things turn out.”

“What I’m trying to say,” said Jerry, “is I hope you know the facts here, because they’re going to bang you around in court and you need to be ready.” I had the sense Jerry was lecturing me.

“I’m ready.”

“Well, good.” He got up and opened the glass louvers to let more air in. “Just be careful. There’s always bad shit waiting to get a guy. Deanne said she seen you,” he said again. I wondered if he meant to emphasize it particularly.

“That’s right, I—”

“I don’t suppose she’ll ever get over that punk.”

I thought for a minute, then said, “It’s tough.”

“He wasn’t but eight or nine when me and Deanne got together. He was a mean little punk then. I swear before God I did my best to knock it out of him.”

I was stumped but struggled to reply. “Not much luck?”

“I made him work at the elevator when he wasn’t at school. Had him load grain, cake, salt, whatever, in trucks. He could work like two men, I’ll give him that. He was just a little kid, but he worked like a Georgia mule. I don’t know what he wanted. I couldn’t stand the sight of him. Had to go. Can I get you something?”

“I’m fine, thanks. What do you mean he had to go? I thought he was a hard worker.”

“I told you: I couldn’t stand the sight of him. How did we get on this?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You seen Deanne at the boneyard. That was it. I knew you discovered the situation there with Clarice. What a mess. And she was a good kid. One of them kids gets beat up by every man she meets. You could just feel it around her. Spend an hour with Clarice and you’d want to boot her in the ass and never know why. It was something about her.”

I saw Clarice a lot and never felt any such thing, but I thought not to mention it. It was clear by now that my connection to the deaths was provoking Jerry to fill me in on the background, though I was growing less inclined to hear it, something he didn’t notice.

“What about a beer?”

“No.”

“Suit yourself. The deal is, I give up a lot for Deanne. I was married to a Callagy from up the Shields. They had ten sections of grass and a thousand acres under sprinklers. It was a money deal and I walked away from it because Deanne was good-looking and a ton of fun, but Cody come with the package. My ex had a good income at the courthouse and even though she weighed over two hundred she carried it well. Carried that suet like a champ. Everyone agreed she carried it well. Since Deanne married me she hadn’t done shit-all, but she’s exciting and keeps a great house and, hey, I love her to death, but the Cody years was an inch short of a deal breaker. I’d be lying if I told you I was sorry he’s gone. It’s too damn bad he took Clarice with him, but if it hadn’t been him it would’ve been someone else. She was that kind.”

This was making me sick. I was able to suppress an outburst because I knew I had business with Deanne. What business was that? I only knew it was connected to my own survival.

“I don’t want you to think I have any regrets about the ex, whatever that Callagy deal is. She was too serious. She was serious as lip cancer. A guy needs to have some fun every now and then. Which leads him to whatever bar where all the man-eaters live. And believe you me, I’m not bitter. I just wish Deanne would quit smoking and writing ‘thank you’ on my alimony checks. No need to be rubbing it in.”