Steve regarded him. “You ever see me at the range, bud?”
“No. I don’t go there much myself.” He gave the man an easy smile. “Too many po-lice.”
“You think I’m a po-lice?”
“No, I’d wager you’re not.”
“Why would you wager that?”
“What’s a cop doing in a place like this?”
“Looking for bad men.”
“He’d be in the right place. But he wouldn’t have mud on his boots. A lawman can’t abide mud on his boots. Everybody knows that.”
Steve did not glance down at his boots. “You have some particular interest in my boots, bud?”
Billy smiled. Steve did not smile but neither did he appear hostile under the bill of the cap. Did not appear anything. The cap, entirely featureless and of a nameless color between green and brown, matched the canvas jacket he kept zipped to his throat, a bland and homespun uniform of unguessable protocols. Seated he somehow gave the impression of a man who, on his feet, would not be very big but whom you would not take lightly in a fight. It was early for a fight but men who drank in the daytime would fight in the daytime and Billy was one of them.
He didn’t want to fight. He was enjoying his drinking and he had the twenties in his pocket and he didn’t want to get thrown out by old Louis with his great hands.
“None whatsoever, Steve. Why don’t you let me buy you one?”
“Did you just call me Steve?”
“I did. I heard the military man say it before. What’s your pleasure?”
“My name isn’t Steve.”
“My mistake,” said Billy. “I must of misheard.” He teased one of the twenties from his pocket. “Mine ain’t bud, either. It’s Billy.” He floated the twenty to the bar and watched Louis come over. “Seven-and-seven for me, and whatever this man is drinking.”
“Same?” said Louis, and after a moment the man nodded.
They sat in silence until the drinks came and were paid for and Louis had been tipped.
“I thank you for the drink and I apologize for my rudeness,” the man said. “I guess I got all talked out by Mr. Covert-Ops.”
“My feelings ain’t hurt,” Billy said. “Cheers.”
“My name’s Joe,” the man said, offering his hand, and Billy laughed, shaking his hand.
“What’s funny?” said Joe.
“I got a brother named Joe.”
“That so?”
“Guess what he is.”
“What?”
“Po-lice.”
THEY DRANK A WHILE, and then this man Joe said: “Joe the cop”—
smiling for the first time.
“Joe the sheriff. Up in the mountains.”
“Which mountains are those?”
“Are there some other mountains around here?”
“There’s all kinds of mountains in the mountains, Billy.”
Billy looked over at him. The man looking back from under the bill. Still smiling.
“Brother Joe is sheriff in the Grand County mountains,” he said, and the man picked up his beer and sipped it.
“Grand County,” he said thoughtfully. “Grand County. Seems like there was something in the news with a sheriff from Grand County, while back.”
“Probably some drunk on skis waving a cap gun.”
“No,” said the man. “No, this had to do with a girl. Teenage girl went missing up there. Or am I misremembering?”
Billy gave him a frown of admiration. “Good recall, Joe. That was over two years ago.”
“You remember things like that. Things like that they stay with you.”
They drank. A tall man at the end of the bar stood, looked about, saw nothing that pleased him, and then seemed to follow his own wooden legs out the back door.
“There was this one boy I remember from grade school,” said Joe. He looked up from his beer, up from under the bill, and when Billy met his eyes in the mirror he looked down again and stared into his glass. As though pondering what he’d just said or what he would say next. Whether to say anything more at all.
“What boy was that?” said Billy, and Joe tilted his pint for a sip.
“That boy was Delmar Steadman. Plain, ordinary boy we all called Smellmar for some reason. He wasn’t fat or ugly or smelly or anything, but we’d decided to make him something to make fun of, I can’t even tell you why. Maybe because his daddy was the Roto-Rooter man. Maybe because he had a big sister named Bonnie who gave us all boners, I don’t know. Well. His backyard, Delmar’s backyard, came fence to fence with Becky Clark’s backyard, and those two had grown up making eyes at each other through that cyclone fence. Sneaking kisses, pressing up against one another before they even knew why. It happens. Happens all the time. Some people find the love of their lives at that age. Tell stories about it when they’re sixty, seventy years old.” He glanced at Billy in the mirror, raised his glass for a sip, and set it down again.
“Trouble was, at about age ten, Becky lost interest. Just dropped old
Delmar cold. We knew this the way you knew everything about everybody back then and not because of computers and cell phones either. You remember how that was, Billy?”
Billy said he did and the man went on.
“Well. Along came the summer between grade school and middle school. Magical summer. All of us shooting up like weeds, smell of chlorine and cut grass. It’s about the Fourth of July—day before or day after I don’t recall—and young Becky is out back suntanning on the patio. By now it’s been a good two years since she’s said a single word to Delmar, through that fence or at school or anywhere else. Fact is, she’s hardly even seen Delmar in all that time. The boy never comes out in the yard anymore, not even to play with that sorry little dog of his. The back door opens, dog goes out, pisses, shits, back door opens again and dog goes in. Like living next door to Boo Radley. You know who that is?”
Billy didn’t. It didn’t matter.
“So Becky’s out on the patio, which was nothing but a concrete slab with weeds growing in the cracks, catching some rays in that red bikini she wore that summer, oh Lord. Browning those arms, that stomach. Smell of coconut oil. She’s got the sunglasses on and the headphones going and she doesn’t hear him. Never even turns her head.”
The man fell silent, staring into his glass. He gave the glass a turn as if to set the contents in motion and thereby his story again.
“Her own daddy found her like that, Billy. Lying there in the July sun with those headphones still going and her little forehead pushed in like a bad melon. Glass of iced tea sweating on the concrete and a red Stillson wrench lying there beside it. You know what a Stillson wrench is, Billy?”
“Pipe wrench.”
“Big one. His daddy’s, about yea big.” He shook his head like a man in dismay. He drank.
After a minute Billy said: “Did they think he did it?”
“Think who?”
“Delmar’s daddy. The Roto-Rooter man.”
“They might of, at first. But then Delmar himself came out with the whole story.”
“What was the whole story?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why did he do it?”