“He said it just come to him. He couldn’t say why.”
Billy picked up his cigarettes and got one in his lips and lit it with the Zippo and set the Zippo carefully down again. He pulled on the cigarette and side-blew the smoke away from the man.
“What happened to him?” he said. “To Delmar.”
“They took him away. Becky’s folks got divorced and moved away. Old man Steadman moved away and we never saw nor heard another thing about any of those people again. The world just rolled on.” He lifted his beer and tilted back a drink. Made an adjustment to his cap. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I think he was just too young for himself, old Delmar.” He raised his glass again but didn’t drink. “I think if he’d of waited, if he’d of just let himself grow into himself, he’d of been all right.”
Billy drew on the cigarette and blew a slow cloud into the space between himself and the image of himself.
“I never told that story before,” the man said. “I wonder what made me tell it now. Talking this man’s ear off.”
THEY SAT. THEY DRANK. After a while the man drew the edge of his thumb over his lips corner to corner and said: “They ever find that girl?”
“What girl?”
“Up in those mountains.”
“No, they never did.”
The man shook his head. “How about that boy, then?”
Billy had drained his drink to the ice and was preparing to stand. “What boy is that?”
“There was a boy too, wasn’t there? A little brother or something? Got hurt up there on his bike?”
Billy looked at him.
“And she left him there,” the man said. “That girl. Threw a blanket on him and just left him there, as I recall.”
“That’s right,” Billy said. “A boy on a bike.”
“Where’s he at now? That boy?”
“Damned if I know. They were just tourists.” He raised his glass and tumbled an ice cube past his lips and broke it in his molars, the sound enormous and concussive in his skull. Then he said: “That boy wasn’t worth shit for evidence.”
“He wasn’t?”
“Anything he saw got knocked clean out of him.”
The man shook his head. “That’s a pity. That’s a flat-out pity.” He sat staring into his glass. “It sure is a funny world, isn’t it, Billy.”
“That’s one word for it.”
“What’s another one?”
“I don’t know.”
Billy sat another minute, and one minute more, then peeled off a five and got to his feet. “Gotta hit the road, Joe. But I’d like to buy you one more. Just for calling you Steve.”
“You’re off, Billy?”
“It looks like weather and I’m heading right into it.”
They both turned to look at the window behind them. The man and the woman were gone and the grayness that Billy had left in the hills had rolled down onto the city as though it sought him out.
“Good talking to you, Billy. Next time I’ll buy.”
“That’s a deal, Joe. You take her easy.”
“Drive safe now.”
Coldness had come down with the gray and it had a sharp coppery taste to it like blood. Three cars sat in the lot: his own El Camino, a burgundy and white Oldsmobile, and an old, high-sitting black Bronco with new mud on the tires and sprayed along the body in heavy four-wheel-drive patterns.
He stepped up to the Bronco on the passenger’s side and peered into the front seats and there was nothing in there but car. Seats, dash, floorboards. As if it were newly bought or up for sale. He looked more closely at the paint job and saw that it was not the original, nor the work of someone who painted cars for a living. He moved to the rear and bent to the tinted glass of the hardtop and saw in the cargo space an orderly array of gear: five-gallon gas can, fat coil of towing rope, a good-sized tool or tackle box, and two paper grocery bags, all of it seized in a black elastic webbing.
He stood and looked at the back door of the bar. He shook his head. “Shit,” he said, and walked away. Then he stopped and went back. He made a diving mask of his hands and peered inside again. One of the grocery bags was less than full and no way to tell what it held. In the other the tops of two boxes were visible, one box top rectangular and anonymously white, the other a square of light blue with the word Tampax in bright yellow.
He straightened and looked about him with his hands in his jacket pockets. His right hand playing the weight of the lighter around and around. He could feel the liquor swimming in his brain.
“Shit,” he said again. And turned and walked to his car.
He sat with the engine off and watched the first volley of sleet break across the glass. After a while he started the car and drove across the road to the 7-Eleven, backed into a space, and killed the engine again. He took his phone from his pocket and checked the time. Two thirty in the afternoon.
He drew on his cigarette and held the smoke, staring at the phone. Then he exhaled and dialed. The call was forwarded and a deputy answered and Billy asked to speak to the sheriff.
“He’s fairly jammed up right now, Billy. I’ll have him call you back.”
“I need to talk to him now, Denny. It’s critical.”
“Critical?”
“It’s important, Denny.”
“Donny. I’ll tell him to call you, Billy.”
Billy blew smoke from his nostrils and grinned. “I’d be very grateful, Donny.”
The sheriff called back an hour later. By then, Billy was climbing the interstate through a heavy sleet going to snow.
“Thanks for returning my call, Sheriff.”
“What is it, Billy?”
“I got a question for you.”
The sheriff, in his office, was going over some of his father’s—their father’s—old papers. Some so old the ink had begun to fade. “Ask it,” he said.
“Those Courtland kids, up on that mountain, when the girl went missing.”
The line was silent as the sheriff got his bearings. “What about them?”
“There’s something you never told anybody. Isn’t there.”
“Not following you, Billy.”
“There’s always something you don’t tell. That only the cops know about. That’s how it’s done, right? Procedurally speaking.”
“Billy, are you drunk?”
“I ain’t had a drop.”
“Sounds like you’re driving too.”
“Listen, God damn it. I just want to know what you didn’t tell nobody, that’s all. It’s a simple question.”
The sheriff was silent. Billy watched the fat wet flakes coming down. The dark grooves of tiretrack in the gray slurry of the road. The Bronco’s taillights simmering far ahead, hot and beady.
“If I didn’t tell nobody,” said his brother finally, “I didn’t tell nobody for a reason, so why would I tell you now?”
“Because I’m asking. Because who gives a damn now?”
The sheriff said nothing. Then: “You better get off the road, Billy. We got a storm up here and it’s headed down there.”
The line hissed and crackled. He was climbing higher now and losing his signal. He thought he’d lost it, was about to hang up when the sheriff said, “Go home, Billy. I mean it. Those folks ain’t none of your business now.”
“Now?” he laughed. “Hell, Sheriff, they never were.”