“Keep looking.”
She looked out through the display window again. Presently while she watched, the bloated-looking man in the front seat of the shiny car turned his head to spit and now she could see the side of his face. Hannah Bird recognized him at once.
“Now don’t you do anything, Ralph,” she said. “You leave that man alone.”
“Sure,” Bird said. “I thought it was him.”
“But don’t you bother him. You don’t have any idea what that man might do.”
“He still owes me money.”
“I don’t care. You let the police handle this.”
Ralph Bird didn’t listen to her. His wife put her hand on his arm as if she meant to control him, to hold him there by force, but he brushed her hand away as though it were no more than store lint. He opened the door and stepped outside.
“Ralph,” she cried. “Ralph. You come back here, Ralph.”
Along the street it had begun to grow chill and raw. The mercury lights had come on at the street corners and there was a little breeze starting up along the pavement. Bird looked up and down Main Street; it was nearly empty of people; then he stepped off the curb and crossed the street toward Burdette’s red Cadillac. When he reached it he stopped for a moment to study the plates. The plates showed that the car had been licensed in California. Then he moved along the side toward the driver’s door. He peered in. Burdette was staring back at him through the open window.
But Burdette looked bad now. In the eight years since Bird or any one of us had seen him he’d changed for the worse. He was fat now, obese; he was sloppy and excessive; his head had grown bald and the flesh hung on him like suet. “It was like,” Bird would say later, “like for eight years he’d been feeding on cream pie and pork steak and lately he hadn’t fed at all.” Still it was Jack Burdette.
“You son of a bitch,” Bird said. “What are you doing back here?”
“That you, Bird?”
“Yeah. It’s me.”
“I seen you in the mirror. Only I had about decided you wasn’t going to speak to me. I thought you just wanted to admire this car.”
“I’ll speak to you,” Bird said. “I’ll speak to Bud Sealy too.”
Burdette stared at Bird, then he laughed once, loud, harsh. So his laugh hadn’t changed at all; it was the same sudden explosion that everyone remembered.
“That’s right,” Bird told him. “Go ahead. Enjoy it. You still got a few minutes.”
“Why’s that? Because you already told Bud Sealy I was here?”
“No. Because I’m going to.”
“Go ahead, then. I ain’t going nowhere. And you can tell Bud—” Burdette seemed to think. He spat once more out the window into the street, this time onto the pavement at Bird’s feet. “You can tell him I’m looking forward to seeing him.”
“You son of a bitch,” Bird said. “You goddamn—”