She went back into the front room. She turned the television off and I could hear her talking to them; I could hear the questions they asked and then her quiet voice talking again, reassuring them. I sat at the table thinking about it all.
That was on Saturday night. On Monday I went over to the courthouse to see Jack Burdette. Jessie had called in at work and she had kept the boys home from school. We thought it would be better to let some time pass. The boys were frightened and upset. Nevertheless they went back to school and Jessie went back to work the next day. They were not trying to avoid things indefinitely.
On that Monday afternoon when I got to the courthouse there was a group of men, hangers-on and old local men retired from work, standing around in the parking lot in their adjustable caps and their long-sleeved shirts looking at Burdette’s car. The police had moved it from Main Street on Sunday morning and it stood now, long and shiny and red, gleaming in the lot behind the courthouse. Parked beside the cars from town, it looked an affront. The men were talking and gesturing to one another.
“We ought to take a torch and cut this goddamn thing into pieces,” one of them said.
“And parcel it out,” another said. “The son of a bitch. It was our money.”
I went on into the courthouse and down to the sheriff’s office. Bud Sealy was sitting behind his desk, slouched back in his chair reading a magazine. He looked tired. I told him I wanted to talk to Burdette.
“Go ahead,” Sealy said. “You can try it.”
“Isn’t he talking?”
“Not much. Not since the other night when I brought him in. We had a little talk then.”
“But hasn’t he said anything?”
“Sure. But nothing you’d want to print.”
“I need to try him anyway.”
“Of course. You two was friends once, wasn’t you? He might talk to you.”
I walked back into the jail. I had been there a number of times before, for newspaper stories, and as always the jail smelled sourly rank and oppressive. There were three empty cells, then the last one where Burdette was. I could see him through the bars.
He was lying on a cot which was too short for him so that his feet hung over the end uncomfortably. His feet were bare and calloused and he was still wearing the same wrinkled plaid shirt and dark pants he had worn when he had arrived on Saturday. Over in the corner of the cell there was a small sink and next to it a lidless toilet. He looked very bad, though, so that I don’t know that I would have recognized him if I hadn’t known in advance who it was. He looked wasted now, massively fat and excessive, sick-looking. I thought in fact that he must be sick; his skin was the yellow color you associate with serious illness and there were deep circles under his eyes. Most of his hair had fallen out in the years he had been gone so that the top of his head shone under the light now, and on his face there was a look of disgust, a kind of unaccustomed cynicism, as if nothing in the world interested him at all anymore.
Then he spoke. And I knew that I would have recognized his voice. “That you, Arbuckle?” he said. “I been laying here wondering if you’d come to see me.”
“Yes. I’ve come to see you. You’re news, Jack.”
He grinned at me. “You mean this isn’t a social call?”
“I need something for the paper.”
“Well,” he said. “You look about like you always did. Life must agree with you, Arbuckle.”
“It does,” I said. “But you don’t look so well. What’s wrong with you? Are you sick?”
“No. Hell. I’m all right. I’ll be a whole lot better once I get out of this goddamn place.”
“If you do get out.”
“Oh, yeah, I’ll get out all right. They can’t hold me.”
“They think they can.”
“They can’t, though. That’s a fact.”
“Maybe,” I said. “We’ll see.”