He shook his head. Figured Larry and Walt might be sitting on his front steps. Or the back steps. Or hiding in the closet. He kept pacing and drinking and thinking. Sometimes talked to the stars. Sometimes kicked at the grass.
He knew that sooner or later he was going to go to that address and find out if she was there and right now seemed like as good a time as any. He cranked the truck and swung around. Passed through the gate and lit a cigarette. And then he turned south on Highway 48 and made his way toward Magnolia.
18
IT WAS ONE OF THOSE SMALL AND PICTURESQUE SOUTHERN TOWNS that should have and might have been in the movies. Tall, Victorian houses. Grand magnolias. Turn-of-the-century streetlamps. Churches with steeples that reached into the clouds. He passed a row of shotgun houses. One blue, the next yellow, the next pink, the next white. He followed the highway into downtown and turned left on Jefferson Street and passed city hall. The courthouse stood at the end of the block and then he turned right and drove three streets uphill to where the road reached back around behind city hall and from your front yard you could look out across the town. He had the address memorized and he drove slowly along Washington Avenue looking for 722. He found it on the corner, a fire hydrant painted like a jockey at the edge of the sidewalk. He stopped the truck on the opposite side of the street.
It was a two-story blue house with a steep roof. There was an arched window on the second floor that looked like an upstairs balcony. Burgundy shutters. There were two chimneys and a porch that stretched the length of the front of the house and turned the corner and reached down the right side toward the backyard fence. A brick walkway from the sidewalk to the steps and then brick steps and terra cotta pots on each step. Yellow and white petals hung over the edges of the pots. At the foot of the steps a little red wagon was dumped over on its side. Wicker furniture on the porch and empty glasses on the table. Two cars were parked in the street along the side of the house. Something big and black with four doors and something sleek with round taillights. Alongside the house lay a soccer ball and a baseball bat. A plastic slide perfect for somebody small.
All the appearances of happiness.
He put the truck in drive and he drove into the night thinking about his life. With the effortlessness with which he had arrived at this moment. I got drunk and killed somebody with my car. That was it. He had marveled at the stories he had heard from other inmates. At the complications they had fallen into. At the opportunities they were given for things to go right but then they went wrong and it seemed like it was mostly the fault of others. He didn’t have that story. I got drunk and killed somebody with my car. It was as basic a story as you could tell. He thought of her now like he had thought of her so many times. Sleeping between soft sheets. Sleeping in a silent peace or sometimes turning and reaching for him. Maybe it had happened before but he couldn’t imagine it now. Not after seeing that house. Those toys in the yard. He saw her sleeping and her dreams filled with sand castles and birthday cakes and dinner parties while his dreams were filled with hand grenades. Filled with things he didn’t want to see any longer. Filled with things he wished he could forget.
Back in McComb he drove along Delaware Avenue, serene and illuminated by streetlights. Two police cars sat parked next to one another in a pawn shop parking lot with the windows down, the cops talking to one another. He drove on past grocery stores and gas stations and he moved closer to downtown where the streets were lined with churches and he slowed when he came to the First Methodist Church with its high arches and brick steps and wooden steeple that made a wonderful shadow into the street in the afternoons. He hadn’t been a stranger to church or to God as he and his mother and father had gone every Sunday morning. His dad would drop him off at Sunday school and then he and Mom would sit on the seventh pew on the right side when his father joined them in the sanctuary for the service. Mom with her legs crossed and her Bible with LIZA GAINES inscribed on the bottom right of the front cover on her lap. Dad next to her in a black suit that matched all his ties and when Russell would get restless Mitchell would reach around his wife and pinch his ear and look down at him with serious eyes. Russell would then move and sit between his mother and father. His mom would pull a pen out of her purse and let him draw on the bulletin. That would keep him through the message and then they’d stand up and sing and the preacher would stand in front of the pulpit and ask for souls and sometimes one would come but most of the time not and then they’d walk out the front and Dad would shake hands with the preacher and the old men and then they’d go home and eat something with gravy.