And then he applied the same question to Russell.
Boyd knelt down and picked up a pebble from the patchy pavement and he tossed it into the brush off the road. He wondered if their guy had asked for it. Wondered if this was the first or tenth or fiftieth time he’d ended up in this spot. This spot away from everything and everyone and nothing but the sky to see what you’re doing.
Don’t matter what he was doing, he thought. He’s dead and he’s one of us. It was hard to get past that one. Hard for Boyd not to imagine himself making the news in the same way someday. Deputy shot and killed. For apparently no good reason. Funeral to be held on Friday. Survived by a wife and two sons.
He walked back to his cruiser and thought about his boys. Thought about Lacey. He got in and called the office. Said he was done for the day. He then took a phone from his shirt pocket and he called Lacey and asked her if she was hungry and when she said yes he told her he’d swing by and pick her up. We’re going out.
They lived a couple of streets from the high school and he drove by the football field. His boys were there doing the same summer workouts he had once dreaded. Boyd parked but kept it running and he looked for his boys in the wave of shirtless bodies going up and down and up and down the aluminum bleachers, the clanging of a hundred feet echoing like steel drums. The oldest one had to be there and the youngest one didn’t. But he wouldn’t be outdone and no coach was going to tell him not to work out if he wanted. Boyd picked them out. Their bodies and heads slick with sweat. All of them slick with sweat. A different set of bodies from the year before and the year before but yet somehow the same. Somehow the same boys running the same bleachers and sweating the same sweat and breathing the same heavy air. It was easy for Boyd to imagine himself running with them. Up and down and up and down until you didn’t think you had anything left and then you went up and down again. Feeling the hurt and the exuberance and the strength and the weakness all in the same moment wound together like the spirals of a rope. He sat and watched and it could have been twenty years ago. It could have been twenty years from now. He rubbed at the muscles in his thighs. Could almost feel the burning. Wanted to get out and drop his gun belt and rip off his shirt and head across the field and go up and down and up and down with them. Wanted to but couldn’t.
Damn it, Russell, he thought.
He drove on from the football field and he stopped in front of his house and Lacey was outside watering the flowers in her window boxes with the garden hose. Jesus H. if shit don’t change, he thought as he looked at her. She turned and smiled and waved and it filled him in such a way that for a moment he felt born again and it made it more difficult to stop thinking about how it would read in the newspaper. Deputy shot and killed. For apparently no good reason. Survived by a wife and two sons.
44
THE WAY LARRY REMEMBERED IT THEY PLAYED BALL JUST ABOUT every night of the week, so he figured he had a decent chance of seeing him. He hung around at a job site until around five and then he drove over to Buddy’s and ate a shrimp poboy and had a few beers. He watched a couple of innings of the ball game and at the end of the fifth inning he left Buddy’s and stopped by the liquor store and bought bourbon and then he stopped at a gas station and filled a cup with Coke and ice. He drove down to Kentwood with the stiff drink between his legs and the night falling earlier than usual because of a settling of clouds. He listened to M?tley Crüe as he drove. Turned up loud. The drink and the music getting him going in the direction he liked to go.
He turned off the interstate at the Kentwood exit. Check cashing offices and condemned houses lining the main road. Few signs of progress. Fewer signs of effort. He saw the lights of the ball fields shining over to the right and he drove toward them and turned into the parking lot that sat behind the outfield fence. He circled around the lot and when he couldn’t find a space he hopped the curb and parked in the grass. He poured another shot into the cup and then he got out of the truck and he followed the walkway that led to the concession stand and bleachers.