Cort Wesley started to take a deep breath but stopped. “What time did your meeting wrap up in Houston?”
“Five o’clock. What makes you ask?”
“Because fifteen minutes later, the trouble here all started. You think that was a coincidence, Ranger, or somebody sending a message?”
*
Cort Wesley wished he had some ice to wrap around his swollen hand. Funny how he never remembered them hurting after he got into scrapes years back; they probably did, just not as much—or maybe he was just too young and stupid to pay attention. Like his sons, who were young and not stupid at all, although you wouldn’t know it sometimes.
Looks like I’m not going to win father of the year …
Not with Luke ready to quit his fancy prep school because he couldn’t room with his ex-boyfriend, while Dylan had dropped out of Brown University to protest oil drilling on his Indian girlfriend’s reservation.
“That’s ‘Native American’ these days, bubba,” the spectral shape of Leroy Epps said from the passenger seat, tipping the neck of a root beer bottle back against his lips.
19
BOERNE, TEXAS
“Was I talking to you, champ?”
“Think, talk—same thing from where I be. I heard you thinking that, just like I heard you wishing you could ice your sore hand.” Leroy flashed the root beer bottle. Cort Wesley was able to see through him in parts, as clear as through the glass. “Guess you forgot about your cooler. Hope you don’t mind me taking your last one.”
“I’ve developed a taste for the stuff, thanks to you.”
“Notice you only buy real Hires, flavored with genuine sarsaparilla. I’d take my hat off to you if I wore one.” The ghost of his old friend watched Cort Wesley trying to flex the life back into his swollen fingers. “In my day, we had to box once a month instead of a year. Know how I’d heal my hands fast? Go out and catch as many bees as I could hold and squeeze until they stung me.”
“I’ll give it a try.”
“Don’t crack wise with me, bubba.”
Cort Wesley found himself thinking about old Leroy’s funeral, which prison officials had let Cort attend, in a potter’s field for inmates who didn’t have any relatives left to claim the body. He’d been the only one standing at the graveside, besides the prison chaplain, when Mexican laborers had lowered the plank coffin into the ground. Cort Wesley tried to remember what he’d been thinking that day, but it was hard because he’d done his best to erase those years not just from his memory but also from his very being. One thing he did remember was that the service was the first time he’d smelled the talcum powder Leroy Epps had used to hide the stench of the festering sores caused by the diabetes that ultimately killed him.
Cort Wesley looked back toward the passenger seat, half expecting Leroy to be gone. But he was still there, sipping from the bottle of root beer clasped in a thin, liver-spotted hand. His lips were pale pink and crinkled with dryness. The thin light radiating from the truck’s dashboard cast his brown skin in a yellowish tint. The diabetes that had planted him in the ground had turned Leroy’s eyes bloodshot and had numbed his limbs years before the sores and infections set in. As a boxer, Leroy had fought for the middleweight crown on three different occasions. He’d been knocked out once and had the belt stolen from him through paid-off judges’ scorecards two other times. He’d been busted for killing a white man in self-defense and had died three years into Cort Wesley’s four-year incarceration, but ever since he always seemed to show up when he was needed the most. Whether a ghostly specter or a figment of Cort Wesley’s imagination, Cort Wesley had given up trying to figure out. He just accepted the fact of Leroy’s presence and was grateful that Leroy kept coming around to help him out of one scrape after another.
“As I was saying,” old Leroy resumed, “you sure know how to pick ’em.”
“As in…”
“Fights, bubba. I don’t know what was more fun, watching you mix it up with that principal lady at your youngest’s school or frying the grits of those side busters fixing to turn your oldest into mashed potatoes.”
“You sure have a way with words, champ.”
“What do you expect, you being the only live person I’m on a speaking basis with and all? No different now than it was back in the Walls, I suppose, the thing being a man’s gotta know when it’s time to choose his words carefully.”
“There a message in there somewhere meant for me?”
Cort Wesley watched old Leroy swirl the remnants of his root beer about the bottom of the bottle, wanting to savor the last sips. “Not of my making, bubba. But now that you mention it…”
“Oh boy…”
“I find myself agreeing with you.”
“About what?”
“What you told the Ranger lady, about something spurring those workmen to action when it did. Men like that don’t do nothing unless somebody’s telling them to do it.”