“What about Pollard?”
“It’s too early in the mornin’ to be thinking about that lowlife.”
“But it’s almost three o’clock,” Lester said.
“Son, just let me drink my coffee, will ye?”
Lester found a cart with wobbly wheels and a shovel buried under a pile of unclaimed stolen property in the shed behind the jail, then went in and took Sugar out of his cell. He had the prisoner push the cart back to the scene of the crime while he followed behind in the police car. “You get that yard cleaned up, and you’re a free man.”
“I don’t see why—” Sugar started to say, but the look on the cop’s blank face told him he’d be wasting his breath arguing. “Where you want me to put it?”
The policeman pointed down the alley to the creek bank. “You’ll have to take it down there, dump it in the water.” Then he took out his pocket watch and checked the time. “Now look, I got things to do tonight, so let’s get moving. I don’t want to see nothin’ but elbows and assholes, understand?” Then he leaned back in the front seat of the car and pulled his hat down over his eyes.
At four o’clock, Sugar upended the last load of waste into Paint Creek. He’d kept waiting for Pollard to come around, so he could sling a shovelful in his face, but he never showed up. After waking Lester, he took the cart and the shovel back to the jail and hosed them off before he was officially released. Sugar stuck his razor in his pocket and tossed the nuts away, then headed for the colored section of town where he’d bought his bowler, thinking he might run into the whore with the wart on her lip again. If possible, he wanted to find someone to shack up with for a couple of days, so he could rebuild his strength before he proceeded on to Detroit. Walking down an alley, he happened to see the old man who had given him the drink of water just a few days ago. He was sitting on the ground at the edge of his garden with a sad look on his wizened, charcoal gray face. Of course, Sugar didn’t know, and if he had, he wouldn’t have given a damn, but the old man had just dug up the last of his turnips, a yearly event that always brought him much pain. It meant that cold weather was right around the corner; and within a few more weeks, he’d be shut up tight in two cramped rooms with his old woman until the spring thaw. Imagine, he’d told his daughter the last time she came down from Lima for a visit, being trapped in a coffin with your worst enemy. That’s what the winters were like for them now. By the middle of February, they’d both have murder on their minds. Sugar kept on walking; and the old man got up and went around the yard looking for a rat to beat on, but he couldn’t find one.
66
THE CHURCH BELLS chimed six o’clock just as Chimney headed into the park to meet up with his brothers. As he approached them seated on the bench, he saw, to his consternation, that Cob was wearing a pair of goggles just like the ones he carried in the pocket of his duster. “What the fuck?” he said to Cane. “You bought him those just to piss me off.”