“Which is?”
“Well, he came home sometime around ’75,” Rob says. “Viv nursed him off the drugs. He quit the nightlife, quit playing, and tried to settle down, back home in Pleasantville. Sam had moved out of the neighborhood by then, and A.G. moved into the family house on Norvic. He got a job at the high school, cleaning up. He even started coaching intramural basketball and football teams with the neighborhood kids, the same program that Keith Morehead runs now.”
He shoves the red plastic baskets of food off to the side.
Across the table, he unfolds the photocopied pages.
There, on top, is a black-and-white image of A.G. at the head of a line of marchers, holding up one half of a printed banner that reads: DON’T POLLUTE PLEASANTVILLE! Behind him, Jay notices a young Arlee Delyvan, in her early forties, her black hair wrapped in a paisley scarf. Jim and Ruby Wainwright stand just to the other side. Given the multitude of belled pants legs, the wide, lank collars, it must be 1976, Jay thinks, the same year ProFerma Labs had to file a public notice of its plans to build along Market Street, and six years after Jay had walked away from his own activism for good, or so he thought. “He got heavily involved in the campaign to keep the area around Pleasantville residential, keeping industry out,” Rob says. “But this is it,” he says, pointing to a photograph from this same march, A.G. again, surrounded by a swarm of kids as young as five and six following him in the street, their mouths open in midchant. “This is the last shot of A.G. I could find anywhere. The Post, the Chronicle, the archives in the Pleasantville community center, he just disappeared. I drank my way through every juke joint and blues hall in south Texas trying to track down any trace of the man. It was a fluke to find him pushing a broom, right in Third Ward, an absolute shot in the dark.”
The cell phone in Jay’s pocket trills, buzzing against the side of his hip. He slides it from his pocket, reading the number on the screen–Rolly, calling from his cell phone.
“Rolly,” he says when he answers.
“We got a problem, boss.”
“What’s going on?”
“Hollis is on the move.”
“I thought he had another hour on the clock,” Jay says, checking the time on his watch. “Plus, I thought you were still chasing print shops.”
“I might have moved up the schedule.”
“You mean you didn’t follow my instructions.”
“I’m thinking right about now you’ll be glad I didn’t.”
“How’s that?”
“He clocked out early,” Rolly says. “I’m on him now since he left the tire shop, heading not to his apartment, the grocery store, laundromat, nowhere near home, but instead keeping south on 45. Then he hopped on 610. He just exited Braeswood, and now he’s turning onto Rice.”
“That’s right by my place.”
“Same thing I thought,” Rolly says.
Hollis coming after me? Jay wonders.
He can’t think fast enough to guess why.
He can’t think of anything but his kids.
“That’s a right turn on Glenmeadow, man. He’s on your street.”
“Get ahead of him,” Jay says, standing quickly. “Get to the house and have Ellie let you in. Evelyn should be there, but don’t say a word about it if you don’t have to.” He throws two twenties onto the picnic table. “I’m on my way.”
When he arrives at the house on Glenmeadow, almost thirty minutes later, Rolly’s El Camino is parked in the driveway, behind Evelyn’s Pontiac Grand Am. And just down the street, between two lampposts, a blue Chevy Caprice is parked, the same make and model as the one that was parked next to Rolly’s truck the night they staked out Beechwood Estates. “He’s just watching the house,” Rolly said, when he called from Jay’s street a few minutes ago. Jay lost him after that, his cell phone dropping out during a tricky patch of poor reception on Richmond, and when he tried back, his calls went straight to Rolly’s voice mail, and no one was answering the house line. Stepping out of his car, Jay has just enough time to register the lights on inside the house before Hollis is on him. “Hey,” the man says, marching toward Jay, stepping from the darkness into the light of the streetlamp overhead, two white-knuckled fists already clenched at his sides. Jay looks back toward the house, aching to know what is going on in there, what would keep Rolly or Evelyn from picking up the home phone. “What in the fuck all do you think you’re doing?” Hollis says.
He’s drunk. Jay can smell it from here. He can practically count the number of empties lining the floor of the Chevy. “Take it easy,” he says.
Hollis is shorter than Jay, but meatier in the places that give men permission to start shit on dark street corners, thick about the neck and upper arms. The ribbed seams of his black-and-gold GOLDWELL TIRES T-shirt are stretched by the width of his biceps. It’s him, all right. The greasy-haired white guy who confronted Jay in the parking lot of the apartment complex: sandy, almost reddish hair, clipped at the front, and brown eyes, a perfect match for the description given to the cops after the deaths of Deanne Duchon and Tina Wells.
“You following me?” he says.
“Might I point out you’re standing in front of my house right now.”
Jay slides his hands inside his pants pockets, thinking he might dupe Hollis into believing he’s got something in there other than pennies and his car keys. This is the last time, he thinks, that he’s leaving the house without the .38.
“And wasn’t that you out in front of my house? Coming around my old job, stirring up some ancient shit?” Hollis says, creeping closer. He’s sweating despite the cooling night air, and his skin is sallow. His five o’clock shadow is rough enough to be a weapon. “I ought to have you arrested for trespassing, stalking or something,” he says, fists tightening at his sides.
“You really want to invite police scrutiny right now?”