six

WEDNESDAY MORNING SILAS sat at The Hub’s small back table, chewing the last bite of his second sausage biscuit. He’d called Angie the night before to say he wasn’t coming but they could have lunch the next day. He’d slept badly and even dreamed about Larry Ott, though the dream was gone by the time he sat up amid his tangled wet sheets to reassemble its strange narrative. On the drive to The Hub he called the hospital, and a nurse said Larry had been moved out of recovery and to intensive care. He’d come through surgery but was yet to wake up.

Silas looked out the window at the mill’s smokestacks, relieved again not to have to face Larry. For so long he’d used that stuttered “nigger” as an excuse to avoid him. Coming back home, rare as he did, from Ole Miss, from the navy, Silas had never asked about Larry. Once in a while as he drank and smoked weed with M&M and their pals, Larry’s name would come up. Scary Larry they’d begun to call him; should they ride over fuck with him? But Silas would change the subject, put Larry out of his mind. Sure he’d heard Carl Ott had died. Who gave a shit.

“You want another biscuit, sugar?” Marla called. She wore a hairnet over her gray hair and a white T-shirt stained with grease. She was in her early sixties with a potbelly and had been cooking here when he’d been in school. She had leathery hands and a voice like a man. She bore an uncanny family resemblance to Roy French but damn if that woman couldn’t make a sausage biscuit.

“No thank you, Miss Marla,” he said, dabbing his chin with a napkin from the aluminum dispenser on the table and adjusting his seat on the bench so his handcuffs wouldn’t pinch. He wiped his lips and sipped his Pepsi. He loved the food here, especially the hot dogs, which reminded him of Chicago. Marla used kielbasa and grilled them almost black, with a lot of ketchup and mustard and relish and chopped onion. She dabbed hot sauce on top of it and your lips would be burning when you finished.

He got up and put his notebook in his back pocket and took his hat from the chair beside him and walked past an aisle of fishing tackle and cosmetic items and up to the checkout. Facing him a wall of cigarettes, lighters, cheap cigars, aspirin, BC powders, and energy pills.

“I’m bagging you up a couple of hot dogs,” Marla said over her shoulder. She had a cigarette in her mouth, the smoke a constant updraft under the hood of her grill.

“Preciate it,” he said, passing his hat from hand to hand.

In a moment she came to the counter and handed him one of her greasy bags.

“Thank you, Miss Marla,” he said, long past even the pretense of paying her. Instead, as she turned to get something behind her, he slipped a five into the tip jar.

“I saw that,” she said, turning back to hand him four ketchup packets and a few salts and peppers. She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray by her register. “I heard somebody shot Larry Ott.”

“Sure did. I’m headed out there in a bit. Look around.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s in the ICU.”

“Lord, oh Lord Lord Lord,” she said, her face grave. “First Tina Rutherford, then M&M, and now this.” She clucked her tongue. “Well, they say bad things come in threes, so we got our quota for a while ain’t we.”

“I’d say we do.”

She reached absently behind her for another pack of Marlboros and began to unwrap the cellophane. “You know, 32, I always felt bad for him. Larry.”

“You did?”

“Yeah, sugar. Whole county thinks he’s a kidnaper or rapist or murderer or all three, but I remember he used to come in here buy comic books. Back when we carried em. The politest thing, that boy. Wouldn’t hardly look you in the eye.”

“You ever see him now?”

She shook her head and slid a cigarette out and lit it with a Bic. “I had me a girl worked the register few years ago. Didn’t hear when it happened but she told me later, all proud, how she told that so-and-so he wasn’t welcome in this ‘family place.’ That was about the time I let her go.”

Silas nodded and put his hat on.

“You gone see Roy today?” Marla asked.

“Don’t know.” He opened the bag, still warm, and slipped the condiments in.

“You do, tell him I got in some fresh catfish.”

“I will. Thanks.” He raised the sack, greasier than when she’d given it to him. “For this, too.”

“You welcome, sugar,” she said, smoking.

HE PARKED BY the gas tanks in front of Ottomotive and got out jiggling Larry’s keys. The shop looked the same, its white-painted cement blocks pleasantly crumbling at the edges and sprigs of grass sprouting along the foundation. He turned. Nothing moving out here, the motel across the highway silent, a child’s bike parked by the front door. Had Larry caused this section of town to dry up? Fulsom had moved east, sure, but why? Silas tossed the keys in the air and caught them. Then he got back in his Jeep, smell of hot dogs, and pulled past the gas tanks and parked where Larry did each day, over that Ford-shaped rectangle of dead grass, noting the lack of an oil stain. Larry’s vehicle must be the most cared-for in the county, a patient with its own full-time doctor, Larry riding along, ear cocked for any rattle, hoping for a knock, a belt to squeal, the brakes to whine.

He selected a key, and when he pushed the office door open a slab of light, punched through with his shadow, fell into the room. He reached in and clicked the light on. Smell of grease and old dust, not unpleasant. The office was small, a desk to the right, a few chairs along the wall under a calendar, an ancient Coke machine and crates of empty bottles, bookshelves.

Of course, he thought. Books. They were everywhere, double-stacked and dog-eared, novels among automotive repair manuals in brown binders. At the other end of the room another door led into the shop. He left it open and fumbled along the wall for a light switch, finding it and splashing the shop into view, a large room, high ceiling with exposed wooden rafters, car bumpers and long pipes and hoses stored up among the beams. The back walls were hung with tools and belts. There was a shelf of Interstate batteries. A metal worktable with a gutter along the back for collecting oil. There were fifty-five-gallon drums stacked in one corner and a large hand jack in another beside a tall red toolbox on casters. He came forward and opened the top drawer, the smoothest bearings he’d ever felt.

He pulled the chain that raised the bay door and stood watching the highway, struck by a memory. When he’d heard about his mother’s death several years ago, he’d driven down from Oxford. On the way into Fulsom, he’d gone right past here and from the car window seen Larry standing where Silas stood now, in this spot. Silas had kept his eyes forward, as if Larry could’ve seen him, as if he’d been standing there all those years, watching for Silas to come back. It had bothered him, and he’d tidied up his mother’s affairs quickly, ready to get the hell out of south Mississippi. She’d already paid for her funeral and the little plot out in a country graveyard, already done the work to get ready for her own death; all Silas had to do was sign some papers and collect her few belongings, which included Larry’s old rifle. He’d taken it all, the gun in a carrying case, back with him, passing Ottomotive on the way out of town, too, Larry standing there, again, Silas facing forward.

AT LARRY’S HOUSE he got out and stood in the sun. He looked at Larry’s piece of sky, his view of trees, his house. He breathed Larry’s air.

Glancing down, he saw something twinkle among the rocks and dirt of the road. He pushed his hat back on his head and took off his sunglasses, knelt. Glass. Without touching it he lowered his face toward the road, which already gave off heat. Little square pieces, thick. Windshield, or a window. Not many pieces, a few here and there, as if somebody had cleaned most of it up. Now on all fours like a dog, he eased his eyes over the road.

He got a few evidence bags out of the cardboard box of things he’d brought from his Jeep and used tweezers to pick up several pieces.

Next he gave the yard a thorough walk-through, circling the house once, again, finding nothing, not even a cigarette butt, telling himself you couldn’t go too slow, that anything might be the piece that solves the puzzle.

French came on the radio, asking did he have news. Silas said negative.

“You been to see him? Ott?”

Silas said he hadn’t and felt French waiting.

“He ain’t awake yet. I’ll go when he wakes up.”

“If,” French said and rogered off.

Far in the distance the growl of a motor. Silas had learned the difference between the chain saws you heard most of the time and four-wheelers you heard the rest of the time. This was the latter. He walked over the field past the barn, firewood stacked neatly along the wall, the larger pieces split with an axe, all of it shielded from the weather by the high barn eave. Out at the edge of the trees he saw a few stumps, trees Larry had cut down to burn, and somehow he knew the only trees Larry would take were those dead or dying, that he would never kill a healthy tree. He turned toward the barn. The ground was soft and he looked down.

Then knelt. Four-wheeler track. He studied its treads. There. Getting up. And there. Walking. There, there, there. In the print of the tire was a perfect circle at regular intervals, probably a nail the four-wheeler had run over. He had one more of French’s mold kits, didn’t he?

An hour later he was sitting on the porch, sweating, waiting for the mold to dry and eating Marla’s hot dogs, when he saw something in the grass. Just a speck he’d missed from his other angles.

Roach end of a joint, dewy, dirty, probably useless, but still.

He tweezed it into an evidence bag and realized this alone was worth his morning. If Larry Ott smoked weed Silas would shoot his badge. Somebody else had been here. He laid the bagged roach alongside the twin bags of glass and circled the house again. At the chicken pen the birds all ran over to him.

“Yall hungry, ain’t you,” he said, taking their clucking and muttering for hell yes, feed us, dipshit.

He noticed the wheels on the back of the cage, frowned as he walked its width and turned and walked, the chickens shadowing him, its length. He toed the trailer hitch. Why would Larry want wheels on his pen? He looked out over the field and saw several brownish spots in the otherwise bright green weeds and wildflowers, each spot the size of the cage beside him. Walking, he imagined Larry tractoring the cage over the land, the chickens fluttering along inside. He paused at the dark spot farthest from the barn, where the weeds and grass were flattened into mud and speckled with shit and feathers, the square where the pen must have sat most recently. Coming back toward the barn, he saw that in the second spot a few sprigs were raising periscopes. In the next, the grass looked better and the shit had begun to smear away in rain and dew. Then more grass still and weeds full throttle, here and there a dot of blue salvia or goldenrod, his elongated shadow falling on the time read in grass. Within five or six days the field had recovered: you couldn’t tell the cage had ever been there.

Back at the barn he stepped under the yellow tape and let himself in, taking a moment to gaze at the old tractor he’d sat on so long ago.

He heard the chickens griping so he went along the wall where a scythe hung and other instruments he didn’t recognize, one a heavy iron spring coiled around an iron bar. The kind of thing the Rutherfords would hang on their den wall for decoration. He dipped his head into the coop, the chickens scattering out the door. For a moment he stood, puzzling over the twin feed sacks, one full of gray grainy pellets and the other dusty corn. Finally reckoning it was better to overfeed than underfeed, he poured a quarter sack of each onto the ground amid the trident tracks. The chickens began to peck up the feed, and Silas remembered how he and Larry had overturned logs to catch beetles and cockroaches and pushed them through the wire for the chickens to chase down and eat.

In the barn, he looked in the tack room and saw an old chain saw and Larry’s fishing rods neatly laid over big nails in the wall, his tackle box in a corner moored to the floor in dusty spiderweb. He knelt and opened it and sifted through the lures and hooks, still clean, some familiar, smaller in his hand than they’d been those years back. He remembered fishing with Larry, the boy always talking, full of information about snakes or catfish or owlets or lawn mowers and dying for somebody to tell it to.

Back at Larry’s house he blasted the window unit air conditioner. Wearing gloves, he spent a long time looking at the spines of books, the old titles and plots he remembered so well from Larry’s descriptions. In the kitchen he opened the refrigerator and it smelled sour. The case of Pabst. Several bottles of Coke and a few Styrofoam containers from the Piggly Wiggly grocery store. He got a Coke and used a Jesus refrigerator magnet to open its lid and drank it as he opened one kitchen drawer after another. Forks, spoons, knives. He got on a chair and looked in the high cabinets, many of which had become reservoirs for old mail. Catalogs, circulars, newspapers, flyers. Silas took a stack down and blew the dust off its top and looked for the date. June 11, 1988. Another stack was from the early 1980s. One was a stack of monster magazines, Eerie and Creepy, and one about horror movies, called Fangoria. He remembered reading some of these with Larry. He got down and moved his chair and looked in another cabinet, moving each stack to check behind it. The lower cabinets offered more mail except for one, which held cleaning supplies.

He went into the hall and stood over the gun cabinet. Sighing, he began sifting through the stacks of mail, circulars, and the book club catalogs, Field & Streams, Outdoor Lifes. A sticker with CARL OTT and his address affixed to each.

Silas had gotten stiff, and when he tilted his neck to uncrink it, he noticed the attic trapdoor.

He brought a chair from the kitchen and stood on it and pushed it open. With his flashlight, he climbed into the hot darkness that was a city of boxes. He sneezed. Spiderwebs in the high corners and light through a single window in the front. A string depended from the ceiling, and he pulled the light on. He sneezed again and unbuttoned the top of his shirt.

In the boxes he found old land deeds, tax papers, letters yellowed and cracked. He scanned them, amazed how much there was to say about things so long gone, people so dead. He scanned the papers. Carl Ott had once owned over five hundred acres. According to these records, Larry had sold almost half of them, in parcels, through the last twenty years, to the Rutherford Lumber Company. No surprise there. Larry had no business, no income, and Rutherford was one land-buying son of a bitch.

He began to look for lawyer bills but found none. An hour later he rose in the half-light and stretched his back and noticed a filing cabinet in the corner. He stepped over boxes he’d already searched and found the cabinet unlocked. The top drawer slid out with a creak of protest, showing manila file folders, each labeled. One held five search warrants, from French’s visits. Another held receipts for the nursing home where Ina Ott was. Another gas bills, power bills, house payments, recent income tax forms. He slid the one labeled PHONE out and set it aside.

The bottom drawer held only a shoe box full of old photographs. He carried this and the phone file back to the trapdoor and lowered himself onto the chair and went to the kitchen and set it all on the table. His clothes were drenched and he went back into the living room and stood in front of the AC for several minutes. He pulled the gloves off, flapping his hands, then went back to the kitchen.

At the table he opened the phone file and studied it. No long-distance calls. Not one. No 1-900 calls to girls who’d get you off. Just the flat local rate. But another set of bills—he frowned—was for a cell phone. French had the cell. The only calls listed were from a single number, which he copied into his notebook. Sometimes a call once a month, some months with no calls at all. He put the file back in order and closed it and pushed from the table and looked into the living room to where the bloodstain had turned dark on the wood.

The shoe box next, the photographs. Most were from a Polaroid camera, in no order, just piled in. There were a few photo albums in the back bedroom, so these must be castoffs, duplicates. He took them one by one and glanced at them, teenage Larry drawing, reading, holding up fish. Silas went faster, noting how few showed Carl or Ina, and he knew without thinking that Ina had taken the pictures. Larry cutting grass, posing with a rifle, opening a G.I. Joe under a Christmas tree, standing in an Easter suit, holding a toad. Toddler Larry in the tub, on a tricycle, crying, aging in reverse the deeper Silas dug. One photo at the bottom showed baby Larry in a woman’s lap. The woman from the chest down, but with black hands. A maid, he thought. He found a few more, her dark arms bathing Larry in the sink, her hand putting in his pacifier, the woman never the point of the shot, in the pictures as a chair would be, or a table.

Only one showed her face. And the thing that stunned Silas, the thing he couldn’t believe, was that this woman was his mother.

WHEN SILAS WAS thirteen years old, his mother’s boyfriend, the one they’d been living with for almost seven years, had been arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. This was Joliet, south Chicago. Police officers kicked open the door of their duplex and flung themselves in behind shotguns and riot shields and huge square pistols, Oliver, the boyfriend, down the hall and out the back door before Silas could move.

It wasn’t a bad neighborhood, and this wasn’t normal the way it was for much of Chicago, especially the South Side. The three of them lived on a quiet, all-black street in an all-black neighborhood with Bradford pears planted along the curbs. There was shade, benches, a phone booth. Most everyone had a little backyard with little backyard dogs yapping under the fence bottoms. A lot of families had wading or above-ground pools, and one even had a duck that lived in their pool. It was nothing like Silas’s favorite show, Good Times, where the Evans family lived in the projects, confined to their apartment. Silas had never even seen the projects, might as well have been Mars to him. But he hadn’t seen many white people, either. It wasn’t until he and his mother came south that he encountered them.

Oliver, his mother’s boyfriend, drove a delivery van. He was gone a lot. When he was home, he ignored Silas.

Now the cops were bringing him back up the hall, handcuffed and scowling at the eight officers searching his house. Silas sat huddled on the sofa with his mother, who was sobbing, but he, Silas, felt no sorrow. His mother’s history with Oliver had shown him two things. One, men noticed Alice Jones. And two, when men look for women, the last thing they want in the bargain is a kid. At the time, Silas had no idea that the cops could place Oliver at the scene of a fight two nights before, where a man had been shot, and that they were about to find the weapon. Silas only knew that Oliver had made it plain that, if not for his mother, he, Silas, would be in the street.

Now one of the cops said, “Bingo,” and produced a snub-nosed pistol from high in a kitchen cabinet, Alice’s face showing she’d had no idea it was there, Oliver’s showing disgust. Two of the cops pulled him to his feet and led him from the room yelling “Call a lawyer” to Silas’s mother as she covered her mouth with her hands.

Within two days she’d put the house up for bail money. But as soon as he was on the street, not even out of sight of the courthouse, Oliver looked at Alice and said, “Have a yard sale and get whatever you can. It’s another warrant on me they didn’t find, some reason, and soon’s that one matches up, and it will, I’m back in for good.” He kissed Alice on the mouth and cupped her breast, there on the street, in front of Silas. “Good-bye,” he said, not even looking in the boy’s direction.

And he was gone.

Alice held the yard sale before anybody knew he’d left for good, and they got some cash together. By the time the sheriff’s department came with the outstanding warrant, Oliver was in Mexico or someplace and Silas and his mother were gone.

On the bus, him leaning against her shoulder as she rocked to the rhythm of the big Greyhound, he’d asked, “Where we going, Momma?”

“Down south,” she said.

“How come?”

“Cause I got people down there.”

“My daddy?”

“Hush, boy. No.”

“Who then?”

She elbowed him. “Don’t be asking so many questions. Read your magazine.”

He opened the Sports Illustrated on his lap. But he wasn’t in the mood and looked instead out the window. He was glad to be leaving Chicago. If Oliver had spoken to him at all it was to order him to the corner store for cigarettes or to tell him get lost while he and Silas’s momma “he’d and she’d,” Silas going outside onto their tiny porch and looking up the road at a dozen or more tiny porches with people on them, big woman with arms saggy and loose as pillows, old men smoking cigars and pushing dominoes across a card table at one another, and dogs tied to porch rails. His mother sewed in a shirt factory, and Oliver drove his brown van. It wasn’t a bad spell of life, Silas would tell himself later. He always had hot food and his own room. TV. Laughing his head off at J.J. on Good Times, even Alice smiling, that big whole-face one Oliver could bring out when he imitated Flip Wilson. Silas went to a decent school and had friends there. Two streets over was a vacant lot where the boys played baseball. Silas had gotten his first glove for Christmas when he was nine; he’d outgrown it and gotten another last year.

Now, south. Getting out of the Greyhound each time the bus huffed into another small town, stretching his arms and legs, each station different, the back of an auto mechanic’s shop once, a gas station next, then just a drizzly corner in Gladiola, Illinois, flat, flat Illinois splayed along the horizon out the bus window like a still photograph, silos and weird tall houses surrounded by stands of trees but otherwise an ocean of harvested wheat or corn, dead and dry and some broken stalks in casts of gray snow.

Then, somehow, he’d slept through both Missouri and Arkansas, waking farther than he’d ever been from home. Next stop Memphis, loud clanging Beale Street as his mother goaded him along the bright morning (carrying a suitcase in each hand) and dragging her own two suitcases. The address she’d been given was a boarded-up building, condemned, and they stood looking up at it, wondering what to do as people stepped around them on their way wherever people went.

“Where we going, Momma?” he asked. Back to the bus station, his mother said. It hadn’t been too far, had it? They could just walk. She thought she remembered the way.

As they struggled along, it was clear they’d overpacked, so she found a pawnshop on the corner, a tall white man in a bow tie behind the counter. While he flirted and opened the suitcases and removed her dishes and china, each piece wrapped in a bra or slip, as he lifted out the things his mother had spent her lifetime accumulating, Silas stepped away and looked along the shelves and cluttered rows at what people were willing to give up when the chips were down. Fishing rods, rifles, pistols, a dirt bike, television sets, record players. He looked at his mother where she was shaking her head at the low price all her things would bring.

They got out of another bus later that night in Jackson, Mississippi. The driver, a heavy white man, helped Alice lug their last two suitcases to the curb. Downtown Jackson seemed quiet after Chicago and Memphis, quieter without the trains he’d grown up hearing and the sirens and car horns. It was 10:00 P.M., the streets deserted except for a few people lurking in shadows, passing bottles. Against the sky, two or three tall buildings and a silhouetted bridge over some cold river. The bus driver stood there in front of the bricks, sweating despite it being January, his blue uniform shirt untucked at the back. He took off his cap and put it back on.

“Where you folks off to now?” he asked.

“Just find a motel,” she said.

He eyed her suitcase, the big one, part of a set taken from Oliver.

“It ain’t no motels for a stretch,” the driver said. “Just your nicer hotels. The Edison Walthall, half a mile yonder ways.”

“Nicer,” she said. “You mean won’t take black folks?”

The man pulled at his blue Greyhound lapel. “No. I mean their rooms are real expensive. I sure couldn’t afford to stay there.”

Alice looked up the street.

“Tell you folks what,” he said. “I’m about to get off my shift here, and I got my truck parked over yonder. If yall can wait I’ll give you a lift.”

“You ain’t got to do that,” Silas heard his mother say.

“Ain’t no bother. Just don’t go nowhere, and I’ll be back directly.” He turned before going inside. “Why don’t yall wait in the door yonder. It’s no loitering after hours, but I’ll tell Wanda there.”

“We be fine,” his mother said.

The driver looked dubious but went on inside.

It was cold, waiting.

“We going with him?” Silas asked.

She was looking up the deserted street. Across was a dry cleaners, closed, and beside that a bail bondsman. A white man watching them from the steps, smoking a cigarette. No restaurants in sight.

“Momma,” he said.

She was leaning, looking. She wore a blue coat and a scarf. A car drove past and the driver, a black man, looked too long at them. Silas glanced back into the bus station where the heavy driver was writing something on a clipboard. He saw Silas and smiled.

“Momma,” he said again. “Where we going?”

“Silas,” she said, watching the road. “You shhh right now.”

“Momma? We going with that white man?”

“I said shhhhh.”

“Momma—”

She turned on him so quickly he never saw her hand. She’d hit him before, but not like this, out in the open. First thing he did was look to see if the driver had seen. If he had, he wasn’t looking now. Silas’s next instinct was to run. He turned to go but she had him by the wrist.

“Don’t you dare run,” she said, “from the one person in this world who love you.”

He snatched his arm away.

“You don’t know where we going,” he said.

He saw in her eyes that she was nearly crying. He knew he should stop but couldn’t. “I’m cold, Momma, I want to go back.”

“Back to where?”

“Home.”

“Quit it,” she said, not looking at him.

Then the bus driver’s pickup pulled up and the big man was out, wearing not his uniform jacket but a blue denim coat and a baseball cap with a red bird on it. A Cardinals fan. Bob Gibson.

He’d left his flashers on and grunted, lifting her suitcase into the back. “You transporting rocks?” he asked.

Alice’s smile trembled.

“I’m Charles,” he said.

Alice said her name and Silas’s.

“Good to meet you, Silas.” Charles extended his hand.

“Silas,” his mother said.

Silas shook the man’s beefsteak of a hand while his mother went around and opened the side door and waited for him. Instead, avoiding her eyes, Silas threw his backpack over the truck rail and jumped in behind it.

“Boy, it’s too cold to ride back there,” Charles said.

“Silas,” his mother said, the half-coaxing, half-threatening tone. “Get up front.”

The driver clapped his hands. His breath leaked out in a thin white line. “Boy, do what your momma says.”

“Silas.”

But he was dug in. “I ain’t riding up there,” he said. He didn’t dare risk a look at his mother and sat enduring her embarrassment as they watched him.

Finally he heard Alice say, fake mirth in her voice, “Well, we from up at Chicago. I reckon this Mississippi cold ain’t cold to him.”

Before he closed his door, the driver said, “Now if you get too cold, boy, just bang on the window.”

He sat against the back and pulled the suitcase and his backpack against him as Charles drove the truck onto the empty road. He considered jumping out when the white man slowed to turn. His teeth began to clatter and the truck bounced. He stole a look over his shoulder and saw his mother as far over the long bench seat as she could be, against the door. He could tell from the way Charles’s hand moved, pointing at things, that he was talking.

Silas knew what the bus driver wanted with his mother, and he thought how he, Silas, was in a way an impediment. Without him here, she could do whatever she needed to, without witness, to get through this cold night, to get wherever she was going. He knew his mother was beautiful.

He thought about jumping out again, the next time they slowed to turn. He’d heard a train whistle a moment before and thought he could ride the rails back north, like the old men who used to gather in the alleys in their neighborhood would tell about, a fifty-five-gallon oil drum with a fire in it and the men speaking fondly of the world seen from a boxcar, drawn by in a never-ending, living mural you tipped your can of malt liquor to.

It was almost ten-thirty now, and Silas hugged himself tighter. They came to a traffic light and the truck stopped all the way. Silas looked left, past the backpack he’d been using to block the wind, and saw a line of neon signs. Surely a motel in there among them. He looked to the right where streetlights led down a lonely road.

And yet this was the way they were turning. Up ahead the road was dark. He leaned up and looked at his mother’s profile as she smiled, listening, to the bus driver who had one hand on the steering wheel and the other flapping, some story his mother was supposed to laugh at. And Silas knew without looking at her that she would, because it was polite and she lived in a world where she had to be polite all the time.

It was a world he wanted no part of. He wanted no part of her. He was already up, backpack in hand, and over the sideboard and gone. He’d catch that northbound and hobo it all the way home. He ran back toward the lights as behind him Charles’s brake lights came on. He turned right between two dark buildings and ran down this alley and over a dark street toward another with a few streetlights. He crouched in an alley behind a garbage can as Charles’s truck slowly rolled by, then the white man and Silas’s mother were out and yelling, his mother’s voice so panicked he nearly rose toward it, but instead he turned and plugged his ears with his fingers and ran down the alley.

He didn’t know if ten minutes had passed or an hour, had no idea how far he’d gone, and was starting to feel panicky when someone pulled him behind a pair of metal garbage cans, his backpack stripped away and his coat wrenched off, somebody’s hand in his pants pockets, taking his pocketknife, his forty cents. He tried to yell but another hand clamped over his mouth and somebody was pulling his Nikes off. He fought and bit the hand and when it sprang away he began to yell. In a moment Charles was there, pulling one thief away while another ran down the alley. The one Charles had by the shirtsleeve was a black boy not much older than Silas.

“Let me go, motherfucker,” he said to Charles and snatched his arm so hard the sleeve came off and he was gone down the alley, the bus driver left holding the sleeve like a dead wind sock.

“You okay, baby?” His mother was hugging him. She pushed him away and looked at him. “Did he hurt you?”

Silas shook his head. He was beginning to understand that it was over, he was going to be all right, a few lights coming on in the high decrepit apartment buildings.

His mother and the bus driver pulled him up and helped him back to the pickup, waiting a few blocks away.

“Dammit,” Charles said. Someone had stolen his hubcaps.

“I’m so sorry, Charles,” his mother said.

She reached and touched his wrist.

They’d stolen Silas’s suitcase from the back of the truck, and his mother’s from inside. Got her coat, too, where she’d left it on the seat. By some miracle she still had her purse, their money. His mother climbed in the middle and Silas sat by the door, which was cold. Still, he pressed against it, shivering, his feet cold in his socks.

“Lord,” his mother said to Charles, “the night we’ve give you.”

“Well,” he said, “truth is yall ain’t going to find a motel room this late. They all full by now, the decent ones anyway.”

“We might have to use one of the other ones, then,” his mother said.

“Well,” Charles’s voice sounded thick, stifling a yawn, “maybe I could drive you.”

Silas heard her protesting, but he was so tired he closed his eyes. When he opened them it was warmer, his socked feet dry under the heater, and he heard Alice talking again, her chatting no longer afraid, she was happy because Charles was driving them all the way to wherever they were going.

Silas closed his eyes.

Sometime later she shook him awake and put him out of the truck, saying to stand in the alcove at the bus station door, she’d be there in a minute. He did as she said, hurrying toward the door, still half-asleep. The concrete was ice to his feet and he clutched himself and shivered awake. He looked in the big window of the bus station, the lights dimmed, the ticket window closed. A large clock said it was almost 6:00 A.M. He looked back toward the truck, where his mother was standing at Charles’s window, talking to him.

Something clicked behind him, and the bus station door opened. A white woman with a giant ring of keys looked out. She wore a blue uniform like a police officer and a cigarette hung from her lip.

“Good Lord, child,” she said. “Get in here before you freeze to death.”

He came in as she flipped a row of switches that lit the ceiling a section at a time.

“You by yourself?” the woman asked, walking. “Come on.” Her name tag said CLARA.

“No,” he said, following her over the cold white tile. “My mom’ll be here in a minute.”

“No, ma’am,” she corrected. “Where is she?”

“She coming.”

Clara smiled at him and stubbed out her cigarette in a standing ashtray. “You from up north?”

“Yeah.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Chicago.”

“I can tell. You don’t talk like the colored boys around here.”

By the time Alice came in, a few minutes later, Clara had given Silas some hot chocolate in a Styrofoam cup and even found a pair of unclaimed sneakers from the lost and found. His mother talked to Clara, now behind the ticket counter, then came over to him where he sat in a chair by the radiator.

“Momma—”

“Silas don’t talk to me.”

He followed her outside into the cold and down a street toward a diner. Inside it was hot and bright with gleaming Formica tables, and for a moment he felt giddy. He smelled coffee and bacon frying. They slid into a corner booth and he wiggled his toes in his roomy new shoes while his mother flapped open a giant laminated menu. Their waitress, a young white girl, arrived with coffee for his mother. She ordered Silas bacon and eggs with grits and toast with jelly and orange juice but said the coffee was fine for her. While they waited she looked out the window and never once spoke. Soon his steaming food arrived, but she didn’t watch him eat, continued to stare out the window where clandestine dawn had arrived and figures in coats began to pass the window and cars blare by as his mother held her cup with both hands and sipped.

The waitress brought Silas more jelly and refilled Alice’s coffee.

“If yall ain’t too busy,” his mother asked, “can we just set for a while, till our bus come?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the girl said. “Just let me know if yall need anything else.”

When she left he said, “Momma?”

She didn’t look at him.

“Momma?”

“What?”

“Ain’t you hungry?”

Now she looked. “What’s missing out of you, Silas?” She looked hard. “You ain’t seen it that bad. I know. I know cause I have seen it that bad. But you. Up till now you had it easier than I ever did. But now I see what kind of man it’s made you, I don’t know if maybe I didn’t do you a disservice.”

He wouldn’t look at her.

“I’m done fighting you so I’ll tell you what I’m gone do. This here is Fulsom, Mississippi, not far from where I grew up. I’m taking the bus here to a town called Chabot. It ain’t far. From there I’ve got to walk, or catch a ride. To a place I know. It won’t be much, at first. But it’ll get better, soon as I get me a job. If you want to come, you’re going to be a very different boy. Is that clear?”

He didn’t answer.

“Silas?”

The waitress appeared with a second plate, two eggs, over easy, four link sausages, grits, and a cat-head biscuit. She moved Silas’s plate to set the new one between them.

Alice looked up to the girl’s face. “Miss? This ain’t ours.”

The steam from this and other food had frizzed the girl’s hair. “Somebody else sent it back,” she said. “That old grump in the corner. He never even touched it. If yall don’t want it, I’ll have to throw it away.”

“Thank you,” his mother said.

“Enjoy,” the girl said and was gone.

“Silas,” his mother said.

“What?”

“Would you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Would you go find a booth and let me set alone with my breakfast?”

“But, Momma.”

“Go, now,” she said. “If the place gets busy, you can come back.”

He slid out of the booth and found an empty one a few behind her and watched her head move as she ate, slowly. The diner never did fill up, and he looked for the old grump who’d sent his food back and saw no one who wasn’t already eating.

He and his mother sat separated the rest of the time until she rose and he followed her and she paid their bill and he stood by the door as she went back to her table and left a dollar tip. Then she asked the girl something and waited as she brought out a paper. A job application.

Hugging himself, Silas followed her into the morning and up the street to the bus that took them five miles east through more trees than he had ever seen to Chabot where he beheld for the first time the lumber mill he now saw daily. An old man in an ancient pickup with a cracked dash and a pair of vise grips for a window knob gave them a ride and dropped them off by the store at a bend in the road called Amos. His mother went inside and Silas followed her up and down the aisles as she bought a few things and paid, agreeing with the fat white counterman that yes, it was very cold for this time of year. From there they walked, carrying a paper sack each, without coats and Silas in his overlarge shoes, for two miles along a dirt road. He was shivering by the time they stepped over an old chain and headed down what seemed little more than a path, trees high on both sides and blocking the clouds. When they came to the hunting cabin in the middle of the field surrounded by woods, Alice Jones spoke her first words to her son since the diner.

“Find some wood,” she said.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, his head full of the past, here in Larry Ott’s kitchen, Silas stared at the photograph of his mother. Because they’d lost their things on the trip from Chicago, this was the first picture of her he’d seen in decades, her light skin, hair drawn back in a scarf. The smile she wore was the one she used around white people, not the one he remembered when she was genuinely happy, where every part of her face moved and not just her lips, how her eyes wrinkled, her hairline went back, how you saw every gleaming white tooth, the kind of smile he’d seen fewer and fewer times the older she got. But this plastic smile, the photograph, was better than no picture at all.

His cell buzzed and he jumped.

“You still on for lunch?” Angie asked.

“Yeah.”

“What’s wrong, baby? Your voice sounds funny.”

“Nothing,” he said, staring at his mother’s face. “I’ll see you in a bit.”

He closed the phone and, glancing around the kitchen, stuck the picture in his shirt pocket, vaguely aware he was stealing evidence from a crime scene. He stood, covered in sweat, feeling like somebody was watching him. But who would care that he kept one picture? The only ghosts here knew the secrets already.