seven

IT WAS 1982. Larry sat up in bed and rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked out the window where a fence cut across his view of the cornfield and beyond that the line of trees. His life had changed. He got out of bed and dressed quickly and in the bathroom looked at his face in the mirror. He came down the hall with his hair wet and sat and watched as his mother mashed his eggs with a fork the way he liked them and salted and peppered them and set the plate between his fork and paper napkin.

“Thanks.”

“Daddy’s already said the blessing.”

A paper napkin in his uniform collar, his father sat at the head of the table, leaning back with his head turned so he could see the news. When a commercial came on Carl turned his attention back to his plate of eggs, grits, and bacon. He added salt.

“Where’s the mail?” he asked.

Larry hadn’t even thought of it. “I forgot,” he said.

“Larry,” his mother said. “Did you tell Daddy?”

His father paused chewing his bacon but didn’t look at Larry. “Tell Daddy what?”

“Larry’s asked Cindy on a date.”

Now he looked. “I’ll be damn.”

“Carl.”

“Sorry.”

His mother sat beside him and blew into her coffee mug. “Tell us how you asked her.”

“I just done it,” Larry mumbled, though the opposite was true.

The day before, he’d been walking past the Walker place with his rifle, same as a thousand other times. Their car was gone, so he was surprised when Cindy walked out of the house, almost as if she’d been waiting on him. She wore cut-off jeans and a T-shirt and suddenly, as he stood there grateful for the rifle that gave his hands something to do, she was talking to him.

“You like movies?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Movies.”

“You ever go?”

“We seen Star Wars. And Smokey and the Bandit. In Meridian.”

“You ever go to that drive-in theater they got?”

He hadn’t. It was off on a lonely two-lane, twenty minutes toward Hattiesburg, and only showed movies rated R. He remembered Ken and David talking about it on the playground years earlier. Now they went each weekend on double dates with their girlfriends, smuggling in beer, marijuana joints, making out with the girls.

“We could go,” Cindy said.

“We could?”

“Can you get a car?”

If he had to steal one he could. “Yeah.”

And so, standing in the middle of the road, he’d been asked out on a date.

“Friday night?” Cindy had said.

“Friday night,” he’d said.

“I’ll be dern,” said his father.

His mother leaned over and refilled his cup. “Idn’t that something, Carl?”

But the news had come back on and his father was watching again, sipping his coffee.

Larry shot his mother a plaintive glance, and she was up and around the table with her coffeepot, blocking his father’s view and leaning down eye to eye. “He needs to use my car, Carl,” she said. “I told him ask you.”

He’d drawn back from her but his face relaxed in a kind way, like after Larry had cut the grass without being told. “If he asks me his self,” Carl said, “I reckon he can use it.”

His mother leaned back and nodded to Larry.

“Can I?” he asked.

“Can you what?”

“Please borry Momma’s car Friday night for a date with Cindy to the drive-in?” He was immediately sorry he’d given that detail.

“To the what?” his mother said. “I don’t—”

Carl tried not to grin. “That where they show bosoms?”

“Carl—”

“Not always, Daddy.” Larry had begun to blush. “This time it’s a western. About the James gang. Name of it’s The Long Riders.”

“Long Riders,” his father said. “What’s it rated?”

Larry looked into his plate. “R.”

“Carl—”

“A Jesse James picture, complete with bosoms.”

“Carl!”

He was almost smiling and humor kindled his eyes. “They had em back then, too, Ina, I’m pretty sure they did. Yeah, boy,” he told Larry, “you can go. Take the Buick. It’s got a bigger backseat.”

“Carl Ott, you stop!”

“Ina the boy’s sixteen ain’t he? Hell,” he said, “I’ll even pay.” He produced his wallet and drew a twenty-dollar bill. He flattened it on the table and slid it over to Larry’s place mat.

He could have slid a thousand-dollar bill and Larry wouldn’t have been more surprised. For a moment he couldn’t imagine what to say.

“Larry?” His mother raised her eyebrows.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Now go get the mail.”

HIS FATHER STILL drove him to school, long talkless rides they both endured. Neither had ever mentioned what had happened at the cabin, Larry’s fight with Silas. Carl had returned home later that evening, no apology, no mention of the rifle, come in the house as if he’d been working. Gone to the refrigerator, gotten a beer, and sat in front of the television watching baseball. They’d had supper that night, no one speaking beyond Carl saying the blessing his mother insisted on, “Bless this food, amen,” but gradually, the next day, the one after, their life together had resumed, Carl working, his mother cooking and cleaning, out volunteering for the church, Larry going to school.

Riding now, he sat against the passenger door of the red Ford and looked out the window at the landscape of his life, a different landscape today, the trees and vines, the Walker house going by outside the window, its uneven porch, its tar-papered walls, the house in which his date moved, dressed, undressed, her pretty face reflected in the bathroom mirror.

Soon Larry and his father were passing the cluttered houses near Fulsom, then his father’s shop, then through downtown, to the school where he said, “Bye, Daddy,” and got out, Carl saying, “Have a good one,” with his usual glance, Larry with his stack of books going off to homeroom.

HE WAS A junior now, the high school still with more black students than white, but with a better ratio than the Chabot school, and so Larry, one of four white boys in his homeroom, against five black ones, felt safer. The girls were evenly divided.

Slipping into his desk this morning, he couldn’t help but say to Ken, who sat behind him, “I’m going to the drive-in this weekend.”

“By yourself?”

David, a row over, snickered. “Naw, Kenny, he’ll have a date.” He made a fist of his hand and mimed masturbating. “Same date he has ever night.”

“It’s Cindy Walker,” Larry said, and turned back to face the front of the room, their teacher coming in, telling the class to pipe down.

“Horse shit,” Ken hissed to the back of his head. “She wouldn’t go out with you.”

“Is, too,” Larry whispered over his shoulder.

“Mr. Ott,” the teacher said, “is there something you want to share with the class?”

All eyes settled on him and Larry said, “No, ma’am.”

At break he walked past a classroom building and behind the gym, toward the baseball field. There were two sets of metal bleachers and one had been designated as a smoking area for students. Larry rarely came out here, usually spent his breaks alone in the gym, reading on a bench, but today was different. He knew Cindy smoked and hung out here with her friends in their acid-washed jeans and T-shirts. On the field the baseball team was practicing, and Larry saw Silas in the shortstop position, fielding hard-hit balls and flipping them effortlessly to the second baseman, Morton Morrisette. The double-play combo was locally famous, 32 Jones and M&M, two youngsters, the newspaper had said, you couldn’t get a ball between if you shot it out of a gun.

Larry watched awhile, then spotted Cindy smoking in a cluster of white girls. He stepped out of the bleacher’s shadow and waved to her. She said something to her friends and walked over to him.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.” She sucked on her cigarette and dropped it between them. “What’s up?”

“Just thought I’d tell you,” he said, “that The Amityville Horror is the movie at the drive-in.”

“The what?”

“Amityville Horror. It’s about a haunted house. I read all about it in a magazine. My momma, she would never let me see a horror show,” he said, “so you know what I told her?”

Cindy was looking toward the baseball field. “What.”

“That we were going to see The Long Riders. It’s about Jesse James.”

“Who?”

“He was an outlaw, in the old west?”

“Oh.”

They stood a moment.

“Listen,” she said. “I gotta go.”

“Wait. What time you want me to pick you up?”

“Seven, I guess. The movie don’t start till dark.”

“Okay,” he said, but she was walking off.

Then she turned. “Larry?”

“Yeah?”

“Can you get some beer?”

“I guess so.”

He stood a moment watching her go, then looked back toward the field, where Silas had been staring at the two of them. Larry lifted his hand to wave, hoping the black boy had seen him talking to Cindy, but then M&M said something behind his glove and Silas turned back just in time to shorthop a grounder.

IT WAS THE slowest week of his life, clocks his enemy, their hands mocking him with their frozen minutes. Classes that took forever anyway somehow seemed longer now, and he’d lost all interest in reading. In the afternoons his mother picked him up and asked about his day. Fine, he would say. Did he talk to Cindy? No, ma’am. Why not?

“Momma, stop asking me,” he said on Wednesday.

“I just thought you’d talk about what yall were gonna do.”

“We did Monday. I told you. We going to the movie.”

“Is she excited?”

She didn’t seem to be. He’d wave to her in the cafeteria and she’d nod or raise her chin, acting embarrassed.

“I guess so.”

“I remember my first date,” she said.

“With Daddy?”

She glanced at him. “No. It was with another man.” She talked about going fishing with him, how he baited her hook and nearly fell in the water he was so nervous. As his mother kept talking, Larry wondered if he should take Cindy fishing on their second date.

Thursday at lunch he brought his orange tray with its fish sticks, green beans, and corn to the white boys’ table and sat a few feet down from the cluster that included Ken and David. Each table had a teacher at its end, to keep order, Mr. Robertson, the vocational agriculture teacher down at the far end with a fat boy named Fred whose father raised cattle. Larry sat where he could see Cindy across the heads of black boys and girls bent over their food, watched her eat, her hair pushed back by a band. Silas sat, as ever, with the baseball team and Coach Hytower.

“Ott,” Ken called.

Larry looked up and Ken motioned him over. Surprised and worried, he slid his tray down the table.

“You got a rubber yet?” David asked.

Larry shook his head.

“Best place to get em,” David said, “is Chapman’s Drugs. Old man Chapman’ll sell em to you. He’ll sell you a Playboy, too.”

“He will?” Larry asked.

“What’s he need a rubber for?” another boy, Philip, asked.

“Ott here’s got him a date Friday. Ain’t that right?”

Larry nodded.

“With who?”

“Jackie,” somebody said, and the table laughed.

Blushing, Larry was about to answer when Ken said, “Cindy Walker.”

The boys’ heads all turned toward him.

“She’s a slut,” one boy said.

“How you know?” asked Ken.

“How you think?”

“I heard she likes niggers,” Philip said.

“Yo momma likes niggers,” Larry said quietly. Before he’d thought.

For a moment their table became the incredulous calm eye of the cafeteria’s hurricane, the boys looking from Larry to Philip, Larry aware of the lockblade knife in his back pocket. Then Ken laughed and held his palm out and Larry slapped it.

“You a badass now?” Philip asked.

“He got you,” somebody said.

“What’s the movie?” Ken asked Larry, breaking the tension, and when he told them they began talking about it, how it was supposed to be bloody, even Philip talking, wanting, Larry imagined, to put being bested behind him. Larry looked at the corn on his tray, too happy to eat, a date the next day and friends to tell about it. Across the cafeteria, Cindy got up with two of her pals and made their way through the crowded tables to the window where their trays were taken by thick black hands, then headed out to the smoking area.

Outside, he found himself walking along a sidewalk with Ken and David, who took out his wallet.

“Here,” he said, handing Larry a flat cellophane wrapper. It said TROJAN.

Larry, who’d never seen a condom but knew what it was, took it, slippery inside the foil. “You don’t need it?”

“Hell no, he don’t,” Ken said, and the three of them laughed, Larry removing his own wallet and putting it beside the twenty-dollar bill.

HE HOVERED IN the kitchen, his father in the next room watching the news and drinking beer, his mother making cornbread behind him. He went down the hall past the gun cabinet and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and came back out, his father in his chair, and went back into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and counted nine Budweisers. His mother, humming at the counter, glanced at him and smiled.

“Be a gentleman,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Do you know what that means?”

“Be nice?”

“Well, yes, but also stand up when she enters a room. Open doors for her. Hold her chair if yall go eat somewhere.”

“We’re going to the movie,” he said.

“Then pay for the movie. With that money Daddy gave you. Ask her if she wants popcorn and go get it for her. It’s romantic to share a bucket, but if she wants her own, that’s okay, too.”

He slipped a can of beer into his pocket, nodding, keeping that side away from her as he edged out of the kitchen. His father sat sipping his beer in his socks—his work shoes on the porch by the door. In his room he hid the cold can under his bed then went past his father and back into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

She was buttering a pan. “What’s that movie yall are seeing?”

He told her The Long Riders again and when she asked what it was about he told her again, keeping the impatience out of his voice and slipping another beer in his pocket.

“Boy,” his father’s voice called.

He stopped, cold in the door. “Sir?”

“Bring me a beer.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, slipping the can from his pocket. When he came back out of the kitchen Carl was squatting in front of the console changing the channel. He set the can on the coffee table near his chair and turned.

“Hey,” he said and Larry stopped.

“Sir?”

Carl was watching him. “Don’t give Cecil none of that money.”

“I won’t, Daddy.”

“You got any change, bring it back.”

“Yes, sir.”

He snuck one more beer, knowing that was all he dare take, his thigh cold and a wet smear on his pocket.

At supper Carl cut his roast into bites and Larry’s mother talked about their first dates, Larry barely chewing his rice and gravy.

“Slow down,” she said. “You don’t want to be early. A girl hates that.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Carl asked for the potatoes and she passed them.

“You remember that old tree, Carl?” she asked.

“Tree?”

“Oh you remember. It was before we got married. Over at the bluff?”

“Yeah.” He was mixing his roast into his rice and gravy, adding in the carrots and potatoes, making a big stew of it all. “Old Man Collins’s land.”

“That was his name. There was this tree,” his mother told Larry, “growing off the side of a bluff. What kind of tree was it, Carl?”

“Live oak.”

“Yes. You could see the roots all down the side of the bank, and below there was just this awful mess of briars, you remember, Carl?”

“Yeah,” he said, “would’ve took a dern bulldozer to move it.”

“That’s where Daddy and me used to go meet our friends, didn’t we, Carl? We’d build a bonfire and the boys would climb that old tree and swing off a rope they had up there, and we’d watch, all us girls.”

“Your momma never would do it,” Carl said.

“Well, it wouldn’t have been decent,” she said. “In a dress.”

They ate for a while, his mother filling his tea glass even though it was nearly full.

“You remember that time,” Carl said, “that I paid Cecil to swing off it, him drunk?”

She said no.

Larry watched his father.

“Oh, maybe you wasn’t there then,” winking at Larry, “maybe I had me some other gal.”

“Carl Ott.”

Larry said, “What happened?”

Carl pushed his plate away and stood up. He went to the refrigerator and got another beer, Larry nervous he would notice there were only five left. But Carl sat down and pulled his plate back and popped the tab.

“What you did,” he said, “was scale that tree. It was two big old limbs up there, the one you’d stand on and the other one, higher, where we’d tied that rope. We had a big old knot in it that you held on to and a loop for your foot, and you’d stand on the one branch and catch your breath, and then bail off over that gully. Best time was night, you’d be out there flying around in the dark like a dang bat.”

Larry imagined it, sailing out over the world, leaving your stomach back at the tree, weightless as you turned and turned, nearly stopping at the rope’s apex and swinging back where you grabbed the limb waiting like a hand.

“Now your momma’s right bout that briar patch down there,” Carl said. “Black-tipped thorns big as a catfish fin. You’d be better off jumping in a pit of treble hooks. Poison ivy, too. Like something out of one of your funny books.

“Now Cecil, he’s sacred of heights, right, don’t even like going up the steps on the school bus, and wouldn’t be caught dead in that tree. But the day I remember, it was six or eight of us boys out there and we’d been drinking beer and riding him all afternoon, calling him chicken, sissy, and finally bout dark I say, ‘Hey Cecil. I’ll give you a dollar if you go do it.’

“Cecil, he looks up that big old tree trunk and says, ‘That ain’t worth no so-and-so dollar.’

“‘Okay then,’ another fellow says, ‘make it two.’

“Cecil, he’s drinking his beer, says, ‘Boys, it’s some things can’t be bought. I’ll do it for three.’ ”

His father smiling telling it. “He makes us take the money out so he can see it. Ain’t wearing nothing but cut-off blue jeans, no shirt, no shoes, his whole family poor as niggers. Ever summer when school let out his momma’d cut off his long britches for short ones and save his shoes for one of his brothers. Went barefoot in summer, we all did, back then, feet so tough you could saw on em for a while with your knife before you felt it.

“Anyway, Cecil, he takes him another swig, he’s already drunk as Cooter Brown, pops his knuckles, looks like a demented Tarzan shinnying up the tree and straddling that lower limb, not looking down, bout ten feet off the ground but the bluff out there was probably twenty, twenty-five feet down, a good long fall.”

Carl paused and took a swallow of his beer. “Now I sidle up to one of the other fellows by the fire there and say, ‘Watch this,’ just about the time Cecil gets the rope in his hand. We can barely see him it’s so dark. Trying to stab his foot in that loop. You knew he was drunk otherwise he’d a never scaled that tree much less jump. But about then he lets out a whoop and bails right off that limb. He’s yelling his Tarzan yell but about halfway into it we hear it change and sort of trail off, all of us down there at the edge, looking out, trying to see. And what we see? The dang rope comes a-flapping back empty, without Cecil. We hear this scream out there in the dark then a crash, way the heck down in them briars. We all looking at each other with our mouths hanging open, thinking, we done killed Cecil.

“But about then the cussing starts, way down in the bottom, sounds like it’s about a half mile off. Son-of-a-blank and mother blanker and G. D. this and G. D. that—”

“Carl—” his mother said, trying not to smile.

“Well, by now we was all falling down on the ground we was laughing so hard, poor old Cecil, he didn’t even have him a layer of clothes to absorb the briar and thorns.

“And when he finally come climbing back up the bank bout twenty minutes later he looked like he’d been in a cage with a bobcat, welts ever where, cut all to pieces, bleeding, got a big ole knot on his head. We’d long since stopped making noise we’s laughing so hard, I couldn’t even catch my breath, red in the face, bout to choke, Cecil standing there in the firelight with briars sticking out of his hair, but then when he seen us laughing that fool starts to laugh himself, holding out his bloody palm for his money.”

His father was shaking his head and smiling, his mother laughing and Larry, too.

“Where’s that tree?” Larry said, thinking he might take Cindy. “Is the rope still there?”

Glancing at him, his father said, “Naw.”

“What happened to it?”

“They cut it down. Mill did.” He pushed his plate aside and rose from the table. “Enjoyed it,” he said, got another beer from the refrigerator, and went into the den.

Larry and his mother sat a moment, the television clicking on in the living room.

“You best go,” she said. “Don’t keep her waiting.”

HE GOT OUT of the Buick at the Walker house, their car gone, which meant Cindy’s mother was at work. Cecil was waiting on the porch, smoking. He wore his usual greasy baseball cap and cut-off jeans and a dirty white T-shirt and no shoes.

“Hey, Cecil,” he said, crossing their yard, smiling thinking of him all tore up and bloody.

Cecil flicked his cigarette toward him. “Boy, it ain’t Cecil today ner ever again. It’s Mr. Walker now, got it?”

Larry stopped.

“I said you got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah what?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get over here,” Cecil said.

Larry crossed the yard, glancing at the windows of the little house, hoping Cindy might come out.

“Is it something wrong, Ce—” he said, nearing the porch, “—I mean, Mr. Walker?”

He stopped at the bottom step, hoping Cecil was joking, that any second that ignorant smile with its missing bottom tooth might break open, that he would elbow Larry and say, “I’m messing with you, Larry boy. You something else.”

But the fist that grabbed his shirtfront and pulled him up the stairs was as hard as a sledgehammer, this man no lacerated winking fool. Cecil spun him and pushed him face-first into the coarse wall, its ancient gray boards and their faintly sweet tickle in his nose. Something, a tear, blood, ran down his cheek. Cecil had one hand behind Larry’s neck and the other in the small of his back, his whiskers prickling his cheeks as he ground his face so close Larry could smell beer and cigarettes and the old meat in his teeth.

“If you so much as get a finger in her,” Cecil hissed, “I’ll cut your little pecker off myself.” And now the grip at his neck was gone, but before Larry could move the hand had grabbed his testicles.

Larry’s knees gave way but the hand was back at his neck, pressing him into the wall.

“You get me, sissy boy?”

Larry thought he might vomit. When Cecil moved his hand Larry collapsed. He heard shoes on the porch boards and tried to move.

“I said you get me? And if you say one word to your daddy—”

“Cecil!” It was Cindy, between them, pushing at her stepfather.

He laughed, stepped over Larry on his way to the door. “Go on out with that one,” he said. “He ain’t gone do you no good tonight, you little whore.”

The screen door slammed.

Cindy tried to help him up but he shook his head and lay breathing.

“I’ll be right back,” she said.

His eyes were closed but he felt water—not even tears, just water—spilling over his cheekbones, dripping off his jaw and chin. He burped several times, the hot roast, it was everything he could do not to throw up. He heard them yelling inside.

Then the screen door screaked and slammed and she was back, pulling him to his feet. He was aware of her against him, her sweaty perfume and cigarettes.

“Can you walk?”

“Yeah.”

They went toward the car.

“He’s a son of a bitch,” Cindy said. “I hate his guts.”

He opened the door for her. She slipped in without saying thanks and he closed it and limped around the back of the car watching the house. He got in. She was looking out the window, across the road.

“It’s half a hour,” he said, “fore it gets dark.”

She didn’t answer.

“What you want to do first?”

“This,” Cindy said. “Scootch over.”

He slid toward her on the seat, surprised they’d kiss here and not at the drive-in, but instead she opened her door, got out, and ran around the car and climbed in the driver’s side.

Cecil came back out, lighting a cigarette.

“You get the beer?”

“Just two.”

“Shit. Well?”

He reached under the seat and handed her the first.

She took it and glanced at him. “It’s warm.”

“Sorry.”

When she popped the tab it spewed foam on her. “Shit,” she said, flinging beer off her fingers.

She cranked up the Buick and spun off, flipping out her middle finger to her stepfather, and Larry looked back to where Cecil had left his porch and was walking quickly toward them, even as they peeled away throwing gravel.

Cindy sipped the beer and grimaced. She clicked on the radio and began turning the dial, settling on a station playing the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” She lowered her window and had trouble lighting her cigarette and then rolled it back up and lit the smoke and lowered the window again, accelerating over the dirt road, holding the beer in one hand and the cigarette in the other. She had on a short skirt that lifted in the wind and he could see far up her legs, her thighs slightly apart and brown from all her lying out. If Carl found out somebody else drove the car, Larry would be in trouble. Would Cecil tell? Was he right now walking over to their house?

“I better drive,” Larry said. “Do you even have your license?”

“Listen,” she said, “you got to do me a favor.”

“Okay,” he said.

She drove without looking at him, sipping the beer. “I need to get someplace else tonight,” she said. “Other than the movie.”

“What you mean? Where?”

She glanced at him, smoke from her lips pulled out the window. “That bastard’ll only let me out of the house with you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. He thinks I’m safe with you.”

“You are,” Larry said.

“I know. That’s why I need to go to Fulsom. I got to go see him.”

“Who?”

“My boyfriend.”

He moved his legs carefully, his balls still tender. “But—”

“Listen,” she said. “You have to help me. Nobody else will. That Cecil’s after me, and if I can’t go see my boyfriend, I’ll never get away from him.”

“But,” he said.

She slowed as they approached the highway and turned without looking or using her blinker. She was going the opposite way from the drive-in.

He didn’t know what to say. The nausea was subsiding but another thing was taking its place.

“Cindy,” he said. “Can’t we just have our date?”

“I’m gonna tell you something,” she said. “Something nobody else knows.”

“Okay.”

“Something you got to swear to God you won’t ever tell nobody. Okay?”

“Swear.”

“I swear.”

“To God.”

“To God.”

She threw her cigarette out the window.

“I’m gonna have a baby,” she said, drinking more beer.

He didn’t know what to say. “A what?”

“Baby. An itty-bitty baby. And if Cecil finds out, he’ll kill me.”

“Who’s the, you know, daddy?” he asked. “Your boyfriend?”

She looked at him. “I can’t say. If Cecil finds that out, he’ll kill him, too.”

“What you need me to do?”

“I’m going to meet him so we can talk. We got to make us a plan. You just ride around awhile, but don’t let nobody see you. Go on to the movie, but not till the second one starts. They stop taking admission then and you can drive on in and won’t nobody see I ain’t in the car with you. Park in the back. My boyfriend’ll drop me off at the road to my house. You can pick me up there at eleven and drive me home. That way Cecil won’t never know.”

He’d imagined their date dozens of times. Pulling into the drive-in, paying five dollars for the car, rolling over the grounds, past the other people in their cars and trucks, past the posts where the speakers hung. David had told him you drove to the back two rows where you had the most privacy and detached your speaker and hung it on your window and climbed over the seat with your girl and got under a blanket—his brother had one, hidden under the seat with the beer—and you began to make out. When the time was right, when the girl was hot, her legs opening, you put your rubber on and…

Now that was all flying away, passing him by at sixty miles an hour on the highway toward Fulsom. She threw her empty can out the window and said, “You got the other one?”

“Cindy,” he said, giving her the beer. “I don’t want to do this. Can’t we just go to the movie?”

“Didn’t you hear me? Shit—” The beer exploded when she opened it. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

“Yeah.”

Wiping her hand on the car seat. “Fuck a movie. You the only person in the world who can help me, Larry. God damn it. Please?”

“CAN YOU FIND your way back?” she asked, out of the car, bent to see him through the passenger window.

She’d driven past Fulsom, the four-lane back to a two, then turned down an unmarked county road and then onto a dirt road. A blacksnake had been crossing the gravel and she veered to run over it. He didn’t even try to stop her. She’d parked by another dirt road, no houses in sight. The trees high and green and filled with birds.

“I said, ‘Can you find your way back?’ ”

“Yeah.” Not looking at her.

“Just be at the road to my house at eleven o’clock, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Will you come?”

He nodded.

“Swear?”

“Yeah.”

“Swear to God, Larry.”

The steering wheel was still warm from her hands and the car stank of cigarette smoke and the seat was wet with beer. He’d have to leave the windows down so his mother wouldn’t smell it.

“I swear to God,” he said.

He pulled the car up and she stepped out of the way as he backed into the dirt road and turned around. She waved at him but he didn’t wave back, just clenched the steering wheel and nudged the gas pedal, the Buick bumping over the road, passing the blacksnake where it lay, leaving her in the woods in the gathering dark, watching her in the mirror as he drove away, watching her turn and begin to run—run—toward her boyfriend, waiting somewhere down that road.

LATER HE WOULD do as she told him. Ride around alone. Take the Buick to the drive-in, park out of sight, and watch through tree limbs as the first feature ended, the movie family fleeing the house in Amityville and its devils, wait through the intermission, food advertisements, coming attractions, the radio playing songs he didn’t hear and describing weather he didn’t feel. He waited until the second feature began and then pulled with his lights off past the ticket booth, which, as she’d said, was empty. With the screen flickering over him, he eased the Buick past cars and trucks filled with men and women and boys and girls and past the metal poles with their speakers blaring and squawking, past popcorn boxes pushed by the wind, empty Coke cups rolling in his wake. He parked on the row second from the back, near the corner, shadowed from the moon by trees, lowered his window and unhooked his speaker and watched the people move on the screen.

The movie was half an hour in when a car backed out a row up and several slots down. In the light from the movie, he watched it become Ken’s father’s Ford Fairmont and realized they must have seen him drive in. Its parking lights on, the car rode to the end of the row and turned and began coming back toward him. As it neared the Buick, it slowed, then stopped and backed into the spot behind Larry. Its parking lights snapped off. From there, Ken and David, or Ken and his date, would be able to see that Larry was alone.

He reached beneath the seat for the blanket he’d brought. Quickly, he covered his open hand with it and held it up beside his shoulder as if it were a girl’s head, Cindy sitting very close. He watched his rearview mirror, unable to see the Ford’s interior. Maybe it wasn’t even them. But he knew it was. He sat, hoping they wouldn’t get out, even bent his arm as if she were leaning to whisper something in his ear. Maybe kiss him. When his biceps began to tire a few minutes later, he reached and pulled the armrest from the seat and rested his elbow there, barely aware of the movement on the screen.

In his mirror the Ford’s interior lit Ken and David’s faces as Ken opened the driver’s side door. He got out and stood. Maybe he was just going for popcorn. Still, Larry reached around, under the steering column, his wrist at a painful angle, and started the car. Ken was coming forward now, getting close, angling his head to see. Larry pulled the shifter down to drive and lurched away, steering with his left hand, straining to keep his right up, the blanket steady, as if he and Cindy had decided they’d had enough of the movie, leaving Ken standing in his empty spot.

HE ARRIVED AT the road fifteen minutes before eleven, hoping to see the boyfriend. Maybe recognize his car. He had an idea it was an older fellow. Her mother worked a late shift in the tie factory on Fridays and wouldn’t be home until midnight, but, in case Miss Shelia got off early, he rode past their mailboxes and parked farther on, out of sight. He sat with the windows down, hoping the cigarette and beer smell had dissipated, watching for lights.

At eleven, he sat straight in his seat. They’d be along any minute now.

But at eleven-fifteen, no car. The half moon blackened the trees in front of it and rose yellow and cocked in the sky. No car at eleven-thirty. Maybe the boyfriend had dropped her off early. But wouldn’t Cindy want to sustain the illusion of her date with Larry? He cranked the car and, lights on low, drove slowly by the turnoff, expecting to see her standing by the mailboxes with her purse.

She wasn’t there. He drove by again and parked in his same spot, growing more worried.

At ten to midnight he got out of the car and stood at the edge of the highway and listened, trying to hear over the crickets and frogs. Looked in one direction, the other. Overhead, an airplane winked across the sky, the moon’s high cratered cheek centered in its spackling of stars. He stepped into the road to better see. Maybe they’d had an accident. How would he explain that to Cecil? To his father? Maybe, a dreadful thought, they already knew, the police having called.

At ten past twelve he began to hope he’d missed them somehow. Maybe the boyfriend had snuck in with his lights off, afraid Cecil might be lurking about. Larry cranked the Buick and clicked the headlights on low beam again and eased onto the pavement and turned off at the familiar dirt road that snaked past the Walker house and ended up, a mile farther, at Larry’s house. He drove, hoping Cindy might pop out of the trees, angry at him, Where the hell you been? I said eleven! Cecil’s gone kick my ass and yours, too. But no mad girl in his lights. Just the dusty diorama of trees hung with vines and slashed with leaves and the bobwire fence casing off the woods from the ditch.

He sat for five more minutes, fingers drumming the steering wheel. His own parents would likely be worried, too. He was more than an hour late. Because he’d never had a date, he didn’t know if they’d sit up and wait or what. He imagined his mother’s strained face. How had the date been? He turned the lights off and began to crunch over the gravel, the crickets as he passed silencing and then starting up after he’d gone. Maybe Cindy was someplace between the road and house. Maybe drunk and passed out. He slowed again, barely moving now, afraid of running her over.

Afraid of alerting Cecil, too. Maybe he’d have already passed out. Likely they were both there, him and Cindy, and Larry was working himself up for nothing. Certainly there was an explanation. Why did he have to make such a commotion out of this? He eased, lights off, closer to the house.

Finally, the last turn before the yard would open out. Fingers still drumming. He knew what he had to do. He had to go up and see if she was home safe.

When he rounded the curve the house was dark. He slowed, thinking about that. Were they all asleep? Wouldn’t they leave a light on for Cindy’s mother? She wasn’t home yet because he didn’t see her car. He touched the brakes and reached for the gear, about to shift into reverse, when Cecil appeared from the darkness like a torch ignited, filling his window with hot boozy breath and anger and sweaty arms.

“Where you been, you little fuck?”

His hands grabbing Larry’s neck, his shirt collar, Larry fighting the arms, the car lurching forward, his feet stabbing at the brakes. Cecil held on to him and he slammed the gear up into park just as he felt himself pulled out the window, the door lock caught in his belt loop, snapping off.

Cecil had him by the shirtfront, against the car.

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” Larry said, “I thought she was home.”

“Thought she was home?” He slung Larry around, into the dirt. “Why the fuck would she be home?”

“I let her out,” Larry said, scrabbling away.

But here Cecil came, straddling him now, both on the ground, Cecil growling, “Dropped her off where?” and Larry trying to speak but the man’s hands were around his neck and he might, he thought later, have been strangled if car lights—Miss Shelia, home from work—hadn’t suddenly found them there, wrestling in the dirt.

HALF AN HOUR later the sheriff arrived.

Before that, before Larry’s parents drove up in Carl’s truck, Miss Shelia, her hands shaking, had put on coffee. Larry sat centered on their threadbare sofa, his first time, some part of him realized, inside this house. It was low and dark, uneven floors. A small television with a rabbit ear antenna and the channel knob missing. Ashtrays with mounds of cigarette butts and a few framed class photos of Cindy on the wall. He tried not to look at them. Waiting for the Otts, Miss Shelia had busied herself sweeping the floor and collecting empty beer cans while Cecil sat across from Larry in a kitchen chair, glaring at him and smoking one cigarette after another. He’d switched from beer to coffee, Miss Shelia hissing, “You don’t want to be drunk when the law gets here.”

The sheriff, with an air of getting to the bottom of things, out of uniform and wearing no socks under his house shoes, sat by Larry, ignoring the parents, asking him, patiently, exactly what had happened. Said don’t leave nothing out. Larry told how she’d wanted to be dropped off in the woods, aware of the adults watching him. When he got to the part about the drive-in, he skipped using the blanket as her head and said he’d decided to leave during the second movie. Because he’d sworn not to, he didn’t mention her being pregnant. The sheriff put his hands on his knees and sat back. Teenagers, he said. Wasn’t no point in getting all worked up. She was probably out with some boy and would show up later that night. Was such behavior beyond the girl? No, her mother admitted, it wasn’t. Teenagers, the sheriff repeated. Well, why didn’t everybody just go on home. If she hadn’t come back by morning, give him a call, he’d look into it.

That seemed to satisfy everyone but Cecil, who stormed outside cursing, but when Larry stood to go the sheriff said, “What a minute, buddy.”

Larry stopped and felt the man reach into his back pocket and pull out his lockblade knife.

“All boys carry em,” Larry said.

“Well,” said the sheriff. “Let’s see what tomorrow brings.” He put the knife in his pocket.

Tomorrow did not bring Cindy home. Nor the next day or the one after that. Word got out that she had disappeared on a date with Larry, and then, Monday at school, Ken and David told about seeing Larry and Cindy screeching off. The sheriff was notified. Because Larry hadn’t told that part, his story seemed flawed, revised, and on Tuesday he found himself, along with his father, riding to the sheriff’s department for the first of many “talks.” Here, the sheriff growing stern, Carl angry, Larry confessed to how she said she’d been pregnant. Why hadn’t he said this the other night, the sheriff wanted to know. Because I swore I wouldn’t, he said.

The three rode in the sheriff’s car, Larry in the backseat, caged off from the front, no handles on the doors, to the spot in the woods where he’d dropped her off, the sheriff asking Larry did he see any tracks that would verify a car had been waiting. Did he see a cigarette butt? A rubber? Anything to help prove Larry wasn’t lying? No, no, no, no. Well, the sheriff said, hadn’t Larry worried about leaving a young girl alone in the woods? What kind of a gentleman would do that? Out of answers, Larry was led back to the car.

Cindy’s friends were asked to volunteer information about her, who she might’ve left with, where she could’ve gone, but nobody knew anything, everyone swearing she wasn’t seeing anybody. Meanwhile, deputies looked for Cindy in Carl’s woods, pulled by hounds, kicking through leaves, wading the creek, searching other parts of the county as well, dragging lakes, interviewing Larry over and over, sending out bulletins, nailing up posters. Larry never returned to school, the weeks stretching into months, and when even the most fervent optimists were beginning to doubt she’d run away, after Silas had left for Oxford, Larry spent his hours in his room, reading. His father switched from beer to whiskey and drank more and more, starting earlier in the day as his business dwindled, fewer and fewer customers each month until the cars that trickled in were the cars of strangers, strangers who found a disheveled drunk sitting in the office smoking cigarettes, a man who’d stopped talking to his son period and quit telling stories. Larry’s mother stopped going to church and stayed home, minding her chickens, often standing in the pen gazing into space or at the kitchen sink in her yellow gloves, hands sunk in gray dishwater, looking out the window. Their lives had stopped, frozen, as if in a picture, and the days were nothing more than empty squares on a calendar. In the evening the three of them would find themselves at the table over a quiet meal no one tasted, or before the television as if painted there, the baseball game the only light in the room, its commentators’ voices and the cracks of bats and cheers the only sound, that and the clink of Carl’s ice.

Larry wouldn’t remember, almost a year later, whose idea it was, his going to the army. But because Cindy’s body had never been recovered, because no trace had been found, not a hair, a spot of blood, a thread from her short skirt, and despite most of the county’s belief that he’d raped and killed her, Larry had been allowed to board the bus in Fulsom, his mother receding in the window as he sat with his duffle bag and crew cut and rode across the bottom of the state away from Fulsom then north to Hattiesburg for basic training. The army recruiter had informed his commander of his situation and all agreed, should evidence occur, that he would be returned to stand trial. They’d keep their eye on him.

In the bus he saw his face reflected in the window and reached up, took off his glasses. He looked thinner without them and left them on the seat when he arrived at Camp Shelby.

There, he found that the anonymity of army life fit him, basic training where he lost twenty pounds, the bland food, the busy hours. When assignment time came, a sergeant asked him what his talents were and Larry said he didn’t have any. The man asked, well, what did his daddy do. Larry said, “He’s a mechanic.” The sergeant wrote something on a form and mumbled, “If it’s good enough for him, son, it’s good enough for you.” Which was how Larry found himself in the motor pool among engine blocks hanging from chains and upraised hoods and good-natured city boys with cigarettes in their uniform pockets. Larry smiled at their jokes but kept to himself, in his bunk, in the mess hall, alone over his clean work station handling wrenches, ratchets, screwdrivers, and pliers that felt and weighed the same as his father’s had, that smelled and gleamed the same, his year-long apprenticeship as a mechanic in this army barracks where Jeeps and trucks came in an endless line, Private First Class Larry Ott, Serial Number US 53241315, not so disinclined as his father had claimed, emerging a certified mechanic. With his duffle and a shopping bag filled with paperbacks, thinner in his uniform, he was transferred to Jackson, Mississippi, this new part of his life seeming not so much like another chapter in a novel as a different dream in the same night’s sleep.

Each time he went home on furlough—Christmas, Thanksgiving—he found his parents both older and stranger, his mother forgetful of where the dustpan was, how the gas stove worked. Larry was somehow taller than the father who couldn’t seem to look at him, always out of the house, working, though his shop was as empty those days as it would be after Larry took it over, after Carl, who passed out every night in his chair by the television, finally ran his truck off the road into a field on his way home one summer’s evening and went through the windshield and broke his neck, the overturned truck barely damaged, still running perfectly when it was found. Larry was called in to his captain’s office near the end of his third year of service to hear the news. Honorably discharged, he was moved shortly thereafter back home where all agreed—the new sheriff, the chief investigator, and the lieutenant in charge of Larry’s unit—that he should care for his mother.

In Chabot, Silas was still gone. And still no Cindy. She hadn’t returned, and no hunter, no lumberjack, had stumbled upon her bones, no hound had nosed them up. Cecil and Shelia Walker had moved, he didn’t know where, and the old house without them seemed to have given up, ended a brave stand, sagging with the relief of vacancy, weeds sprouting through the steps, privet over the windows and kudzu vines slithering around the porch posts. The NO TRESPASSING sign someone had nailed on the door had begun to fade.

For years, after Larry had signed his mother into River Acres, he would wake each morning to the faraway growl of power saws cutting down trees on the acres he’d been forced to sell, the shriek of back-up alarms, the grumble of log trucks trundling the muddy ruts to deliver their quivering wet hardwood to the mill’s teeth. Soon the land he had walked as a boy, the trees he’d climbed, had been winnowed to three hundred acres, the land surrounding it clear-cut, replanted with loblolly pines that rose quickly toward the sky and would, he knew, be ready for harvest in another fifteen years. Days, he waited for customers, his shop more a tradition than a business. Evenings, on his porch or by his fire, he read. Nights he spent alone, seldom thinking of his mother’s old prayer, the one where she asked God to send him a special friend. Until it was answered.