five

LARRY WOKE BEFORE his mother knocked. It was a Saturday, the first day of summer, school out and three long months of freedom ahead of him. He dressed quickly in the clothes he’d chosen the night before, an old T-shirt and blue jeans with the knees out, perfect for getting dirty. He stuck his lockblade knife in his back pocket and tied his sneakers and was down the hall and out the front door before anyone saw him. He hopped onto his bicycle where he’d leaned it by the porch and kicked away pedaling. He flew down the driveway through the trees, dodging puddles and watching for snakes. He passed the Walker place, Cecil on the porch with a cup of coffee and a cigarette that he raised. Larry waved back and kept going, skidding to a stop before the mailboxes, theirs and the Walkers’. Without dismounting he opened the little door and pulled out the letters and circulars; he got Cecil’s, too, glancing at it. Where Larry sometimes had mail, comic books or magazines, things he’d ordered, Cindy Walker never did. The Walkers usually only got junk.

Cecil was gone when he rode back by and he left their circulars on the porch. At home he laid his father’s mail on the kitchen table and took his seat. In a moment the back door closed and his mother came in the kitchen with several eggs in her apron.

“You scared me,” she said.

“Sorry.”

She began to lay the eggs on the counter and noticed the mail. “Did your funny books come?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Maybe Monday.”

Because it was warm, she was barefoot. She lit a match and touched it to the burner and a flame bloomed to life, smell of natural gas, piped from the big metal tank in the backyard, filled once a month by a truck.

“How was your breathing last night?” she asked, rinsing the eggs.

“Fine. Good.”

“Good.” She was opening drawers, lighting another burner. “You want fried?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Something banged in the back of the house and they exchanged a look. Then the television clicked on and the newscaster’s voice grew louder as Carl raised the volume, part of his morning ritual, watching the news and reading the mail while he ate.

A moment later he came into the kitchen tucking his green short-sleeved uniform shirt into his blue jeans, another sign of Saturday—the rest of the week he wore matching green pants. He often grumbled about having to work on Saturday, but Larry knew he preferred it to being here. And on any other Saturday Larry would have been anxious to go with him.

But not today.

“Good morning, Daddy,” he said, once a commercial came on, the television visible only from Carl’s end of the table.

His father was spreading the mail in front of him. “Morning.”

His mother appeared at Carl’s elbow with a ceramic coffeepot and poured his cup full.

“Thank you.” He reached for the sugar and poured a huge amount in.

She lingered at his elbow. “Honey?”

He sipped and noticed them both looking at him, the usual Saturday ritual, the two of them teaming up on him, asking without words if Larry would be able to go to the shop today.

Today, though, Larry was relieved when his father looked back at the letter in his hand and said, “Got a busy one, Ina. Two transmissions and a carburetor. He won’t do nothing but get in the way.”

Behind them, the frying pan on the stove began to sizzle.

“Okay, Daddy,” Larry said.

“Maybe next week,” said his mother. One thing Carl had made clear long ago, to both of them, was that no meant hell no from the get-go.

In a moment his mother set Larry’s eggs before him and he salted them and ate them quickly and his bacon, too. When he finished he felt his father’s eyes on his plate and said, “Can I be excused?”

“What you tell your momma?”

“Enjoyed it.”

“Go on.”

He went down the hall toward his room but heard his father call, “Hey, boy?”

He hurried back. “Yes, sir?”

“You stay outside today. Cut the grass.”

Which meant Don’t read all day.

“Yes, sir.”

He went down the hall and picked up the paper sack of trash, heavy with last night’s beer bottles, and carried it outside and put it in the back of his father’s truck, where Carl would throw it in his trash can at the shop.

HE WAS LUGGING the push mower out of the barn when Carl drove past in the red Ford and slowed to a stop, lowering his window.

“Don’t run over no sticks with that mower,” he called. “I just sharpened the blade.”

“Yes, sir.”

He waved as his father drove away, then turned to face their three-acre yard, the house centered in it and the barn back by the trees. Half a day’s work, at least.

“Dern,” he whispered.

Might as well get it done with. That way he could salvage the second half of the day and not get in trouble. He added gas to the mower and checked the oil. It cranked on his first pull and he began to push it along the edge of the driveway, shooting grass, small rocks, and mangled sticks out the side, glad again that school was over. Next year he’d go to Fulsom, the only public high school in the county.

As he pushed the mower, he thought how Alice’s car must have come from Carl, but Larry knew not to say more about it. He’d failed Carl before by not understanding that the black woman and her son had been their secret. He should have known that men do not discuss with their wives (or mothers) the business that is their own.

Since he’d given Silas his .22, he now carried a Model 94 lever-action .33 that, of all their guns, most closely resembled the .22. Though his mother couldn’t have named a difference if you’d lain the rifles side by side, his father would have noticed if Larry began to carry a gun without a lever, a pump shotgun, or one of the single-shot or automatic rifles.

For the past spring, whenever he’d been able to, Larry would race through the woods with this rifle, toward the cabin. Each time Silas would jump out with the .22, a good-natured ambush, Larry understanding that Silas would have been waiting for him no matter how long it took him to get there, the black boy always breaking into his big grin.

As it had grown warmer, as the school year had progressed, Silas had abandoned the coat and gloves from Larry and Larry saw he now wore better clothes, his mother (with her two jobs, a waitress in the Fulsom Diner and a cafeteria worker in the grocery store) buying them at the TG&Y. The boys would shoot their rifles, play mumblety-peg with Larry’s knife, play chase, war, cowboys and Indians, climb trees. With Silas on Larry’s bike, racing back and forth, doing wheelies, skidding, Larry ran along behind with his stick, looking for snakes sunning on the road. When they found one—a blacksnake, a hognose—Larry would pin its head to the dirt with the stick and grab the snake behind its neck, holding it as it wrapped itself around his wrist and shot out its tongue. Silas always kept his distance as Larry stuffed the snakes into the pillowcase he carried.

In April they began to fish in the creek on the other side of the cabin. In one of the rooms in their barn, Larry’s father had several rods and reels on nails on the wall, and a giant tackle box, and as long as he was careful, Larry was allowed to use the equipment.

As they walked, loaded down with rods and reels, the tackle box, their rifles, Silas asked if Larry was going out for baseball this year. Larry said he wasn’t, he’d never played, had never even considered it.

“How come?”

“I ain’t no good.”

At the creek’s widest point, he showed Silas how to bait a hook, throw the cork out, catch and clean a fish. How to use artificial bait, rubber worms, broke-back minnow, Snagless Sallys, silver spoons, plugs. But these were for bass, which were few in the creek and hard to catch, and so mostly they used corks and sinkers, for this was what the big gray catfish that sucked along the bottom of the creek preferred. Larry had tried to get Silas to take their first stringer of these fish home to his mother, several pounds, but Silas said he couldn’t.

“Why not?” Larry was sitting on the creek bank, watching his cork, the water roiling and bubbling as the fish pulled at the stringer. Silas, fascinated at what they’d hooked from the creek, raised the stringer to gape at the prehistoric faces, their wide mouths, flat heads.

“Why not?” Larry asked again.

“Momma. She say I ain’t supposed to play with you.”

“Why?”

Silas just shrugged. The catfish croaked, and Silas splashed them into the water. “What’s that?”

Larry smiled at him. “That’s how they talk.”

He pulled them up again.

“Careful of that long fin there,” Larry said. “It’ll stick you.”

Silas lowered his face to the catfish’s. “What you saying, Mr. Catfish?”

“Is it cause I’m white?” Larry asked.

“What?”

“Why your momma don’t want you to play with me?”

“I don’t know.”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“She just say, ‘Don’t you go near that boy.’ Made me promise I wouldn’t.”

“How come?”

“I done said I don’t know.”

Larry was puzzled. It had to be his color. What else could it be? He’d known his own father would disapprove. He would never tell Carl about the friendship, but wouldn’t it be different for Silas? Wouldn’t a black woman be happy her son had a white friend? They’d given them coats, a car. He’d assumed the anger that black folks felt was a reaction to white people’s attitude toward them. Yall started it. But if somebody white was willing to befriend somebody black, offer them gifts, even a place to live, shouldn’t the blacks be grateful?

“You ever tell her about that rifle?”

“Hell naw. I keep it hid.”

“How come?”

“Cause she’ll make me give it back.”

“I do need it back,” Larry said. “Fore my daddy goes looking for it. Here,” he said, offering his knife. “I’ll trade you this.”

“A knife for a gun?”

“Please?”

“Tell me one them stories,” Silas said.

He meant a Stephen King story. Larry had lent Silas books, but the black boy said he didn’t like reading, homework was enough. Weren’t lights in the cabin anyhow. Just an oil lamp and candles. A flashlight. Silas did, however, like to hear Larry describe the stories. Now he told about the one called “Trucks,” where a supernatural force has taken over all the trucks at an interstate exit (and presumably all over the world) and a bunch of people are trapped in a diner surrounded by murderous vehicles. Near the end the trucks start blowing their horns and one of the survivors recognizes that it’s Morse code.

Silas was threading a worm onto his treble hook. “What’s that?” Larry had described the dot-and-dash code, then told how the trucks were honking in Morse that somebody needed to fill them up with gas. The story ended with the people serving the trucks, taking turns filling them with gas, the guy telling the story looking up at two airplanes. “I hope to God,” he’d said, “that there are people in them.”

Silas had been watching the sky.

LARRY FINISHED THE grass just before noon, and for lunch his mother made him a potted meat and mayo sandwich with saltines on the side. He read a comic book at the table while he ate then drained his glass of Coke and thanked her and got his .33 from the gun cabinet in the hall and two boxes of cartridges and Stephen King’s short story collection Night Shift and, at the front door, called, “I’m going outside,” and let the screen door bang behind him, feeling her coming out behind him, watching him. As always, he headed toward Cindy’s house to throw her off, shoulder-strapped the Marlin and walked down along the road. Once around the bend he doubled back, went east.

Because Silas had started playing baseball at school, Larry worried that he was losing him. He’d invited him to his house once, and they’d played in the barn and Silas had cut the grass, but he knew the black boy wouldn’t do that again. Maybe he could take him back through the woods, toward Cindy’s house. She’d been his secret, but maybe it was time to share her.

Half an hour later he knelt at the edge of the woods, rifle unshouldered. From across the field he watched Silas standing on a pile of dirt he’d mounded behind the cabin. He looked back over his shoulder toward Larry, who ducked before he realized Silas was just checking an imaginary runner on first. Then he raised both his hands to his chest and kicked up one leg and fired a streak of gray toward the tree sixty feet away. Larry was impressed at the thwack the ball made when it bounced off the trunk and rolled back. Silas was already charging to scoop the baseball bare-handed out of the weeds and pretend to throw it back in Larry’s direction, as fluid a move as an Atlanta Brave on the television.

His mother’s car was nowhere in sight, which meant she was working. Around the cabin the field that had been so dead and gray in winter was now greening, butterflies doddering over the goldenrod and orb spiders centered in their webs like the pupils of eyes.

Back on the mound, Silas checked runners on first and second before he pitched and then he did it all again. Larry sat back against a tree and picked beggar’s lice off his socks and pants. He’d hear the thump the ball made then maybe a grunt or hoot from Silas but soon he’d opened Night Shift to one of his favorite stories, “The Mangler.”

When he looked up, Silas was standing over him, his chest rising and falling. “You spying?”

Larry closed his book. He saw the cat a few feet behind Silas and realized it had probably smelled him and come over, Silas following it.

“No.” Larry shrugged and got to his feet and looked down at the rifle. “I just come to see you but you was busy throwing.”

Silas watched him. He still held his baseball and Larry wondered did he steal it from school.

Silas looked back toward his mound, the tree. “I bet I can throw seventy, eighty miles a hour,” he said.

“Yeah,” Larry said. “It looked real fast from here.”

“What you reading?”

Larry held the book up. Its cover showed a human hand with eyes in the palm and on the fingers. Some of the hand and fingers were wrapped in gauze like a mummy.

Silas said. “Is it scary?”

Larry told him about “The Mangler,” describing in great detail the scene when the detectives go to visit the girl who cuts her finger on the laundry machine. If the detectives’ far-fetched theory is accurate, a freakish confluence of events caused the machine nicknamed “the Mangler” to become possessed by a demon. The last piece in the puzzle, Larry told Silas, is the blood of a virgin. So the cops finally ask the girl: “Are you a virgin?” “I’m saving myself for my husband,” she tells them. By then it’s too late, and the Mangler is coming for them all.

Silas frowned. “What’s a virgin?”

“Somebody that hadn’t ever had intercourse.”

“Intercourse? You mean somebody ain’t never been fucked?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me another one.” Silas said. By now they were walking, the rifle strapped to Larry’s back, Silas grinding his baseball into his palm.

He told about “Jerusalem’s Lot” and told how it was a precursor to King’s novel Salem’s Lot.

“That’s the one I was reading that first day I met you. When we picked yall up. You remember?”

“I don’t remember no book.”

Larry shrugged.

“Where we going anyway?” Silas asked. “I don’t want to go to your house.”

They were in the woods a quarter mile from Larry’s barn, skirting it and heading toward the Walker place.

“I want to show you something,” Larry said. “Somebody.”

“Who?”

“You’ll see.”

“A girl?”

“A real pretty one.”

“Who is she?”

“Our closest neighbor,” Larry said. “Her stepdaddy, Cecil, he’s a funny man, always doing crazy things.”

“Crazy how?”

Larry stopped, Silas behind him, and began to tell about the New Year’s Eve a couple of years before when the Walkers had come over and Carl had brought a bunch of fireworks. Trying to pause when his father did, Larry told how the mothers were in the house talking and cooking a chicken and Larry, Cindy, Carl, and Cecil were outside with the fireworks. Both men were drunk and it was one of the happiest memories Larry had, yellow and red smoke bombs, Roman candles, even Cindy, usually so aloof, laughing as Cecil goofed off and held his fizzing bottle rockets in his hand, one or two exploding before he threw them, which had everybody laughing as he shook his hand, burnt black and smoking. He had a bundle sticking out of his coat pocket, fuse ends up, and he’d quick-draw them and light them and fling them out. Carl wasn’t shooting, just watching from the porch steps with his beer and cigarette.

Cecil lit another with a kitchen match and let it sizzle. Cindy was a few feet away, fourteen years old and with pigtails, squatting in blue jeans and a sweater beside her Coke bottle holding a cigarette lighter to a rocket of her own.

“Hey, Cin,” Cecil said, and when she looked up he flicked the lit bottle rocket at her.

She shrieked and jumped aside as it zipped past her and blew up in the field.

“Cecil you mean,” she said as he quick-drew another and lit it, flicking it at her.

“Dance!” he yelled, like a gunslinger shooting at her feet.

“You gone deafen that girl,” Carl called. “Or blind her one.”

Larry stepped back, behind Cecil, and watched as he lit another and let it fly at her.

This time it did hit her as she ran away from him, out into the darkness. It exploded against her back and she screamed, Carl starting down off the steps and Larry heading out to see if she was okay. In a panic, glancing back toward the house, Cecil dropped his match. Cindy was crying and the women came out onto the porch just in time to see that she was fine; it had bounced off her and exploded in the grass.

But the match Cecil dropped had landed in his coat pocket where the bottle rockets were, him so drunk he just looked around and said, “Something’s burning.”

“It’s your coat, Cecil,” Larry said, pointing.

Cecil raised his arm and looked down as the first bottle rocket hissed out of his pocket into the air, bang. Then another. He flung his arm back and yelled as another flew out, and another, his coat ablaze now, the sound Larry heard his father laughing as Cecil began to run, yelling, beating at his coat and more rockets taking off. Then Cindy was laughing and Larry was and even the women, Shelia covering her mouth with both hands as Cecil wrenched off the coat still spraying its fireworks and began to stomp it, laughing himself now, falling, Larry laughing now, telling it.

But not Silas.

Larry had heard Carl tell the story before and have the men at his shop howling, Cecil hardest of all, in stitches, nodding that yep, it was true, he’d burnt up his own damn coat, plus got in Dutch with the old lady, but Silas never broke a smile.

“Sound more mean than crazy,” he said. “I don’t know if I want to go see a man like that.”

Larry tugged his sleeve. “Come on.”

As they got closer to the edge of the woods that bordered the Walker property, Larry put a finger to his lips and knelt and began to creep. Behind, Silas did the same. They were coming up an incline and just before the house came in sight Larry lay flat on his belly. Silas hesitated, as if he didn’t want to mess up his clothes, but finally lay alongside Larry and together they peered out of the woods. Fifty yards away, the Walker house was a dirty, uneven rectangle with a series of ill-planned additions covered in black tar paper curling at the edges. Between two of the rooms was a rudimentary deck and here was where Cindy often sunbathed.

Today, though, Cecil stood on the deck with Carl himself.

“That’s your daddy,” Silas said. “What’s he doing there?”

Larry had no idea.

Carl was smoking a cigarette and talking the way he did at his shop and drinking a bottle of beer, Cecil listening. He had sawyered in the mill until he hurt his back and now he got a small disability, which he used for beer and cigarettes.

“Let’s go,” Larry whispered. He began to slide back.

“Hang on.” Silas grabbed his arm. “We snuck this far. Maybe that girl’ll come out.”

They waited, huddled on the ground. Larry caught a word now and again as they matched each other beer for beer and seemed fairly drunk when Cindy finally burst out onto the deck.

Larry froze in the leaves.

They watched as Cindy stood on the porch wrapped in a small towel with another one turbaned on her head. She was arguing with Cecil, one arm waving in the air and the other clenching her towel at her chest.

She raised her voice. “Momma said I could go!”

Her mother, Larry knew, worked evenings at the tie factory over in east Fulsom.

“What you say her name was?” Silas whispered. “I seen her at school.”

“Cindy.”

She was getting madder on the deck, raising her voice.

Cecil leaned over and nudged Carl and reached out and tugged at Cindy’s towel. She slapped Cecil’s hand but he held on and pulled harder, Carl laughing, rising from his seat on the steps to stand leaning against the rail, a better view, more cleavage, half her bosom showing.

“Cecil!” Cindy shrieked. “Let go! I’ll tell Momma!”

He murmured something, clinging to the towel. He winked at Carl who was scratching his cheek and taking a long pull from his beer, Cindy’s towel inching up her thigh and down her chest as she slapped at Cecil’s hand.

Silas was out of the leaves and halfway across the yard, brushing dirt from his knees, before Larry realized he was gone from his side. Striding away, he seemed taller than he had when they’d met.

Still frozen, Larry watched Silas walk up to the two drunk white men on the porch, both speechless at his appearance.

“Yall leave that girl alone,” he said.

Cecil let go of Cindy and she cinched up her towel and stood watching the black boy down in their yard, as speechless as everybody else, then she turned and went inside, the door slamming behind her.

The noise startled Cecil. “Who you, boy?”

But Silas was walking, around the deck and house, heading for the road.

“Wait,” Carl was saying. “Hey, boy!” He came down the steps with his bottle and circled the house but Silas had sprinted away, gone for good.

Larry began to inch down the land in the rustling leaves like a reptile and lay breathing hard at the bottom. He was about to rise with his rifle and trudge home when, above him, Carl stepped into the tree line. He stood gazing about, maybe looking to see were there more black boys in the woods, and Larry lay flat, thankful for his camouflage. Carl kinked his hip and unzipped his fly and reached into his pants. Larry looked away as his father hosed out piss that crackled in the dry leaves like a fire. When he finished he stood a moment.

“Hey, Carl!”

It was Cecil.

“Any more natives down yonder? Don’t get stobbed by no spear.”

When Larry opened his eyes his father was gone from the top of the hill.

HE FOUND SILAS flinging his baseball at a stout magnolia and fielding the returns.

“Thanks for helping her,” he said.

Silas wound up and threw into the tree. Instead of fielding, he let the ball die in the weeds. “You always spying on people,” he said.

“I don’t spy.”

“You ever take that girl on a date?”

Larry didn’t answer.

“You wasn’t gone help her.”

“I wanted to.”

Silas watched him a moment, then got his ball and began to walk toward home and Larry followed. It was cooler in the woods and they crunched over the leaves and ducked branches. At one point when the brush cleared Silas sprinted ahead and turned, still running, and pivoted and threw the baseball back toward Larry. Larry reached for it but closed his eyes and missed and it bounced behind him and disappeared.

“Shit,” Silas said.

He hurried past Larry and began looking for the ball.

LARRY KNEW SOMETHING was wrong when he walked in the back door, on his way to place the .33 in its green velvet slot in the gun cabinet in the hall.

Carl sidestepped out of the kitchen to face him.

“Come here,” he said.

Larry willed himself to walk toward his father, who seized him by his sleeve and dragged him into the living room. He took the rifle from Larry.

“Where’s my Marlin?”

Larry looked down at his hands.

“Get it,” his father said.

Larry didn’t move.

“Boy.”

“I ain’t got it, Daddy.”

“ ‘Ain’t got it, Daddy.’ ”

“Yes, sir. I mean no, sir.”

Larry’s mother was behind them now. “Carl,” she said.

Carl held up his finger to her and looked at his son. “Where’s my dad-blame rifle, boy?”

Larry was kneading his fingers. “I let my friend use it.”

“Friend,” his father said. “I didn’t know you had none.”

“Carl—”

“Ina Jean, this boy’s subcontracting out my firearms. I want to know who it is. Well?”

Larry didn’t answer.

“I ain’t asking again.”

“That boy we picked up.”

“What boy?”

“Silas.”

“Silas,” his father said. “Silas that nigger boy?”

“Carl.”

His father moved his face so close Larry could smell beer and cigarettes, and in that moment he knew that Carl had seen him at the bottom of the hill. “Just a dad-blame minute. You give my gun to your nigger friend?”

“Carl, stop it.”

He looked at his wife pointing her finger.

“Carl Ott, I said stop it right now.”

His father let Larry’s sleeve go. “Maybe you right. You want to have em over for dinner after church?”

“You’re—” she said, “you’re just—”

“Tomorrow,” Carl told Larry. “Tomorrow first thing you get your ass out there where they’re squatting and get my god dang Marlin back. Is that clear, boy?”

“Carl, your language.”

“Ina Jean, this is not the time.”

“Then when is? How long they gone live there, Carl?”

“Shut your mouth.”

“It ain’t proper.”

Larry had wedged himself into the corner behind his father’s chair.

“Proper,” his father said.

“If they don’t leave,” his mother said, “then me and Larry are. Tonight.”

For a moment it seemed his father might laugh, then he just shook his head. “Don’t tempt me,” he said.

“Carl,” she whispered.

He flapped a hand at Larry. “When you able to come out of the corner—”

“Carl.”

“Just get the gun back,” he said through his teeth. “Whether you’re here tomorrow or not.”

He went up the hall to the front and banged opened the screen door and went onto the porch and the screen door closed slowly in his wake.

“Carl,” she called, following him, peering through the screen. “Where you going? ”

From behind the chair, Larry couldn’t hear what he said.

THAT NIGHT, AS she had every night of his life, his mother came into his room and sat on his bed. He was facing the wall and didn’t turn around, even when he felt her hand, its familiar odor of dish soap, rest on his shoulder.

“Larry?”

He didn’t answer.

“Son?”

During his attacks of asthma, she’d stayed up with him as he struggled to breathe—nights were worse—rubbing Vicks on his chest, and they’d prayed together for the asthma to go away. When her rooster began to crow he’d know the long nights were nearly over. In first grade he’d told her how he asked Shelly Salter to marry him, sent her a note with two boxes drawn at the bottom, check yes or no. She’d checked no. “Silly girl,” his mother had said, rubbing his chest. “Good-looking boy like you? If I wasn’t your mother I’d set my cap for you.” In second grade, the year he’d begun to stutter, he told her how the kids laughed at him and she’d prayed the stuttering would go away. It hadn’t. The asthma either. Both got worse. In the third grade the class read aloud and Larry dreaded reading days. When he stuttered the other boys laughed and his teacher thought he was doing it on purpose and fussed at him. “It’s my reading day tomorrow,” he’d say as his mother sat on his bed. “Lord,” she would pray, “thank You for Your grace. Please help Larry read good tomorrow, take that stuttering away, and please help his breathing tonight, and send him a special friend, Lord, one just for him.” Eventually the prayers worked, but on a delayed schedule. “God’s timing,” his mother said, “is His own.” The stuttering stopped late in the fourth grade, almost overnight, and only rarely recurred. His asthma subsided gradually, gone entirely by the end of the summer before sixth grade. And then Silas had come. A friend. Silas, who was the first answered prayer he couldn’t tell her about, knowing that the chilly mother who’d given Silas and Alice Jones those coats would return, that she would do something to make them leave the cabin in the woods. Now her prayer had become, “Dear Lord, thank You for Your grace, and thank You for healing Larry’s stuttering and his asthma. Please send him a special friend, one just for him.”

Was continuing to pray for something you already had wrong? He’d even begun to worry his stuttering, his asthma, might return.

“Son?”

He was still against the wall and she took her hand from his shoulder.

He didn’t answer.

She sat for a while longer. He breathed the smell of his room, the dust behind his bed.

“Larry?”

Finally she sighed and he felt her hand on his shoulder again. “Dear Lord,” she prayed, “thank You for Your grace. Thank You for healing Larry’s stuttering and his asthma. Please,” she said, and he heard that she was trying not to cry, “please, God, send him a special friend. One just—one just for him. Amen,” she said, and left.

WHEN HE WOKE in the morning his teeth were gritty. He’d gone to sleep without brushing. His mother was in the kitchen cooking breakfast, as if nothing had happened. Through his window he saw Carl’s truck gone and wondered if he’d stayed at Cecil’s all night.

He slipped outside without eating breakfast and trotted all the way to Silas’s with the book in his back pocket. From his spot behind a tree, he saw Silas’s mother’s car parked in front of the cabin and waited until she came out of the house in her Piggly Wiggly uniform and a hairnet. An old cat that had been sleeping in the sun on the car hood rose and stretched as she scratched behind its ears. Then she shooed it off and got in the car, an old Chevy Nova with rust spots and no hubcaps. She turned its engine over a few times but it finally started and she backed up, the cat sitting in the dirt road watching.

Presently Silas came out and hopped off the porch and began to throw his baseball. He had a glove now, somehow. Larry came out of the woods and walked up to where Silas stood waiting.

“Hey,” Larry said.

“Hey.”

Larry looked around. Then he thrust out his hand. “I brought you this.”

Night Shift.

“I know you don’t like to read, but these are all short stories, some just a few pages, so maybe you’d like to try em.”

Silas popped his ball into his glove and took the book and looked at it.

“I need the .22 back,” Larry said.

“How come?”

“I just do. Please, Silas.”

“Tell me how come. You got a lot of em. I ain’t got but one.”

“I told you. I want it back.”

“No. We need it.”

“It’s my daddy’s.”

“ ‘It’s my daddy’s,’ “ Silas mocked.

Larry had a lockblade knife in the right back pocket of his jeans, and he slipped a finger into that pocket knowing he’d never use the knife, suddenly even having it was a disadvantage.

“You got—” Silas said then stopped. He looked past Larry toward the trees, and Larry followed his eyes, knowing what he would see.

It was Carl with a bottle of bourbon, walking toward them. “Hell,” he yelled, “I followed you, boy. Just right behind you, you never seen me. Not once. Drunk I followed you, boy.” He stumbled but came on. “You ain’t got the slightest idea what’s around you, you and your monster books. In the olden days you’d a been dead a long time ago. Some Indian cutting your throat or some gook with a grenade. You got it easy. Momma’s boy reading the livelong day. Watch your cartoons, play with your dolls, read your funny books. But you can’t unscrew a god dang bolt to save your life, can’t charge a dad blame battery. And here when it comes to knuckles, you can’t even get your own daddy’s gun back from the boy that stole it.”

He’d arrived before them and looked down at Silas. “You don’t like that do you, boy?”

Silas folded his arms over his chest, the glove in his right hand. He wouldn’t look at Carl.

“Answer me, boy.”

“Naw.”

“Naw, sir.”

“Naw, sir.”

“Why not?”

Now he looked Carl in the face. “Cause I ain’t stole nothing.”

“Well, if you ain’t stole nothing then don’t be offended.” He took a long pull from his whiskey and screwed the lid back on and wiped his lips with his fingers. “And if you ain’t stole nothing I’ll take it all back.”

He looked from one boy to the other. “Well now,” he said. “Peers like we got us a dispute between the races, here.” He looked at Silas. “How old are you, boy?”

“Fourteen.”

“Tell me who your daddy is.” He waited. “I ain’t gone ask you again.”

“He dead.”

“Dead! Well, ain’t that sad. And he didn’t leave you no gun? Ain’t that one of a daddy’s duties? Leave his boy a firearm?

“Tell you boys what.” Carl walked over to the tree and placed his hand on its trunk, scuffed from Silas’s baseball, and eased himself down until he sat at its base with his legs crossed.

“So. Yall both want the rifle. You remember in the Bible? Story of King Solomon? Wisest man ever? Two women come before him with a baby both claiming it. Know what he says? Says cut that sum bitch in two, give each woman half.” Carl mimed sawing through a baby and giving Larry one side, Silas the other, all the while talking. “The one woman says, ‘Good, do it,’ and the other says, ‘No, don’t kill that youngun. She can have it.’ And boom, mystery solved. What I’m getting at here, boys, is that yall have put me in the position of Solomon. I got to slice me a baby.”

“I’ll get the gun,” Silas said.

“Don’t be so hasty, boy,” Carl said, unscrewing the lid. “I just need me one of them lightbulbs to go off over my head. Then we can figure this out. Wait—” He coughed and wiped the back of his hand over his mouth. “I got it. Yall got to fight it out. Man to man. White to colored. Whichever one of yall wins gets the gun.”

At first Silas folded his arms and turned to go, but Carl said if he did he’d go tell his mother, that when she came home tired from her two shifts she’d find Carl Ott waiting inside the house, a mite drunker, too.

“Fight,” Carl said.

Neither boy spoke.

“Now Larry here’s a little older, but on the girly side, so I figure it’s even.”

Silas said, “You can’t make me.”

“Oh I can’t?”

“Naw.”

“Naw, sir. If yall don’t fight,” Carl said, stripping off his belt, which fell from his fist like a snake unrolling, “I’ll whoop you both.”

Carl started forward with the belt back and Silas came at Larry and pushed him, not too hard, and Carl stepped away, crouching like a handler at a cockfight. When Larry didn’t push back Silas pushed again and Carl yelled, “Fight,” and Silas pushed a third time and this time Larry grabbed him in a halfhearted hug around Silas’s middle. Silas brought his knee up in Larry’s gut and Larry let go and fell, his belly on fire, his breath lost, grateful for that, otherwise he’d be crying.

“Get up,” Carl said.

He rolled over.

“He down,” Silas said.

“Get your pansy behind up, boy,” Carl said. He came forward swinging the belt and popped Larry’s rump with it.

Larry barely felt it over the shame swarming his cheeks. He saw his hands in the dirt as they pushed up. Silas had retreated a few steps. He crouched, ready, when Larry charged, and sidestepped and tripped him and fell on his back and they were wrestling on the ground, dull thuds in the dust, cloth tearing, grunts. From above he heard Carl telling them to bite if they want to, it’s allowed, kneeing in the nuts, allowed, kidney punches, rabbit punches, check, check, eye gouging, go ahead, fight dirty, the whole time swigging from his bottle, until finally Silas had Larry facedown in the dirt. When the dust passed it was over. A matter of seconds.

“Let-let-let go,” Larry said, his voice muffled.

“Looks like you won yourself a rifle, boy,” Carl said.

“Let me-me-me-me-me uh-uh-up,” Larry said again, louder, a note of panic.

Silas tightened his grip.

“La-la-la-la-listen at the little stuttering baby,” Carl said.

“Quit it Sssssilas!” he cried. “Ple-ple-ple-please.”

Silas held on.

“You,” Larry burbled, “you n-n-n-nigger.”

Silas let him go and rose. He backed up with his hands open.

Larry got to his knees, brushing dirt from his face, spitting. Tears were falling off his chin now, dripping into the dirt on his shirt. He stood to face Silas, and Silas looked different than Larry had ever seen him. His eyes now flashed the same fierceness the other black boys at school had, that the girl Carolyn had. He was already sorry but knew it was too late.

Because here came Silas and Larry saw that Silas was fixing to hit him, now on his own. Was coming around with his left hand and Larry waited for it, closing his eyes, and then Larry’s head popped and the world blared with hot white noise and spots of light. When he opened his eyes he was facing another direction. His knees had buckled and he opened and closed his mouth, tasting blood, sorrier yet for what he’d called Silas and seeing, through his flooded vision, Night Shift facedown in the dirt. Somewhere behind him he heard their voices and looked back to a world that would never be the same.

Carl had dropped his bottle and begun to fall, hugging Silas for balance, the two dancing weirdly through the bitterweed toward the house, Silas fighting to get away, nearly crying himself as he said, “Let me go, Mr. Ott, please,” and Carl slurring something in his ear that made Silas bat his hands away. He broke free and sprinted toward the far woods and Larry was left alone, on the ground, in the weeds, with his father.