“What's with Alf?”
“You're her father. She associates you with perfection.”
I chipped at the weeds with the corner of the hoe. The shaft felt hard and dry and full of sharp edges in my hands.
“Moleen's the problem, Dave. Not Sonny,” Bootsie said.
“What?”
“You think he's a hypocrite because he left the black woman in jail.
Now maybe you're wondering about yourself and Sonny Boy.”
I looked up at her, squinted through the sweat in my eyes. I wanted to keep thudding the hoe into the dirt, let her words go by me as though they were illogical and unworthy of recognition. But there was a sick feeling in my stomach.
I propped my hands on the hoe handle, blotted my eyes on my forearm.
“I'm a police officer,” I said. “I can't revise what happened. Sonny killed a man, Boots. He says he's killed others.”
“Then put it out of your mind,” she said, and went back inside the house.
Across the fence in my neighbor's field, I saw an owl swoop low out of the sun's last red light and, in a flurry of wings, trap and then scissor a field mouse in its beak. I could hear the mouse's voice squeaking helplessly as the owl flew into the sun.
Saturday morning I worked until noon at the bait shop, counting change twice to get it right, feigning interest in conversations I hardly heard. Then I put a Dr. Pepper and two bottles of beer in a paper bag, with two ham and onion sandwiches, called the sheriff, and asked him to meet me up the road by the four corners.
He walked down the bank in a pair of floppy khaki shorts with zipper pockets, a white straw cowboy hat, and a denim shirt with the sleeves cut off at the armpits. He carried a spinning rod that looked like it belonged to a child.
“Beautiful day for it,” he said, lifting his face in the breeze.
The boat dipped heavily when he got into the bow. The tops of his arms were red with sunburn and unusually big for a man who did administrative work.
I took us through a narrow channel into the swamp, cut the engine, and let the boat drift on its wake into a small black lagoon surrounded with flooded cypress. A deserted cabin, built on pilings, was set back in the trees. A rowboat that was grayish blue with rot was tied to the porch and half-submerged in the water.
The sheriff bit into a ham sandwich. “I got to admit this beats hitting golf balls in sand traps,” he said.
But he was an intelligent and perceptive man whose weekend humor served poorly the concern in his eyes.
Then I said it all, the way as a child I took my confused and labored thoughts into the confessional and tried to explain what both my vocabulary and loneliness made unexplainable. Except now, in order to undo a wrong, I was He said the word for me.
“Lying, Dave. We've never had that problem between us. I have a hard time dealing with this, podna.”
“The guy's grandiose, he's a huckster, he's got electrodes in his temples. But he's down on the wrong beef.”
“I don't give a goddamn what he is. You're violating your oath as a police officer. You're walking on the edges of perjury as well.”
I looked into the diffused green and yellow light on the rim of the lagoon. “The eye remembers after the fact sometimes,” I said.
“You saw the cut-down twelve-gauge under the guy's coat? You felt you were in danger?”
“I'll put my revised statement in your mailbox this afternoon.”
“You missed your calling over in Vietnam. You remember those monks who used to set themselves on fire? You were born for it, Dave.”
“Marsallus doesn't belong in prison. At least not for popping the guy in front of my house.”
The sheriff set his fishing rod across his thighs and pulled up the anchor without my asking him. He stared into the water and the black silt that swirled out of the bottom, then wiped his face with his hand as though he were temporarily erasing an inevitable conclusion from his thoughts.
Monday morning I was suspended from the department without