“The old woman wants me to invite you to dinner tonight,” Joe Bim says.
“I appreciate it,” Albert replies.
“You never heard no more from those bikers, huh?”
/> “Why would I?”
Joe Bim pinches out the end of his cigarette, field-strips the paper, and watches the tobacco blow away in the wind. “Got a call two days ago from Sand Point. The one with the red beard killed the other two, and an Indian woman for good measure. The three of them was drunk and fighting over the woman.”
“I’m not interested.”
“The killing got done with an 1894-model Winchester. Guess who it’s registered to? How’d they end up with your rifle, Albert?”
“Maybe they found it somewhere.”
“I think they stole it out of your house and you didn’t know about it. That’s why you didn’t report it stolen.” Joe Bim folds his hands and gazes at the hillside across the road and the wildflowers ruffling in the wind.
“They killed an innocent person with it?” Albert asks.
“If she was hanging with that bunch, she bought her own ticket. Show some humility for a change. You didn’t invent original sin.”
Albert starts to tell Joe Bim all of it—the attempt he made on the biker’s life, the deed the sheriff’s deputy had done to him when he was eighteen, the accidental death of his father, the incipient rage that has lived in his breast all his adult life—but the words break apart in his throat before he can speak them. In the silence he can hear the wind coursing through the trees and grass, just like the sound of rushing water, and he wonders if it is blowing through the canyon where he lives or through his own soul. He wonders if his reticence with Joe Bim is not indeed the moment of absolution that has always eluded him. He waits for Joe Bim to speak again but realizes his friend’s crooked smile is one of puzzlement, not omniscience, that the puckered skin on the side of his face is a reminder that the good people of the world each carry their own burden.
Albert feeds his dog and says a prayer for his wife. Then he drives down the dirt road with Joe Bim in a sunset that makes him think of gold pollen floating above the fields.
The Molester
He told all the kids to call him Frank. He had married into oil money, in this case a stone-deaf woman in the old Memorial District out by Rice University. When she died, Frank moved into a bachelor apartment with a swimming pool not far from the city park where Nick Hauser and I hung out during the summer of 1949. Frank drove a metallic-green Chevy convertible with a white top, rolled leather seats, and a polished walnut dashboard. In the late afternoon he would park it under shade trees and watch the kids playing on the softball diamond or working out on the chained-up sets of iron weights and the heavy bag in the lee of the park house.
Sometimes a bag of golf clubs was propped up in the backseat of Frank’s car. He was a hard-bodied, athletic man, perhaps forty, his skin sun-browned, his thinning black hair combed straight back on his head. He smoked gold-tipped cigarettes and lit them with a tiny leather-encased lighter. One time he showed the lighter to me and Mary Jo Scarlotti and two other girls; the girls’ shorts were rolled up high on their thighs, almost to their rumps. When the lighter was passed to me, Frank took it out of my hand and gave it to Mary Jo.
“I got that off a Jap colonel at Saipan,” he said.
“Did you kill him, Frank?” one of the other girls asked, her mouth turned up at the corner.
“Not me. I was in Intelligence,” he said, and winked behind his sunglasses.
Then he took the two other girls for a drive and left Mary Jo and me at the curb. “I’m glad you didn’t go with him,” I said.
Mary Jo had bongos that made my windpipe close up when I looked at them too long. “I think he’s nice,” she said.
The next day a new director showed up at the park house. Her name was Terry Anne and she was a magician at Ping-Pong, volleyball, and every kind of handicraft. She had thick, chestnut-colored hair and didn’t have to wear makeup to be pretty. She wore jeans and tennis shoes to work and smelled like strawberry shampoo when her office heated up in the afternoon. I found every excuse to go into Terry Anne’s office.
The first time she saw Frank unloading three junior high girls at the curb, she headed straight across the grass for his car. We could see her raise her finger in his face, her back stiff with anger, her mouth moving rapidly. Then she strode back to the park house, glancing back over her shoulder to ensure Frank was gone.
The next afternoon I saw Frank smoking a cigarette in the hot shade of the trees, not far from where Nick was laying it into the heavy bag. “Where’s Terry Anne?” he asked.
“Inside the park house,” I replied.
“You saw her yelling at me yesterday?”
I shrugged, my eyes downcast.
“Your name is Charlie, isn’t it?” he said. He smiled at the corner of his mouth.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m not a ‘sir.’ Listen, Charlie. Terry Anne’s a dyke. I tried to turn her around but didn’t have any success, know what I mean? That’s why she’s got it in for me. What’s your friend’s name, the guy on the bag?”