He stood on the porch in a pair of pin-striped overalls and a Clorox-stained purple T-shirt.
'My mother don't get off from work till nine,' he replied.
'Did you eat yet?'
'Some.'
'Like what?'
'Viennas and saltines.'
'I think we'd better get us a couple of those chicken-fried steaks at the café.'
'I knew you was gonna say that.'
It was dusk when we got to the café. We sat under a big electric fan by the window and ordered. Down the street, the sun was red behind the pines in the church yard. Pete had wet his hair and brushed it up on the sides so that it was as flat as a landing field.
'You have to be careful, bud. Don't talk to strangers, don't let some no-count fellow tell you he's a friend of your mom,' I said.
'Temple done told me all that.'
'Then you won't mind hearing it again.'
'That ain't all she told me.'
'Oh?'
'She said for a river-baptized person you been doing something you ain't supposed to. What'd she mean by that?'
'Search me.'
'It's got to do with that lady from the sheriff's department. That's my take on it, anyway.' He bit off a bread stick and crunched it in his jaw.
'Really?'
'Temple talks about you all the time. She said she feels like going upside your head with a two-by-four.'
'How about clicking it off, bud?'
'You gonna come to my ball game this weekend?'
'What do you think?'
He chewed the bread stick and grinned at the same time.
In a candid moment most longtime cops and prison personnel will tell you there are some criminals whom they secretly respect. Charles Arthur Floyd was known for his scrupulousness in paying for the food he was given by Oklahoma farmers when he hid out on the Canadian River. Clyde Barrow finished a jolt on a Texas prison farm, then went back and broke his friends out. Men who have invested their entire lives in dishonesty do max time rather than lie about or snitch-off another con. Murderers go to their deaths without complaint, their shoulders erect, their fears sealed behind their eyes. The appellation 'stand-up' in a prison population is never used lightly.
But the above instances are the exceptions. The average sociopath is driven by one engine, namely, the self. He has no bottom, and his crimes, large or small, are as morally interchangeable to him as watching TV with his family or walking back to a witness at a convenience store robbery and popping a .22 round through the center of her forehead.
Darl Vanzandt pulled his '32 Ford into my drive the next evening, then saw me currying Beau in the lot and drove his car to the edge of the barn and got out and stood in the wind, his face twitching from the dust that swirled out of the fields or the chemicals that swam in his brain.
He approached the fence and lay his forearm on the top rail, studying me, his unbuttoned shirt flapping on his chest. I hadn't noticed before how truncated his body was. The legs were too short for his torso, the shoulders too wide for the hips, the hands as round and thick as clubs.
'Sa
y it and leave,' I said.
'Bunny Vogel quit his job at the skeet club. My mother got him that job. He walks in yesterday and tells the manager he's finished bagging trash and cleaning toilets. Big fucking superstar. He's gonna dime me, that's what he's doing.'