Shut up, Loren.
“Seventeen, eighteen, along in there,” the cop said. “He was here with his mother. You know those boys from Tomball?”
“No, sir,” Loren said.
“They’re good boys,” the cop said. “This is a goddamn shame.”
He shone his light over our faces and bodies again, then clicked off the light and went away, leaving the door open. Loren’s legs looked long, like stovepipes, inside Grandfather’s chaps.
“Don’t stop till you get to your brother’s truck,” I said. “Don’t look around, either. No matter how bad you want to.”
“Was that cop trying to say something to me?”
“No, you didn’t have anything to do with it, Loren.”
“That boy must have done something. Maybe he pulled a shank himself.”
“Stop fooling yourself. Those kids from Tomball think a John Deere tractor exhibit in the high school gym is a big event. So is the rodeo. Their only sin is their innocence. They think a fight is with fists.”
I didn’t mean to make his situation worse than it was. But the disbelief and fear in the boy’s face and the helplessness in his eyes were not images I would easily get rid of. Secretly I hoped Loren’s friends were pounded to pulp.
“I feel bad about that kid, man,” he said. “Who takes shit-kickers seriously? If I’d been there, I could have shut it down.”
“Think they’re worrying about you? The switchblade was on the concrete. I bet there’re no prints on it. I bet it’s pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey time.”
“No, the guy who did it will stand up.”
“Yeah, that’s why they were all being cuffed,” I said.
“They were?”
“Getting knocked around, too. Nobody stood up. The guy who knifed that kid was a punk.”
Loren widened his eyes and looked over his shoulder. “What about my girl?”
“Those are reserved seats. I know where she’ll be. I’ll take her home.”
“I got to say something. I went to Gatesville for almost killing a guy with a pellet pistol. He felt up my sister at her junior h
igh picnic and had it coming, but it bothered me just the same. I ain’t that kind, Aaron.”
“I know that.”
“How?”
“You’re like me. You never gave yourself credit for anything.”
He walked down the concourse, my straw hat slanted over his eyes, Grandfather’s chaps swishing on his legs. No one gave him a second look. Then he was out the door and gone.
I never found his girl, but I did find Valerie, and we went up into the stands and sat with my parents. I did not tell them what I had seen in the concourse, nor did I mention Loren. The rodeo resumed, but we left early, and I had twenty-one stitches put in my face in an emergency room, and we went to a barbecue joint and ate a late dinner.
I said a silent prayer for the boy who had been murdered and tried to forget the look I saw in his eyes. After all these years, it is still with me. The look was one of regret, not because of the incautious words he may have uttered but because he had not been given time to appreciate how ephemeral life was. I thought about my father’s account of the Yankee soldiers who tamped their musket stocks on the ground atop Cemetery Ridge and chanted “Fredericksburg, Fredericksburg, Fredericksburg,” and I wondered if they were stained forever by their visit to the Abyss, or if they had become willing caretakers of it.
For some reason I couldn’t explain, I felt I had gained a greater understanding of my father’s loneliness.
Chapter
25