“Sign for your stuff at the property desk,” he said.
I turned and stared at him, but his attention was already locked on the holding cell, where a man in a suit was shaking the door against the jamb.
I walked to the property desk and gave my name. A woman in a brown uniform smiled pleasantly at me, pulled a manila envelope from a pigeonhole and placed it, my folded coat with one wet sleeve, and a release card in front of me. I slipped on my watch, put my billfold in my pocket, and in a signature I was back on the street, in the sunlight, into a cool morning with a hard blue sky and the brilliant whip of Indian summer in the air.
I didn’t have enough money to ride the bus back to the ranch, and I didn’t feel like hitchhiking, so I walked toward the Garden District by the university, where Buddy’s wife lived. It didn’t seem an unreasonable thing to do, and I didn’t allow myself to think deeply on it, anyway. The air was so clear and bright from the rains and the touch of fall that I could see college kids hiking high up on the brown mountain behind the university and the line of green trees that began on the top slope. I crossed the bridge over the Clark and looked down at the deep pools where large rainbow hung behind the boulders, waiting for food to float downstream. The sidewalks in the Garden District were shaded by maple and elm trees, and overnight the leaves had started to turn red and gold.
Buddy’s boys were playing catch in the front yard, burning each other out with the baseball. I started to walk up on the porch, and then I felt a sense of guilt and awkwardness at being there. I paused on the walk and felt even more stupid as the two boys looked at me.
“Did your old man ever show you how to throw an in-shoot?” I said. “It’s the meanest pitch in baseball. It leaves them looking every time.”
I wet two of my fingers, held the ball over the stitches, and whipped it out sidearm at the older boy’s claw mitt. He leaped upward at it, but it sailed away into the trees.
“I’ve been having trouble with my arm since I threw against Marty Marion,” I said.
“That’s all right. I’ll get it,” the boy said, and raced across the lawn through the leaves.
You’re really great with kids, Paret, I thought. I heard the screen door squeak on the spring.
“Come in,” Beth said. She wore white shorts and a denim shirt, and she had a blue bandana tied around her black hair.
“I was trying to get back to the ranch, and I thought Buddy might be around,” I said.
“I haven’t seen him, but Mel ought to be by later. Come on in the kitchen.”
I followed her through the house, which was darkened and furnished with old stuffed chairs and a broken couch and mismatched things that were bought at intervals in a secondhand store. She pulled a pair of dripping blue jeans from the soapy water in the sink and then rubbed the knees against one another. Her thighs and stomach were tight against her white shorts, and when she leaned over the sink, her breasts hung heavily against her denim shirt.
“What are you doing in town?” she said.
“I managed to get put in the bag yesterday.”
“What?”
“I just got out of the slam.”
“What for?” She turned around and looked at me.
“Some trucks were shot up down at that pulp mill.”
She went back to her washing in silence, then stopped and dried her hands on a towel.
“Do you want a beer?”
“All right.”
She took two bottles from the icebox and sat down at the unpainted wood table with me.
“Do they want Buddy?”
“They were just interested in me because I’d been out there about my pickup being burned.”
The younger boy came in perspiring and out of breath for a glass of water from the sink faucet. She waited until he finished and had slammed the screen behind him.
“Buddy can’t go to jail again. Not here,” she said.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with him.”
“There’re many people here who would like to destroy Frank Riordan, and they’ll take Buddy as a second choice. I had five years of explanation to his children about where he was, and we’re not up to it again.”