“None taken,” Leonard said. “But I still don’t know any more than I’ve told you.”
Hanson removed his cigar and put it inside his coat pocket. “OK then,” he said, “I’m through being clever. For now. You fellas want more coffee?”
“I’ll have a Coke,” Leonard said. “Long as you’re buying.”
13.
Three days later and the morning was very bright and the light that came through the windows was splotched with eyeshade-green patches from the sun shining through oak leaves and there were intervals of jet-black shadows made by the bars over the windows.
We had spent the time since the discovery of the body out at our places outside of town, but now we were back. The cops were through and no more kid skeletons had been found, though Leonard had profited fifty-five cents found on the ground beneath the flooring, turned in by Hanson, who may have done it to prove to us he was an honest cop. Hell, it might have even come out of his pocket.
The law had been nice enough to haul off the newspapers and the rotten lumber, just in case a clue was lurking in a knothole or behind the sports sections, and Leonard bought some one-by-eight pine boards and a sack of nails and we went to putting in new subflooring. That’s what we were doing the morning I’m talking about. The boards were fresh cut and the weather so hot you could smell the resin on them and feel a powdering of sawdust on your hands. It was a little odd, putting that flooring down and living in a house where just a few days ago Leonard had made a bony discovery, but with the newspapers hauled off, the smell of new lumber, and the hot sunshine sticking through the windows, the house seemed different somehow, as if it had never held the remains of a long-dead child.
When we had a good chunk of flooring replaced with Lap ’n’ Gap decking, Leonard said, “Let’s break it.”
We poured some lukewarm coffee into our cups and went out on the porch and sat in the swing. It was not so humid this day, so maybe that was better, though it’s always been my contention that at the bottom of it all, the distinction is bullshit. Bake or fry, hot is hot. Least when it’s humid, I know I’m hot, when it isn’t, I get the feeling I’m being cooked up secretively.
We sipped the coffee for a while and looked at the street and watched a few cars go by. Over at the crack house, it was quiet.
Leonard went back into the house and came out with a bag of his favorite cookies, vanilla creme. Well, actually his favorite is vanilla anything. He kept the bag on his side of the swing and didn’t volunteer me any cookies. He made me ask for one.
“You haven’t been the most talkative about all this,” I said.
“A board’s a board,” Leonard said. “You do what I say, you won’t fuck up.”
“Your uncle, Leonard. You haven’t talked about your uncle.”
“I’m still putting it together. Not just the stuff with the skeleton, but my life.”
“Is this going to be one of those insightful moments?”
“I think so. You see, all I ever wanted was to be loved and comfortable and fulfilled in my work. Way it stands, the family I cared about is dead, and has been dead for years, except one, and he just died, and without ever saying he was sorry or just taking me as I am. I guess I’m more comfortable now financially than I was a short time ago because he’s dead, but the house I inherited and loved turns out to have a dead kid under the floorboards, and my uncle is supposed to have put him there, and if that ain’t shitty enough, I’ve got no work to go to or feel good about. Think I sound sorry enough for myself?”
“You could maybe throw in a favorite dog got hit by a truck or something. And you didn’t mention Mama or a train, like in the country-and-western songs.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. And I do have my cookies. What about Florida? What’s she think about all this?”
“She came out to my house day before yesterday. She was sorry about the whole thing. Shocked. What you’d expect. She said to give you her best.”
“I notice she hasn’t been back over here.”
“Yeah, well, we just got back. What’d you think, she’d be waiting on the porch?”
“I guess I’m getting sensitive in my old age.”
“She’ll be back. Or I think she will. I hope she will.”
“How’s the relationship?”
“I’m not sure. We like each other. We have sex and we can joke with each other, and I want there to be more to it than there is at the moment, but I get the feeling she doesn’t want to be seen with me in public.”
“I have the same problem.”
“Seriously. I think it’s because I’m white. She said as much once, but I thought she got past it.”
“She may know better than feeling that way, but that doesn’t mean she can get completely past it. Not in that short time anyway. Hey, look at it this way, she’s made great strides. She’s fucking you, and you’re white.”
“That’s what I like about you, Leonard. You’re such a romantic.”
“Hap, you think my uncle killed that kid?”
“I don’t know. It looks that way. Main thing is you don’t think so.”
“I did at first, and you told me not to jump to conclusions. Remember?”
“I’ll be honest. I thought he did it the moment you found the body. I said what I said to be nice to you. There’s things point to him having done it, besides the obvious, the skeleton under the floorboards. Stuff like him being a cop freak. That by itself doesn’t mean anything, but lots of times, people who are into wanting to be cops and can’t, people obsessed with it, have some kind of control fixation. Child abuse, the abuse of anyone weaker than you, is a form of control. Like rape. Wife-beating. Maybe your uncle was an abused child and it affected him. It all goes together.”
“I know my uncle.”
“You knew your uncle.”
“He didn’t change that much. I never got any indication from him he was an abused child. And if he was, it didn’t make him a child abuser. Lots of abused children aren’t child molesters. He was the one taught me how to live, how to think. He didn’t just turn around one day and start wanting to kill children.”
“It could have been going on for a time.”
Leonard shook his head. “Nope. And I don’t think he had a power fixation. I think the man wanted a job with respect, and law enforcement was it. He just never got it because of who he was and where he was. He may have begun to lose his head some at the end, but that doesn’t mean he lost his ethics. I want to know what happened, Hap, no matter what the results, and I want you to help me.”
“What makes you think you have to ask?”
14.
We finished our coffee and were about to go back to work, when across the street we saw the old, black lady on the walker come onto her front porch. It was a slow and dutiful process, her coming outside, and watching her made me nervous. The screen door slammed her in the hip because she couldn’t move away from it fast enough, and she wobbled and the porch groaned loud enough for us to hear across the street. I bet she didn’t weigh ninety pounds, but I could see boards sagging as she went.
She looked across the street at us and we waved. She waved back, careful to do it so her arm didn’t come off at the shoulder.
She stood in the frame of her walker and watched us awhile, then slowly lifted her hand and flicked a come-over signal with her fingers.
We went over and stood at the bottom step of her porch and looked up at her. The hot sunlight lay on her like a slice of thin cheese and showed her to no advantage. She looked as if she had been boiled down and wrung out and left to dry. The wrinkles in her face were very deep and rivered with sweat. Her prune-colored eyes were runny and the whites were no longer white; they were a Hiroshima of exploded blood vessels: pink, red, and blue. Her false teeth hung too low in her mouth at the top and were set too high at the bottom, giving the impression of living things trying to climb out of a hole. Her head was mostly bald and her hair was spaced in gray tufts and looked like dirty cotton that had been blown by the wind to collect on a damp, black rock. Her breasts sagged and wobbled against her ribs inside her simple blue shift. She wore fuzzy pink house shoes on her feet and one black toe, like a water-logged pecan, poked through a hole in the right one.