“You quite sure?”
“Uh-huh.”
“No more?”
Billy shook his head.
“How did it start, the first time?”
“I dunno.”
“ ’Course you do, Billy. That’s silly, to say you don’t know.”
“A man came up to me one day, before the school bus came. Asked me to run an errand. Said I’d get money for it.”
“Didn’t you wonder if you should do it?”
“It wasn’t to get into his car or anything. Mommy told me not to do that.”
“What did he want you to do then?”
“Just put the package in my backpack, that’s all. He said when I got off, I was to wait for a man to come up and say did I have a present for him? When I gave it to him, he would give me ten dollars.”
O’Farrell felt hot, his collar restrictively tight, at how exposed Billy had been. An image came into his mind that he didn’t recognize at first and then he did: it was a boy eating dinner in an exclusive London restaurant with his beautiful mother and ambassador father. O’Farrell blinked it away. He said, “Is that how it happened, all five times?”
“Kind of,” Billy said. “Sometimes I had to wait around.”
“But you always did?”
“Sure, always.”
“They must have liked that, knowing you were reliable, a good guy.”
“They did!” Billy said, smiling up, proud again.
“You become friends?”
“Kind of.”
“What did they call you? They call you Billy or maybe something else? Just kid or something?”
“Always Bill, after that first time,” the boy said, still proud. “Sometimes Billy-boy.”
“What did you call them?”
“I used—” The boy stopped and his face closed, as if a curtain had been drawn across ii.
“What, Billy?”
“Nothing.”
“You were telling me what you called them.”
“Didn’t call them anything. Never knew their names.”
O’Farrell turned Billy’s drawing around so that he could see it better. “What’s that again?”
“A Zirton,” the boy said. He was cautious now against relaxing at an apparently casual question.
“They make Zirtons in those things I bought you, a few months back?”
“I just told you. I made it up.”
“So you did,” O’Farrell said easily. “That was a good weekend, wasn’t it?”
“It was okay,” Billy said stubbornly.
“I enjoyed that hamburger and fries we had, near the lake,” O’Farrell said. “You remember what we talked about then?”
“Yes.” Billy said, unexpectedly direct.
“And the promise you made me?”
“Yes.”
At last the child’s lips were trembling, the first sign of giving way. O’Farrell was surprised Billy had held out so long and thought his grandson was a plucky little bastard. Just as he thought of himself as a shit, for coming down on him like this, and hoped it would all be worthwhile. Relentlessly he went on, “I don’t think you’ve kept it, Billy. I thought we were friends, loved each other, but I don’t think you’ve kept your promise.”
“You said I was to tell Miss James or Mommy if anyone tried to sell me drugs at school,” Billy said.
It was a lawyer’s escape and bloody good for a kid so young. O’Farrell said, “You knew what was in those packages, didn’t you, Billy?”
“No!”
“Or didn’t you want to know?” O’Farrell asked, changing direction with the idea. “Was that it? You thought you were safer if you pretended not to know what was in them? Even though you did, all the time.”
Billy couldn’t hold his grandfather’s eyes. He looked down into his lap and O’Farrell thought the tears were going to come then, but still they didn’t. “I didn’t know,” the boy mumbled.
“It was cocaine, Billy. That stuff that makes you feel funny, the stuff we talked about. And crack is cocaine in crystals, which is even worse.”
The boy shrugged, saying nothing.
“You do know some names, don’t you?” O’Farrell persisted. “Not all, not even complete. But you know some.”
“Can’t.”
The word was so quiet that O’Farrell feared he’d misheard. “What? What did you say?”
“Can’t,” Billy repeated.
“Why can’t you?”
“Frightened.”
“You mustn’t be frightened,” O’Farrell urged. “People will look after you. I’ll look after you. It’ll be all right.”
The tears came as abruptly as Ellen’s had earlier. Billy suddenly sobbed and fell forward on his arms and O’Farrell sat in helpless indecision, wanting to go around the table and hold him and stop the tears but pulling back against halting the outburst with kindness before it all came out. He compromised, reaching across for Billy’s outstretched arms and stroking his hand. It was a long time before Billy looked up, and when he did, his eyes were red-rimmed and his nose was running. O’Farrell gave him a handkerchief and Billy wiped himself. His mouth moved, unsurely forming the words. At last, broken-voiced, he said, “I’ve kept it all. The money I mean.”
“I heard,” O’Farrell said, still anxious not to block the flow.
“It would have been sixty dollars, today.”
So at ten dollars a delivery, he hadn’t lied about the five previous deliveries. “Yes,” O’Farrell said.
“Wanted a hundred,” Billy said. “There’s three months, to Mom’s birthday, so I guess I would have gotten it easily. She hasn’t had anything new, not for a long time. I was going to give it to her on her birthday so she could have something new. Hadn’t worked out a way to say how I’d gotten it, but I’d have thought of something, by the time. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. Honest.”
“I know that,” O’Farrell said thickly. “We’ll find something for Mommy, you and me, for her birthday. Okay?”
“Okay,” the boy said.
“They’re not your friends, Billy. Not these guys for whom you’ve been carrying packages.”
“I know that, really. They pretended to be, but when they said about Mom, I knew they weren’t.”
O’Farrell went from hot to cold. “What did they say about Mom?”
“That they knew where we lived and that they’d make her ugly—like me, said Rick; he’s got a big scar right over his nose—if I told her what I was doing, if I told anyone what I was doing. If I got caught, I was to say it was just an errand and that I didn’t know what it was and there was nothing wrong. That I wouldn’t get into trouble.”
“Was Rick the guy who took die stuff when you got off or who gave it to you near die school?” coaxed O’Farrell.
“He gave it to me, showed me first time how to put it in my backpack.”
“By himself?”
“No, he—” Billy stopped, looking pebble-eyed at his grandfather.
O’Farrell held the child’s hands tightly across the table, to reinforce what he said. “He can’t hurt you; none of them can hurt you now. I won’t let them.”
“They said.”
“They were trying to sound big. Important. It wasn’t true.”
The child stared across the table, his mouth a tight line, and O’Farrell could feel the fear shaking through him. “Have I ever told you something that wasn’t right? Wasn’t true?”
It was still some time before the boy spoke. “Guess not,” he said.
“So trust me now, Billy.”
“Felipe,” blurted the boy, looking down into his lap again, as if he were ashamed. “There was a man called Felipe. Sometimes he stayed in the car.”
“Was it a big car?” O’Farrell asked, imagining a block-long Cadillac with chrome and fins.
“Like Mom’s,” Billy said. “Gray too.”
“Just Rick and Felipe? Never anyone else?”
Billy shook his head.
“You ever hear their other names?”