“OK,” Edgren told him. “Hold everything. We’ll be out.”
But he and the firemen had to figure out how they’d do it. They finally decided that the motor was out again; the propeller would foul in the parachute’s cordage. Then they saw they would need a line to tow the chute in with and asked me if I had one. I remembered a light cotton rope I used to line things up when putting in corn. When I got back from the house with it, Mantle had rowed Mom back to the river bank again. She was giving out once more about the reward. Nobody made any comment. Then Mantle rowed around the island again, up to where the chute was, caught on some snag in the river. The firemen had oars in their boat and followed behind the johnboat. Then Edgren, Mom, and I walked up the bank a short ways, past the head of the island, so we could see what was going on. One of the firemen reached down in the water, fished some cordage up, and made my line fast to it. Then they tried to haul the chute into the boat, but it slopped things up so bad that they gave up and decided to drag it. They rowed over to where we were, paying out my line as they came, and then started to haul. It was slow work. Out there in the johnboat, Mantle kept having to clear the cordage, when it would foul up. He would lean out of the boat, and once almost capsized. At last, though, he got things clear. The chute came out on the bank — silk with red and white pieces. It was no sooner on the bank than Mom started pawing at it, “in case that poke is in under it,” she said. But it wasn’t, and she nearly cried. “That means it’s in the river,” she wailed. “Being swept down to go over the dam. If it ever gets in the Ohio, we never will get it back! Never!”
Mantle kept staring at her, and Edgren asked my permission to spread the chute on my land, “to give it a chance to dry.” I told him, “of course,” and the firemen spread it over some bushes. It was now around nine o’clock, and I asked them all up for some early lunch. “I can give you hot dogs pretty quick,” I said. “With coffee and pie. They might go pretty good.”
The sheriff’s men had to go back, however, and the firemen were due downriver. They said goodbye to me and Mom, then putt-putted away. Going back to his car, Edgren told me and Mom: “We’ll be out later on in the day to ask more questions about it — if that girl is able to come. Around five o’clock, I’d say. So stand by. If you want a lawyer, you’re entitled to have one, and of course, if you don’t want to talk, you don’t have to.”
“Well why wouldn’t I want to talk?”
“I’m advising you of your rights. You killed a man. I don’t think you’ll be charged, but you might be. It’s not up to me to say.”
“Who is it up to then?”
“Coroner’s jury — they generally do as the state’s attorney says. But if we have reason, we can charge you too.”
“And that’s why I need a lawyer?”
“I didn’t say need. You’re entitled to one if you want him.”
“Well, that’s nice,” said Mom. “Here my boy kills that awful man, and now you’re fixing to lock him up.”
“Ma’am, I’m not fixing to do anything, except what the law requires, and right now the law requires I advise him. Which I’ve done.” And to me: “You understand, Mr. Howell?”
“I think so. Thanks.”
“And ma’am, you were a witness, so you must stand by, too. You’re entitled to a lawyer, and you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”
“You mean I could be charged too?”
“It could happen.”
“With what?”
“We don’t know yet.”
That’s what he said, but before he said it he shot a look at Mantle who didn’t return it but kept his eyes on the ground. “Well I like that,” said Mom.
“Any questions?”
I didn’t have any. If Mom did, she kept them to herself, so the officers drove off — but not till I got them the rifle which they took with them, the empty shell still in the chamber.
6
We went in, and Mom said: “Well, thank God it’ll soon be over, and then the sun will come up. Won’t it?”
“Well? It generally does.”
She had plumped herself down on the sofa and looked at me kind of funny as though what I said wasn’t quite what she expected to hear. But before she could say what that was, a car turned in to our lane from the main highway and pulled up in front of the house — a cream-colored truck with the letters on the side of the TV station we have across the Ohio from Marietta at Parkersburg, West Virginia. Then a woman was ringing the bell and guys were getting out. She wanted to come in and take pictures of me and Mom, and I said OK — “but the real star of the show was that girl, Jill Kreeger’s her name, who rode that parachute down, and held Shaw off somehow until I had a chance to plug him.”
“Oh, but we have her already.”
It seemed that Jill was hardly in her hospital room before they were there too, “and shot her in her nightie, the short one the hospital gave her, which wasn’t much of a costume, but a lot they’ll care tonight, when the tape goes on TV. That’s a mighty pretty girl, and the tribute she pays you, Mr. Howell, is really something to hear.”
Mom didn’t say anything.
They set their camera up at the end of the room, next to the arch, and the woman put me on the sofa, using the low table, the one in front of the fireplace, to sit on herself. Then she began asking questions. I answered as well as I could, though there wasn’t much to say, and I felt she was disappointed. I strung it out as well as I could, how I carried Jill to the house, “got her into a hot bath, to stop her teeth from chattering, and then called the sheriff’s office.” After a while she seemed satisfied, then decided to work on Mom. That made me nervous, for some reason, but when she’d put Mom on the sofa in the place where I’d been sitting and stayed where she had been, there on the low table, it began to go all right. Mom really gave out with it, all about her “doing my best, to get it through his head what would happen to him if he dast to kill that girl.” You’d have thought Mom was the star of the show, and the woman was suddenly delighted. Then Mom blurted out: “But my boy is the one — except he didn’t tell it right. We’re mountain, and we don’t brag about what we do. But when the time comes to do it, we do it — as he done.”
You could tell how pleased the woman was, and I was doubly pleased, from having my worry eased. Then she and her crew left, and Mom kept asking: “Was I all right?” I told her she was and patted her cheek, but right away I wished I hadn’t. She grabbed my hand and kissed inside the palm in that sticky way that she had. But the sound truck was hardly gone when a little Chevy showed up with three reporters in it — one from the Marietta Times, one from a Chicago paper, and one from some news service, maybe the Associated Press. They had cameras with them and took our pictures. Then they began asking questions, one of them with a recorder, so we had to start all over. By now Mom was doing it big and this time gave out with all kinds of stuff about how she’d looked for the money, “and pretty near drowned out there, when that johnboat all but tipped over — because I don’t swim, not a stroke.” Then they left, and once more I felt relieved, though what about I didn’t quite know.
Then some people came in with a ham all cooked up, potato salad, baked beans in a casserole, and a can of shrimp — “as we know how busy you must be, and some lunch will come in handy.” But what they really meant was they wanted to hear about it. The radio had carried the news, at least that I’d killed Shaw, so the girl was safe. They were from a couple of miles upriver. At that time of year, nobody lived very near us. There were houses on both sides of the river, but of summer people who locked up their places in winter and hauled their boats out on trestles. So I put out some of the ham, beans, and salad, and Mom told it again, this time about finding the chute. But right in the middle of it, around one o’clock I would say, the phone rang. When I answered, it was a lawyer I know whose car I had gassed often and who seemed to like me. Fact of the matter, I thought he was responsible for me being picked to follow Mr. Holt as manager of the station soon as he leaves for California next summer when he retires. Bledsoe was his name. I knew from the tone of his voice he had something on his mind.