Maybe the food would help. Lloyd stood up, but his legs felt wobbly and his eyes couldn’t focus right. He lurched to the stool, planted himself on it, and held the edge of the table. When he picked up the plastic fork, it vibrated in his fingers. His touch sent a jangling electrical charge through his arm and down his back. The harder he gripped, the more he felt as though he were trying to etch stone with a pencil, yet only this concentration made any steadiness possible. Keeping his face close to the plate, he scooped the watery scrambled eggs into his mouth. He fell to his knees and threw up in the toilet. Curled facedown on the floor, Lloyd felt a prickly, nauseous chill seep into his muscles and begin to paralyze him.
Someone not Sheriff Lynch, who seemed by his step to be burly and ill-tempered, grabbed Lloyd’s shoulder and twisted his body so that he faced the ceiling. The floor fell cold and hard against the back of his head. The man spread Lloyd’s eyelids, opened his shirt, and put a cold metal disc on his chest. Lloyd had not noticed until now, but his heart was racing — much faster than the sheep’s. That seemed so long ago. Mr. Mac was angry with him. The man started to yank down Lloyd’s pants. Lloyd moved his lips to say no! No! But his limbs and muscles had turned to cement. His mouth gaped open, but he couldn’t catch any air. The chill sweat returned. He was a boy again. Mr. Mac’s heaviness pressed the air from his lungs, pinned him from behind, faceless, pushing the dull, tearing pain into him; he choked Lloyd’s thin gasps with old-man smells of sweat and smoke and liquor and his ragged, grunting breath. The man rubbed something on Lloyd’s right buttock and then pricked it with a needle. He left without pulling up Lloyd’s pants.
Lloyd’s body softened, and the cement dissolved; a cushiony feeling spread through him, as though his limbs were swaddled in plush, warm blankets. He could breathe. He could not smell himself anymore. “Son,” he heard the sheriff say. “Put your pants on.”
The two of them sat in the little white room, this time without Blanchard.
“Sheriff.” Lloyd’s words seemed to float out of his mouth. “Sheriff, what’s all thisayre ’bout?”
Sheriff Lynch sat across the table. His face changed faintly as animals and unknown faces, and then the spirits of Mr. Mac and Blanchard, passed through it. He popped a peppermint Life Saver, sucked on it hard, and pulled back into focus.
“Let me ask you a question first, son, and then I’ll answer yours.” He reached down next to his chair and put two Ziploc bags with Lloyd’s shears and bowie knife in them on the table. Both the shears and the knife were tagged, as if they were in hock. The sheriff pressed them a few times with the tips of his long rust-colored fingers, lightly, as though to make sure they were there, or to remind them to stay still. “Now,” he said. “I think I already know the answer to this question, but I need to know from you.” He pressed them again. “Are these your knife and shears?”
How should he answer? The sheriff leaned back, waiting, with a look on his face that said he didn’t want to hear the answer.
“Maybe,” Lloyd said.
“Maybe.” The sheriff joined his hands behind his head and pointed his eyes up and away, as though he were considering this as a possible truth.
“Maybe,” Lloyd said.
“Lloyd Wayne Dogget,” the sheriff said, turning his not-blue eyes on him. “How long have I known you? I knew your daddy and your grandpappy when they were alive. I know more about you than you know about you. And you ain’t never been able to lie to me and get clear with it. So I’ll ask you again — are these your knife and shears?”
Mr. Mac had given Lloyd the shears when he was sixteen. They were long and silvery. At the end of each day of shearing, after cutting the sheep’s coarse, billowy hair, Lloyd would sharpen them on a strop and oil them with a can of S’OK to keep off the rust The merry old man on the green can, a pipe in his mouth, always reminded him of Mr. Mac.
“What if I say yes?” Lloyd said.
Sheriff Lynch sucked on the Life Saver and blew out a breath. He leaned close to Lloyd and put his elbows on the table. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “it doesn’t make a whit’s difference.” He pressed the plastic bags again. “There’s blood on these tools matches the type of a young lady people saw you leave Genie’s with, a young lady who turned up murdered. And I confiscated these two things from you. So it doesn’t make a whit’s difference what you say, whether you lie or not. I’m just trying to give you a chance to get right with yourself, to be a man.” He sank back and ran his hands through his stubbly iron-gray hair as he bowed his head and looked at the bags. He massaged his clean-cut neck. “Maybe to get right with the Lord too. I don’t know. I don’t believe in that kind of thing, but sometimes it helps people.”
To Lloyd, the sheriff seemed embarrassed about something. Lloyd wanted to help him. But he was also afraid; he could not remember any young lady, only smiling dark-red lips, the curve of a bare upper arm, honky-tonk music. Dwight flinging the colored baby doll around.
“Okay, Sheriff,” he said. “Since it don’t make any difference, you know they’re mine.”
The sheriff escorted him to the showers, where he took Lloyd’s clothes and gave him an inmate’s orange jumpsuit and a pair of regulation flip-flops. After Lloyd had showered and changed, the sheriff told him he was under arrest for capital murder, read him his rights, and handcuffed him. They got in his car, Lloyd riding in the front seat, and drove the two blocks to the courthouse. The judge asked him if he had any money or expected any help, and he said no, which was the truth.
Every morning Sheriff Lynch came to Lloyd’s cell and walked with him down to the little white room, where Lloyd talked with his lawyer. When the sheriff opened the door to the room, Lloyd watched his lawyer and the sheriff volley looks under their pleasantries. He remembered a cartoon he’d seen: Bluto and Popeye had each grabbed one of Olive Oyl’s rubbery arms. They were stretching her like taffy. He couldn’t remember how it ended.
Raoul Schwartz, the lawyer Lloyd had been assigned, said the judge had granted Lloyd a competency hearing, but not much money to do it with. He, Schwartz, would have to conduct the tests himself and then send them to a psychiatrist for evaluation. In two months the psychiatrist would testify and the judge would decide whether Lloyd was competent to stand trial. Schwartz said they had a lot of work to do. Schwartz said he was there to help.
Schwartz was everything the sheriff was not. He had short, pale, womanish fingers that fluttered through papers, fiddled with pencils, took off his wire-rimmed granny glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. When he got impatient, which was often, his fingers scratched at a bald spot on the top of his forehead. Lloyd thought he might have rubbed his hair off this way.
Schwartz wouldn’t let him wriggle out of questions, sometimes asking the same ones many times, like Blanchard. He asked about Lloyd’s whole life. Sometimes the glare of the white room and Schwartz’s drone were like being in school again, and Lloyd would lay his head down on the slick-topped table between them and put his cheek to its cool surface, “Come on, Lloyd,” Schwartz would say. “We’ve got work to do.”
Also unlike the sheriff, Schwartz cussed, which was something Lloyd could never abide, and the little man’s Yankee accent raked the words across Lloyd’s nerves even worse than usual. When Lloyd told him that Sheriff Lynch had been out to talk to Mr. Mac after a teacher had spotted cigarette burns on his arms, Schwartz murmured, “Excellent, excellent. Fucking bastard.”
“Who’s the effing bastard?”