“You think you’ll be all right?”
“I hurt too much to think. It must he stove in my ribs or something.”
“Let’s get in ye car and try to make it in to see Ratcliff.”
“I’ll be all right in the morning.”
“Lord God, boy. Now ain’t nothin to the way you’ll feel in the morning. I remember one time I got locked up in Nashville for a public drunk and a pair of the blueboys played around with me for a while. I went to bed feelin purty good and when I got up next day I fell right flat on my face. I hurt in places I didn’t even know I had…Say what did yins have ye falllin out about anyway?”
“We just got into it.”
“Well, whatever it was you ought to swear out a warrant and have him locked up anyway.”
“No. I got an idea or two of my own.”
He made his way through the slack Monday-morning commerce, a felthatted old man in a gray raincoat too big through the shoulders and chest carrying a shoebox tucked tightly under his arm as though he conveyed something of unreckonable value. Whatever his business was it drew him down North Main and left at the General Cafe across toward the courthouse sat on its carpet of winter brown. A flag on a flagpole set in concrete fluttered and snapped in the bitter wind.
Old courthouse sounds and smells and the way his footfalls echoed hollowly in the sepulchral silence brought back other days so strongly he fancied he felt guided hands on an elbow, steel chafing his wrists, heard other harsher footsteps that echoed his own. Days when the wildness lay on him and he bought time by the second and paid for it by the year. “I said I’d never darken these doors,” he told himself. “And I wouldn’t if it wadnt for the boy, if there was any way in God’s world around it.”
He went down the stairs to the basement level and past the library to where the high sheriff’s office was. The door was locked. There was a sign on it. BACK IN FIVE MINUTES, the sign said. There was a bench in the hall by the door and the old man seated himself there with the box in his lap and waited. He waited with the patient forbearance of the old, through some acquired knowledge that sooner or later all things come to pass. Past the concrete stairs that ascended to the level of the courthouse yard he could see a gray square of winter light and the bare branches of trees. He sat idly watching foraging birds flit from tree to tree as if he had never seen such a thing before.
It was an hour before Bellwether came and when he did he had Cooper in tow. He nodded to Oliver and unlocked the door.
“How you makin it, Mr. Oliver?”
“I’m tolerable, I reckon. You need to set your watch.”
“I expect I do. But if I did it’d be the only thing working right around here and just foul everything else up. Did you need to see me about somethin?”
“I wanted to talk to you a few minutes.”
“Come on in here and get you a seat.”
Oliver took off his hat and seated himself in a straightback chair. He cross his legs and hung his hat on a spindly knee and sat cradling the shoebox in his lap. Bellwether glanced at the shoebox a time or two but he didn’t say anything. He poured himself a cup of cold coffee from the unplugged coffeepot and drank and shuddered and sat waiting for Oliver to speak.
At length Oliver cleared his throat. “What I had to say was just for you,” he said. “Not this young feller here.”
Bellwether looked up sharply. “Well, he’s a deputy sheriff in this county. I reckon whatever you had to talk to me about had to do with law enforcement.”
“Yeah, it did,” Oliver said. “That’s why I’d just as soon this feller here didn’t know nothin about it.”
“Anything that pertains to law enforcement in this county is my business,” Cooper said. “Like he told you, I’m a deputy sheriff.”
Oliver arose, put on his hat. “I’ll be gettin on if that’s the way of it,” he said. “Yins may hear it but you won’t hear it from me.”
“Wait a minute, now,” Bellwether said. “Sit down there, Mr. Oliver.” He looked from the old man’s flinty face to Cooper’s and back again. “Is there somethin goin on here I don’t know about or what?”
Cooper shrugged. “If it is it’s news to me.”
“What about it, Mr. Oliver?”
“I’ve said my piece.”
Cooper favored Oliver with a look of perplexed innocence. “What have you got against me, Mr. Oliver? I don’t reckon I ever stepped on your toes, did I? Hell, I don’t even hardly know you.”
“Cooper, you go on over to the General and drink you a cup of coffee. Bring me one when you come back.”
“Why, hellfire. I ain’t done nothin, ain’t actin like I have. If he knows somethin on me let him say so or shut the hell up.”
“Mr. Oliver?”
“It ain’t nothin to me what he does, he don’t work for me. But the man I come to see you about totes this feller in his pocket like a handkerchief. He’s bought and paid for and I don’t like where the money come from.”
“Why, hellfire. A string of Goddamn lies.”
“I seen you drivin out to Hardin’s place last spring. I seen him hand you money and you slip it down your britches pocket and you and him had a regular get-together. The brotherly love was just drippin off yins both. After a while you left and they flew to totin out whiskey like the house was on fire. Time the rest of the laws got there that place was as bare of whiskey as a Baptist footwashin.”
“You Goddamned lyin troublemaker,” Cooper said, rising, his face fiery with rage. “Sheriff, he—”
“Go get that coffee, Cooper.”
Cooper crossed to the door. He opened it and stood for a moment as if undecided what to do. He turned back toward the room. “Damn it, Sheriff,” he said. Then he walked through the doorway and slammed the door behind him.
“If that story’s true you ought to told me long before this, Mr. Oliver.”
“It wadnt nothin to me. That yins lookout. I just come about Hardin and if I’d wanted him to know my business I’d just cut out the middleman and deal with him direct.”
Bellwether didn’t say anything. He took out a pack of Luckies, tipped one out and smelled it reflectively, sat turning it in his fingers studying it as if he’d never come across another quite like it before.
“This other thing though, I ort to have come about it.” Oliver was silent a moment and when he spoke his voice was charged with vehemence. “I knowed yins would work it around and blame it on me or I would’ve done brought it in. God knows I never wanted it on me. But I didn’t want no more time and I didn’t want that boy thinkin it was me killed his pa. I reckon I’d’ve brought it anyway if I hadn’t knowed he’d kill Hardin and throw his own life away.”
Bellwether had arisen. “Here, slow down a little,” he said. He touched the old man’s shoulder. “I can’t follow just whatever it is we’re talkin about here.”
“Course I didn’t care for him killin Hardin cept for messin his ownself up. I think a right smart of that boy.”
“Who are we talkin about here, Mr. Oliver.?”
“Hardin, Hardin,” the old man said impatiently, he seemed to think Bellwether bereft of his senses. “What do you think? Somethin’s got to be done about him. Somebody’s goin to have to waste a cartridge on him and I wish I’d done it myself a long time ago. He’s just using up air other folk could put to good use.”
“Mr. Oliver, have you somethin I can use against Dallas Hardin or is this just some kind of general complaint?”
Oliver set the shoebox on Bellwether’s desk. Bellwether crossed behind the desk and reseated himself in the chair and drew the box toward him, a hand on either end of it. He sat for a moment without opening it.