“Forget about him,” the deputy said, and locked the cell door.
“Hey, man, what these cats got down on you?” the Negro said.
“I don’t know. I haven’t been booked yet.”
“I mean, you got in the man’s face last night or something?”
“I didn’t read it like that. Maybe I did.”
“Let me have a smoke.”
There were two cigarettes left, and I gave him one and lit the other. He sat on the floor in his white undershorts, his knees splayed, and ate the eggs with one hand and held the cigarette in the back of his knuckles. His skin was absolutely black.
“I got a hundred and eighty to do,” he said. “But I don’t do nothing except wash cars. The judge says he’d send me to the joint, but you can’t cowboy with one arm.”
He laughed, and the dried eggs fell from his bad teeth back into the plate. “I’ll tell you why they ain’t put me in Deer Lodge, brother. Because they won’t take no niggers up there. That’s right. There ain’t a colored man in that whole joint.”
I sat on my bunk and drank the coffee from the paper cup. It tasted like iodine.
“You a paperhanger?” he said.
“No.”
“I ax you this because, you see, this is my living place, and they bring in this white whale that moans at night and makes gas every fifteen minutes. I don’t like jailing with no queer, either.”
“His family will come for him eventually,” I said.
“Which means me and you, brother.”
“OK, let me give it to you. Five in Louisiana for manslaughter. Maybe another jolt here for shooting up some people who leaned on me.”
He pressed the scrambled eggs into the spoon with his thumb and dropped them into his mouth, then took a puff off his cigarette and laughed again.
“What they putting you badasses in with me for?”
“I think the man wants to talk with me,” I said.
I heard the deputy’s keys and leather soles in the corridor.
“They ain’t bad guys,” the Negro said. “Most of them work another job in town. Just don’t stick your finger in the wrong place.”
The deputy who had brought breakfast with the Indian trusty turned the key and opened the cell door.
“Let’s get it, Paret,” he said.
He didn’t have the handcuffs out, nor did he catch me under the arm, which I waited automatically for him to do.
“Down the stairs,” he said.
“What’s going on?”
“Just walk.”
We went down the spiral metal staircase to the first floor, and I had to squint at the sudden light off the yellow walls. I looked over at the door to the booking room, the box camera on its tripod, and the ink pad, rollers, and cleansing cream on the counter.
“Sign for your stuff at the property desk,” he said.
I turned and stared at him, but his attention was already locked on the holding cell, where a man in a suit was shaking the door against the jamb.
I walked to the property desk and gave my name. A woman in a brown uniform smiled pleasantly at me, pulled a manila envelope from a pigeonhole and placed it, my folded coat with one wet sleeve, and a release card in front of me. I slipped on my watch, put my billfold in my pocket, and in a signature I was back on the street, in the sunlight, into a cool morning with a hard blue sky and the brilliant whip of Indian summer in the air.
I didn’t have enough money to ride the bus back to the ranch, and I didn’t feel like hitchhiking, so I walked toward the Garden District by the university, where Buddy’s wife lived. It didn’t seem an unreasonable thing to do, and I didn’t allow myself to think deeply on it, anyway. The air was so clear and bright from the rains and the touch of fall that I could see college kids hiking high up on the brown mountain behind the university and the line of green trees that began on the top slope. I crossed the bridge over the Clark and looked down at the deep pools where large rainbow hung behind the boulders, waiting for food to float downstream. The sidewalks in the Garden District were shaded by maple and elm trees, and overnight the leaves had started to turn red and gold.
Buddy’s boys were playing catch in the front yard, burning each other out with the baseball. I started to walk up on the porch, and then I felt a sense of guilt and awkwardness at being there. I paused on the walk and felt even more stupid as the two boys looked at me.
“Did your old man ever show you how to throw an in-shoot?” I said. “It’s the meanest pitch in baseball. It leaves them looking every time.”
I wet two of my fingers, held the ball over the stitches, and whipped it out sidearm at the older boy’s claw mitt. He leaped upward at it, but it sailed away into the trees.
“I’ve been having trouble with my arm since I threw against Marty Marion,” I said.
“That’s all right. I’ll get it,” the boy said, and raced across the lawn through the leaves.
You’re really great with kids, Paret, I thought. I heard the screen door squeak on the spring.
“Come in,” Beth said. She wore white shorts and a denim shirt, and she had a blue bandana tied around her black hair.
“I was trying to get back to the ranch, and I thought Buddy might be around,” I said.
“I haven’t seen him, but Mel ought to be by later. Come on in the kitchen.”
I followed her through the house, which was darkened and furnished with old stuffed chairs and a broken couch and mismatched things that were bought at intervals in a secondhand store. She pulled a pair of dripping blue jeans from the soapy water in the sink and then rubbed the knees against one another. Her thighs and stomach were tight against her white shorts, and when she leaned over the sink, her breasts hung heavily against her denim shirt.
“What are you doing in town?” she said.
“I managed to get put in the bag yesterday.”
“What?”
“I just got out of the slam.”
“What for?” She turned around and looked at me.
“Some trucks were shot up down at that pulp mill.”
She went back to her washing in silence, then stopped and dried her hands on a towel.
“Do you want a beer?”
“All right.”
She took two bottles from the icebox and sat down at the unpainted wood table with me.
“Do they want Buddy?”
“They were just interested in me because I’d been out there about my pickup being burned.”
The younger boy came in perspiring and out of breath for a glass of water from the sink faucet. She waited until he finished and had slammed the screen behind him.
“Buddy can’t go to jail again. Not here,” she said.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with him.”
“There’re many people here who would like to destroy Frank Riordan, and they’ll take Buddy as a second choice. I had five years of explanation to his children about where he was, and we’re not up to it again.”
I wanted to explain that he wasn’t involved, that it was my own drunken barrel of snakes and southern barroom anger that had put me up on the mountain with a rifle. But I had stepped across a line with a heavy, dirty shoe into her and her children’s lives, and I felt like an intrusive outsider who had just presented someone with a handful of spiders. I drank down the bottle and set it lightly on the tabletop.
“I guess I’d better catch air,” I said. “I can probably hitch a ride pretty easy out by the highway.”
“Wait for Mel. He comes by after class for coffee.”
“Buddy’s probably junking his Plymouth for bond, and I have to go by the hospital anyway.”
She got up from her chair and took another beer from the icebox. The V in the tail of her denim shirt exposed the white skin above her shorts. She clicked the cap off into a paper bag and put the bottle in front of me.