"So," Tim said. "What can I do?"
"What we want," I said, "is for you to let us talk to your mother. You know, set it up with her. Maybe there's something she knows that didn't seem important at the time, but is now. Perhaps Florida left her clothes in the trailer and your mother took them.”
"She's not a thief," Tim said.
"He didn't say that," Leonard said. "What he wants is any bit of evidence we can find. If your mother has the clothes, then that could point to Florida being abducted, killed. Might be something in her clothes that'll give us a lead. If we could find her car. Just something to start with. Anything."
"Hell," I said. "We don't know what we want, Tim. We just want it. Understand?"
"Here's what I'll do," Tim said. "I'll ask her she knows anything. I'll call out there. I want to talk her into leaving anyway, all this water risin', but that's all I'll do. My mother is not a well woman, and I don't want you two giving her grief. Got me?"
"Fair enough," I said.
Tim went in the back and we sat by the stove and waited. Five minutes later he returned.
"She won't leave," he said, "and she doesn't know anything. She said Florida was there, then she wasn't, and she never saw her again. And she didn't leave any clothes."
We bought some gas and soft drinks from Tim. I even bought one of the pig's feet. We went out and sat in the truck. The rain rattled on the roof and flooded over the windshield so thick it was like we were underwater.
"What now?" I said.
"This hasn't worked out quite like I thought," Leonard said. "I figure I pissed Raul off for nothing. It's too wet to do a goddamn thing. No place to stay. We've got less ideas than we did before we came the first time. And that check I wrote Tim is hot, I don't get some money to cover it. Boy, he is one tight sonofabitch."
"You're right," I said. "On all accounts."
"I missed out on an anniversary dinner and Raul's ass for this, and I tell you, I ain't happy."
"Maybe you could find someone to beat up."
"Yeah. Things could get better. What would cheer me up real good is getting to hit that Reynolds fucker."
"He'll hit back. I guarantee it."
"That is a drawback. Want to eat this sack lunch?"
"I been thinking about it ever since we left your house."
We got the sack lunch and ate it. I tried to eat the pig's foot too. It smelled rank and it was like eating a piece of soggy, vinegar-soaked rubber. I rolled down the window and spat a few times, then wrapped the pig's foot up in a paper sack, double-bagged it with another.
"Maybe you ought to wrap that sack in chains," Leonard said. "Drive a stake through it so when you throw it out, it ain't gonna come back."
"What now?" I said.
"We've been avoiding the cafe," Leonard said. "Might as well go there and get a cup of coffee, warm up."
We walked over, getting drenched, the water sloshing almost to our knees. I felt sick to my stomach thinking of going into that place, but with our guns in our coat pockets we were a lot braver.
The cafe was locked. There was a sign on the inside of the glass door that said CLOSED DUE TO HIGH WATER.
We got in the truck and sat for a while. "Well, we were ready to go in there and face the devil," I said. "And had it been open, we would have too. I'm proud of us."
"Me too," Leonard said. "On the other hand, I'm kinda glad it wasn't open."
"Me too." ^
"Know what, Hap? We're gonna have to go back to LaBorde. Get our shit together better, have a real plan. I hate to admit it, but I couldn't wait to get here today, and now we're here, and I don't know what for. Maybe if it wasn't rainin'. Or we had a place to stay. As it is we're just running around like chickens with our heads cut off. I'm wet. I'm cold. No one is here I can be mad at, and Cantuck won't let me and Reynolds play." '
"I was thinking the same thing. And feeling stupid about jumping up like a big dog, and then here we are and there's nothing for us to do."
We left Grovetown, started the way we'd come, but the weather was so bad we had to creep along at thirty miles an hour, and when we came to the marsh where Leonard's car had gone in, the marsh was over the road.
We turned around, headed back to Grovetown, then took the highway that ran out by Bacon's place, hoping to find a long way to LaBorde.
We edged along slowly. The water was starting to seep out of the woods and onto the road. The sky was a light show, and the wind was so strong it was hard to hold the truck in a lane. We passed Bacon's place, went on out a ways, finally came to a rise on the highway, and when we looked down we could see darkness, and the darkness was water.
I thought about turning back, but the rain was so severe I chose not to. Even with the lights on bright, I couldn't see much beyond the length of the truck hood, only enough to recognize a swell of water across the highway below. The truck was vibrating in the wind.
Off to our right was a short gravel road that went up a hill higher than the highway, and we took it. After a little ways, we were able to make out it was a cemetery road, and we drove inside the place and parked under a great oak near an old tomb that was swelling out of the ground, threatening to fall.
The rain pounded us so hard I thought it would come through the pickup roof, and the lightning was like luminous varicose veins across the sky. It cracked and hissed and made the darkness go daylight for full seconds at a time. I feared the tree would attract it, as trees do, so I backed out from under and tried to find a clear spot. I finally settled on a place between a row of tombstones, killed the engine, and we sat there and looked at their gray shapes through the rain, and though I've never been one to be bothered by cemeteries, I was feeling pretty blue and pretty spooky right then. Being out in the open like that made me feel worse. The tree had felt safe, though logically, I knew it was the worst place we could be in a storm. Except maybe a mobile home. Storms, especially tornadoes, dearly loved a mobile home.
"Sometimes," Leonard said, "I think when I die I'd like to end up in a place like this."
"I donated my body to science," I said. "Got it marked on my driver's license. But I don't know. I may take it off next time. Stuff I used to think was silly ain't so silly anymore. I mean, you're dead, you're dead, but it means a little something to know your name might get read off a tombstone someday. Otherwise, it's like you never lived."
" 'Course, giving someone your liver or eyes and them living because of you, that's quite a legacy," Leonard said.
"Then you ought to donate yourself too."
"No, I mean it's a legacy for you. Me, I want to be buried."
We sat there for about twenty minutes, not saying anything, the interior of the truck growing colder, and then I said, "You know, I just realized, first time I met Florida was at a cemetery. I been trying to remember first time I saw her, and it finally came to me."
"My uncle's funeral."
"Yeah. I don't know why I couldn't remember that. A thing like that, think you wouldn't forget."
"Cold is making my leg ache like a sonofabitch, Hap. We got enough gas to run the heater some?"
I fired up the engine and cranked the heater on high, said, "The cemetery here. It's given me an idea. Something that's been building in my subconscious all along. We been going about this all wrong."
"I could have told you that."
"We started out right, but now we're going wrong. We came to Grovetown trying to follow what Florida would have done, but we quit doing that. We did it a little, but we quit. We started trying to figure who killed her, instead of thinking like she would think."
"And how would she think?"
"She'd go first to see Cantuck. Maybe talk to Reynolds."
"We did that."
"She'd go to the road houses, talk to people knew Soothe, saw him and this Yankee together. She'd talk to Soothe's relatives."
"Chief, Rangers, you name it, they've done that, Hap. I mean, we might ask something they didn't ask 'cause we know Florida better than them, but I don't put lots of stock in it. Ultimately, we're just amateurs, and we ain't worth a damn at it. Earnest. But stupid."