Directly this here bobcat eased out just as lightfooted and calm as you please. He looked all around and highfooted it toward the Harrikin and that’s the last I ever saw him.
When Tyler reached the first scattered houses of the town a wan sun stood at midmorning over the bare winter trees. A pale band of lighter sky lay above the horizon and the air felt like snow. Where the city limits sign was he halted and sat on a bank watching off toward the spare outposts of commerce as if he were of a mind not to go on. He felt he’d been so longin the Harrikin he’d lost touch with the doings of these more normal folk and the way they’d grouped themselves together here in this outpost with houses leant one atop the other seemed a strange way to live. But at length he unfolded himself and went on, the rifle yoked across his shoulders and forearms dangling.
He was constantly looking about. He was looking for Sutter, and Sutter was the last thing he wanted to see, but he had to look anyway. No one who looked like Sutter and no one with a curious eye for him, and this suited him just fine. He unyoked the rifle and went along swinging it gently at his side.
The first thing he came upon was a restaurant named the Snip, Snap amp; Bite Cafe. Nearly empty. A bald man mopping the counter with a rag. Smells of grease and frying bacon and coffee. His mouth watered.
Hey, you can’t bring that thing in here.
Do what? He blinked and looked down at the rifle. He’d forgotten it.
Sorry, he said. He went back out onto the sidewalk. He looked all about. He felt strangely dislocated, his vision darkened, the edges seemed to burn. There wasn’t anything to do with the gun. He went back in.
It ain’t working right anyway.
Oh, all right. Open the bolt and stand it in the corner there by the hatrack. Just don’t club nobody with it.
He commenced with coffee thick with cream and sugar while sunny-side-up eggs and country ham fried. When they came he finished them clean, chasing down the last bit of runny egg yolk with a triangle of buttered toast. He ordered another side order of toast and pear preserves and morecoffee and a glass of orange juice for his thirst. When he ordered this last and finished it and wiped his mouth with a napkin the counterman was regarding him with something akin to admiration. Tyler himself had begun to feel downright expansive and a warm sense of wellbeing comforted him.
Could I bring you somethin else?
I reckon that ought to do me awhile. How much do I owe you?
He paid and pocketed the change. Where’s Sheriff Bellwether’s office?
In the courthouse basement, less they moved it without tellin me. That’s where it’s always been.
He got the rifle and went out. He looked up and down the street cautiously, like a man sweating in the last card in a poker hand. Ordinary folk going about their business. Their very ordinariness reassured him. The dull day-to-day routine of life seemed suddenly very dear to him, for it was something he had lost. All these rustic folk with their complacent faces seemed to dwell in the happy-ever-after end of a fable. He took a deep breath and held it a moment. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest. All he had to do was make it a block and a half to the courthouse. A cripple could do that, a blind man tapping with a cane.
Old men like fragile statuary were already set about the courtyard benches for such faint sun as there was. They looked up expectantly as Tyler approached, as if he might do something interesting to break the monotony that yawned before them, but when he didn’t and just strode purposefully on, their eyes dismissed him and they went back to the nothing they’d been doing before.
The courthouse was a square twostory brick building. Theboy looked up. Windows on the upper floor were barred, and Tyler wished he might see Sutter’s face peering down at him. The words covrt hovse were chiseled into a great concrete lintel set above the double door. He turned the corner and there was an iron railing round a set of concrete stairs descending to the basement.
An old grandmotherlike woman sat on a bench like a sentinel guarding a palace door. She wore an anklelength dress and men’s brogans broken out at the side and a ratty plaid shawl wound about her ample shoulders. She watched him out of the folds of the pokebonnet she wore tied beneath her long chin and from behind dimestore shades with tortoiseshell frames.
He had a hand on the cold metal railing.
She rose at his arrival as if she’d been awaiting him. Sonny boy, she said. Her voice was an ingratiating whine, and it grated on his nerves like a fingernail dragged across a chalkboard.
He turned. Yes, ma’am?
I need a little help, she said. I sure wish you could do me a little favor.
I’d like to but I’m in an awful hurry. Maybe I could when I get done with the sheriff.
He was on the first step. The steel-reinforced glass door lay in shadowed sanctuary.
It ain’t much, she whined. Won’t take you but a minute. I’ll give you a dollar.
Once more he turned. I really can’t. He started down the stairs.
My old man took and died, she said, and I ain’t got nobody to do for me but strangers. It’s awful to be at the mercy ofstrangers.
He stopped.
And me about blind on top of it.
She was just not going to let up. All right, he said. What is it you need done?
Not much for a big strong young man like you, she said. Just load a sack of cowfeed in the trunk of my car for me.
She had turned and was hobbling away. Tall old grandmother with broad humped shoulders. Confident of him now, she didn’t even look back. He followed.
Where is your car?
Down by the tie yard.
They passed under casual eyes that remarked them without interest. The railroad then and a sulfurous pall of coal smoke and tackier houses with black faces pressed against the glass to mark their progress. Old blownout automobiles enshrined on tieblocks while poisonoak crept their rocker panels. Surly watchdogs watched from chains with cartire anchors, and one chained to a clothesline followed them to the end of its tether with the chain skirling on wire then sat on its haunches and watched them go.
I don’t really understand this, the boy said. Would they not load the feed for you where you bought it?
The boy at the store had a bad back, Grandmother said.
Then how the hell did it get to the tieyard? he wondered to himself. He didn’t pursue it, for he had come to suspect the workings of the old woman’s mind. Perhaps his own as well.
The silence between them deepened as the road they trod narrowed to a footpath bowered by winterbare sumac. He and Grandmother walking in a fairytale wood, but a wrong turn has been taken somewhere, for nothing seems rightabout any of this. The very light had altered, darkened as if for an early December dusk. Behind them a car took the railroad crossing fast and its mufflers opened up fullthroated then the siren came on, laying wail on fading wail on the belabored countryside. He wondered if it was Bellwether and he’d missed him. There was a leaden weight on his heart.
The silence seemed interminable. To break it he asked her back, What did your man die of?
She didn’t hesitate. The syph, she said.
The what? He had skipped a step, he’d misunderstood, his ears were failing him.
The syph, she whined. He come down with it and it drug on and turned into the drizzlin shits and he just wasted away.