“That was a long time ago,” Burdette said.
“Sure it was. But not long enough, don’t you see? And that surprises me. Because I can’t imagine what in hell you was thinking of. But I know one thing: you made a mistake coming back here. You never should of did that. Now get out of the car.”
Burdette didn’t move. “You can’t do anything to me,” he said. “It’s been eight years. The statute’s already run out.”
“You been talking to lawyers?”
“I talked to a couple of them.”
“You wasted your time. That don’t mean anything. That don’t mean diddly-shit.”
“Sure it does. It’s the same everywhere.”
“No,” Sealy said. “It don’t mean a thing.” He opened the car door. “Now listen to me. I’m through talking. I already been nice.”
Burdette refused to move. He sat slumped against the steering wheel of the Cadillac, his head lolled back against the headrest.
“Okay, then,” Sealy said. “I told you once. I did do that much.” He withdrew the gun from its holster on his belt and suddenly he jammed the short barrel into Burdette’s ear.
Burdette sat up. He tried to move his head away. But Sealy followed his head with the gun.
“Jesus Christ,” Burdette said. “What in hell you think you’re doing?”
“Get out,” Sealy said.
Now Burdette did move. He rose up out of the Cadillac and stood onto the pavement, tall, heavy, massive, a presence above the sheriff. He was dressed in plaid shirt and dark pants; he was wearing shoes but no socks. His clothes looked as though he’d been sleeping in them.
“Turn around,” Sealy said.
“Now goddamn it, Bud. What the hell?”
Sealy poked him with the gun. “Turn around.”
Burdette grunted, but slowly he turned so that his back was toward the sheriff. Sealy removed a pair of handcuffs from his back pocket and locked them around Burdette’s thick wrists. It took some effort to get them closed.
“Well Jesus,” Burdette said. “You mean to tell me, you mean you’re not even going to read me my rights?”
“What rights is that? You don’t have no rights. Not no more. Now hold still while I feel you.”
“You son of a bitch,” Burdette said.
“That’s right,” Sealy said. “That’s just exactly right.”
He began to run his hands over Burdette, feeling up and down his pants legs and along the fat over his ribs. He turned his pockets out. When he was satisfied that Burdette was carrying nothing more dangerous than a wallet and some pocket change, he stood for a moment behind Burdette’s wide back, staring at the massive and wrinkled shirt.
And yet it was still that quiet hour on Main Street, that brief elusive moment of peace and nothing was moving; there wasn’t another person anywhere on the street. And so, without thought, I suppose without even knowing he was going to, while the two of them stood beside the gleaming red Cadillac in that brief tranquillity of a November evening, the sheriff smashed Jack Burdette in the back of the head with the butt of his gun. Burdette howled and fell across the hood of the car. He began to curse.
“No,” Bud Sealy said, looking down at the blood trickling from the back of Burdette’s head. “I thought you was smarter than that. I did think you knew better than to come back here. What in hell was you thinking of?”
2
I had known Jack Burdette all his life. Or all of it, that is, except for the four years in the early 1960s when he was in the Army and in Holt and I was in college and then again later for those eight years after he had disappeared when no one in Holt knew him, that period when he was out in California living on his charm and that sum of money which he must have thought would last him a lifetime until one day the money gave out and he discovered he had only the charm left and not much of that. But yes: I knew him. We had grown up together. For a long time I had even liked him.
His father, whom people here still refer to as John Senior, was a well-known figure in town. He worked at Nexey’s Lumberyard on Main Street near the railroad tracks and he was a big man too — like Jack was, or like Jack was to become anyway — with a considerable gut and a big loud voice that was exactly like a bull’s bellow and of about that appropriateness. Still he was a likable man, I suppose. People in Holt thought so. He wore pressed overalls to work at the lumberyard, and in the evenings before he went home for supper he always drank for an hour or two in the bars out along Highway 34, in the Legion bar or at the Wagon-wheel Lounge, with some of the other men in town who were his contemporaries.
Jack’s mother, on the other hand, was a very small woman, very thin and pinched-looking. She wore scrupulously clean round wire glasses on the bridge of her nose and she combed her hair in a style that would have been fashionable in the 1920s when she was young, a kind of permanent sheared-off bob. She was a very serious woman. She never drank or raised her voice much above a whisper, so we understood in Holt that she tolerated her husband’s excesses because she was a good Catholic. She played the organ at St. John’s Church and made confession faithfully to old Father O’Brien who wore a hearing aid. She hadn’t much else in her life, so it must have been Father O’Brien and the Catholic Church which sustained her.
They lived, during the years I am talking about, over there on the north side of town on Birch Street across the tracks. It was an old yellow stucco house and behind it they had a vacant lot, overgrown with cheat weed and redroot, which ran back for fifty yards toward the fairgrounds. This was the poorer part of town then, before the new tract houses were annexed into the city in the 1970s, but people in Holt still considered the Burdettes to be an average family with adequate income and status. If nothing else, they were interesting. There was sufficient tension in the family to make them worth watching.
Jack was born in 1941. His parents were already in their mid-forties then. They had been married for more than twenty years. So I assume they had long ago stopped expecting ever to have children and had settled into that fractious kind of truce that childless couples often accept in place of real marriage. Then Jack was born. And he was quite unexpected, of course. Consequently his parents tried to patch it up for a while. His father is said to have stopped drinking in the bars for an entire year and people say his mother looked almost pretty for a time, that she appeared to have a kind of glow. But it didn’t last. She never became pregnant again. And soon the old man was drinking regularly in the bars once more while Jack’s mother went back to playing the organ at the Catholic church on Sunday mornings, where in that weekly hour of temporary peace she could watch Father O’Brien from behind those clean little wire glasses of hers. It was all as if nothing had changed — except that there was a new source of tension now, and consequently more arguments.
Well, he was a tough kid. He had a shock of black hair and he was always big for his age. Then when he was six they sent him to school. With his hair combed flat on his head and dressed in new shirt and pants, he entered for the first time that old red three-story brick building on the west edge of town, with its wide foot-hollowed stairs and its tall windows and that familiar smell of swept dust, and he didn’t like it. At school they expected him to sit still, to raise his hand and be quiet. So at recess he walked off the playground and went home. He did this about once a week. And when he arrived at home Mrs. Burdette, that serious little pious woman, would take him by the back hair, lean him across the kitchen table and hit him with the spatula. Then she would send him back. Except that he didn’t always go back; instead he often wandered about town, through the back alleys behind the Main Street businesses and out along the railroad tracks into the country. So in April they decided that another full year of the first grade and another complete term with Mrs. Peach would do him good. I don’t think they believed that Jack had been fully socialized yet.