“You get you a new gun?” she said.
“Naw,” was all he said. He scribbled his name and laid the pen down. He turned and went out the door carrying one gun and wearing another.
Armstrong had his office in the old library building, a small space squeezed in between the county agent and the health clinic. Small black children lined one side of the hall, their mothers in chairs stiffening visibly as he walked past them. He spoke to them, said Good afternoon and went on by them and turned in at the end of the hall. The door was open but he reached in and rapped on the glass. Dan was bent over a bookshelf crammed with files and he turned to look at Bobby with his pipe in his mouth. He had a way of looking up over his eyeglasses at people.
“You open for business?” Bobby said.
“Come on in,” he said. “Have a seat.”
Bobby sat down in the chair in front of the desk and took off his hat. Through some system of his own devising the probation officer selected a space among the thousands of files on the shelf and pushed the one he was holding in among the rest of them. His forearms were covered with tattoos from his years in the navy. Palm trees with hula girls and a screaming eagle diving with talons full of arrows. He sat down in his chair and reached for a pouch of tobacco and started loading his pipe.
“What can I do for you, Sheriff?”
“I'm just checking on Glen Davis. Did he come in this morning?”
He tamped the tobacco into the bowl and from his desk picked up what looked to be a hand grenade. “He was waiting on me when I got here.”
“He was?”
Dan struck the lighter and held it over the bowl of the pipe, making wet sucking sounds as he puffed and tried to get it going. Bobby set his hat on his knee.
“Standing out there in the hall.”
“How's his attitude?”
“All right, I guess. Better than a lot of em come in here.”
“What did he say?”
Dan had the pipe going by then and he set the lighter back on the desk, held the pipe near his jaw.
“Nothing much. Said he'd learned his lesson. Didn't want to go back. He was highly cooperative. I was impressed.”
Bobby leaned back in his chair and looked out the window. He could see some leaves on a tree and part of the courthouse.
“You want to see his papers, Sheriff?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
He handed them over and swiveled around in his chair to look at his files while Bobby scanned down the field report. Glen was supposed to come in weekly, every Monday at 8:00
A.M.
Released early on good behavior. Served two years and eleven months. Two prior convictions for simple assault. One drunk driving. Outstanding warrants: none. Everything seemed to be in order. Except now he was crawling around in people's houses.
Bobby closed the file and handed it back. Dan took it and dropped it on his desk.
“Well,” Bobby said. “How did he look?”
“About like everbody who comes in here. A little nervous. I probably would be, too. Some come in with a chip on their shoulder. Want to blame me for their troubles I guess. But no, he was fine. I gave him the regular speech. You know. Get a job, stay out of the bars. Stay out of trouble.”
“And what about a job. Is he looking for one?”
“I believe he said he was going out to Chambers. Said that was where he used to work. I told him he could go by the unemployment office too and sign up to draw until he gets on somewhere. He should, really.”
Dan seemed serene. His day's work was probably over. His eyes flicked back up. “Have you got some concern about him?”
“I was just checking,” Bobby said, and he stood up. “Just like to keep my eye on em when they come home.”
“Well I certainly appreciate your interest, Sheriff. Makes my job easier.”
“Let me know if he gives you any trouble, okay?”
“I'll do that. And you have a good afternoon.”
Bobby put his hat on and got out of there. Some of the children were still in the hall and some of them couldn't walk too good yet and he almost got a few of them tangled up in his legs. He lifted his arms and kind of waded through them and then he was back out on the street in the sunshine and the traffic of the town and most of the day was gone. He looked at his watch. Jewel wouldn't get off until six but there would be a couple of hours of daylight left after that. He figured she was probably still pissed off at him. He walked back up the sidewalk to the jail but he didn't go in. He got his keys from his pocket and got into the car and started it. There was still a load of paperwork on his desk but he didn't want to mess with it now. He backed out of the parking lot and drove around the square and headed south, down the wide street lined with big oaks and old fine houses, just driving. Looking in particular for Glen. He didn't know what he'd say to him this time if he found him. There wasn't much left.
He turned the volume up on the radio and put his hat on the seat. He couldn't just stay up all night or watch him twenty-four hours a day waiting for him to do something. Or even try to keep up with his comings and goings. And what if he was wrong about everything? The only thing he knew for sure was that he'd been to see Jewel one time. But no matter what Armstrong said, he knew the pen hadn't changed him. Not him. If anything it had probably made him worse. Armstrong didn't know him like he did. Armstrong hadn't grown up with him.
He drove down toward DeLay on a back road, cruising along about forty and looking at the crops, the cotton and the corn. Four-thirty. Still
another hour and a half before Jewel got off. Somebody was building a new barn, a bright arch of pale lumber that rose up into the air where men stood handling shining sheets of tin that flashed in the sun. He slowed, looking at it. He thought that probably wouldn't be a bad job, being a carpenter. You could work with your hands. You wouldn't have any problems with your job after you finished working each day. Go home, drink a beer, eat supper, read the paper. Let somebody else worry about all the headaches. Just drive the nails and saw the lumber. You wouldn't have to be on call and you wouldn't always be seeing the bad side of people.
He almost didn't see the car. He was driving slowly over the river bridge and he just happened to glance down to the right. It was nosed up into a stand of cane on top of the bank and he could see a man and a woman struggling against the hood. Bobby slammed on the brakes and shoved his car up in reverse, squalling a tire and going quickly back across the bridge and a little past it, where a sort of dirt trail led down beside the bridge. It was deeply rutted but he pulled off down in there, dust rolling over and through the car. They had stopped what they were doing by the time he pulled up beside them but the woman was crying. He left the car running and got out. The man was just standing there, weaving unsteadily. He had on a ripped shirt and a pair of cutoff jeans. Beer cans were scattered over the ground. Two small children squatted beside the remains of a fire.
“What's going on here?” Bobby said.
“Arrest this son of a bitch,” the woman said as she wobbled toward him. Her black hair was knotted and tangled and her bare feet were dusty. She had on a baggy pair of shorts and some kind of elastic top that stretched over her breasts. He could see her rotten teeth.
“This ain't none of your goddamn business,” the man said. “This between me and her.” He put one hand on the car to steady himself but
it didn't do much good. He seemed to be trying to effect a casual air now that they weren't alone.
“You better watch your mouth, mister,” Bobby told him. “I'm gonna ask you again. What's going on here?”
The woman had come up beside him by then and he could smell her. One little whiff that almost took his breath away. It was not the first time he had seen folks like these running loose out in the county.
“He's botherin us,” she said, and she stumbled and almost fell. She grabbed Bobby by the arm but he pushed her hand away.
“I ain't bothered nobody,” the man said. “I was mindin my own business. You goddamn whore.”
“All right. That's enough of that. What about these kids here?”
“They mine,” the woman said, and lifted a finger and pointed to the man. “And his. But he won't help me feed em and he comes around botherin me all the time and I'm sick of it. I want his ass arrested.”
Bobby looked at both of them and then he looked at the kids. They had not moved. Then he looked a little closer.
“Both of you stay right where you are. You hear me? Don't make a move.”
“I ain't goin nowhere,” the man said, and he started walking toward a cooler next to the car. Bobby took four steps and pushed him hard against the fender.
“I said freeze. You know what
freeze
means?”
The man didn't say anything but he stayed where he was, glaring at him with drunken intensity. Bobby took his hands off him and walked toward the children. They were a boy and a girl about three or four years old. They looked like they wanted to run.
“It's okay,” he said. “I'm not going to hurt you.”
He could see their fear so he moved slowly, watching their lowered faces and sidelong eyes. He knelt next to them. There were tin cans in the
rubble of the fire, a crude circle of rocks with the blackened stubs of sticks, the skeletons of small fish charred and dusted with ash. He looked back at the man and the woman. They were watching him, poised for flight.
“You better not move,” he said.
“Can I set down?” the woman said.
He didn't answer. He reached out for what he'd already seen, the little girl's arm. A shriveled stick of flesh in his hand, the nails on the fingers deeply rimmed with dirt and the bowed arch of the two bones that run from elbow to wrist. The break had been set badly or maybe not set at all. He turned it over, this way and that. He looked into her eyes. A feral child with bright eyes shining in a bleak face and her hair home-cut and lying in long ragged waves close to her ears.
“What happened to this kid's arm?” he said.
Nobody said anything. He got up and walked behind the girl and over to the boy, a trip of a few steps, and he knelt again. He put his amazed hand gently on the boy's naked back. All his ribs showed and he was badly blistered. He touched the peeling skin with the pads of his fingers. The boy's belly was swollen. One of his eyes was matted almost shut like hounds Bobby had seen and his right arm and leg were covered with clustered bruises scattered up and down those limbs in blue and yellow hues. He stood up and stepped away from them and put his hand on his gun.
“You people are under arrest. If you move one step I'll shoot you where you stand. If you don't believe me, try me.”
They didn't move. Not one muscle.
“You sit down right there where I can watch you. Go on.”
The woman started crying and she covered her face with her hands. She was shaking her head and she turned and pointed to the man still frozen against the car like a rabbit caught in a pair of bright headlights.
“It's all his fault,” she said. “He does it to me, too, comes in drunk and if supper ain't ready starts hittin everbody I told him he was gonna get caught you son of a bitch I told you.”
“Shut up and sit down,” Bobby said, and when she didn't he walked closer and pushed her hard to the ground. She landed on her ass in the dirt and rolled over onto her side, beating at the ground with her fist in her outrage and weeping as if her heart had broken in half.
“Turn around,” he told the man. The man didn't want to do it. He started trying to say something, maybe words in his own defense, but Bobby just went to him and got him by the arm and turned him around and wrenched it up. The man struggled against him until Bobby laid the muzzle of the revolver into the soft place behind the lobe of his ear and leaned close to whisper through gritted teeth: “You can go easy or you can go hard and it don't matter to me. I'd like to shoot you anyway.”
The man quit moving. Bobby holstered the gun and got his cuffs off his belt and shackled him tight, then led him over to the car and made him stand there while he got on the radio and started calling for some people to come help him.
They acted as if they were starving, and he guessed they were. He sat at the kitchen table with them and watched them clean up two plates apiece of hamburger patties and vegetables. Mary had given both of them a bath and borrowed clothes from a neighbor. Dr. Connor had come over and had seen to the boy's eye. He had a white patch over it now and their hands were clean and their hair was clean and they were giggling and whispering to each other and they looked a lot better.
Mary was washing dishes at the sink and she kept turning to smile at them over her shoulder. She finally hung up her dish towel and motioned for him to step out on the back porch with her.
“I'll be back in a minute,” he told them, and they nodded and kept eating.
When he went outside she was sitting in a chair near the railing. He hoisted one leg up on it and leaned back against the post. It was nearly dark.
“Why don't you just let them stay here tonight?” she said. “I can fix their breakfast in the morning.”
“I told those people I'd meet them at eight-thirty. I need to get on down there before long. I appreciate you helping me with em, though.”
He looked through the screen door at them. The boy leaned over and said something to the girl and she squealed and covered her mouth.
“What's gonna happen to them, Bobby?”
He looked at her. She was rocking gently, staring out across the yard where night was coming to the trees and the grass in ever-softening shades, creeping toward them where they sat. Night things beginning to call. The unhurried lowing of a cow calling to her baby and the little cow voice that answered.
“I can tell you what ain't gonna happen to em. They not going back to what they were living in. Right now they're in my custody. The foster home'll see after them until the court decides what to do. That may take a while, though.”