“If I get the chance, I’ll ask. Why are you so worried about her? She seems nice enough.”
“I just am.”
“How did you find out where she was staying?”
“That car she was in went up where you work.”
“What were you doing—following her?”
“No, I wasn’t,” Bobby Ray said, clearly insulted by the question. “Somebody told me it was there.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“Poppy, that’s who. He seen that car was up there when he took his wife to work. He was real glad about it, too, because it was still around and she’d be buying more gas.”
“But you’re not glad,” Meyer said because he was beginning to get a little worried about him.
Bobby Ray ignored his observation.
“Addison got real mad,” Bobby Ray said, looking out the windshield of his truck again.
It took Meyer a moment to adjust to the switch in topics. The only Addison he knew was a former sheriff who’d been dead for years.
“Did he?” Meyer said because that seemed the quickest way to get Bobby Ray to the point.
“He said, ‘Shut the hell up, Bobby Ray! Quit that cryin’!’ But I couldn’t quit it. I didn’t know what to do. He put Tommy in handcuffs and he was a-crying—”
“Addison was crying?”
“No, not Addison. Tommy. He was crying—and him a soldier—crying in front of people. And I knowed how he was wanting to ask Addison for a little bit of time. That was the bad part, Meyer. He was wanting to ask him so bad. But he never did. He just stood there with his hands locked in them things behind his back. And Addison—he was all mad. He never wanted to do it. He said, ‘I got to, boy. The army’s in it now.’ I never seen nothing like that in my life, Meyer.” Bobby Ray looked up at him. “It was raining real bad.”
Meyer was about to ask who “Tommy” was, but he didn’t.
“His fingernails was tore off,” Bobby Ray said, his bottom lip beginning to tremble.
“Bobby Ray—”
“Don’t tell nobody her name but me, okay?” Bobby Ray said, taking the conversation back to its starting point. “Don’t you go telling Tommy Garth. Please, Meyer!”
“Now, Bobby Ray, how am I going to tell Tommy Garth? If he comes into Poppy’s store even twice a year, he’s doing good,” Meyer said.
“And don’t you go telling the preacher,” Bobby Ray said, clearly unimpressed by Meyer’s logic. In Bobby Ray’s reality, happenstance was clearly a bona fide and terrible thing.
“Why don’t you want me telling the preacher?”
“I just don’t. He knows too many people.”
“Like who?”
Again, Bobby Ray didn’t answer him. He sat there instead, his face as sad as some old coon dog that got left tied to a front-porch post when its master went off hunting with the rest of the pack.
“Like Estelle?” Meyer asked, and Bobby looked at him with such alarm that he immediately regretted the question.
“Okay, okay,” Meyer said. “I won’t tell Tommy Garth. Or the preacher. Or anybody. But don’t call me up at Lilac Hill anymore—unless it’s something really important.”
Bobby Ray gave another wavering sigh, his downhearted expression still in place. Clearly, this had been “really important.”
“You’re smart, ain’t you, Meyer?” he asked after a moment, and Meyer laughed softly at this brand new topic.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” he said.
“You been places. You been in the army. You been to college. They let you teach school, Meyer.”
“Yeah, but it takes more than that to make a man really smart, Bobby Ray.”
“Tommy, he was in the army like you.”
“Yeah?” Meyer said, trying to remember if he’d known that about the man and realizing that Bobby Ray hadn’t changed the subject after all.
“He didn’t stay in jail, though. He went back in the army anyway. Estelle, she—”
Bobby Ray abruptly stopped and stared through the windshield again—at nothing as far as Meyer could tell.
“Don’t you let nobody hurt her,” Bobby Ray said quietly, more to himself than to Meyer.
“Who are you talking about, Bobby Ray?”
“I hope she ain’t come back,” he said. He looked at Meyer. “And I hope she is, too. Now ain’t that a crazy thing?”
There wasn’t much Meyer could say about that, even if he’d actually understood it. “You better go on to the store before you get into trouble with Poppy—or Estelle sees us.”
“Yeah. I better,” he said. “You ain’t going to forget to try to find out what her name is, are you?”
“I won’t forget, but I’m not promising you anything.”
“You got any candy, Meyer?” Bobby Ray asked.
“Yeah, I got candy,” Meyer said. He reached into his coat pocket and tossed him a couple of pieces. “You’re going to rot your teeth, you know that.”
Bobby Ray already had a peppermint in his mouth. “I ain’t worried,” he said around it. “You ate these when you was in the army, didn’t you, Meyer? Nelda used to send them to you, didn’t she? She’d go to the post office and mail them.”
“That’s right, Bobby Ray.”
Bobby Ray reached to start his truck, then looked at him. “His fingernails was tore off, Meyer.”
Meyer didn’t say anything. He stood back to let the truck labor forward, then stared after it, trying to recall what he knew about Tommy Garth—mainly that he was Estelle Garth’s only public failure. Meyer vaguely remembered something about Garth’s trouble with the army, that he’d gone AWOL one time when he knew he was going to be sent to Vietnam and his mama had been the one who’d turned him in.
That must have been when people knew once and for all that Sister Garth had a tight handle on what was right and what was wrong, and she didn’t turn loose of it for anybody, not even her own son.
Today, the man was little more than a backwoods hermit, living on a piece of land up on one of the ridges most people here had once thought he didn’t even own—until his daddy’s will had been read. Nobody had known he had been letting his boy stay on it. And, now that they did, nobody knew exactly what went on up at the place, how Tommy Garth made his living or what sins he was guilty of. And Tommy clearly didn’t care what went on down here in the valley. He hardly ever showed his face, and when he did, it was only to buy what little he could afford and then go. He never asked after anybody or commented on any of the ongoing topics—the government’s latest doings, the apple crop, the flatlanders, the weather.
Every now and then somebody would see his truck pass through with a load of lumber on the back, and the rarity of that was enough to cause comment in the store and on the church steps on Sunday mornings, precipitating rampant speculation as to what he could be using it for. The more generous of the group thought he was doing carpentry work for the new people moving in—his daddy and his granddaddy both had been good with their hands. Others thought it had to be something illegal, growing marijuana or something like that, which led to a lively discussion about how there wasn’t much money in running a still anymore, and Tommy Garth wasn’t the kind who would