“I remember telling my grandma one time that I used to hear almost as much salty language from you as I did in locker rooms.”
“Fucking liar,” she says, and we both laugh.
We sit and look out at the great, wide green expanse of the park. In the distance we can see people with dogs on the walking trails, past the kids’ playground. There are people stretched out on blankets, reading or just lying on their backs in the midday sun. Taken as a whole, the whole picture, it’s like some snapshot of sweet North Cackalacky on a summer day.
Except that there are people dying around here because of drugs, and girls are disappearing, and some thugs showed up at my house and I caught the kind of beating I did until Roof Crockett, whatever his reasons were, had called it off.
“By the way, and for the record,” I say. “I’mnotgoing to get myself killed.” I shrug. “If they wanted to get it done last night, one of them did have a gun on him.”
“But what about next time, Silas?” she asks. “What if next time you don’t even get the chance to fight back?”
“Then I go to plan B.”
“And what would that be, exactly?”
“That remains a work in progress.”
“This isn’t funny,” she says. She turns to face me on the bench. “I don’t want you to end up like your dad.”
“You think the Crocketts might have had something to do with that?”
“Not what I’m saying,” she says. “Though I’d be lying if I said thethought hasn’t ever occurred to me, and you’d be lying right back if you said the same damn thing. All I know for sure is that the evil in this world got him killed, the way evil came looking for you last night.” She sighs. “I’d just die if what happened to your dad happened to you.”
“It won’t happen to me.”
“This isn’t football.”
It gets another smile out of me. “Funny,” I say. “Briar Crockett told me the same thing.”
“Well,” she says, “on this one point we both happen to be right.”
I sit and stare out at the park all over again. Way on the other side of the green, I see a dog chasing a Frisbee and then jumping to catch it, and I wonder if Bumper, who’s still healing up from that broken leg, will be able to do that ever again.
I draw in some air and then let it out.
“You’ll understand what I’m about to tell you because you might be the only person in the world who might,” I say. “Not sure that even I understand, at least not completely. But I’ve got this need tobewhat I was when I was still playing football. Got it and can’t shake it no matter how hard I try.”
She waits.
“I want to be the one who decides how it all comes out,” I say. “And not in some softball game. Or helping Charlie Hall lay down crop.”
“I do understand that, because I understand you,” she says. “But you can’t clean up the whole town all by yourself, no matter how good or honorable your intentions are. No one man can do that. If he could, my husband would have done it by now.”
“But I’ve got to dosomething,Tay,” I say. “I can’t sit this out, not with the drugs and not with those missing girls, at least not while I’m still around. Not with Briar Crockett and his boys ruling the roost the way they do.”
“You working on a plan B about that, too?”
“In progress.”
“At least promise me this,” she says, her pretty face solemn and serious. “Promise me you won’t just go looking for trouble.”
“You ever say that to Burt?”
“Burt’s a policeman,” she says, “not a quarterback. And for your information, I tell him that every time he’s about to leave our house.”
There’s more urgency in her voice when she says, “Promise?”
“Promise.”
