Page 7 of Martha Calhoun

Putting his feet up on the desk, he wiggled his chair forward a few inches. The grooves in the bottoms of his sneakers were packed with dried mud, and when he moved, little flakes of it rained down on his desk.

“You look scared,” he said.

“I am.”

“No need to be. I’m used to handling stuff like this. Much worse, in fact. This is nothing.” He made a steeple with his fingers and stared thoughtfully into the air. “You wouldn’t believe what I hear. This town, other towns, too. So different from a few years ago. It’s a city infection. Our boys went to war, Europe, Korea, and fought beside city boys. Brought back some of their attitudes. Passed them on.” He sighed. “You know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“Look at Billy Pick. I know his family, used to shop at their grocery store. He was a punk here, a nothin’, he didn’t even play football. Then he comes back from Korea, and he’s a big deal, lots of girlfriends, just ’cause he won’t take no for an answer. Now look at him. Hollywood. That’s where he belongs.”

I nodded again. Nobody knows what Billy Pick does in Hollywood. He’s not an actor, but he’s handsome and he dates starlets. Sometimes he shows up in gossip columns in the Chicago papers. People make jokes about him, but they say he’s Katydid’s most famous person.

“Hell, I don’t blame the soldiers,” Sergeant Tony continued. “You can’t turn your mind off to that stuff. I fought in Europe, too. I know what it was like. Look at this.” He leaned forward and pointed to the back of his calf. A small, hairless bubble of skin bulged out of the muscle and moved in and out with his pulse. “A piece of shrapnel gave me that. Push on it.”

I frowned, not understanding.

“Go on, push on it.”

Tentatively, I reached out and pushed against the strange little dome of skin. The bubble deflated, then filled up again when I took my finger away.

“See?” he said.

I nodded, still not understanding.

He put his feet down and sat up. “Now, tell me what happened at the Benedicts’. Give me the whole story. Get it off your chest.”

I stared at the floor, pale gray linoleum.

He waited, then went on. “I know it’s a shock. I understand. That Mrs. Benedict—she can get very hysterical. Some of these women, they marry well, then lose all sight of things. I knew her before, you know. She was a few years behind me in school. She lived on Hacker Street. Hacker! You know what I mean?”

Hacker’s a very short street that runs along the train siding behind the KTD. Mary Sue Zimmerman lives over there. “Yes,” I said softly.

“You can’t really know whether to believe a person like that, can you?”

I shook my head.

“I’d like to hear what you had to say, your side of the story.”

Without taking my eyes off the floor, I said, “It’s not really what you think.”

“Oh? What do I think?”

I looked up at him. “That, you know, something was going on up there.”

He shrugged. “Is that what I think? Hmmm. Maybe, maybe not.” He put his hands behind his head. “I just know what Mrs. Benedict says. And then there’s your mother.”

“What’s she—”

“Come on. Grow up.”

My eyes dropped to the floor. I fought to hold back the tears. How could I tell him anything? He’d always been like this, always been cruel about our family. It was crazy to try to explain to him. It would only make things worse.

He saw that I was about to cry, so he waited a few seconds. When he spoke again, his tone was very casual. “Where’s your brother these days? Sherwood?”

“Yes.”

“What’s he got? Four years?”

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