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"You cut me loose on a DWI and got me sober, Dave. Or at least I got a good running start at it. What'd you get for it? A mess of trouble you didn't deserve."
"Extend a hand to somebody else. That way you pass on the favor," I said.
I put my hand on the back of his neck. I could feel the stiff taper of his hair under my palm.
"I think about Kelly most when it rains. It's like she was just washed away, like everything that was her was dissolved right into the earth, like she wasn't ever here," he said. "How can a person be a part of your life twenty-four hours a day and then just be gone? I cain't get used to it."
"Maybe people live on inside of us, El, and then one day we get to see them again."
He leaned one hand against a wood post and stared at the rain. His face was wet with mist.
"It's coming to an end," he said. "Everything we've been doing, all the things that have happened, it's fixing to end," he said.
"You're not communicating too well, partner."
"I saw them back yonder in that sugarcane field last night. But this time it was different. They were furling their colors and loading their wagons. They're leaving us."
"Why now?" I heard my voice say inside myself.
He dropped his arm from the post and looked at me. In the shadows his brown skin was shiny with water.
"Something bad's fixing to happen, Dave," he said. "I can feel it like a hand squeezing my heart."
He tapped the flat of his fist against the wood post as though he were trying to reassure himself of its physical presence.
Late that afternoon the sheriff called me on my extension.
"Dave, could you come down to my office and help me with something?" he said.
When I walked through his door he was leaned back in his swivel chair, watching the treetops flatten in the wind outside the window, pushing against his protruding stomach with stiffened fingers as though he were discovering his weight problem for the first time.
"Oh, there you are," he said.
"What's up?"
"Sit down."
"Do we have a problem?"
He brushed at his round, cleft chin with the backs of his fingers.
"I want to get your reaction to what some people might call a developing situation," he said.
"Developing situation?"
"I went two years to USL, Dave. I'm not the most articulate person in the world. I just try to deal with realities as they are."
"I get the feeling we're about to sell the ranch."
"It's not a perfect world."
"Where's the heat coming from?" I said.
"There're a lot of people who want Balboni out of town."
"Which people?"
"Business people."
