“You think he’s coming to kill me or something?”

“No,” I said, “I ain’t saying that, Pastor. We already had us one funeral. I’d like to hold off a while on having another one if we could.”

I heard a crack of thunder way off behind me over the hills. The breeze picked up again and stirred the branches on the trees behind the barn.

“Now, I believe you’re a spiritual man, Mr. Chambliss. And I know you like to keep your secrets about what’s going on up there in that church, and that’s fine with me as long as nobody gets hurt and nobody ends up dead. But there’s a family’s spirit that needs healing, and I would think a God-fearing man would want to see that it’s done.”

“God don’t just care for the spirit, Sheriff,” Chambliss said. “I’m sure even a man like you knows that Christ healed the sick.”

“Yeah, I know He did,” I said. “But you ain’t Christ.” He smiled and looked up at me and narrowed his eyes. “You call me when you get to feeling like you want to do the right thing. If not, I can guarantee that you’ll be hearing from me soon.”

I turned and walked away from the barn and out across the yard toward the cruiser.

“We’re all in need of some kind of healing, Sheriff,” he hollered after me.

I opened the door to my car and slid onto the seat and watched him as he walked back toward the barn. The first drops of rain splattered on my windshield. I thought about what he said and realized that I couldn’t have agreed with him more.

E

IGHTEEN

I COULD SMELL THE PORK CHOPS FRYING IN THE PAN WHEN I opened the door and walked into the house. Sheila was in the kitchen with the radio on, and I walked down the hallway to the bedroom. I hung my belt and my holster on the closet door, and then I unbuttoned my pants and untucked my shirt. I kicked off my boots and left them on the far side of the bed and sat down. I could hear Sheila’s footsteps coming down the hall. She stopped at the bedroom door.

“You ready to eat?” she asked.

I turned and looked at her over my shoulder. “You sure know how to greet a man,” I said.

She smiled. “Well, come on while it’s hot,” she said. My shirt was almost soaked through with the rain, and I took it off and dropped it by the bed. I walked into the dining room in my undershirt and sat down at the table.

“I forgot to wash my hands,” I said.

“It’s all right,” Sheila said. “It won’t kill you to eat with dirty hands, not tonight, anyway.”

I forked two pork chops and dropped them onto my plate, and then I spooned some salad out beside them.

“You want a beer?” Sheila asked.

“You want a beer?” I asked her back.

She smiled at me and stood up and went into the kitchen and I heard her open the refrigerator, and then I heard the sound of the bottles clinking together. She walked back into the dining room and sat my beer in front of my plate. She sat down and picked up her fork. “So, what you got so far?” she asked.

I took a sip from my beer and sat it on the table and looked at it for a minute. I watched the sweat run off the bottle onto the tablecloth, and then I picked it up and wiped it down with my napkin. I sat it back on the table. “Well, I got a dead boy who never said a word in his life, a mama who don’t want to say one now, a preacher who’s more interested in saving my soul than telling me the truth, and an old woman who’s too scared of him to say hardly anything at all. I know it sounds like I got a lot, but when you take a hard look at it it don’t amount to much more than jack shit, if it even amounts to that.” I picked up the beer and took another drink.

Sheila smiled at me across the table. “Something’ll break,” she said. “It always does.”

And by God if she wasn’t dead on with that.

Jess Hall

N

INETEEN

AFTER THE SCHOOL BUS DROPPED ME OFF ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON, I left my book bag on the porch by the front door and walked over to Joe Bill’s. There wasn’t nobody at home at my house, and I didn’t feel like being there alone.

I rung Joe Bill’s doorbell, and he flung the door open before the chimes even stopped. He stepped out onto the front porch and closed the door behind him like he didn’t want me to see what he was doing inside his house.

“Hey,” he said.

“Can you play?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But you can’t come inside. My mom’s not home. She doesn’t want nobody coming in when she ain’t here.”

“All right,” I said. “What do you want to do?”

“It don’t matter,” he said. He turned his head to his left and looked down the road like he was expecting to see someone. “I was just out in the backyard shooting Scooter’s BB gun a few minutes ago.”

“What were you shooting at?”

“Just different things,” he said.

“Can I shoot it?”

“No,” he said. “I already put it back, and I ain’t getting it out again. He’ll be getting home from work pretty soon, and I don’t want him catching me with it. He’d kill me if he did.”

“Whatever,” I said, but I didn’t blame him. Joe Bill was scared to death of Scooter, and I was too. He was fifteen years old, but he seemed a whole lot older to me. He had a fat friend named Clay, and I was especially afraid of him because he was as dumb as a rock and that made him even more terrifying because he’d do just about anything Scooter told him to do. The two of them worked for Joe Bill’s daddy down at his garage in Marshall. Joe Bill had sworn that one time he saw his brother talk Clay into eating some broken glass that somebody had busted out of the windows in an old school bus that was parked in the junk lot behind the garage. Joe Bill said Clay thought about it for a minute, and then he picked out a couple of pieces of glass from the gravel and put them in his mouth and chewed them for a while and swallowed them. Joe Bill said Clay’s mouth didn’t bleed or nothing. I didn’t know if I believed that or not, but sometimes I thought I might.

The meanest thing I’d ever seen them do was a few years before when Joe Bill got a remote-control car for Christmas. We’d built a little ramp out in his driveway, and we were taking turns launching the car off into the grass. Scooter and Clay rode up on their bikes and watched us from out in the road. After a minute they came up the driveway and Scooter picked up that car and wouldn’t give it back, and then he told Clay to jump up and down on our ramp until it broke, and it wasn’t but two or three jumps before it snapped right in two because he was so fat. Joe Bill said he was going to holler for his mom, and when he did Clay picked up a baseball bat out of the carport and Scooter tossed that car up into the air and Clay swung at it like he was hitting a baseball. He busted all the wheels off the car and knocked out the batteries. It landed right in the middle of the yard, and Joe Bill went running over to it and picked it up and looked at it, and then he threw it down and ran into the house.

He left the carport door open and I could hear him crying inside, but Scooter and Clay just rode off on their bikes before Joe Bill’s mom came out. I knew Joe Bill wouldn’t fess up to crying about that now, but I think I probably would’ve cried too. That was an awfully nice car just to watch it get broken for no reason.

“Well, what do you want to do?” I asked.

“We could shoot some baskets out back,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

THERE WAS A LITTLE PATCH OF DIRT IN JOE BILL’S BACKYARD WHERE his daddy had put up a basketball goal, but it really wasn’t nothing but a wooden backboard with a rusty old rim nailed to it. The rim didn’t even have a net on it. The court was just made of dirt, and when you bounced the ball it looked like brown smoke was rising up off the ground.