LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘When?’

      ‘Now.’

      ‘Okay, let’s make it John Boy’s, but you’ve got to sell it to her. We were gonna watch To Kill a Mockingbird tonight.’

      I heard him call his wife to the phone.

      ‘Hey, crime fighter,’ she said. I pictured dark intelligent eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, her glossy chestnut hair and crooked smile. At this time of day I was sure she’d be wearing her old sweats and carrying a cup of apple tea around with her.

      ‘Atticus gets the guy off,’ I said.

      ‘Yeah, yeah, I know, they all ended happy in those days, that’s what I like about old movies. What’s happening?’

      ‘I want your husband.’

      ‘You want him? Jim, this man is my only stuff. I need him. Where would I find a replacement at my age?’

      ‘I’ll cook the Special for you this weekend,’ I said, meaning charcoal-grilled salmon fillets with caper and raisin sauce, one of the three real-meal recipes Rachel had taught me years ago based on her belief that a man had to be able to put at least that many different credible meals on the table if necessary. ‘On the grill outside if the weather’s good, otherwise I’ll broil it in the kitchen.’

      There was a silent pause, which told me I had her.

      ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘But I want him returned in good condition.’

      ‘No worries,’ I said. ‘It’s only his mind I’m interested in.’

      ‘His what?’

      Beginning to feel that a little momentum might be building, I looked at the mantel again, the other end this time, where the watercolour caricature Jana had had done for me by a friend of hers a few birthdays ago leaned against the bricks: two charging tigers wearing jerseys numbered 39 and 22, the numbers Johnny Trammel and I had worn the year Bragg won State.

      ‘Growl a little growl for me, baby,’ she’d said as she handed it to me. ‘And I’ll show you what real tigers do in the dark.’

      I’d brought it in here from the workshop last week in hopes of reawakening some sense of life in the place, but it hadn’t done that, managing only to bring back the smell of the Bragg Field locker rooms vividly enough to send me on a reconnaissance tour of the house in search of missed laundry or forgotten cat food.

      I decided on one more call before I left to meet Jonas, this one to Johnny over in Burnsville at the western end of the county, to see if I could get him and Li signed on for the cookout too. Not that you had to come up with anything special for him – he’d never been famous for turning down anything that came on a plate. He was still easy because in recent years he’d always seemed too preoccupied even to notice what he was eating, which I took to be a hazard of the legal profession. Some of the guys he represented would be hard on anybody’s appetite.

      The spring we graduated he’d tossed a half-dozen scholarship offers in the trash and started visiting recruiters, eventually ending up in Delta Force and being awarded two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star for his actions in places where hatreds a thousand years old ran like underground rivers, places whose names he would, along with what he’d done there, take with him to the grave. I shouldn’t have known, but did, that his last mission was a so-called black op, a HALO – high altitude, low opening – jump from a C-130 in friendly airspace, he and his squad free-falling thirty thousand feet on a moonless night, five dark silences slanting like raptors down through the stars, nothing to be seen but the soft blue dots of the altimeters on their wrists as they vectored cross-country over a mountain range and a hostile border to pop their chutes a thousand feet above the last ground four of them would ever touch. Johnny made it out alone nine weeks later with a permanent limp and a never-explained tendency to gag at the sight of beets.

      I took the best scholarship offer I got, the one from TCU, where I blew out both knees against Kansas State my second year and had no choice but to become an actual student, while Johnny eventually earned his law degree at Baylor and hung out his shingle in Burnsville, the county seat. He married a blonde former cheerleader named Alicia Meador and settled down to practise country law and watch his cows get fat on the little farm he and Li signed the mortgage on after he brought in his first big settlement. His medals were still gathering dust on his office wall along with his Chamber of Commerce and Rotary certificates and the team picture from our championship season, all of us standing forever shoulder to shoulder in sunlight that somehow seemed historical and heatless in the old print. Johnny himself looked like a dangerous but dapper Prohibition rum-runner or a tragic Irish poet, brick-coloured hair brushed casually to the side and face turned toward me with a small smile, as if I’d just cracked some dumb joke.

      ‘Hi, Jim,’ said Li’s telephone voice.

      I told her what I had in mind.

      She said, ‘Whatcha cooking?’

      ‘The Special.’

      ‘With that weird sauce?’

      ‘It’s the only one I know how to make.’

      ‘Count us in. I know Johnny’ll want to hear all about your hot case.’

      I heard Johnny’s voice in the background: ‘Ask him what’s going on with that. He got any suspects yet?’

      ‘Tell him when I catch somebody I’ll give them his number,’ I said. ‘If they’re rich enough to afford a big-time lawyer.’

      Hanging up the phone, I sipped beer, thinking about what Li had said. It resonated weirdly in my mind because, although the coin had felt warm to me, the case itself didn’t at all. It felt cool, like old mausoleum air or the dank and unfresh stirring of the breeze off a swamp at night.

      I put Mutt on the arm of the chair and stood up, thinking about what I wanted to ask Jonas and about the way things ought to be. ‘Your watch, boy,’ I said to the cat. ‘Don’t let any rats get by you.’

      He just stared at me, looking mystified.

      SIX

      I took Border Avenue south, with Arkansas and its liquor stores on my left, Texas with its car dealerships and Baptist bookstores to the right, and a mile ahead, the Louisiana Quarter, which some said existed only to show the world just how much political corruption and fine cooking it was possible to cram into one medium-sized town.

      Catching the light, I downshifted the F-250 around the corner onto Eastern and listened to the exhaust grumble and roar, a sound Jana called the ‘Serengeti baritone’. It was probably more of an indication of my thinking than I understood at the time, but a few years ago when Jana and the girls were still with me, I realised I was tired of our number-two car, the Acura I’d been driving to work for the last six years. The first vehicle I’d ever been able to call my own had been a pickup, and after my time on the Flying S working for Dusty, nothing felt as natural under my feet as a truck. Which is probably why this one, parked under a huge oak beside the highway with a For Sale sign wedged behind one windshield wiper, had caught my eye. After a ten-minute test drive I bought it from the alcoholic mechanic who’d reworked it, a committed Jehovah’s Witness until he came down with depression, started mixing his medications with vodka and fell from grace. He wasn’t definite about exactly how it happened, but I got the impression it involved several counts of interrupting services at the Kingdom Hall to offer his opinions in favour of wholegrains and anal intercourse. Losing business, he decided to cash in some of his assets, starting with the big four-wheel-drive Ford. It had a heavy brush-buster and winch, oversized knobby tyres and a ceramic eyeball the size of a peach for a shift knob.

      ‘Throw a hook down the well, you could turn the world inside out with this hoss,’ the Witness said, his breath a weapon of mass destruction as he patted the brush-buster affectionately.

      My daughter Casey’s judgement had been, ‘It suits you, Dad.’ Later she had decided for some reason that the truck ought to be

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