RIDE back home was still at the pool hall and might be there another hour yet, or even two.
“Yes,” the neighbor boy told her. “I’m going to town, but just long enough to cash my check.” Then, “Half an hour,” he told her when she found him at the pool hall.
Then, “Just let me finish this rack” when she came back around.
So now she stood out on the courthouse steps, shivering in her jeans jacket, cursing softly.
She had a cigarette in one hand and her twenty-dollar bill balled up in the other and she smoked and shivered until she had smoked the cigarette down to a nub. The jailhouse door swung open and out came the scrawny thing and the heavy girl right behind her.
“What do you want me to do?” the scrawny thing said. “I already told you I’m sorry.”
“You can tell my mom and dad why they had to drive all the way up here and bail me out.”
A gust of wind snatched away the rest of their words and Maggie watched them take their argument up the street and around the corner.
That’s the way the world is, Maggie thought. One damn fuss after another.
She looked across to the pool hall. Half an hour, she thought. It’s been that long at least. That boy’s liable to be there till closing time. What do I do till then?
The wind picked up a scatter of leaves and blew them across the yard and in the rattle of the leaves it seemed she could hear the scrawny thing and the heavy girl going at it hammer and tongs.
Not another soul was out. She reckoned there were people drinking coffee at the Square Deal Grill and people in line at the bank and one or two that stood at the drugstore counter for a prescription. But the wind had driven everyone off the streets and off the square. The trusty’s rake leaned against a wall.
Leaves had gathered under the shrubs, leaves in the gutters, leaves on the windshields of the parked cars.
She looked at her sweaty, balled-up twenty and wished she would not do what she was likely now to do. She crossed the street and looked into the window of the pool hall. The neighbor boy stared at the table and slowly chalked his cue. Another broke a new rack.
So she had time, plenty of time by the look of it. That neighbor boy would play out every dollar in his pocket before he drove her back to Wolf Creek. And then he would want to dun her for gas money, and all she had in life was that twenty.
Her hands began to tremble; she began to ache in every bone at the thought of all that dead time and the money getting hot in her hand. She knew where she could get something for her twenty, something that would ease her mind and take away the ache and blunt the hard edges of memory and the world, something that would set the world aright.
The next gust of wind pushed hard against her. The snows of December were just around the corner. She shivered at the thought and gripped her twenty hard. It was ten cold miles back to Wolf Creek. She looked toward the jailhouse where her old man sat in his cell, then through the pool hall window where the boys were racking up another game. She hesitated for another moment, then with a curse for the neighbor boy, for Deputy Burke, for the heavy young girl and the scrawny thing, she followed her twenty down the alley.
Timothy Weatherstone
IT WAS Timothy Weatherstone’s first day as a deputy and his first official act was to take the cuffs off Maggie Boylan. Insufficient evidence, said her lawyer. Case dismissed, said the judge.
“Score one for you, Maggie,” said the sheriff.
“I didn’t know we was keeping score.”
“Oh, we’re keeping score,” he said. “And one of these days, we’ll win.” The sheriff was lean as a fox, dressed in his sharp-pressed, black-and-gray uniform with gold sunrise patches at the shoulders and a shining gold badge on his chest. Maggie was lean as well, but perilously lean, like a fox half-starved. She wore a sweatshirt and blue jeans busted out at the bony knees. “So you’re free to go,” the sheriff said. “Until next time.”
She looked at the sheriff and then looked away as if she might spit but thought the better of it. She rubbed her wrists where the cuffs had bit them, then looked up to see who had set her loose. “Timmy Weatherstone, is that you?”
Weatherstone winced to hear Maggie call him “Timmy.” He was sure that Tom Burke, the other deputy in the room, was grinning behind his back. Here he was, the rookie, fresh out of college, trying to prove himself, trying to stand up as a professional, and first thing, he gets called “Timmy” by the likes of Maggie Boylan, raggedy, strung-out, withered-to-the-bone Maggie Boylan.
“You don’t remember me,” she said. “But I used to hang with your mother when you was just a baby.”
He did not remember, but he knew the stories and did not want to be reminded.
“We used to call her Aunt Jenny, she was so good to us spite of all her trouble. I used to give you your bottle and change your diaper. That was before she got saved and quit running with us wild young girls. And now you’re a deputy.”
“It’s his first day on the job, Maggie,” said the sheriff. “Don’t ruin it for him.”
“I wouldn’t ruin nothing for him,” Maggie said. “He worked too hard to get here.” She stood to put on her coat—a big, blue denim barn coat that hung off her shoulders and covered her hands so that she had to roll back the cuffs. “He could of been on this side of the table, except he straightened up.”
“That was years ago, Maggie,” said the sheriff.
“You’re right. He’s made something of himself,” she said. “If your mother was here, she’d be proud.”
Tim Weatherstone did not want to hear his mother mentioned by the likes of Maggie Boylan and would have said so. But after six months, even at the mention of his mother, the words still piled up in his throat.
The sheriff pointed to Maggie’s tent of a coat. “Isn’t that Gary’s jacket?”
“I don’t reckon it’s none of your business, but yes it’s his jacket. He don’t need it where you got him.”
“No, I don’t suppose he does.”
She looked into the property bin. “Is this everything?”
“You signed the receipt.”
“But I had a ten-dollar bill in my pocket.”
“You signed the receipt, Maggie. It says fifty-seven cents on the receipt. Fifty-seven cents is what you get.”
Maggie glared at Thomas Burke and he looked away.
“You were intoxicated at the time you signed that receipt,” the sheriff said. “You might have been in a blackout.” He looked at Maggie and he looked at the deputy with the sharp edge of his eye.
“Somebody blacked me out of my money,” Maggie said. She muttered something else, low and indecipherable, and continued to mutter as she signed for the rest of her property.
“What
