Ed put his hands back in view. I was aware of the bar’s other patrons watching, and hoped none of them was in the mood for trouble. Folks can get very protective of the people who serve their beer. It’s an important bond.
‘You the kind of guy who can shoot people?’
I looked at him. ‘What do you think?’
There was a long beat, and then Ed sighed. ‘Should have known you were trouble.’
‘I’m not. I just want to talk.’
‘Out on Long Acre,’ he said. ‘Old trailer by the creek on the other side of the little woods.’
I threw down money for the beers and ran out, nearly knocking down the guy coming back from moving his truck.
Bobby had the car pointed and ready to go. Now that I knew where we were going, it sounded kind of familiar. Long Acre is a seemingly endless road that arcs out from the back of town into the hills. There aren’t many houses out that way, and the creek the man had referred to was well out beyond them, the other side of a thick stand of trees.
It took us about ten minutes. It was very dark, and Bobby was driving very fast. I couldn’t see any sign of taillights up ahead.
‘Maybe he wasn’t heading home,’ Bobby said.
‘He will sooner or later. Slow down. It’s not that far now. Plus you’re scaring me.’
Soon after that we saw the mirror surface of the creek, silver under the blue-black sky. Bobby braked like somebody hitting a wall and turned off down a barely marked track. At the end you could see the shape of an old trailer sitting in splendid isolation. There was no sign of a car.
‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Okay. Pull around where we can’t be seen from the road.’
After about half an hour I started to lose patience. If Lazy had gone some other way to make sure he wasn’t being followed, then he still would have been home by now. Bobby agreed, but put a different interpretation on what I’d said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I knew this guy a long time ago. I’m not rooting through his home.’
‘Wasn’t suggesting you did it. Come on, Ward. Minute this guy sees you, he takes to his heels. You called right. The bar in the video was to remind you of someone, and this old guy knows something.’
‘He could have mistaken me for somebody else.’
‘You’re probably a little thicker than you were back then, but it’s not like you put on a hundred pounds or changed race. He knew it was you. And for someone who’s supposed to be old, he put some distance between you pretty fast.’
I hesitated, but not for long. I’d spent a lot of time with Lazy Ed. I’d only been one of many, for sure, and doubtless there had been several generations of underage drinkers since. But I’d been hoping for a more friendly reception.
We got out of the car together and I walked with him to the door of the trailer. Bobby tricked the lock and slipped inside, and a moment later a dim light seeped out through the windows.
I sat on the step and kept watch, wondering if my parents had suspected that one day it would come to something like this. Their son, half-drunk and breaking into the trailer of an old man. I don’t like the man I have become, but then I didn’t much care for the guy I was before. I wasn’t entirely out of line, and it made sense, of a kind: the memory of playing pool with my father long ago, the way Ed had reacted on seeing him back then, was what had made me go to the bar. But it seemed to me, as I watched down the track and listened to Bobby moving about inside, that I heard my father’s voice again.
‘I wonder what you’ve become.’
Ten minutes later Bobby came back out, holding something.
‘What’s that?’ I stood up, feeling my legs ache.
‘Show you inside. You must be cold as fuck.’
Back in the car I flicked on the interior light.
‘Well,’ Bobby said. ‘Lazy Ed is getting through his twilight years with the aid of alcoholic beverages, and has gotten to the stage where he’s hiding the empties even from himself. Either that or he’s aptly nicknamed, and just can’t be fucked to take them outside. It’s a zoo in there. I couldn’t look through everything. I did, however, come upon this.’
He held out a photograph. I took it and angled it so the light fell on it. ‘Found it in a box stowed beside what I assumed must be his bed. The rest was random junk, but this caught my eye.’
The picture showed a group of five teenagers, four boys and a girl, and had been taken in poor light by someone who’d forgotten to say ‘cheese’. Only one guy, standing right in the centre, seemed to be aware that he was being immortalized. The others were glimpsed in half-profile, faces mainly in shadow. You couldn’t tell where it had been taken, but the clothes and the standard of the print said late 1950s, early 1960s.
‘That’s him,’ I said. ‘The guy in the middle.’ I felt uncomfortable holding something that was so much of someone else’s past and nothing to do with me.
‘By “him”, you mean this guy Lazy Ed.’
‘Yes. But this was taken fifty years ago. He didn’t look that preppy when I knew him. By a long shot.’
‘Okay.’ Bobby pointed at the woman, who was on the left-hand edge of the photo. ‘So who’s that?’
I looked closer at the figure he was indicating. All I could make out was half a brow, some hair, most of a mouth. A thin face, young, quite pretty. I shrugged. ‘You tell me. No one I know.’
‘Really?’
‘What are you saying, Bobby?’
‘I could be wrong and I don’t want to steer you.’
I looked again. Peered carefully at the other faces for a while, to refresh my eyes. Then I glanced at the woman again. She still didn’t trigger anything.
‘It’s not my mother, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘I’m not. Keep looking.’
I did and finally something caught, and I let it come on. It took a few seconds, and then dropped like a brick. ‘Holy shit,’ I said.
‘You see it?’
I kept looking, expecting to become less sure. I didn’t. Once I’d seen it, it couldn’t be denied. Though a lot of her face was obscured, it was there in the eyes and the slope of the top half of her nose.
‘That’s Mary,’ I said. ‘Mary Richards. My parents’ neighbour. In Dyersburg.’ I opened my mouth to say something more – I’m not sure what – but then shut it again with a snap, sideswiped by a sudden flash of another image.
Bobby didn’t notice. ‘So what’s Ed doing in Montana back then? Or what was she doing here?’
‘You
