was over.”
“Ever go back?” Waylon said.
“Not for donkey’s years. Only one sister left alive there now. All my connections are here, and I’ve become quite the Texan.”
“I can testify to that,” Charlie said proudly. “You ought to see the western way Hazel’s decorated the living room of her house, Son.”
“Just a cacti motif, really,” Hazel said. “More Sante Fe style than western, actually. Earth tones, pottery, the odd Navajo blanket.”
“Sounds nice,” Waylon said, noticing that Hazel was using her knife and fork now like everybody else would in the Lone Star State, slicing at her grouper and putting it seriously away, her mouth as much in need of a napkin as his father’s was.
“Tell Waylon,” Charlie said and paused to take a drink of the white wine he had opened for himself and Hazel, Waylon having stayed with beer for the meal, “why you been feeling so cheered up for the last couple of days.”
“During dinner?” Hazel said. “I’m sure it can wait.”
“No, no, tell him,” Charlie said. “It won’t bother Waylon a bit.”
Oh, no, Waylon told himself, here it is the first time I’ve met Charlie’s lady friend, and I’ve already let Terry and Beth down in my role as house spy. The old man’s popped the question to her before I got a single chance to report developments to headquarters. They’ll say I let it happen.
“It’s a long story,” Hazel said to Waylon, looking down at her plate to butter a roll, “and I won’t subject you to all of it. Let’s just say it’s come to a satisfactory ending.”
“Oh,” Waylon said. “Good.”
“It’s her daughter,” Charlie announced. “Her daughter’s boyfriend, actually. Go ahead and tell him, Hazel.”
“He’s been quite a burden, has Dwayne,” Hazel began. “In trouble with the authorities constantly. Abusive to Louise. Unemployed as a way of life. An alcoholic and a drug abuser. The catalogue of his shortcomings goes on and on.”
“Sounds like he’s from Port Neches,” Waylon said.
“Pardon?” Hazel said. “No, Dwayne’s from Vidor.”
“He’s not from anywhere now,” Charlie McPhee chortled. “He’s dead.”
“Dead?” Waylon said, pausing with his fork halfway to his mouth. “Did your daughter shoot him?”
“No, no, hardly,” Hazel said. “Louise is such a shy girl. Always too agreeable for her own good by half. And she’s very small, slight even.” Hazel gave Waylon an appraising look over the bite of grouper perched on her fork. “About your size, I should judge. Or only a bit under your height.”
“I bet she’s strong, though,” Waylon said. “Wiry.”
“Yes,” Hazel said, drawing the word out for a space and then popping the bite of grouper into her mouth. “I suppose.”
“What killed old Dwayne, then?” Waylon asked. “Car wreck? That gets a lot of Vidor natives.”
“You’re right the first time, Son, about the method,” Charlie said. “They shot him stone-dead in Beaumont night before last.”
“Who?”
“The man with the shotgun in the Premier Parts warehouse Dwayne was breaking into there just off of Railroad Avenue.”
“A shotgun,” Waylon said, reaching for his glass of beer. “A bad way to go, even for a man from Vidor named Dwayne.”
“You’ve seen these signs, haven’t you, Waylon?” Charlie said, “up in windows of places, saying something like ‘This store guarded by shotgun three nights a week. You guess which ones.’ Well, old Dwayne, he guessed wrong.”
“He would always work on his cars,” Hazel said. “He would spend his last cent on something shiny to attach to the motor, even when the car was in perfectly good running order.”
“Car nut,” Charlie pronounced. “You know the type. Had to have everything new that comes out for his engine. Everything chromed.”
“You mean he was stealing a part for his car when they shotgunned him?’
“No, dear,” Hazel said, touching Waylon’s hand again in that way which reminded him of something powerful disguising itself as weak: a big man with a limp handshake? a thin cable with a steel wire inside? “Dwayne was breaking into that store to take away auto parts for resale,” Hazel went on. “I’m quite certain of that. That was his livelihood.”
“So your daughter’s troubles with her boyfriend are over, then,” Waylon said. “A happy ending, like you said.”
“One that’s final, at least,” Hazel said. “Oh, dear, I’m eating so much of this wonderful fresh fish.”
“Is Louise happy about it, too?” Waylon asked. “Must’ve been a shock to her about old Dwayne.”
“She’ll get over it,” Charlie said. “Life goes on after somebody dies. If you’re alive, you got to go on living. That’s the way to look at it. Life is a river. It keeps on flowing.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Waylon said. “Right up to the point where they put the shotgun to you.”
“You ought to’ve heard how Hazel acted when she read about Dwayne in the Port Arthur Enterprise yesterday morning,” Charlie said fondly, smiling across the table toward the woman loading up a fork with peas and stove-top stuffing. “She just hollered, didn’t you, Sugar? I thought she had hit the lottery jackpot.”
“I was surprised and delighted,” Hazel said, transporting the forkload toward her mouth. “I’ll grant you that.”
“There’s a last piece of that grouper filet left,” Waylon said and pushed back his chair to head for the kitchen. “You have to eat fish while it’s hot to get it at its best, Mrs. Boles.”
“Do call me by my given name, please,” Hazel said. “And I will share that last bit of fish. It’s indeed my policy to eat while the dish is still hot, always.”
A nibble, Waylon thought as he scooped up the last bit of filet from the baking sheet with a spatula, that’s what that little tap on the hand feels like, a nibble from a keeper-sized grouper right before it hits the bait for real and starts to back up into the rocks to eat what it’s caught, down on the bottom in the dark where nothing can bother it.
“Here it comes,” he announced, balancing the plate on the palm of his hand like a waiter as he returned to the dining room. “The last little bite of the late Mister Grouper.”
They had just started when Bobby Shepard pulled his car up to the football field, both groups—to the right the forty or fifty boys wearing the practice
