“That kid has been shooting off his mouth in a couple of bars.”
“About what?”
“How he kicked our asses.”
“Kids shoot off their mouths.”
He smiled. “That’s true. Come on, it’s your move.”
“You’ve been around the block, Cotton. You know better than to play on the other man’s terms. I’m talking about messing with the Vickers family.”
He glanced at my guitar case, open on the bed. “The skillet shouldn’t be lecturing to the kettle.” The lid to the compartment in the guitar case where I normally kept my picks and strings and a capo was open. Cotton flipped the lid shut. “Mr. Lowry know you have that?”
“I don’t remember it coming up in our conversation.”
“You don’t have no business with a gun.”
“Wonder why the Second Amendment is in the Bill of Rights.”
He knitted his fingers, then unknitted and knitted them again. He began placing the checkers back in the box, softly, one at a time. “I’m more tired than I thought. Age sneaks up on you.”
“Don’t get your thumb infected.”
He fitted the top on the checker box. “I don’t like people being untruthful to me, Aaron.”
“Untruthful about what?”
“Locking and loading and firing an M1 when you’re about to brown your britches.”
“I’ve got six years in my life that are like Swiss cheese, Cotton. I’m lucky I can tie my shoes.”
* * *
THE NEXT EVENING I drove to the hamburger joint where Jo Anne was working. I couldn’t believe what I saw. Like a traveling Visigoth culture that had found a wormhole in the dimension, the people who lived in the school bus were parked behind the Dumpster in back. Through the windows, I could see the whole crew: Stoney and Moon Child and Orchid and Lindsey Lou and Marvin, all of them eating out of Styrofoam containers. I parked on the street, under a row of maple trees, and approached the bus from the back, then stepped into the vestibule.
The girls looked at me blankly. Marvin wore a wilted black cowboy hat that shadowed the top half of his face, his mouth full of food, his whiskers slick with grease and matted with crumbs. Only Stoney showed any reaction. His face lit up like a pink light bulb. “Hey, it’s you! The ice cream guy! Hey, you guys! It’s him! Come on, ice cream guy, sit down!”
“Mind if I have a word with you all?” I said.
“We’ve been looking for you, man,” Marvin said, tapping the air. “We met this guy, see, he’s a prophet. I mean he’s been sent, you dig? I’m talking about illumination, man, on the first day of creation. I’m talking about a burst of light rippling across the fucking universe.”
“I’d like to talk with y’all about running up Jo Anne’s electric bill,” I said. “The neighbor is a little upset about one of his hogs, too.”
“We didn’t steal anybody’s hog,” Marvin said.
“I didn’t say you did.”
“Hogs don’t commit suicide. So if the hog didn’t commit suicide, it must be missing. That means you’re talking about stealing. So, yeah, you did accuse us of stealing. That’s hurtful, man.”
“Don’t talk to him,” Moon Child said to him. Her eyes were black and swimming with hostility.
“I think y’all are good people,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said.
“Henri Devos is not good people,” I said. “He’s a con man. If he’s around other people, it’s for reasons of money, sex, or control.”
“Guy’s an artist, maybe a little over the line, but mellow most of the time,” Marvin said. “We heard about you going apeshit in his office. You need to dial your head down a little bit, use restraint, not cram a telephone pole up your own ass. It ain’t smart.”