“I heard she got married,” he said. “Had a kid. A little girl.”
“That what you heard?”
“Ma wrote something, a few years back.”
Jeff took a drink and set his beer down again. “Had the kid but never got married. Guy was a total douche. Left her high and dry.”
Danny shook his head, in real sadness. “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said, and Jeff shrugged again and said, “It is what it is, man.” And saying this he looked at Danny, as if to give greater weight to the words, and Danny held his eyes—eyes of childhood, eyes of boyhood in the face of this man sitting at the bar drinking his beer, a man still in his mechanic’s jacket and smelling of the garage.
Jeff turned back to the game. Then he gave Danny a backhanded swat to the arm. “You wanna sit at a table? This game is killing me, man.” And they took a table far enough from the bar that they would not be overheard by the men at the bar but not so far that the men would wonder what it was they had to move so far away to discuss, and when they sat they arranged themselves so both had a view of the game, as if that were still their top priority. The man who’d sat to Danny’s left watched the move dull-eyed over his shoulder, and Danny and Jeff returned his look until at last he swung his head back around and lifted his glass and drank, the back side of his skull gleaming under a few dark strings of hair.
“Saw you out there talking to Wabash this morning,” Jeff said. He’d put his boots up on one of the empty chair seats and crossed them at the ankles and likewise crossed his arms, and his eyes were still on the game.
“He felt like a chat, I guess,” Danny said.
“What’d he have to say?”
“He seemed mainly to want to tell me what a small town it is.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I guess I might just want to think about that.”
Jeff picked up his glass and before taking his drink said, “Well, maybe you might.”
Danny looked over but Jeff kept his eyes on the game.
“You got something on your mind, Jeff?”
“Just saying,” Jeff said. “A man might wonder what you’re doing back here, Dan.”
“I don’t know why a man would. I’ve been back plenty of times.”
“I know it. Big Man always tells me. Christmastime, usually. But then you go back to wherever. You don’t go driving him to work. You don’t go parking your truck in the lot and walking right in. Standing around jawing with Wabash all day.”
Danny looked at him, then looked away.
“I guess I shouldn’t have bothered you, Jeff.”
“Aw, shit.” Jeff brought his boots to the floor, and the man at the bar with the stringy hair glanced back at the sound, his brows bunched up over the dark mound of his shoulder. Jeff waited for him to turn away again.
“It ain’t about that, Dan, and you know it.”
“What it’s about?”
“You know what it’s about.” Jeff leaned forward, and Danny turned, the better to face him, and they looked into each other’s eyes—and finally with a smirk Jeff said in a lowered voice, “It’s about what everybody has always said every time they’ve seen you back here and what they’re gonna say now—especially now.”
“Why especially now?”
Jeff looked at him. “Seriously?”
Danny waited.
“Not two weeks since those two girls went into the river down in Iowa? One of them dead and the other the sheriff’s daughter. What sheriff? The sheriff who let that son of a bitch Danny Young go scot-free and who is now dead himself in the ground.”
Danny stared at Jeff, Jeff staring back.
“I gotta say, Jeff. I thought you of all people would cut me a little slack.”
“Why me of all people, Dan?”
Danny looked at him. Sitting there waiting. All tensed up like some kind of animal. Spring-loaded. It made him so tired, suddenly. Then in a voice only Jeff could hear he said, “We drove right by her, Jeff. We both of us drove right by where it happened. Where they say she went into the river.”
Jeff shook his head and laughed but there was no humor in it. “That ain’t what you mean.”
There was a disturbance at the bar and they both turned to watch as the man with the stringy hair righted himself and stood blinking glassily at the room. At the two of them sitting there. He let