community to have an idea of him and his people as adversarial to the better desires of the county. I told him I thought that was a mighty philosophical way of looking at things, taken all in all. A little sweet talk with a DA who’s already covered up prosecuting pillheads all over Kingdom Come, and you’d be surprised what you can get to happen.”
“So you struck a deal with a Nazi? That’s pretty Christian of you.”
“Yeah, well. Sometimes the law ain’t pretty in all of its fine print.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you’ve brought him up here. I only sit down next to the man every month at the courthouse. I’ve got about as much use for him as you do.”
Holston passed a hand over his skull, stood there trying to collect himself. A man come to the end of all best intentions.
“I’m going to tell you right now, Pettus,” Holston said. “Don’t you look this kindness in the face and call it anything else. I’m trying to help you and him both, you stubborn ass. That man could very well end up the majority of his days left on this earth in a damn cage if you don’t help him. Now I need you to take him in for a little bit. Not too long. Maybe a week or two. Time enough to give things a chance to cool off. It’s a goddamn good thing he’s as good a shot as he is. If he’d slipped up and killed one of those boys this would be done before it even got started. You play your cards right, you might even be able to keep him on the commission.”
“Babysit him, huh? What’s he say to that idea?”
“He’s not too fond of it, if you want to know the truth. He said he couldn’t much stand the sight of you and that the only thing that redeemed you as far as he could tell was your politics. Then I told him that a man often hated most what he most resembled. He pretty much shut up after that.”
Kyle shook his head, went over to the coatrack, pulled on his boots and his hunting jacket.
“Come on, dammit,” he said. “Help me convince the old bastard to see to his own best interest.”
Holston smiled, said. “See, there’s that country gentlemen I was talking about. I think the school teachers call it noblesse oblige.”
“Fuck you.”
“Well, no thank you, but I appreciate the offer. I surely do.”
HE PUT Gerald in the front bedroom just down the hall from where he slept. The old man still wore his clothes from that morning and had nothing else to change into.
“Hell, it’s fine,” he said. “Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve slept in my clothes. If it gets bad I can always strip down to my skivvies.”
Kyle was about to show him the closet where he had some old sweatpants that might have fit, but Gerald waved him away, told him to get on and let him have a bit of earned peace. Just as Kyle stepped out the door slammed shut. A second later the bolt shot home.
Kyle went back to his bedroom and went through some pictures of Laura and him he kept in a password-protected folder on his phone. They were all self-shot, high angled and tight, context excluded from the frame. He wanted to call her, but he knew to text first. That was one of the foundations of their agreement. To never put her in a compromised position. He sent a brief message and waited for an answer in the otherwise dark room.
In a few minues: SORRY CANT TONIGHT. WILL SEE YOU TOMORROW THOUGH.;)
He placed the phone on its charger face down on the nightstand, tried to put it out of his head. After a few minutes he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep anytime soon, so he put on his slippers and went quietly to the kitchen to warm a small pan of milk. It was one of his mama’s rituals for helping his father to bed when he’d been sick with cancer and he couldn’t ever rest once the sun was down. Milk with a whole tablespoon of orange blossom honey. Sometimes Kyle could go an entire day without thinking of either one of them, gone now for so many years. Him eight and her six. But then there would be weeks at a stretch that he couldn’t get them off his mind. When he’d come back from Iraq they’d been there for him when everything else in his life had come unsprung. The drugs, the barfights, the ugly divorce from a woman he’d met at an off-base bar in Jacksonville, North Carolina. They’d seen him through all that, brought him home where he could remember who he was before he’d given mind, body, and soul to the Marine Corps. Maybe that’s what the Corps demanded, but when he earned his discharge, surely he was entitled to take back his mind even if the rest was supposed to remain.
Kyle took the milk off the stove and drank it in a steel camping cup, listened for a long time to a barred owl that often liked to take up around the back shed when he came to visit. Heard him keep shouting, “Who cooks for you, who cooks for you all?” until he flew off. By then, it was well past time to put head to pillow.
The next morning he was up early and made a big breakfast of biscuit and eggs and JFG coffee. He ate his own plate of food and sat there drinking two cups of the coffee until the sun was up. He had resolved overnight to make the old man feel as welcomed as he could, thought the breakfast could be a running start. Despite their differences, he knew it couldn’t have been easy to be put in the old man’s position. He thought too about what Holston had said about his similarity to Gerald. In many ways it wasn’t that hard to see. Each of them had his own way of coming to the truth of things and sticking by what they believed. It was what kept both of them on the commission. People trusted them to see to the best interests of those they represented. But they also set their teeth deep into their ideas and sometimes when others disagreed it was a hell of a lot easier to bite down harder rather than let go. People had a way of remembering things like that too.
When it had gotten to be time to go to work Gerald still wasn’t up. A hell of a thing. Kyle had long thought the old kept the same hours as roosters. His luck to have to take care of one that slept like a teenager. He scraped the eggs, wrapped the biscuits in foil, and carried out the last of his coffee in the Stanley thermos.
He had worked his way through the upper greenhouse and was cataloguing some things in the lower one when Gerald poked his head in the door.
“You got any weed growing around here?” the old man asked, scratched at his chin whiskers.
“No, Gerald. I don’t grow weed.”
“That’s a shame. I figured it might be the time to pick up a new habit.”
“There’s better habits to pick up, I imagine.”
“Yeah? Maybe so. I hear that meth is all the rage these days. They like to put it in books and movies. Preachers and teachers catching on fire when their drug labs explode. That seems like something I could get into. Seems like something that might be enough to distract a man from his immediate concerns.”
“Think so, huh?”
He showed his hands, shrugged. After a minute of staring around at the plants he stepped down and walked the neighboring aisle, peered down at the specimen tabs.
“You take a sudden interest in a botany lesson or are you out here to help?”
“Hell, I’m not above putting in a hand if you think it could be useful. Reach me that clipboard.”
They worked shoulder to shoulder for the better part of the hour, ran the inventory. Pickens took down the species and numbers they needed in terms of transfer and seed. Kyle had known him to have a strong eye for detail, had seen for years how he measured the worth of some proposal or regulation with a bottomless patience for even the most tedious points. His mind remained anchored to whatever held its attention. He never wavered or became distracted. He was serious about things because he understood that a moment’s inattention was all it took to rob you of the essence of something, to miss the subtlety that distinguished this from that. Too much noise, too many competing motives floated a political life, and a man without the ability to cut through it was no more than the people’s fool.
“What is it you think that man Noon is up to?” Kyle asked once they had run the numbers and stood there looking over the rows of plants.
“What