sit down in the road in confusion — a detail Ruth wrote in the café log in
full, because, she said, any log that leaves out the dog is a log with an
agenda.
Saturday the same, with different pairs. Sunday the town went to church and
talked about it in the parking lots, and what Alden decided, in the main, was
not the decision Ed had feared. Nobody said gang. Nobody said menace. The
word people used, Paula said, refilling his glass at the supper table, was
neighbors. "Mrs. Abernathy told the entire beauty shop that those boys have
ridden past her house every evening like a clock and she has never felt safer
putting out her trash," Paula said. "She is eighty-one and she called Doyle
Ketchum a boy. I thought you should have that for the record."
Owen wrote it down. ABERNATHY, MRS. — FEELS SAFER. SOURCE:
BEAUTY SHOP, VIA MOM. He marked it hearsay in the margin, because
he had standards, but he wrote it down.
The loop had a rhythm by Monday, and the rhythm had a purpose. The
second black SUV — not the one in the yard, the other one, the one with
both taillights whole that had come down his street the week before at the
hour when the light goes, slowed at the Tate house, and gone on, the one
Owen had logged and timed and feared with the part of him that did numbers
at night — the second SUV did not come on Tuesday. Owen sat on the porch
rail with the notebook until full dark, and wrote the time down every fifteen
minutes the way you log a temperature, and at the end of the page he wrote:
TUESDAY. NOTHING. WHICH IS ALSO A THING.
Wednesday it came.
47
It came at six fifty-two, in the last of the light, whole taillights burning, and
Owen's pencil was already moving before his heart finished its first hard
knock: 6:52, FROM THE WEST, SPEED SLOW. It came down the street at
the pace of a man reading house numbers. It came as far as the Abernathys'
corner and stopped — not braking hard, just stopping, the way a thought
stops — because at the corner, on the gravel shoulder where citizens had a
right to be, two riders sat their bikes with the engines ticking cool and a
thermos between them on a camp stool, and as the SUV stopped, both riders
raised their hands, together, in the slow, pleasant wave of men with nowhere
to be and all evening to be there.
Owen wrote it in the present tense, which he never did: THEY ARE
WAVING. HE IS LOOKING AT THEM. THEY ARE WAVING LIKE
NEIGHBORS.
The SUV sat four minutes. Owen timed it by the second hand of the kitchen
clock through the screen door, counting under his breath the way his father
had taught him to count a diesel's idle. Four minutes, in which nothing
happened, extensively, on purpose, at the corner of his street, by arrangement
of a club that had decided to be a wall. Then the SUV turned, carefully,
signaling, and went back the way it had come, at the speed limit, and Owen
wrote the time and the manner of its going and then, at the bottom of the
page, in the largest letters the notebook had ever held, underlined twice:
THE WALL WORKS.
Thursday came up gray and stayed that way, a lid of a day, and Owen went
to school and was present in body only, and came home and did his
homework at the kitchen table with the notebook closed beside it like a dog
told to stay. Paula made beans and rice. The loop went out at dusk without
him seeing it, and Ruth logged the riders' names and Sheriff Marsh got her
48
copy in the morning, and all of it was ordinary, which was the point, which
was the whole design.
At eight forty that evening, October 16, with the beans done and the dishes in
the rack, headlights washed the front windows of the Tate house and a
vehicle stopped at the curb — not rolled past, stopped — and an engine died,
and two doors opened and closed with the matched, considerate thud of men
who close doors softly in neighborhoods on purpose.
Paula was already standing. Owen never saw her rise; she was at the sink and
then she was standing in the room's center with the dish towel in her hand,
listening the way she listened at bedsides. "Stay at the table," she said, and
then the knock came — three knocks, spaced and reasonable, a knock
designed in an office somewhere to say we are reasonable men.
Owen knew their names because the record knew their names, because
security men at a yard have to sign a gate log and gate logs, like all paper,
stay. Vic Donnelly and R.J. Sorn. Donnelly was the older, the talker. Sorn
was younger and quieter and stood, always, half a step behind and to the left,
which Owen had noted in the notebook weeks ago from the Mesquite Street
fence: SORN STANDS LEFT. IT IS WHERE HE STANDS.
"Paula Tate?" Donnelly said, through the screen, pleasant as a man selling
insurance. "Evening, ma'am. Sorry for the hour. We're with Prescott
Properties' site security, and we're just making the rounds of the
neighborhood — there's been some concern about trespassing out at the
equipment yard, kids getting in the fence, that sort of thing, and we're talking
to folks along Mesquite and the streets around. Your boy, I believe, rides his