bicycle out that way."
The screen door stayed latched. Paula stood inside it with the dish towel over
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her shoulder and one hand resting on the door frame, easy as you'd lean on a
fence, and Owen, behind her at the table, could see the shape of her phone in
her apron pocket and the faint red eye of its recording light through the apron
cloth, because his mother had started the recording before she crossed the
room. Paula Tate was a home-health nurse. She knew what a record was for.
She had married a man who said paper stays, and she had been keeping the
family's paper ever since.
"My boy rides his bicycle on the public streets of Alden, Texas," Paula said,
"which he has a right to do, same as your vehicle has a right to be at my curb,
which it is, at eight forty on a Thursday. Say what you came to say, Mr.
Donnelly."
If Donnelly was surprised to be named, he filed it away without a ripple. "No
accusation, ma'am. None. We just like to get ahead of these things. A yard
like that, there's machinery, there's fuel — a kid could get hurt, and Mr.
Prescott would never forgive himself. We're asking parents to have a word
with their kids about the fence line. That's the whole of it. A word."
"Then you've delivered it," Paula said. "I'll have a word with my son about
fences. I'll have it tonight. Is there anything else the Prescott company needs
from this house?"
"Ma'am, there's no need to make it — "
"I haven't made it anything," Paula said, still pleasant, still leaning, in the
exact tone she used with doctors who tried to rush her off a porch: courteous
as a wall. "You've come to my door at night about my ten-year-old, and
you've been polite, and I've been polite, and the conversation is complete. If
the company has more to say to this family, it can say it in writing, during
business hours, and we'll answer it in writing. We keep our paper in this
50
house."
It was then that the headlights came.
They came from both ends of the street, low and paired — a low, lawful,
unhurried thunder, kept down to the murmur the club kept inside the town
limits, which somehow made it larger, the way a big dog is larger for not
barking. Six riders rolled in, two by two and single, and took the curbs on
both sides, spaced, unhurried, and switched off. The street went quiet in
layers: engines, then cooling ticks, then nothing. Not one of them
dismounted. Not one of them took off a helmet. Six men on six motorcycles
sat along both curbs in the dark with their boots on the ground and their
hands on their knees, like a fence that had decided, for one evening, to be
exactly there.
Donnelly saw them. Sorn, half a step behind and to the left, saw them a
half-second sooner. Neither man said anything about them, which was the
loudest thing in the conversation.
One rider dismounted, at the far end of the line, and walked up the Tate walk
alone, at a walk's pace, with his helmet under his arm. Doyle Ketchum came
up the path his friend's widow kept swept, and he did not look at Donnelly,
and he did not look at Sorn. He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps and
looked up at Paula through the screen, and his voice, when it came, was the
voice of a neighbor on an ordinary Thursday.
"Evening, Paula," Doyle said. "Everything all right at this house?"
"Evening, Doyle," Paula said, steady as the whole week behind her.
"Everything's all right at this house. These gentlemen were just leaving. They
had a word about fences."
"Then I'll not keep them," Doyle said, and stepped aside from the walk —
51
not toward the men, not away from them, just aside, the way you step aside
from a door you're holding — and stood there on the grass with his helmet
under his arm, while Donnelly, after a pause in which an entire profession's
worth of arithmetic got done, inclined his head to Paula with genuine,
defeated courtesy.
"Ma'am," Donnelly said. "We appreciate your time. Y'all have a good night."
"You too," Paula said. "Drive safe. The Elbow's a bad curve after dark."
Owen felt that land in the room like a stone in still water. Donnelly felt it too
— a flicker, professionally suppressed — and the two men went down the
walk, got into the black SUV at the curb, the one with both taillights whole,
and drove away at the speed limit, signaling at the corner, past six silent
motorcycles whose riders watched them go the way a wall watches weather
pass.
Nobody moved until the taillights were gone around the corner. Then the
street breathed. A helmet came off two bikes down — Ed Kowalski's white
mustache surfacing in the porch light — and somebody said "Well," and
somebody else said "Coffee'd be a mercy," and Paula unlatched the screen
door at last and said, "Ruth's got pie, but I've got coffee, and there's a
difference and tonight it matters," and the riders came up the walk in ones
and twos, filling the porch the way they'd filled the garage, without
crowding, while Doyle stayed by the steps with Owen, who had come out
onto the porch with his notebook because there were things that had to be
written while they were still true.
Owen wrote the time first. 8:40 PM, OCT. 16. DONNELLY AND SORN