The Tie That Binds(3)

“Mr. Roscoe,” he says. “Isn’t there some place else we can talk?”

“Oh,” I tell him, motioning at the cows, “you’ll have to never mind them. They just haven’t seen many yellow pants before. Give them a little more time—they might get used to it.”

He looks doubtful over at the cows again. I have to admit they haven’t changed much. They still look like they flat want to run or fly or get loose somehow. They’re still facing him with their eyes rolled back and their butts jammed up against the fence as tight to it as they can get.

“Well,” he says, turning back to me, “if I can, I’d like to ask you some questions. Can I ask you a few questions?”

“Depends,” I say.

“On what?” he says.

“On what you’re asking.”

So then he asks me, and what he asks shows he’s not even a state farm agent, that he doesn’t even amount to that much. It shows too that yellow pants or no, the joke’s over. Because what he asks is:

“You’re a neighborly sort of man, aren’t you, Mr. Roscoe?”

“I can be,” I say, because I know what he’s driving at now; I know what’s coming.

“I mean,” he says, “you know all the neighbors around here.”

“Maybe. Some of them.”

“Edith and Lyman Goodnough, for instance?” he says. “People tell me you knew them better than anyone else did. That you did things for them. Is that true?”

So there it is. It hasn’t taken him long. And I say, “Didn’t all these people you say you talked to at least tell you how to say their name—while they were telling you the rest of it?”

“You mean it’s not Good-now?”

“No.”

“What is it then?”

“Good-no.”

“Okay,” he says. “Suit yourself.”

Then he reaches behind him again to dig in his back pocket. He draws out a little spiral notebook and writes something into it with that Eversharp pencil he used a little while earlier to flick the cow manure off his shirt. When he’s done scribbling he says, “They used to live down the road from you, didn’t they?”

“It’s still theirs,” I say. “Nobody else has bought it from them yet.”

“Yes,” he says, “and I already know it’s located down the road from you.”

So he’s starting to talk that way now, like he’s sure of himself, because with that spiral notebook and that pencil in his hands he’s forgotten he’s standing on top of cow manure inside a work corral where, thirty feet away from him, some fresh-doctored cows are still on his side of the fence, and they would just as soon run through him as have to look at him any longer.

But he goes on. He says, “I’ve been told that you were the first one there that night, last December. That when the others arrived they found you already waiting for them, and then you didn’t want to let them go inside. You tried to prevent them. Why is that?” he says.

“You tell me. You know all about it.”

“Look,” he says, “Mr. Roscoe. I’m just trying to get what my editor sent me out here to get. And I don’t think I like it any better than you do. But I think I know how you must have felt about—”

“You don’t know a damn thing,” I tell him.

“All right,” he says. “All right then, forget that. But listen, let me just ask you this. Let me ask you: you agree it was deliberate, don’t you? You don’t think it was just an accident.”

I don’t answer him. Here he is, standing in front of me in his yellow Ping-Pong pants; he’s not more than an arm’s length away from me, and for what he’s trying to get me to commit myself to saying I ought to swing on him. But I don’t. I just look at him.

So he says, “But we both know that, don’t we? I just want to know what you think of it.”

I’ve had enough of him now. More than enough. I say, “You want to know what I think?”

“Yes.”

“I think it’s none of your goddamn business. I think you better go on back to Denver.”

“Mr. Roscoe,” he says, saying my name this time like he was saying shit. “I’ve already talked to the sheriff, Bud Sealy. And he told me—”

“No,” I say. “No, you better go now.” And I take a step towards him. He looks surprised, like he’s just opened the wrong door and come up on something he never expected. He backs up a couple paces.

“It’ll all come out anyway,” he says. “I’ll find out from somebody.”

“Not from me you won’t.”

I step towards him again and look at him close up, a foot away from his face. His moustache is thin under his nose and he’s got pockmarks along the side of his jaw. He could use a haircut. But—I’ll give him this much—he doesn’t back up anymore, even if he is just a kid, so I’m through playing with him now. I walk around him over to the corral gate and open it by throwing back the bar latch and holding it for him.

He walks over towards me, and when he’s just about to pass me to go through the gate I take his little notebook out of his hand and rip the top page out of it, the one he wrote something on while he was talking to me. Then I give the notebook back to him. His face looks like somebody just slapped him.