The last boys get up to leave the square at once, as if on cue, getting to their feet, punching shoulders, going off home in their various directions, and soon Gabe is alone. He lies on his back in the grass, staring at the darkening sky, and when he finally decides to roll to his feet, he wonders what it is that makes him do so, right then and there. For a minute, he stands and thinks about that, but he can’t pinpoint a particular motivating thought that in that instant propelled him to his feet; he simply got up, thoughtless as a hawk or darkling beetle. It makes him uneasy, to feel moved by a force that he can’t identify, like a plaything being steered by an unseen giant hand.
He surveys the buildings that stand around the square: bank, city hall, post office, the building that houses the law firm of Reynolds, Browns, and Company. The buildings are lit by the square’s streetlights, but their doors are shut, their windows dark, everything closed down for the weekend.
Gabe walks toward city hall, crosses the street, and wanders down the alley that runs between that building and the post office next door. The parking lot at the end of the alley, behind these buildings, is empty, but Gabe sees a square of light on the concrete, cast there by the glow of a first-story window: his father’s. He is not surprised; his father has been keeping long hours, barely home before dinner’s on the table, sometimes not till after. Gabe slips behind the low hedge that runs along the back of city hall. He sidesteps quietly, keeping his back to the stonework until he has reached his father’s window. Then he crouches down, and slowly lifts his eyes just to the level of the sill.
Inside, his father sits at his desk, elbows on the wood and his fist against his mouth. After a moment, he straightens up, runs a hand through his hair. It is a slow, firm movement—for his father, an angry one. He drums his hand on the desktop and lifts the phone, holds the receiver between his shoulder and ear as he turns the dial; Gabe can imagine the familiar clacking sound of the disk spinning around the face. The phone is red, and one of the few items in the room that Gabe recognizes from his father’s old office, in a back downstairs room at home—that and the framed chart of the Mississippi Delta hanging on the wall opposite the window. Everything else in the room—desk, bookshelf, lamp, chairs—was already there, the set and props for the person cast to play the role of DA. Gabe remembers the morning last fall when they announced his father’s election, how he and his mother waited at the bottom of the stairs and clapped for his father when he came out of his bedroom, still sleepy-haired in his pajamas. Gabe wasn’t sure then, is even less sure now, just what they were clapping for. It hasn’t made anybody happier.
His father shifts the receiver from one ear to the other when suddenly Gabe hears sounds coming from the building’s back entrance, at the top of a small stoop several yards away. He drops down into the shadows behind the hedge and presses himself against the cooling marble slabs. When he looks toward the entryway, he sees Earl Montgomery standing on the top step, framed by the wan light coming from the single bulb above the doorway. Gabe doesn’t move; he scarcely dares to breathe.
He hears Montgomery sniff, then scrape a load of phlegm from his throat; when he spits, it splatters loudly on the concrete of the parking lot. The man lights a cigarette, then slowly descends the stairs. At the bottom he stops again, and draws deeply on his smoke before crossing the parking lot and disappearing into the shadows beyond. Gabe waits, unmoving. Soon he hears a car engine start, sees Montgomery’s blue car driving down the street at the lot’s far edge, disappearing behind the side of city hall.
Gabe watches it go. He can imagine the car’s interior, the ridges in the upholstery that left marks on his bare legs, the felt material sagging from the ceiling, the empty bottles on the floor, the cross hanging from the rearview mirror, the reflection there of Montgomery’s eyes, which seemed to be looking at Gabe more often than at the road. We ain’t gonna hurt you, Montgomery said, his eyes glinting in the mirror. Not this time. We just want to show yer daddy a lesson. And Montgomery hadn’t hurt him. None of the men had. But there he’d been, sandwiched between them for hours as they drove down country roads so dark he could see nothing but the dirt in the headlights. He’d been so scared he wet his britches, and this was the biggest shame of all, standing there as wet as a small child when they finally took him back to town.