After agreeing that he would return in the early hours of the next morning, Redbird took the Silver Shadow from my driveway and went off to whatever place extinct tribesmen go.
I wandered the house thinking about forces beyond my control.
When I was a child, no more than six, when my mother and father were still alive and everything in the world was right, I asked my father on the front porch of our shanty shack who he thought were the bravest men in the world.
“Sailors,” he said without hesitation. “The ones in those old ships that used the wind to blow their canvas sails.”
“Why them, Daddy?” I asked. I was snuggled up next to him on the big soft chair because it was cold outside. It must have been winter.
“Because, Ezekiel, a sailor would set out on a voyage that lasted for months at a time. Him and his friends were on a ocean so big that nobody could even see ’em and they rode on waves taller than mountains, fought storms that was big as God. It was like the entire world was against them and they was no more than ants tryin’ to make their way through the mud and dung of the elephants’ playground.
“It’s brave to shoot a gun when you fightin’ against another man with a gun, or to hunt a bear with your buddies armed with some spears and such, but to go out over the blue sea on a boat like a leaf with nothing but the wind at your back and emptiness that go on forever in front’a you—that’s more than brave, more than foolhardy; that’s courage, son.”
This was the gist of his answer, though over the years I’ve begun to doubt the exact wording. But I remember faithfully what I felt like: the chill in the Louisiana air and the rumble of my father’s voice all around me like a vast ocean itself; the smell of smoke from the woodstove and burnt kerosene from lanterns.
It felt to me that night while I tromped back and forth, up and down through the new house, that my father’s words were like prophecy over the forty years that separated me from him and my mother’s love. I was little more than an ant up against the assembled forces of a world that could, that probably would crush me and never even notice the loss. I skipped the windmill completely and went wielding my sword against the wind itself.
I loved my father something fierce.
“Hello,” he answered on the sixth ring. It was maybe three in the morning.
“Mr. Manning,” I said.
“What do you want?”
“The truth might be good.”
“You mean like when you told Captain Reynolds that you weren’t hired to find the Goldsmith girl?”
“The only one you and Frisk ever been interested in was Bob,” I said. “You sent me to that gym, only wanted to know about him.”
“What do you want, Rawlins?”
“You got my letter?”
“You can forget that. The LAPD doesn’t employ private detectives.”
“No? Then where did the money you gave me come from?”
“All American dollars come from the U.S. mint.”
“Did Foster Goldsmith give it to you?”
“The only Goldsmith I’m interested in is Rosemary. And the only thing I said about her was that she had disappeared and that her father is an important man.”
“Bob did not kill those policemen.”
“You couldn’t possibly know that for a fact.”
“The night those men were shot he was in police custody,” I said. “I have proof of it.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said.
“You know what I think, Mr. Manning?” He didn’t reply and so I went on, “I think that you or maybe somebody else wants to prove that Bob did something wrong, probably that he killed those policemen. I think that they were happy sitting back and waiting for him to get shot down in the street but then he got mixed up with Rosemary and the game got taken to a whole nother level. That’s why I got brought in so long after he was supposed to have committed the first crimes.”
There passed maybe fifteen seconds of silence and then the phone on the other end of the line broke connection. I waited, listening to the vast emptiness of the phone’s dimension and then there came another click. I cradled the receiver and went out on the front lawn to smoke.
Out there I went over the short, one-sided conversation a few times. For the little he said, Manning was talking like an actor in front of an audience. He suspected that the phone was bugged; maybe by me or by parties unknown. His knowledge and his guilt were one and the same.