'Yes?'

'Get the girl dug up. See if she wasn't stoned-out on roofies.'

'We're talking about Ro-'

'You got it. Rohypnol. That's what the Vanzandt kid uses. He picks up a girl and dumps it in her drink so he can do anything he wants with her.' She fitted her glasses on, then removed them again. 'I wish I'd sent him to the Ellis Unit at Huntsville. The colored boys always appreciate new Ivory soap when they come out of the field.'

'I've seen the autopsy. She was full of booze but no dope.'

She brushed a long red thumbnail back and forth across a callus. 'He sat on my chest and spit in my face. He broke both my lips. I told this to his old man. He goes, "Ten thousand is my limit."'

'The Vanzandts have their own way of doing things,' I said, my attention starting to wander.

She got up to leave.

'Forget about the dope. Either that kid did her, or y'all got real bad luck.'

'What do you mean?'

'Two like him in one town? This might be a shithole, honey, but it doesn't deserve that,' she said.

Just before lunch, the lady in charge of payroll at my father's old pipeline company called from Houston.

'We didn't contract any jobs around Waco during the late Depression or the war years. But of course that doesn't mean in itself your father wasn't there,' she said.

'Well, what you've found is still helpful,' I said.

'Wait a minute. I did some other checking. I don't know if it will be useful to you or not.'

'Yeah, please, go ahead.'

'Your father worked steadily for us in east Texas from 1939 to 1942. Then evidently he was drafted into the army. I don't know how it would have been possible for him to have worked for another company around Waco at the same time. Does this help you out?'

'I can't tell you how much.' I thanked her again and was just about to hang up. Then I said, 'Just out of curiosity, would the "search" key on your computer kick up the name of a man named Garland T. Moon?'

'Hold on. I'll see. When did he work for us?'

'During the mid-1950s.'

I heard her fingers clicking on the keyboard of a computer, then she scraped the phone up off the table.

'Yes, we have a record of a G. T. Moon. But not during the 1950s. He was a hot-pass welder on a natural gas line down at Matagorda Bay in 1965. Is that the same man?… Hello?'

I don't remember if I answered her or not. I recall replacing the receiver in the cradle, the residue of moisture and oil that my palm print left on the plastic, the skin tightening in my face.

My father had been blown out of a hellhole while mending a leak on a pipe joint at Matagorda Bay in 1965.

I walked across the street to the one-story sandstone building, which was now the office of the new sheriff, Hugo Roberts. He sat with one half-topped boot propped on his desk, the air around him layered with cigarette smoke.

'You want Garland T. Moon's file? Marvin Pomroy don't have it?' he asked.

'It's gone back into Records.'

'What d' you want it for?'

'Idle curiosity. Since he probably killed your predecessor with an ax, I thought you might be interested in it, too.'

He dropped his foot to the floor.

'Damn, Billy Bob, every time I talk with you I feel like a bird dog sticking his nose down a porcupine hole.' He picked up his phone and punched an extension. 'Tell Cleo to stop playing with hisself and to bring Garland Moon's sheet to my office,' he said. He put the phone back down and smiled. 'Hang on, I got to take a whiz.'

He went into a small rest room and urinated into the bowl with the door open.

'You got Moon made for the sheriff's murder, huh?' he said.

'That'd be my bet.'

He washed his hands, combed his hair in the mirror, and came back out. 'Since nobody else has figured that out, what gives you this special insight?' he said.

'Because you're not worried about who did it.'

'Beg your pardon?'

'The sheriff was on a pad. In this county the pad is passed on with the office. If the sheriff was murdered by the guys he was taking juice from, you'd be walking on eggshells, Hugo. You're not.'

A deputy opened the front door and stuck his head in. 'You wanted the file on Moon?' he said.

'Give it to the counselor here,' Hugo said. 'Billy Bob, you don't mind reading it outside, do you? There's a nice table under the trees. Then carry it on back to Cleo.'

I took the manila folder from the deputy and started to follow him outside. Hugo lit a cigarette from a match folder with cupped hands. 'Read the weather warning, son. This is the last time you track your shit in my office,' he said.

I sat under an oak tree filled with mockingbirds and went over the long and dreary history of Garland T. Moon. In Texas alone, he had been jailing for five decades. His career stretched back into the tail end of a prison farm system that had held the gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, Buck and Clyde Barrow, and the twelve-string guitarist Huddie Ledbetter. Hollywood films had always portrayed the Georgia chain gang as the most severe form of penal servitude in the United States. But among old-time recidivists, the benchmark was Arkansas, where convicts were worked long hours, fed the most meager of rations, and beaten with the Black Betty, a razor strop attached to a wood handle. Among these same recidivists, Texas always came in a close second.

At Huntsville Moon had been written up repeatedly for 'shirking work quota' and 'weighing in with dirt clods.'

In the old days a convict at Huntsville had to pick a certain quota of cotton each day. If he didn't, or if he was caught weighting his bag with dirt from the field, he was separated out from the other inmates, taken hot and dirty to a lockdown unit, not allowed to shower or eat, and forced to stand with two others on top of an oil drum until the next morning. If he fell off the drum, he had to deal with the gunbull in the cage.

Moon had been hospitalized twice for head lacerations and broken foot bones. No cause for the injury was given. Each hospitalization took place after an escape attempt. His stomach had been seared by liquid Drano, his back held against a hot radiator, his calves branded with heated coat hangers. Everything in his record indicated he was as friendless and hated among the prison population as he was among the personnel.

But what good did it do to dwell upon the cruelty that had been inculcated in Garland T. Moon or that he had cultivated and nourished in himself and injected systematically into the lives of others? The day you understood a man like Moon was the day you crossed a line and became like him.

I needed to know what had happened between him and my father around the year 1956. Moon had said my father had put him in his truck and dropped him on the highway without food or money or destination. My father was a good-hearted and decent man, slow to anger and generous to a fault. If Moon's account was true, Moon had either committed a crime so heinous or represented a threat so grave to others my father had felt no reservation in abandoning an ignorant, sexually abused boy to his fate.

I went back to the first entries in Moon's file. He had been released from the county prison, at age sixteen, in February of 1956. His record remained clean until August 17 of that same year. The words 'suspicion of abduction' were typed out neatly by the date without explanation.

I walked across the square to the newspaper and asked permission to use the paper's morgue. The issues from 1956 -had never been put on microfilm and were still bound in a heavy green cardboard cover that had turned grey with age around the borders. I turned to the August issues and found a four-inch backpage story about a missing ten-year-old Negro girl who was later discovered hiding in a cave. She told officers a white man had come into her yard and had led her into the woods behind her home. She refused to tell anyone what had happened to her between the time she left home and the time she had been found by sheriff's deputies.