They watched McGregor return to his seat and once more replace his earbuds. When Hallas turned back to the Plexi barrier, there was more than a trace of a smile on his lips. ‘Hell, you could probably guess the rest.’

Although Bradley was sure he could, he folded his hands on his blank legal pad and said, ‘Why don’t you tell me anyway?’

6

I declined the part of Harold Hill and dropped out of Drama Club. I had lost my taste for acting. During my final year at Pitt, I concentrated on my business classes, especially accounting, and Carla Winston. The year I graduated, we were married. My father was my best man. He died three years later.

One of the mines he was responsible for was in the town of Louisa. That’s a little south of Ironville, where he still lived with Nona McCarthy – Mama Nonie – as his ‘housekeeper.’ The mine was called Fair Deep. One day there was a rockfall in its second parlor, which was about two hundred feet down. Not serious, everyone got out fine, but my father went down with a couple of company guys from the front office to look at the damage and try to figure out how long it would take to get things up and running again. He never came out. None of them did.

That boy keeps calling, Nonie said later. She had always been a pretty woman, but in the year after my father died, she bloomed out in wrinkles and dewlaps. Her walk turned into a shuffle, and she hunched her shoulders whenever anyone came into the room, as if she expected to be struck. It wasn’t my father’s death that did it to her; it was the bad little kid.

He keeps calling. He calls me a nigger bitch, but I don’t mind that. I been called worse. That kind of thing rolls right off my back. What doesn’t is him saying it happened because of the present I gave your father. Those boots. That can’t be true, can it, Georgie? It had to’ve been something else. He had to’ve been wearing his felts. He never would have forgotten his felts after a mine accident, even one that didn’t seem serious.

I agreed, but I could see the doubt eating into her like acid.

The boots were Trailman Specials. She gave them to him for his birthday not two months before the explosion in Fair Deep. They must have set her back at least three hundred dollars, but they were worth every penny. Knee high, leather as supple as silk, but tough. They were the kind of boots a man could wear all his life and then pass on to his son. Hobnail boots, you understand, and nails like that can strike sparks on the right surface, just like flint on steel.

My dad never would have worn nailboots into a mine where there might be methane or firedamp, and don’t tell me he could have just forgot, not when he and those other two were toting respirators on their hips and wearing oxygen bottles on their backs. Even if he had been wearing the Specials, Mama Nonie was right – he would also have been wearing felts over them. She didn’t need me to tell her; she knew how careful he was. But even the craziest idea can work its way into your mind if you’re lonely and grief-stricken and someone keeps harping on it. It can wriggle in there like a bloodworm, and lay its eggs, and pretty soon your whole brain is squirming with maggots.

I told her to change her phone number, and she did, but the kid got the new one and kept calling, telling her my father had forgotten what he had on his feet and one of those hobnails struck a spark, and there went the old ballgame.

Never would have happened if you hadn’t given him those boots, you stupid black bitch. That’s the kind of thing he said, and probably worse that she wouldn’t tell me.

Finally she had the phone taken out altogether. I told her she had to have a phone, living by herself like she did, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said, Sometimes he calls in the middle of the night, Georgie. You don’t know how it is, lying awake and listening to the telephone ring and knowing it’s that child. What kind of parents he has to let him do such things I can’t imagine.

Unplug it at night, I said.

She said, I did. But sometimes it rings anyway.

I told her that was just her imagination. And I tried to believe it, but I never did, Mr Bradley. If that bad kid could get hold of Marlee’s Steve Austin lunchbox, and know how badly Vicky messed up her tryout, and about the Trailman Specials – if he could stay young, year after year – then sure, he could make a phone ring even if it was unplugged. Bible says the devil was set free to roam the earth, that God’s hand would not stay him. I don’t know if that bad little kid was the devil, but I know he was a devil.

Nor do I know if an ambulance call could have saved Mama Nonie. All I know is that when she had her heart attack, she couldn’t call for one because the phone was gone. She died alone, in her kitchen. A neighbor lady found her the next day.

Carla and I went to the funeral, and after Nonie was laid to rest, we spent the night in the house she and my father had shared. I woke up from a bad dream just before daybreak and couldn’t get back to sleep. When I heard the newspaper flop on the porch, I went to get it and saw the flag was up on the mailbox. I walked down to the street in my robe and slippers and opened it. Inside there was a beanie with a plastic propeller on top. I fished it out and it was hot, like the person who’d just taken it off was burning up with fever. Touching it made me feel contaminated, but I turned it over and looked inside. It was greasy with some sort of hair oil, the old-fashioned stuff hardly anyone uses anymore. There were a few orangey hairs sticking in it. There was also a note, printed the way a kid might do it – the letters all crooked and slanting downhill. The note said, KEEP IT, I HAVE ANOTHER ONE.

I took the goddam thing inside – tweezed between my thumb and index finger, that was as much as I wanted to touch it – and stuck it in the kitchen woodstove. I put a match to it and it went up all at once: ka-floomp. The flames were greenish. When Carla came down half an hour later, she sniffed and said, What’s that awful smell? It’s like low tide!

I told her it was most likely the septic tank out back, full up and needing to be pumped, but I knew better. That was the stink of methane, probably the last thing my father smelled before something sparked and blew him and those two others to kingdom come.

By then I had a job with an accounting firm – one of the biggest independents in the Midwest – and I worked my way up the ladder pretty quickly. I find that if you come in early, leave late, and keep your eye on the ball in between, that just about has to happen. Carla and I wanted kids, and we could afford them, but it didn’t happen; she got her visit from the cardinal every month, just as regular as clockwork. We went to see an OB in Topeka, and he did all the usual tests. He said we were fine, and it was too early to talk about fertility treatments. He told us to go home, relax, and enjoy our sex life.

So that’s what we did, and eleven months later, my wife’s visits from the cardinal stopped. She had been raised Catholic, and stopped going to church when she was in college, but when she knew for sure she was pregnant, she started going again and dragged me with her. We went to St Andrew’s. I didn’t mind. If she wanted to give God the credit for the bun in her oven, that was okay with me.

She was in her sixth month when the miscarriage happened. Because of the accident that wasn’t really an accident. The baby lived for a few hours, then died. It was a girl. Because she needed a name, we named her Helen, after Carla’s grandmother.

The accident happened after church. When mass was over, we were going to have a nice lunch downtown, then go home, where I’d watch the football game. Carla would put her feet up and rest and enjoy being pregnant. She did enjoy it, Mr Bradley. Every day of it, even early on when she was sick in the mornings.