THEY DRANK A WHILE, and then this man Joe said: “Joe the cop”—

smiling for the first time.

“Joe the sheriff. Up in the mountains.”

“Which mountains are those?”

“Are there some other mountains around here?”

“There’s all kinds of mountains in the mountains, Billy.”

Billy looked over at him. The man looking back from under the bill. Still smiling.

“Brother Joe is sheriff in the Grand County mountains,” he said, and the man picked up his beer and sipped it.

“Grand County,” he said thoughtfully. “Grand County. Seems like there was something in the news with a sheriff from Grand County, while back.”

“Probably some drunk on skis waving a cap gun.”

“No,” said the man. “No, this had to do with a girl. Teenage girl went missing up there. Or am I misremembering?”

Billy gave him a frown of admiration. “Good recall, Joe. That was over two years ago.”

“You remember things like that. Things like that they stay with you.”

They drank. A tall man at the end of the bar stood, looked about, saw nothing that pleased him, and then seemed to follow his own wooden legs out the back door.

“There was this one boy I remember from grade school,” said Joe. He looked up from his beer, up from under the bill, and when Billy met his eyes in the mirror he looked down again and stared into his glass. As though pondering what he’d just said or what he would say next. Whether to say anything more at all.

“What boy was that?” said Billy, and Joe tilted his pint for a sip.

“That boy was Delmar Steadman. Plain, ordinary boy we all called Smellmar for some reason. He wasn’t fat or ugly or smelly or anything, but we’d decided to make him something to make fun of, I can’t even tell you why. Maybe because his daddy was the Roto-Rooter man. Maybe because he had a big sister named Bonnie who gave us all boners, I don’t know. Well. His backyard, Delmar’s backyard, came fence to fence with Becky Clark’s backyard, and those two had grown up making eyes at each other through that cyclone fence. Sneaking kisses, pressing up against one another before they even knew why. It happens. Happens all the time. Some people find the love of their lives at that age. Tell stories about it when they’re sixty, seventy years old.” He glanced at Billy in the mirror, raised his glass for a sip, and set it down again.

“Trouble was, at about age ten, Becky lost interest. Just dropped old

Delmar cold. We knew this the way you knew everything about everybody back then and not because of computers and cell phones either. You remember how that was, Billy?”

Billy said he did and the man went on.

“Well. Along came the summer between grade school and middle school. Magical summer. All of us shooting up like weeds, smell of chlorine and cut grass. It’s about the Fourth of July—day before or day after I don’t recall—and young Becky is out back suntanning on the patio. By now it’s been a good two years since she’s said a single word to Delmar, through that fence or at school or anywhere else. Fact is, she’s hardly even seen Delmar in all that time. The boy never comes out in the yard anymore, not even to play with that sorry little dog of his. The back door opens, dog goes out, pisses, shits, back door opens again and dog goes in. Like living next door to Boo Radley. You know who that is?”

Billy didn’t. It didn’t matter.

“So Becky’s out on the patio, which was nothing but a concrete slab with weeds growing in the cracks, catching some rays in that red bikini she wore that summer, oh Lord. Browning those arms, that stomach. Smell of coconut oil. She’s got the sunglasses on and the headphones going and she doesn’t hear him. Never even turns her head.”

The man fell silent, staring into his glass. He gave the glass a turn as if to set the contents in motion and thereby his story again.

“Her own daddy found her like that, Billy. Lying there in the July sun with those headphones still going and her little forehead pushed in like a bad melon. Glass of iced tea sweating on the concrete and a red Stillson wrench lying there beside it. You know what a Stillson wrench is, Billy?”

“Pipe wrench.”

“Big one. His daddy’s, about yea big.” He shook his head like a man in dismay. He drank.

After a minute Billy said: “Did they think he did it?”

“Think who?”

“Delmar’s daddy. The Roto-Rooter man.”

“They might of, at first. But then Delmar himself came out with the whole story.”

“What was the whole story?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why did he do it?”

“He said it just come to him. He couldn’t say why.”

Billy picked up his cigarettes and got one in his lips and lit it with the Zippo and set the Zippo carefully down again. He pulled on the cigarette and side-blew the smoke away from the man.

“What happened to him?” he said. “To Delmar.”

“They took him away. Becky’s folks got divorced and moved away. Old man Steadman moved away and we never saw nor heard another thing about any of those people again. The world just rolled on.” He lifted his beer and tilted back a drink. Made an adjustment to his cap. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I think he was just too young for himself, old Delmar.” He raised his glass again but didn’t drink. “I think if he’d of waited, if he’d of just let himself grow into himself, he’d of been all right.”

Billy drew on the cigarette and blew a slow cloud into the space between himself and the image of himself.

“I never told that story before,” the man said. “I wonder what made me tell it now. Talking this man’s ear off.”

THEY SAT. THEY DRANK. After a while the man drew the edge of his thumb over his lips corner to corner and said: “They ever find that girl?”

“What girl?”

“Up in those mountains.”

“No, they never did.”

The man shook his head. “How about that boy, then?”

Billy had drained his drink to the ice and was preparing to stand. “What boy is that?”

“There was a boy too, wasn’t there? A little brother or something? Got hurt up there on his bike?”

Billy looked at him.

“And she left him there,” the man said. “That girl. Threw a blanket on him and just left him there, as I recall.”

“That’s right,” Billy said. “A boy on a bike.”

“Where’s he at now? That boy?”

“Damned if I know. They were just tourists.” He raised his glass and tumbled an ice cube past his lips and broke it in his molars, the sound enormous and concussive in his skull. Then he said: “That boy wasn’t worth shit for evidence.”

“He wasn’t?”

“Anything he saw got knocked clean out of him.”

The man shook his head. “That’s a pity. That’s a flat-out pity.” He sat staring into his glass. “It sure is a funny world, isn’t it, Billy.”

“That’s one word for it.”

“What’s another one?”

“I don’t know.”

Billy sat another minute, and one minute more, then peeled off a five and got to his feet. “Gotta hit the road, Joe. But I’d like to buy you one more. Just for calling you Steve.”

“You’re off, Billy?”

“It looks like weather and I’m heading right into it.”

They both turned to look at the window behind them. The man and the woman were gone and the grayness that Billy had left in the hills had rolled down onto the city as though it sought him out.

“Good talking to you, Billy. Next time I’ll buy.”

“That’s a deal, Joe. You take her easy.”

“Drive safe now.”

Coldness had come down with the gray and it had a sharp coppery taste to it like blood. Three cars sat in the lot: his own El Camino, a burgundy and white Oldsmobile, and an old, high-sitting black Bronco with new mud on the tires and sprayed along the body in heavy four-wheel-drive patterns.

He stepped up to the Bronco on the passenger’s side and peered into the front seats and there was nothing in there but car. Seats, dash, floorboards. As if it were newly bought or up for sale. He looked more closely at the paint job and saw that it was not the original, nor the work of someone who painted cars for a living. He moved to the rear and bent to the tinted glass of the hardtop and saw in the cargo space an orderly array of gear: five-gallon gas can, fat coil of towing rope, a good-sized tool or tackle box, and two paper grocery bags, all of it seized in a black elastic webbing.