“You’re not our b-b-b-boss,” Jake said. He picked up a flat stone and flung it angrily. It bit the water at an angle and slid beneath without skipping once.
“Why are you so mad at me?”
“B-b-b-b . . .” His face twisted painfully. “B-b-b . . .” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Cuz you’re a liar.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know.” He eyed Danny who stood fingering a stone that he did not throw.
“Okay, I’m a big fat liar. Happy? We should find your uncle, Danny.” I pushed past them and kept walking downriver.
Danny caught up and sauntered beside me and when I looked back I saw Jake still standing where we’d left him, sullenly considering his options. Finally he followed but he stayed behind us at a distance. As much as possible we kept to the sand beaches and to the bare clay flats that had baked and cracked in the heat. Sometimes we had to break our way through stands of tall reeds and brush that grew right to the edge of the river. Danny told me about a book he’d just read in which a guy bitten by a vampire bat was the last human on earth. Danny read a lot of science fiction and he liked to tell you the whole story. He told it pretty well and just as he was finishing we beat our way through a stand of bulrushes covering a stretch of sand where we stumbled into a little clearing with a lean-to at its center. The structure was made of driftwood lashed into a frame with scavenged pieces of corrugated tin as roof and siding. A man sat in the deep shade created by the lean-to. He sat erect with his legs crossed and he stared at us where we stood on the far side of the clearing.
“That’s my uncle Warren,” Danny said.
I looked at Jake and Jake looked at me because we both recognized Danny’s uncle. We’d seen him before. We’d seen him with the dead man.
Danny’s uncle called out from the shade, “Your mother send you after me?”
Danny said, “Yeah.”
The man’s hands were laid flat on his bent knees. He nodded thoughtfully. He said, “Any chance I could bribe you to tell her you couldn’t find me?”
Danny walked across the sand leaving the prints of his sneakers behind him. I followed Danny’s prints and Jake followed mine.
“Bribe me?” Danny said. He seemed to think about it seriously. Whether he was seriously considering the offer or considering whether the offer was serious I couldn’t say. In any event he shook his head.
“Didn’t think so,” his uncle said. “How about this then? How about you tell her I’ll be around for dinner. Until then, I’m fishing.”
“But you’re not.”
“Fishing, Danny boy, is purely a state of mind. Some men when they’re fishing are after fish. Me, I’m after things you could never set a barbed hook in.” He looked up at Jake and me. “I know you boys.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“I heard they buried Skipper.”
“Yes, sir. Today. I was there.”
“You were? Why?”
“I don’t know. It seemed kind of right.”
“Kind of right?” His lips formed a grin but his eyes held no humor. “Was anybody else there?”
“My father. He’s a minister and said the prayers. And our friend Gus. He dug the grave. And the sheriff. And the undertaker.”
“Sounds surprisingly well attended.”
“It was fine. They buried him in a real nice place.”
“No kidding? Well, I’ll be. A lot of kindness shown there. A little late, though, don’t you think?”
“Sir?”
“You boys know what itokagata iyaye means? You, Danny?”
“Nope.”
“It’s Dakota. It means the spirit has gone south. It means that Skipper’s dead. Your mom or dad ever try to teach you our language, Danny?”
“Our language is English,” Danny said.
“I suppose it is,” his uncle said. “I suppose it is.”
“You got a letter,” Danny said. He pulled it folded from his back pocket and handed it to his great-uncle.
The man took the envelope and squinted. He reached into his shirt pocket and drew out a pair of glasses with thick lenses and with rims that looked made of gold. He didn’t put them on but used the lenses instead in the way you might use a magnifying glass and painstakingly read the return address. Then he slid his finger under the flap, carefully tore it open, pulled out the letter, and read it with the glasses in the same slow fashion.
I stood uncomfortably waiting to be dismissed. I was eager to be gone.
“Shit,” Danny’s uncle said at last and crumpled the letter and threw it into the yellow sand. He looked up at Danny. “Well, didn’t I tell you what to say to your mother? What are you waiting for?”
Danny backed away and turned and hightailed it out of the clearing with Jake and me at his heels. When we were a good distance away and the wall of bulrushes blinded his uncle to us I said, “What’s with him?”
Danny said, “I don’t know him very well. He’s been gone a long time. There was some kind of trouble and he had to leave town.”
“What kind of trouble?” Jake asked.
Danny shrugged. “Mom and Dad don’t talk about it. Uncle Warren showed up last week and my mom took him in. She told my dad she had to. He’s family. He’s not really so bad. Sometimes he’s kind of funny. He doesn’t like staying in the house though. He says walls make him feel like he’s in jail.”
We walked back to where the river ran near Danny’s house and we climbed the bank and Jake and I went our way toward home and Danny went to deliver his uncle’s message to his mother. I wondered what exactly he would tell her.
We reached our yard and Jake started up the front steps but I hung back.
Jake said, “What’s wrong?”
“Didn’t you see?”
“See what?”
“Those glasses Danny’s uncle had.”
“What about them?”
“They don’t belong to him, Jake,” I said. “They belonged to Bobby Cole.”
Jake stared at me a moment dumb as a brick. Then the light came into his eyes.
8
That evening my grandfather came to dinner. He brought his wife, a woman who was not my mother’s mother, a woman named Elizabeth who’d been his secretary and then became more to him. My real grandmother had died of cancer when I was too young to remember her, and Liz—she insisted we call her Liz, not Grandma—was the only grandmother I knew. I liked her and Jake and Ariel liked her too. Though my father wasn’t fond of my grandfather it was clear that he felt differently about Liz. Only my mother had problems with her. With Liz she was polite but distant.