Down River by John Hart Page B

shootings?”
    “Because the sheriff is useless. He was useless five years ago and he’s found no reason to change, far as I can tell. First time we called him, he walked once around the carcass, then suggested that it might be best for all concerned if your father just sold. That about settled it for your dad and me.”
    “Is anybody still at the hospital?”
    “They won’t let us see her, so no point hanging around. We came home a few hours ago.”
    I stood up, walked to the corner of the porch. The sun was rising above the treetops. I debated how much to tell Dolf, decided he ought to know everything. “It was Zebulon Faith,” I said. “Him or Danny. They’re the ones that did it.”
    Dolf was silent for a long moment. I heard his chair creak again and felt his footsteps on the old floor. He stood next to me and put his hands on the rail, looked out to where a low mist was rising from the river.
    “Wasn’t Zebulon Faith,” he said.
    I turned, not sure what to think; he picked a piece of tobacco off of his tongue as I waited for him to explain. He took his time about it.
    “He’s mean enough to do it, I reckon, but he went in for prostate cancer three years ago.” He looked at me. “The old boy can’t get it up anymore. He’s impotent. No lead left in the pencil.”
    “How can you know that?” I asked.
    Dolf sighed, kept his eyes on the river. “We had the same doctor, got diagnosed about the same time; we went through it together. Not like we were friends or anything, but we talked once or twice.” He shrugged. “Just one of those things.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Pretty much.”
    I thought about Dolf fighting off a cancer while I struggled for meaning in some faraway city I had no business being in. “I’m sorry, Dolf.”
    He spit out another piece of tobacco, shrugged off my sympathy. “What makes you think it was one of them?” he asked.
    I told him everything I knew: Danny’s ring, the fire, my fight with Zebulon Faith.
    “Maybe a good thing you didn’t kill him,” Dolf said.
    “I wanted to.”
    “Don’t blame you.”
    “Could have been Danny that did it.”
    Dolf thought about it, spoke with reluctance. “Most people have a dark streak in them somewhere. Danny is a good enough kid in a lot of ways, but his streak is closer to the surface than most.”
    “What do you mean?”
    He studied me. “I spent a lot of years watching you swing at shadows, Adam. Lashing out. Untouchable in a lot of ways. It killed me to see you like that, but I could understand it. You saw things no boy should see.” He paused and I looked away. “When you’d come home bloodied up, or when your dad and I bailed you out, there was always a sadness in you, a quietness. Damn, son, you’d look all but lost. That’s a hard thing for me to say to you, but there it is. Now Danny, he was different. He’d have this look of barely restrained glee. That boy, he got in fights because he enjoyed it. Big damn difference.”
    I didn’t argue. In a lot of ways, Danny’s dark streak formed the bedrock of our friendship. I’d met him six months after my mother killed herself. I was already fighting, cutting school. Most of my friends had pulled away from me. They didn’t know how to handle me, had no idea what to say to a boy whose mother blew her own head off. That hurt, too, but I didn’t whine about it. I pulled deeper into myself, gave up on everybody. Danny came into my life like a brother. He had no money, bad grades, and an abusive father. He hadn’t seen his mother or a square meal in two years.
    Consequence meant nothing to Danny. He flat-out did not give a shit.
    I wanted to feel like he did.
    We hit it off. If I got into a fight, he backed me up. I did the same. Older kids. Kids our age. It didn’t matter. Once, in the eighth grade, we stole the principal’s car and parked it in plain view at the massage parlor by the interstate. Danny went down for that: expelled for two weeks, juvenile record. He