Chat - Archer Mayor [67]
Willy nodded without comment, feeding into the traditional New England version of a conversation, where the less you say, the less you have to explain later, not to mention that it’s nobody’s business anyway.
“Where to?” Willy asked, as Griffis climbed on board.
“Right. Up to the top, then left. I’ll show you from there.”
After he approvingly watched Willy negotiate the steering wheel one-handed, E. T. stared out the front of the old truck’s smeared windshield.
“Sue still have that cold?”
“Pneumonia,” Willy said shortly to pass the obvious test. He doubted Griffis cared one way or the other about Sue Mackie’s health. “Antibiotics. Guess they’re working.”
“Not from around here.”
No shit, Willy felt like saying. “New York.”
That brought a brief stare. “City?”
“Yeah. Been bumming around a lot lately, though—like working with Wheeler.”
The truck was grinding uphill, lumbering to overtake the feeble reach of its own headlights.
“New York’s a long ways.”
Christ, Willy thought. This was going to take a while.
“Figured this would be a better place to die,” he said, risking a little melodrama in the hopes of speeding things up.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Griffis push his lips out thoughtfully.
“The Mackies know about that?” his passenger asked.
“They know what happened,” Willy answered obliquely, nevertheless impressed by E. T.’s practical handling of his statement.
E. T. seemed to accept that and didn’t speak until the truck had reached the top of the hill, when he repeated, “Left here.”
After a few more minutes, during which Willy could almost hear E. T. arguing with himself, he’d been put in such an awkward spot, Willy took him off the hook with “I had a car crash. Fucked myself up, killed my son. I was drunk.”
Both the wording and the tone had been carefully chosen—not so terse as to cut off further conversation, not so confessional that it was best not to ask. Just the facts, but sentimentally evocative enough to get the old man thinking of his own losses.
Willy waited patiently, the heavily shadowed snowbanks to both sides of them slipping past like discarded bundles of laundry.
“That’s tough,” Griffis finally said heavily. “Know the feeling.”
Willy didn’t doubt it. Not only had he played to E. T.’s recent loss of Andy, but he knew Griffis as a fellow alcoholic—only a nonrecovering one.
“You, too?” he asked open-endedly.
E. T. bit. “Yeah. My youngest. Hung himself.”
Willy thought of Sammie again but didn’t correct the other man’s grammar. Instead, he faked a theatrical double take. “No shit? A woman, right? It usually is.”
But he’d gotten as much as he was going to for the moment.
“Nah,” E. T. said under his breath, eyes fixed ahead.
Willy let it be. “I can’t get it out of my head, especially with this to remind me.” He hefted his useless arm’s shoulder. “How do you live with it?” he asked after a pause, trying a different tack, knowing he might be pushing too hard. In truth, it wasn’t that important to him. He was doing Joe a favor, it got him out of the office and on his own, and he had nothing to lose if he ended up empty-handed. He could take risks.
But, as if E. T. were eavesdropping and not wanting Willy to betray his boss, the older man met him halfway with “I have another son.”
Willy nodded. “Guess that would help.”
He hoped it didn’t, given Joe’s suspicions about why Andy had copped to a crime he’d never committed.
E. T.’s monotone response opened that door wider. “Not even close.”
Willy smiled slightly in the darkness. I got you now, he thought.
Willy approached the farmhouse on foot, having parked at the bottom of the long driveway. This was a pure impulse, driven solely by nosiness. He could have called Joe or paged him, or even waited until morning to report on his purely social meeting with E. T. He’d just spent an hour with the old man at his home over a nightcap, further ingratiating himself. But he wasn’t interested in seeing Joe—it was the serendipitous proximity of the Gunther farm that had