Dream With Little Angels

by Michael Hiebert

  “You said the box just looked like it could carry a shotgun,” Dewey said.

  “Yeah, but what else would you put in a box like that? Come on, Dewey. It was a cardboard shotgun box if I ever seen one.”

  “Have you ever seen one? I never even heard’ve one.”

  I thought that over. “No, I suppose I haven’t. Not until this morning, anyway.”

  “I’m not sure I should leave,” Dewey said. “My mom’s still asleep.”

  “Leave her a note. Tell her you’ll be back before nine.” I reminded him I now had my very own watch.

  “I’m still thinking that maybe we should wait . . .”

  “Wait for what? We’ve been watchin’ his house going on . . . I don’t even know how long. Now, out of nowhere, I actually see him leave and we have the opportunity to find out what he’s really up to. And you’re worried about your mom because she’s sleepin’?”

  “We know he ain’t taking roadkill,” Dewey said. “It came back, remember?”

  “We know he ain’t taking it no more,” I corrected him. “We have no idea what he does. This is what we have to find out.” I sighed, trying not to get too angry and raise my voice too loud. I didn’t want to wake anybody.

  Finally, I convinced Dewey that going after Mr. Wyatt Edward Farrow was not only the right thing to do, it was, by all intents, the only thing to do.

  “All right,” he said. “Give me twenty minutes.”

  “Twenty minutes? You already used up ten on the phone. We need to catch up with him. You got ten to get here.”

  “All right.”

  It took him more like seventeen. In fact, I was on the verge of calling him back when I saw his bike pull up outside my yard through that gap in them drapes. I already had my boots on and quietly headed outside using the backdoor, being careful to shut it slowly so it didn’t slam the way it normally did. I grabbed my bike from beside the garage and pushed it gently down the driveway in the still quiet of the early morning.

  “What took you so long?” I asked, still keeping my voice down.

  “I was in my pajamas when you called.”

  “So was I.”

  “I was hungry.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Fine time to think about eating. Anyway, let’s go before someone wakes up and finds us.”

  “Did you leave your mom a note?” Dewey asked.

  I nodded.

  “What’d it say?”

  “Said I was going biking with you and I’d be home by nine. What did yours say?”

  Dewey’s cheeks pinkened under the golden morning light. The sun twinkled off the chrome of his handlebars. A few puffy white clouds were stretched across an otherwise light blue sky the color of a dipped Easter egg. “I said we was going after your neighbor to see what it is he does on Saturday mornings dressed as a cowboy.”

  I stared at him for what felt like a full-on minute, wondering if he was pulling my leg. He wasn’t. “Now, why would you go say somethin’ dumb like that?” I asked.

  “Cuz it’s the truth, ain’t it?”

  “So? What if your mom calls my mom?”

  “I always tell the truth.”

  I bit my tongue and thought before responding. “I do too, but just because I left out part of the why doesn’t mean I wasn’t being truthful. Anyway, it’s too late now to worry ’bout it; we ain’t goin’ back to your house to rewrite your note. Let’s go, before we lose any chance of findin’ him. Christ, Dewey, it’s been nearly half an hour since he left.”

  We kicked off in the same direction Mr. Wyatt Edward Farrow had been walking. “I figure he’s likely gone downtown,” I said. “Although I doubt too many shops or anythin’ is open so early on a Saturday morning.” I said this, although I didn’t rightly know whether or not it was true. Maybe all this time I’d been thinking I was one of the only people who woke up bright and early on Saturday mornings when the truth was it actually turned out most folk were just like me, and my mother and Carry were the exceptions. I guess me and Dewey were about to find out.

  While we rode, I told Dewey about me and my mother finding Carry and her boyfriend the night before. Most of the story I went over rather quickly, but he made me slow down at several key areas. The first was when I described what Carry was wearing in the back of that car. I knew he’d be interested in hearing that, I just never realized how interested. He must have asked me nearly ten different things about it. Finally, I just got mad.

  “She was in her bra. What else do you need to know? Why is this so important?”

  Dewey shrugged. He was coasting beside me. “I dunno,” he said.

  “Well, let’s get past it, then, all right? I mean heck, you can either imagine what she looked like, or you can’t. I don’t see how I can provide any more details than I already have.”

  He stopped me again when I got to the end and told him about how my mother pulled out her gun, pointed it straight at Carry’s boyfriend, and—the most important part, I thought—used the word. Not once, but twice.

  “Really?” Dewey asked. This interested him even more than Carry’s undergarments. “Was the gun loaded?”

  It was my turn to shrug. “I’m assuming so. My mom said it was.”

  “And she used all them words?”

  I nodded. We both swerved around a parked Chevy truck. “I couldn’t believe what I heard,” I said. “She even said she was gonna blow his balls off, or something to that effect.”

  “Wow.”

  When Dewey was finally satisfied that he’d wrung every detail of the story he could from me, we fell into silence for a while. I rode the lead, taking us up to Main Street.

  “How do you know this is the way Mr. Farrow went?” Dewey asked.

  “I don’t,” I said. “I just figure if you’re gonna go out on a Saturday morning and get dressed up, you’re probably headed downtown. I doubt he was going to the swamp or any of the mud roads or anything like that. He certainly didn’t look dressed for roadkill collectin’.”

  Dewey considered this and seemed to be satisfied that it made some sort of sense, because he never asked any more about it. “So,” he said after a bit, “did your mom really arrest Mr. Garner?”

  This question didn’t sit well with me, but I answered with the truth. “Yep. Far as I know, he’s still in jail.”

  “You don’t sound too happy about it,” he said.

  I hesitated. Truth was, I wasn’t happy about it, but I didn’t exactly know why. Something about the whole thing felt very wrong to me. Like there was something I should understand but didn’t, or maybe something I should be remembering but forgot. “Tell me somethin’, Dewey; you were there that afternoon in the rain when we went searching for Mary Ann Dailey. Remember all the stuff Mr. Robert Lee Garner said? Remember the way he talked about Ruby Mae Vickers? How he put flowers out for her?”

  Dewey said he did. “He didn’t seem as though he wanted to talk much ’bout them flowers, though.”

  I nodded. “But we saw more flowers that day we rode over to his ranch, remember?” I asked. “The day they found Mary Ann? Those flowers seemed fresh to me.”

  “Yup,” Dewey said. “Me too.”

  I backpedaled slightly, slowing a bit. “Dewey, do you think Mr. Garner could do something like this to Mary Ann?”

  “If the police think so, I don’t see why my opinion would rightly matter. I’m only eleven years old,” he said. This was a slightly different opinion than the one he had expressed the night Mary Ann Dailey showed up dead and Mr. Garner was first taken into custody.

  “But—” I wanted to keep talking, yet I really didn’t know where to go with it. Problem was the details surrounding everything to do with Mary Ann Dailey nearly exactly matched those of Ruby Mae Vickers. This meant, at least in my mother’s eyes, that the two cases weren’t just likely related, they were related. They had to be related.

  I had figured nothing downtown would be open this early on a Saturday, but I was wrong. As we came up on the Mercantile (which
everyone as old as my mother referred to as Mr. Harrison’s five and dime), I saw Jesse James Allen coming up the sidewalk and turning in. I couldn’t believe how many people were up so early. As the door opened, I slowed down to get a glimpse inside to make sure Mr. Farrow wasn’t there.

  I squinted into the dark interior. I didn’t see any customers, just Mr. Harrison stocking shelves. My concentration was fixed so much on the store that I nearly ran into Jesse James where he was still holding the door open. Smiling, I backpedaled, skidding my bike to a stop. “I reckon I near on hit you,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

  It had been at least a year since I’d last seen Jesse James, but he knew me well enough. At least usually. This time, it was like he’d never seen me before in his life. He just stared at me without saying a word.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  He looked terrible, like he was sick or something. His clothes didn’t help. He had on a T-shirt that looked like it should have seen the bottom of a garbage can a long time ago. It was smudged with dirt and ripped along one of the seams. It hung untucked over a pair of jeans that were only in slightly better shape. His black hair probably hadn’t been cut since at least Easter and was in need of a good combing. It hung over his soft gray eyes in a way that made it impossible to guess what he might be thinking.

  As I looked at him, I couldn’t help but remember those twins sitting in front of Luther Willard King’s house. In my head, I gave myself a good talking to for these thoughts, assuming they had to be racist.

  Awkwardly, Jesse James Allen gave me the briefest of nods before ducking into the Mercantile. Dewey pulled up beside me as the door closed, the bell attached to its top ringing.

  “Never mind him,” Dewey said to me. “My pa says he ain’t been right since the fire.”

  “He used to say hi to me,” I said, feeling a bit dejected.

  “Looked to me like he ain’t sayin’ nothing today.”

  I gave the door one last consideration.

  “Are we lookin’ for Mr. Farrow or not?” Dewey asked. He’d started slowly down the sidewalk again.

  I nodded. “I’m coming.” I began pedaling, leaving all thoughts of the store and Jesse’s rudeness behind me.

  It didn’t take me long to catch back up to Dewey. He wasn’t nearly as fast a rider as I was. “Let me ask you something else,” I said as I coasted up to his side. I wanted to get back to my issues about the Ruby Mae case being related to Mary Ann Dailey and whether or not Mr. Garner was innocent. I decided to try approaching the problem from the opposite direction. “Do you think Mr. Garner might have killed Ruby Mae Vickers all them years ago?”

  Dewey glanced away from the street and looked at me, confused. “No, ’course not. Why would he be puttin’ flowers out for her if he did that?”

  I nodded slowly, more to myself than to Dewey. That was the main question that had been rattling around inside my head ever since I’d seen Officer Jackson pull out his handcuffs and bring Mr. Garner’s hands behind his back out there on Holly Berry Ranch.

  But there was something else, too. Something I knew I had forgotten. Something important. But, no matter how hard I thought about it, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. It was as though it was just waiting there, hovering in the corner of my mind just outside of reach.

  “Look!” Dewey shouted, interrupting my thoughts. We had just turned down Main Street, and two blocks ahead of us was none other than Mr. Wyatt Edward Farrow himself. There was no mistaking those cowboy boots, vest, and hat. He was still carrying what I was now completely convinced could only be a shotgun box. He was walking in the same direction we were going, so he didn’t see us behind him.

  We hit our brakes, slowing nearly to a stop. “We gotta keep back at least a block or two,” I said quietly. I knew something about tailing a suspect from all the years growing up with my mother.

  “I’m not so sure that looks like a shotgun box to me,” Dewey said.

  “What else could it be?”

  “I dunno. Roses, maybe?”

  “Now, why in heck would Mr. Wyatt Edward Farrow be carryin’ a cardboard box full of roses down Main Street at seven in the mornin’ on a Saturday?” I asked.

  “I dunno,” Dewey said. “Why would he be carrryin’ a shotgun in a box down Main Street at seven in the mornin’?”

  “Because he’s up to no good,” I said. That one was easy.

  “There could be anythin’ in that box,” Dewey pointed out. “Maybe a baseball bat.”

  “That makes even less sense than the roses. At any rate, we’ll never know unless we follow him and find out.”

  Mr. Farrow walked another six blocks or so until he came to the post office. He tried the door but, of course, the Alvin Post Office is never open before nine o’clock, especially on Saturdays when I figured it probably stayed closed until noon. We pulled up to a stop a few blocks away, trying not to look conspicuous.

  “What’s he doin’?” Dewey asked.

  “I dunno,” I said. “Maybe he was goin’ to start shooting everyone working at the post office, but showed up too early.”

  “You think if he were gonna do somethin’ like that, he’d be smart enough to check up on their hours first.”

  We watched him ponder the dilemma of the not-yet-open post office for a few minutes until he took a card and a pen from the pocket of his jeans and wrote something on the card before tucking it into the top of the shotgun box. Then, with a suspicious glance up and down the street, he propped the box against the post office door. Luckily, he didn’t see us when he looked around. With one final consideration of the box and the locked door, he started walking back our way, whistling to himself.

  “Let’s turn around,” Dewey whispered.

  “No,” I said. “Let’s wait until he’s long past and go see what he wrote on that card. Maybe we can even open the box.”

  “I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” Dewey said.

  “You don’t think any of my good ideas are very good. It’s part of why you never . . .”

  I started explaining all this to Dewey when I heard a car pull up beside us. I nearly ignored it completely, even when I heard the door open. But seconds later, my mother was yelling at us in a way that, had I not heard her screaming all them cuss words at Carry’s boyfriend last night, might have actually scared me. She was telling us to get in the goddamn car and that we don’t go stalking neighbors and we especially don’t sneak out of the house without asking permission first.

  I saw the color drain from Dewey’s face as she came around and held the door open and we clambered into the backseat.

  “She’s really mad,” he said.

  “It was your stupid note,” I snapped back.

  “Hope she didn’t bring her gun,” he said.

  Outside, my mother was throwing our bikes into the trunk of her car. She wasn’t being too gentle about it.

  “Didn’t you learn nothin’ last night?” she asked me after she got inside the car and pulled her door shut.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “With Carry and her boyfriend? Did you not learn anythin’?”

  “I learned that you don’t take kindly to boys parking with Carry, and that when you pull out your gun, you tend to use some words I never heard you use before.”

  She hesitated then, and I wasn’t sure if I’d maybe said something really wrong. But I saw her struggle not to smile, and my stomach calmed a bit. “Well, that’s not what you were supposed to learn,” she said. “You were supposed to learn that you don’t sneak out of the house. And I already told you about how you should be treatin’ our neighbors.”

  “But—” I started, but stopped when she held up her finger. Her face was red and I could tell she was angry. Dewey, on the other hand, obviously didn’t know my mother as well as I did.

  “Ma’am, we saw Mr. Farrow carrying a box that may or may not have contained a shotgun. It could have had roses in it, I thought, but Abe pointed out that my idea ma
de less sense and that it probably was a shotgun. Then I figured it maybe was something like a baseball bat, but again, Abe—”

  “Dewey,” she said, turning right around to him. “Do yourself a huge favor right now and just stop talkin’, all right?”

  Nodding, Dewey said very matter-of-factly, “All right, ma’am, I will do just that. I was only tryin’ to point out that if someone actually was walkin’ around with what could possibly be a loaded firearm and perhaps—and this again was Abe’s theory—had planned on shooting up the post office, I think it’s somethin’ that—”

  My mother’s eyes closed and her head came down on the top of her steering wheel.

  I turned to Dewey. “Dewey. Seriously. Shut up.”

  He nodded. “All right,” he said.

  My mother sighed, shaking her head. “And next time you leave a note, Dewey? Don’t incriminate yourself if you don’t have to. It’s just . . . stupid.”

  “I was being honest,” he said, again, very matter-of-factly.

  “There’s honest, Dewey, and there’s stupid. Learn the difference, or you’ll end up in my jail or dead or somethin’ one of these days.”

  Seriousness fell over Dewey’s face. “All right, I will do that. I will learn the difference.” He was keeping his own, I’ll give him that much. I heard not even the slightest hint of shakiness in his voice.

  My mother shook her head again. “You’re a very strange boy, Dewey.”

  He gave another nod.

  My mother pulled the car out onto the street. I gave Dewey an elbow. “Told you your note sucked,” I whispered, but my mother shushed me and told us both not to say another word.

  We didn’t.

  CHAPTER 20

  Shortly after starting back home after apprehending me and Dewey, my mother’s car phone rang. I was beginning to suspect maybe my theory was right. Maybe most folk do keep the same early-morning Saturday schedule as me, except they just don’t go to work. They just walked around with shotguns in cardboard boxes or called people on the telephone.

  “Chris?” my mother asked after she answered. “What is it?”

  “It’s Officer Jackson,” I whispered to Dewey.