I called them but they couldn’t hear me because of the noise of the creek. So I walked down to where they were. One of the pinecones had gotten hung up on a snag and they were poking at it with a stick. The stick wasn’t long enough and they couldn’t quite reach it. “You try,” Bobby said.
I took the stick and poked and made a sweeping motion, but couldn’t reach it, and leaned farther out and suddenly lost my footing so that I stepped down into the water and filled both shoes. “Jesus,” I said. “Christ, that’s cold.” The boys giggled and pointed at my feet. I was standing in the water with my good shoes on. “You bums,” I said. “You lousy bums.” I poked the stick again and dislodged the pinecone and it floated away. Then I stepped back onto the bank and, suddenly making a grab, took both boys around the head, wrestling with them against my chest.
“So. You think that’s funny, do you? Making a man get his feet wet? You think that’s funny?”
“Yes. We do.” They were still giggling.
I squeezed them a little bit. “You think so?”
“Yes.”
“Still?”
“Yes.”
“All right,” I said. I squeezed them one more time. “Now what do you think?”
“We still think it’s funny.”
“Okay,” I said, “I guess it is, then.” I hugged them both. Then we walked back to the picnic table. I made a play of taking giant steps and sloshing.
“Mom,” TJ shouted when we approached the table. “He fell in the creek.”
“Who did?”
“Pat.”
“Oh my.”
“And he got his shoes wet.”
“And he cussed too,” Bobby said.
“Did you?” Jessie said.
“Hell, no.”
“Yes, he did, Mom.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But they made me.”
“What a mess,” Jessie said. “Look at you.”
“I know it,” I said.
“But you should have seen him, Mom,” TJ said. They started laughing again and took turns telling her about it while we sat down to eat.
It was cold and almost dark by the time we finished supper. Still it seemed pleasant there, the four of us, sitting at the same table, with the sound of the creek nearby and the smell of pine and blue spruce all around us. Finally we left. The boys had to go to school the next day and Jessie and I had to go back to work.
We drove home out of the mountains in the dark on Highway 34, down through Loveland and Greeley and on through Fort Morgan and Brush onto the High Plains, past Akron and then into Holt County and finally Holt, with its blue streetlights showing from a distance and then closer, and then the streets all quiet and empty when we drove into town. We walked up the steps into their apartment on the edge of town. We put the boys to bed and went to bed ourselves. We were all exhausted. Jessie and I talked very briefly and went to sleep.
Sometime after midnight I woke again, thinking I’d heard a noise. I lay listening for a minute in the dark. Then I heard it again in the front room. I sat up. Now slowly the doorway filled and it was Jack Burdette. In the faint light from the street corner I could see him standing in the door, massive and dark; he smelled of alcohol and there was something across his arm. I started to get up. Then he found the bedroom switch on the wall and turned the light on. Jessie was suddenly awake too. She sat up.
“Hell,” he said. “Don’t you two never wear clothes? Jesus Christ, look at you.”
Jessie pulled the sheet around her. I started to swing out of bed.
“Wait now,” Burdette said. “I’m not ready for you to move yet. Just sit there for a minute.”
“What do you want?” I said.
“What do you think I want?”
“There’s nothing here for you. You know that.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, there is something.”
He was leaning against the wall, looking at us. He had cleaned up since Friday night, since he had been released. His eyes were bloodshot, but he was clean-shaven now and he was wearing a maroon shirt and a pair of new-looking tan slacks. The shirt was stretched tight over his gut, and lying across his arm was a shotgun. He motioned with it, pointing it at me.
“I told you I had family here. But you never believed me, did you?”
“That’s over,” I said.