“I’m sorry. After that situation at the courthouse, I mean, the way the Mexican girl was treated, I wanted to apologize in some way.”
“You don’t owe me one.”
“I didn’t say I did. How do you think I felt, watching that girl patronized and dismissed like that? But I couldn’t do anything about it, not without starting a fight right there on the street,” she replied. She took off her glasses and let them hang from a velvet cord around her neck. “I’m thinking of leaving Earl.”
I felt my hand close and open at my side and a tingling sensation in my throat that I didn’t understand.
“You’ll do the right thing,” I said.
“I haven’t done the right thing in twenty years, Billy Bob.”
Then I realized who was sitting at one of the reading tables against the far wall, his hands clasped like paws on edges of a huge Life pictorial history, the top of the book obscuring the lower half of his face, so that he resembled the World War II cartoon drawing of Kilroy.
“That’s Skyler Doolittle,” I said.
“The man who claims Earl cheated him out of his watch?”
“Does Skyler know who you are?” I asked.
“No, he comes in here all the time. Poor soul, I feel sorry for him.”
The overhead lights blinked to indicate the library would close in five minutes.
“I guess you have a ride home,” I said.
“Earl’s picking me up,” she said.
“I see. Well, good night, Peggy Jean,” I said.
“Good night,” she said.
Outside, a moment later, as the rain clouds pulsed with veins of lightning, I witnessed one of those improbable incidents that you know will result in grave harm to an innocent party, one whose life seems destined to be governed by the laws of misfortune. Skyler Doolittle, in his wilted seersucker, walked down the library steps behind Peggy Jean just as Earl Deitrich’s maroon Lincoln pulled to the curb and Earl popped open the passenger door for his wife.
Earl’s face was rainbowed with color in the glow of his dash.
“I don’t believe it. You’re stalking my wife,” he said.
“I haven’t did no such thing,” Skyler said.
Peggy Jean got in the car and closed the door. But Earl did not drive away. He made a U-turn and slowed by the curb, rolling his window down on its electric motor so he could look directly into Skyler’s face.
“You malignant deformity, you just made the worst mistake of your life,” he said.
I was standing in the shadows on the corner and Earl did not see me. For some reason I could not explain, I felt obscene.
Early the next morning, before I went to the office, I drove to a sporting goods store in the strip mall on the four-lane, then returned to the west end of the county and headed down the dirt street that fronted Pete’s house. When no one answered the door, I walked around back. He stood barefoot in the tomato plants, hoeing weeds out of the row, the straps of his striped overalls notched into his Astros T-shirt.
“Give it a break, bud,” I said, and sat down on a folding metal chair. I put my Stetson on his head and popped loose the staples on the shopping bag in my hand, then reached inside it.
“Where’d you get the glove?” he asked.
“A client gave me this two or three years back. I put it up in the closet and forgot all about it.”
His gaze shifted to the back door and windows of his house.
“That’s why it’s still in the shopping bag?” he said.
“Right, because I don’t have occasion to use it. But you’re missing the point. Anybody can own a fielder’s glove. The art comes in molding the pocket.” I opened a cardboard box and rolled an immaculate white, red-stitched baseball out of it. “See, you rub oil into the pocket, then mold the ball into it and tie the fingers down on top of it with leather cord. Watch.”