Into the Web by Thomas H. Cook

blush at her cheek, the younger version of an older face I’d not seen again until years later, after I’d found my way up to Waylord, where she had greeted me at the door,
Well, now, you must be Roy Slater. Lila’s not quite ready.
    “Betty Cutler was at that game,” I said.
    “That right?” My father seemed hardly to recognize the name.
    “You don’t remember talking to her?”
    “Why would I remember that?”
    “Last night you mentioned that you knew each other. Betty-and-Deidre, remember?”
    “I knew a lot of people up in Waylord way back when.”
    “I just thought that—”
    “Talked to a lot of people at them games too.”
    “Well, actually, you didn’t,” I said. “You sat off by yourself. I don’t remember ever seeing you talk to anybody but—”
    “What difference does it make who I talked to at them games?”
    “It’s just an observation, Dad.”
    A brief silence, then he said, “You see Lila today?”
    “Yes.”
    “What’d she have to say?”
    “Nothing much.”
    He shrugged. “If you don’t want to talk about it, just say so.”
    “We talked about the old days,” I said. “High school. She didn’t have much to say.”
    But my father no longer seemed interested in my conversation with Lila. His mind was now focused on a gloomier terrain. “Death clams people up. Did that to your mother.”
    He was talking about Archie, of course, the way his death had sent my mother into the murky bedroom for the rest of her days. But I wondered if he were not also talking about others who’d suffered the same devastation, the process by which a child’s death closes around a parent’s world, becomes the dark prism through which all life passes after that.
    “Lonnie Porterfield should just leave Lila alone.” His eyes snapped over to me. “If Lila don’t want to talk, it ain’t none of his business to make her.”
    “He asked me to help him.” I drew out the badge Lonnie had issued me. “He even made it official.”
    As if I’d pulled a rattlesnake from my pocket, my father recoiled physically. “You ain’t got no business carrying that thing.”
    “Why not? Lonnie made me a deputy.”
    Even as I spoke, it seemed perverse to me that in some boyish way I still wanted to impress my father.
    “A sheriff’s deputy ain’t nothing but a gun-thug with a badge.” The mining wars flared in his eyes. “Bought and sold by the mine owners.”
    “County deputies don’t work for mine owners anymore,” I said, now sorry that I’d bothered to display the badge.
    “What do you know about what deputies do or don’t do around here, Roy?”
    “I know that things have changed, Dad.”
    “Things don’t never change. People neither. Especially them Porterfields. You take off the muzzle, and Lonnie’ll come at you just like his old man come at me.”
    “What did Wallace Porterfield ever do to you?”
    My father waved his hand. “You don’t know a thing, Roy. All that learning, them books you read, and you still don’t know one goddamn thing.”
    I glanced at his hands and couldn’t help but admire how steady they remained.
    “Tell me something then,” I challenged. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
    His eyes blazed. “All right, I will. Here’s something you don’t know. Blood is blood. What’s in the blood is there for good. You can’t get shed of it.”
    I stared at him silently.
    “Well?” he asked after a moment.
    “That’s it? That’s the thing I don’t know?”
    “Damn right it is. ’Cause if you knew it, you wouldn’t be carrying no badge Lonnie Porterfield give you.” He snorted harshly. “But you’re going to learn a lesson soon enough, by God.” His voice rang with a maddening certainty that made all further argument superfluous. “The fact is, Lonnie’s just using you, Roy. Getting you to do something ’Cause he don’t want to do it hisself. Just like his daddy used people. Give them little tin badges and got them to go against their own kind.