by spring-green fields. He pulled off to the side of the road, and with the motor still clumping away, he hopped out of the car. The passenger door opened without complaint, but when he found the seat back lever and pulled it up, the seat remained stubbornly in place. “C’mon, you piece of shit. If you went down, you can fucking well get back up again.”
He wrenched at the lever with all his strength and gave a satisfied laugh when the seat popped upright. But before he could celebrate too heartily, he caught sight of a folded piece of white paper lying on the floor. It had been tucked mostly under the seat, invisible when the thing was reclined. It could have been anything. A receipt. Something one of the cops dropped while searching the car. But he knew in his heart what it was, so he wasn’t at all surprised to read the name penned in shaky handwriting across the outside: Shane .
Goddammit.
With the paper clutched in his hand, Jimmy slammed the door. He went around to the driver’s seat and collapsed heavily into it. He shut the door and looked at the paper, which was smudged with dirt and had obviously been handled a lot. “Must’ve fallen out of Tom’s jacket,” he said out loud. The cops hadn’t found it when they searched the car, but they probably hadn’t searched all that diligently. The sudden death of a drifter wasn’t exactly their top priority.
Shane didn’t even care enough about his father to give him a funeral. Tom probably deserved his son’s disdain. It sounded as if he’d been a shitty parent before he up and disappeared, and Jimmy didn’t blame Shane at all. So if Jimmy tossed the letter out the window beside a field somewhere north of Fresno, Shane would never know and wouldn’t care even if he did know. The letter was nothing. Garbage.
Except it wasn’t. At least it hadn’t been to Tom. And the decision whether to read it or rip it to shreds should be Shane’s. It wasn’t Jimmy’s place to steal that from him.
Fine, then. Shane Little of Rattlesnake, California. That should be address enough. Jimmy could mail it to him. Except that required an envelope and stamp, neither of which he possessed, and while he could certainly find a post office if he tried, well, that felt like the wrong kind of effort.
Fuck. Picking up that hitchhiker was causing him all sorts of trouble.
Feeling oddly voyeuristic, Jimmy unfolded the paper.
Dear Shane,
I don’t know if you have any good memories of me, but we had some. I want you to know about them because I’m dying and I’m a selfish old bastard. Want you to know we was happy once. When you were a bitty baby you used to fuss at bedtime, and the only way to get you to sleep was if I sang to you. I’d carry you around singing whatever came into my head. Country tunes. Ring of Fire was your favorite. And you’d stop crying and close your eyes and your little fists would unclench and you’d fall asleep. You wouldn’t do it for your ma—only me. When you got a little bigger we used to sit on the porch while your ma cooked dinner. I had a job then. A good one. But when I came home you were always waiting for me on that porch, with all them good smells coming out the windows and the sounds of your ma fixing our food, and we’d throw rocks at old tin cans. You had a good arm for a little kid. I used to tell you you’d be a baseball star someday.
I know it all went to shit later. I’d tell you how sorry I am, but you don’t want no I’m sorrys from an old man. They don’t do you no good.
But before I fucked up we had some good. I been remembering that good all these years, even when there ain’t been much other good around me. You keep that in mind, ok? Go ahead and hate me if it makes you feel better, but that won’t change what we had for a short time, there at the beginning.
Love,
Papa
Jimmy folded the paper and set it on the passenger seat. He’d spent a lot of years going away from places, but this was the first