“I never saw him. He stayed far enough away. But he wasn’t dangerous. Mike knew him.”
Ben felt as if the top of his head were coming off, and he wanted to shake the rest of the story out of her without having to go through this question-and-answer routine. Calmly he said, “Who was the guy?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Mike wouldn’t tell me.”
“And you weren’t curious?” he asked.
“Sure I was. But when Mike made up his mind about something, he wouldn’t change it. One night, when we went to the Diamond Dell – that’s a drive-in hamburger joint on Galasio – he got out of the car and went back and talked to the guy in the VW. When he came back, he said he knew him and that we wouldn’t have any more trouble with him. And he was right. The guy drove away, and he didn’t follow us any more. I never knew what it was about, and I forgot about it till you asked.”
“But you must have had some idea,” Ben insisted. “You can’t have let it drop without having found out something more concrete.”
She put down her drink. “Mike didn’t want to talk about it, and I thought I knew why. He never said directly, but I think maybe the weasel in the VW made a pass at him once.”
“A pass?” Ben said.
“I only think so,” she said. “Couldn’t prove it. Anyway, it couldn’t be the same guy that killed him, the guy with the ring.”
“Why not?” Glenda asked.
“These Aryan Alliance guys, they hate fags every bit as much as they hate all the coloreds. No way they’re ever going to let some pansy-ass wear the ring.”
“One more thing,” Ben said. “I’d really like a list of Mike’s friends, five or six guys his own age that he was close to. Someone he might have told about this guy in the red Volkswagen.”
“Five or six – you’re wasting your time. Mike wasn’t close to very many people. Fact is, Marty Cable was his one best friend.”
“Then we’ll need to talk to Cable.”
“He’s probably at Hanover Park. Summers, he works as a lifeguard at the municipal pool.” She looked more directly at Glenda than she had since they’d entered the house. “You think Ben here is ever going to screw me?”
“Probably not,” Glenda said, evincing no surprise whatsoever at the question.
“Am I a package or not?” Louise asked.
Glenda said, “You are a package, all right.”
“Then he must be nuts.”
“Oh, he’s okay,” Glenda said.
“You think so?” the girl asked.
“Yeah,” Glenda said. “He’s a good guy.”
“If you say so, then he must be.”
The two women smiled at each other.
Then Louise took her hand from her crotch, looked at Ben, and sighed. “Too bad.”
In the car, driving away from the house, Ben said, “Is the world going to hell or what?”
“You mean Louise?”
“Are girls like that now?”
“Some. But there have always been some like her. She’s nothing new. She’s just a child.”
“She’s almost eighteen, going to college in the fall, old enough to have some sense.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. She’s just a child, and she always will be. Perpetually immature, always needing to be the center of attention. Don’t waste your time disliking her, Ben. What she needs is sympathy, and lots of it, because she’s going to have a bad life, a load of pain. When her looks eventually start to go, she won’t know what to be.”
“She liked you, even if she didn’t want to,” he said.
“A little, yeah.”
“You liked her?”
“No. But we’re all God’s children, right? None of us deserve what life’s going to dish out to her.”
They drove along a street lined with enormous trees. Sunlight and shadow flickered across the windshield. Light and shadow. Hope and despair. Yesterday and tomorrow. Flickering.
After a while, he said, “She’s a perpetual child, but you’ve been grown up forever.”
“In spite of everything,” she said, “I’m the lucky one.”
* * *
Under the trees in Hanover Park, every patch of shade had been claimed by families with picnic hampers. Sunbathers lounged on big beach towels on the lawns, and games of volleyball were under way.