Here’s the plain truth of it. I never killed no one. You want to talk murder, you talk to Jim Bailey. He didn’t mean to, neither. He’s the one done it.

In the newspapers they said we was bum bashing. They called it that—bum bashing—and other times they called it crashing. That don’t sound right to me. We was rousting. My daddy uses a word: Roustabout. You know it? It means a rough person, a person who’s only going to be around for a little while, a person prone to raising some hell. Pile four or five boys into an old green Impala, white leather seats, old 8-track player, wake some up some vagrants. That’s rousting.

That night there was a party at the Hills—you wouldn’t know the place, it’s gone now—but out behind the old Royce Hotel there was a big sandpit, hills and hills of sand they’d dumped to raise a foundation for some tower they never built—and all around it the pines grew thick enough you couldn’t see inside from the street, but low enough so the cobalt streetlights could sneak over the trees, light the place up.

Our plan was to drive around for awhile first. You don’t never show up to a party early. I liked to show up last, give a war whoop, a Banshee cry, make my arriving known. So quarter past eight Freddy Bailey shows up at my house, him driving, his brother Jim in the front seat telling him where to go, Billy Jones in the back, his hand wrapped around one of the baseball bats like he’d ever have it in him to swing one at anything but a baseball.

“Badass Billy Jones!” I said. “Move it on over.” And I slapped him upside the head because that’s how we did him, and he wouldn’t expect nothing else. Freddy thought this was funny and got to laughing, and Jim slapped his ear with his hand cupped shape of a C. If you slap somebody’s ear like that it rings for hours, and Jim knew how to do things like that—he done it to me and said it was to show me how. Jim Bailey knew how to hurt people a hundred ways and more.

The week before I gone to the Farmer’s Market, big old warehouse on Congress Avenue, and I bought some protection. The streets at night can get scary, cocaine niggers and worse, and we’d had a bad scare already. You heard of a transvestite? That’s a man done up like a woman. We’d saw one a few weeks before, walking up and down Florida Mango, drinking from a brown paper bag, and on that night it was just Jim and me and John Streeter, big dumb offensive tackle, and Jim was driving and pulls the car over and throws a beer bottle out the window. It bounces off the guy’s head and shatters into pieces on the sidewalk. Before I know it Jim’s grabbing our shirts, John’s and mine, and pulling us out of the car, and we’re running toward this big ugly woman who’s cussing and screaming bloody murder, and Jim’s yelling, “Bring it on, freakshow,” and big John Streeter’s outrunning both of us—he’s in football shape, been running laps, and we’re already losing our wind, running so hard—and John, who’s only a little bigger than the transvestite, he gets there first, and then the transvestite does some kind of judo move, sort of steps out of the way and yanks on John’s arm at the same time, and John goes flying and lands ten feet away in a heap. And then me and Jim jump at the old bag. More judo, and we’re on our asses, when John jumps her from behind, and they roll around for a minute, tangled up in that big old skirt, both of them so big it’s scary, and next thing you know John is laying on his stomach, blood soaking through the back of his shirt, and the hag running away, screaming, “I was in Vietnam. Viet-fucking-Nam, motherfuckers.” Then she was gone into some alley, took her knife with her, and we took John and dumped him at the emergency room doors and drove off before anyone could ask what happened.

So after that, like I said, we all got some protection. Jim Bailey sawed the handle off a shovel and duct-taped one end, made himself a billy club. Freddy Bailey bought some brass knuckles from a colored kid, and Billy Jones, he didn’t know what to do, so Jim told him to swipe some baseball bats from the equipment shed at school, said might as well get something for all the time he wasted at practice and riding the bus home all night from games, but I think Jim just said that part on account of being jealous of Billy always being in the newspaper—no-hitter this, and home run that—and because Billy didn’t know better than to rub it in our faces when the scout from the Cincinnati Reds come to watch a couple games. John Streeter, he didn’t buy or swipe nothing. He said he was finished with all that business, and getting near stabbed to death saved him, tell you the truth, from being in Jim and Freddy’s Impala that night, from ending up like us. I can’t say that none of us blamed him, or even said one word about his getting nearly stabbed to death by a man in a dress. We was ashamed of that ourselves. We didn’t tell nobody.

And me, I marched on over to the Farmer’s Market on Congress and bought a blackjack, a real nice one, eight inches of leather, lead ball embedded in the mouth. That’s what I swung at the one who didn’t die. I never touched the one who died. That’s why I got eighteen months and three years probation instead of twenty-five to life, like Jim, who, like I said, didn’t mean to kill nobody, same as me. I got wise to something in the penitentiary, and I’ll tell it now: the difference between one kind of life and another comes down to a moment no person can control. What if instead of buying a blackjack I made me a billy club instead, like Jim? What if we each of us run off toward a different vagrant—that’s the word the lawyer said to use, and I been using it ever since, vagrant—what if Jim got the nigger instead of me, and I was the one went after the Indian? What then?

That night we drove around, Jim and Freddy and Billy and me, waiting for some time to pass so we could show up late to the Hills and see some girls drink from the kegs and make ourselves known. Jim and Freddy only had about two 8-track tapes, both Kenny Rogers, but one of them Islands in the Stream with Dolly Parton, and nobody wants to hear that, so we was listening to Coward of the County over and over, and singing along, too, singing into the blackjack and the billy club and the baseball bats like they was microphones, loud as we wanted, because it was funny to sing loud and bad, especially out the window at other cars when we stopped at red lights, and especially to hold out a long note when the music faded down and the track changed and then the music faded back up again at the place where it left off.

We drove back into a side neighborhood over there near the airport, you know, the one behind the Verdes Tropicana bowling alley where all the spics live, and one of the streets run along by a canal where this Guatemalan was fishing. He was squatted down, and sort of leaning forward, like he was gonna think some fish into jumping onto his line, and it was too good to pass up, him leaning forward like that and squatted down, so I told Freddy to slow down, and I reached up to the front seat and grabbed hold of Jim’s billy club, then leaned my whole body out the back window and gave him a tap on the backside, just a little love pat, just enough to help his body move in the direction it wanted to move already. That fisherman didn’t know what happened. He just fell forward, dove really, right into that nasty brown canal water, and we nearly doubled over laughing, it was so funny. Jim said it served him right for fishing in that canal where they probably pumped sewage and who knows what else, and for all our laughing we stopped paying attention to Freddy for a moment. Freddy always needs babysat when he’s driving—he hardly ever pays enough attention regular times, forget about laughing times—and then Jim sees how the road is about to dead end at the bend in the canal. He starts yelling at Freddy, grabs the wheel and turns it while Freddy slams on the brakes. Goddamn, I thought we was going into the canal. But the car spun out so we was sideways and stopped just in time to see that Guatemalan climbing up the canal bank, madder than hell. He come running at us, and Jim must’ve been thinking about that man in a skirt, because he wasn’t itching for no fight like you’d’ve thought. He told Freddy to get the hell out of there, and Freddy turned the wheels around and hit his foot on the gas and damn near ran that Guatemalan into the water a second time.

Jim said we better be on to the Hills, and I think he was a little shook up even though he wasn’t acting like it. Under his seat he always kept a bottle of Jim Beam, and he pulled it out and made a big show of flashing it in front of the window like he wasn’t scared of no cops. My daddy’s a highway patrolman, and I know how it ain’t smart to call attention to yourself, especially by waving around a bottle of bourbon in a car. I told Jim to put that thing away, but Jim just put it to his mouth and tilted it back. Took two big swigs. Then he turned around and leaned over the back of his seat, got right in my face and said, “Russell, pal, I like you, you know it? But don’t you ever say nothing to me about nothing.” He had a big, ugly look on his face, smiling like a Rottweiler who’s spotted a trespasser. Some smiles don’t mean nothing joyful. Half of me wanted to knock that dog smile off his face, take a couple teeth, but I knew well as Jim did how he could break me into small, tiny pieces, real fast. I seen him beat bloody grown men twice his size.

I backed down, and he patted me twice on the cheek hard enough so I knew he was being nice. He handed over the Jim Beam and I took a long swig myself and then passed it over to Billy.

It’d been dark for a couple hours when some blue lights come flashing behind us and right off I thought that Guatemalan must’ve lived close by to where he was fishing and called in on us, and I could know right then what was on Jim’s mind, that he was gonna tell Freddy to go faster or turn into some alley and try to get away. And I knowed from my daddy how there ain’t no getting away, and it’s best to just let them get you, to go quiet and be agreeable and say yes sir and no sir. Sometimes we’d have five or ten state troopers over to the house, all of us eating around the big oak table, and they’d be sipping on red wine—all except Daddy, he’s a deacon at the Baptist church and won’t drink a drop—and making jokes about how sophisticated they’d all become, all of them now turned into wine sippers, and they’d make a big show of holding their pinkies up in the air while they held their glasses—their goblets, they’d call them—and it being funny because with the other hand they’d be stuffing their mouths with barbeque, and after a few hours of wine drinking, they’d get to bragging about hauling in this assailant or that criminal, and the most happiness they’d show would be when they’d talk about some colored kid resisting, and then of course they’d have to show him who was boss or beat some respect into his head, and whenever they were talking about it I’d think how they really liked being disrespected, on account of it gave them a chance to kick and punch on somebody for awhile.

So behind us those blue lights come flashing, and Jim starts yelling at Freddy to step on the gas, and I’m yelling no, no, keep it steady, and all the while the siren getting louder in our ears and the blue lights getting bigger in the rearview mirror, and Freddy screaming I’m gonna turn, I’m gonna turn, but not turning or anything. By then the whole inside of the Impala was all lit up blue, them blue streaks flying across the white leather seats every time the lights rolled around. I could see Freddy was about to run, the way his body went stiff—he was telegraphing it. Like my daddy says, there ain’t no mystery with that boy. And just then, them blue lights right up on us, that cop car swerved out into the lane beside us and kept on going, fast as a rocket ship, not after us at all, as it turns out.

Everybody starts laughing, and all is forgiven, even though my first thought was Jim might turn around and sock me in the jaw for arguing. But he wasn’t always like that. Sometimes Jim could be a real nice guy, and right then he slid over to the middle part of the seat and put his arm around Freddy and tussled his hair. “I’m hungry as hell,” he said. “Hamburgers on me, for everybody.”

Freddy pulled into the drive thru, and after we all got our burgers he got all brave and started talking about how he was gonna score with Allyson Dedo, which was bullshit and we all knew it, because her daddy was a famous boob doctor from the island, from Palm Beach, and we was just white trash far as she was concerned, and she probably didn’t even know who we was. But Jim was still being nice then, chewing his hamburger, and he said, “I don’t know if it’s gonna happen tonight, Freddy boy, but I’ll tell you this. I seen Allyson Dedo looking your way at school. She’s been watching you for half the year now, and I half can’t believe it took you this long to see how she’s all up in your shit. It ain’t gonna happen tonight, probably. You gotta grow some testes first, be nice and take her to a movie, feed her some fancy shrimp or something. But soon, baby brother. Soon.”

You should’ve seen how Freddy perked up. You could tell how much Freddy really wanted Jim to believe in him and Allyson Dedo, and it got me to thinking—then, not now—how nice it would be if Jim was my big brother, instead of Freddy’s, or if I just had a big brother like Jim who was closer to my age, and home instead of in prison like my brother Emmett. But that’s a whole nother story I don’t want to get into right now on account of as it turned out it was a good thing for me that Emmett was in jail when I got there because it gave me some protection right off that neither Jim or Freddy ever had. To this day I know they give Jim an awful time inside, and he still has a long time to go before it’s over if he don’t kill himself first, which wouldn’t be no surprise..

We got to the Hills around quarter past nine. Freddy drove the Impala on around the back of the Royce Hotel. There was a little dirt turnoff at the back end of the parking lot, a path that was wore away by them dump trucks that hauled up all the sand. I was finishing my last bites of hamburger and Jim was giving all of us a hard time for checking our teeth in the rearview mirror, even though he was doing it, too. Nobody wants to greet the ladies with beef between your teeth.

Them trees did their work. Outside you couldn’t tell nothing was going on, but inside the Hills was lit up like the Fourth of July, the cars and trucks all lined up in a big square, their headlights facing in toward the mounds of sand, and lit from up top by them cobalt streetlights. It was kind of eerie, too, how the white light from the headlights reflected off the white sand so bright you could hardly stand to look at it straight on, and then up near the top of the mounds how the streetlights gave everything sort of a blue glow, like in horror movies, you know, how the spirits of little children come to visit and have them auras humming all around them? That’s how it was, only everybody looked like a spirit, because after you’d had a few taps off the keg that bright white tended to give you a headache, so before long everybody was moving up to the top of the mounds. That was the big joke, you know? I am the Ghost of the Hills. Jim liked to say it just like that, and then he’d let out this long, dark laugh, and for half a second you’d be afraid even though you knew he was pulling your leg.

You got to imagine how big the Hills was. You might think there’d be four or five little sand mounds and everybody partying all close together. But it wasn’t like that. There was probably twenty sand mounds spread out over maybe two acres, and they was tall enough that you could go between them and find a nice dark spot, spread out a blanket, make time with your girl. Plenty of people did it, and even though there was probably a couple hundred kids around, you knew you could get a quiet space for yourself if you needed. That’s why it was no use to have a Hills party without a whole bunch of people, because it took a lot of headlights to keep it all up.

So Freddy pulled in, and a rich kid, pretty boy name of Tom Schoepf, come up to Freddy’s window and asked how many of us in the car, and Jim leaned over and said, “Oh come on, Tom, we ain’t got it,” and Tom said, “You guys aren’t gonna drink anything?” And Jim just flashed him a big grin and said, “No, sir, we ain’t,” and Tom just kinda tapped his foot like he didn’t believe it, and finally Jim said, “Oh, all right. Here’s your money,” and handed him the twenty bucks he collected from us earlier—five dollars a head if you brung headlights, seven bucks without. Tom stuck a piece of white paper on the window, and that meant we was free to have all the beer we wanted until it all run out, which was never, on account of Tom’s daddy owned twenty or thirty Schoepf’s Grocers and sold him kegs at cost, so cheap Tom could clear six or seven hundred dollars on a good night.

We got out and right off head up the nearest hill, because that’s where they put all the kegs, up top. There was a mess of trash all the way up—old paper and plastic cups and bottles and drive thru bags—and we was racing like always, and Billy Jones was starting to get ahead partway up the hill, because, like I said, he was in baseball shape, and Jim wasn’t having none of second place. He grabbed Billy’s leg and tripped him up, and Billy went down hard in a wet patch strewn with cans. Jim passed him by and ran on up top first, yelling, “King of the mountain,” and we wasn’t far behind him, but when Billy didn’t get up real fast I went back down to see why. He was bent over his knees holding his face, and when he looked up at me I saw he was bleeding from his eye. Or that’s what I thought at first, that his eye was bleeding, but he wiped at it with his shirtsleeve, and I could see he’d got cut by a piece of broken glass above his eye, below his eyebrow, real close to his eyelid. It sliced him up real good, and some girls caught wind of some trouble and first ran away, then ran back over. Jim saw the girls, and then he got all concerned, too, and ran down the hill to check on Billy, Freddy tagging along behind him.

“Billy. Jesus, God,” Jim said, and he was looking real intent at Billy’s eye, but also I could tell he was scanning around to see what girls had come over. It wasn’t any girls he cared about, mostly some fat girls that always hang around the baseball games and pine away for Billy Jones anyway, but still, they was girls, so Jim took off his own shirt and pushed it up against Billy’s eye to stop the bloodflow. He yelled at Freddy to go run to the car and get the duct tape from the trunk, on account of he had some left over from wrapping the shovel handle. Jim put his hand on the back of Billy’s head and said, “Listen here, pal. You’re gonna pull through. We’ll patch it up right.” Jim had pretty good pectorals, and I could see he was glad to have his shirt off, so he could flex for them girls.

More people come over because they heard there was a fight, so when Freddy come back up the hill he had to push and shove some to get through with the duct tape. Jim made a big show of holding up that bloodsoaked shirt and handing it to me so he could play paramedic. He grabbed the skin on both sides of Billy’s wound and pressed them real tight together, which made more blood run into Billy’s eye. Then he had Freddy tear off a little piece of duct tape, just a half of a half of a little piece, and he taped Billy’s head shut and wandered off to the dark places with one of the fat girls who was making a fuss over him.

There wasn’t no fight, obviously, and everyone who’d come hoping for a ruckus went away all disappointed. I stood there holding Jim’s shirt, Freddy was twirling the roll of duct tape around and around on his finger like he didn’t know no better, and Billy shot us the shit-eatingest grin and said, “How bout we get some beers before they’re all gone.” He didn’t look like nobody the Cincinnati Reds would want, that line of not even dried blood all smeared across his face, and I think he might’ve liked it that way, since he got to look like he’d been slugging it out without having to actually slug it out.

We got us some plastic cups and kicked back for awhile waiting for Jim. Before long we started whooping and hollering and carrying on, and I got to noticing how even with all them headlights below and the blue light creeping in from over the trees, there was a place in the sky where the ground lights didn’t reach no more, and it got darker up there with nothing but a skinny old moon, and you could see all the stars like you couldn’t usually when you was lower to the ground. It reminded me of when I was a little boy, right before Emmett went to jail—hell, he was probably the age I was right then—and my daddy come home one weekend and said he was gonna take us out into the woods. We packed up two pup tents with no ground floor or nothing, and we didn’t even use them on account of it was a nice night and we was wearing warm shirts. I didn’t hardly sleep at all that night. Me and Emmett just stretched out opposite ways there on our tarps. Our heads was close together, and every once in awhile he’d lean over and take a dip or spit some in his coffee can. You could hear Daddy snoring, and we didn’t say nothing to each other, mostly, but I remember it was the same as that night on the hill, just a nice peaceful feeling, tiny little moon, and all them stars where you could really see them. I’d have to say both them times was the high points of my life so far. It’s funny, because right after both those times life got real bad.

Jim come running up the hill mad as hell, huffing and puffing like I don’t know what. At first I thought somebody jumped him, but he didn’t have a mark on him, and his fists wasn’t bloody or nothing. “We’re getting the hell out of here,” he said, and right then I knew something went wrong with that fat girl. It ain’t often you got one over on Jim like that, and I couldn’t resist saying so. What I said was, “Old fatty kicked you to the curb, hey Jim?” and I thought he was gonna light me afire right then and there, especially after Freddy started laughing even though he was trying not to, and then Billy Jones got tickled, too, and started making humping moves with his hips and talking in a girly voice, saying, “Jim, Jim, Jim,” and then Jim got real sore and told Billy to give up his shirt since Jim had got his all bloodstained from fixing Billy’s eye.

“No sir, I ain’t giving up my shirt,” Billy told him. “Goddammit, Jim, you the one pushed me down that hill.”

By now a bunch of the fat girl’s friends come around to see if they couldn’t taunt Jim until he lit into somebody, Billy probably, and I figured I was the only one on earth knew how to handle the situation. I walked up to Jim, right in front of all these girls, put my arm around him, and said, “Ladies, I’m sorry to interrupt, but Jim Bailey’s services is needed elsewhere.”

Jim could hardly get enough of that kind of talk. He tipped an imaginary cowboy hat to them, and I steered him in the direction of the Impala. When we got out of earshot, he said, “What the hell was that all about,” and I said, “Jim, buddy, the night is young, and we are fearsome young men.”

“We gonna clean up the streets tonight?”

“Yeah, Jim, buddy,” I said. “You gonna lead us into action.”

Then we all started howling at that little sliver of moon. Freddy Bailey put on this little tiny voice: “We’re going rous-tiiiing!”

And we all answered, “Rous-tiiiing!” and put our hands to our mouths and war-whooped the end part like we was playing cowboys and Indians, and had us a footrace to the car, and Billy Jones didn’t run his hardest but didn’t let us win neither, and Jim knew better this time than to trip him up from behind.

We piled in the Impala, and Freddy revved up the engine a couple times, threw us into reverse and gunned it. For a minute I thought we might get stuck in the sand, but them tires caught hold and we was out of there, goodbye Hills, hello night.

My great granddaddy, my daddy’s daddy’s daddy, told me a story before he died. He used to live up in the middle of the state, what they call the Chain of Lakes that runs on down to the Kissimmee River. He lived up on Lake Pierce, which is still a special place, a wild place, but not so wild as it used to be when my granddaddy was young. By the time of his story, there wasn’t no more problems with the Seminoles. There was some around to say prayers and do dances around the mounds there, where their dead kings was buried. But mostly they was from old Indian families everybody knew, and they’d as soon hunt and fish with the people who lived around the lake as one of their own, and that worked both ways. They was only good Indians around Lake Pierce. The problem, my great granddaddy told me, was Yankees. They’d come down to the lake and throw money around and fool around with the women and go back north before anybody even knew how much damage they’d caused. So after awhile people got sick of it. There was this hermit named Scroggins who worked for the state—his job was to measure how high and low the lake water got to be at different parts of the year—but mostly he just lived close to the land, pitched tents out on the islands and sometimes found a woman to bring back and set up house with for awhile until they got tired of one another and went their separate ways. Everyone was a little bit scared of Scroggins, because he wasn’t just partly crazy. He was also partly smarter than everybody else, and a smart crazy man, great granddaddy said, is a lot more dangerous than a dumb one. So my great great granddaddy, my daddy’s daddy’s daddy’s daddy, he knew about Yankees from fighting them in the war, and he also knew how to live like an Indian, same as Scroggins. So he rounded up some other men and formed a posse and they went on down to Snodgrass Island where Scroggins was staying, and they made themselves a plan to rid the lake of them Yankees once and for all. What they did—and you should’ve seen the look on my great granddaddy’s face when he told this, like he was fifteen years old instead of eighty—was they got hold of some roots and berries and made some face paints and then they’d go to whatever place some Yankee was staying, and they’d break in sometime in the middle of the night and get themselves arranged all around the bed, and then they’d start hollering all at once, all around the bed, and dancing and kicking up their heels. They’d rouse that Yankee right up from bed and slap him around some, and shake him, and my great granddaddy said that Yankee wouldn’t hardly know what hit him since he just got up out of sleep and so was still half-asleep in the deep black as it was, and then before too much more time they’d run off into the night, and maybe leave some old arrowheads splayed out there by the door as a reminder. “Them Yankees never would come back,” great granddaddy would say, and he’d slap me hard on the back the way old men do when they’re showing how they like you.

Ever since what happened that night under the overpass, lots of people’ve asked me what the hell I was thinking, going around with those boys, roughing up bums and vagrants. And mostly I don’t know what to tell them, but I’ve been thinking on it a lot—I’ve had a lot of time to think—and I guess the best I can do to is say that all the newspapers and the people on TV, my momma, my daddy and all his trooper friends, the preacher at church—everybody was always talking about what they was calling the homeless problem, and everybody was trying to pass laws or getting on the backs of the police and whatnot to do something about all these stray men passing through town and breaking into buildings like my momma’s beauty shop and even sometimes beating somebody up at night, but nobody was doing nothing about it. And at the time, I guess I was thinking about my great granddaddy and Scroggins and how they was men of action and intent, willing to do something about the Yankee roustabouts that come in and disrupt their way of life. So, that’s one part of what I was thinking. And the other part is, I wasn’t thinking at all. We was just having a heyday, and wasn’t nobody gonna stop us until things gone too far to fix themselves.

We left out from the Hills and the Royce, and our first thought was to hunt down that Guat fisherman. Jim was bragging about how we run him off the road one and a half times already, and the story’d almost grown to where he’d fell in the water twice, not because we believed it, but because it was more fun to tell that way. If you could’ve taken a look around the inside of that car, you might’ve understood how real and make-believe didn’t seem so far apart. You’d’ve saw Freddy Bailey driving, blowing into a empty bottle of Jim Beam like he’s playing in a jug band, and Jim Bailey, his shirt long gone, his nipples getting hard from the blowing of the air conditioner, singing Coward of the County for the eleventh time into a Billy club made out of a sawed-off shovel handle wrapped in duct tape. You’d’ve saw pretty old Billy Jones, his face and shirt all smeared with dried blood, the skin around his eye all lifted up funny from where Jim had taped his skin together, baseball bat between his knees, and me, Russell Gibbs, foolish and feeling fine, whacking that blackjack against my hand, feeling the sting of that lead ball against my palm, pretending like I was my great great granddaddy, ready to raise a ruckus, ready to get on with the rousting at hand.

Freddy turned into the neighborhood behind Verdes Tropicana bowling alley, and we drove all along the canal and the side streets, down the rows of houses painted up like whores, pinks and bright greens and what they call fuchsias, every kind of flag but American hanging from above the front door, and little runty dogs running every which way. All we saw was some old men smoking on their porches, and a few women peeking at us through the slats of their window blinds.

We didn’t even see a single Guatemalan the whole time, and them window blind women was making Jim worried we might get more blue lights called on us, so we hightailed it out of there, and stopped by Verdes Tropicana for a slice of pizza, said hello to some old boys we knew there. Judy at the counter—she owns the place and lives upstairs from the soda fountain—got on Jim for coming in without a shirt, but nothing too severe. She wouldn’t serve us no beer, and we knew it and didn’t even ask, but we did get some Cokes and some of them pretzels with the extra big pieces of salt poured all over one side to take for our ride. We got back in the car, and Freddy was saying we better not spill nothing on the white leather seats, and Jim slapped him—not hard—upside the head and said how this Impala was older than Jesus, maybe, and them seats had worse than Coke spilled on them and held up just fine.

We got back onto Belvedere Road, and it wasn’t but about three miles in the direction of the ocean, just right within spitting distance of my momma’s beauty shop, where we saw them, two vagrants, snoring away under the I-95 overpass. “Pull over in the grass,” Jim said, and when Freddy didn’t do it fast enough, Jim grabbed the wheel and pulled it over himself. Billy Jones didn’t have a good enough hold on his Coke, and he spilled it all over his pants and got some on my good slide shoes.

There wasn’t time to think about it, though, because Jim had already opened his car door and was running up the concrete incline toward where the two men were sleeping, and there was two of them and one of him, so I kicked off my slides in the floorboard and grabbed hold of my blackjack and run up the hill after him.

I got up there, and it was real dark. Jim was already going through the motions of what he called interrogating the prisoner. He was standing over the Indian, slapping his face, saying, “Wake up, Chief. Wake up, Tonto.” The Indian wasn’t stirring much. He’d fell asleep with his hand around a bottle in a paper bag, and I figure he was passed out from drink.

Jim didn’t approve. He ripped that paper bag bottle out of the Indian’s hand and started beating him with it, hitting him on one side and then the other, and that got the Indian roused a little, but Jim still didn’t have his attention, but he had already made a hell of a lot of noise. Even with all the sound of the interstate traffic going over the bridge right above us, I could still hear the thud of that bottle connecting with the Indian’s body, so I figure Jim must have been wailing on him something awful.

The colored man must’ve heard it too, because he started waking up, and he didn’t seem quite so out of it as the Indian. Jim yelled at me and said I better go take care of business, so I went and stood over the colored man and started slapping him around and telling him to wake his ass up, and while I was slapping his face I give him a speech I used to give about how some roustabouts come and broke into my momma’s beauty shop and how my daddy was a state trooper so wasn’t nobody gonna come rescue him. He took notice of that and didn’t fight me too much. He just put his arms up to cover his head, and when he opened his mouth he was speaking Creole and I saw that he didn’t have no teeth. I thought, here is a man who has taken some beatings in his time and knows how to take one proper. When I thought of that, I didn’t really want to beat on him no more—I only even whacked him one time with the blackjack—and I looked over and Jim was really going to town on the Indian, and I wondered how come Freddy and Billy wasn’t coming up to help, so I looked away toward the car for a minute, and BAM! That nigger sprang up out of nowhere and sucker punched me in the mouth, and right off I could feel my lip rising up into a big bubble, and before I could do nothing else, he run off—he was fast, faster than you could’ve expected—into the night, and they never did find him again. He never came forward or nothing.

Things wasn’t going good for me, but Jim seemed like he had his situation with the Indian under control, although I did think he was beating on him maybe too hard, so I ran back down the concrete to see why the hell Freddy and Billy was still in the car, and there they was, cleaning all that spilled Coke off the white leather seats with their shirts. I said, “What the hell are you doing with your shirts off? Jim’s gonna kick your asses for not helping out,” and Freddy said, “This is my daddy’s car, and there ain’t no beating Jim could imagine could compare to the shitstorm my old man would kick up if I brung this leather back some other color than white,” and while we was arguing I looked up the incline and saw Jim reach behind him. He had stuck that shovel handle billy club in the back of his pants, and now he pulled it out and hit the Indian on the head with it once, and it made a dull sound, and then he hit him again, and I heard a crack and knew Jim had broke his skull.

Jim raised that shovel handle a third time, and for a second I could see the side of his face and I could see he had lost himself. He was gonna break that Indian’s head in two.

I ran up the incline again, and I was yelling, I was screaming, “No, Jim, no!” but he wasn’t even hearing me by then. He brought that shovel handle down a third time, and there was another sickly crack, and that Indian’s head broke open like a fountain, blood just everywhere. Jim didn’t even seem to notice. He raised his weapon again, and by then I’d reached where they was. I grabbed his arm, and he like to flipped out, just started flailing himself in all directions until I thought he was gonna wail on my head, too.

Freddy and Billy had run up the hill by then, and they was yelling, “Jim, stop! Stop Jim!” and something seemed to break in Jim, some wild fire left from his eyes. He turned around and looked at the Indian and said, “Oh shit. Is he dead?”

Billy went up to feel his pulse—his mom is a paramedic so he knew how—and he said, “He ain’t dead yet,” and Jim got his senses back and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here before he is.”

You know what happened after that—anybody ever read a newspaper or watched TV knows nearly much as I do. It was morning before they found him. Billy’s mom and her partner was first on the scene—I always thought that was strange and awful—and that Indian wasn’t dead yet, but he might as well have been. He was gone before they made it to the hospital.

They locked me up for eighteen months, and Jim, he’ll be in prison until he’s old and gray. Freddy and Billy they gave probation in exchange for telling everything on us, which I would have done if I was them, too. Billy never was allowed back to play baseball after that, and he already tried and failed at hanging himself in his momma’s closet. He won’t never amount to nothing probably. Baseball was all he had. Everyone tends to dwell on that. They think it’s so terrible that he lost out on baseball, and they don’t see what’s more terrible, which is none of the rest of us ever thought we had anything to lose out on at all.

After the cameras and the news people all left—and before they all came back again in time for Jim’s and my trial—there was a few months of, well, quiet but no peace. I didn’t have nothing else to do but run errands for my momma, take things back and forth from the house to the beauty shop mostly, and so three or four times a week I found myself driving right under that overpass, where everything happened.

Every time I’d drive by, I’d see in the light what I never could’ve saw in the dark. That Indian must’ve bled a lot, because there was a big crimson stain running from the top of that concrete incline on down into the strip of grass at the bottom. Every time I’d see that crimson stain, that sickly trail of blood, I’d get sick to my stomach and feel the need to pull over and vomit, but the only place to pull over was that grassy strip where Freddy had pulled over that night, so I’d just throw up a little in my mouth and swallow it, and that’s the thing I remember most about those quiet days, that awful taste in my mouth and the smell that got all up into my nose, and the way my whole face would burn for hours afterward.

One day, toward the end of the quiet, when things were about to wind up toward the trial, I drove by and saw that right under the bloodstain, someone had taken a spray can and painted LEST WE NOT FORGET in big block letters.

I couldn’t help myself. There wasn’t nothing else to do. I pulled over in that grassy strip and puked and cried until there wasn’t no fluid left in my body. Then I walked down the road a ways, down to the electrical workers union building across the street from the beauty shop. I knew they had cans of paint stored away out back, and I swiped four gallon buckets of concrete gray and two paintbrushes, and walked back under that overpass and started painting.

A state trooper car come by, and I thought I was gonna get taken away again, but the door opened, and it was my daddy. He got out and walked up the incline where I was painting with two hands at once and didn’t say nothing, just looked at me for a long time. And finally I couldn’t look at him no more. I took the paintbrush I’d been using with my left hand and dipped the bristles in the bucket and handed it to him. He got down on his knees and started painting.

We painted all the rest of the afternoon, together there on hands and knees, painted over the blood and painted over the letters. By time we finished it was dark, and he said, “Why don’t you follow me home.” We got in our separate cars and turned onto Belvedere Road. Above us was a tiny little sliver of moon, and the stars all shining.

Kyle Minor is author of the short story collection In the Devil's Territory, in which "goodbye Hills, hello night" appears. His work also appears in Surreal South, The Southern Review, and Best American Mystery Stories 2008.