One Monday We Killed Them All Read Free Page B

here!” Boo yelled. “You’ll be back in here, by God, and I’ll break you the next time, I swear. I’ll have you begging and screaming like a girl. I’ll tell them what to do to you, you—”
    “Let’s go,” said Dwight McAran, and I followed him out of the office. We were escorted across an angle of the yard through the drizzle to the gate. The gate guards made a phone check on the exit pass, then gave the coded signal to the tower to lift the outer gate. We crossed the road to the parking lot. I suddenly realized he wasn’t beside me. I stopped and looked back. He was standing under an elm tree with his fists on his hips, staring up at the rain-wet leaves. A small boy pedaled down the road on his bicycle. McAran followed the boy with a slow turning of his head. Then he gave a curious contortion of his body, a sort of massive shuddering shrug. Perhaps in that moment he threw off some of the hopeless weight of the prison years. At any rate, when he turned and walked toward me his stride was subtly changed, and his clothing seemed more suitable to him.

ii
    When McAran got into the car with me, he was as casual as though I were giving him a lift from his home to the grocery store.
    As we left the lot, he said, “Not much miles on this for a six-year-old car.”
    “It didn’t have much on it when we bought it. Maybe it was turned back. We took one trip in it. Except for running up here once a month, it just gets used around town, and most of that by Meg.”
    “There was sixteen times she came up when she couldn’t get to see me. Hudson could have let her know.”
    “At least she could bring you stuff those times and leave it off. That was something she felt good about doing, even when she couldn’t see you.”
    “Stop where I can buy cigarettes, will you?”
    I pulled into a gas station. When we were on the road again, I glanced over at him from time to time. Awkward silences can be created only between individuals who are aware of each other. Dwight McAran was so totally indifferent to any impression he might be making, he could have been sitting entirely alone. I glanced at him. In the line of the thickened brow, in the weight and placement of his pale green eyes, in the curve of the broken mouth, I could see a remote echo of the contours of the face of my beloved wife. It seemed a savage paradox that this could be true. It was as if someone had defiled a picture of her. His face was not a suitable place for this inference of warmth and sensitivity.
    He is one of those men who do not seem particularly big until you notice some small detail, such as the great thickness of wrist. When you realize he is all in proportion to that dimension, he begins to look increasingly massive and indestructible. They comb our hills looking for these boys, knowing their merciless toughness, and, as in the case of Dwight, they give them football scholarships and keep them eligible to play as long as possible before losing themto the pro leagues. McAran was an All-State fullback. After a knee injury slowed him one step, the University converted him to offensive guard. He had time for one pro season as a rookie linebacker with the Bears before he killed Mildred Hanaman.
    “You wanted me to come alone to pick you up,” I said.
    “So you can tell me what it’ll be like before I get there. Maybe what you want to say, you couldn’t say it in front of her.”
    “Why do you want to come back to Brook City?”
    “To have a nice visit with my loving sister.”
    “Are you going to stay long?”
    “I haven’t decided.”
    I went into my speech. I hoped it didn’t sound as carefully planned as it was. “Dwight, I can forget about Meg and look at it from the cop point of view. You killed Paul Hanaman’s only daughter. You hadn’t made yourself what anybody would call popular around town even before it happened. It wasn’t like killing the daughter of—a mill worker.”
    “Wasn’t it? Are you trying to tell me, Lieutenant