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hair had gone iron gray with age and been forced back with a stout brush. He still carried the marine discipline with him.
    The father was a man with scars. His son had seen them: streaks, where something long and sinewy had bit him, puckered clusters from bullet holes, more ragged ridges of dead tissue where the Japanese shrapnel had torn through him. His fists, too, were a latticework of dead white. A bitter mark or two also flecked his jawline. He was a man who’d seen a lot of what the world can do to flesh.
    â€œCome on, you two,” he turned now and called. “If we don’t get back by supper, Junie’s going to be plenty teed off.”
    They reached his brand-new used pickup, with the gray fender and the cracked rear glass, but still an upstanding vehicle, if cheap after much bargaining.
    â€œDaddy, what we gon’ tell Mr. Nelson?”
    â€œThe truth, Bob Lee. That’s all. He can handle it.”
    â€œBest way,” confirmed Sam.
    Mr. Nelson, who farmed a spread seven miles the other side of Blue Eye, had a deer problem. The young bucks had grown brazen as they nibbled his corn. He was a man of law, and so didn’t shoot, as so many might have, out of season. But he’d applied for a special dispensation from the state game agency, had gotten it, and asked Earl, the best shot in the county, to handle his problem in exchange for the meat to be harvested. It was a generous offer. Earl, who was not rich, could use the free meat. But that was before Bob Lee had decided not to shoot.
    Another father might have ordered the son to shoot, or shot himself. But Earl wanted his son making up his own mind about things, and tried never to order him toward conclusions. He alone in Polk County would not permit his son to call him sir, as all the other boys did to their dads on pain of a mighty licking. Earl in fact could not bring himself to strike the boy, even when he was bad. Why was a mystery that he never communicated to anybody; it’s just the way he was, and when Earl Swagger was set in certain ways, then those were the ways they would remain.
    â€œI’ll call him and explain,” Sam said.
    â€œNo, I will,” said Earl. “Actually, I know a fine hunter named Hitchens, a colored fellow, who could come out and take the deer, and that meat’d do him and his’n right fine in the months to come.”
    â€œIf I know Ed Nelson, he’ll not want colored shooting on his property.”
    â€œI’ll make him understand.”
    The drive was not long, though they stopped and bought the boy an RC Cola. But when they got home to Earl’s place off Route 7 this side of Board Camp, and saw the house that had been his own daddy’s set a mile off the road, on a bit of a hill, painted freshly white and nice looking in the now failing light, they were amazed at what they beheld, as it was so completely unexpected: three state police cruisers and a Cadillac Fleetwood limousine, black and big and gleaming in the sun from somebody’s fresh labor that very morning.
    â€œOh, Lord,” said Earl. “I do wonder what’s up.”
    â€œCan’t be much,” said Sam. “We drove on through Blue Eye, and there was no sign of a commotion.”
    They approached.
    â€œI’ll be damned,” said Earl. “Lookie that.”
    What he gestured toward was the white-and-black license plate on the Caddy, not green and tan like Arkansas’s; this one bore a low number with no letters and the identifying inscription U NITED S TATES C ONGRESS .
    They pulled in, climbed from the pickup, and went quickly to the steps. Through the windows, Earl could see Junie inside, slightly nonplussed, and Colonel Jenks, who was his commanding officer, two or three other state police sergeants known to him as the sort that hung close to headquarters in Little Rock and thereby prospered, and two men in black suits.
    â€œGood lord, Earl,” said Sam,