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my way back from Jenny. I wasn’t surprised at who it was. Bobby Barnes stood at the edge of the field and muttered a curse as he wiped a thick smear of manure from the bottom of his boot. I knew he’d panic, but I helloed anyway. Bobby flinched when he saw me and turned to run, then tripped when he forgot his foot was still in his hand.
    “Now just hang on, Bobby,” I said. The walk back from Hollis’s clearing had helped repair my confidence. I was meagain—the fake me, but the me everyone was used to. Of course, that Bobby wasn’t carrying a shotgun also helped. “I don’t want no trouble.”
    “I ain’t doin’ nothin’,” Bobby said. “Hand t’God, Jake, I’m just out walkin’ is all.”
    I kept my gait slow and stopped, reaching out my right hand to help him up. Bobby refused and managed it himself.
    “And of all the hollers around here, you just so happen to pick Hollis’s for your morning constitutional?”
    Bobby’s shoulders hitched twice when he shrugged. I looked away with a kind of embarrassment. Not even lunchtime, and he’d already come down with the shakes. I thought it awful, what people could become. Then I remembered the jar in my hand and thought of myself.
    “This here’s good a place as any,” he told me. “You got nothin’ on me, Sheriff. You know that.”
    “Easy,” I said.
    I held up the bulging dish towel in my left hand. Bobby’s eyes burned a wide hole in my gut. Just like that, what swagger I’d found was lost again. The man in front of me stood a good six inches shorter and weighed all of 120 pounds, but I felt smaller. I often did. That’s a way of looking at yourself that you never get used to.
    “You been to see Jenny?” he asked.
    I ignored his question and said, “Funny I should run into you, Bobby. Your name came up last night. Zach got in a tussle with a boy at school. You remember the one we had?”
    “I remember you sucker punchin’ me for lookin’ at Kate’s delicates, which I weren’t ,” he said. “Now state your aim, Jake. I can run fast, and I see you dint come up here with that dad-blamed tommyhawk neither.”
    I had him dead to rights, of course. I knew what Bobbywas doing there, and it was absolutely in my power to turn him around and send him back to town empty-handed. But I couldn’t. I was just as much in the wrong as he was—more so, given the jar in my hand. I didn’t want trouble. And to be honest, I pitied Bobby Barnes. Always had.
    “Bessie’s in the truck,” I said. “Which is where I’m heading. I aim to keep moving and head to town.”
    Bobby shuffled his weight from left to right, like he was dancing on hot coals. I figured that was likely how his insides felt.
    “So I can pass?” he asked. “You ain’t gonna cleave my head and run me in?”
    “Law only applies to what’s been done, Bobby. Ain’t gonna run you in for what you’ll likely do. So I’m gonna go ahead and let you finish your walk, and you can thank me by not telling anyone I was here and by enjoying the fruits of your labor down at the shop instead of on the road. That sound like something we can agree on?”
    Bobby took a step forward and extended his hand. I caught it between spasms. “You got that, Jake. You’re a good man.” He shuffled past and on into the woods, then turned just outside a slant of morning light. “Hey, Jake? You feelin’ all right? You look some peaked.”
    “I’m fine.”
    He looked at his feet and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his frayed jeans. “I never saw nothin’. That day on the playground with Kate, I mean. I was lookin’, but I didn’t see. You tell her that for me?”
    “I will. You be careful, Bobby. And mind what I told you.”
    Bobby nodded as that single regret slipped away. I’ll say I was envious. Doesn’t sound right, being jealous of the town drunk. And yet Bobby had just managed to lay down a smallpart of the heavy shame only Hollis’s drink could help him shoulder. That was something