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searched for prey.
    Clutching a cold bottle of beer in his hand, Bobby slouched against the back of the white patio chair, stretched out his legs, and crossed one ankle over the other. His face raised toward the smoldering warmth of the blood-red sun, he closed his eyes. A cryptic smile edged across his lips.
    “I liked the way you told Albert what your fee would be,”he said, his eyes still shut. “It reminded me of what I've always imagined our grandfather must have been like. You had that same look, a sort of calculated indifference; that look that lets everyone know there's nothing you need, nothing you want so much you have to have it; that tells everyone you're ready to walk away from anything, that you'll do things on your terms or not at all.”
    His eyes snapped open and his head dropped to the side closest to me. “I have a picture of him, taken when he was about the age you are now. You look just like him. Dark hair, dark eyes— it's the eyes, mainly: detached, a little arrogant.”He flashed a smile. “I suppose
confident
would be a better word.”
    He took a drink and then put the bottle down on the table. He stared across the close-cropped green lawn on the other side of the pool, out over the rolling hills in the distance.
    “It's kind of ironic, isn't it? You become a great criminal lawyer, and he was a great criminal.”
    My grandfather was an old man who wore a wool cardigan sweater and a flannel shirt. He sat in a rocking chair that had a brown leather seat and wide flat arms. I had no memory of him anywhere else—not even of him standing up—only in that chair, slowly rocking back and forth, a kindly old man who would never hurt a soul.
    “He was a fisherman,”I said. “He had a fishing boat, didn't he?”I asked, wondering where I had first heard it and whether I had perhaps only imagined it.
    “That was later, when he was much older, after he lost everything else. I don't quite know when it all started. In New Orleans, I guess. That's where he was from.”
    Bobby looked at me a moment. “You didn't know anything about this, did you—where he was from; why he came here; what he did; what happened to him because of it?”
    I did not know anything, and only now, when he asked, did it strike me as strange that I did not. My grandfather had died when I was still a boy, and I had a vague recollection that my mother had gone to his funeral. I do not remember that she said anything about him when she came back home to Portland, except that, in the phrase so often used to give comfort to others, it had been for the best. It never occurred to me to ask why this was so, why it was best that he had died. I assumed, I suppose, that he had been suffering or that there was no chance he would ever get better; though I had not been told he was ill and, beyond a few fragmentary allusions to his heart, never knew why he had passed away. I was still a boy, or rather, still a child; I believed in the things children were taught to believe: I believed in God, and I believed in heaven. That night, the night my mother came home and told me Grandpa had died and gone to heaven, I said the same prayer I said every night in the warm comfort of my bed; the prayer that when, after all these years of forgetfulness, I think about it again, gives me a different kind of comfort: the knowledge that there was once a time when I was still an innocent boy with a pure heart and a clean body who only wanted to do good. Only that night, while I heard through the wall the muffled tones of the argument my parents had every time my mother stayed away longer than she had said she would when she left, I took a chance and instead of asking for the usual blessings asked God to say hello to Grandpa.
    “Where's he buried?”I asked Bobby.
    It took him by surprise. “Do you want to go out there?” “Sometime while I'm here. I've never been there.”The sun was sinking below the western hills, burning the sky a brilliant reddish orange.