Read Online In the Night Season by Richard Bausch - Free Book Online

stopped, I just let myself out and went on my merry way.”
    “Where’d you get the gun—and your clothes?”
    Travis stared. “You’re a smart boy, ain’t you.”
    “No, sir.”
    “Well. I made a couple of other stops. Before I stopped here.”
    “What—what was the crime they said you did?”
    “Agh.” He waved this away. “Theft. You know. One thing and another.”
    “I thought you said you weren’t a burglar.”
    “I’m not.”
    “Burglary is theft.”
    “Well, it’s a particular kind of theft. This was a—a bank robbery.”
    “There’s video cameras in banks. Wouldn’t they know from the tape if you were innocent?”
    “Boy, you watch too much TV. It ain’t like TV everywhere, you know. There wasn’t any tape this time. Just circumstantial. Some folks said they saw me. Well. Some said it was me and some said it wasn’t.” He took another cigarette out and moved to the stove again. “This is nice,” he said, blowing more smoke. “Let’s keep talking. What else do you want to know?”
    “Nothing,” the boy said. Something in the other’s animation, his confidence, and that hollow little smile, had discouraged any response.
    “Nothing else you want to ask me?”
    “No.”
    “Course, I could be telling you a lot of lies here.”
    Now there was just the sound of the furnace running, and when it stopped, the grandfather clock in the hall was sounding.
    “Five o’clock,” Travis said.
    “My mother won’t get home till six.”
    “Hell, I don’t know, man. That’s a long time to wait for dinner. What do you usually do for dinner?”
    “There’s stuff in the refrigerator. I make my own.”
    Travis tilted his head to the side, regarding him. “She don’t like the job much—right? The job is a bad necessity.”
    It was true. When the small contracting business Jack Michaelson had owned began to fail in the real estate slump, he had borrowed heavily on life insurance policies. Jason’s father had spent nearly everything trying to save the business, and in the end there had been little more than the money necessary to bury him. The last months of the man’s life had been so strange, requiring a kind of caution when with him that had never been necessary before, and he had spent many long hours looking through the account books, as if searching for the one mistake that had put him in the mess he was in. It had become almost impossible to talk to him, and his son imagined that when the bus had crossed the median strip, careening toward him, his mind was elsewhere.
    But the boy had worked to unthink everything he knew about those last days, all of which seemed concentrated in the memory of a day they had planted maple saplings out in the back of the house; a freezing cold twilight, Jason standing with his father in the cold, the oncoming night having caught them before they could finish, Jason wishing he could be anywhere else, hating his father, and thinking about how good it would be to have him somewhere faraway for a while….
    It felt as though that were the last time he saw his father alive. But the tree planting had been more than a week before the accident. Jason spent so much of that week avoiding him, attempting as often as possible to evade notice, to be invisible. Trouble between them, and an anger in the boy’s heart, a refusal, deep down, to forgive. He did not want to have his father to deal with, and he had succeeded too well. He could not remember the last thing he mighthave said to him, what had passed between them. It was buried in the blur and stress of avoidance, the enforced, moody quiet of those last days.
    Now, Travis said, “Yeah. Your mom’s left you for a career, I guess somebody’s gotta make money—I figured that. And you’re mad at her for it. I can see it. I can come up with stuff like that. I bet I’d make a good shrink.”
    “We don’t even have much of a car. We had to sell the good one. There’s nothing here for you.”
    Travis seemed to