Ricky’s eyes fluttered and moved with rapid thought. “No,” he said quietly, and then added, “I—I don’t know.” He folded himself into one sharp sob.

Mr. Chiles let go of him. He excelled loud and deep, pacing away, crossing the room. He came to stand in front of Ricky. “What happened at the cabin?”

“Nothing. I mean, we were just horsing around.”

“And then what?”

“Uh…we—we went to the lake.”

“You were there with her at the lake? Tell me what happened, Ricky.”

He hesitated as his memory scrambled fragmented images, sounds that painfully stabbed at his thinking. His voice came out in a low tremor: “That’s the thing—like I said, I can’t really remember.”

“What do you mean you can’t remember?” The words came at him hard. Ricky flinched. “She gave me something.”

“You took drugs?”

Nodding, “Yes, sir. It was my first time. I swear,” hands out as if pleading.

“What can you remember?”

“She tried to cut me, daddy. I remember her face—so messed up and bloody. I don’t know if I did that. I think I chased her. I’m not sure. I couldn’t—” He tried to control the tears.

“What about Sweed? Was he high? What does he know?”

“He didn’t take the stuff.”

“You ask him what happened?”

“Yeah, but he was taking a walk. I don’t think he knows for sure, either.” He paused. “Daddy, I’m scared.”

***

Mr. Chiles knew that at any time the police would return. They would come back and demand that he produce his son. Despite the possible consequences, he could not bring himself to do it. Then like the stick of ripe flesh had been waved in another direction, some other young man driving through Loveless had been arrested for the murder of Alison Tucker. The hunt would end with this one and be enough to appease most. Talk of an accomplice would not be resurrected for more than fifteen years. The branded guilty man’s image was a grainy black-and-white Saturday newspaper photo. Mr. Chiles read the story over his morning coffee. The coffee and his insides turned chilly. The boy held an arrest number under his chin. Even in the colorless photo, Mr. Chiles could tell that the boy was very dark complexioned—the kind of black that glistens like the skin of a wet seal. His right eyelid drooped just slightly with his brow pinched. His broad nostrils were disproportionate to his narrow face. His heavy lips hung open slightly. He looked confused. Maybe because he had only stopped in the local general store to ask to use the phone. His car had broken down, but according to the newspaper article, the old clerk had ID’d the young man as the person he’d seen with Alison Tucker.

Mr. Chiles wasn’t aware that his hand holding the paper while reading was shaking.

“You alright?” his wife Katherine asked as she put the plate of eggs down on the table.

He looked up at her concerned expression and then across the table to Ricky who was in mid-reach for the eggs. “I’m fine,” he said. “They,” he hesitated, “It seems like they got somebody for that murder in Loveless.”

Ricky held his fork suspended beneath his open mouth.

“Oh,” Katherine said. She looked at her son and then again at her husband who had returned to the article. She went back to cooking. “I gotta say,” she said over the frying pan, “I’m sure our neighbors are relieved.” She was referring to the handful of propertied blacks they knew in the lake town. She didn’t complete the rest of her thought: how she herself would breathe easy knowing that there would be no need for the police to bother them again. She didn’t ask for details about the arrest. She didn’t want them. But Mr. Chiles wouldn’t be able to separate himself so casually. And apparently, neither could his son.

After breakfast, when Mr. Chiles went to the garden shed to get the lawnmower, Ricky followed. They talked in hushed voices in the shady little structure, surrounded by plastic bags of fertilizer, garbage bins, rakes, shovels, and the like. Particles of dust were illuminated by the bans of light that came through the one crooked window where they stood. The light sliced across Ricky’s pinched face and the crumpled shirt he’d slept in.

“What do we do now, daddy?”

Mr. Chiles turned away from the weight of the question. There was no good answer he could offer. He couldn’t deny the relief he felt, too, when he’d read the article. But at the same time, there was guilt. He saw in his son’s face need and expectation: What will we do? It was a test, thick and heavy that rose up in the warm dusty air: What kind of man will you show yourself to be? What kind of man will I become? The father’s boastful, moral pride shriveled into something fearful, ugly and selfish. Throughout Ricky’s boyhood, Mr. Chiles had rehearsed the story that they were the bloodline of the southern lynched: a great, great uncle who had been wrongfully accused of stealing from a white man’s store. The uncle had been dragged from his own porch one night amidst torches and bottles shattering the front windows of his home. His wife who survived him told the story of crying out for help to the neighbors whose window lights went black. Ricky understood the two-pronged message of the story: an abject hatred for injustice and equally so, a disdain for those too cowardly to fight against it.

And so there it was, Mr. Chiles’ own moment to look out from the safety of his window and choose to do something and risk everything.