Free American rust by Philipp Meyer Page A

no horrible visits to people he liked. Those things got worse with age, not better.
    He was still standing near the body, absorbing things, when he saw a familiar jacket. Then heard another vehicle—the state trooper—bouncing down the old access road. He scooped up the jacket and stuffed it behind a workbench. The young state trooper walked in just after and Harris had tried to conjure his name. Clancy. Delancey He couldn't think straight—he knew this man. But Delancey was oblivious to what Harris had just done. He nodded his greeting, then looked at the body. He's a big one, huh?
    People came and went all day but the jacket had remained, unnoticed, where Harris hid it. Now, sitting here with Steve Ho, he was extremely nervous, not so much that he'd hidden the jacket as much as that the jacket belonged to Billy Poe. He rubbed his temples; he'd gone off Zoloft a few weeks earlier, which was not helping things now. He tried to separate the things in his mind. Hiding the jacket was probably not bothering him. You didn't arrest every kid you caught breaking windows. Or every citizen who drove home after a few too many Budweisers at happy hour. Good people got one free pass. Kids got two, though the second one might be a handcuffed ride in the Explorer. There was a role everyone played in the community, an unspoken agreement. Which was basically to do right. Sometimes that meant stopping people for a dirty license plate, other times it meant letting people go who were committing felonies. Which is what anyone did when they consumed three beers and put their keys in the ignition. You couldn't say it but that was the truth—it was not the law so much as doing right. The trick being to figure out exactly what that was.
    Listen to you, he thought. Trying to distract from the question. Which is whether you ought to be defending Billy Poe. Get out of this truck and go down there and discover that jacket. You should have already arrested him. At least that was one take on it—Even Keel's. Even Keel had also made him buy a cabin on top of a mountain that no woman in her right mind would ever consider living in. Even Keel was a coward. Harris decided he would sit there. He would watch and see what happened. He would see which part of him turned out to be right.
        — — —
    Near sundown, they spotted movement at the far edge of the meadow near the train tracks.
    “Now there's two people who don't want to get seen,” said Ho.
    Harris got an even worse feeling. He lifted his binoculars. He couldn't make out the faces on either of the two people in the meadow but he could guess from the size and the strange bouncing walk. Coming back to get his jacket. A tightness was growing in his chest. As the two got closer, he could see clearly that it was Billy Poe and one of his friends, the short kid whose sister had gotten all those scholarships. He thought about Grace. He felt sick to his stomach.
    “You okay?” said Ho.
    Harris nodded.
    Ho was looking through his own binoculars, an expensive Zeiss model.
    “That who I think it is?”
    “Believe so.”
    “You want me to go down there?”
    “Just hold on.”
    It was quiet for a few seconds, then Ho said: “You better make sure this doesn't burn you, Chief. The whole town knows you put in a good word for him last time. You've said yourself—”
    “Do me the favor.”
    “You know all I'm saying, Chief. This ain't the old days.”
    Harris turned on the light bar for a few seconds to let the two in the field know they should come up. They both froze.
    “They're gonna run for it.”
    “That kid's sister is at Harvard. He isn't running anywhere.”
    As predicted, the two began to walk glumly up the hill toward the Explorer.
    “You ought to take a look through these glasses, Chief. I can see every last goddamn zit on their faces.”
    “Later,” said Harris.
    But it was a clear enough picture. Billy Poe and some friends had come out here to drink, maybe score some meth, and