Free Father and Son by Larry Brown

maybe walk over to the store. His leg felt okay today and he liked to get out whenever he could. Sitting around the house got old.
    He found a shirt that wasn’t too dirty and he put it on and buttoned it up, tucked the shirttail inside. His money was on the dresser and he stuck it in his pocket. When he went back to the living room, Glen was still sitting there, watching a commercial.
    â€œI’m gonna walk down to the store,” Virgil said. “You gonna be here when I get back?”
    â€œI don’t know.” Glen didn’t look up, just sprawled there on the couch in his bare feet.
    â€œWell. I’ll see you sometime.”
    â€œRight.”
    He went on out the door and the Redbone came trotting around the corner of the house to meet him.
    â€œC’mere,” he told him. The puppy followed him over to a little tree by the end of the porch and Virgil bent to pick up a tattered dog collar that was wired to a piece of Emma’s clothesline. He put the collar around the puppy’s neck and snapped the clothesline into an eye hook he’d threaded into the tree and left him there. There was a pan of water with a few dead bugs floating on the surface and the shade of the porch was close enough for him to get in under it if he wanted to. He glanced up at the house. The television was still going and he could hear Glen laughing at the cartoons again. There wasn’t any need in talking to him.
    The heat seemed to turn up a few degrees as he walked the dirt road. Deep green ridges lay thickly wooded in the distance and cows stared at him from behind their fences as he went along. The cotton was tall everywhere in spite of the dry spell. Once in a while a vehicle passed him, folks dressed up and going to church in their pickups and rusty cars, rattling through the gravel and spreading a cloud of light brown dust that washed over him and went into his nose and settled over the ditches and roadside grasses. He was a man seen often walking at odd hours of the night or day and those passersby mostly ignored him as he did them.
    On this fine day the pale clouds hung far and near in their slowly changing shapes, now flat and unbunched or colliding softly as the sun rose higher and gaining height, folding and refolding their masses torecombine in new banks that climbed the sky and built and drifted. He walked beneath the sky and on top of the land, a tiny figure moving like an ant.
    He was sitting on a stump at the corner of a property line where a big sycamore shaded his cigarette-rolling when a ’54 Chevy sedan came easing around the curve just above an idle. The car had originally been blue and white but now it sported a red front fender and a green hood. Above the grill a chrome-winged nymph leaned swimming into the wind. Virgil licked the length of his paper tube and stuck one end into his mouth as the car jerked to a halt beside him and died.
    â€œGood God,” he said. Woodrow was grinning behind the steering wheel. His teeth were splayed out in front but only two or three showed. Virgil crossed his legs on the stump and leaned one wrist on top of the other. “You out mighty early.”
    â€œI ain’t been to bed yet. We went huntin last night and I just got in. I lost old Nimrod and I still got Naman in the backseat. Come on and get in, where you headed?”
    â€œI’m just out for my daily exercise,” Virgil said. He got up and stepped across the shallow ditch and walked around behind the car. In passing he looked in at what appeared to be an enormous dead Bluetick stretched out across the backseat, all four legs straight out, huge feet. He opened the door and got in the front seat and rolled the window down.
    â€œOld Naman’s plumb give out,” Woodrow said. “He run a coon for three hours straight by the watch. He was still treein his ass off when I finally put the leash on him. Here, get you a drink.”
    He held up a half pint of whiskey.