Free Father and Son by Larry Brown Page A

Virgil took the bottle and looked at it.
    â€œIt’s awful early,” he said. “But I reckon I will.”
    He twisted the cap off and turned a good drink down his throat. Woodrow cranked the car and pulled it down into low and they crept off.He got up a little speed, shifted it into second, and left it there. Virgil took one more drink and then capped it and put it on the seat between them.
    â€œYou headed the wrong way, Woodrow. I was gonna walk over to the store.”
    â€œI’ll run you by there. I’m just out lookin for old Nimrod.
    â€œWhere did y’all turn out?”
    â€œHell.” Woodrow hung his arm out the window and pointed. “Five or six miles from here. I reckon he jumped a deer. He may be in Stone County by now for all I know. I just thought he might be out on the road somewhere. If I can find the son of a bitch I’m gonna sell him.”
    â€œI thought he was a good coon dog.”
    â€œHe is when he runs a coon.”
    Virgil smoked his cigarette and flipped the ashes down the outside of the door. The car smelled like wet dogs and spilled whiskey.
    â€œI saw your boys yesterday,” Woodrow said. He had the habit of poking the black lens of his eyeglasses once in a while as if to see better. His hammer had tried to drive a nail that glanced off a sunny roof on a summer day. Virgil had seen that gray and vacant eye.
    â€œYou did? Where at?”
    â€œThey come in Winter’s and stayed a little bit. I spoke to em. Is he glad to be out?”
    Virgil scratched his leg. He drew on his cigarette and rested his elbow on the window frame.
    â€œI can’t tell if he is or not. He’s over at the house when I left. I spect he’s still pissed off at the whole world. He always was.”
    Woodrow steered the car carefully down the sandy road and through curves laned with thick timber, a lush canopy overhead that was a haven for squirrels and birds.
    â€œDid you tell him about his mama?”
    â€œNaw. I was going to but he started in on me about her not having aheadstone. You can’t talk to him when he gets like that.”
    â€œWhat’s he gonna do about that youngun?”
    â€œProbably nothin.”
    â€œLet me pull over up here and see if I can hear anything out of old Nimrod. He’ll tree a squirrel in the daytime ever once in a while but he’s probably asleep or headed back home by now.”
    Woodrow eased to a stop in the middle of the road and shut off the car. Virgil took the last drag from his smoke. He let it drop out the window and glanced over his shoulder at the hound on the backseat. There was only the rise and fall of his ribs to mark any life within him. The motor ticked and popped. Virgil leaned his head out the window and listened.
    â€œYou ever killed any squirrels with him?”
    â€œA couple. He’ll tree possums too. He’ll run the livin shit out of a fox.”
    The woods were mostly still. There was a weak wind high in the very tops of the oaks and hickories. A crow called once in the distance. A tree frog sang. The sun dappled patterns of light and dark over the hood. There was the barely audible bark of a dog somewhere far off and muted in those wooded hills.
    â€œDamn,” Woodrow said, and leaned back in the seat from where he’d been cupping his ear to the world. He pointed toward the back of the car. “He’s back over there on Miss Hattie’s place, sounds like. Let me turn this thing around.”
    He started the car and drove up to the place where a grassy old logging road met the one they were on. He stopped there and turned around, going back the way they’d come, still moving at a crawl.
    â€œI wish he’d just sit down and talk to me some,” Virgil said. He looked at the whiskey on the seat and turned his head away from it. “I reckon he’d rather watch them damn cartoons.”
    A big doe bolted from the undergrowth and cleared the road in