John Brandon - Further Joy

She was seeing a Sunday. The ancient pale sky and the black marl and the creatures in between that wanted to survive. A lie told. A boy sick and staying home from church — so yes, a Sunday — and then she saw a pistol. It was being looked at, but not yet held. Breathed upon. Sofia’s fingers felt stiffened, as if with cold. She could feel surly boredom, but that’s what JP was radiating right now. She saw a happy school bus on a country road. But Sunday? Little airplanes buzzing overhead, anonymous and joyriding. Buses and airplanes and pistols and church — the commonest of memories. Then she saw the egret, taking a high retreating step, puzzled at someone sloshing so close in the reeds of the drainage ditch. She could hear toads, the distant revving of an engine. JP was openly glaring at Sofia across the table, scratching his shoulder. She was still in the present, enough. Even scratching his shoulder, he was defiant. He still thought life was winning and losing, and he was claiming scorekeeper error and false starts. She heard the toneless echoing crack, saw the elegant white neck jerking, flung back and forth, an animal’s desperation and outrage. Sofia saw the body stagger forward, dragging the barely attached head, blood already blackening the feathers. She saw the bird topple over in the stagnant water, instantly a sodden ugly pile, instantly a meal for buzzards and nothing greater. And then all of it began to dissolve, her consciousness becoming whole again. She had no say in it, as far as she could tell — the wind dying out at once.

“I told your uncle I got five minutes,” JP said. “I hope I didn’t come up here to compete in a staring contest.”

Sofia sat up straight, giving her hair a shake. She quit squeezing her knee and crossed her arms in front of her, regaining her footing in the moment. She had no idea how to tack toward useful information, which was her duty here. She wouldn’t have imagined JP capable of guilt, but everyone was. The more you had, the deeper you kept it buried.

“I don’t have anything against you, JP.”

His face didn’t change. It lost no impatience.

“You’re scowling at me,” Sofia said. “I have no idea why.”

JP absently reached down to one of his pockets, a smoker’s habit. His pockets had been emptied. “I don’t mind telling you, if you got to know. The reason is because you think you’re better than everyone else. You always have, ever since you showed up here. And don’t say it ain’t true.”

“What a boring reason,” Sofia said. “Besides being wrong.”

“See, like that. That face you just made. Everybody’s always nice to you because your uncle’s the law, but people don’t appreciate you playing the little princess. I know, he’s right there watching. He’ll be mad at me now, but he’s always mad at me anyway.”

Sofia heard the air conditioner kick on in the room. She hoped the draft from the vent would find the back of her neck. Whatever had come over her was fully gone now, and she felt worn and hot. She was holding the egret in her mind’s eye.

“I think the person you’re mad at is yourself,” she said. “That’s probably not front-page news to you.”

“I guess you aced your intro to psychology class at the college. You showed up here and held your nose through a couple years of high school and then off to get some bullshit degree so you can tell me who I’m mad at. Or is it whom I’m mad at. I’m glad you did that. I’m glad you went to school.”

“You’ve never even spoken to me before.”

“I am now, and it’s going about how I expected.”

“You could go to college, you know.”

“Some of us got life to live,” JP said. “Some of us don’t have a benefactor.” He looked over toward the mirror, toward where Sofia’s uncle was. Sofia was staying composed. She’d told her uncle not to come in unless she asked him to, but that would go out the window the instant she seemed upset.

She wasn’t going to see anything else, nothing connecting JP to Barn Renfro’s death. She could tell. Just the egret, if the egret was real. She guessed he probably wasn’t guilty, or he wouldn’t be goading Sofia’s uncle. Of course, some people goaded everyone all the time; that was their program.

“So how’d old Spencer do on this exam?” JP asked. “He pass with flying colors, like me?”

“I don’t think I’m allowed to say.”

“He’s kind of a hothead, huh? Or he used to be.”

“He’s trying to be happier,” Sofia admitted.

“I always liked him. I guess I have to raise twice as much hell now that he turned over a new leaf. I need to pull some doubles.”

Sofia clasped her hands in front of her. They looked feeble under the fluorescent lights. She had no pen or barrette to fidget with. She could feel herself smirking.

“What?” said JP. “Whatever it is, say it.”

“You and Spencer were never the same.”

“Oh, no?”

“Spencer liked giving and getting. You, you’re cut more from the bully cloth. Am I wrong? Tell me if I’m wrong.”

JP laughed. It seemed genuine. “Is five minutes up? I’m a man of my word and I said five minutes. I got things to do today. I know you can’t relate to that. I told your uncle my whole alibi and all. Do I need to walk you through it again? I will. I just want to satisfy the powers that be so I can go about my business.”

“No,” Sofia said. “The powers are satisfied.”

“Your uncle must have nothing plus nothing on this, bringing in the… you know, the family circus.” JP cackled ostentatiously, like people did who were used to laughing alone.

“When you were a kid,” Sofia said.

JP nodded. He steered his attention back to her, bringing himself back to order. “Yeah?” he said. “When I was a kid what?”

“Did you stay home from church service one day and kill an egret? A white egret in a ditch?”

JP’s face turned stony, and Sofia could tell his mind was working. “The hell you talking about?” he said.

She looked at him solemnly.

“An egret ? When I was twelve?” He tugged at one of his sleeves. “Are you serious?”

Sofia couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Maybe he was flipping through the catalog of cruel acts he’d perpetrated during his lifetime, or maybe he was thinking of something else mean he could say right now. He huffed and let his posture go jangly, pitching to one side in his chair. There was curiosity in his face, competing with the scorn. Sofia knew she wouldn’t get an answer out of him, that there was no way to prove that she hadn’t invented the egret and killed it herself.

“Nope, I didn’t shoot no water birds,” he told Sofia. “Sorry to disappoint you.” He sniffed sharply into the back of his hand. “Think of it, I didn’t shoot no bald eagle neither. And I didn’t kill no redheaded woodpecker with a slingshot.”

That afternoon Sofia ran into James at the coffee shop. He was sitting along the far wall under a painting of a dove, absorbed in a book, and he didn’t notice her until she walked up to his table with her mug cradled in her hands. He lifted his feet off the chair across from him — grudgingly, Sofia noticed — and she sat down. It always seemed odd, during the periods when they were broken up, to not kiss when they saw each other. It left a sad void to be pressed through.

“I’ve always liked watching you read,” Sofia said.

James looked at what was left in his cup and threw it back, then closed his book, using an old receipt to mark the page. Sofia’s coffee was too hot to drink. She asked James what his book was about and he looked down and made a face at it.

“It covers a good bit of ground,” he said, his voice flat but chafed.

“Give me a highlight,” said Sofia.