Niceville

Since the war. I’m glad to see you safely home.”
    “Thank you.”
    The driver shook his head.
    “My son got killed over there.”
    “Did he? I’m very sorry.”
    “Damn fool war. No offense, sir.”
    “None taken.”
    “My son was conscripted.”
    Since he was reasonably sure the draft had been ended by Congress in 1973, Merle decided to change the subject.
    “I didn’t catch
your
name, sir?”
    “My name is Albert Lee, like in the general, not like in the Minnesota,” he said, with a grin, obviously repeating an old line.
    “Mr. Lee. Good to meet you,” said Merle.
    “Please. Call me Albert.”
    “If you’ll call me John.”
    A polite pause.
    “Would you be a drinking man, sir?’
    “Well, I do enjoy a bourbon from time to time.”
    Albert Lee’s cheek pulled back and his teeth glinted in a shaft of the rising sun.
    “I just happen to have a flask of Napoleon with me. I’d be honored if you would join me?”
    He took a hand off the wheel, reached up into an overhead compartment and brought down a fat silver flask. Merle got up from his seat, took one next to the driver’s side. Albert Lee took a sip, handed the flask back to Merle, who took one too. The cognac went down like a ribbon of blue silk soaked in liquid fire.
    It warmed him to his boot heels.
    He handed the flask back.
    “That, Albert, is a very fine cognac.”
    “I do admire my liquor, although I would never drink such on a normal driving day. But today does have sort of a different feel to it, doesn’t it?”
    “It does,” said Merle.
    They shared the flask back and forth for a while in friendly silence. Merle offered the man a cigarette, which he accepted, twirling it in his arthritic hands, his palms shining in the golden light, his eyes bright with humor and intelligence.
    “A filter tip. We don’t see much of those here in the Belfair Range.Down in Niceville, maybe, but not up here. Used to buy them at the Belfair Pike General Store and Saddlery, put them on the ticket, but they stopped giving out credit last year, on account of the economy.”
    Merle was privately thinking that they probably stopped giving credit at the Belfair Pike General Store and Saddlery because Charlie Danziger had burned the place to the ground late Friday afternoon. However, in keeping with his
don’t rock the boat
policy and his growing suspicion that Albert Lee, although amiable, was another one of those slightly crazed Belfair Range locals, he declined to point this out.
    Instead he lit up Albert’s cigarette, and then one of his own, and they both watched the countryside roll towards them, a morning mist rising up out of the fields and all the trees a hazy blue, the dim black shapes of cattle in the golden fields of canola moving in slow motion through a soft, shimmering light.
    They both saw the silvery spire of a church as the sun glinted off it, a needle-sharp nick in the far horizon, and Albert, pointing with the stub of his cigarette, told Merle that was the steeple of Saint Margaret’s Church in Sallytown.
    At the name, Merle’s belly tightened and he sat back, watching the church spire as if it were the tip of a knife.
    Albert sensed the change.
    “Don’t want to push myself in on a private affair, but could you use some help, when we get to Sallytown?”
    “What sort of help?”
    “Well, pretty much everybody knows you going up there to call out Mr. Abel Teague.”
    “They do?” said Merle, surprised but not shocked. It would be damn unnatural if the word hadn’t gotten around.
    “Yes, they do,” said Albert Lee, looking over his shoulder at him. “And many think it’s been a time coming, too. Mrs. Ruelle knows, I suspect.”
    “Yes. She does.”
    “I thought she looked long at you, like she was afraid she might not see you again. Were you going to follow the Irish rules?”
    “He had his chance.”
    A silence.
    “The lady said there might be two others coming along, relatives ofhers who owed the Ruelles a debt, a Mr. Haggard and a Mr. Walker, but you are here alone, so I guess there won’t be what we used to call seconds, and anyway, Mr. Teague, he has been asked to stand before, and refused.”
    “So I hear.”
    They were rolling in past the edge of town, a tiny cluster of Victorian houses, still in the shadows, neat redbrick homes with narrow windows, white-painted porches, sheltering under tree-shaded avenues. They bumped and chugged along the single main street, all the stores shuttered and closed at this