His father pushed the limp creature back and corrected him.I put it out of its misery.
George couldn’t stop sobbing; he hadn’t stopped, not when he buried the cigar box in his mother’s melon patch; not when she made him catfish for dinner; not when he lay down in his pajamas after saying his prayers for the departed soul of the bird. He could hear his parents arguing in the hall.
What kind of fatherdoesthat?
Back then he had wondered if his father truly thought he was doing the right thing by ending the bird’s suffering.
Now, George looked around the clinic waiting room at the motley collection of people whose fate he held in his hand.
Violence, from one angle, looked like mercy from another.
—
TEN YEARS EARLIER,HUGH HADbeen one of a dozen cops on the ground twenty-two stories below the Regions Plaza. He squinted up at the roof, where a slight guy in a windbreaker wavered on the edge. The chief was talking into a bullhorn. “Step away from the edge,” he said. “Don’t jump.”
It seemed to Hugh that the last thing you wanted to say to someone in this situation wasDon’t jump. It was like you were planting the seed more firmly in his head, when what you really needed to do was distract him.
“Chief,” he said, “I’ve got an idea.”
Within minutes, Hugh had climbed a set of stairs from the twenty-second floor to the roof of the building and crept to the edge where the man sat. Except he wasn’t a man. He was a boy, really. Eighteen, if that.
Hugh sat down beside the kid, facing the opposite direction, away from the edge. He turned on the digital recorder in his pocket. “Hey,” Hugh said.
“They sent you?”
“Theydidn’t do anything. I came up here because I wanted to.”
The boy glanced at him. “And you just happen to be wearing a cop uniform.”
“My name is Hugh. How about you?”
“Alex.”
“Is it okay if I call you that?”
The boy shrugged. The wind ruffled his fine hair.
“You okay?”
“Do Ilookokay?”
Hugh thought back to when he was a teenager, and such a smart-ass that once, Bex had made dinner and set an extra plate at the table.That’s for your attitude,she had said,and feel free to leave it behind when you’re done eating.
Hugh noticed the familiar colors of an Ole Miss T-shirt peeking from behind the boy’s half-zipped windbreaker. “Ole Miss, huh?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Because if you were a fan of Mississippi State I might have had to push you off.”
A laugh burst out of the kid’s throat, surprising him. “If I was a fan of Mississippi State I would have jumped.”
Hugh leaned back a little, like he had all the time in the world, and started talking about who was going to replace the quarterback after he graduated. It went on from there, like they were just two guys shooting the breeze.
After a couple of hours had passed, Alex said, “You ever wonder why they call them stories? The floors of a building?”
“No.”
“I mean, then why isn’t a building called a book?”
