'Sorry. What he write?'

'You really wanna know?'

'Pray tell.'

'The dame he pledged his heart to turned out to be a German spy. She was so good at it he couldn't even hear a trace of Kraut when she spoke American. But because he was a patriot he poisoned her even though he still loved her. And carried her to the sea and threw her in.'

'That's when the whale got him?'

'Jeez, hold your horses.'

'Sorry.'

'Like I was saying, after he threw her in he-'

'Whitey?'

'What?'

'Can you let me out? I think I'm gonna be sick.'

Just then a light knock at her nursing home door.

'Who's that?' she says and throws what's left of her cigarette out the window and makes a fanning motion in the air with her thin hand as if that might make it all go away.

'It's me, Ma.'

'Joe Boy?'

'Who else calls you Ma?'

'Hold on a minute, I'm not decent,' she lies and shuffles on her walker after a spray bottle of Georgia peach air freshener she keeps in a drawer by her bed. Halfway there she loses heart and says to herself, What's the difference now? Then calls to her son, 'Okay, come in, I'm fit to behold.'

Entering with a smile on his face her tall son says, 'Well thank you, my queen.'

He looks at her here in the middle of this sad little room and when their eyes meet he finds something there he never saw.

'Were you smoking?'

'Yes, Officer,' she tries to joke. 'You caught me red-handed.'

'What's wrong, Mom?'

Bea doesn't answer right off. She turns her face away and shuffles to the open window. From here she can see the dogwood tree in the yard. Its white flowers, its branches in the easy wind.

'It's caught up with me, Joe Boy.'

The Deputy knows exactly what she means, but all he can bring himself to say is, 'What are you talking about?'

'I didn't wanna tell you till the tests came in and I was sure.'

'You're gonna die?'

'Not this minute.'

'When?'

'That's for the Great Spirit to know, not us.'

'Please, Ma, none of that mumbo jumbo. How long did they say?'

'He said if I do the chemo I have a shot at remission. Or at least kicking around another five, six years.'

'So when do you start?'

'I don't.'

'You gotta be kiddin' me.'

'No, Sir. Honest Injun.'

'How can you joke?'

Now her sideways smirk turns to something else. Now she looks her boy in the face, the afternoon light behind her, the breeze at her long silver ponytail. 'I don't know how else to make you feel better.'

And with that he starts to cry.

'Oh, Joe. Please. I don't wanna make you sad.'

Her tall son couldn't reply if he tried. That ache in his cheeks and throat, that dryness of the tongue and strange play of oxygen we've all come to know.

'The miracles of chemo. I seen enough. Hair of the dog. One kind of death for another. I guess I just figure your time's your time. In here you make friends, guys and gals down the hall. You sit together in the cafeteria, play bridge, crochet, maybe watch a picture in the TV room.' Here Bea takes a pause, and her eyes trail down, moist globes of memory, a war movie there, a chariot race, a starlet dancing barefoot on a windy beach, and says, 'Then one day you look and they're gone.'

Joe moves and sits on his mom's thin bed. Squeak of springs. Soft blanket. Faint smell of fake peach and dying. Now his cell phone rings: We will, we will rock you.

'Answer it, Joe Boy.'

He shakes his head, tears down the high bones of his Indian face. We will, we will rock you.

'Could be important.'

'It's my girlfriend.'

'The one that bought the Dairy Queen?'

He nods.

'Well, answer it then,' says Bea.

Joe does his best to compose himself. Then he flips the Motorola.

'h.e.l.lo?'

'Joe?'

'It's me.'

'Don't sound like you.'

'Sorry. I'm visitin' my mom. Must be bad reception.'

'Well we got an emergency down here.'

Like cold water on a town drunk's face the 'E' word snaps the public servant to attention.

'What happened?'

'I apprehended a shoplifter.'

'Are you for real?'

'No time to explain. Just get here ASAP, baby.'

'But I'm here with my mom and she's-'

No need for Joe to finish because Debbie hung up.

'I gotta go, Ma. There's some kind of trouble at the Dairy Queen.'

'Yes. You go. It'll help get your mind off all this.'

'I doubt that very much,' he says and gets to his feet, the springs in the little bed complaining as he rises.

Bending low, he kisses her goodbye and tells her he'll be back in the morning.

When he's halfway out the door Bea warns, 'Be careful, Joe, tonight's a full moon.'

When you gonna stop with that c.r.a.p? is what he wants to say, but he says, 'Sure thing, Ma. I promise.'

After he's gone the old woman waits a long time at her window. There's birds in the dogwood.

On his way through town Joe spies two drunks fighting tooth and nail in the gravel lot outside Shakespeare's Bar & Grill. He knows them both by heart. Now they're on the ground, rolling and kicking up dust. Work boots and t-shirts and ragged hair. One's got a broken bottle.

Debbie needs me, thinks Joe. Besides, they'll be kissin' and makin' up before the jukebox can change songs. And if not, let them claw each other to shreds if they want, waste of fresh air the both of 'em.

Pulling into the Dairy Queen, he notices a strange moped parked by Deb's station wagon, looks like it's been through the war. Sheer habit makes him check his hair in the rear-view before he shuts the cruiser off and gets out. Approaching the scene of the crime he sees a girl squatting in the gravel next to Lionel's rocking chair, a helmet on her head, her face lowered between her knees, both her arms wrapped around them as if to shield herself from a falling sky.

'That you, Joe?' says Lionel from his still rocker.

'It's me, Black Jesus,' says Joe and sees now why the girl hasn't moved. She's handcuffed by her wrist to the back of the chair.

'Where the h.e.l.l's your mother?' he says.

'Think she went inside,' says Lionel with a stoned smile. 'Didn't know you were bedding down with a crazy lady huh, man?'

'There's gotta be a reason for this.'

'Sure. Just keep your seatbelt on, Geronimo, this is only the tip of the iceberg.'

'Debbie!' yells Joe in the basic direction of the DQ and even before the sound of her name dies under the blue tarps she comes waltzing through the screen door like the lead in a play.

'Well, if it isn't the big bad Deputy. Thought you'd never come. Look what I caught,' she says and points to the girl still frozen there in her desperate pose.

'What's going on here, babe?' says Joe, doing his best to hide the sadness and worry in his voice, the creeping annoyance.

'This freak was trying to steal from us.'

'That's not why I gave you those handcuffs,' says Joe.

'Oh, come on!' barks Lionel. 'I really don't need to hear that, do I? I get enough nightmares as it is.'

'She was stealing a pair of gloves, Joe!'

'A pair of gloves?' says Joe, more annoyed by the moment.

'Those sparkly Michael Jackson ones. Authentic Thriller era. I had 'em marked at eighty bucks!'

'I told her to let her go,' says Lionel. 'This is the dancer. The one I saw when they blew me up.'

'Let's not talk about that now, okay honey,' snaps his mother.

'She came askin' how to get to the Mystery Spot,' says Lionel. 'So Mom told her. Then she came back a little while later and said to me that her hands were cold. She told me to feel them and put one on my face and it was like ice. Mom was in the shower so I told her just to take a pair of gloves. Any ones she wanted.'

'Debbie?'

'What, Joe?'

'Give me the keys for the cuffs.'

'Christ, if you don't believe me see for yourself what they go for on eBay!'

'I don't give a flying f.u.c.k about the gloves, Debbie! You should be ashamed. Don't think I don't remember you spending the night in Catskill jail for shoplifting a blender from Jamesway in the nineties. What's that they say? Takes a thief to catch a thief?'

'Joe Two-Feathers! What on earth's gotten into you?'

'You really wanna know?'

'Of course I do, sweet potato.'