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Show •138 Brady posing on the courthouse steps with a sullen fat man in manacles. I looked away from this multiplication of triumphant and possibly mythical Bradys and back to the man himself. "Chances are, maybe, probably," I said. "What do you know for sure?" He made a little steeple with his fingers; the cowboy boots tapped each other. "If you put it like that, nothing." We rolled slowly under sycamores and maples heavy with moisture; the patches of grass in front of the houses were a harsh vivid startling green, almost too vigorous in color to look like the real thing. "Just us three now," Jacob said. He drove hunched over the wheel, his face dark with thought. "If you don't count my mother, wherever she is," I said. Dead, I as much as hoped. She must have been a bitch to leave us like that. I remember her as soft and wonderful, but that's because I was just a little kid and didn't know any better. "You and me and Carlo," I said. "I'm not as quick as the two of you," Jacob said. He stopped the car under an old massive Douglas f i r growing at an odd angle out of someone's front yard. A gust of wind brought down brown needles to dance b r i e f l y on the Volkswagen' hood. Some stayed, glued to the wet metal in swirling |