Do Unto Others

Billy Ray Bummel, the assistant D.A., wouldn’t have stopped anyhow. He dashed into the library. Some indeterminate time later, Junebug, the coroner, and Billy Ray Bummel emerged. The paramedics followed, trundling a blanketed form. Gasps and other expressions of surprise and curiosity arose from the crowd. They sounded like a freakshow audience ogling a particularly ugly mutant. Junebug fixed the group with a stern eye. “Y’all get! Get going about your business and let us do ours.” A few spectators moved away, but most acted like their feet were mired in mud. “Who is it?” a voice croaked from the crowd.

Junebug leveled his eyes at the offender. “You can read about it in the paper. Now get moving along.” He’d put on his reflective sunglasses for the proper authority image and stuck a Stetson back on his brown crewcut. He was bigger and taller than me, with a solidly broad face. I’m sure he’d already thought it’d look good next year on a sheriff’s poster. He looked much the same as in high school, except for the slightest of beer guts and a few worry lines creasing his brow. A second warning sufficed and the crowd ambled apart as the ambulance was loaded and roared off toward the hospital. The lights didn’t flare and the siren stayed silent. I felt sick and sad; Beta might’ve been crazy, but she didn’t deserve this. Junebug took me by the arm. “C’mon, Jordy.” His deep voice was raspy from tobacco. “Let’s talk inside.” Let me explain about me and Junebug. We’d known each other since first grade. In a small town, when you spend twelve years of school and summers with the same kids, you develop what those TV shrinks call love/hate relationships. It’s inevitable. You play with these kids day after day and you can’t imagine life without their company. But you’re also guaranteed to get plenty mad at each other.

Junebug and I got along fine until high school, when we got all competitive. We competed for sports honors (he usually won), academic honors (I usually won, but Junebug beat me in math), and the same pretty girls, of which we had a finite supply in Mirabeau. Our friendship didn’t pick up when I returned to town. I’d been beyond Mirabeau and he’d stuck close. We didn’t hang out together, but neither were we sworn enemies. He came to my daddy’s funeral and three weeks ago I’d gone to his daddy’s funeral. You do that here, even if comforting words to someone you’ve drifted far away from taste odd in your mouth. Junebug of course isn’t his given name. He’s Hewett Moncrief, Junior, and everyone knows that a Junior is sometimes saddled as a toddler with being a Junebug. Well, that saddle stuck.

His daddy was mean that way. We sat in the periodical section, the day’s Houston and Austin papers still wrapped in their plastic covers, dotted with drops of water from the wet grass. “You want us to get y’all some coffee?” Junebug offered. “I can’t let you go back there to make any, but I’ll call over to the diner and get you and Miss Tully some.” I shook my head. I suddenly realized that Candace was not there. Junebug saw my face. “She’s outside. I’ll talk to her in a minute.” Junebug’s voice is always slow and languorous, like he just woke up. I couldn’t imagine him yelling at an arrestee; he’d probably thank them once he locked the handcuffs. “I need to ask you some questions.” “Okay,” I said blankly, but I stared at the pack in his pocket. “I’d really, really like a cigarette.” “Here. I’m quittin’.”