Clinton determined not to answer.

“Remember this,” Ramírez said. “Whatever you got from that tramp, two or three times, whatever it was, you wouldn’t have got it except for me. A gift from Ramírez. Hadn’t been I’m big-hearted, you’d of waited for the bus in jail. You know that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, now you got a lot to think about, huh? Am I right?”

“Yes, sir.”

Ramírez removed one hand from the wheel and raised it toward Clinton. For a moment it hovered in the air, near the boy’s neck, caught between an act of strangling and a caress. But without touching Clinton at all, the hand returned to the wheel.

“Goddam you, you got a nerve,” Ramírez said, “sittin’ there bein’ polite to me, callin’ me ‘sir.’ So goddam smart.” He stopped the car. “Get out.”

They were parked across the street from a variety store that served also as a bus station. The bus was at the opposite curb. The driver, sitting on a bench in front of the store, watched Clinton climb out of the police car. A few passengers, already seated on the bus, watched from the windows as Clinton walked across the street, through the white tropical glare of noon, followed by the police lieutenant.

Ramírez talked with the driver of the bus. Clinton went into the store to buy his ticket. Inside, on the counter, he saw a display of cheese-flavored crackers wrapped in five-cent cellophane packages. He bought seven of them and stuffed them into his pockets and under his shirt. Then he went outside and handed his ticket to the driver and got on the bus.

Ramírez and the driver climbed aboard. The driver got into his seat and accelerated the motor several times, as if testing it. Ramírez conducted Clinton down the aisle, stopping him midway with a hand on the boy’s arm. “Not back there. That’s for colored,” he said.

Clinton sat down. The seat next to him was empty. Ramírez looked at him; and in a voice that was like a politician campaigning for office, he said: “Now, son, you go on back to Ohio with your daddy, and when you’re twenty-one, maybe you’ll come back and see us. Will you do that? Now, no hard feelings, is there?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, I hope not,” the officer said. Then he strutted back up the aisle. “Hello, Mary,” he said to a lady passenger, seated alone. “Goin’ up to see Danny, are you? And do a little shoppin’?”

“That’s right, Lieutenant.”

“Well. You hurry back.”

“I will.”

As he stepped off the bus, Ramírez said, over his shoulder, to the driver, “Thanks, Henry.”

Then the bus started to move.

part 3

part 3