The long and short of it is that we walked for over two hours. We didn’t find anything. It was a little before noon when we decided to call it off. There was nobody in those woods but us. We knew that. Nobody we could see, anyway. We could still hear the voice, but it seemed to get fainter when we turned toward the road. When we got within sight of my truck, we couldn’t hear it at all.

We racked the guns and stood around in the road. I had three hot beers in the back end and we started drinking those. Jim said he thought we ought to call the Civil Defense in and let them worry about it. I didn’t say anything. Bobby was like me, he thought like I did. We didn’t want to look like fools, but I’d seen something like this once before, in Alabama, when I was five years old. My mother knew of it, and my older brother. No one else. Not even Mary Annie. I thought about that when Bobby said that maybe it wasn’t something that anybody would be able to find.

Jim’s face gave a little funny jerk when he said that. He sells insurance for a living and deals with the reality of life and death, the cash value of a person’s demise. He laughed.

“You crazy, Bobby,” he said. “You know that? You crazy.”

I wouldn’t have wanted to have told Bobby that. I saw him put a guy through a plate glass window in a bar uptown years ago. He almost went to the pen over it. No, I wouldn’t have said that.

“It ain’t no need in calling out the Civil Defense,” Bobby repeated. “They wouldn’t find nothin’.”

Jim’s face twitched like he wanted to say something else. He didn’t. We left it at that.

The phone ringing lifted me out of my thoughts one night. It was between seasons, a Friday night. Alvin was off with some girl who had just gotten her driver’s license and Karla was up in her room with her mother, talking out something she’d already been told about and had been expecting, and that had finally happened. Mary Annie was just glad it had happened at home, instead of at school, or when she was off with some of her friends at the pool. I took it as a sign to go down into the den and mix myself a good drink and not even pay attention to the television, just marvel at the way a baby girl grows into a woman in twelve short years. I left them alone. I wasn’t empty so much as lonely, and feeling old. I was glad to hear Bobby on the line.

“Boy, what you doing?” he said.

“Just laying around. What you up to?”