Cody lifted the phone to his ear with a hand that shook so badly it rattled against his jaw. I could hear the old voice from where I sat, hoarse and slow and entirely calm. “Cody,” said Hollis Bray, “this is Hollis. I am standing on the porch of your grandmother with two officers. I would like you to come to the front door with your hands where I can see them. I do not want to come in. Your grandmother has had a long night, and so have I.” Cody lowered the phone. Sharon stared at me across the table with her mouth open and her eyes hard with fear.
I turned over the last page and slid it to her. It was a form from the Wichita Falls Police Department, signed by me, dated in October. For two months, I told my daughter, I had been a confidential informant. The camera over my counter belonged to the police. Hollis, who had worn the badge for thirty years, had taken my statement. The cash deposits, the small bags, the pawned cue of Buddy, and every minute of the footage had been gathered with my permission. The bank had flagged the deposits in September and sent a letter to Hollis, and Hollis had sat down at table six and told me to think carefully.
“I had to think about whether I could do it,” I said. “It was my own daughter and my own grandson. But Hollis told me that if I did nothing, one of you would be gone within a year, in the back of that building, and the pool hall would be a crime scene. I decided I would rather have you angry at me in a courtroom than lose you.” My voice broke on the last word. At the table, my daughter Pam, who had not known any of it, got up and came around and stood behind my chair with both hands on my shoulders.
A camera above a lunch counter gave one grandmother the Christmas Eve to bring her grandson back to the pool hall in Wichita Falls.
I gave my terms from my chair, with Pam standing behind me. “Sharon, you will tell the detective everything about the deposits, and you will testify, and in return the district attorney has agreed that you will have probation and not prison. Cody, you will walk out of that door and into the car with Hollis, and you will plead into the drug court program. You will do the treatment, the classes and the work. When you come out, there is a counter and an apron for you, if you want one. The building is sold. The pool hall is mine until the day it is not. I will keep it open for the old men.”
Sharon broke first, which I had expected. She put her forehead on the tablecloth, among the tamale husks, and wept like a woman at the end of a very long road. “Mama,” she said, “Cody told me it was only small. Only a little. Then it was a lot, and then it was the only thing keeping us from losing everything, and I told myself I was helping him. I deposited your money with my own hands, nine thousand at a time, and I knew exactly why it was nine.” She raised her wet face. “I wanted so badly to be needed.”
Cody did not go to the front door. He stood up, snatched his phone and the folder with the photographs off the table, and ran for the kitchen and the back door, which he flung open. On the back step stood Hollis Bray, eighty three years old, in the windbreaker of a retired sergeant, with a cane in one hand and the other hand held up flat, as he had held it at a thousand intersections. Behind him, in the dark yard, a uniformed officer shone a light. “Evening, son,” Hollis said mildly. “I thought you might try the back.” Cody stopped, staring, with the folder pressed to his chest.
Cody sagged against the doorframe. Hollis put one thick hand on his shoulder and led him back into the kitchen like a man leading a tired horse. I stood up from the table, and Cody looked at me, my only grandson, twenty eight years old, with the eyes of a frightened boy. I held out my arms. He walked into them and bent almost double, and I felt him shake from head to foot. “Grandma,” he whispered, “I am sorry I took the cue.” Over his shoulder, Hollis looked at the ceiling and cleared his throat.
The money consequences were firm. The pool hall building was sold for five million, four hundred thousand dollars to the developer in Dallas, as agreed, with a clause that the pool hall could stay open in the front half for the life of its owner. The deposits were traced and reported, and Sharon repaid the bank from her own savings. Cody entered the drug court program and the treatment center, and the district attorney agreed to dismiss the charges upon completion. The cue of Buddy came home from the pawn shop on Kemp Boulevard in the pocket of Hollis.
In the name of Buddy, who passed in 2020, I started the Buddy Kincaid Fund. It pays for treatment beds, cue sticks, hall rent and after school programs for young people in Wichita, Clay and Archer counties. In the first year we opened a free afternoon table for forty teenagers, and Hollis taught them to rack. One boy of sixteen, who had been selling pills outside his school, sank a long cut shot on the first try. He looked up at Hollis with a face I will not forget and asked if that counted as a skill.
Cody finished his program in the summer and walked into the pool hall on a Tuesday afternoon, in a clean white shirt and a black apron. He stood at the lunch counter where he had once handed over small bags, and he made the first order of chili cheese fries that I had ever seen him cook. Hollis, at table six, took the plate and ate a forkful. Then he lifted his cue, pointed it at the boy, and said, loud enough for the whole hall to hear, “Sergeant approves.” Cody looked at me. I smiled, and I turned up the jukebox.