Nobody did, I think, except my father himself. But I think he did, and was trying to find out how to.

My father turned suddenly and glared at my mother, his eyes shiny and moving, but with the gun still on Woody’s skin. I think he was afraid, afraid he was doing this wrong and could mess all of it up and make matters worse without accomplishing anything.

“You’re leaving,” he yelled at her. “That’s why you’re packed. Get out. Go on.”

“Jackie has to be at school in the morning,” my mother said in just her normal voice. And without another word to any one of us, she walked out of the floodlamp light carrying her bag, turned the corner at the front porch steps and disappeared toward the olive trees that ran in rows back into the wheat.

My father looked back at me where I was standing in the gravel, as if he expected to see me go with my mother toward Woody’s car. But I hadn’t thought about that—though later I would. Later I would think I should have gone with her, and that things between them might’ve been different. But that isn’t how it happened.

“You’re sure you’re going to get away now, aren’t you, mister?” my father said into Woody’s face. He was crazy himself, then. Anyone would’ve been. Everything must have seemed out of hand to him.

“I’d like to,” Woody said. “I’d like to get away from here.”

“And I’d like to think of some way to hurt you,” my father said and blinked his eyes. “I feel helpless about it.” We all heard the door to Woody’s car close in the dark. “Do you think that I’m a fool?” my father said.

“No,” Woody said. “I don’t think that.”

“Do you think you’re important?”

“No,” Woody said. “I’m not.”

My father blinked again. He seemed to be becoming someone else at that moment, someone I didn’t know. “Where are you from?”

And Woody closed his eyes. He breathed in, then out, a long sigh. It was as if this was somehow the hardest part, something he hadn’t expected to be asked to say.

“Chicago,” Woody said. “A suburb of there.”

“Are your parents alive?” my father said, all the time with his blue magnum pistol pushed under Woody’s chin.

“Yes,” Woody said. “Yessir.”

“That’s too bad,” my father said. “Too bad they have to know what you are. I’m sure you stopped meaning anything to them a long time ago. I’m sure they both wish you were dead. You didn’t know that. But I know it. I can’t help them out, though.