Then I sat in my kitchen at nine o’clock at night and called a sixty-one-year-old man I met in a woodchip pit, and when he picked up I couldn’t get the words out for a minute, and he waited, because he always waits.
“He said your name,” I told him.
Walt was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped.
Then he said, real rough, “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh,” he said.
That’s all. That’s the whole thing he had to say about it.
Three days later a package came in the mail with no note in it. Inside was a small patch, about two inches, stitched crooked like somebody who doesn’t sew did it himself at a kitchen table.
It just said CREW.
It’s on Eli’s backpack. He touches it with two fingers before we go into any building.
And somewhere out there, there are forty-one thousand people who watched eleven seconds of my son and decided they knew what they were looking at.
