The Dead Don't Dance by Charles Martin Page A

boys, Bryce came home different, and he’s been the same ever since—living alone with his beer and his bagpipes and his movies—and his trust fund.
    So occasionally, ever since that first night in the amphitheatre, I check up on him. I’ll sneak up the path to the parking area of the drive-in, and there stands Bryce. Front and center. Butt naked, except for his boots. Blowing ’til his face looks like a glow plug. Drunk as a skunk. Rattling off “Amazing Grace,” “A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” or “Taps.”
    We usually end up watching movies together. We’ll drink beer and sit in the silence, or if we can find a speaker that works, listen to the static spewing from the box between us. The poor audio doesn’t seem to bother Bryce. He knows most every word of every film by heart.
    S HORTLY AFTER THE DAY M AGGIE TACKLED ME OFF THE front porch and shoved the pink line under my nose, we climbed the hill and knocked on Bryce’s trailer door, because we figured he’d want to know. Ever since I first introduced him to her, he’d shown a special affection for Maggie. I guess after so much killing, Bryce is attracted to things that are tender and full of life.
    Hand in hand, we knocked and listened while Bryce cussed and tripped over the empty beer cans on his way to answer the door. He greeted us wearing nothing but his boots and a straw hat. When he saw Maggie, he slowly reached behind the door and grabbed a framed poster of John Wayne to cover himself from belly button to kneecap.
    I nudged Maggs, and she leaned in on her tiptoes and whispered in Bryce’s ear, “Dylan’s gonna be a daddy.”
    It took a second to register, but when it did, Bryce’s already dilated pupils grew as large as the end of a beer bottle. His eyes darted from side to side, he held up a finger and slowly shut the door. To call Bryce a friend, you have to be willing to live with a few eccentricities.
    The noises behind the door told us that Bryce was tearing apart the inside of his trailer, looking for a pair of pants. A few minutes later he opened the door, wearing a yellowed and stretched-out T-shirt—as a pair of shorts. He had shoved his boots through the armholes, hiked it up around his waist, and buckled a belt over it to hold it around his hips. The neck hole hung down around his knees and flapped when he walked.
    Bryce crept up to Maggie, knelt, and slowly placed his ear to her stomach like a safecracker. Then he wrapped his arms around her waist and pressed his ear farther into her stomach. Maggie is more ticklish than any human being alive, so the pressure of his forearms on her ribs and his ear pressed against her tummy started her to giggling. With Maggie laughing, Bryce could no longer hear whatever he was listening for, so he squeezed tighter. The crescendo grew, and thirty seconds later, Maggie was laughing so hard and wiggling around so much that Bryce just picked her up off the ground, tossing her over his shoulder like a duffel bag, and continued listening while Maggie flung her feet and laughed hysterically.
    â€œBryce Kai MacGregor!” she said, pounding him on the back.
    Bryce set Maggs on her feet, nodded as if satisfied that there actually was a baby in her tummy, and held up his index finger again. He disappeared into the trailer, only to return half a minute later holding a beer and two dirty Styrofoam cups. After popping the tab, he poured half a sip in Maggs’s cup, a full sip in mine, and kept the remainder for himself.
    Beneath the shadow of the silver screen, Bryce raised his can, we clinked Styrofoam to aluminum, and the three of us drank to our son. We set down our cups and started walking toward the fence when Bryce shouted after us. “Maggie, what’s your favorite movie?”
    All true Southern girls have only one favorite movie, and they’ve all seen it ten thousand times. It’s stitched into their