The Maid's Version by Daniel Woodrell

he would seek their company no more. Tough guys, once pondered in a quieted mind, were revealed to be boring, really, just so tediously dangerous and boring! As Freddy Poltz he amassed for himself an innocuous history as a commonplace rustic who’d done no notable wrongs or rights anyplace, ever. He married a sunny woman in the sticks who didn’t know his real name until he died in the blast, and had two children who after his passing felt timid and unmoored the remainder of their lives. His wife, Mae, worked as a cook and laundress for Mr. and Mrs. Edward Williams over on Curry Street. She was a regular on the bench outside the Greek’s, where every maid in town came to know and admire her seriousness of intent and casual charity.
    The unraveling of Freddy Poltz began when the leaves were down. A fog bank low to ground lapped the skin on the mud to a treacherous slickness, and two eight-man football teams banged away at each other on sliding feet in that field beside the old high school where the Methodist church sits now. The leather ball disappeared into the huddling gray sky whenever punted, leading to entertaining miscalculations by stumbling players staring skyward who could only guess where the booted thing might squirt from the cloud and slipping off their heedless feet as they shifted directions to make a catch.
    The teams churned the field of blanched autumn grass into a thin flat wallow and drew an audience with their animated voices. The small crowd was free with suggestions on how players might want to improve and were disputed from the scrum in return. At game’s end Freddy was exhausted, spattered by mud to the distance of his hair, and alarmed by a face beneath a brim hat that stared his way from the center of the crowd. He looked at the face and the face kept looking back. Freddy quickly said his so-longs and left the mud and the face followed. Freddy walked directly across the railroad tracks and took the path under the Fussell Creek bridge, where he stopped in the shadow, turned around, “What do you want?”
    “You’re Plug, ain’t you? From Egan’s?”
    “Not lately.”
    “Who is it you are now, Plug?”
    “A decent man, and I’m stayin’ him, too. So let’s us promise to not be seein’ each other again, Mikey.”
    “Can’t make that promise, Plug—or Freddy—I hear you’re Freddy these days—might make myself into a goddam liar, and how’s Mother goin’ to feel if word I’m a goddam liar gets back to Kerry Patch?”
    “So you’re still in the game.”
    “It’s the only game that tickles me right.”
    “Well, I don’t tickle no more, so leave me out. Just leave me the hell out of everything you might get up to—am I bein’ clear?”
    “Okay, okay, don’t get in a huff. Just wanted to say hello ’cause I knew you when you was up to no good in the city, and here I go scoutin’ the boondocks—and this is sure ’nough the boondocks, brother, nothin’ but brush apes eatin’ dingleberries and draggin’ their squaws by the hair—when I see a city face from home to talk at, so I do that. Listen, I got no kick with you, we’re still pals, far as I care. But Humbert and Jellyroll and them, they wouldn’t call you pal. No, Mr. Poltz, I don’t think so. I don’t think they ever will. Not after what you done on Ashley Street that time.”
    “What’s your bite?”
    “Nothin’. I don’t want nothin’, not really. Only, say if people who know people you know dropped by while passin’ through here, solid people scoutin’ for safes and things like that, could you help them all they want? I think you should.”
    Freddy walked home by a looping, indirect route and pulled the shades, told Mae and the kids he was going fishing of a sudden and might be away two or three days, but don’t worry if it’s more. He had no pistols, only a shotgun for taking game birds, a hefty double-barreled he’d never fired, and when he grabbed it dusty from the closet beside the bed, Mae