Part 3 — Lamar On The Porch
The address on the back of that last receipt belonged to a small yellow house on Church Street in Hannibal. Sergeant Calloway read it twice, reached for his radio, and then, instead of calling for backup, said quietly, Boyd, I think I want you to ride with me. I think we may be about to meet someone who has been waiting a long time.
The porch light was on. A man sat in a wicker chair with a battered suitcase at his feet, his hands folded on his knee, watching the street like a person waiting for a bus. He was gray and heavy, in his early fifties, with a face I recognized from the newspaper photo of 2019. He stood up as we came up the walk, and said, Evening, Sergeant. I am Lamar Sledge.
He was alive. He had never fallen off that houseboat, never drowned in the flood. He had walked off the boat one night with a duffel bag and a plan, drifted down the river to a town in Illinois, and lived there under a different name for five years. He told us this in a calm, weary voice, as though he had rehearsed it a hundred times in the mirror.
Lamar had owned a small hardware store, and in 2018 he lost it. A partner had embezzled, the bank called the loans, and he was left with a judgment he could never pay. He was sure he was a burden. In the flood of 2019 he saw a way out of the shame, and he took it. His family held a funeral. He watched the service from a car across the road.
The box under the toilet floor held what he called his penance. Every month he had saved a little of what he earned, bought money orders, and signed them to the people he owed, but he never mailed them. He could not do it without revealing himself. The marina receipts were for the slip he kept paying so the houseboat would not be towed, because it held his daughters name.
A man can hide for five years from everyone but the people he is paying back in his head.
TONIGHT was the word he had written for himself. His daughter, Amanda, was getting married on Saturday in a little church two blocks from that porch. He had read it in the local paper. He had decided that he was done hiding, and that he would walk in on his own two feet, and take whatever the law had in store.
Calloway sat beside him on the steps, took off his hat, and said they would go to the station first. Lamar nodded. He picked up his suitcase, locked the door of the little yellow house, and handed the key to me. He asked if I would please mail the money orders. I said I would do it that very night.
The law treated him fairly. A judge found that he had committed false reporting and a minor insurance violation, since the family had collected a small policy. He agreed to repay it, with interest. His old debts had been discharged long before. The court sentenced him to two years of probation and community service at the county food pantry, and nothing more.
On Saturday, Calloway let Lamar attend the wedding, in a borrowed suit, with a deputy waiting politely outside. I sat at the back. When Amanda turned and saw him standing in the doorway, her bouquet slipped from her hands, and she ran down the aisle in her white dress and threw her arms around his neck.
I bought the houseboat, new cleaned and sound, from the port authority at the sealed-bid price. I repaired the hull and painted the name Second Chance on the stern. Lamar helps me on weekends, with a wrench in his hand, and nobody in Hannibal says a word about the past. We sit on the deck with coffee and watch the barges push up the river.
