Barker gang had died. Garland T. Moon had waded through this water and fished here, wearing a suit, flinging a hook full of bloody melt into the current that flowed through the car's empty windows.
Why this particular spot, I wondered. Did he know the sunken car was there, that it was a nest for shovel- mouth catfish, that bass hung under the bluffs and fed on the insects that fell from the grove of trees upstream?
My father probably took him fishing here, walked these same banks with him as he did with me in later years, a sack of bread-and-butter sandwiches swinging from his big hand.
Moon had tried to extort ten acres from me on the back of my property. What were his words? I want the place should have been mine. At least part of it. Was that it, I thought. Maybe I had been wrong, he hadn't returned to Deaf Smith simply for revenge. Somehow he had convinced himself he was owed part of my father's estate. He had also gone to Jack Vanzandt, perhaps a surrogate for my father, walking into the middle of his golf game, as though somehow the door to wealth and acceptance in Deaf Smith society would open for him if he could only turn the right handle.
Now he had disappeared. Where would a man dying of cancer, beaten with a maul handle, and hunted by a sadist go in a county that had been the origin of his travail and the denier of what he believed was his inheritance?
What places was he even familiar with? Perhaps just the motel room with water bed and X-rated cable he lived in, the old county prison where he had been sodomized by two roadbulls, the tin welding shed that was like stepping into the devil's forge, the wide, green sweep of the river below the bluffs at the back of my property.
And the Hart Ranch, where he had seen lights in the clouds he associated with UFOs.
I went back to the house, wrapped the belt around L.Q.'s holstered . 45 revolver, and set it on the seat next to me in the Avalon.
But I didn't get far. Bunny Vogel pulled his '55 Chevy into my drive and got out with a sheet of lined notebook paper gripped in his hand. His Mexican girlfriend sat in the passenger's seat.
'What's wrong, Bunny?' I said.
'I went to Lucas's house. To tell him I'm sorry for my part in that cow-flop stuff out at the country club. There wasn't nobody home. That Indian motorcycle was gone, too. I found this note wadded up on the porch.'
I smoothed it out on Bunny's hood. The handwriting, in pencil, was like a child's.
Lucas,
We got a new name for you. Its Baby Shit. In case you dont know, baby shit is yellow. You got everybody to feel sorry for you at the trial because you dont have parents. You know what the truth is? You dont have parents because nobody ever wanted you. Baby shit gets wiped off. It doesnt get raised.
I gave you my collectors bike and you snitched me off. I thought you could hang out with us but you couldn't cut the initiation at the country club. You got one way out of your problem, Baby Shit. Maybe you can prove your not a spineless cunt. Bring my bike out to the Rim Rocks at 6. I'll be there by myself because I dont have to run to my old man to square a beef.
You thought Roseanne was a good girl? She was good, all right. Down past the part you couldnt get to.
It was unsigned.
'The Rim Rocks?' I said.
'There's a dirt road in the woods at the top of the cliffs, about two miles upriver from the Hart Ranch,' Bunny said.
'The steel cable,' I said.
'The what?' he asked, his head tilted peculiarly in the wind, as though the air held a secret that had eluded him.
I pulled into the drive of the Vanzandts' home. Bunny and his girlfriend parked by the curb and did not get out of their car. The sun had dipped behind the house, and the pine trees in the front yard were edged with fire, the trunks deep in shadow. Far up the slope, sitting in deck chairs on their wide, breezy front porch, were Jack and Emma, a drink tray set between them.
So that's how they would handle it, I thought. With booze and pills and assignment of blame to others. Why not? They lived in a world where use was a way of life and money and morality were synonymous. Perhaps they believed the burden of their son's errant ways absolved them of their own sins, or that indeed they had been made the scapegoats of the slothful and inept whose plight it was to loathe and envy the rich.
Jack rose from his chair as I approached the porch. He wore a canary-yellow sports shirt and white slacks and a western belt and polished cowboy boots, and his face looked as composed as that of a defeated warrior to whom victory was denied by only chance and accident.
'I'd invite you for a drink, Billy Bob, but I suspect you're here for other reasons,' he said.
Emma lit a cigarette with a gold lighter and smoked it as though I were not there, her red nails clicking slowly on the arm of the chair.
'Is Darl around?' I asked.
'No, he went to a show with friends,' Jack said.
'This morning he was melting screamers in red wine. But tonight he's eating popcorn at the theater?' I said.
'What in God's name are you talking about now?' Emma said.
'Screamers, leapers, uppers, black beauties, whatever you want to call them. They tie serious knots in people's brains,' I said.
'Maybe you'd better leave,' Jack said.
I handed him the note Darl had left on Lucas's porch. He straightened it between his hands and read, his feet spread slightly, pointed outward, like a man on a ship.
'This isn't even signed,' he said. But his voice faltered.
'Why would your boy buy twenty feet of steel cable at a building supply, Jack?' I asked.
'Cable?' he said.
'With U-bolts,' I said.
He kneaded the sheet of paper with one hand into a ball and dropped it on the drink table. It bounced and rolled onto the floor.
'I'll be back,' he said to his wife.
'Jack…' she said. Then she said it again, to his back, as he walked around the side of his house to his four- wheel-drive Cherokee.
I bent over and picked up Darl's note and put it in my pocket. I thought Emma would say something else. But she didn't. She simply propped her elbow on the arm of the chair and rested her forehead on her fingers, the smoke from her cigarette curling out of the ashtray into her hair.
I walked back down the drive in the cooling shadows to Bunny's car. At the end of the block, the taillights of Jack's Cherokee turned the corner and disappeared up a winding street whose high-banked, blue-green lawns hissed with sprinkler systems.
'Can you take me to the Rim Rocks?' I said to Bunny through his window.
He didn't reply. Instead, he was looking at something through the front windshield. He opened the door and stepped out on the pavement.
'I think that boy done growed up on us,' he said.
Lucas and Vernon Smothers slowed their pickup truck to the curb. They were both eating fried chicken out of a plastic bucket. They got out and walked to the back of the truck. Lucas dropped the tailgate and slid a plank down to the pavement to offload the Indian motorcycle, which was held erect in the truck bed with four crisscrossed lengths of bungi cord. He kept looking at us, waiting for one of us to speak.
'Hi, what cha y'all doing here?' he said.
What follows is put together from accounts given me by Marvin Pomroy, a sheriff's deputy, and a seventeen- year-old West End girl who had not guessed that a late-spring evening high above a lazy river could prove to be the worst memory of her life.
The wind was cool on the outcrop of rocks above the gorge, the evening star bright in the west, the air scented with pine needles, wood smoke from the campfire, the cold odor of water flowing over stone at the base of the cliffs.
Earlier, the others had been worried about Darl. Speed took his metabolism to strange places. His face had
