It wasn’t much, that hand on his arm, but it was something, a tidbit he could enjoy. Like a blind hog finding an acorn, it wasn’t filling, but it fed the appetite.
27
After his talk with McBride, Rooster went to his office, trembling, his hand aching. It wasn’t broken. McBride’s strong grip had shifted bones and now they were shifted back, but it was sore.
Rooster thought about what McBride made him do, felt sick about it, felt about two inches tall if he could wear stilts and stand on a stump. There wasn’t any need for McBride to do that. He had done it just because he could, the wig-headed sonofabitch.
Rooster got a wash pan, filled it with water, used a thick bar of soap to wash his lips, rubbed with it until they were near raw and the soap taste was in his mouth; he thought he’d gag from it, but determined it was a taste better than the one he was remembering.
After the soap, he took off his hat and put his face down in the pan of water and held it there for as long as he could hold his breath. When he came up, snorting, grabbing for a towel, he didn’t feel one bit cleaner.
He marched out on the office steps, looked up the street, stared at the red apartment over the drugstore, felt like he should go in and get the shotgun, trot back over to see McBride. He’d make him suck on the barrel, that’s what he would do. Should have bit the bastard’s dick off, that’s what he ought to have done, tore it out by the roots with his teeth. What a coward he was, doing what he did. Should have let McBride break his hand before he did what he did.
He thought about the shotgun some more, but didn’t think he could do it, and if he tried, he might end up with it up his ass, McBride working the pump action, pulling the trigger till it didn’t work anymore. It was easy to be tough out here on the steps of his office in the sunlight, but up there in that stuffy room with the little bit of light and all the shadows and McBride in his ugly black wig, that was another thing. And there was the Beetle Man, too.
Rooster thought about getting one of Sheriff Knowles’ cigars from the desk drawer, smoking that, to kind of purify himself, clean out his mouth with smoke, but the more he thought about the big fat cigars Sheriff Knowles had smoked, the less he liked that idea.
He walked around the edge of the office and looked to see the colored men still on their line, sleeping, and Plug and Tootie still sleeping as well. The dew had settled on them and Rooster could see it lay damp on Plug’s hat and the knees of his pants. Rooster was so angry, he thought he might take it out on them for sleeping, then he thought better of it. He didn’t want them up.
Rooster observed a fistful of grasshoppers hanging on the edge of the building, and to quench his anger, he used his hand to smash a couple of them, wiped the waste on the edge of the bricks with a quick scraping motion.
He went back around front and stood on the steps again. He was wiping at his mouth with the back of his clean hand, when a blue car came down the street, veered around the passed-out fat woman, paused with the motor humming. The passenger door opened and Hillbilly got out with a blanket bound up and tied over his shoulder. Rooster strained to see who was driving. It was some man he had seen around town, but didn’t know. The car drove on past the office in the direction of the courthouse.
Hillbilly stopped in the road for a minute, studied the fat woman lying there with the precision of a marine biologist studying a beached whale, then came walking toward Rooster. As Hillbilly passed him on the walk, he nodded.
Rooster said, “I thought you was constablin’.”
“Sometimes,” Hillbilly said. “Today I didn’t want to. I don’t know I’m gonna want to again. I’m actually a singer and picker. Did some singing last night, and I know that’s what I got to do. Got some pay, so I hitched in to look for a guitar to buy. You don’t know of any?”
Rooster shook his head.
“Your mouth’s all red. You got some kind of hives?”
“No. I do know this, though. That gal, Sunset, who I figure you like… you do like her, don’t you?”
“Well enough and in certain ways,” Hillbilly said.
“She’s in for some hell, friend. There’s a way maybe you can help her.”
When Rooster finished saying this, he felt stunned. It had just leaped from his mouth like a frog.
“I try to mind my own business,” Hillbilly said.
Rooster gave him a quizzical look. “You are the law.”
“Ain’t so sure I want to be any kind of law anymore. I never felt I fit good being the law. Ain’t you the law? This has something to do with the law, you’re the law. I’m retired.”
“I like that redhead,” Rooster said.
“Hell, any man likes that redhead,” Hillbilly said.
“That’s not what I mean. She’s got heart. She’s got more courage than I got. And she’s gonna need it.”
“How’s that?”
“McBride.”
“John McBride?”
“How’d you know?”
“Seen his name on a paper at the courthouse.”
Rooster nodded. He saw the fat woman lying in the street move, start to get up. She managed to roll over and get a knee under her.
“I think you’re a man that’ll play angles,” Rooster said. “I’m not sure Sunset is a woman that’ll do that.”
“What does that mean, I’m a man will play angles? What are you getting at, Rooster?”
“I think you can help her and maybe make some good money quick like.”
“Where does it come from, this quick money?”
“Me.”
“Tell you what, buddy. I got better things to do with my morning than play at riddles.”
“Henry Shelby over at the mill in Camp Rapture-”
“I know who he is.”
“-he come up with this idea, you see. He was hunting on land belonged to this colored, Zendo, and he found oil. Zendo don’t even know it’s his land. Or if he thought it was his land, Shelby fixed that. Day after he found the oil, he went and asked Zendo if he’d sell, telling him he wanted it for the lumber company, and Zendo said no, he didn’t want to sell, and Shelby asked him how big his land was, and Zendo didn’t know. Just bought him a patch and farms part of what he knows is his patch. A colored, he don’t ask a lot of questions when he gets something around here, even if he pays near double for it. Glad to have what he knows to be his, even if he has more and don’t know it. Course, he don’t know about the oil. That might change his thinking. Surveyors hadn’t even bothered to come and stake out the land he bought. Just drew it up on paper, and you got to really study them papers to know what they’re about. And Zendo, if he’s like a lot of the coloreds around here, he don’t even read. So, Henry Shelby, he says, ‘Tell you what, I’ll pay to have your land surveyed so you’ll know exactly what’s yours, cause since I can’t buy your land, I can buy land next to you.’ That’s no big thing to Zendo, a free survey, cause now he’ll know exactly what he owns.”
“And the land got cut up different than it was supposed to be,” Hillbilly said. “Yeah, me and Sunset sort of got that part.”
They watched as the woman from the street came stumbling by. Rooster thought she looked like one of the women from Dodge Street. She was lurching in that direction. When she passed them and was far enough away, Rooster continued.
