Marvin Pomroy came around back and tapped on the screen door to the porch. He wore a seersucker suit and narrow brown suspenders with his white shirt. I thought he had come to the house to apologize for threatening to break my jaw. Wrong. He sat down at the kitchen table without being invited and began smacking one fist erratically into his palm.
'Yes?' I said.
'I think Wilbur and Kippy Jo Pickett and Skyler Doolittle are all guilty of various crimes. I think guilty people come to you as a matter of course, primarily because you're a sucker for daytime TV watchers who model their lives on soap operas. So my being here has nothing to do with a change of attitude about your clients,' he said.
'Thanks for the feedback on that, Marvin.'
'But because your clients are dirty doesn't mean that Earl Deitrich isn't.'
'You've got a problem of conscience?' I asked.
'No. What I've got is this character Fletcher Grinnel, Deitrich's chauffeur. A week ago he was staring at me in the courthouse with this smirk on his face. I said, 'Can I help you with something?'
'He says, 'I was just admiring your suspenders. I served with a man, an ex-banker, actually, who always wore suspenders like that when we were on leave. He was a ferocious fighter. You'd never believe it from his appearance.'
'So I said, 'You were in the military?'
'He goes, 'Here and there. Mostly with a private group. Ex-Legionnaires, South African mercs, guys who were drummed out of the British army, that sort of thing. But we saved a lot of Europeans from the wogs and the bush bunnies.''
Marvin paused, his eyes blinking.
'What does this have to do with my clients?' I asked.
'Several political pissants in Austin keep calling me up about Wilbur and Kippy Jo Pickett, like somehow I'm not fully committed to the situation. Then I have this encounter with Fletcher Grinnel, who seems to think he can use racist language with me as though we're in the same white brotherhood. So I called in a favor from a federal agent in Washington and had him run this guy.
'Grinnel is a naturalized U.S. citizen from New Zealand. He's also worked for some very nasty people in South Africa and the Belgian Congo. He thinks cutting off body parts is quite a joke.'
'That's on his sheet?'
'No. Grinnel told me his friend, the ex-banker who wore suspenders like mine, made necklaces of human ears and fingers that he traded for ivory and rhino horn. Grinnel said his friend put a burning tire around a man and made his family watch.'
Marvin sat very still in the chair, his face bemused at the strangeness of his own words, one strand of hair hanging in the middle of his glasses.
'I think once in a while we're allowed to look into someone's eyes, somebody who a moment earlier seemed perfectly normal, and see right to the bottom of the Abyss,' he said. 'But maybe that's just my fundamentalist upbringing.'
His eyes lifted earnestly into mine, as though waiting for an opinion.
That evening Wilbur Pickett drove a flatbed pipe truck into my backyard and stepped down from the cab with a half pint of whiskey in his hand. His skin was filmed with dust, his washed-out denim shirt unbuttoned on his chest, his battered hat streaked with grease. 'You're listing hard to port, bud,' I said.
'I got run off two jobs in one day. The driller cut me loose at the rig and the water well boss said he felt ashamed at hiring a rodeo man to do nigra work. Told me he was firing me out of respect. How about them pineapples?' he said.
'Were you drunk?'
'No. But I'm working on it.'
'Why'd they run you off?'
He tipped the half-pint bottle to his lips and drank gingerly, perhaps no more than a capful, the whiskey lighting in the glass against the sun.
'Somebody got to them. Somebody with the name Earl Deitrich, I expect,' he said.
'We can do something about that,' I said.
'No, you cain't. He's the man with the money and the power. I thought folks here'bouts would stand behind one of their own. That's the thinking of a fool, son.'
'Come inside.'
'Nope. I'm throwing it in. Cut a deal with that fellow Pomroy.'
'What?'
'I'm letting Earl Deitrich in on our drill site up in Wyoming. Neither me or Kippy Jo is going to jail.'
He tried to hold his eyes on mine, then his stare broke and he drank from the bottle again.
'I don't care what Deitrich or his people have told you. Marvin Pomroy won't have anything to do with something like this. Frankly I won't, either,' I said.
'Then I'll get me another lawyer.'
'That's your choice, sir.'
'I ain't no 'sir.' I ain't nothing. But at least I ain't been sleeping with the wife of the man trying to put my friends in jail.'
His face was sullen, embarrassed, and accusatory, like a child's, all at the same time. I turned and walked back inside the house. I heard him fling his uncapped whiskey bottle whistling into the twilight, then start his truck and back out into the street, tearing a swatch out of a poplar tree.
What could I do about Wilbur? The answer was nothing. I drove out to his house on the hardpan in the morning. As I approached the house a '49 Mercury roared past me in the opposite direction.
Kippy Jo Pickett was on the front steps, in the shade, snapping beans in a pan, when I walked into the yard.
'That was Cholo Ramirez's car,' I said.
'Yes, he just left.'
'What's he doing here?'
'Visiting. Telling me about his life, his cars, things he worries about.'
'That kid has brain damage. If I were you, I'd leave him alone.'
'His mother's boyfriend broke his skull when he was a baby. Do we also throw away the part of him that wasn't damaged? Is that what you mean?'
I looked off in the distance, across the hot shimmer of the fields, and watched Cholo run a stop sign, then swerve full-bore around an oil truck.
'Where's Wilbur?' I asked.
'He went down to the state employment office.'
'Earl Deitrich's trying to jerk y'all around. If you're jammed up for money, I can lend you some. Don't give in to this man.'
Her eyes fixed on my face and stayed there. A brown and white beagle lay in a shallow depression by the side of the gallery, its tail flopping in the silence.
'You'd do that?' she asked.
'Pay me back when y'all punch into your first oil sand.'
'Wilbur's scared. He sits by himself in the kitchen in the middle of the night. He thinks I'm going to prison.'
'Listen, Kippy Jo, men like Earl Deitrich steal people's dreams. They have no creative vision of their own, no love, and no courage. They envy people like you and Wilbur. That's why they have to destroy you.'
She was quiet a long time. The sun was hot and bright in the sky, and the pools of rainwater in the alfalfa glimmered like quicksilver. Kippy Jo set down the tin pan of snapbeans and kneaded the thick folds of skin on top of the beagle's neck. The wind blew her hair in a black skein across her eyes.
'He won't listen,' she said.
Earl Deitrich was one of those who believed that when force, control, and arrogance did not get you your way, you simply applied more of the same.
That night the moon was down, and rain clouds sealed the sky and heat lightning nickered over the hills in
