Kippy Jo Pickett had called me a giver of death. Her words were like spittle in the face, and I could not dismiss or forget them. L.Q. and I killed Mexican drug mules on the pretext they would otherwise never be made accountable for their crimes; but the truth was we killed them because we personally loathed what they were and what they did and we took enormous satisfaction in leaving them where they fell, a card twisted in the mouth, for their friends to find.
Then I saw L.Q. standing at the foot of my tester bed, his hat and pinstripe suit streaked with dust, his white shirt glowing radiantly in the dark. He inserted a gold toothpick in the corner of his mouth.
' Get rid of them thoughts. It was me got us down there, bud,' he said.
' I got something bad in me, L.Q. It's just like the time I caught one in the chest.'
'The trip across ain't bad. It's just like you and me splashing hell for breakfast through the Rio Grande. You blink and there's ole red-eye coming up in the east.'
'I'm afraid.'
' You ain't got to be. It'll happen for you. It's the one moment you ain't got to plan,' he said, then turned, as though distracted by something behind him, a gleam of light reflecting on his gold toothpick.
Temple Carrol came through the door and walked right through him and out the other side, so that his presence was now a black-purple silhouette around her body.
She sat on the edge of the bed and took both my hands in hers and looked into my face.
'I shouldn't have left you,' she said.
I wanted to answer but I couldn't. I could hear my teeth rattling in my jaws. She wiped my brow with her hand and touched my cheek with the back of her wrist.
'I'm going to get some water and some damp towels,' she said, and started to rise from the bed.
But I held both of her hands tightly in mine, and like a child I pulled her toward me, put my face in her breasts, slipped my arms around her sides, felt her hesitate momentarily, then lie down against me and place her hands on the back of my head and neck, one knee pointed across my thigh.
I could hear a cacophony of huge, thick-bodied birds outside the window and the flapping of wings that spread as wide as a man's arms.
The whirring sounds in Temple's chest were like those inside a seashell, like wind and salt tide blowing onto a beach. I held her against me while carrion birds drifted in a red sky behind my eyelids.
18
I awoke in the hospital the next afternoon. A hard yellow light filled the room and seemed to enamel the walls and furniture with a severity and coldness that was unrelated to the season. The inside of my throat was raw, as though it had been scraped by a metal tool, and my head reeled when I went into the bathroom.
I got back into bed and held a pillow across my eyes and tried to sleep but couldn't. A half hour later a tall physician in greens by the name of Tobin Voss came in and sat on the foot of my bed. His jaws were unshaved, his thick graying hair uncombed. He had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam but never spoke except in an oblique way of his experience there.
'You feel like somebody hit all over you with an ice mallet?' he asked.
'What's wrong with me?'
'Tainted food maybe. We pumped your stomach out. You don't remember it?'
'No.'
'We were a little worried about you for a while. Your girlfriend, the one who brought you in? She's quite a gal.'
'She's a private investigator who works for me.'
'I've got it. At two in the morning your P.I. is at your house. Sorry I had things confused,' he said. 'Is anybody mad at you?'
'What are you telling me. Doc?'
'I've seen Third World peasants eat rice from storage dumps we poisoned. You brought back some memories.'
He stood up from the bed and looked out the window at the trees below. The backs of his arms were covered with salt-and-pepper hair. When he turned back from the window he was smiling.
'Your private investigator? She pushed your gurney into the E.R. and put the fear of God in a couple of people. She's not looking for a job in midlevel management, is she?' he said.
I got home late that evening, light-headed and dehydrated, the inside of my eyelids like sandpaper. I went out to the barn and removed two vinyl sacks of garbage from the garbage cans and emptied them on a large piece of plywood and used a garden rake to separate out packaged and canned food from any that might have been tampered with.
Mixed in with the takeout food from a half dozen restaurants and stores were the remains of watermelon, cantaloupes, strawberries, and bananas I had bought at roadside stands. But local merchants and tailgate fruit vendors didn't lie in wait to poison their customers. Maybe Doc Voss just had too many shadows left in his mind from Vietnam, I thought.
Temple Carrol's car came up the drive and stopped. I raked all the decaying food I had bought in supermarkets into a pile and rebagged it, then leaned over and picked up an empty half-gallon milk carton.
'I went to the hospital this afternoon and you were asleep. When I came back you were checked out,' Temple said.
'I hear you shook them up in the E.R.,' I said, and sat down on the scrolled-iron, white-painted bench under the chinaberry tree, my head dizzy from bending over.
She wore a pair of soft boots and rust-colored jeans and a checkered tan shirt. Her eyes fixed on mine while she slipped a stick of gum in her mouth.
'You remember a lot?' she asked.
'Big blank.'
She nodded, her jaws chewing slowly.
'The doc says maybe you saved my life,' I said.
'Dull night. A girl has to do something for kicks.'
The sky was lavender and streaked with fire behind her head. She put her hands in her back pockets and lifted her chin slightly.
'I guess I remember pieces of things,' I said.
'Pieces? Wonderful choice,' she said.
I looked away from her stare. My face was cold and moist in the breeze. I could feel blood veins tightening in my head, my vision slip in and out of focus. 'You were there for me. That's what I remember, Temple,' I said.
'There for you? Wow,' she said, her face heating.
I couldn't think of an adequate response. I ran one hand through my hair and stared at the tops of my boots.
'What are you doing with that milk carton?' she said irritably.
I rubbed my thumb over a tiny burr on the side, then splayed open the top for Temple to look inside.
'I have the milk delivered. There's a puncture in it. Like the kind a hypodermic needle would make,' I said.
On Monday morning I met Tobin Voss in his office out by the four-lane. A half dozen books were opened on his desktop. On a glass-covered bookcase behind his chair was a framed color photograph of him and his flight crew in front of a Huey helicopter.
'Here's a copy of the paperwork from the lab. You ever hear of a World War II Japanese group called Unit 731?' he said.
'No.'
'They conducted experiments on Chinese prisoners in Manchuria. The subject probably doesn't come up often in out trade negotiations with Tokyo. Traces from your specimens show similarities to a couple of toxins they developed.'
