I stood at the window and looked out at the treetops and the old brick apartment houses along the streets. “Why would anyone want to pay you a hundred grand?” I said, my back turned to Charlie Ruggles.
“Considering what’s on the table, that ain’t much to ask,” he replied.
The personality and mind-set of men and women like Charlie Ruggles never changed, I thought. They believe their own experience and knowledge of events are of indispensable value and importance to others. The fact that their own lives are marked by failure of every kind, that their rodent’s-eye view of the world is repellent to any normal person, is totally lost upon them. “Hey, did you hear me?” he asked.
“I don’t have one hundred grand. Neither does my client. If we did, we wouldn’t give it to you,” I replied.
“Your client knows the people he can get it from. They’ll pay him just to go away.”
“I don’t want to offend you, Ruggles, but are you retarded?”
His facial expression remained dead, but his eyes were imbued with a mindless, liquid malevolence that I had seen only in condemned sociopaths who no longer had anything to lose. “Step over here and I’ll whisper a secret in your ear. Come on, don’t be afraid. You’re safe with me. I just want to tell you about a couple of liberal lawyers who got in my face.”
He rubbed his tattoos with the balls of his fingers and waited for me to speak. I walked close to his bed.
“What do you think hell’s going to be like?” I asked.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Say what you said again.”
“I’ll give you something else to think about instead. You and your bud were armed with a semiautomatic and a cut-down double barrel, but an Indian with a knife and tomahawk cleaned your clock and didn’t get a scratch on him. If I were you, I’d stick to beating up old people and hookers.”
I could feel his eyes burrowing into my neck as I left the room.
On the way to my car I passed the sheriff’s detective, Darrel McComb. I had used the words “racist” and “thug” when talking about McComb to the district attorney, Fay Harback. Like most slurs, the words were simplistic and inadequate and probably revealed more about me than they did about McComb, namely, my inability to think clearly about men of his background.
The truth was he didn’t have a background. He came from the hinterland somewhere, perhaps Nebraska or Kansas, a green-gold place of wheat and cornfields and North European churches we do not associate with the Darrel McCombs of the world. He was big, with farm-boy hands, his head crew-cut, his face full of bone. He had been a crop duster, an M.P. in the Army, and later had worked as an investigator for CID.
But there were rumors about Darrel: He’d been part of the dirty war in Argentina and connected up with intelligence operations in Nicaragua and El Salvador; he’d run cocaine for the Contras into the ghettos of the West Coast; he was an honest-to-God war hero and Air America pilot who had been shot down twice in Laos. And, lastly, he was just a dumb misogynistic flatfoot with delusions of grandeur.
As a sheriff’s detective, he operated on the fine edges of restraint, never quite crossing lines but always leaving others with the impression of where he stood on race, university peace activists, and handling criminals.
Ask Darrel McComb a question about trout fishing while he was sitting in the barber’s chair, he’d talk the calendar off the wall. Ask him where he lived twenty years ago, Darrel McComb would only smile.
“I hear your man is on the street,” he said.
“Which man is that, Darrel?”
“Wyatt Dixon,” he said, feeding a stick of gum into his mouth, his eyes focused down the sidewalk.
“Fact is, he was out at my house. I shot at him a couple of times. Did he check in with you on that?”
McComb’s eyes came back on mine. “Your aim must not be too good. I just saw him eating at Stockman’s.”
“Nice seeing you, Darrel. You try to jump Johnny American Horse over the hurdles again, I’ll be seeing a lot more of you.”
I heard him laugh to himself as I walked away.
Temple and I and my son, Lucas, had moved to western Montana from Texas only two years before. But moving to Montana marked more than a geographic change in a person’s life. The mountains and rivers of the northern Rockies are the last of an unspoiled America. To live inside a stretch of country that still bears similarities to the way the earth looked before the Industrial Age humbles a person in a fashion that is hard to convey to outsiders. The summer light rises high into the sky and stays there until after 10 P.M.; the stones in a river quake with sound in the darkness, giving the lie to the notion that matter does not possess a soul; the sunset on the mountains becomes like electrified blood, so intense in its burning on the earth’s rim even an unbeliever is tempted to think of it as a metaphysical testimony to the passion of Christ.
But I did not need the grandeur of the Northwest to make me dwell upon spiritual presences. The friend I’d slain, L. Q. Navarro, was never far from my sight, regardless of where I happened to be. Sometimes he stood behind me while I groomed our horses in the barn, or perhaps he walked past a window in the starlight, still wearing the ash-gray Stetson, pin-striped suit, and boots and spurs he had died in.
L.Q. had an opinion on everything. Usually I didn’t listen to him. Most of the time I wished I had.
Don’t stick a burr in that McComb fellow’s shoe, he said to me that night as I was loading a wheelbarrow in the barn and hauling it out to our compost pile.
He started it, I replied.
That’s what we’d always tell ourselves before we scrambled somebody’s eggs.
I don’t need this, L.Q.
You should have parked one between Wyatt Dixon’s eyes and put a throw-down on him. No serial numbers, no prints but his own.
Would you give it a rest? I said.
He climbed up on the stall and sat on the top slat. He had a black mustache and his hair grew in black locks on the back of his neck; his shirt glowed as brightly as snow in moonlight. This American Horse business is starting to develop a federal odor, he said.
You were always a closet states’-righter, L.Q. You just never accepted it. Now shut up.
When I looked up, the stall was empty. From up the slope I could hear an owl screeching in the trees.
I dumped the wheelbarrow on the compost pile just as the phone rang in the house. The message machine didn’t click on and the phone was still ringing when I entered the kitchen. For some reason I thought it might be L.Q. It wasn’t.
“What do you want, Johnny?” I asked.
He was clearly drunk. In the background I could hear country music and loud voices. “Come have a drink with me and Amber,” he said.
“Don’t make me get you out of jail,” I replied.
I heard someone pull the phone from his hand. “Drag your butt down here, you wet blanket,” Amber’s voice said.
“Thanks for the call,” I said, and hung up.
Later, in the early hours of Sunday morning, a diminutive man, one for whom joy was an emotion he experienced only in stealing it from others, lay in the semidarkness of his hospital room, the maples outside alive with wind, the mountains to the east rounded softly like a woman’s breasts, the clouds veined with lightning.
The Demerol flowing out of the IV into his finger was the best dope he’d ever had. It made him neither high nor low but instead created a neutral space inside him that was like warm water in a stone pool or the fleeting sense of tranquillity he experienced after sexual intercourse. He paid little attention to the deputy who looked in on him occasionally or the nurses who came and went or a solitary figure in greens who gazed benignly at him out of the shadows, then reached down to puff up his pillow.
In fact, the Demerol made Charlie Ruggles feel so good about his situation he was sure the right people would once again show up in his life, as they always did, and set matters straight. It had started to rain, a warm, beautiful, steady rain that pattered on the tops of the maple trees. He could not remember a night that had been as perfect in its combination of colors and sensations. When he turned his head toward the figure in greens, the coolness of the pillow being placed across his face made him think of a woman’s kiss, perhaps from years ago, although in truth he did not recall any woman whose touch had been this cool and gentle.
