have happened if it hadn’t been for men like Rocky and himself, would it?
Let the peace marchers and the bunny huggers light candles and sing their hymns, he thought. They would never be players. This was a great country. Guys like Rocky gave up their lives so the jackoff crowd could revel in their own ignorance. In Cuba they’d be diced pork inside somebody’s taco.
But the splenetic nature of his thoughts brought him little peace. What was really on his mind? he asked himself, sitting on the tile stoop in the steam room, his skin threaded with sweat. For an answer he only had to glance down at the erection under his towel.
Amber Finley.
He thought about her all the time, in ways he had never thought about a woman. In fact, women had never been an issue in his life. He went to bed with them occasionally and had even been married for a few months. An Army psychiatrist had once told him he was probably homoerotic, a categorization that oddly enough didn’t offend him. But the sight of Amber Finley filled his head with images and sounds that beset him like a crown of thorns, leaving him sleepless at night and throbbing in the morning.
What was it that attracted or bothered him most about her? The blueness and luminosity of her eyes? Her heart-shaped face? Or the throaty quality of her laugh and the irreverence in her speech? Perhaps the perfect quality of her skin, her education and intelligence and the fact she spent it like coin in lowlife bars with people like Johnny American Horse?
No, it was all of it. Amber Finley could walk down a street and make his innards drain like water.
He shouldn’t have lost it with that Indian kid. American Horse was going down anyway; he might even ride the needle for the gig on Ruggles. Why did Darrel have to make a martyr of him and probably earn himself a civil rights beef in the bargain? He’d flushed himself good with Amber, and acquired a dirty jacket on top of it.
He showered, dressed, and ate supper by himself in a workingmen’s cafe on Front Street. The evening was warm, the color of the sky as soft as lilacs, the flooded willows on the riverbanks clattering with birds. There were many places he could go-a movie, a concert in the park, a minor league baseball game, a bar where cops drank and he sometimes joined them with a soda and sliced lime. But Darrel had no doubt where he would end up as soon as the sun began to sink, and that thought more than any other filled him with an abiding shame.
Amber lived with her widower father, the senator, up Rattlesnake Creek, in a two-story home built on a slope above a sepia-tinted stream. Darrel parked his car and walked through a woods that looked down on the back of the house, the hot tub on the deck, and the lawn where Amber’s yoga class met on Tuesday evenings. His binoculars were Russian Army issue, the magnification amazing. He could see the down on her cheeks, the shine on the tops of her breasts, the way she breathed through her mouth, as though the air were cold and she were warming it before it entered her lungs. No woman had the right to be that desirable.
Was this what people called midlife crisis?
A black Mercury pulled to the front of the house, and two men and a woman got out and were greeted at the door by the senator. The woman looked familiar, but Darrel could not be sure where he had seen her. Then he heard a noise behind him.
A man in a cowboy hat and jeans was sitting on a big, flat, lichen-stained rock, shaving a stick with the six- inch blade of an opened bone-handled knife. Even though there was a chill in the air, the man’s corduroy shirtsleeves were rolled, exposing biceps that were as big as grapefruit.
“Late for bird-watching, ain’t it?” the man said, without looking up.
Think, Darrel told himself. He opened his badge holder. “I don’t know who the hell you are, but you’re interfering in a police surveillance. That means haul your ass out of here, pal,” he said.
The man closed the knife in his palm and stuck it in his back pocket. He picked a piece of wet matter off his lip and looked at it. “You don’t ’member me?” he asked.
“No.”
The man removed his hat and the afterglow of the sun fell through the trees on the paleness of his brow and the moral vacuity in his eyes, the chiseled, lifeless features of his face. “ ’Member me now?” he asked.
“Maybe,” Darrel said.
“I want in on it,” the man said.
“On what?”
“Chance to serve the red, white, and blue, sir. You want serious work done, I’m your huckleberry.”
“Is that right? Well, I think you’re crazy. I think your name is Wyatt Dixon and you’re about to get yourself put back in a cage.”
Wyatt fitted his hat back on and pushed himself up from the rock, advancing toward Darrel so quickly Darrel’s hand went inside his coat. Then he realized Wyatt Dixon was not even looking at him but instead was unzipping his jeans.
“Drunk a horse tank of lemonade this afternoon. Ah, that’s better,” he said, urinating in a bright arc down the side of the hill.
Wyatt’s voice was loud and had obviously carried down into the Finleys’ yard. Amber went into the house and came back out the sliding glass door with her father, both of them now staring up the hill. Don’t lose control. Handle this right, Darrel told himself. Never surrender the situation to perps.
He turned on Wyatt Dixon. “You’re in a shitload of trouble, boy. Wait right here till I get back,” he said.
Darrel went hurriedly down the incline, stepped across a series of rocks that spanned the stream at the bottom, and entered Amber Finley’s backyard, while she and her father and their guests stared at him in dismay. His shield was open in his hand.
“I’m Detective Darrel McComb, Senator. I was following an ex-convict by the name of Wyatt Dixon. He seems to have taken an interest in your house,” he said.
“Why would he be interested in us?” Romulus Finley asked.
“He was in Deer Lodge for a homicide. But unfortunately he’s out,” Darrel said.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“This man beat Johnny American Horse with a blackjack,” Amber said.
“I see,” Romulus said.
“I’ve intruded on you, but I thought you should know, I mean about this fellow up in the trees,” Darrel said. He folded his badge holder and put it away, glad to have something to occupy his hands.
“I appreciate your concern. But we’re not real worried about this,” Romulus said.
The two men and the woman who had arrived in the Mercury were on the patio now, watching Darrel as though he were part of a skit. Where had he seen the woman? Somewhere down in the Bitterroot Valley? She wore a suit and was auburn-haired and attractive in a masculine way. Her eyes seemed to look directly into his.
“I guess I’ll go. I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” Darrel said.
“It’s no problem,” Romulus said.
Darrel recrossed the stream and climbed the incline back into the woods, wondering if his story had been plausible at all or if he had looked as ridiculous as he felt.
But at least Wyatt Dixon was gone. From the shadows Darrel looked back down into the yard of Amber Finley. The auburn-haired woman dressed in the suit was standing on the deck, steam rising from the hot tub behind her. He thought she was gazing up at the treeline where he stood, perhaps wondering where she had met or seen him. Then he realized she was watching a child launch a kite into the sunset, and his presence in the Finleys’ backyard had been of no more consequence to those gathered there than his absence.
A white-tailed doe bolted out of the trees and thumped across the sod and down a gully. The woods felt dark and cold, the air heavy with gas, more like autumn than spring. Darrel struck the trunk of a larch with the heel of his hand, hard, shaking needles out of the branches, cursing the quiet desperation of his life.
Amber called me at the office early the next morning and told me of Darrel McComb’s bizarre behavior at her house. “He was lying. He’s a voyeur,” she said.
“He told you he was following a man named Dixon?”
“Right. Who’s this guy Dixon, anyway?”
“A guy who left his pancakes on the stove too long.” I glanced out the window.
“What’s he want with us?” she asked.
“I’ll let you know. He’s looking through my window right now.”
After I hung up, I opened my door and went into the reception area just as Wyatt came through the front door. He wore a purple-striped western shirt with scarlet garters on the sleeves. The bottoms of his jeans were
