bullshit like that, but what the fuck is he talking about?” he said.
She bent over in the chair, her hands pressed on the sides of her head. “I’m going to be sick,” she said.
“Are you in a cult?”
“Cult? You idiot! Cult? No one can be that stupid.”
Her skin had turned as gray as a cadaver’s, her upper lip beaded with moisture. Then she sniffed at the air again, remembering the food on the stove. She ran into the kitchen and shut off the flame under a pan filled with blackened onions and scorched hamburger patties.
“Turn around and look at me,” Darrel said.
Instead, she swung the pan at his head. He blocked her arm and food that smelled like it had been dug out of an incinerator splattered all over the walls. But she wasn’t finished. She struck at his face and tried to claw his eyes, and he had to pin her arms against her sides and squeeze them against her torso in a bear hug until the tension made her breath seize in her chest and her spine pop.
He saw her mouth open, and he knew what was coming next. He released her, and she ran to the toilet and threw up, then went into the dry heaves on her knees, clenching the edge of the bowl, her back shaking, her skin the color of cardboard.
Darrel sat on the rim of the tub and flushed the toilet for her, then wet a towel and put it in her hand. “Why’d you rat-fuck me, Greta?” he said.
“Because I hate you,” she replied.
“For once you’re probably telling the truth,” he said, his eyes flat, concealing the recognition that her words could still wound him.
He leaned over and raised her shirt, exposing a dry, star-shaped swelling under her arm.
“That looks like a jungle ulcer. We used to get them in Nicaragua,” he said.
“Rah-rah for you,” she said.
“It’s just a skin problem, so now we got that out of the way. You’re going to wear a recorder into Karsten Mabus’s house, Greta.”
“No, I’m not.”
“I still don’t think you understand my status. I’m effectively canned, in large part because of you. That means we’re not using rule books here. You wear a recorder, or I put out the word you’re a federal informant. I also stoke up Wyatt Dixon and let him know who sent that collection of killers to his house. Want Wyatt coming around to see you again, Greta?”
“I have melanoma. It’s already gone into my organs. You can’t hurt me,” she said. She tried to hold her eyes on his, but they watered around the edges and she blinked and looked away.
“Good try,” he said.
Johnny American Horse’s window at St. Pat’s looked out upon a neighborhood of early-twentieth-century buildings and sidewalks shaded by dense rows of maple trees. The buildings were brick, solidly constructed, undiminished by time, but the porches were made of wood and the cracked paint on them gave the dwellings a look of weathered gentility. Blue-collar people and college students lived in the buildings, and on Thursday evenings during the summer many of them walked together down to the free concert and dance in the park by the river. The yards were green and cool, sometimes bordered by tulip beds, and the people who lived in the apartments planted vegetable gardens between the alleyways and the back porches, which were usually enclosed with latticework. If a man chose to live in town, this was a fine neighborhood to raise a family in, Johnny thought.
When he woke Tuesday morning he was handcuffed to the railing of the bed and could not see out the window into the street, but even before the soft edges of his sleep had disappeared from his mind, he knew there was something different about this day. He could hear the sweep of rain on the window glass-not a shower, either, but a hard, driving rain that ran off the eaves and through the guttering and over the hospital lawn into storm drains. Johnny could hear the wet sound of automobile tires on the slickness of the streets, a deep roll of thunder resonating in the hills, the thick flapping of an American flag someone had forgotten to take down from the hospital pole, and he knew the summer drought was broken, that the fires that threatened his ranch up on the Jocko were turning into steam.
He pushed the button for the nurse who would come to the room and then tell the U.S. marshal on the door that Johnny needed to be unhooked so he could use the bathroom. The rain clicked on the glass, and he could hear a freight train blowing somewhere west of town, perhaps heading into Alberton Gorge. After the marshal unsnapped the cuff on his wrist, Johnny stood by his bed and gazed out the window at the dark green sogginess of the maples on the street, the cars driving with their lights on in the middle of the day, and the columns of smoke rising from extinguished fires on the mountainsides. All that separated him from the outside world was a pane of glass and a thirty-foot drop onto a spongy square of flooded lawn.
He used the toilet, then waited for the marshal to hook him up again.
“It looks like you’re going to Fort Lewis tomorrow. Sorry to lose you, Johnny. You play a mean game of checkers,” the marshal said.
He was a heavyset, prematurely balding man named Tim, who had a small Irish mouth and big hands, and was evidently addicted to the candy bars he carried in his pockets as a surrogate for the booze he was trying to get rid of at Twelve-Step meetings.
“Who told you that about Fort Lewis?” Johnny asked, lying back on the bed, the handcuff chain pulling tight on his wrist.
“Forget I mentioned it. That’s true, you have the DSC from Operation Desert Storm?”
“Yeah, you want it?”
“Shouldn’t kid like that,” Tim said.
A floral delivery man tapped on the door and Tim let him in. The delivery man started to set a vase of cut flowers on the table by Johnny’s bed. “Let me see that first,” Tim said.
Tim peeled back the decorative foil wrapped around the vase, shifted the flower stems around in the water, and examined the greeting card inside the small envelope attached with a paper clip to the foil. Then he set the vase down on the table. “Looks like somebody sent you a nice bouquet. Can I ask you something?” he said.
“Sure,” Johnny said.
“How’d you get messed up like this?”
“It was easy. I was me,” Johnny said.
“You sound like you might be a Twelve-Step guy yourself.”
“I’m not,” Johnny replied.
As the marshal and the nurse left the room, Johnny glanced through the opened door and saw a group of painters pass by, carrying buckets, tarps, ladders, and brushes, all of them dressed in paint-flecked caps and coveralls. The last man in the group was an Indian from the res. His eyes, as unreadable as obsidian, swept across Johnny, then the door closed.
Johnny removed the card from the envelope on the flower vase and opened it. It read:
They still won’t let me visit you, but look across the street at noon and you’ll see your gal with the 8:30 blues. We’re going to beat this, baby.
Love, A.
Johnny stared at the paper clip on the envelope, then looked at the glass in the window that separated him from the outside world. He looked at the glass a long time, then gave up whatever thoughts were on his mind and ate the breakfast an orderly brought in on a tray. At eleven-thirty, just before he was scheduled to be cuffed to a wheelchair and rolled down the corridor for X-rays, Johnny slipped the paper clip into his mouth between his gum and cheek.
The rain had turned to hail, and it bounced on the windowsill as brightly as mothballs against the grayness of the day. When Johnny closed his eyes and listened to the hail and the roll of thunder in the hills, he imagined a vast landscape where the mesas rose into steel-colored stormheads forked with lightning while down below the hooves of red ponies shook the earth. At this moment, for no reason that made logical sense, he knew his dreams were real and not fantasies and that all the gifts of creation still awaited him, were still his, as tangible as a woman’s smile on the far side of a street on a rainy day.
That morning I left the office and went home, unable to work, concentrate, or think on any subject except the telephone threat that had been made against Temple and the child she was carrying. I had now talked to the sheriff’s office, Fay Harback, and the FBI agent Francis Broussard and had gotten nowhere. Lucas had been set up
