“It’s time to back off, partner,” I said, and smiled again.
“And it don’t matter you been warned. You get in people’s face, you got no respect for an old man, you got no respect for people’s privacy. You’re a jitterbird, man.” His three stiffened fingers tapped against my chest again, this time harder. “You get off hanging around swinging dicks, ’cause you got nothing going on your own.”
His face came closer to mine and he poked me in the chest again. The looped scar under his right eye looked like a flattened piece of string on his skin. I slipped my hands into the back pockets of my khakis, as a third-base coach might, and looked off at the sunlight winking through the pine trees.
“Let me run something by you, Sal,” I said. “Did you ever ask yourself why you have a certain kind of people hanging around you? Hired help, rummy musicians, beachboys with rut for brains. Do you think it’s just an accident that everybody around you is a gumball? When’s the last time somebody told you you were full of shit?”
I could hear his breathing.
“You got a death wish, man. You got something wrong with you,” he said.
“Let’s face it, Sal. I’m not the guy with the electronic gate on my driveway. You think the Fuller Brush man is going to whack you out?”
He wet his lips to speak again, then suddenly one side of his face tightened and he swung at my head. I ducked sideways and felt a ring graze across my ear and scalp. Then I hooked him, hard, between the mouth and the nose. His head snapped back, and his long hair collapsed over his ears. Then he came at me, swinging wildly with both fists, the way an enraged child would. Before I could hit him squarely again, he locked both arms around me, grunting, wheezing in my ear; I could smell his hair tonic and deodorant and the reefer smoke in his clothes. Then he released one of his arms, bent his knees, and swung at my phallus.
But his aim was not as good as his design. He hit me inside the thigh, and I brought my elbow into his nose, felt it break like a chicken bone, saw the shock and pain in his eyes just before I hit him again, this time in the mouth. He bounced off the van’s side panel, and I hit him hard in the face again. He was trying to raise his hands in front of him, but it did him no good. I heard the back of his head bounce off the metal again, saw the genuine terror in his eyes, saw his blood whipped across the glass bubble in the panel, felt my fists hit him so hard that his face went out of round.
Then Clete was between us, his revolver drawn, one arm held out stiffly toward me, his eyes big and glaring.
“Back away, Dave! I’ll shoot you in the foot! I swear to God I will!” he said.
On the edge of my vision I could see cars stopped on the road in each direction. Clete was breathing through his mouth, his eyes riveted on mine. Sally Dio had both of his hands pressed to his face. His fingers were red in the sunlight through the trees. In the distance I heard a police siren. I felt the heat go out of my chest the way a hot-eyed, hook-beaked raven would fly out of a cage.
“Sure,” I said.
“I mean it, all the way across the road,” he said.
I held up my palms.
“No problem,” I said. “Don’t you want me to move my truck, though? We’re blocking a lot of traffic.”
I saw the sun-bleached boy and the girl walk Sally Dio around to the other side of the van. A sheriff’s car was driving around the traffic jam on the edge of the road. Cletus put his revolver back in his nylon shoulder holster.
“You crazy sonofabitch,” he said.
The holding cell in the county jail was white and small, and the barred door gave onto a small office area where two khaki-uniformed deputies did their paperwork. The cell contained nothing to sit or sleep on but a narrow wood bench that was bolted into the back wall, and no plumbing except a yellow-streaked drain in the center of the cement floor. I had already used the phone to call the babysitter in Missoula to tell her that I would probably not be home that night.
One of the deputies was a big Indian with a plug of chewing tobacco buttoned down tightly in his shirt pocket. He bent over a cuspidor by the side of his desk and spit in it. He had come into the office only a few minutes earlier.
“They already told you Dio’s not pressing charges?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“So it’s just a disorderly conduct charge. Your bond’s a hundred bucks.”
“I don’t have it.”
“Write a check.”
“I don’t have one.”
“You want to use the phone again?”
“I don’t know anyone I can call.”
“Look, guilty court’s not for two days.”
“There’s nothing I can do about it, podna.”