the sheriff said to Clete.
Clete removed the matchstick from his mouth and flipped it into the wastebasket.
“No, I don’t mind. You might check the walls for bugs, though. You can never tell in a place like this,” he said.
The sheriff stared at Clete’s back as he went out the door, then turned back toward me. “What’s with that guy?” he asked.
“Everybody wants respect, Sheriff. There’re times Clete doesn’t get it. He was a good cop. Why not give credit where it’s due?”
The sheriff leaned forward in his chair.
“I learned in the Corps a good officer takes care of his people first. Everything else is second. But you don’t allow that to happen, Dave. You think you operate in your own time zone and zip code. And every time you get in trouble, your friend out there seems to be belly-deep in it with you.”
“Sorry to hear you feel that way.”
The sheriff stood up from his chair and pulled at his coat sleeves until they were even on his wrists. “You know why the world’s run by clerks? It’s because our best people flame out across the sky and never leave anything behind but a good light show. Is that what you want to be, Dave? A light show? Damn, if you don’t piss me off.”
After he was gone, Clete put ice in a water glass and inserted a straw in the ice and held the glass for me to drink.
“What happened out there?” he asked.
I told him of the systematic beating from head to foot, the contempt shown my person, the sense that I no longer possessed control over my life, that my confidence in myself, my ability to deal with the world, had always been the stuff of vanity.
Then I told him about the kiss, a male tongue rife with nicotine pushed inside my mouth, over the teeth, into the throat, his saliva like an obscene burn on my chin.
I looked up into Clete’s face. His green eyes were filled with a mixture of pity and the kind of latent thoughts that made his enemies back out of rooms when they recognized them.
“You’re not going to file on this guy?” he asked.
“No.”
“You feel ashamed because of what he did to you?” he asked.
When I didn’t reply, he walked to the window and looked at the trees out on the road and the moss on the limbs lifting in the wind.
“I can set it up. He’ll never know what hit him. I’ve got the throw-down, too, all numbers acid-burned and ground on an emery wheel,” he said.
“I’ll let you know.”
“Yeah, I bet,” he said, turning from the window. He picked his porkpie hat off the sill and slanted it on his brow. “I’ll see you this afternoon, Streak. But with or without you, that cocksucker is going to get blown out of his socks.”
Bootsie came through the door with a vase of flowers and a box of doughnuts. She had slept all night in a chair under a rough woolen blanket, but her face, even without makeup, was as pink and lovely as the morning.
“What’s going on?” she said, looking from me to Clete.
Two days later I left the hospital, limping on a cane, my head spinning with painkillers, one eye swollen almost shut, the side of my face inflated with a large yellow and purple bruise. It was Friday, a workday, but I did not go back to the office. Instead, I sat for a long time in the living room by myself, the blinds drawn, and listened to a strange whirring sound in my head. I found myself at the kitchen sink, first pouring a glass of iced tea and a second later opening the bottle of painkillers the doctor had given me. One or two to get back to normal can’t hurt, I thought.
Right.
I poured the pills down the drain, then ran water on top of them and dropped the bottle in the garbage sack under the counter.
Bootsie and I ate lunch on the redwood table under the mimosa tree in the backyard. It was shady and cool in the yard, and a gust of wind ruffled the periwinkles and bamboo that grew along the coulee, but there was no hint of rain in the air and dust blew in brown clouds out of my neighbor’s cane field.
Bootsie was talking about a college baseball game scheduled for that night in Lafayette. I tried to follow what she was saying, but the whirring sound began again in my head.
“Do you?” she said.
“Excuse me?” I said.