“Pack rats got into my file drawer. These grade sheets are useless,” he said. “I can’t find this guy’s name.”
I didn’t want to ask him how he never noticed that pack rats were living in his office. “What are you going to do?” I said.
“Well, I can’t give him an A because he turned the work in eleven years later. But he probably deserves at least a B, so that’s what he’s going to get.”
“I’m sorry for setting a fire in the cave,” I said.
“That’s all right. Your heart was in the right place. I just worry about you sometimes.”
Don’t buy into Albert’s doodah and get into it with him, I thought.
“There’s a lesson you never learned,” he said. “Do you remember the last line of dialogue Harry Morgan speaks in To Have and Have Not?”
“Not offhand.”
“Harry is shot up real bad on his boat and dying and can hardly talk, and he says, ‘No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.’ ”
“You’re saying I’m a loner?”
“Inside you are. You have people around you, and they mean a lot to you, but inside you’re always by yourself.”
“You’ve been a loner since you were a kid,” I said.
“I’ve been alone since Opal died, but not before. Don’t ever make yourself alone, Dave. That’s the big lesson. When you start to see evil forces at work in the world, you give them power they don’t have.”
I was sitting in a leather swivel chair by his bookcases. I looked at my shoes and wasn’t sure what I should say. Albert had chain-ganged on the hard road in Florida. I didn’t want to talk down to him. But he made me mad. “I saw GIs who had been hanged in trees and skinned alive. I had a marine friend from Georgia, a sergeant, who went crazy with remorse over what he saw some other guys do to a Vietnamese girl in a ville they trashed. You want to know what they did?”
“No, I don’t.”
I told him anyway and saw him swallow and his eyes recede with a look of sorrow that would not go away easily. “You know that story to be true?” he asked.
“The guy who told it to me killed himself. Evil isn’t an abstraction,” I said.
“None of those things would have happened if we hadn’t taken on the neocolonial policies of the French and the British.”
“This isn’t politics. Asa Surrette is out there. He’s been on your property, and he tried to kill Alafair and Gretchen. How did he survive a head-on crash between a prison van and a tanker truck filled with gasoline?”
He shook his head. “I’m old, and I live by myself in a house where I hear my wife’s voice talking to me. Sometimes I think it’s my imagination, sometimes not. Sometimes I want to unlock my gun cabinet and join her. I don’t believe in the devil, and I don’t believe in Asa Surrette. The evil in our lives comes from men’s greed, and the manifestation of that greed is in the corporations that cause the wars.”
I loved Albert and felt bad for him. I hadn’t meant to hurt him or remind him of the loss of his wife or call up the feelings of loneliness and mortality that beset all of us when we live longer than perhaps we should. A window was open, and the wind wa
s blowing strands of his white hair on his forehead. The evening was warm and the trees on the hillside were glowing in the sunset, and there was something about the moment that made me think of traditional America and lighted houses throughout the land and family people whose only goal was to lead good lives and be with one another. As I looked at Albert’s broad face and wide-set eyes and purposeful gaze, I thought of the ragtag army of Anglo-Scotch soldiers who formed up at Breed’s Hill outside Boston in 1775. I realized there was someone else Albert resembled, a man who was a collector of historical firearms and who represented everything Albert despised. I kept my opinion to myself and did not tell Albert how much he reminded me of Love Younger.
THE WEST END of Broadway in Missoula was a study in contradictions. The vista was lovely. The mountains were mauve and purple in the sunset, the river wide and braided over the rocks and rimmed along the banks with willows and cottonwoods. The street was lined on either side with bars, liquor stores, casinos, and run-down independent motels. Saturday-night knifings were not unusual; neither were sexual assaults. If you wanted to get falling-down drunk, laid and dosed with the clap, shanked or shot or just beat up, arrested, and jailed, this was the place to do it.
Tony Zappa drove around to the side of a motel by the river’s edge and parked in a handicap zone not far from a green door with a tin numeral nailed on it. He took off his gloves and looked up and down the street at the bars and casinos that had turned on their neon signs, then gazed through the window of Gretchen’s pickup at the rolled leather interior and the polished woodwork and high-tech gauges on the dashboard. He looked at the heavy tread on the tires and the chrome on the radiator and the moon hubcaps and the Frenched headlights and the waxed three-layer black paint job, all of which were high-end modifications that cost high-end money.
He tapped his gloves in his palm and went into the office. The clerk was a kid with zits on his forehead and thin arms wrapped with tattoos of snakes and skulls and bleeding daggers. He was glued to the screen of his laptop. On it, a naked man and woman were in full-body inverted congress.
“You know the broad in room nine?” Zappa said.
“She’s a guest.”
“I know she’s a guest. What’s her story?”
“How the fuck should I know?” the clerk replied.
“I can see this is a class joint, the kind that protects its guests’ privacy. You accept food stamps?”