“Don’t you be telling him these things,” Bertha said. “Who are you to come here and do this? You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Gretchen looked at the heavyset woman, then back at Wyatt Dixon. “Do you know any reason the Younger family might hold a grudge against you? Caspian Younger in particular?”
“I could say their kind don’t like working people, and I got in their face. But that ain’t it.”
“Miss, please leave,” Bertha said.
“It’s all right,” Wyatt said. “Miss Gretchen is just doing what she thinks is right. He was using the name Geta Noonen when he grabbed the waitress.”
“How do you know this?” Gretchen asked.
“I did some investigating on my own.”
“Have you told anyone?”
“The state of Montana shot my head full of electricity. You think they’re gonna ask me for advice in catching serial killers? Besides, that ain’t what he is.”
“He’s the beast in the Bible?”
“No, he’s probably an acolyte, a lesser angel in the bunch that got thrown down to hell.”
“I’ve had all this that I can listen to,” Bertha said, getting up from the table. “You get out of here and leave us alone.”
“I’m sorry for upsetting you,” Gretchen said.
“Love Younger come out to my place and fished off my bank,” Wyatt said. “He asked about my folks. He asked if I was part Indian. What the hell would he care about my folks?”
“Watch your back, Wyatt. Good-bye, Ms. Phelps,” Gretchen said.
Wyatt watched Gretchen walk through a field of parked cars, her red shirt and chestnut hair seeming to blur and merge with the molten intensity of the sun. He pushed aside his food and removed a whetstone and a large sheathed bowie knife from a rucksack by his foot. The knife had a white handle and a nickel-plated guard. He began sliding the blade up and down the length of the whetstone, his eyes fixed on a spot three inches in front of his face.
“Why are you doing that?” Bertha asked.
“I’m gonna wear it in the snake dance.”
“Why are you sharpening it?”
“I used to do this when I was a little boy. I’d take my bicycle way out in the woods, along with my pocketknife and a piece of soap rock I dug from a riverbed. That’s when I learned not everybody has the same clock. I’d disappear and go somewhere I wouldn’t have no memory of later, then come back and still be sharpening my pocketknife.”
“You mustn’t talk about these things anymore,” she said. “We need to go on a trip, maybe to Denver. We could stay at the Brown Palace. The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy stayed there. Did you know that?”
“I think some things are starting to catch up with me, Bertha. In my dreams, there’s something I ain’t supposed to see. I got a feeling what it is.”
“Don’t talk about it. Let go of the past.”
“Something happened when I was about fifteen. I can almost see it, like it’s hiding right around a corner. You know what all this is about?”
“No, and I don’t want to hear it,” she said, her voice starting to break.
“I picked the wrong goddamn parents,” he said. “Either that or they picked the wrong kid to use a horse quirt on.”
THE ROOM REVEREND Geta Noonen had rented was located on the second floor of an old frame house at the far end of the hollow, below a slit in the mountains through which he could see the evening star from his window. Geta, as his host family called him, had a backstairs entrance and his own bathroom with an old-fashioned claw-footed bathtub. There was a nostalgic element about his new home, a hint of the agrarian Midwest and the immigrant farm families who plowed the prairies and planted the land with Russian wheat. Everything about the house reminded him of the world in which he had grown up: the glider on the front porch, the linoleum floor in the bathroom, the freeze cracks in the paint around the window, the stamped tin ceiling, a stovepipe hole in the wall patched with an aluminum pie plate. The upstairs echoed with the sounds of the teenage girls running through the hallways, slamming doors, giggling about the boys who called them on the phone, not unlike the way his sisters had carried on during adolescence. Geta thought of all these things with great fondness until he began to remember other things that had occurred in the foster home west of Omaha, a house in which one room always stayed locked and no one ever asked what was beyond the door.
It was not a time to reflect upon these matters. The world moved on and so did he. As he soaked in the tub, his chin barely above the gray patina of soap that covered the surface, he could see the sun setting beyond trees that grew out of the rocks, its orange glow as bright as a burnished shield hung on a castle wall. No, it was not a shield, he told himself. It was a celestial talisman, a source of enormous natural heat and energy that was about to be transferred into the hands of a man the world had too long taken for granted.
Many a night he had studied the heavens through a cell window and had seen his destiny as clearly as he saw the Milky Way, a shower of white glass on black velvet trailing into infinity, not unlike the magical light that he sometimes felt radiating from his palms.
The greatest gift he possessed and that others did not was recognition. He saw a universe that was not expanding but contracting, a vortex at the center sucking all of creation into its maw. The goal of the physical universe was the reverse of what everyone thought. Its goal was annihilation. What could equal nothingness in terms of perfection? Those who could accept such conclusions became the captains of their souls, the masters of their fate, the puppeteers who looked down from above at the stick figures jiggling on the ends of strings.