He pushed down the door handle and started to get out, his right hand clutching the 1892 Winchester. His sheathed bowie knife rested on the dashboard. She held him by the arm. “We have a special thing between us,” she said. “Don’t let this man take that away.”
“I’m gonna fix it so he don’t ever hurt nobody again, Bertha. What happens after that ain’t in my hands.”
“They’ll crush us, Wyatt. You know why? Because you’re too good for them. They hate and fear a brave man. You don’t know you’re essentially good, so you keep giving away your power.”
The front door of the cabin opened. Love Younger stood in the doorway, squinting into the brilliance of the pickup’s high beams. “Begone, Wyatt Dixon,” he called out, his teeth baring in the headlights.
Wyatt was no longer listening to the thespian rhetoric of Love Younger. Bertha Phelps reached up on the dashboard and clutched his bowie knife. The blade was thick across the top and eleven inches long, the nickel-plated guard bigger than her cupped hand. “You stay here. Don’t you dare try to stop me,” she said.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Saving you from yourself. Paying a debt. Bringing judgment on the wicked. Call it anything you want. But it’s going to be over.”
She climbed out of the cab, her big rump sliding off the seat, carrying her cloud of perfume with her, the blade still sheathed in its beaded Indian scabbard.
LOVE YOUNGER RAISED his hand against the glare of the headlights. His eyes were burning, his tear ducts streaming. He brushed at his cheeks with the back of his wrist, almost like a child recovering from an unfair reprimand. The air seemed lit with an oily iridescence that he could reach out and touch. “Who comes there?” he said, feeling like one of the grandiose characters he discovered in the medieval romances carried to the hollow by the bookmobile.
He smelled her before he saw her. The odor made him think of flowers on a warm night. Where had he smelled it before? Down south somewhere, perhaps in the tidewater country, a place where moss-hung oaks and palm trees both grew in profusion and the glory of a failed nation clinked and popped on a flagpole at every sunrise. Then he saw her and the reality that she represented.
He did not know who she was, but he quickly recognized the rage that lived in her face. He had seen it many times over the years and factored it in as part of the long gloomy march from Eden into the land of Canaan. Women were cursed with childbearing and scullery and the back of a man’s hand and the wanton breath of a drunkard against the cheek in the middle of the night. Until modern times, many of them died while giving birth, or were haggard and exhausted at forty, with tattered memories of the expectations they had brought to their beds on their wedding night. He had always considered it their misfortune and none of his own.
&nb
sp; She flung the sheath off the knife she held in her right hand, the blade as bright and honed as an Arthurian sword pulled from stone.
“You corrupted and destroyed my brother,” she said. “His death is on you, not on the serial killer. Now you’re fixing to take my man.”
“Your brother? What brother?” he said. In his confusion, he tried to answer his own question. The faceless men he had destroyed were too numerous to count. He saw the knife blade rise to eye level, out of the headlights’ glare, and wondered how someone he had never met could hate him so much.
“Your dress is purple,” he said.
She drove the knife into his chest. He felt its point reach deep inside him, cutting through tendon and muscle, searching out the source of the blood that pounded in his temples and wrists when he was angered, now probing the outer edges of the heart, the steel tip going deeper each time the muscle swelled and receded. Her face was no more than three inches from his, her mouth a tight seam, her eyes burrowing into his, as she forced the knife deeper inside, pinching off the flow of light into his brain, stilling the fury and mire of veins and heart’s blood that, for a lifetime, had fed his thoughts and given him the libidinal power of a lion and allowed him to build a business empire that thrilled him as would the jingle of sabers and spurs.
He felt himself slip off her knife blade and fall backward through the open door of the cabin. He could see the Colt revolver hanging on the back of the wicker chair and wondered if he could crawl across the floor and reach up to the holster and pull it loose and raise it and cock the hammer in a last effort to save his life.
“What do you care if I wear purple?” she asked.
It befits royalty and should be worn even by the king’s executioner, he tried to say. The words would not leave his throat.
He rolled on his side and tried to crawl toward the chair. Or was he watching himself and the woman from someplace in the rafters, as though he had left his body? He couldn’t be sure. He felt her tangle her fingers in his hair and pull his head back, stretching his throat tight, her shadow falling across him like a headsman’s.
“Where do you think you’re going, Buster Brown?” she said. “I’m not through with you. This is for Bill Pepper.”
AFTER MY ABORTED conversation with the sheriff, I asked Albert for permission to borrow his M-1.
“What for?” he asked.
“There’s a chance we can find Surrette. Gretchen thinks he might be holed up in a place down by the water.”
“The lake is twenty-four miles long,” he said.
“I won’t be able to sleep tonight, thinking about the two girls he took from the minister’s house.”
He handed me the key to one of the gun cabinets in the hallway. “There’s a bandolier full of clips in the drawer under the glass doors. Dave?”
“Yes?”
“Know the worst thing about age? You start thinking you’ve seen it all, no different from the way you looked at the world when you were seventeen. All this started with me. I brought Surrette here.”