“Okay, I won’t.”
“Private in what way?” she said.
“Will you marry me?”
She closed her eyes, then opened them again. “You ask me that just after we visited somebody who had her head caved in?”
“That’s the point. Clocks don’t wait on people.”
Her hand rested on the handle of the passenger door. She looked drunk. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Think it over. Take all the time you want. A day or two.”
“You’re the weirdest person on the planet.”
“In what way?”
She pressed her palms to both sides of her head. I guess I had that effect on people sometimes.
* * *
WHEN I DROPPED her off for work, she still hadn’t answered my question. The sun was going down, the hamburger joint glowing with red-and-yellow neon in the drizzle. She opened the door to get out, a newspaper over her head. I hate to admit this, but I wanted to cry. “We’ll have to talk later,” she said. “Okay?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I just can’t think all this through right now.”
“Roger that,” I said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You’re going to pick me up?” she said.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
She shut the door and ran through a puddle into the building, splashing her tacky orange-and-black uniform. I started the car and turned on the wipers. I could see her squaring her cap and wiping her face with a paper towel behind the counter. I wondered how many people were aware how hard she worked to earn the little she had. I drove away into the darkness, the wipers slapping back and forth, my high beams lighting up an empty firehouse, a low-rent saloon with blacked-out windows, a shelter for vagrants vandalized with graffiti, the sidewalk littered with trash.
I knew my thoughts were going to a bad pl
ace. There is a strange phenomenon among human beings to which most of us are susceptible. It’s an affliction that contaminates our vision of the world and invades the heart and the mind and the soul. Its origins are always the same: the sudden recognition that you are unloved or, worse, that you are unworthy of love. When that happens, you sail your ship alone, with no harbor lights in sight and no companion except the wind.
I never had a big thirst for booze, although I drank more than my share of it. Anger was another matter. I knew how to get drunk on it. My mother’s family, the Hollands, were indiscriminate when it came to shooting people: Mexicans at San Jacinto, Yankee infantry at Little Round Top, Comancheros along the Chisholm Trail, take your pick during the Sutton-Taylor Feud, the Katzenjammer Kids on the Marne, Hitler’s panzer corps in the breakout at the Bulge. The only problem was they did it to themselves as well, usually drunk, with a pistol, and through the head.
I kept seeing Moon Child in the hospital bed—abandoned by her friends, probably brain-damaged, wondering where her father was. I also could not get the nurse’s warning about Mr. Vickers out of my mind. Why had he come to Moon Child’s room? Why hadn’t he gone inside? Did he intend to do harm to her? Or did he have suspicions about his son, who was a suspect in the asphyxiation of a playmate years ago?
Maybe Rueben Vickers had gotten a pass for too long, I thought. I drove farther down the street into a section of town where the power had failed and all the lights had gone out and the streets were draped with shadow. The sun looked like a guttering candle at the bottom of a V between two mountains, then it slipped off the side of the earth, and a wind laced with rain and wet snow blew through the streets with such force that the street sign on the corner trembled on the pole. I made a U-turn and headed for the two-lane highway and the ranch of Rueben Vickers.
* * *
THE HOUSE WAS on a plateau, made of purple brick, flat-roofed and sprawling and utilitarian, with white garage doors on each end facing the front yard. A huge American flag with a spotlight centered on it flew seventy-five feet high on a silver pole, even though protocol required that it be lowered at sunset and never flown in the rain.
The barns were enormous and hung with lights, the three-sided hay sheds stacked twenty bales high. All motorized equipment was either tarp-covered or parked in a giant, well-lit aluminum building. When lightning struck the mountain behind the ranch, I could see the eyes and horns of hundreds of Angus down in a draw, the entire herd bawling as the thunder rolled through the canyons.
One of the garage doors was open, the ceiling lights burning. Mr. Vickers’s yellow race car was parked inside, fresh tire tracks leading from the pea-gravel driveway onto the concrete pad. The driver’s side of the car was scraped, the metal gouged, as though the hubs on a bigger and a more powerful vehicle had spun into it. I parked and cut my headlights. There seemed to be no security system in place at the Vickers ranch, no dogs, no locked gates, no nocturnal paid help. As the nurse at the hospital had suggested, I had the feeling that few people wanted to test Rueben Vickers’s charity.
I got out of my car and ran for the porch. On the way, I got a better look at the damage to the side of the race car. The pattern was characteristic of a traditional sideswipe. The incongruity was the lack of a different color of paint.
I knocked on the door, then knocked again. Mr. Vickers jerked it open, a piece of fried chicken in his hand. I could see his son and a woman at a table in the dining room. “You again!” he said. “Like bubble gum on my shoe. What are you doing here?”
“Passing by,” I said.