“They’re flopping out there, ain’t they?” he said.
“There’s a pole and a coffee can of worms by that willow,” I said.
“Lordy, this is a nice place. I aim to have one like it someday,” he said, squatting down to thread a night crawler on his hook.
“You doing all right?” I said.
He swung the cork and weighted line out into the fog.
“My wife sees pictures in her head. It scares me sometimes. She says you got dead people following you around,” he said.
“I don’t see any.”
“She said these are people you killed down in Old Mexico. I told her I never heard no such thing.” He looked straight ahead, a nervous flicker in the corner of his eye.
I reeled in my line and rested my rod against the trunk of a redbud tree. I watched a cottonmouth moccasin swimming through the shallows, its body forming and re-forming itself like an S-shaped spring.
“Billy Bob?” Wilbur said.
“They were heroin mules. They got what they deserved,” I said.
“That don’t sound like you.”
“I?
?ve got to get to work,” I said.
He rubbed his palm on his forehead, and his eyes searched in the fog, as though looking for words that weren’t part of his vocabulary. I saw his throat swallow. “She says you’re a giver of death. She says it’s gonna happen again.”
“What will happen again?”
“She says there’s spirits that want revenge. It’s got to do with human heads in a garden in Africa. It don’t make no sense. I ain’t up to this. I ain’t never hurt nobody. I don’t want to have nothing to do with this kind of stuff,” he said.
He dropped the cane pole across a willow branch and got into his paint-skinned truck and began grinding the starter.
“Wilbur, get down here and talk,” I said.
His engine caught and he twisted his head back toward me as he turned the wheel with both hands.
“You killed people and you ain’t sorry? That ain’t the Billy Bob Holland I always knowed. Why’d you tell me that?” he said, his eyes wet.
He roared through the field, the tall grass whipping under his front bumper, trash blowing from the bed of his truck.
4
Late the next afternoon I received a phone call from Kippy Jo Pickett, Wilbur’s wife.
“They tore up our house. They ripped the floor out of the barn,” she said.
“Who did?” I said.
“The sheriff and his men.”
“Did he have a search warrant?”
“He said he did. He kept rattling a paper in front of me. He smelled like liquor,” she said.
“Where’s Wilbur?” I asked.