“What’s the matter?” Wilbur said.
“I don’t know if I’d want to punch a hole in a place that beautiful.”
“Well, you ain’t me.”
“I’ll get everything I can for you. But you have to trust me. That means at a certain point we indicate to the Deitrichs you’re willing to go to jail. You have to mean it, too,” I said.
“Scared money don’t win?”
“Not in my experience.”
“I don’t think I ever felt so miserable in my life. My mama always said it. Us Picketts has got two claims on fame: My daddy was the dumbest white man in this county and I worked a lifetime to come in a close second.”
He took the photographs of his two hundred acres in Wyoming from my hand and pitched them into the drawer and looked into space.
It was raining the next evening, the air dense with ozone, when Chug Rollins left the Deitrich home and drove down the long valley across the cattleguard onto a two-lane blacktop road fringed on both sides with hardwood trees. The landscape was sodden, the corridor of trees dripping, and a green radiance seemed to lift off the crest of the hills into the dome of sky overhead, then disappear into the swirls of blue-black clouds that groaned and crackled with thunder but contained no lightning that struck the earth.
Chug ripped the tab on a Pearl and drank the can half empty in three swallows, then set it in the holder on the dashboard. In his rearview mirror he could still see the sheriff’s cruisers that were parked by the Deitrichs’ cattleguard. It was all going to turn out all right, he thought. Nobody had tied the drowned mop-heads to him or Jeff, and besides, it was Jeff’s grief, anyway. What they needed to do now was straighten out a few people who thought the East Enders didn’t have a firm grip on events in Deaf Smith, starting with Jeff’s ex and that punk Lucas Smothers and working on down through Ronnie Cruise and any other Purple Hearts who wanted to be deep-fried in their own grease and then finally, as an afterthought, that pimple on everybody’s ass, Wesley Rhodes, yes indeedy.
Who paid the taxes here, anyway? Pepperbellies and bohunks?
Up ahead a sheriff’s deputy by the side of the road waved a flashlight at him. Chug lifted the can of Pearl from the dash holder and set it on the fl
oor, then pulled to a stop and rolled down the passenger window with the electric motor.
“Give me a ride up to my cruiser?” the deputy asked, bending down to the window. His uniform was soaked through and molded to his thin frame, and water sluiced off the brim of his campaign hat.
“Sure, get in,” Chug answered.
The deputy seemed relieved to be in the dryness and warmth of the automobile. He removed his hat and shook the water off gingerly on the carpeting and wiped his face with a red handkerchief.
“That open container you got on the floor don’t bother me,” the deputy said.
Chug grinned and replaced the can of Pearl in the dash holder. But the deputy continued to study the floor for some reason.
“Where’s your cruiser?” Chug asked.
“On up a piece. This rain’s a frog-stringer, ain’t it?”
“How come you to get separated from your car in weather like this?”
“Another deputy dropped me off to check something out, then he went on up to the house,” the deputy replied.
“Check out what?”
“A colored man standing by the road. I run him off.”
“Is there a reason you keep looking at my feet?” Chug asked.
“Didn’t know I was.”
“You damn sure were. What’s your name?”
“It’s right there on my name tag.” The deputy hooked his thumb inside his shirt pocket and poked out the cloth and the brass nameplate pinned to it. The plate read B. Stokes.
“But what’s your name?” Chug asked again.
The deputy was silent. The car hit a depression and splashed water across the windshield, and Chug increased the speed of the wipers, glad to have something to do, to show control of his machine and the environment around him. But why was he thinking like that? he asked himself. The rain spun in a vortex between the line of trees on each side of the blacktop, and the fading, peculiar nature of the light seemed to form a green arch, like a canopy, over the roadway. Chug realized he was sweating and that his breath was coming hard in his chest. He rolled down his window and let the wind and rain blow in his face.