My heart raced and my skin crawled with apprehension. It was the same feeling I'd had when L.Q. Navarro and I had waited in ambush for Mexican tar mules deep in Coahuila, our palms sweating on our weapons, our wrists tingling with adrenaline. We washed the salt and insects out of our eyes with canteens and could hardly contain our excitement, one that bordered almost on sexual release, when we saw silhouettes appear on a hill.
Lucas was still not back from the concert. I drove to East Missoula and parked in front of the brick cottage where Sue Lynn Big Medicine lived with her uncle. As I walked up to the porch I thought I heard voices behind the building.
"Is that you, Lucas?" I said into the darkness.
"Oh, hi, Billy Bob," he replied, walking toward me. "Something wrong?"
"I'm not sure. What's Sue Lynn doing?"
"She says a prayer to all the Grandfathers. Those are the spirits who live in the four corners of the universe."
"A prayer about what?"
"People got their secrets," he replied.
"What's that supposed to mean?" I said.
"She carries a big load about something. It don't always help our love life."
"Come home with me," I said.
"She'll drive me. Everything's cool here."
"Did you see Wyatt Dixon at the concert?"
"Nope."
"He intends to do us harm, Lucas."
"He'd better not come around here. Sue Lynn's uncle was in the federal pen for cutting up a couple of guys on the Res."
"I can see this is a great place for a prayer garden. You're not moving in with this girl, are you?" I said.
"Quit calling her a girl. You worry too much, Billy Bob," he said, and hit me on the arm.
The innocence in his smile made my heart sink.
I drove back to Doc's place but found no release from the abiding fear that an undeserved fate was about to be visited upon someone close to me. The house was lighted and smoke flattened off the chimney and I could smell bread baking in the kitchen. Maisey played in front of the fireplace with her cat, the goodness in her young face undiminished by the violence the world had done her. Doc had an apron tied around his waist and was carrying two bread pans with hot pads to the plank table in the center of the kitchen. He had already laid out jars of blackberry and orange jam and a block of butter and a cold platter of fried chicken and a pitcher of milk on the table, and for just a moment I saw the tranquillity in his expression as he became both mother and doting father, and I was sure the bloodlust he had brought back from Vietnam had finally become a decaying memory.
But for some illogical reason I kept remembering a story, or rather an image, related to me by my grandfather about the death of the gunfighter John Wesley Hardin in the Acme Saloon in El Paso in 1895. Hardin was the most feared and dangerous man in Texas and may have killed as many as seventy-five men. In the Acme he was drinking shot-glass whiskey and rolling poker dice out of a leather cup. He inverted the cup and clapped the dice on the bar and said to a friend, "You got four sixes to beat."
That's when he heard a revolver cock behind him. A split second later a lawman named John Selman blew Hardin's brain matter on the mirror.
"You make me think of an ice cube sweating in a skillet. You worried about something?" Doc said.
"You rolled the dice for all of us, Doc," I replied.
"I'd change it if I could."
I paced up and down. "Did I get any phone calls?"
"Yeah, you did." He started slicing bread, the knife going snick, snick, snick into the plank table while I waited.
"From whom?"
"Cleo Lonnigan. She says you and Temple Carrol caused a scene at the concert."
"Is she crazy?"