WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON was hot and dry, hazy with dust and smoke, the highway scattered with ash that looked like the gray wings of dead insects. I was at a civil trial down in Hamilton when Wyatt Dixon called the house again. “Why, howdy doodie? Is the counselor there’bouts?” he said.
“Didn’t Billy Bob warn you about calling here?” Temple said.
“Come to think of it, he did. But since he ain’t at his office, and since I ain’t God and cain’t dial up Brother Holland’s head, I called his house. What y’all cain’t seem to understand is we’re all soldiers on the same side. I think this man Mabus works for the devil.”
“The fact you’re on the street makes me wonder if there shouldn’t be a three-day open season on people. I can’t change what the court has done, but I can make you a promise—”
“Done heard all that before, Miss Temple, and I ain’t interested in hearing no more of it. Tell your husband I’ll ring him later. Y’all don’t like it, the feeling is mutual. Brother Holland come to my house, making threats, and I ain’t gonna abide it. I think my chemical cocktails ain’t working too well these days. You can also tell him I’m starting to get tired of pulling y’all’s acorns out of the fire.”
The connection went dead.
Temple sat in a chair and tried to think about what Dixon had just said. Was he simply trying to provoke her and bait another trap? If so, what was his motivation? Or was he just trying to make her miserable, to live inside her head, to occupy her dreams and force her again and again to reenter the premature grave on which he had stacked stones one by one, while she lay bound and blindfolded, encased inside the hard-packed dirt, a rubber hose inserted in her mouth?
She leaned over in the chair and thought she was going to be sick. She heard rocks clattering on the hillside and knew the sounds were only those of deer or elk working their way down to the pasture. But the image they conjured out of her memory made her press her hands against her ears, then turn up the volume on the television set until the adenoidal voice of a newscaster talking about hog futures filled the house like an old friend.
She had come too far to lose it like this, she told herself. She would not accept the role of victim, not be manipulated by Dixon, not allow him breath inside her head. When Billy Bob came home, they’d have a talk, maybe go out to dinner, and decide once and for all—
She realized she was repeating the same patterns of behavior about Dixon over and over, somehow expecting different results. Each time Dixon had made contact with them, she had blamed her husband, acting grandiosely, speaking of the violence she would do, but ultimately pushing the problem and its resolution onto someone else.
Had she lost her courage? Worse, had she demeaned her husband in order to hide her own fear? She felt the blood drain from her head and had to sit down again. There was only one way to overcome fear, and that was to confront it. But she tried to shake the thought of confrontation with Dixon out of her head. Don’t be a fool, she told herself. You don’t enter the cage of a wild animal in order to prove your courage. You don’t allow degenerates and sadists to draw you into their maw.
No, you sit like a prisoner in your home, waiting for the phone to ring, flagellating your husband for your inability to deal with your problem.
She put her .38 on the seat of the Tacoma and drove through the tiny mill town of Bonner and on up the Blackfoot toward Wyatt Dixon’s house, passing company-owned cottages shaded by birch trees and orange cliffs from which high school kids cannonballed into the river.
Up ahead, on the left, she saw the swing bridge spanning the Blackfoot and Dixon’s ruined house perched up on a green slope. But she decided to cross the river farther down, on the vehicle bridge, and use the back road to approach the house so her truck and her revolver would both be close by when she confronted him, since she had already resolved she would do so unarmed.
A tractor-trailer boomed down with ponderosa logs roared past her in the opposite lane, blowing dust and the smell of pine rosin and diesel smoke through her window. She crossed the river on a two-lane bridge into trees and drove down a dirt road that wound along the bottom of a hill whose sides were slashed with rock slides. Ahead she could see smoke blowing down the canyon from the sawmill, the sun’s reflection like hammered bronze on the river’s surface, and the roof of Dixon’s house, the pipe from a woodstove wisping in the breeze.
Maybe he won’t be home, she told herself, then felt a rush of shame at the fearful content of her thought processes. The .38 vibrated next to her on the seat, and she touched it and pushed it against the backrest so it wouldn’t fall on the floor. The left front tire hit a rock, lurching the truck frame toward the road’s edge, forcing her to grab the steering wheel with both hands. In her rearview mirror she saw small yellow rocks cascading off the road into a green pool down below.
She came over a rise and looked down the road into the twilight and saw Wyatt Dixon in his yard, shirtless, one thigh still in a cast, dipping a sponge into a water bucket and wiping down an Appaloosa whose rump was blanketed with gray and white spots.
Dixon seemed to turn and look at her just as she came over the rise, frozen in time and place, as though in a sepia-tinted photograph, his skin as smooth as melted candle wax, his face slightly bemused, a dusty shaft of sunlight causing him to squint one eye. In that moment he seemed to become flesh and blood, no longer a phantom, no longer larger than life. Her fear and self-doubt seemed to die in her chest like a fever that has run its course, and the wind off the river was suddenly cool and sweet-smelling in her face, the world once more a place of birch and fir tre
es and aspens and wild roses on a riverbank. Wyatt Dixon was only a man—a pitiful, malformed creature whose mother had killed his father for the years of drunkenness and abuse he had visited upon her and then for extra measure tried to kill Wyatt, age thirteen, with a hay fork. How could anyone fear a man who had probably been born only because his mother couldn’t afford an abortion?
She rolled down the incline toward the back of Dixon’s rented property, touching the brakes, wondering if she should park by the back shed or simply pull boldly into his yard.
Except the brake pedal had no resistance under her foot and it sank to the floor as though it had been disconnected from its own mechanical apparatus. Suddenly Temple was speeding down the incline, while in front of her a jagged rock the size of a watermelon waited for the tie rod on her left front tire. She heard metal snap, felt the steering wheel twist crazily in her hands, then, as in a dream, saw the front of the truck dip over the edge of the road and take her with it, plummeting through space, upside down, into a green pool whose surface was swirling with dirty white froth from a beaver dam.
The air bag exploded against her chest, pinning her against the seat, but she got her fingers on the window levers and was able to close both windows before the cab filled.
Water pin-holed through the floor and dashboard, and river gravel crunched against the windows as the truck’s weight settled to the bottom of the pool. The crown of her skull was jammed into the headliner, and while the truck’s engine boiled like a woodstove in the current, she could feel water rising to her brow and she knew in that moment that she would die upside down, like Peter on his inverted cross, alone and abandoned, in her case twice condemned to incremental suffocation inside a premature grave, and she wondered what wickedness she could have done in this life to deserve such a fate.
She struck at the air bag with both hands and jerked impotently at the safety strap, then gave up and strained her head upward as the water crept over her eyes and into her nose. In high school, on a dare, she had held her breath for almost two minutes in a swimming pool. She wondered if she could do that now and, if she could, if it was actually worth the effort. She had become an expert in dying an inch at a time inside a place where no one could see or hear her. Inside that dark place, death didn’t come by stealth or a sudden rending of the heart. Suffocation was an animal trying to claw its way to light; it was muriatic acid setting the lungs aflame, shards of glass slicing through pink tissue; it was a steel saw cutting through the sternum while the victim was denied the right to scream.
For the first time in years she wanted to weep, to find the revolver that lay somewhere on the headliner and put a bullet into her brain.
She saw a shirtless man plunge through the river’s surface, clutching a gunny sack with a huge rock twisted inside it, air bubbles chaining out of the plaster cast on his thigh. A cloud of sand mushroomed around him when he struck the silt at the bottom of the pool. In his right hand Temple saw a bowie knife, one with a blood groove and a point that had been sharpened into a sliver of ice on a whetstone.
He stuck the bowie knife in the sand and tried to pull the door open with one hand while holding the rock in the other. But the door was wedged hard into the river bottom, and each time he tugged on it, he lost purchase and his feet floated out from under him.
He let go of the rock, grabbed the frame of the truck with both hands, and drove one boot through the window glass, releasing a torrent of water into the cab. Then his hands were inside the rim of the window, lifting the cab free of the sand.
He got his arm inside the window, drove the knife into the air bag, and sliced the safety strap off her chest. The cab filled in seconds. Temple could see Wyatt Dixon’s face inches from hers, his face dilating from lack of air. He tore the door loose from the frame, scraping it back in a shower of sand, then grabbed her with both hands and ripped her from behind the steering wheel.
The eight feet to the surface was like eight miles, then she seemed to soar through wet cellophane and fractured light into wind and trees and air that was as cold and pure as bottled oxygen. She treaded water and turned in a circle, expecting to see Wyatt Dixon, but she saw only a long, bronze-hammered riffle coursing down the center of the river, gray boulders etched with the skeletons of hellgrammites, and the eroded caverns under the bank that hummed with a sound like a muted sewing machine.