“I sight with one eye over my Cadillac hood just like a pistol barrel,” I said.
“I’ll ride to the hotel with you.”
“No, the sheriff will probably be hanging around there somewhere. I think you’ve had enough innings with a left-handed pitcher for one day.”
The building shook in the wind, and pieces of newspaper blew by the window. Across the river two Mexican children were leading a flat-sided, mange-scarred cow off the mud bank into a shed. Her swollen red udder swung under her belly.
“I don’t want to see you get busted again,” Rie said.
“You take care, babe.” I put my hands on her shoulders and kissed her on the cheek. For just an instant the nipples of her breasts touched me and I turned to water inside. Her mouth and eyes made my heart race. “I expect I’ll be back here eventually and try to do something for that Yankee mind of yours.”
“Be careful with yourself, Hack.”
I walked out into the dust and drove to the hotel. Leaves were shredding from the trees on the courthouse lawn and blowing along the sidewalk. An empty tomato basket bounced end over end in the middle of the street, and the wood sign over the hotel slammed back and forth on its iron hooks. The fat deputy who had let me out of the cell that morning sat in the swing on the verandah with his feet propped against the railing. He looked off casually at the yellow sky when I passed him, his huge stomach bursting against his shirt buttons.
“Mr. Holland, we’ll be needing your room tonight,” the desk clerk said inside. His eyes were focused about three inches to the side of my face, then they would flick temporarily across the bridge of my nose and back again to a spot on the far wall.
“By God, that’s right, isn’t it?” I said. “The Cattlemen’s Association is holding its world convention here this week.”
My room had been cleaned, the bed made, the empty beer bottles carried out, as though I had never been there, and my suitcase was packed and closed and sitting just inside the door, ready to be picked up in one convenient motion. Someone had even put a Gideon Bible on the dresser top.
I paid my bill at the desk, and the clerk managed to show me nothing but the crown of his head while he marked off the ticket and counted out my change.
“You don’t sell cigars in here, do you?” I said.
He fumbled in the middle of his counting, his eyelids blinking nervously, and I thought I had him, but he regained his resolve and kept his eyes nailed to the counter. “No sir, but you can get them right next door,” he said, and turned away to the cash register.
I started down the steps to my car, then I heard the swing flop back empty on its chains and the boards of the porch bend under the deputy’s massive weight. What a time not to have a cigar, I thought.
“Mr. Holland, the sheriff wanted me to give you this road map,” he said, pulling it out of the back pocket of his khaki trousers. The paper was pressed into an arc from the curve of his buttocks. “He don’t want you to get lost nowhere on that highway construction before you get into the next county.”
“I guess that would be easy to do unless I had a map. Say, you don’t smoke cigars, do you?” I said. “Let me get a Camel from you, then.”
His eyes looked at me unc
omprehendingly out of his white volleyball face. His greased black hair, combed over the balding pate, had grains of sand in it. He pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket with two fingers and handed it to me.
“This is nice of you and the sheriff, and I appreciate it.” I borrowed his lighter, which had a Confederate flag on the side of it, and lit the cigarette. “Look, I’ve got two lifetime World Rodeo Association passes that I never use. They’re good for box seats at any livestock show or ass-buster in the state. Here, you take them.”
I pulled the two thick cardboard passes from my billfold and stuck them in his shirt pocket.
“Well, thank you, Mr. Holland,” he said.
I went next door to the tavern, bought a box of cigars and a six-pack of cold Jax, and headed down the road in the blowing clouds of dust, the cornstalks rattling in the wind, the gold of the citrus exposed among the swelling green trees, and each time I made a curve between two hills at ninety miles an hour I felt the old omnipotence vibrate smoothly out of the engine through the steering column into my hands. The fields of cotton, watermelons, and tomatoes flashed by me, and the late sun splintered in shafts of light through the dust clouds and struck on the tops of the hills in soft areas of pale green and shadow. Then the country began to become more level, the twilight took on all the violent purple and yellow colors of an apocalypse, and I felt the wind driving with me eastward down a narrow blacktop highway that stretched endlessly across empty land toward the gathering darkness on the horizon.
CHAPTER 5
THE POPLAR TREES along my front lane were bent in the wind when I got back to the ranch that night. Under the full moon their shadows beat on the white gravel, and the air was full of swirling rose petals from Verisa’s gardens. Someone had forgotten to chain the windmill by the barn, and the blades were spinning in a circle of tinny light while the water overflowed from the trough onto the ground. I could see the dark shapes of ruined tomatoes lying in the rows, and some of the cotton had started to strip. Then I saw Sailor Boy, my Tennessee walking horse that I had bought from Spendthrift Farm for six thousand dollars, knocking against the rails in the lot. His nostrils were dilated, his black head shiny with moonlight and fear, and he was running in a broken gait against each of the rick fence corners, rearing his head and kicking dirt and manure in the air. I climbed into the lot with him, worked him back easy against the rails with both my arms outspread, and got a halter over his head. There was a four-inch cut in one flank, and he had thrown a shoe and splintered part of a hoof against the barn wall. I led him into a stall, slipped an oats bag over his ears, and dressed the ragged split in his skin. Then I went into the house, my blood roaring.
Verisa was reading a book under a lamp in the living room. She wore her nightgown, and she had two curlers set in the front of her hair. A cigarette had burned down to its filter in the ashtray. She had the nocturnal, isolated composure of a woman who might have lived by herself all her life.
“Question number one: who in the hell left Sailor Boy out in the lot?” I said.
She turned and looked at me, and her face whitened under the lamp.
“What—” I saw her eyes trying to adjust on the swollen side of my head.
“Who left Sailor Boy out in a windstorm?”