“My title is Deputy.”
“It don’t seem respectful.”
“What is it you need to know, Darl?”
“Did something happen while I was at the café and you was over at the fairgrounds?”
“Nothing of world importance, I’d say.”
“Because this guy went walking past the café real fast, saying a crazy person tore the hell out of the three guys with an ax handle. More or less jumped up and down on their faces, too.”
“Probably a Bolshevik agitator of some kind. I mean the man spreading rumors. That’s how the Reds work. Always stirring up people’s imagination. Would you drive us across the river now?”
“Yes, sir. Deputy Holland, we’re on the same side, ain’t we?”
“That’s a funny question to ask.”
“No, sir, it ain’t,” Darl replied, looking straight ahead.
They rumbled across the river on a wooden bridge and parked in front of the clinic. It was two-fifteen A.M. The electricity in the neighborhood was off, the building dark, the oil lamps in the foyer extinguished. A Mexican woman working by a battery-powered lamp in the small admissions office said no one by the name of Holland had been formally admitted to the clinic the previous night or that morning.
“He’s big, like me. His legs are bad,” Hackberry said. “He may have been beaten.”
The woman shook her head.
“The lady who would have brought him here is named Ruby Dansen. She’s a handsome woman. She looks like a Swede. Talks like a Yankee.”
“No, I don’t remember anybody like that.”
“I do,” a nurse said from the doorway. “She and a jitney operator brought the man in. They didn’t stop at the desk. They put him on a pallet. She went out back and got in line to fill a water can for an influenza patient.”
“Where is she?” Hackberry said, his heart pressing against his side.
“She and her friends took the man away,” the nurse replied. “No, wait a minute. Some men in a black car came inside and lifted him up. Maybe she helped them carry him out, I don’t remember. I know she was close by. We were terribly busy. I remember a little boy thanking her for helping his mother.”
“Where did they take my son?” Hackberry said. “Who were the men in the black car?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry,” the nurse said.
Hackberry felt Darl’s hand on his shoulder. “We cain’t do no good here, Mr. Holland. Let’s go. We’ll find him. I promise.”
But they didn’t find him. And when Hackberry returned home at six that morning, the sun looked like a broken egg yolk on the horizon, the fog on the river as toxic as the haze on the Styx.
HE SLEPT ON the living room couch so he could hear the telephone if it rang. When he woke, he fixed coffee and eggs and a slice of ham on his woodstove, then ate and washed his face and brushed his teeth and shaved and put on fresh clothes. Through the front window, he saw a raccoon walking along the porch railing, his fat ringed tail flicking back and forth like a spring. Hackberry filled a bowl with fish scraps from the icebox, and a second bowl with water, and took them out on the porch and set them down not far from the raccoon. “Here you go, Poindexter. Chomp it down.”
Then he saw a sight he wouldn’t have believed he would ever see. Cod Bishop was coming up his lane on a groomed long-legged re
d gelding, sitting on an English saddle, wearing immaculate white jodhpurs and black knee-high boots and a riding cap strapped tightly under his chin. In his right hand, he held a tissue-wrapped box with blue ribbon tied around it. His face had the solemnity of a prune.
“Good morning, Mr. Holland,” he said. “Looks like you have a fat little friend there.”
“That’s Poindexter. What are you after, Cod?”
“A word. May I get down?”
“I’m running behind on my chores at the moment.”
“Do me the courtesy, sir.”