He held his eyes on hers, refusing to concede an inch. She picked up his hand and pressed it against her left breast, clenching down on his wrist so he couldn’t remove it. “Feel my heart.”
“Don’t
do this, Pam.”
“Don’t you ever accuse me of disloyalty.”
“I wouldn’t do that, Pam. Never.”
“Then why the hell do you hurt me?”
“I don’t mean to.”
“That’s all you’re going to say?”
“Yes, ma’am, that’s about it.”
“I want to hit you. With my fists. As hard as I can. I want to break the bones in your face.”
“Go ahead.”
Her eyes went in and out of focus, a nest of blue veins pulsing by her temple. “What do you want me to do now?” she said.
“About what?”
“About Preacher Jack Collins or whoever this tramp and his friend are. About doing my goddamn job.”
“We start at the hunting camp. Later, I’d like to buy you dinner.”
“In your dreams,” she said. “I’ll wait for you in the Jeep.”
INSIDE A RAVINE snaking back through a collection of sandstone formations that resembled pillars in an ancient church, a man wearing a soiled panama hat tipped down over his brow and a pin-striped suit coat that was frayed white on the tips of the sleeves squatted at the opening to a cave. He stared into a cook fire that he had built inside a ring of stones, and he fed the fire incrementally, stick by stick, as though fascinated with either his power over the flames or an image he saw inside them. In the firelight, his face seemed dotted with lumps of proud flesh, his cheeks and throat streaked with the irregular stubble of a man who had shaved with a dry razor.
“Why are you grinning?” asked the man on the opposite side of the fire ring.
“No reason,” the man in the suit coat replied.
But he was not telling the truth. Inside the flames, he saw a woman’s hair and the paleness of her face and the redness of her mouth. He saw the wantonness of her smile, the lewdness in her eyes, the flash of an incisor tooth as she glanced at him from behind a blanket she had hung on the wash line dividing the boxcar where she and her son lived. He heard the heavy weight of a Mexican gandy dancer settling between her thighs.
“You’re a mysterious fellow,” said the man on the far side of the fire ring.
“How’s that?”
“You have little to share, but you befriend a stranger who has nothing. You’re willing to break the law to find food for a man you owe nothing.”
“Maybe I stole it for myself.”
“A man as poor as you is not a thief.”
“Maybe I like your name.”
“It’s hardly original,” said the man on the opposite side of the fire. His face was long and homely, his ears too large, his nose shaped like a big teardrop, his shoulders knobbed as though they had been turned on a lathe. His name was Noie Barnum.
“Noie restarted the human race,” the man in the suit coat said. “Noie watched Yahweh hang the archer’s bow in the sky. ‘God gave Noie the rainbow sign / It’s not by water, it’s the fire next time.’ You know that song?”
“I haven’t heard it.”
“Yahweh made a contract. He stopped the rain and stilled the water and brought Noie and the ark to land. Before the flood, man was not supposed to break the skin of an animal with a knife. After the flood, the lion was supposed to lie down with the lamb. But it didn’t work out that way. That’s why the land is cursed.”