John Nash smiled to himself and stared out the window again. Then he said, "That's it yonder, set back against that hill. It's a real nice spot here. Not a soul around. A Mexican drug smuggler pulled a gun on me down by that creek once. I killed him deader than hell."
Helen and I both turned around and looked at John Nash as though for the first time.
Harpo Scruggs's ranch was rail-fenced and covered with sage, bordered on the far side by low bills and a creek that was lined with aspens. The house was gingerbread late Victorian, gabled and paintless, surrounded on four sides by a handrailed gallery. We could see a tall figure splitting firewood on a stump by the barn. Our tires thumped across the cattle guard. John Nash leaned forward with his arms on the back of my seat.
"Mr. Robicheaux, you're not hoping for our friend out there to do something rash, are you?" he said.
"You're an interesting man, Mr. Nash," I said.
"I get told that a lot," he replied.
We stopped the car on the edge of the dirt yard and got out. The air smelled like wet sage and wood smoke and manure and horses when there's frost on their coats and they steam in the sun. Scruggs paused in his work and stared at us from under the flop brim of an Australian bush hat. Then he stood another chunk of firewood on its edge and split it in half.
We walked
toward him through the side yard. Coffee cans planted with violets and pansies were placed at even intervals along the edge of the gallery. For some reason John Nash separated himself from us and stepped up on the gallery and propped his hands on the rail and watched us as though he were a spectator.
"Nice place," I said to Scruggs.
"Who's that man up on my gallery?" he said.
"My boss man's brought the Feds into it, Scruggs. Crossing state lines. Big mistake," I said.
"Here's the rest of it. Ricky Scar is seriously pissed because a poor-white-trash peckerwood took his money and then smeared shit all over southwest Louisiana," Helen said.
"Plus you tied a current homicide to one that was committed forty years ago," I said.
"The real mystery is why the Mob would hire a used-up old fart who thinks bedding hookers will stop his Johnson from dribbling in the toilet bowl three times a night. That Mexican hot pillow joint you visited in Houston? The girl said she wanted to scrub herself down with peroxide," Helen said. When Scruggs stared at her, she nodded affirmatively, her face dramatically sincere.
Scruggs leaned the handle of his ax against the stump and bit a small chew off a plug of tobacco, his shoulders and long back held erect inside his sun-faded shirt. He turned his face away and spit in the dirt, then rubbed his nose with the back of his wrist.
"You born in New Iberia, Robicheaux?" he asked.
"That's right."
"You think with what I know of past events, bodies buried in the levee at Angola, troublesome people killed in St. Mary Parish, I'm going down in a state court?"
"Times have changed, Scruggs," I said.
He hefted the ax in one hand and began splitting a chunk of wood into long white strips for kindling, his lips glazed with a brown residue from the tobacco in his jaw. Then he said, "If y'all going down to Deming to hurt my name there, it won't do you no good. I've lived a good life in the West. It ain't never been dirtied by nigra trouble and rich people that thinks they can make white men into nigras, too."
"You were one of the men who killed Jack Flynn, weren't you?" I said.
"I'm fixing to butcher a hog, then I got a lady friend coming out to visit. I'd like for y'all to be gone before she gets here. By the way, that man up on the gallery ain't no federal agent."
"We'll be around, Scruggs. I guarantee it," I said.
"Yeah, you will. Just like a tumblebug rolling shit balls."
We started toward the car. Behind me I heard his ax blade splitting a piece of pine with a loud snap, then John Nash called out from the gallery, "Mr. Scruggs, where's that fellow used to sell you cordwood, do your fence work and such, the one looks like he's got clap on his face?"
"He don't work for me no more," Scruggs said.
"I bet he don't. Being as he's in a clinic down in Raton with an infected knife wound," John Nash said.
IN THE BACK SEAT of the car Nash took a notebook from his shirt pocket and folded back several pages.
"His name's Jubal Breedlove. We think he killed a trucker about six years ago over some dope but we couldn't prove it. I put him in jail a couple of times on drunk charges. Otherwise, his sheet's not remarkable," he said.