“I’m not afraid of him. I wish he would come around.”
“Caution and fear aren’t the same thing.”
“You don’t know him, Dave. I do. He’s a frightened, pathetic little man.”
I pulled up a chair next to her bed. “So was Hitler,” I said. “Don’t underestimate the power of evil. Sometimes I think it finds a vessel to operate in, then discards it and moves on.”
“I think you’re giving Surrette too much credit.”
“About fifteen years ago, a twenty-one-year-old kid broke into a home in the Blackfoot Valley and tied up the husband and wife in chairs and butchered them alive. The husband had a seventh-degree black belt in karate. When the kid was awaiting execution in Deer Lodge, some inmates got out of lockdown and took over the cell house for three days. The kid killed or helped kill five more people. On the day of his execution, he had to be awakened from a sound sleep.”
Alafair went into the bathroom and washed her face and came back out. “Want to go back to Louisiana?”
I didn’t answer.
“Of course not,” she said. “Because we don’t run away from problems. That’s what you always taught me. And we never allow ourselves to be afraid. You said it over and over when I was growing up.”
“I didn’t say close your eyes to reality.”
“Where’s Gretchen?” she said.
“At the cabin with Clete.”
“None of this is her fault. Don’t put it on her, Dave.”
“I haven’t,” I said.
“You were thinking about it.”
“She’s a lightning rod, Alf.”
“Let’s get something straight, Pops. I’m the one who stoked up Asa Surrette, not Gretchen.”
“It’s not all about you. He has other reasons for being here. I just don’t know what they are.”
She put her hand on the back of my neck and squeezed. “You worry too much. We’ll get through this. What is it Clete always says? Good guys über alles?” She took her hand away from my neck. “You’re hot as a stove. You have a fever?”
“Like you say, I worry too much,” I replied.
HE HAD HIS hair barbered by a stylist and his suit dry-cleaned and pressed and checked into a motel under the name of Reverend Geta Noonen, way up a long mountainous slope next to a river, almost to Idaho, in an area where people still lived up the drainages and off the computer. Inside his room, he threw away his pipe and tobacco and dyed and blow-dried his hair a sandy blond and, for twenty minutes, used a brush and washrag in the shower to scrub the smell of nicotine off his skin and nails. He shaved his chest and armpits, pared and clipped his nails, and layered his body with deodorant.
When he was tempted to retrieve his pipe from the wastebasket and core it out and refill it with the dark mix of imported tobaccos he had loved for years, he put a piece of licorice in his mouth and sucked it into a tiny lump and did push-ups in front of the television and then ate another piece until the craving passed. He showered again and kept the cold water on his face and head and shoulders so long that he was numb all over and had no desire other than to get warm and to put hot food in his stomach.
Yes, he could do it, he told himself. The sacrifice of his only vice was small compared to the reward that awaited him west of Lolo, on the ranch owned by Albert Hollister. He took a print shirt from a box of eighteen he had bought at Costco and put it on with his beige suit and a pair of new loafers and looked into the mirror. Clean-shaven and blond, he hardly recognized himself. He looked like an aging sportsman, a sun-bleached fellow strolling along a beach in the Florida Keys, his mouth effeminate in an appealing way, the palm trees lifting against a lavender sky, a woman at an outside bar glancing up at him.
Not bad, he thought.
He ate supper at the counter in the café attached to the motel. Through the back window, he could see the river flowing long and straight out of the hills, the rocks protruding from the riffle, the surface dark and glistening with the last rays of a red sun. A man in hip waders was fly-casting in the shallows, working the nylon line into a figure eight above his head and laying the fly onto the riffle as gently as a butterfly descending on a leaf. Except the man who had registered as the Reverend Geta Noonen was not interested in fly-fishing. He could see a swing set on the motel lawn, down by the water, and a little girl throwing rocks in the current while the mother watched. He put a forkful of meat loaf in his mouth, blowing air on it as he chewed, as though it were
too hot to swallow.
“The food okay?” the waitress asked. She was young and uncertain, her bones as fragile as a bird’s. Her pink uniform was splattered on one side with either grease or dishwater, and she kept looking away from the man’s face as she waited for him to answer.
“It’s perfect,” he said.
“I thought it might be too hot. I put it in the micro because you were in the washroom.”
“You have a nice place here.”