I wanted to believe him, except in this case, I think Albert also had his doubts.
The message had probably been incised into the lichen with the point of a rock. The letters had not been cut much deeper than the moldy green patina. The intensity of the fire, augmented by two bottles of gasoline, should have burned the wall as clean as old bone. Instead, the letters were black and smoking, as though they had been seared into the stone with a branding iron.
“Don’t just walk away,” I said.
“I’m done with this foolishness, and I won’t discuss it with you or anybody else,” he replied. “Not now, not ever. You get yourself to a psychiatrist, Dave.”
AT DAWN ON Sunday, Wyatt Dixon awoke to a sound that didn’t fit with either his dreams or the sounds he usually heard at daybreak. It was a sound like the pages of a book or magazine flipping in the breeze. Had he left a window open? No, the temperature had dropped last night, and he had shut and latched all of them. He sat up in bed and removed the sheathed bowie knife he kept under his pillow. He put on his jeans and limped barefoot and shirtless into the kitchen, his hair hanging in his face, his bad ankle wrapped with an elastic bandage.
She was sitting at the table, her long legs propped on a chair, reading a copy of People, a cup of Starbucks coffee in her hand. “What are you doing in my house?” he said.
“I didn’t want to wake you, so I let myself in,” Gretchen said.
“My door was dead-bolted.”
“It was dead-bolted until I got a coat hanger on it. Dave Robicheaux told me about the three guys who attacked you and your friend. How is she doing?”
“She’s home.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“They messed up her head proper.”
“You recognized a tattoo on one guy’s hand?”
He sat down across from her and stretched out one leg. “His glove slipped. I couldn’t hear his voice good inside the mask, but I saw the tattoo, and I knew where I’d seen it before.”
She waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. “You look a little hobbled up,” she said.
“It was a red spider. The gardener at Love Younger’s place had one like it. What are you aiming to do, Miss Gretchen?”
“Cook their hash, hon. Want to come along?” she said.
THE SALOON ON North Higgins, down by the old train station, had been through a number of incarnations. For decades it was a brightly lit low-bottom watering hole where workingmen and terminal alcoholics could shoot pool and play pinochle and drink pitcher beer and bulk wine and whiskey at prices that had no peer, except for the Oxford down the street, which in the 1960s charged only five cents for a glass of beer. Academic writers and flower children tried to appropriate the saloon, but their presence was transitory and cosmetic, and the core clientele remained the same—old-time bindle stiffs, gandy dancers, marginal criminals, pullers of the green chain, reservation Indians who drank up their government checks on the fourth day of the month, gypo loggers, miners from Butte and furnace stokers from Anaconda, used-up prostitutes, and the biggest group of all, one that has no categorical name other than the people for whom the phrase “born to lose” was an anthem and not an apology.
Over a long period of time, the photographs of these people were taken by an eccentric and enormously talented daytime bartender named Lee Nye, who framed and hung them on the wall in rows down the length of the saloon. By the 1990s almost all of these Depression-era people were dead and forgotten. The ownership changed and the tobacco-stained floors were replaced, the restrooms painted and remodeled, and a small restaurant was installed in back. The saloon became a cheerful and crowded place in the evenings, full of laughter and free of smoke and worry about privation and disease and mortality.
The photographs of the men and women in tattered clothes remained, their toothless mouths collapsed, their faces wrinkled with hundreds of tiny lines, their recessed eyes containing a strange kind of radiance, as though they wanted to tell us a secret they’d never had a chance to share.
On Sunday evening a man riding a new white Harley flanged with polished chrome drove up the alley behind the saloon and parked next to the brick wall and entered through the back door. The man’s name was Tony Zappa. His eyes were pale and elongated, his hair braided in cornrows. He had the flat chest of a boxer and sun-browned skin as tight as latex on his frame. He did not pay attention to a chopped-down pickup truck with twin Hollywood mufflers that passed the alley and pulled to the curb just beyond the lee of the building.
A few minutes later, Gretchen Horowitz entered the saloon through the front door and went to the bar and stood next to Tony and ordered a beer. She put one foot on the brass rail and looked up at the flat-screen television on the wall. “You ever been in New Orleans?” she said.
“You talking to me?” Zappa said.
“Did you know that was Robert De Niro’s most famous line? It’s from Taxi Driver.”
“You saying I’m copying Robert De Niro?”
“No, I asked if you’d ever been in New Orleans.”
“I’m from Compton by way of Carson City. Know what I mean?”
“Not exactly.”
“Compton is where you go if hell is overcrowded.”
“Wednesday night is yuppie night in New Orleans,” she said. “That’s what this place reminds me of, except tonight is Sunday.”
“You don’t sound like you’re from New Orleans.”
“What do people from New Orleans sound like?”
“Part Italian, part boon, although I hear a lot of the boons got washed out during Katrina,” he said. “You want a shot to go with that beer?”
“Long day, boss. Another time.” Her attention seemed to fade. She yawned and looked up at the television screen.
“I say something wrong?”
“No, I need to get something to eat.”
“I bet you wear contacts.”
“You’re going to tell me something about my eyes?”
“They’re violet. You got reddish hair with violet eyes. It’s not something you see every day.”
“I was conceived in an in vitro dish. The male donor was a package of purple Kool-Aid.”
“That’s pretty good.”
“You took a slide on your bike?”
He gazed at her, puzzled.
“The bruises on your arms and neck. I saw you on Higgins a little while ago. You were riding a white Harley.”
“You were looking at me?”
“What’s the spider on your hand mean?”
“You know what Compton is like if you’re white or Hispanic?”
“You’re lunch meat?”
“Ever hear of the Arañas?”
“No.”
“That was our gang, the Spiders. We had one rule and one rule only, and all the Crips and Bloods knew what it was: Anything they did to one of us, we did to ten of them. If a cannibal got caught in the wrong apartment building, he got a free flight off the roof.”
“You look a little hyper.”
“I consider myself pretty mellow.”
“You get into it with somebody?”
“No. Why you asking?”
“Because you’re agitated and because I saw something outside.”
“Where you come from, people talk in code?”
She finished her beer and stared into space as though coming to a decision. “I don’t like to mind other people’s business, but you seem like a nice guy. That’s your Harley in back, right?”
“What about it?” he said.
“When I walked past the alley, there was a guy out there.”
“Which guy? What are you talking about?”
“A guy. He was dressed like a cowboy.”
“What was he doing?”
“Looking at your hog.”
“Who cares?”
“He squatted down like he was examining the engine, like it was his hog.”
“Did this guy look like he’s part white, part Indian? Or m
ore like a white Indian?”
“His Wranglers were splitting on his ass. He was wearing a straw cowboy hat. A white Indian?”
“He had a limp, maybe?”
“I didn’t stick around to see. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“You wait here.”
“I didn’t get that.”
“Wait here. I’ll be back.”
“How about it on the attitude?”
“I want to buy you a drink or dinner. Don’t go anywhere. That’s all I was saying, for Christ’s sake.”
Tony Zappa went out the back and returned in under five minutes. He was grinning and obviously feeling good and ready to resume the conversation. “No problem. I cranked it up. It’s fine. You had me going there. How about that drink now?”
“No, thanks.”
He seemed to reevaluate, as though he couldn’t free himself of a self-centered fear that had probably governed his thoughts for a lifetime. “One last try. Was there anything different about this guy? Did he have weird-looking eyes, maybe a cut on his head?”
“He looked like a cowboy. I told you. You get into it with somebody?”
“No. There’s a lot of riffraff around these days, that’s all. How about dinner? A nice place, maybe El Cazador if you like Mexican, or Romeo’s if you like Italian?”
There was a beat. “I need to take a shower and change.”
“So shower and change.”
“I’m at a motel on West Broadway.” She gave him the name. “Know where that is?”
“You’re staying there? That’s a shithole.”
“Tell me about it. Room nine. Give me a half hour. If I’m in the shower, the door will be unlocked.”
“You never asked my name.”
“You didn’t ask mine,” she said.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Trouble, with a capital T. You think you can handle it, Spider-Man?”
He slipped on his Ray-Bans. His incisors were white and pointy when he smiled. “I like the way you talk, mama. I promise you the ride of your life. Hey, I’m talking about on my Harley. Jesus, you’re touchy.”
THAT SAME EVENING, I tapped on Albert’s office door on the first floor in the back of the house, just past the glassed-in gun cabinets in the hallway. He kept an extraordinary collection of firearms and ordnance, most connected in some way to historical figures or events: several 1851 Navy Colt revolvers, many World War II rifles and handguns, a 1927 Thompson submachine gun with a fifty-round drum magazine, an 1873 Winchester, an AK-47 and an AR-15, disarmed hand grenades, shelves of .58-caliber minié balls and canister and grapeshot. Above his desk were other shelves stacked with bowie knives, glass telegraph transformers, Spanish wine bags, tomahawks, and framed collections of coins and Indian arrowheads and stone tools. Above his work desk, where he wrote both in longhand and on his computer, was a huge photograph of Woody Guthrie holding a guitar with THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS painted on the soundboard.
He also kept a corkboard where he thumbtacked his collection of crank and hate mail, which he received with regularity, most of it written by racists throughout the United States. The centerpiece of the display, and my favorite, was a letter written by a prisoner on death row at Huntsville State Prison in Texas. The condemned prisoner’s mother had given him a copy of Albert’s last novel, narrated by a fictitious former Texas Ranger. The prison censor had expurgated so many passages that the text was unreadable. The inmate attached a copy of the censor’s justifications: Albert’s novel promoted racial divisiveness and a disrespect for authority.
“Am I bothering you?” I asked.
He was sitting at his desk, his reading glasses on, a dozen grade sheets spread before him. “No, come in, Dave,” he said, waving me in.
“What are you working on?”
“The general pain in the ass that made me quit teaching—fooling with grades and all that nonsense.”
“You’re retired. Why are you worrying about student grades now?”
“People I gave an incomplete to years ago finally end up doing the work and want credit for the course.”
I had known some of Albert’s students. They had told me about his method of teaching: He didn’t have one. His classes were chaos. Often he conducted them in a saloon or, if the weather was nice, on the lawn. He didn’t check the roll. He didn’t give grades for assignments. As a rule, he knew the students only by their first names. He told them to forget everything they had ever learned about literature and write about what they knew and remember that in art, there were no rules. The lowest grade he ever gave anyone who completed his creative writing workshop was a B. The only text he ever used was John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks. The only critic he ever respected was Wallace Stegner, not because Stegner was a scholar at Stanford but because he had been a Wobbly.
“Pack rats got into my file drawer. These grade sheets are useless,” he said. “I can’t find this guy’s name.”
I didn’t want to ask him how he never noticed that pack rats were living in his office. “What are you going to do?” I said.
“Well, I can’t give him an A because he turned the work in eleven years later. But he probably deserves at least a B, so that’s what he’s going to get.”
“I’m sorry for setting a fire in the cave,” I said.
“That’s all right. Your heart was in the right place. I just worry about you sometimes.”
Don’t buy into Albert’s doodah and get into it with him, I thought.
“There’s a lesson you never learned,” he said. “Do you remember the last line of dialogue Harry Morgan speaks in To Have and Have Not?”
“Not offhand.”
“Harry is shot up real bad on his boat and dying and can hardly talk, and he says, ‘No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.’ ”
“You’re saying I’m a loner?”
“Inside you are. You have people around you, and they mean a lot to you, but inside you’re always by yourself.”
“You’ve been a loner since you were a kid,” I said.
“I’ve been alone since Opal died, but not before. Don’t ever make yourself alone, Dave. That’s the big lesson. When you start to see evil forces at work in the world, you give them power they don’t have.”
I was sitting in a leather swivel chair by his bookcases. I looked at my shoes and wasn’t sure what I should say. Albert had chain-ganged on the hard road in Florida. I didn’t want to talk down to him. But he made me mad. “I saw GIs who had been hanged in trees and skinned alive. I had a marine friend from Georgia, a sergeant, who went crazy with remorse over what he saw some other guys do to a Vietnamese girl in a ville they trashed. You want to know what they did?”
“No, I don’t.”
I told him anyway and saw him swallow and his eyes recede with a look of sorrow that would not go away easily. “You know that story to be true?” he asked.
“The guy who told it to me killed himself. Evil isn’t an abstraction,” I said.
“None of those things would have happened if we hadn’t taken on the neocolonial policies of the French and the British.”
“This isn’t politics. Asa Surrette is out there. He’s been on your property, and he tried to kill Alafair and Gretchen. How did he survive a head-on crash between a prison van and a tanker truck filled with gasoline?”
He shook his head. “I’m old, and I live by myself in a house where I hear my wife’s voice talking to me. Sometimes I think it’s my imagination, sometimes not. Sometimes I want to unlock my gun cabinet and join her. I don’t believe in the devil, and I don’t believe in Asa Surrette. The evil in our lives comes from men’s greed, and the manifestation of that greed is in the corporations that cause the wars.”
I loved Albert and felt bad for him. I hadn’t meant to hurt him or remind him of the loss of his wife or call up the feelings of loneliness and mortality that beset all of us when we live longer than perhaps we should. A window was open, and the wind wa
s blowing strands of his white hair on his forehead. The evening was warm and the trees on the hillside were glowing in the sunset, and there was something about the moment that made me think of traditional America and lighted houses throughout the land and family people whose only goal was to lead good lives and be with one another. As I looked at Albert’s broad face and wide-set eyes and purposeful gaze, I thought of the ragtag army of Anglo-Scotch soldiers who formed up at Breed’s Hill outside Boston in 1775. I realized there was someone else Albert resembled, a man who was a collector of historical firearms and who represented everything Albert despised. I kept my opinion to myself and did not tell Albert how much he reminded me of Love Younger.
THE WEST END of Broadway in Missoula was a study in contradictions. The vista was lovely. The mountains were mauve and purple in the sunset, the river wide and braided over the rocks and rimmed along the banks with willows and cottonwoods. The street was lined on either side with bars, liquor stores, casinos, and run-down independent motels. Saturday-night knifings were not unusual; neither were sexual assaults. If you wanted to get falling-down drunk, laid and dosed with the clap, shanked or shot or just beat up, arrested, and jailed, this was the place to do it.
Tony Zappa drove around to the side of a motel by the river’s edge and parked in a handicap zone not far from a green door with a tin numeral nailed on it. He took off his gloves and looked up and down the street at the bars and casinos that had turned on their neon signs, then gazed through the window of Gretchen’s pickup at the rolled leather interior and the polished woodwork and high-tech gauges on the dashboard. He looked at the heavy tread on the tires and the chrome on the radiator and the moon hubcaps and the Frenched headlights and the waxed three-layer black paint job, all of which were high-end modifications that cost high-end money.
He tapped his gloves in his palm and went into the office. The clerk was a kid with zits on his forehead and thin arms wrapped with tattoos of snakes and skulls and bleeding daggers. He was glued to the screen of his laptop. On it, a naked man and woman were in full-body inverted congress.
“You know the broad in room nine?” Zappa said.