Mindy bounced out of the side door, her lean legs flashing as the sunlight failed and the front settled over the valley. She threw a wave my way, then ran toward the barn, kicking her legs like a child. The air tingled with ozone and the hammer of distant thunder. A light mist dappled my windshield. I wished I were as happy about seeing Lawrence Reese again as she was.
I thought about other weapons, the leather sap hidden in the crack of the front seat, a flat sap with a spring steel handle and a lead disk in the head. It worked really well on drunks and fighting families, when you could get behind them, but I couldn’t see Reese letting me behind him. I also had a good knife, a large Buck folding knife, razor-sharp, but I didn’t think Reese would roll over and play dead if I jerked it out and shaved all the hair off my forearm. That left my intelligence and his generosity, neither very dependable weapons.
Just as I had almost decided to forget about the whole thing and get drunk, Reese came shambling out of the barn door, Mindy at his side talking earnestly. Country living seemed to have changed him. His swagger had become a country-boy barefoot shuffle, his face was slightly sunburnt, and his hair had been cropped so short that his pink scalp glowed through his thinning hair. But he hadn’t gotten any smaller; he was still a horse. His faded overalls would have fit a grizzly bear, his neck and shoulders done credit to a fighting bull.
I got out of the rig anyway, leaned against the fender, my arms crossed peacefully. I tried to look pleasant but unafraid. Reese stopped about three feet from me, his large hands hidden in his pockets, his bare feet scratching at the skim of dampness over the dust. We looked at each other without greetings. In the soft light, without the purple eye shadow, his eyes were pale blue and dim, almost watery, no longer arrogant. Mindy paused beside him, then hurried to my side, hooking her arm in mine. Her smile had gone ragged at the edges, but she wore it bravely, and she held my arm protectively. In the damp, cool air, her slim body began to tremble, but mine had become oddly still.
“I’m not too happy to see you, man,” he said quietly, almost apologetically. And I started feeling cocky. As he spoke, the veranda filled with people coming out of the house and barn, most wearing worried grimaces, but others aglow with happy expectancy. The tall blond lady especially; she wanted to see me hurt.
“I didn’t come to make you happy,” I said. “I still want to ask some questions about Raymond Duffy.”
“Why don’t you just go away,” he said.
“Not this time.”
“This time ain’t gonna be any different.”
“It won’t be as easy,” I said. Reese took his hands out of his pockets, flexed them, then jammed them back into his pockets. Something I didn’t know about was holding him back.
“Listen, man,” he said in a harsh whisper, “I don’t need any trouble. Just go away. These people don’t like you, man, and they don’t like trouble.”
“Just answer a few questions, and there won’t be any trouble.”
He thought about it, shaking his head, glancing once over his shoulder, then he mumbled, almost pleading, “Just go away, man.”
There it was. In the ashen light of a rainy afternoon, no dragon, just a large, tired man on the wrong side of forty, punch-drunk from his life. His pale eyes were afraid, not of me, but of his future. I might not think too much of the Hog Farm, but he wanted to live there so badly that he might do anything, even talk to me.
“Hey, man,” I said, “let’s go have a drink of whiskey.”
Reese smiled, as if he meant to say yes, and I shrugged my right arm out of Mindy’s clasped hands, but he shook his head, saying, “No way, man.”
He could have ducked the punch, or dodged, or tried to block; instead, he let me have a free one, leaving his hands pocketed. I assumed that if it was free, it had better be good, so I aimed a straight right hand at his throat. But he lowered his jaw and took it in the mouth. It split his upper lip and knocked him down but didn’t knock any teeth out or make his eyes glassy even for a second.
“I guess that means trouble,” I said lamely.
Reese glanced over his shoulder again, and a thin-faced young man with a long beard nodded from the veranda, then Reese got up.
—
Afterwards, vaguely conscious but unable to stand up again, I remained where I had fallen.
“Enough,” I said, hoping he believed me.
Mindy ran over, knelt and held my head against her bare thigh. A long smear of blood and dirt stained her leg when I lifted my head, but I couldn’t tell where the blood was coming from.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I don’t think I’m dead,” I said, tottering to my hands and knees, “but I’m not sure.” My tongue took a roll call of teeth and came up with a familiar number, and when I felt my nose, it seemed intact. I dreaded a broken nose as much as a dentist, so I couldn’t complain too much. My eyes worked, if I concentrated on focusing them, and I could breathe without fainting, which meant that even if I had broken ribs, at least they weren’t sticking into a lung. I tried standing, which worked, then tried not to weave, which didn’t. The crowd was still arranged on the veranda, smiling gravely, as if for a family portrait. The light mist fell coolly on my tired face.
“Why didn’t you make him promise not to hurt me?” I asked Mindy, trying to smile to let her know it was all right.
“She did, man,” Reese muttered from the edge of the lawn. “You’re not hurt, man, not permanently.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” I said, my hand following the blood up my left cheek to a gash three fingers wide in my left eyebrow.
“Sorry about that,” he said pleasantly, “but you bobbed when you should’ve weaved.”
“Someday I’m gonna get beat up by a guy who doesn’t want to be my goddamned buddy afterwards.”
“Hell, man, I’m hurt worse than you,” he said, smiling broadly, as if he was happy about the injury, and holding up his right hand. The middle knuckle had been jammed halfway back to the wrist. “You’re a hard-headed son of a bitch,” he added, as if it were a compliment.
“You don’t know just how hard-headed, buddy,” I said, then walked over to my rig and took the automatic from under the seat, keeping my body between the gun and the crowd. I went the rest of the way around the rig and stood behind the hood. “Okay, Reese,” I said quietly, “I don’t want to scare your friends, so I won’t show this automatic pistol to them, but I want you to know that it’s here, and that no matter how hard you try, you can’t get to me before I put a large and painful hole somewhere in your large and painful body.”
“Get it on, man. I been to the hard place where the real bad dudes hang out, and you ain’t nothing. And that’s what you get, nothing.”
“Does this mean we’re not buddies anymore?”
“You guessed it, man,” he said, moving a slow step closer to the rig.
“Think about it, now, before you do something foolish. Whatever happens when I pull this trigger, it’s all bad, it means the man has to come out here to disturb this bucolic tranquillity.”
“You won’t pull that trigger, man.”
“You can find out the hard way.”
The crowd on the veranda began to mill about, craning their necks to see why Mindy had her hand over her mouth. I smiled pleasantly, Reese shuffled his feet and jammed his sore hands behind the bib of his overalls, and Mindy stood absolutely still.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Let’s go have that drink.”
“Okay.”
I climbed in the passenger door and replaced the pistol under the seat. Reese walked toward the rig, moving reluctantly.
“Where you guys going?” Mindy asked, taking her hand out of her mouth.
“Get a goddamned drink,” Reese said, “before that crazy bastard kills somebody.”
“Can I go?” she asked, looking at me. I looked at Reese.
“It’s your party, man,” he said, shrugging.
So I nodded at Mi
ndy, and she slipped in the door in front of Reese and settled between us.
“You dudes are crazy,” she said. She sounded happy about it.
“Just him,” Reese answered. When I glanced over at him, he wasn’t smiling. But he looked as if he wanted to.
“Violence makes strange bedfellows,” I said, “but then you guys know all about that.”
Mindy elbowed me in the ribs, her hand trying to hold back the giggles, and if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn that Reese blushed. At least he grinned. And we drove away through the shifting rain as cozy as a newly wed ménage à trois.
—
At the small infirmary in the town of Stone River, a clumsy doctor put ten stitches in my right eyebrow, then let a nurse clean the rest of the scrapes and scratches while he checked the X-rays and set Reese’s hand.
“You guys have a fight?” he asked as he wound Reese’s hand with an elastic bandage.
“That’s right,” I answered.
“Who won?” he asked.
“You charge extra for jokes?” I asked, but he didn’t answer. At least they weren’t listed on the bill, which I paid.
“My treat,” I said to Reese.
“That’s right.”
—
The bar in Stone River was just a bar, the only bar in town. Two old farmers, excusing themselves from the fields because of the light rain, stroked lazily at a ritual pool game in the rear of the bar, bitching patiently at each other like a couple married much too long. The resident drunk aimed his blind grin at us when we came into the bar, but we didn’t offer greetings or whiskey, so he staggered past us to the door to watch the rain. At the bar, I ordered a shot and a beer, and Reese had the same, but Mindy took too long to make up her mind, and the bartender asked for her ID. Except for lint, her pockets were empty, so she had another Coke.
“I hate that crap, man,” she groused.
“You can’t have civilization without laws,” I said.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” she groaned, then took my change and walked over to the pinball machine. She played the first few balls without using the flippers or touching the sides of the machine, just letting the balls roll wherever they might, but soon she had her fingers locked to the flipper buttons, and she was hammering and twisting, fighting gravity and the stainless-steel balls.
Reese and I drank silently, watching her battle. When we finished the shots, I ordered two more.
“I’m flat, man, I can’t buy back,” he said.
“No sweat.”
“It’s your money, man.”
“Not exactly,” I said.
“After all the trouble you caused me, man, the least you could do is buy the drinks with your own money.”
“Trouble?” I asked.
“Trouble,” he said, smiling. “Blew up my porch, man, hit me in the mouth, broke my hand, and got the man on my ass.”
“Jamison?”
“You guessed it, man.”
“Give you a hard time?”
“No shit. Daddy, that’s one uptight man. I can’t afford any felony hassles, but that dude scared me so bad, I nearly busted him and run. He may think he’s a boy scout but he’s as bad as any cop I’ve ever seen. And I seen a few.”
“He takes his work seriously,” I said.
“He’s crazy. All you goddamned hick cops are crazy. In the cities, man, the cops are usually just dudes doing a job of work, and some of them like it and some don’t, some are good, some bad. But none of them think they’re gonna save the world from evil. Hick cops always think they’re John Wayne making the frontier safe for decent, God-fearing folk. That’s why we’re having this drink, man, ‘cause you’re a crazy cowboy.”
“I’m not the man and haven’t been for years,” I said, feeling some need to defend myself.
“But you think you are, man. It’s all over you.”
I didn’t ask him what that meant because I didn’t want to know. Or maybe I knew but didn’t like it.
“You mind answering some questions?”
“Of course I mind, man. Didn’t you get that impression from me yet?”
“Sure.”
“But you’re just hard-headed enough to keep after me, huh?”
“You guessed it,” I said.
“What’s in this for you?”
“You want the truth?”
“Why not?”
“Maybe nothing. Maybe a lady.”
“The sister?”
“Maybe.”
“I told you you were crazy, man. Hell, if you want a lady, take that one home,” he said, nodding toward Mindy. “Feed her a few meals and wash her back every now and then, and she’ll follow you around like a puppy dog. For a while.”
“Maybe that’s the problem,” I said.
“Christ, not true love, man. Not that. Yeah, that’s it. I can see it now. Well, daddy, if she’s anything like her little brother, you’re in one hell of a mess.”
“She’s not,” I said. “The kid was adopted.”
Reese looked at me for a moment, rolling the shot glass between his thumb and forefinger so smoothly that it was hard to think of his hand as broken. Then he shook his head, saying, “He never told me that.”
“Maybe he was ashamed of it,” I said. “Some adopted kids are.”
“Not the Duff, man. Whatever he was ashamed of, he threw it right in people’s faces. Like the homosexual thing. To compensate for the guilt with aggression.”
“You learn that in prison?”
“Man, they got more shrinks than cons in the joint. Group therapy on every floor.”
“Must be fun.”
“It’s a scam, man, a way to get out. You ever see a crib sheet for the Rorschach test?”
“That’s where my tax money goes, huh?”
“You probably cheat on the returns,” he said.
“That’s right. But don’t tell anybody.”
“Man, I never tell anybody anything.”
“So I gathered. Which puts us right back at the beginning,” I said.
“Wrong, man, this is the end. You wanted to buy me a drink, you bought me a drink, we chatted, and that’s it.”
“Three drinks,” I said, motioning to the bartender. “And either we have more conversation or round two.”
“You’re serious, huh?”
“You better believe it,” I said.
“This time you might get hurt.”
“Reese, old buddy, I think you’re afraid to hurt me. How many falls have you taken? Two? Three? How many more before you take a habitual rap? So you can’t afford to hurt me.”
“You’re real smart, man, aren’t you? A real bad-ass, right? Well, just swing away, old buddy. I won’t raise a hand to stop you, and when you get tired, man, I still won’t have nothing to say.”
“I guess you got me then,” I said. “To hell with it. Enjoy your drink.” Then I picked up my beer and started over to watch Mindy.
“Hey, man,” he said behind me.
“What?”
“Come here. What the hell does the sister want to know?”
“She doesn’t believe that her little brother committed suicide or died by accident. Of course, she can’t believe that he was hooked on smack either.”
“Well, he was, man,” Reese said sadly.
“I know. But not too long, right? A month or so.”
“Whatever the coroner says, man,” he answered, his face going blank again. “You tell the sister that the Duff killed himself, man.”
“And if she asks how I know?”
“Come on, man, get off my ass.”
“No way,” I said. “You asked me to come back, Reese. You got something you want to say, I want to hear it, so let’s quit farting around.”
“Okay, man, but let me tell you something first. I ain’t never been straight. As soon as I could walk, I was boosting shit outa the corner grocery store, and I been in and out of every kinda joint there is, but I ain’t never talked to the man. Never. And
I pulled some hard time for it, man, but I never been a snitch. And that’s a hard habit to break. Just like being bent. But when that crazy bastard Jamison had me in interrogation, man, I got scared. I don’t want another trip to the joint. No more bars, man. I couldn’t handle it. And if I tell you what I know about the Duff, and you tell the lady, and she makes a fuss, then Jamison is going to want to know how you know. He’ll turn the screws on your ass, you’ll babble, and I’ll go back to the slammer for one final engagement.”
“Nope. Won’t happen like that,” I said.
“What?”
“I won’t give Jamison the time of day.”
“You won’t take an obstruction fall for me, man.”
“Of course I would.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I just like you,” I said, then finished my whiskey.
Reese was silent a second, then he burst out laughing. He slapped me on the back and said, “That’s pretty damn slim, man, but what the hell. Why not?”
“So give,” I said, ordering another round.
“None for me, man.”
“I’ll drink it.”
“It’s your money.”
“It’s your turn,” I said.
“Right,” he said, almost sounding happy. “Sure. Absolutely, man. What do you want?”
“Everything.”
“You ain’t gonna like it. The lady ain’t gonna like it, so you still gotta come up with a good lie, man,” he said.
“I’ll worry about that.”
“Okay, man, it’s your life. Or the Duff’s. He was a kid looking to die, man, he was a real crazy. Makes— Made you and I look like saints. He was so crazy, even I was afraid of him. Then he started sticking that nail in his arm, and he was dead.”
“Who turned him on to smack?”
“Whoever he was dealing for.”
“He was dealing smack?”
“That’s right, man.”
“Jesus,” I said. “How long?”
“A couple of months.”
“Who for?”
“Don’t know, man. Didn’t want to know.”
“How’d he get started?”
“You gonna love this, man. He borrowed five grand from his sister.”
“I can’t tell her that,” I said, gunning my shot.