I walked up the hill, wondering how I would explain my presence without lying if Mr. or Mrs. Lowry came outside. I paused when I reached the piked fence and the flagstones that led to the gallery. I could see no one inside. The side yard, the one that had the most sun, contained a gazebo threaded with clematis and trumpet vine. There was a ladder by the side wall and a half-broken trellis leaning in pieces against it. Rose petals were sprinkled all over the grass and the bed.
The French doors opened. Mrs. Lowry stepped outside, her smile as encompassing as ever, her dull-red hair wrapped partially around her thick neck. She was drying her hands and wearing a sundress with no covering on her sun-freckled shoulders, even though she was in shade and the wind out of the woods was cold and damp.
“Mr. Lowry is not home now,” she said. “Can I help you, Aaron?”
“Spud told me he was doing some garden work for you. I just wanted to make sure everything got done all right.”
“Depends on what you call all right,” she said.
“Something happened?”
“He fell off the ladder and brought the trellis down with him,” she said.
She was beaming and as always smelled like a freshly baked cake. I looked away from her. “That sounds like Spud.”
“Want to come in?”
“I’d better get back to the bunkhouse.”
“I just made a big strawberry milkshake.”
“I’d better run.”
Her eyes intensified. “I’d sure like to share it with you,” she said.
I know my face reddened. I couldn’t help it. I looked up at the sky and the yellow-and-purple marbling in the clouds. “I think we’re about to get hit with a gully washer. Jo Anne wants me to drive her to work this evening.”
“Well, she’s a very nice young woman,” she said. “And you’re a very nice young man.” She winked. I could almost hear her eyelid click.
I walked back down the slope, my face burning. I wanted to airbrush the last ten minutes out of my life.
* * *
LATE SUNDAY MORNING, Spud stopped me on the way to my car. “Hold up, Aaron.”
I pretended not to hear him. He shouted again.
“What’s up?” I said, gazing at the dirt road that led to the highway, hating the thought of the conversation that was about to ensue.
“I just went up to Miz Lowry’s to clean the flower bed and repair her trellis,” he said.
I nodded and looked at my watch. “Good,” I said.
His eyes went everywhere except my face. He picked up a pebble and threw it at nothing. “Miz Lowry said you were up there asking if I’d done my work satisfactorily. You been checking on me, Aaron?”
“Your face was marked up, so I just wondered.”
“Wondered what?”
“I wondered what happened. So I found out. You took a fall off the ladder.”
“I think you were trying to find out if I did something else.”
“I’m not reading you, Spud,” I lied.
“The heck you’re not. Rich women can get a hankering, too. I was working here a long time before you were. I know some stories.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” I said.
“I thought you were my friend.”
“I am.”
“Not no more,” he said, kicking at the ground. “Not no damn more.”
He walked away, his shoulders simian and his back humped, his brow furrowed under his fedora, like a modern-day Quasimodo in search of cathedral bells.
Chapter Twenty
THAT AFTERNOON JO Anne and I took flowers to Moon Child at the hospital. Her condition was unchanged. There had been no visitors, no telephone inquiries. In fact, no one knew her real name. The clipboard attached to the bed frame identified the occupant as “M. Child.” She was in the ICU, so she could not have flowers in the room. We left them at the nurse’s desk. We were on our way out when the nurse on duty called us back to her desk. She was an older woman and had an erect posture and bluish-gray hair. No one else was around.
“I know you,” she said to me. “The last name is Broussard.”
“That’s right.”
“I was in the ER when you came in. You had been severely beaten.”
I didn’t remember her, but I said I did.
“I belong to a church that has rather strict boundaries about certain things,” she said.
“I don’t know if I’m following you, ma’am,” I said.
“My religion teaches that the deliberate denial of information to a person who should have access to it is the same as a lie.”
“I understand,” I said. “But I don’t know how that fits in with my presence here.”
“Rueben Vickers attacked you,” she said. “I’ve known him all my life.”
“I see.”
“He was here. He looked in that poor girl’s room. I’m talking about the girl named Child. I asked him what he wanted. He left without speaking.”
“Was his son with him?”
“No.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Be careful, young man. And you, too, young lady. Rueben Vickers has depths no one should test.”
Jo Anne and I walked back to my car. The sky was dark, the clouds swollen with rain or snow, the Indian summer dying like the leaves on the maple trees. I had a terrible sense of ephemerality, maybe because of the injustice done to Moon Child, or the nurse’s warning about Mr. Vickers, or the fact that there was no way to hold on to the season and prevent the coming of winter.
Jo Anne’s hair was blowing in a skein on her face, causing her to constantly brush it out of her eyes. “Why are you always staring at me like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. Get that smile off your face.”
“I stare at you because I don’t want you to get away.”
“I look like I’m fixing to leave town?”
“Not if I have anything to do with it.”
“Really?”
“Can I ask you something that’s a little private?”
“Depends on what you’re going to ask me.”
“Okay, I won’t.”
“Private in what way?” she said.
“Will you marry me?”
She closed her eyes, then opened them again. “You ask me that just after we visited somebody who had her head caved in?”
“That’s the point. Clocks don’t wait on people.”
Her hand rested on the handle of the passenger door. She looked drunk. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Think it over. Take all the time you want. A day or two.”
“You’re the weirdest person on the planet.”
“In what way?”
She pressed her palms to both sides of her head. I guess I had that effect on people sometimes.
* * *
WHEN I DROPPED her off for work, she still hadn’t answered my question. The sun was going down, the hamburger joint glowing with red-and-yellow neon in the drizzle. She opened the door to get out, a newspaper over her head. I hate to admit this, but I wanted to cry. “We’ll have to talk later,” she said. “Okay?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I just can’t think all this through right now.”
“Roger that,” I said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You’re going to pick me up?” she said.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
She shut the door and ran through a puddle into the building, splashing her tacky orange-and-black uniform. I started the car and turned on the wipers. I could see her squaring her cap and wiping her face with a paper towel behind the counter. I wondered how many people were aware how hard she worked to earn the little she had. I drove away into the darkness, the wipers slapping back and forth, my high beams lighting up an empty firehouse, a low-rent saloon with blacked-out windows, a shelter for vagrants vandalized with graffiti, the sidewalk littered with trash.
I knew my thoughts were going to a bad pl
ace. There is a strange phenomenon among human beings to which most of us are susceptible. It’s an affliction that contaminates our vision of the world and invades the heart and the mind and the soul. Its origins are always the same: the sudden recognition that you are unloved or, worse, that you are unworthy of love. When that happens, you sail your ship alone, with no harbor lights in sight and no companion except the wind.
I never had a big thirst for booze, although I drank more than my share of it. Anger was another matter. I knew how to get drunk on it. My mother’s family, the Hollands, were indiscriminate when it came to shooting people: Mexicans at San Jacinto, Yankee infantry at Little Round Top, Comancheros along the Chisholm Trail, take your pick during the Sutton-Taylor Feud, the Katzenjammer Kids on the Marne, Hitler’s panzer corps in the breakout at the Bulge. The only problem was they did it to themselves as well, usually drunk, with a pistol, and through the head.
I kept seeing Moon Child in the hospital bed—abandoned by her friends, probably brain-damaged, wondering where her father was. I also could not get the nurse’s warning about Mr. Vickers out of my mind. Why had he come to Moon Child’s room? Why hadn’t he gone inside? Did he intend to do harm to her? Or did he have suspicions about his son, who was a suspect in the asphyxiation of a playmate years ago?
Maybe Rueben Vickers had gotten a pass for too long, I thought. I drove farther down the street into a section of town where the power had failed and all the lights had gone out and the streets were draped with shadow. The sun looked like a guttering candle at the bottom of a V between two mountains, then it slipped off the side of the earth, and a wind laced with rain and wet snow blew through the streets with such force that the street sign on the corner trembled on the pole. I made a U-turn and headed for the two-lane highway and the ranch of Rueben Vickers.
* * *
THE HOUSE WAS on a plateau, made of purple brick, flat-roofed and sprawling and utilitarian, with white garage doors on each end facing the front yard. A huge American flag with a spotlight centered on it flew seventy-five feet high on a silver pole, even though protocol required that it be lowered at sunset and never flown in the rain.
The barns were enormous and hung with lights, the three-sided hay sheds stacked twenty bales high. All motorized equipment was either tarp-covered or parked in a giant, well-lit aluminum building. When lightning struck the mountain behind the ranch, I could see the eyes and horns of hundreds of Angus down in a draw, the entire herd bawling as the thunder rolled through the canyons.
One of the garage doors was open, the ceiling lights burning. Mr. Vickers’s yellow race car was parked inside, fresh tire tracks leading from the pea-gravel driveway onto the concrete pad. The driver’s side of the car was scraped, the metal gouged, as though the hubs on a bigger and a more powerful vehicle had spun into it. I parked and cut my headlights. There seemed to be no security system in place at the Vickers ranch, no dogs, no locked gates, no nocturnal paid help. As the nurse at the hospital had suggested, I had the feeling that few people wanted to test Rueben Vickers’s charity.
I got out of my car and ran for the porch. On the way, I got a better look at the damage to the side of the race car. The pattern was characteristic of a traditional sideswipe. The incongruity was the lack of a different color of paint.
I knocked on the door, then knocked again. Mr. Vickers jerked it open, a piece of fried chicken in his hand. I could see his son and a woman at a table in the dining room. “You again!” he said. “Like bubble gum on my shoe. What are you doing here?”
“Passing by,” I said.
“This some kind of scam? You trying to put something on us?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a beef with your son. For breaking Jo Anne McDuffy’s windows.”
“He didn’t break any windows. Now get away from my door.”
“Why don’t you tell him to take the mashed potatoes out of his mouth and come here and defend himself like a man?”
“You by yourself?” he said, peeking around both sides of my head.
“Yep.”
“You think you’re gonna get a few bucks, right?”
“I wouldn’t spit on your money, Mr. Vickers.”
“Where you get off talking to me like that?”
“May I come in?”
“Is that one of Darrel’s little friends?” the woman at the table said.
“No,” Vickers replied.
“Ask him in or close the door,” she said.
Vickers’s face was knotted with consternation. He looked torn between shoving me into the rain or inviting trouble with his wife. “Come inside. And watch your mouth. Got it?”
I entered the foyer. Glass gun cases and the mounted heads of deer and elk and mountain goats and at least one moose lined the walls. The photos on the wall included Richard Nixon, Billy Graham, and Strom Thurmond. A large-print black Bible containing both the Old and New Testament lay on a small table under a lamp by the hall closet, the words “Bless Our Home” stamped in gold on the cover.
“What might your name be?” the woman said to me. Her hair was parted in the middle and pulled straight back; her features could have been shaped with a putty knife. She wore a black blouse with a white lace collar and had an animated sternness about her that suggested a conjugal situation similar to waking up each morning on a medieval rack.
“I’m Aaron Holland Broussard, Mrs. Vickers. I’m pleased to meet you.”
“He’s here about business, Dorothea,” Vickers said.
“What kind of business?” she asked.
“I heard Darrel was in an accident out by Ludlow,” I said. “I hope he’s okay.”
Vickers had gone back to the table and was still standing. He dropped his piece of fried chicken on his plate and wiped his hand with a cloth napkin as if cleaning a dirty wrench. “You talking about the damage to my race car? I got slammed up in a practice run at Castle Rock. This has got nothing to do with our son.”
“Just tell him to get out, Daddy,” Darrel said. “Take the quirt to him if you have to.”
Mrs. Vickers tapped her spoon on the tablecloth. “Both of you calm down. What’s this about a quirt?”
“I believe Mr. Vickers’s race car was involved in an accident with a school bus,” I said. “The one the beatniks ride around in.”
“What beatniks?” she said. “Darrel, have you been hanging around with beatniks?”
“No, he hasn’t,” Vickers said. “And you get out of here, Broussard.” He nailed me in the sternum with his index finger.
“No, we will finish this here and now,” Mrs. Vickers said. “Don’t lie to me, Darrel. Were you in an accident?”
“I was up by Ludlow. The bus came out of nowhere and hit me.”
“Why were you in Ludlow?” she said.
“Trying to help those girls.”
“What girls?” she said.
“I think they’re runaways. I think bad guys are making them sell themselves.”
His mother’s eyes were blazing. “Is this true, Rueben?”
“Yes,” he said. “We didn’t want you to worry.”
She looked at me. “See? You have your answer, Mr. Broussard. Would you like a piece of chicken?”
“I don’t think so.” I looked at the heads of the animals on the walls. “Did you know both the Old Testament and Saint Paul teach the protection of animals? Try the Book of Hosea 2:18. Or Isaiah 11:6–9.”
“You’re a bunny-hugger, huh?” Vickers said.
“Why don’t you guys fence in a big area in the desert and hunt each other?” I said. “Declare a three-day open season on people, put your jockstraps on outside your pants, and blow your neighbors to shit.”
“You get out of this house,” Vickers said. His son was rising from the table, a fork in his hand.
“You went up to Moon Child’s room, Mr. Vickers,” I said. “Did you want to see the job finished?”
He clenched my arm with one hand and tried to work me toward the door. Then I did something I h
ad never done with an older man. I ripped his hand from me and slammed him against the wall. “If you ever touch me again, I’ll tear off your arm and kick it up your ass,” I said. Then I slammed him into the wall again, shaking the glass of his gun cases. Mrs. Vickers’s mouth hung open.
I went out the door, the rain swirling in my face. I thought it was over. I should have known better. The greatest fear in men like Rueben Vickers is personal failure; they will destroy the earth rather than admit they’re wrong. He came after me.
“Step back,” I said, my car door half-opened.
“Apologize.”
“Before you hit me with the quirt at Mr. Lowry’s farm, you said your ancestors were burned to death by the Comanche. Is that true?”
His face was beaded with rainwater, his hair in his eyes. “What do you care?”
“I don’t,” I said. “I just thought you’d like to know they’re still out there.”
“You say the Comanche are still setting people on fire? Are you crazy?”
“I know two people who have seen them. They’ve heard their victims screaming.”
“You’re lying.”
“They’re coming for you, aren’t they? That’s what all this is about.”
He put his hand in front of my face as though trying to push back my words. “You’re a sick man,” he said.
“What drives you, Mr. Vickers?”
“Get away from me.”
“Your son put a playmate in an abandoned refrigerator, didn’t he?” I said. “You can’t get that image out of your head.”
His eyes were ball bearings, his face peppered with rain. I got into my car and drove away. He never moved.
Chapter Twenty-One
THE RAIN WAS still falling when I picked up Jo Anne at eleven p.m. and drove her home. She hardly spoke. The headlights of other vehicles made shadows on her face like dark water running down window glass. I told her nothing of my visit to the Vickers home.
“Did you think over my proposal?” I asked, half-smiling, my throat catching.
“I’ve never told you a lot about my past.”
“You mean with Henri?”
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