“You like strawberry cake and ice cream that’s been put on dry ice?”
“What’s the occasion?”
“It’s your birthday.”
“No, it’s not.”
“We’re celebrating your last birthday a little late or the upcoming one a little early. So that makes today your birthday. I used the Internet at the public library.”
But she didn’t make the connection and had no idea what he was talking about. She dropped a pile of kindling into the fire ring and dusted her hands. “The Internet?” she said.
“I downloaded a bunch of information and printed it up. Get that manila folder out of the glove box. I thought we might need this truck. If you live rural, you got to own a truck.”
She got the manila folder from the box and opened it on the truck’s hood. “You downloaded this from a real estate Web site in Washington?”
“They got acreage for sale all up through the Cascades. I done talked to the agent already. Look at that sheet of notepaper in there.”
She lifted up a piece of lined paper that had been torn from a spiral notebook. On it was a long list of figures.
“That’s my total assets. I’m selling off my stock in the prison. That’ll give us a hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars. I got twenty-three thousand in an Ameritrade account, and a couple of commercial lots in El Paso. Way I see it, we can build us one of those log-kit houses on land that comes at about ten grand an acre. We can get a mortgage on the house and land and still have money left over for that café you was talking about.”
She felt her eyes moistening. “I’m not contributing very much, Troyce.”
He picked her up, high on his chest, his arms propped under her rump. She held on to his neck, her breasts pressed into his face, her cheek against his hair.
“I ain’t sure there’s a God, but I suspect there is or I wouldn’t have you,” he said. “And I’ll call you all the silly names I want.”
THAT SAME MORNING Jimmy Dale Greenwood parked his boosted gas-guzzler at a truck stop just outside the sawmill town of Bonner and dropped several coins into a pay phone. Even as he punched in the cell number given to him by the young actor at the nightclub, his hand hesitated. There was still time to back out. He was a half-continent away from the prison he had broken out of. Had he come all this way to step irrevocably across a line, one that had less to do with the law than with the image of the man he believed himself to be? He had never been a violent man and had originally gone to jail for stopping an assault on a prostitute. Even when he had cut up Troyce Nix, he had done so only because all his other selections had been used up.
Then he thought about Nix again and the labored hoarseness of his voice in Jimmy Dale’s ear and his fingers seeking purchase on Jimmy Dale’s hip bone. The memory of it caused the cars and trucks out on the interstate to blur and shimmer for a moment. He clicked the rest of the actor’s phone number into the telephone pad, his heart beating.
“G’day,” a voice said.
“It’s J.D. You said call you if I need a favor. You sound like an Australian.”
“I’m rehearsing for my new picture. Where you been, bud? You’re a hero.”
“I cain’t figure out what was going on in the parking lot Friday night. Who was the woman that guy was trying to throw acid on?”
“I told you about her when you were on the bandstand. But you couldn’t hear me over the noise. I think my friends’ weed had herbicide on it, too.”
“Told me what?”
“She said some guy named Nixon was after you. I told her she probably had the wrong guy.”
“You mean Nix? She was with Troyce Nix?”
“Yeah, that was the name. She said they were staying at a motel down the road. Look, if you’re in L.A., give me a call. I’ll hook you up, man. This place is dangerous. J.D., you still there?”
For the next half hour, Jimmy Dale cruised up and down the highway, checking out the motels in Hellgate Canyon and on East Broadway. Some were upscale, some were dumps. He guessed Nix would stay in a place that was clean and squared away, located by a restaurant that served steaks. A trusty in records back at the prison had said Nix was kicked out of the army for something he did in Iraq, but Nix still had a military tuck in all his clothes and hated dirt and disorganization, and on the hard road he knew where every man and shovel and machine was at any given moment.
But Jimmy Dale didn’t know what kind of vehicle Nix was driving, so his knowledge about the man’s habits was of little value to him. Also, he was sweating inside his clothes, his mouth was dry, and the unmistakable odor of fear was rising from his armpits. He ordered a big take-out meal at the McDonald’s drive-through window on East Broadway and tried to eat it in the park across the river. The hamburger tasted like wood pulp, and when he drank the milk shake too fast, he had a brain-freeze that made him double over on the picnic bench.
A little girl at the next table pointed at him and said, “Mommy, look, the funny man has ice cream coming out his nose.”
He stuffed his food in a trash can and got back in his gas-guzzler. His duffel bag with the twenty-two pump inside lay on the backseat. His heart was racing, his thoughts like lines of centipedes crawling around inside his head. He could not remember ever being this afraid. But why? Because he didn’t have the guts to kill Troyce Nix, a man who had sodomized Jimmy Dale and come all the way to Montana to make his life even more miserable than it already was? Maybe Nix had recognized Jimmy Dale early on for the punk he had always been. Maybe he deserved what had happened to him back at the prison.
As he drove out of the university district and headed back through Hellgate Canyon again, he secretly hoped that fate would intervene and he would not find Troyce Nix. Then, almost as though a malevolent prankster were orchestrating a script that controlled his life, Jimmy Dale looked through the windshield at a dark blue truck turning out of traffic into a motel that was only a few hundred yards from the club where Quince Whitley had died. There was no mistaking the woman in the passenger seat. She was the one whose life he had saved. There was also no mistaking the chiseled profile and big chest and shoulders of the man behind the wheel, or the way he wore his Stetson at a jaunty angle or the way he grinned at the corner of his mouth when he told a joke. Jimmy Dale felt like he had just swallowed a cupful of diesel fuel.