“It’s got to be. There’s only one or two bars here,” he said.
“How do you know what the car looks like?”
“The waitress told me. The bartender came by the café with it.”
Troyce drove the pickup around the back of the log building, leaning forward to see beyond a parked tractor rig. His face was gray under his hat, the skin around his eyes whiter than it should have been. He cleared his throat and spit out the window.
Candace touched his cheek with the back of her wrist. “You’re sick,” she said.
He didn’t argue. All the way from Swan Lake, a pain like a shard of glass had been working its way through his viscera, causing him on a couple of occasions to suck in his breath as though his skin had been touched with a hot wire.
He pointed through the windshield. “Look yonder — a white Camry, just like she said.”
Candace had hoped they wouldn’t find it, that Troyce would give up his anger and pride and stubbornness and let go of his obsession with a man who perhaps someday he would meet on the street and smile at and shake hands with and feel neither ashamed nor resentful about. Candace looked around at the great empty bowl of the valley they were in, the Mission Mountains rising straight up into the sky, leviathan and green and so massive she thought they would crack the earth where they stood. The sun had reddened behind the smoke from forest fires and the thunderclouds building in the west, and the air smelled of dust and chaff blowing out of the fields. She thought she could smell rain in the air, too, although only an hour earlier, the sky had been clear and hot, the treetops glazed with heat. Now a shadow seemed to be slipping across the land from one end of the Jocko Valley to the other.
“This doesn’t feel right, Troyce,” she said.
“What don’t?”
“Everything — this place, that car, the way the light is changing, those dark clouds moving across the valley.”
“It’s probably just one of them dry electric storms. All snap, crackle, and pop, and not one drop of rain.”
“What do you know about that bartender? You said you knew a dishonest man when you saw one. Why do you trust what the waitress says? You like her boobs?”
“Cut that stuff out.”
“Then start thinking about what we’re doing.”
“It ain’t that complicated, darlin’. Jamie Sue Wellstone got that idiot to help her run away with an escaped felon. That makes the idiot a felon, too. But he ain’t figured that out yet. You know why criminals are criminals? It’s ’cause most of them majored in dumb.”
Troyce parked the truck thirty yards from the Camry and cut the engine. He closed and opened his eyes as though he were dropping through an elevator shaft.
“We need to take you to a hospital,” she said.
“I just need to hit the can. Come inside.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Sitting at the bar by myself in a joint on the res on Saturday afternoon? Duh!”
She watched him enter the back of the bar. Two Indian men who looked like father and son came out the side door. Both of them wore braided pigtails on their shoulders. They got into the cab of a flatbed and drove away, neither of them looking directly at her. She watched their vehicle disappear down the highway, over a rise, dipping into the sun, straw blowing off the bed of the truck. She wondered if they were going home to a Saturday-evening meal with the members of their family gathered around the table, an unwatched television set playing in the living room, the mountains gold and purple against the sunset. She wondered if a time would come when the simplest activities of others would not make her covetous.
The wind was picking up, and a solitary drop of rain struck her face like a BB just below the eye. She turned, wiping the wetness off her skin, just as a bus stopped on the road and a dark-complexioned man carrying a duffel and a rolled sleeping bag stepped down on the gravel in a whoosh of air.
He walked into the parking lot, carrying his bag on his shoulder, a shapeless, sweat-rimmed hat low on his brow. He was unshaved, his denim jacket tied by the arms around his waist. But incongruously, he wore an immaculate white long-sleeve cowboy shirt, one with pearl-gray snap buttons and a silver thread woven into the fabric.
He stopped and stared at the white car, then surveyed the parking lot and looked over his shoulder at the bar. His eyes seemed to linger on Candace’s for a moment, as though he recognized her, but the sun’s refracted glare was like a heliograph’s on the windshield, and it was obvious he could not make out her features. Oddly, without thinking, Candace had started to raise her hand from her lap and wave at him, as though they were old friends.
Jimmy Dale Greenwood set his duffel and rolled sleeping bag on the hood of the Camry and began fishing under the fender with one hand. When he could not find what he was looking for, he squatted on one haunch and put his arm deeper under the fender’s recesses.
Then a black cargo van backed up from the far side of the bar, not hurriedly, not in a dramatic fashion, merely creeping across the gravel as though the driver wished to create a wide arc in order to turn around. But when the vehicle stopped and the driver and two passengers got out, stepping down almost gently on the ground, Candace knew her premonitions were as they had always been — true and destined to be disbelieved by others.
The three men were not large; they were simply physical. They were the kind of men whose stare was always invasive, whose teeth were too big for their mouths, whose hard bodies were genetic and not earned, whose hands could be like the claws on a crab.
Where was Troyce? Why did he have to get sick now? Why had she not gone inside with him?