When the blows stopped, I heard the four men walking away, one of them talking about Richard Boone, the star of Have Gun—Will Travel. I got the blanket off my head and stumbled onto the highway as they drove off. I couldn’t make out their license number. A beer can flew from the back window and bounced end over end on the asphalt, all the way down the hill.
Chapter Three
TWO SHERIFF’S DEPUTIES put us in the back of a patrol car, and one gave Spud a towel to cup to his mouth. I thought we were going to a hospital. When I saw the lights of the jail, I rattled the grille. “My friend needs stitches,” I said.
“The ER is full-up,” the driver said, his eyes in the rearview mirror. He was smiling. “Wreck on the highway.”
We were put in different cells in a row separated by bars rather than walls. In the morning we were questioned one by one in a room that had a D ring sunk in the floor, although we were not cuffed to it. The detective who questioned us was tall and impersonal and wore a drooping mustache and cowboy boots and a short-brim Stetson tilted over his eyebrows.
“My name is Wade Benbow,” he said to me. “Which one are you?”
“Aaron Holland Broussard.”
“You never saw those guys before?” he said.
“No, sir.”
“They just came out of the dark and laid into you? No warning?”
“No, sir. No warning.”
“No explanation?”
“None.”
“You think they mistook you for somebody else?”
This time I didn’t reply.
“Hearing problem?” he said.
“I already answered your questions, sir.”
The window was open. It was raining, and I could smell the rain and the coldness of the bricks in the street and the water backed up in the storm gutters. The sky was an ink wash. What is the lesson you learn if you’ve even been in the can? You turn compliance into a religion. I lifted my eyes to the detective. “Sir, I don’t know who those fellows were or why they attacked us. That’s the truth.”
“Fellows?” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“The bumper sticker on your truck probably doesn’t endear you to some people here’bouts.”
“That’s Mr. Lowry’s truck. I didn’t look at the sticker.”
“You work for Jude Lowry?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I should have known.”
“I don’t get your meaning,” I said.
“No other grower in Colorado would put a union sticker on his own truck. Does your friend Cotton Williams always carry a knife?”
“Yes, sir. For popping bales and such.”
“A couple of customers in the café say he pulled it before the fight got started.”
“It wasn’t a fight, sir,” I said.