“Do you know who it is?”
He walked away without answering. I climbed down the ladder and went into the dining hall. Chen Jen was mopping down the tables. “Mr. Lowry said I had a call,” I said.
“Yes, you have call from stupid man who yell to show how stupid he is.”
I went to the counter and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“That you, Broussard?”
“Who do you think it is, Mr. Vickers?”
“Pull your dork out of the lamp socket. I was out of line. I told the hamburger guy that.”
“You called the owner of your own volition?”
“Of my own what?” he said.
“What do you want from me?”
There was a long silence.
“Are you still there?” I asked.
“Am I here? Are you retarded? Where would I go? Why do you think I called?”
“Sir, I have no idea.”
“That’s what I mean. You just said ‘sir.’ You got manners. When you got manners, you got a leg up on other people. I can’t teach my boy that. I’ve got an IQ twenty points higher than Wernher von Braun, but I’m from Jerksville on manners.”
“I’ve got a crew on our barn roof, Mr. Vickers. I had better get back to work.”
“What I’m telling you is I’m a hothead. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about my son. I’ve done everything I could. I gave him the strop. That didn’t work. I sent him to military school. He got thrown out. So what I’m telling you is watch out for that girl.”
My ear felt dirty, as though someone had put spittle in it. “You’re telling me Darrel plans to hurt Jo Anne?”
“I got no idea what’s in his head. He fell off an electric hobbyhorse when he was a little boy. That’s what I’m saying.”
“You need to talk to Detective Benbow.”
“I call him Bimbo.”
“You do him a disservice,” I said.
“You walk around with a thesaurus? Where’d you learn to talk English? Protect your girl, but don’t you hurt my boy. If you have trouble, you call me. Got a pencil?”
* * *
SUNDAY AFTERNOON JO Anne and I saw Lonely Are the Brave at a theater in Trinidad. It was written by Dalton Trumbo and Edward Abbey and starred Kirk Douglas and George Kennedy and Gena Rowlands. Douglas plays a cowboy named Jack Burns who cuts wire fences wherever he has the opportunity and punches out a cop in order to be jailed so he can free a friend who was imprisoned for aiding illegal immigrants. The friend is a family man and cannot risk a jailbreak, so Jack removes the hacksaw blades he has hidden inside the tops of his cowboy boots and cuts through the bars and escapes with two Indians. In the last scene, Jack tries to ride his horse across a highway into Mexico and is run over by a truck loaded with commodes, driven by Carroll O’Connor.
After the show, we walked toward a coffee shop. The neon lighting on the bars and restaurants was just coming on. The shadows were long in the street, the wind unseasonably cold. Jo Anne had said hardly a word since we left the theater.
“You okay?” I said.
“It’s a dark film,” she replied.
“Look at it this way. Jack Burns is the outsider who sets the standard for the rest of the cast. Even the sheriff, the Walter Matthau character, is actually on Jack’s side.”
“The good people of the world get it in the neck, and nobody cares,” she said. “That’s the message.”