'Ask Ringo to show you his Polaroid collection of life down in the tropics.'
'Let this go, Billy Bob.'
'Moon killed my father.'
He repeated my statement back to me incredulously. When I didn't reply, he said, 'Do you realize what you just told me? If this guy shows up dead…'
'Get a life, Marvin,' I said, and eased the phone receiver down in the cradle.
Lucas stood at the bookshelves, Great-grandpa Sam's journal spread in his hands, his mouth open.
'What's up, bud?' I said.
He blinked, then closed the journal.
'Moon killed your dad?' he asked.
'Yeah, I guess he did.'
'What are you gonna do about it?'
'That journal was kept by my great-grandfather. He was a drunkard and a gunfighter who became a saddle preacher on the Chisholm Trail. It took him a long time, but he learned how to put aside his violent ways.'
'What happens when the other guy don't put aside his?'
'You talking about Moon or Darl Vanzandt?'
'I seen Darl out at the drive-in this morning. He was melting screamers in dago red. He said I was yellow. He said he's gonna pop me in the face every time he sees me.'
'He'll crash and burn, Lucas. He's a pitiful person.'
'You told Marvin Pomroy you capped some dope mules.'
'So I'm a bad example.'
'No, you ain't. You're a good man. And that's why I come here, just to tell you that. I'm proud we're… Well, I'm proud, that's all. I'll see you, Billy Bob.'
He went down the front hall and out the door to his pickup. Through the screen I could see shadows on the hillside and wildflowers rippling and bending and straightening in the wind, like colored confetti flickering in a world that had almost gone gray.
* * *
chapter thirty-five
That afternoon I drove to the welding shop where Moon worked. It was padlocked, and the owner of the motel next door, where Moon kept a room, said he had not seen him in two days.
I went home and worked in the yard and tried to think my way out of an impossible situation. Great-grandpa Sam, at age fifty-six, had prevailed against the Dalton-Doolin gang but had kept faith with his ordination and had not taken human life. I had manipulated a psychopath, perhaps putting the Vanzandts at risk as well as Felix Ringo. Intellectually I regretted what I had done, but secretly I still lusted for revenge and my wrists swelled with blood and my calluses rasped against the grain of the mattock when I thudded it into the roots of a willow that had threaded themselves into my water well.
I sat in the grass on the riverbank and watched the current riffle across the top of a submerged cottonwood. Directly below me, lost in the murk and high water, was the sunken automobile where two members of the Karpis-Barker gang had died. Garland T. Moon had waded through this water and fished here, wearing a suit, flinging a hook full of bloody melt into the current that flowed through the car's empty windows.
Why this particular spot, I wondered. Did he know the sunken car was there, that it was a nest for shovel-mouth catfish, that bass hung under the bluffs and fed on the insects that fell from the grove of trees upstream?
My father probably took him fishing here, walked these same banks with him as he did with me in later years, a sack of bread-and-butter sandwiches swinging from his big hand.
Moon had tried to extort ten acres from me on the back of my property. What were his words? I want the place should have been mine. At least part of it. Was that it, I thought. Maybe I had been wrong, he hadn't returned to Deaf Smith simply for revenge. Somehow he had convinced himself he was owed part of my father's estate. He had also gone to Jack Vanzandt, perhaps a surrogate for my father, walking into the middle of his golf game, as though somehow the door to wealth and acceptance in Deaf Smith society would open for him if he could only turn the right handle.
Now he had disappeared. Where would a man dying of cancer, beaten with a maul handle, and hunted by a sadist go in a county that had been the origin of his travail and the denier of what he believed was his inheritance?
What places was he even familiar with? Perhaps just the motel room with water bed and X-rated cable he lived in, the old county prison where he had been sodomized by two roadbulls, the tin welding shed that was like stepping into the devil's forge, the wide, green sweep of the river below the bluffs at the back of my property.