'Well, you're just a big pill. But one day you'll see we mean you well. Until then, you have a good life, sir,' she said, and squeezed my hand.
She got out of my car, her long, Indian-black hair tucked behind her head with a silver comb. Then I saw Darl come to meet her, looking past her shoulder at me, his face oily and insentient with booze and tranquilizers, the glare in his eyes like yellow heat trapped under murky water.
The next day, in my office, Marvin Pomroy, the prosecutor, told me about the call that had come in to the rural fire station, his eyes moving across the rug as though he were clarifying the details to himself rather than to me.
No one would have seen the flames, but a shower broke in the predawn hours and a column of wet smoke rose from between two hills and hung in the sky like a long gray rope. At first the firemen thought they were simply putting out a pile of discarded automobile tires that had been heaped into a deep pit. Then they began to poke through the foam and pull apart the tires with their axes. The blackened figure at the bottom of the pyre looked atrophied, cemented at the joints, like an anatomically deformed manikin encased in a thick crust. Except for the white teeth, exposed by the skin that had stretched back on the skull in a death grin.
'You're sure it's Jimmy Cole?' I asked.
'Cole was missing two toes on his left foot. He cut them off with a hatchet to get out of the field in Sugarland,' Marvin said. His eyes were bright, his gum snapping in his jaw. 'The crime scene's clean, though. We can't tie it to Moon.'
'You look like your circuits are burning,' I said.
'The ME says Cole died somewhere else. His nose and mouth and ears were full of sediment and pig shit. The ME says he was probably buried in a hog lot, then dug up after rigor mortis set in.' He glanced at my face. 'What?' he said.
'I told Garland Moon I thought he'd killed Cole. He probably decided to move the body.'
'What were you doing with Moon?'
'Either he or Cole was in my barn. I tried to war
n him off.'
'Don't try to 'front this guy on your own,' he said. But I knew I was not the source of his agitation. He leaned forward in the chair, a heated sheen on his face. 'Look, I've got a problem here that's eating my lunch. The fire was on the old Hart property. Nobody's lived there for thirty years. But I got the feeling most of those deputies had been there before. I also got the feeling the sheriff didn't want anybody hanging around there.'
'Who owns the place now?'
'A California company that sells western real estate to people tired of shopping in malls where the Crips and the Bloods have firefights. But I don't see anything there worth hiding, a strip of ground between the hills, the kind of place where the hoot owls screw the jackrabbits.'
'Why you telling me this?'
'That's the irony. I work in a county that's so corrupt I have to confide in a defense lawyer who rides his horse into barrooms. I grant you, it's a pitiful situation,' he said.
'Thanks, Marvin. The ME thinks Jimmy Cole was suffocated in a hog lot?'
'Moon wouldn't do that to an old friend. He put an ice pick inside his head.'
After work that day I took the rake and garden shears and a gunny sack out of the barn and walked to our family cemetery on the far side of the tank. It was bordered by sandstone fence posts drilled through the center to hold the cedar rails that my father had shaved and beveled and notched thirty-two years ago, the year before he had climbed down into a hellhole on a natural gas pipeline to mend a leak in a faulty weld.
Each year he faked his physicals or got someone else to take them for him, because, like many pipeline arc welders, his eyes were filled with tiny pinholes from weaving a circle of fire that was as white as the sun around a pipe joint. My mother said his vision had become so bad that clarity of sight came to him only when he struck the stringer-bead rod against the pipe's metal and saw again the flame that was as pure to him as the cathedral's bells were to the deaf bellringer Quasimodo.
My father never saw the apprentice with him pull a Zippo from his khakis and light a cigarette. The explosion blew the glass out of the welding truck like brittle candy.
My mother, who had been a librarian and an elementary school teacher, was buried next to him. After my father's death, she had purchased a common headstone for them both, inscribed with her name as well as his, with her birth date and a chiseled dash that left the date of death to another hand.
I raked their graves and Great-grandpa Sam's clean, and those of all the other Hollands buried there, trimmed the grass around the headstones, and weeded out the rose beds I had dug under the cedar fence rails. Then I picked wild-flowers from the field and set them on my parents' graves, and cut a solitary yellow rose and laid it against Great-grandpa Sam's headstone.
The wind was warm blowing across the field, rippling the grass like new wheat, and I could smell the river and the water in the irrigation ditches and the day's heat baked into the scarred hardpan that had once been part of the Chisholm Trail. I didn't hear the footsteps behind me.
'I saw you from the back of the house,' Mary Beth said. She wore tan slacks, with high pockets, and sandals and a magenta shirt, and she carried a picnic basket by the straw bail in her right hand.
'How you doin', slim?' I said.
'Slim? If you aren't a peach.'
'You figure out who those guys in the cruiser were?'
'Take your choice.'