Chapter 12
THAT EVENING I SAT by Wyatt Dixon’s bed at St. Pat’s Hospital and tried to figure out the strange processes that must have governed his thinking. Had he called me rather than 911 only because my number was automatically activated by the redial button? Or had he factored me into his life as some kind of symbiotic brother-in-arms? And, more essentially, how could a man who was so brave be capable of so much evil? He had perhaps come within fifteen minutes of dying, had been in surgery four hours, and now lay in traction, his thigh encased in plaster, refusing painkillers, because, he explained, “Dope puts un-Christian-like thoughts in my brain cells.”
He stonewalled the cops, stating he had no idea who had attacked him or where the attackers had gone. “What I have told you officers is just a picture from the other side of life in this land of the free and home of the brave,” he said. “It is like many a sad situation in the world of dim lights, thick smoke, and loud, loud music, where honky-tonk angels and men with broken hearts play. Sirs, I have came often upon these scenes of destruction, and I heard the groans of the dying but I didn’t hear nobody pray.”
The cops put away their notebooks in disgust and left the room.
Except for Darrel McComb, who stood at the foot of the bed, snapping a piece of gum between his molars. “You a fan of Vern Gosdin and Hank Williams? Don’t bother answering that. I just wanted you to be aware I know where all that cornpone crap comes from,” Darrel said.
“In my correspondence with President Bush, I have asked him to put aside extra money for lawmen such as yourself. While the rest of us is sleeping safe in our beds, you are out there fighting the criminals that is turning our great country into a dungheap. Even when I was standing dirty and hungry on the punishment barrel in Huntsville Pen, I knowed it was men like you that was protecting the nation from the likes of me. You have kept the Stars and Stripes popping smartly atop every institution in our fine nation, including the jails where this lonely cowboy slept in shackles and chains. I say God bless you, noble sir.”
“You listen, you hillbilly moron,” Darrel said. “I know you broke into Greta Lundstrum’s house. You think you’re some kind of one-man intelligence operation? Here’s a big flash for you. Meltdowns and ignorant peckerwoods don’t get to be intelligence operatives. You got the names of Tex Barker and Lynwood Peeples out of her house. Those are the guys who buried that shank in your thigh. They were carrying a bagful of tools to torture you with. Is it starting to add up for you now? You’ve stuck your dork in the wall socket, Gomer. That means you start cooperating with us or we’re going to let them recycle you into fish chum.”
Wyatt stared at Darrel McComb, his mouth twisting with each word Darrel spoke, his eyes blinking with feigned awe. “You have done convinced me of the fact you are not an ordinary policeman. I am contacting President Bush immediately to see if he can find federal employment for you. I have never seen such a shameful waste of mental talents.”
“Who’s Mabus?” Darrel asked.
Wyatt started to speak, then was silent. A strange transformation seemed to take place in his face. He looked straight ahead, his eyes thoughtful, his mouth compressed. He raised his right hand off the sheet and ticked a callus with his thumbnail, his eyes uplifted at Darrel now. “I ain’t sure who he is. But I got a notion he’s a whole lot bigger than any little shithouse operation you got around here. I seen that name wrote inside a-”
“Inside what?” Darrel said.
“I need my chemical cocktail. I’m done talking with you,” Wyatt said, his sardonic attitude gone now, his expression sullen.
After Darrel McComb left the room, a nurse brought in a glass containing the orange medicine that smelled as if it had been dipped out of a settling pond at a sewage works. Wyatt drank the glass empty and continued to stare into space.
“You saw the name ‘Mabus’ written inside what, Wyatt?” I said.
“A pentagram. The woman who wrote it there knows what a pentagram means, too. Her daddy was a preacher.”
“The sign of the devil?”
“I ain’t got no more to say on it. God, my leg hurts. Them boys who visited me was a pair of mean motor scooters, wasn’t they?”
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Saturday, I was Johnny American Horse’s best man at his and Amber Finley’s wedding on the lawn of a small white woodframe church with a tiny belfry, set against the backdrop of the Mission Mountains, rising like ancient glaciers straight out of the green earth into the clouds. The ceremony was conducted by both a Methodist minister and an Indian shaman who was the great-grandson of the Lakota mystic Black Elk. Amber wore a white dress with frills on it and purple suede cowboy boots, and looked radiant and happy and beautiful in the sunshine. Johnny, conservative as always, wore what was evidently his only suit, one that brought back memories I did not want to entertain on such a fine afternoon. The suit and vest were narrow-cut, dark pinstripe, just like the suit worn by L. Q. Navarro on the night he died.
Johnny and Amber had sent out no formal invitations, but the churchyard was crowded with their friends-wranglers, feed growers from the Jocko Valley, musicians, log haulers, university professors, hard-core drunks, organic farmers, writers and artists, Indians from the Salish, Northern Cheyenne, Crow, and Blackfeet reservations, and weirded-out, mind-altered people who still believed the year was 1968.
The reception was in a saloon, the dinner a pig and half of a buffalo barbecued over a pit of flaming wood dug in a grove of cottonwoods. The orchestra was a western string band put together by my son, Lucas, and the dance was held on a cement pad under a lilac sky, the snow on the Missions red in the sunset, the music of Bob Wills and Rose Maddox floating out over a countryside knee-deep in alfalfa and pooled with duck ponds.
Everyone important in Amber’s life was there. Except for her father, United States Senator Romulus Finley.
SENATOR FINLEY was at my office by 8 A.M. Monday. When he didn’t find me there, he went to the courthouse, where I was involved in a trial, and caught me in the corridor outside the courtroom. “What in the goddamn hell do you think you’re doing, son?” he said, his grip biting into my arm.
“I’d appreciate your taking your hand off my person,” I said.
“A murderer just married my daughter, and you helped him do it.”
“I’m not going to ask you again,” I said.
He released me and took a step back. “I won’t put up with this bullshit, Mr. Holland.”
“I think you embarrass yourself, sir,” I said.
“Say that again?”
“Your daughter is a good person. Why don’t you show her a little respect?”
“Son, I’m just about a half inch from busting you between the lights.”
“My father was a stringer-bead welder on gaslines all over the Southwest. He was a fine man and called me ‘son.’ Other men don’t.”
“Have it your way. As far as I’m concerned, Johnny American Horse is a subversive and a traitor. He’s taken advantage of my daughter’s naïveté and you, an educated man and officer of the court, have helped him do it. I won’t put up with it.”
He walked back down the corridor toward the courthouse entrance, his leather soles loud, his meaty shoulders and neck framed against the light outside.
I should have dismissed the insult, even the implied threat, as the expression of wounded pride in a childish man. But there was something about Finley that was hard to abide, a prototypical personality any southerner recognizes-one characterized by a combination of self-satisfaction, stupidity, and a suggestion of imminent violence, all of it glossed over with a veneer of moral and patriotic respectability.