The next day, he saw no sign of gopher activity. With a happy heart he strung water hoses and sprinklers over his property, raked grass seed into the serpentine lines of sterile dirt and rock that now networked his entire lot, and drove home whistling a song.

When he returned the following week, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The combination of chemical, igneous, and rodent damage was incredible. Grass that had not been eaten at the roots had been cooked by the rockets, firecrackers, and sulfur bombs. The grass was yellow or dying, the field pocked with collapsed areas larger than his car, his well water contaminated. He saw a solitary gopher sitting on the edge of its hole and emptied the magazine of his nine millimeter at it. Some of the bullets ricocheted off a rock and hit a neighbor’s truck across the river.

The following week, Darrel determined the flaw in his strategy. He had waged a war of aggression and superior force against a wily creature that had survived millions of years by using its wits to outsmart both primitive and modern man. Power and success had their origins in guile and deception, not in force and weaponry. How had the famous North Vietnamese general Giap once put it? He had defeated the French not with the gun but with the shovel. Darrel had tried to defeat the gopher with the gun.

What was the answer?

Give the gopher what it wanted.

Darrel fixed a huge salad of scallions and the tender root systems of alfalfa and Canadian bluegrass. He wore rubber gloves so as not to get his scent on the salad, then soaked it overnight in poison. The next morning he packed the salad down the burrows of every pocket gopher on the property. His gopher problem disappeared.

Give your enemies what they want, he told himself. With Greta and her friends, that was easy.

Greta wanted Wyatt Dixon dead and the goods from the Global Research robbery back in the company’s possession.

Before he went to her house that afternoon, he gargled with whiskey, swallowing none of it, and dabbed some on his cheeks and shirt. When she opened the door, she caught a load of his breath and said, “I thought you’d given up getting hammered for a while.”

“What’s a guy going to do on a Saturday afternoon?”

“Come in and I’ll show you,” she said, pulling him by the arm.

He feigned a smile and sat down heavily in a chair. “Got a cold beer? I smell like a smoked ham. The fire on Black Mountain blew out last night,” he said.

She unscrewed the cap on a long-necked bottle and handed it to him. “Want to take a shower?” she said.

“Got to work tonight. I think I’ll be scrubbing a couple of your problems off the blackboard.”

“Like what?”

“Know why the Feds haven’t found the goods from the Global Research break-in?”

“The Feds are bozos?”

“No, they’re smart guys. At least most of the time. They just didn’t figure Wyatt Dixon as a serious player. They marked him off as a psycho because he writes letters to the President.” He upended his beer and smiled at her over the top of the bottle.

She sat down in a chair across from him. She wore a white dress with purple and green flowers printed on it, a silver chain around her neck. Her hair was brushed in thick swirls, her cheeks ruddy. Once again she made him think of a country woman, someone who could knead bread dough, grind up hamburger, and handle a windstorm blowing her wash all over the lawn.

“Darrel, I’ve got a lot at stake in this. Don’t be clever or tease me,” she said. Her eyes were green and sincere, and they never blinked when she spoke.

“The Indians had the stuff from Global Research stashed in a barn up by Johnny American Horse’s spread,” he said. “Wyatt Dixon is con-wise and was onto these guys from the jump. That’s why he was following Amber Finley around. He found their stash and moved it to an old potato cellar behind his house on the Blackfoot. I’m going to take him down tonight. Dixon’s going to do the big exit on this one.”

“Say that last part again.”

“Tonight he gets his ticket punched. No transfers. Next stop, a long cylinder where he gets turned into a shoe box full of ashes.” Darrel laughed, watching her.

“That sounds mean,” she said.

He studied her face, the expression in her eyes, the pulse in her throat. “It doesn’t have to be that way. I thought it was what you wanted,” he said, his heart regaining a sense of hope he had all but abandoned.

There was a long silence. She turned from him and gazed out the window, biting down on the corner of her lip. She cleared her throat. “I don’t tell other people what they should do,” she said.

So much for pangs of conscience, he thought.

Then he pulled the string on her.

“The stuff from Global Research will have to go into an evidence locker for a while. But eventually it’ll get back to the owners,” he said.

Her expression clouded. She took his empty beer bottle from his hand and went to the kitchen to get him a fresh one. When she returned, her eyes were flat. “You don’t want to do something before you work?” she said.

“The highway is clogged with fire trucks. I’d better go.”

“You said, ‘I’m going to take him down.’ Don’t you have to use backup?” she said.

“Did I tell you I was an M.P. in the Army?”

“No.”

“Know what an instructor told me off the record in M.P. school?”

“No,” she said, one hand on her hip, looking down at him curiously.

“When you escort a prisoner and a situation goes south, you bring back only one story. Isn’t that a howl?”

WYATT DIXON DID NOT dream in color, nor upon waking did he remember stories from his sleep or events that fell into any narrative sequence. His dreams were stark, in black and white, composed of indistinct shards, disembodied faces carved out of wood, voices that had no source, perhaps a bull exploding like a piece of black lightning from a bucking chute, or sometimes a razor strop hanging like a punctuation mark in the back of a closet.

In his dreams he both saw and smelled his father, an unshaved, jug-headed man whose overalls hung like rags on his body. The father did not speak in the dream; he simply stared, one eye squinting with an unrelieved anger that seemed to have no cause. But his hands were remarkably fast, a blur of light capable of delivering blows before Wyatt ever saw them coming.

When Wyatt woke from dreams about his father, he would sit for a long time on the side of the bed, his skin insentient, a sound in his ears like wind blowing in a cave. On this particular night he woke to his father’s presence in the room, as palpable as the smell of field sweat and smoke from a stump fire and fresh dirt peeled back over the point of a plowshare. His father stood in silhouette against the window, a revolver hanging from his hand.

“You wasn’t worth the busted rubber that got you born,” the father said.

Wyatt sat on the side of the bed. He wore no shirt and the cold from the river had invaded the room. “What are you doing here, Pap?” he said.

The figure stepped out of the moonlight, the revolver still pointed at the floor. “There are men coming to kill you. I suspect they’ll try to take me out at the same time. Do I have to hook you up again?”

Wyatt focused on the face looming above him and saw his father’s image disappear and another take its place. “How’d you get in, McComb?”

“It was pretty hard. I had to slip the lock with a credit card. Why don’t you invest three bucks in a dead bolt?”

“You said some men is coming here to kill me.”

“Old friends of yours.” McComb touched Wyatt’s cast with the barrel of his revolver.

“Take this dogshit of yours somewheres else.”

“What makes you think you got a vote in this?” Darrel asked.

Wyatt picked up a jelly glass partially filled with his chemical cocktail. He upended the glass, gargled, and swallowed. He licked the dirty residue from the inside of the glass, then set the glass back on the nightstand. “You ain’t no different from me, McComb. Anything I done, you done it twicet over. Except you hid behind the government and done it against a bunch of pitiful Indians down in Central America.”