I watched them for two hours. They smoked dope in the lee of the van, drank wine and canned beer out of a washtub filled with crushed ice, ate bleeding steaks and tossed salads off paper plates, swam out breathlessly into the lake and climbed laughing into their yellow raft, their bodies hard and prickled with cold. The girls were pretty and tan and good to look at. Everyone was happy, except maybe Clete and the elder Dio. The Tahoe crowd were the kind of people who knew that they would never die.

The sun had moved into the western sky, which was absolutely blue above the green hills, and the light must have glinted on my field glasses because I saw Sally Dio look up suddenly and squint at the pine trees in which I knelt. I stepped back into the shadows and refocused through the branches. Dio stood by Clete and his father and was pointing in my direction. Clete stopped cleaning up paper plates from a picnic table, glanced up briefly at the cliff, then resumed his work. But Sally Dio and his father looked as if they were staring at an angry dog that was running against its chain. The elder Dio's mouth was wide when he spoke to Clete again, and Clete flung a handful of picnic trash into a garbage can, walked down to the water's edge where the swimmers had left the raft, dragged it up on the sand, and began pulling out the air plugs. Then he loaded the hampers, the washtub of beer and wine coolers, and the elder Dio back into the van.

I could have gotten out of there, I suppose, without being seen. But sometimes self-respect requires that you float one down the middle, letter high, big as a balloon, and let the batter have his way. I walked through the trees back to the road. The air was cool in the shade and heavy with the smell of the pine needles on the ground. Bluebirds with yellow wings flew in and out of the smoky light at the tops of the trees. I walked up the shoulder of the road, got in my truck, put my field glasses inside their case, put the case inside the glove box, and started the engine just as Dio's van and Clete's jeep turned out of the entrance to the public beach and headed toward me.

I saw Sally Dio's face through the wide front window of the van, saw the recognition and anger grow in it as he looked back at me and took his foot off the accelerator. Clete was slowing behind him at the same time.

Dio stopped opposite my cab and stared at me.

"What the fuck you think you're doing, man?" he said.

Through the bubble side window of the van I could see people sitting in leather swivel chairs. Their faces gathered at the window as though they were looking out of a fishbowl.

"Wonderful day," I said.

"What the fuck you doing up in that woods?"

"What do you care? You're not shy. Come on, Dio. That air show was first-rate."

I saw his nostrils whiten around the edges.

"We told you the other day you don't come around," he said.

"You're not a cop. You seem to have confusion about that."

I turned off my engine and clicked my nails on the window jamb. He turned off his engine, too. It was silent on the road, except for the wind blowing through the pines. The western sun over the lake made his waxed black van almost glow with an aura.

"I heard you like to take off parts of people," I said.

"You heard what?"

"The Sal the Duck story. It's the kind of stuff they enjoy at the DEA. It brightens up a guy's file."

He opened the door and started to step out on the road. I saw his father lean forward from the back and try to hold his shoulder. The father's lips looked purple against his gray skin; his goiter worked in his throat and his eyes were intense and black when he spoke. But Sally Dio was not listening to his father's caution, and he slid off the seat and stepped out on the road.

I set my sunglasses on the dashboard and got out of the truck. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Clete standing by his jeep. Dio had put on a pair of Levi's over his bathing suit. His denim shirt was open, and his stomach was flat and ridged with muscle. I heard the van door slide open on the far side, and a sun-bleached boy and girl walked around the back and stared at me, but it was obvious they intended to remain spectators. Through the trees I could see the sun click on the deep-blue rippling sheen of the lake.

"You've got a serious problem," Sally Dio said.

"How's that?" I said, and I smiled.

"You hear an Italian name, you think you can piss on it. A guy's been up the road, you think he's anybody's fuck."

"You're not a convincing victim, Dio."

"So you keep coming around, provoking a guy, bothering his family, bothering his friends." He touched me lightly on the chest with three stiff fingers. There were small saliva bubbles in the corner of his mouth. His duck tailed hair was the color of burnt copper in the slanting light.

"It's time to back off, partner," I said, and smiled again.

"And it don't matter you been warned. You get in people's face, you got no respect for an old man, you got no respect for people's privacy. You're a jitter bird man." His three stiffened fingers tapped against my chest again, this time harder.

"You get off hanging around swinging dicks, 'cause you got nothing going on your own."

His face came closer to mine and he poked me in the chest again. The looped scar under his right eye looked like a flattened piece of string on his skin. I slipped my hands into the back pockets of my khakis, as a third-base coach might, and looked off at the sunlight winking through the pine trees.

"Let me run something by you, Sal," I said.

"Did you ever ask yourself why you have a certain kind of people hanging around you? Hired help, rummy musicians, beach boys with rut for brains. Do you think it's just an accident that everybody around you is a gum ball When's the last time somebody told you you were full of shit?"

I could hear his breathing.

"You got a death wish, man. You got something wrong with you," he said.

"Let's face it, Sal. I'm not the guy with the electronic gate on my driveway. You think the Fuller Brush man is going to whack you out?"

He wet his lips to speak again, then suddenly one side of his face tightened and he swung at my head. I ducked sideways and felt a ring graze across my ear and scalp. Then I hooked him, hard, between the mouth and the nose. His head snapped back, and his long hair collapsed over his ears. Then he came at me, swinging wildly with both fists, the way an enraged child would. Before I could hit him squarely again, he locked both arms around me, grunting, wheezing in my ear; I could smell his hair tonic and deodorant and the reefer smoke in his clothes. Then he released one of his arms, bent his knees, and swung at my phallus.

But his aim was not as good as his design. He hit me inside the thigh, and I brought my elbow into his nose, felt it break like a chicken bone, saw the shock and pain in his eyes just before I hit him again, this time in the mouth. He bounced off the van's side panel, and I hit him hard in the face again. He was trying to raise his hands in front of him, but it did him no good. I heard the back of his head bounce off the metal again, saw the genuine terror in his eyes, saw his blood whipped across the glass bubble in the panel, felt my fists hit him so hard that his face went out of round.

Then Clete was between us, his revolver drawn, one arm held out stiffly toward me, his eyes big and glaring.

"Back away, Dave! I'll shoot you in the foot! I swear to God I will!" he said.

On the edge of my vision I could see cars stopped on the road in each direction. Clete was breathing through his mouth, his eyes riveted on mine. Sally Dio had both of his hands pressed to his face. His fingers were red in the sunlight through the trees. In the distance I heard a police siren. I felt the heat go out of my chest the way a hot-eyed, hook-beaked raven would fly out of a cage.