Chapter 16

Nicki Molinari wore leather hiking shorts rolled tightly around his thighs, alpine climbing shoes with red laces and heavy lugs, and a purple polo shirt scissored off below his nipples. A nest of scars, like pink string, was festooned on his skin between one hip and his rib cage. On his left hand was a sun-bleached fielder's glove with a scuffed baseball gripped inside the pocket.

His eyes searched up and down the tunnel of trees, as though he heard voices in the wind.

"Were you talking to somebody out here?" he asked.

I saw his convertible parked in the sunshine. His men were nowhere around.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"That skank up in the Jocko Valley owes me seven hundred grand. I'll pay you a ten percent finder's fee if you can get it out of her."

"The skank is Cleo Lonnigan?"

"The language I use offends your sensibilities, that's too bad. Her husband was the business partner of some associates of mine. He stiffed them, they stiffed me. I ended up in Terminal Island. The shorter version is I got cluster-fucked eight ways from breakfast and that broad is living on a horse ranch bought with my money."

"Not interested," I said.

He flipped the baseball into the air and caught it.

"You want to play catch?" he said.

"No."

He grinned and tossed the ball at my face so that I had to catch it or be hit.

"See, you can do it," he said. "Come on, I got another glove in the Caddy."

"How about getting out of here?" I said.

"I thought you might have a sense of humor."

I walked past him, into the sunlight, and handed him his ball. I heard him follow me.

"What do you have against me?" he asked.

"You hurt people."

"Oh, you heard the stories, huh? I leave body parts in garbage grinders, throw people off roofs, stuff like that? It's DEA bullshit."

"I don't think so."

"Were you in the service?"

"No."

"I was in Laos, at a place where these sawed-off little guys called the Hmongs grew a lot of poppies. Me and about four hundred other guys. We got left behind. Why do you think that happened?"

"I don't know."

"Yeah, you do. You worked for the G. If you like government mythology about wiseguys, that's your business. What I do in five years don't add up to five minutes of what I seen in Vietnam. That includes dope getting flown out of the Golden Triangle on American planes."

"How'd you get out of Laos?"

"Play catch with me and I'll tell you the whole story," he said.

"Nope."

"Were you in the sack with Cleo?"

"You're out of line, Nicki."

"There's my first name again. I love it. I did some boom-boom with that broad, too. It was like curling up with an ice cube. Tell me I'm wrong."

He bounced the baseball up and down in the pocket of his glove, studying its scuffed surface, his mouth down-hooked at the corners.

That night I dreamed I saw Doc Voss standing waist-deep in a stream, under a yellow moon, his skin prickled with cold. Then his fly line stiffened in the riffle and the tip of his rod bent almost to the water's surface, trembling with tension.

He wrapped the line around his left forearm, so tightly his veins corded with blood, and horsed a long, thick-bodied brown trout through the shallows onto the gravel. He slipped a huge knife from a scabbard on his side and stooped over the trout and inserted the knife point into the trout's anus and slit its belly all the way to the gills.

Doc lifted the trout by its mouth and the unborn roe fell in a gush of heavy pink water from the separated skin in its belly and glistened on the rocks at Doc's feet. He looked up and grinned at me, but I hardly recognized him. His face had become skeletal, his eyes lighted with the moon's reflection off the river.

"Where are your waders, Doc?" I said.

He turned and walked away from me, the blade in his hand glowing with white fire.

I woke from the dream and went into the kitchen and opened a drawer where Doc often stuffed his shopping receipts. It took me a minute to find it, but there it was, crumpled up at the back of the drawer, the carbon of a bill of sale from Bob Ward's Sporting Goods.

"What are you doing in there?" Doc said behind me.

"I saw this receipt a week ago. For a pair of chest waders," I said.

"So?"

"Where are they?" I asked.

"I returned them," he replied.

"Without the receipt?"

"What are you saying, Billy Bob?"

"Did you drown that man?" My voice caught in my throat.

"Somebody else got to him first. Turn out the light when you go to bed," he said.

On Sunday I went to Mass at the Catholic church by the university, then drove out on the Clark

Fork west of town in a sun shower and sat on an enormous flat rock that slanted into the water. The river was wide, the color of green-tarnished copper, and cottonwoods dotted the banks and there were blue mountains in the distance. Upstream, a radio was playing gospel music in a parked pickup truck, and for just a moment I was nine years old again, at a camp meeting in the Winding Stair Mountains of eastern Oklahoma. The preacher had just lowered me backward into the river, and when the coldness of the water struck my lungs I opened my eyes involuntarily and looked upward at the lacy green canopy of the heartwood trees overhead and at the blue dome of sky and at the autumnal light that broke around the preacher's silhouette as though it had been poured from a gold beaker.

Then he lifted me from the water, my mouth gasping for air. When I walked with him toward the bank, where my father waited for me, the world did not seem changed but redefined in a way I could not explain at the time. The sky was joined to the rim of the earth; the trees fluttered with red and gold leaves all the way to the hazy outline of the Ozarks, and there was a cool, fecund odor of silt and ponded water and disturbed animal nests blowing out of the shade. Then a huge woman with a black-lacquered big-bellied Gibson hung around her neck commenced singing "I Saw the Light."

The preacher was as lean as a scarecrow. He spoke in tongues and clogged on the wood stage, a Bible cupped in his hand, while the congregation clapped and shouted with a thunderous rhythm that made the ground shake. The pitch of their voices was almost orgasmic, filled with joy and visceral release. Even my father, who ordinarily was a sober and reticent man, picked me up with one arm and danced in a circle.

It was a moment that others might parody or ridicule, but I'll never forget it. After my father and I had gotten into our pickup truck and were preparing to leave, the preacher leaned his head through the passenger's window. His hair looked like it had been cut with sheep shears; his face was as long as a horse's, his skin as rough as a wood shingle.

"You wasn't scared, was you?" he asked.

"No, sir," I lied.

"The papists got seven sacraments. We ain't got but one. That's why we really let 'er rip. You're river-baptized, son. From here on out, you take your church with you wherever you go, earth and sky and water and spirit, all of it burned forever into your soul. You ain't never got to be afraid," he said, his dark eyes bursting with certitude.

"What are you doin', slim?" a voice said behind me.

I turned and looked up at Temple Carrol, who stood on the down-sloping rock, her thumbs hooked in her back pockets.

"How'd you know I was here?" I asked.

"I saw you leaving the church, so I followed you."

"What's on your mind?" I said.

She sat down, just a little higher on the rock than I was, her knees pulled up before her. She wore brown jeans and loafers and white socks and she crossed her hands on her knees. "Was I too hard on you the other day?"