"Yeah, food's real cheap here."
"Dixie Lee came along with me. He's in a bar right now."
"He called me. You might have to drag him out of the place on a chain."
"He'll be all right. He's only bad when Sal lets him take cocaine." She paused a moment.
"I thought maybe you wouldn't be home."
"I got a late start today. A bunch of phone calls, stuff like that."
She reached for the cups and saucers on the drain board and her arm brushed against mine. She looked at my eyes and raised her mouth, and I slipped my arms around her shoulders and kissed her. She stepped close against me, so that her stomach touched lightly against my loins, and moved her palms over my back. She opened and closed her mouth while she held and kissed me, and then she put her tongue in my mouth and I felt her body flatten against me. I ran my hands over her bottom and her thighs and gently bit her shoulder as she wrapped one calf inside my leg and rubbed her hair on the side of my face.
We pulled the shades in the bedroom and undressed without speaking, as if words would lead both of us to an awareness about morality and betrayal that we did not care to examine in the heated touch of our skin, the dry swallow in the throat, the silent parting of our mouths.
There had been one woman in my life since my wife's death, and I had lived celibate almost a year. She reached down and took me inside her and stretched out her legs along me and ran her hands along the small of my back and down my thighs. The breeze clattered the shades on the windows, the room was dark and cool, but my body was rigid and hot and my neck filmed with perspiration, and I felt like an inept and simian creature laboring above her. She stopped her motion, kissed me on the cheek and smiled, and I stared down at her, out of breath and with the surprise of a man whose education with women always proved inadequate.
"There's no hurry," she said quietly, almost in a whisper.
"There's nothing to worry about."
Then she said, "Here," and pressed on my arm for me to move off her. She brushed her hair out of her eyes, sat on top of me, kissed me on the mouth, then raised herself on her knees and put me inside her again. Her eyes closed and opened, she tightened her thighs against me, and propped herself up on her hands and looked quietly and lovingly into my face.
She came before I did, her face growing intense and small, her mouth suddenly opening like a flower. Then I felt all my nocturnal erotic dreams, my fear, my aching celibacy, rise and swell in my loins, and burst away outside of me like a wave receding without sound in a cave by the sea.
She lay close to me under the sheet, her fingers in the back of my hair. A willow tree in the backyard made shadows on the shade.
"You feel bad, don't you?" she said.
"No."
"You think what you've done is wrong, don't you?"
I didn't answer.
"Clete's impotent, Dave," she said.
"What?"
"He goes to a doctor, but it doesn't do any good."
"When did he become impotent?"
"I don't know. Before I met him. He says a fever did it to him in Guatemala. He says he'll be all right eventually. He pretends it's not a problem."
I raised up on my elbow and looked into her face.
"I don't understand," I said.
"You moved in with an impotent man?"
"He can't help what he is. He's good to me in other ways. He's generous, and he respects me. He takes me places where Indians don't go. Why do you have that look on your face?"
"I'm sorry. I don't mean to," I said.
"What are you thinking?"
"Nothing. I just don't quite understand."
"Understand what?"
"Your relationship. It doesn't make sense."
"Maybe it isn't your business."
"He was my partner, I'm in bed with his girl. You don't think I have some involvement here?"
"I don't like the way you're talking to me."
I knew that anything else that I said would be wrong. I sat on the edge of the bed with my back toward her. The wind fluttered the shade in the window, casting a brilliant crack of sunlight across the room. Finally I looked over my shoulder at her. She had pulled the sheet up over her breasts.
"I try not to be judgmental about other people. I apologize," I said.
"But he and I used to be good friends. You said he was impotent. You were suggesting I didn't have anything to feel bad about. There's something wrong in the equation here. Don't pretend there isn't."
"Look the other way, please," she said, gathered the sheet around her, picked up her clothes from the chair, and walked into the bathroom. A few minutes later she came back out in her yellow dress, pushing the top back on her lipstick, pressing her lips together.
"I like you just the same," I said.
"You don't know anything," she said.
And she left me there, with a wet spot in the center of my bed and a big question mark as to whether I had acquired any degree of caution or wisdom in the fiftieth year of my life.
CHAPTER 7
I needed to go back east of the Divide and talk to more people about the disappearance of Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin. But I had gotten too late a start that day, and instead I drove up to Flathead Lake and spent two hours searching through property records in the county clerk's office. I was still convinced that there was some tie between Sally Dio, Dixie Lee, Harry Mapes, and Star Drilling Company. I didn't buy the story that Sally Dio kept Dixie Lee around to effect innocuous real estate deals or because he simply liked over-the-hill rockabilly musicians. I had known too many like him in New Orleans. They liked women but didn't consider them important; they liked power but would share it out of necessity; they were cruel or violent upon occasion but usually in a pragmatic way. However, they loved money. It was the ultimate measure of success in their lives, the only subject of interest in their conversations. They paid with cash in restaurants, not with credit cards, and their elaborate tipping was as much a part of their predictable grandiosity as their lavender Cadillacs and eight-hundred-dollar tropical suits.
But all I found in the courthouse with Dixie Lee's or Dio's name on them were deeds or leases to house lots, corner business property, and a couple of marinas, nothing that surprised me, nothing that suggested anything more than investments in local real estate.
I drove up the east shore of the lake, through the orchards of cherry trees, past the restaurant built out over the water and the blue lagoon with the rim of white beach and the pines growing thickly up the incline back toward the road, and finally to the entrance of Sally Dio's split-level redwood home built up on a cliff that overlooked the dazzling silk like sheen of the lake. I drove around the next curve, parked my truck off the shoulder, and walked back through a stand of pine trees that ended abruptly at the lip of a cliff that fell away to the lake's edge. Green, moss-covered rocks showed dully in the sunlight just below the water's surface.
Across the lagoon I could see Die's house and the cottage below where Clete and Darlene lived. I knelt on one knee among the pine needles and steadied my World War II Japanese field glasses against a tree trunk. An American flag popped in the breeze on Dio's veranda, his flower boxes were brilliant with pink and blue and crimson petunias, and a cream-colored Mercury and black Porsche with Nevada plates were parked in the gravel at the edge of his lawn. I wrote the tag numbers down in a notebook, buttoned it in my shirt pocket, then watched a big van with bubble side windows, followed by a Toyota jeep, drive out on the beach. The side door, which was painted with a tropical sunset, slid open and a group of swimmers jumped out on the sand and began inflating a huge yellow raft with a foot-operated air pump.
I refocused the glasses on their faces. It was Dio and what Clete called the Tahoe crowd. Dio wore an open shirt, flop sandals, and a luminescent purple bikini that fitted tightly against his loins and outlined his phallus. He was in a good mood, directing the outing of his entourage, pointing at a milk-white two-engine amphibian plane that came in low over the hills on the far side of the lake, unlocking his father's wheelchair from the mechanical platform that extended from the van's open door and lowered to the sand. Clete walked from the Toyota, wheeled Dio's father by a barbecue pit, lighted a bag of charcoal, and began forking a box of steaks onto the grill. He wore his crushed porkpie fishing hat, and I could see his nylon shoulder holster and revolver under his sweater.