I watched the pallbearers lower Darlene's casket into the freshly dug hole in the cemetery. The piled orange-and-gray dirt next to the grave was slick with rainwater. The graves around hers were littered with jelly glasses and dime-store vases filled with dead wild-flowers. A small American flag lay sideways on a soldier's grave, spotted with mud. A picture of a little girl, not more than five or six, was wrapped in plastic and tied to a small stone marker with baling wire. On the incline to one side of the cemetery a long length of black plastic pipe ran from a house trailer down to the lip of the river basin. The pipe had cracked at a joint, and a stream of yellow-black effluent had leaked its way in rivulets into one side of the cemetery.
I walked over to the pickup truck, where Alafair slept on the seat with the door open; I stared out over the wet land. In the distance I could see rain falling heavily on some low gray-green hills dotted with a few pine trees. After a while I heard cars and pickups driving away over the dirt road, rocks knocking up under their fenders; then it became quiet again, except for the sound of the two grave diggers spading the mound of dirt on Darlene's casket. Then a strange thing happened: the wind began to blow across the fields, flattening the grass, wrinkling the pools of rainwater in the road. It blew stronger and stronger, so unexpectedly hard, in fact, that I opened my mouth to clear my ears and looked at the sky for the presence of new storm clouds or even a funnel. A cloud shifted temporarily away from the sun and a curtain of light moved suddenly across the bluffs and the gradated layers of the river basin. As it did, the wind stripped away the purple flowers of the dogwood blooming by the cemetery fence and blew them in a pocket of air out over the river's surface like a fragmented bird.
Then it was all over. The sky was gray again, the wind dropped, the weeds stood up stiffly in the fields.
I heard someone standing behind me.
"It looks like the end of the earth, don't it?" Dixie Lee said. He wore a gray western suit with a maroon shirt that had pearl snap buttons on it.
"Or what the earth'll look like the day Jesus ends it."
I saw Clete behind the wheel of Dixie 's pink Cadillac convertible, waiting for him.
"Who paid for the casket?" I said.
"Clete."
"Who did it, Dixie?"
"I don't know."
"Sally Dio?"
"I can't believe something like that."
"Don't tell me that."
"Fuck, I don't know." He looked at Alafair, who was sleeping with her rump in the air.
"I'm sorry… but I don't know. I ain't sure about anything anymore."
I continued to look out over the river flats, the swirl of dark current in the middle of the river, and the orange-streaked bluffs beyond.
"It ain't any good to stand out here studying on things," he said.
"Convoy on back with us and we'll stop in Lincoln for something to eat."
"I'll be along after a while."
I heard him light a cigarette, click his lighter shut and put it in his pocket. I could smell his cigarette smoke drifting from behind me.
"Walk over here with me. I don't want to wake up that little girl," he said.
"What is it, Dixie?" I said irritably.
"Some people say life's a bitch and you die. I don't know if that's right or not. But it's what you're starting to think right now, and it ain't your way. You get yourself a lot of distance between you and them kind of thoughts, son. Look, you got involved with her. Everything ain't lost on me. I know what you're feeling."
"You're sober."
"So I eased up a couple of days. I got my own program. You guys stay sober a day at a time. I get drunk a day at a time. Convoy on back with us. Give me a break from Clete. Sonofabitch is driving me crazy. It's like being next to a balloon that's fixing to float down on a hot cigarette. I tell you, he catches the guy that did this, it ain't ever getting to the jailhouse."
I followed them back toward the Divide, across the greening plains and into the mountains, up the glistening black highway into thick stands of ponderosa pine, blue shadow in the canyons, white water breaking over the boulders in the stream beds far below, long strips of cloud hanging wetly in the trees. It was misting heavily in the town of Lincoln; the air was cool and purple in the twilight and smelled of cut logs and woodsmoke and food cooking and the diesel exhaust from the eighteen-wheel log trucks idling in cafe parking lots. I saw Clete and Dixie pull off the road next to a cafe and look back at me. I shifted into second, accelerated through the traffic light, and kept going through town. Alafair looked at me in the light from the dashboard. Her window was half down, and there were drops of water in her hair and on her tan face.
"We ain't going to stop?" she said.
"How about I buy you a buffalo burger on the other side of the mountain?"
"They wanted you to stop with them, didn't they?"
"Those guys want lots of things. But like somebody once told me, I just don't want to be there when they find it."
"Sometimes you don't make no sense, Dave."
"I've got to have a talk with your teacher," I said.
On Monday morning I started to call my lawyer, then decided I didn't need higher phone bills or more depressing news. If he had gotten a continuance, he would have called me, and anything else he might have to say would be largely irrelevant. I walked Alafair to school, then ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts at the kitchen table and tried to think, as I had all day Sunday, of a reasonable plan to push Harry Mapes and Sally Dio to the wall. But I was quickly running out of options. I would never be able to find the bodies of the dead Indians, much less prove that they were killed by Harry Mapes and Dalton Vidrine. I wondered how I had ever thought I could solve my legal problems by myself, anyway. I wasn't a cop; I had no authority, access to police information, power of warrant, arrest, or interrogation. Most motion pictures portray private investigators as chivalric outsiders who solve crimes that mystify the bumbling flatfeet of officialdom. The reality is that most Pis are former jocks, barroom bouncers, and fired or resigned cops who would cut off their fingers to still have their civil service ratings. Their licenses gave them about as much legal authority as a postman.
I could go back on the eastern slope of the Divide and start checking oil leases in county courthouses. Maybe somehow I would tie Dio into Harry Mapes and Star Drilling Company and the Indians, but even if the connection existed, how would that help my defense on the murder charge in Louisiana? And who had killed Darlene and why? My thoughts became like dogs snapping at each other.
I was distracted by the sound of somebody walking between my house and the neighbor's. I got up from the table and looked through the bedroom door and out the screen window. In the leafy shade I saw a thick-bodied blond man in a yellow hard hat and a denim shirt with cutoff sleeves disappear through some bushes into the backyard. A tool belt clinked on his side. I walked quickly to the back door and saw him standing in the sunlight, in the middle of the lawn, staring up at the telephone pole with his hands on his hips. His biceps were big and red with sunburn.
"Could I help you?" I said.
"Telephone company. There's trouble on the line."
I nodded and didn't reply. He continued to stare up at the pole, then he glanced back at me again.
"Did you use your phone this morning?" he asked.
"No."
"Did it ring and just stop?"
"No."
"Well, it's no big thing. I got to get up on your pole, and then maybe I'll have to use your phone in a little bit. We'll get it fixed, though." He grinned at me, then walked out into the alley and behind the garage where I couldn't see him.