“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Messenger?”
“Standing here smelling your bad breath.”
“You son of a bitch, I warned you not to hang around and make any more trouble. And now I find out you’ve moved in. Talked Dacy into giving you a job and moved the hell in.”
Behind him Dacy said, “I told you, John T., he didn’t talk me into anything.” She was angry too, standing with arms folded tight across her breasts. But from her tone and the crooked set of her mouth Messenger sensed that satisfaction and a hint of amusement lay under the anger. “I make my own decisions.”
“You goddamn well made the wrong one this time,” John T. said without taking his hot eyes off Messenger.
“None of your business if I did.”
“Yours and his, that it?”
“That’s it.”
“What other kind of business you and him got, Dacy?”
“What’d you just say?”
“You heard me. Been a long time since you had a man around to tend to your needs. Pick up a better man than this one at any bar on Saturday night, good-looking woman like you. Or maybe you just like short-peckers from the big city.”
Dacy’s amusement was gone. She came forward in a jerky rush and caught Roebuck’s arm and pulled him around to face her. “Get off my property. Now.”
“When I’m good and ready.”
“Now. I mean it.”
“Or what? You figure to put me off? Or you gonna ask this sorry hunk of horse turd to do it for you?”
Messenger said thinly, “It won’t work, Roebuck.”
“What won’t work, asshole?”
“Trying to provoke me into a fight so you can call the sheriff and file an assault charge. I won’t fight you, not that way. And you won’t get rid of me that way, either.”
“You son of a bitch—”
“You used that name already. Try a new one.”
Dacy laughed. She’d relaxed again. “When it comes to cussing,” she said to Messenger, “he’s about as original as a kid in a schoolyard.”
Roebuck’s fury was on the edge of explosion; you could see him struggling to maintain his control. He tried to reestablish an aggressive position by getting back up in Messenger’s face. Messenger stood with his arms flat against his sides, his expression neutral — giving John T. nothing to blow up on.
They maintained their positions for what must have been a minute or more. Messenger knew the game; it was called staredown. The first one to blink or look away was the loser. He’d never played it before, would have considered himself a poor prospect if he’d thought about his chances. Old Jim was too passive for a game like that. But this wasn’t Old Jim; this was New Jim. And New Jim played John T. Roebuck to a draw.
Dacy broke it up. She said, “Lonnie, if John T. isn’t off our property in three minutes, you go get your Ruger carbine and shoot out two tires on that station wagon of his. It’ll be a freak accident. You and me and Jim’ll swear to that.”
John T. backed up a step — a slow, sinuous movement like a snake uncoiling. He had his anger in check now. “We both know that’s an idle threat,” he said.
“You think so? Lonnie, you timing what I said?”
“Two and a half minutes left, Ma.”
“What’ll you do when the time’s up?”
“Go get my Ruger and shoot out two tires on his wagon.”
“Bullshit,” Roebuck said, but he no longer sounded convinced. He said to Messenger, “I’m not through with you, boy, not by a long shot. I’m just getting started.”
“Is that so? How do you plan to get shut of me?”
“There are ways, by God.”
“Sure there are,” Dacy said. “Night riders with buckets of tar and sacks of chicken feathers, that’s one. Or maybe you could hire a couple of men to lure him out to Mackey’s and shove him down into the snakepit.”
“What the hell?” John T. said, and for the first time since Messenger’s arrival he put his gaze on her. “I didn’t have anything to do with that. If it even happened.”
“It happened,” Messenger said.
“Well, I didn’t make it happen. I don’t do things that way.”
“Too violent for you? Or not violent enough?”
“Could be you’ll find out.”
Dacy said, “How much time’s he have left, Lonnie?”
“Less than a minute.”
“Just won’t learn, none of you. Just won’t learn to leave well enough alone. Well, all right. It’s on your head too now, Dacy. His and yours.”
Roebuck walked to his station wagon, back and shoulders rigid. Messenger expected him to drive off with another little show of aggression — fast and reckless, fouling the night air with dust. But he didn’t. His departure was slow, measured, as if he were afraid to slacken the tight rein he’d put on his control.
When the wagon’s lights reached the gate, Dacy said, “Well, you wanted to shake things up, Jim.”
“Yeah.”
“Having second thoughts?”
“No.” He was wondering why John T. had come flying over here in such a high state of rage. He was no real threat to the man, unless John T. was involved in his brother’s death. Or unless some other kind of guilty knowledge was driving him. He was hiding something: Messenger felt as certain of it as he did that Lonnie was hiding something. The same thing, maybe? Even if John T. wasn’t behind the snake trap at Mackey’s, it had upset him in some way that wasn’t quite clear. The fact that the target had survived unharmed? The fact that the trap had been set in the first place?
Dacy said, “Well, I’m not either, so you don’t need to worry on that score. I like seeing that strutty rooster with his feathers ruffled and his pecker down.”
“Just as long as he doesn’t... what’s the phrase? Do you a meanness?’
“He won’t. But we better watch out he doesn’t try to do you one.”
“I’m not afraid of him.”
“That the truth, or just bravado?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe a little of both.”
After supper he and Dacy spent an hour on the porch, talking. Her opinion on the intensity of John T.’s reaction was that it didn’t necessarily mean anything. “That’s the kind of man he is. Something upsets him, he goes off like a damn firecracker.” In addition to John T. they discussed his brother, his wife, Joe Hanratty, Lynette Carey, Maria Hoxie, and others who in one way or another had been involved with Dave Roebuck — Messenger probing for specific background information, some factor in personalities and relationships that might be worth exploring. Neither he nor Dacy found one. But he did come away from the talk with a definite conviction.
Beulah’s closets were full of secrets. More, it seemed, than in most small towns; uglier ones, too. And the more you shook the closet doors, the louder the skeletons would rattle.
In the morning he and Lonnie finished work on the windmill and then went to the holding pens to repair a loose panel on a large cagelike device called a squeeze chute. Made of welded bars, its two main panels were used to immobilize steers during spring and fall roundups for branding, castration, and inoculation against disease.
Just before lunch they began replacing broken rails in the corral fence and loose and warped boards in the stable and barn. Next week, Lonnie said, if the wind cooperated and the weather remained dry, they would weather-seal the wood and then spray paint both buildings. They were running low on lumber and ten-penny nails by midafternoon, and Messenger volunteered to drive into town to the building outfitters. Dacy gave him a list of supplies to pick up that included paint and turpentine and a new pane of glass for the kitchen window. She also gave him the keys to their pickup.