But later I was bothered by my own remarks to the Vanzandts. Darl connected with the sheriff's murder? It was unlikely. Darl and his friends didn't prey on people who had power. They sought out the halt and lame and socially ostracized, ultimately the people who were most like themselves.
The sheriff's widow was the daughter of a blacksmith, a square, muscular woman with recessed brooding eyes who wore her dark hair wrapped around her head like a turban. Whether she bore her husband's infidelities and vulgarity out of religious resignation or desire for his money was a mystery to the community, since she had virtually no friends or life of her own except for her weekly attendance at the Pentecostal church downtown, and the community had stopped thinking of her other than as a silent backdrop to her husband's career.
'The person done this was probably a lunatic got loose from some mental hospital,' she said in her kitchen.
'Why's that?'
'Cause it's what Davis Love always told me it'd be if it happened,' she said. (Davis Love was her husband's first and last name and the only one she ever called him by.) 'He said the man who killed him would probably be some crazy person, 'cause nobody he sent up to prison would ever want to see him again.'
She let the undisguised heat in her eyes linger on my face so I would make no mistake about her meaning.
'He left his mark on them?' I said.
'They tended to move to other places.'
I looked out the kitchen window at the rolling pasture behind her house, the neat red and white barn, an eight-acre tank stocked with big-mouth bass, the sheriff's prize Arabians that had the smooth gray contours of carved soap rock.
'I'm sorry for your loss,' I said.
'They might bad-mouth him, but he worked hisself up from road guard to high sheriff, without no hep from nobody.'
I nodded as her words turned over a vague recollection in my mind about the sheriff's background.
'He was an extraordinary person,' I said.
Her smile was attenuated, wan, a victorious recognition of the assent she had extracted from me. Then I saw it in her eyes. She had already revised him and placed him in the past, assigning him qualities he never had, as the roles of widow and proprietress melded together in her new life.
I had forgotten that the sheriff had started out his law enforcement career not as a cop but as a gunbull on a road gang, back in the days when the inmates from the old county prison were used to trench water and sewer lines and to spread tar on county roads. I remember seeing them as a boy, their backs arched with vertebrae, their skin sun-browned the color of chewing tobacco, thudding their picks into a ditch while the road hacks stood over them with walking canes that were sheathed on the tips with cast-iron tubes.
Moon had been one of those inmates.
At age fifteen raped on a regular basis by two gunbulls in the county prison.
What were his words? Tore my insides out and laughed while they done it… Y'all gonna get rid of me the day you learn how to scrub the stink out of your own shit.
Was the splattered, red trail from the kitchen to the gun case in the sheriff's log house just the beginning of our odyssey with Garland T. Moon?
That night I called Mary Beth Sweeney and got her answering machine.
'It's Billy Bob. I'll buy you a late dinner-' I said, before she picked up the receiver.
'Hi,' she said.
'Are you Secret Service?'
'No!'
'I had a run-in with this character Brian Wilcox this morning. Why are Treasury people interested in the sheriff's murder?'
'Ask Brian Wilcox.'
'Come on, Mary Beth.'
'I don't want to talk about him.'
Through my library window I could see the moon rising over the hills.
'How about dinner?' I said.
'It's a possibility.'
'I'll be by in a few minutes.'
'No, I'll come there.'
'What's wrong?'
'Brian watches my place sometimes. He's weird…' Then, before I could speak again, she said, 'I'll take care of it. Don't get involved with this man… See you soon.'
The breeze was cool that night, the clouds hammered with silver. It had been an unseasonably wet spring, and small raindrops had started to click on the roof and the elephant ears under my library windows. I walked out into the barn and the railed lot behind it and fed Beau molasses balls out of my hand. When he had finished one, he would bob his head and nose me in the shirt pocket and face until I gave him another, crunching it like a dry carrot between his teeth. I stroked his ears and mane and touched the dried edges of the wound someone had inflicted on his withers, and tried to think through all the complexities that had attached themselves to the defense of Lucas Smothers and had brought someone onto my property who would take his rage out on a horse.
I could hear the windmill's blades ginning in the dark and the bullfrogs starting up in the tank. My back was to the open barn doors and the wind blew across me and Beau as though we were standing in a tunnel. For no apparent reason his head pitched away from the molasses ball in my palm, one walleye staring at me, and then he backed toward the far side of the lot, his nostrils flaring.
I turned and just had time to raise one arm before a booted man in shapeless clothes swung a sawed-off pool cue at the side of my head. I heard the wood knock into bone, then the earth came up in my face, the breath burst from my chest, and I heard a snapping, disconnected sound in the inner ear, like things coming apart, like the sound of seawater at an intolerable depth.
I was on my elbows and knees when he kicked me, hard, the round steel-toe of the boot biting upward into the stomach.
'You like roping people in bars? How's it feel, motherfucker?' he said.
Then a second man kicked me from the other side, stomped me once in the neck, lost his balance, and kicked me again.
My Stetson lay in the dirt by my head, the crown pushed sideways like a broken nose. I could hear Beau spooking against the rails, his hooves thudding on the mat of desiccated manure.
But a third man was in the lot too. He wore khakis and snakeskin boots, and hanging loosely from the fingers of his right hand was a curved knife, hooked at the end, the kind used to slice banana stalks. He dropped it in the dirt by the booted man's foot.
The booted man gathered it into his right hand and laced the fingers of his left into my hair and jerked my head erect.
'Just so you'll know what's going on, we're cutting off your ears,' he said.
For just a second, through the water and blood and dirt in my eyes, I saw a flash of gold in the mouth of the man who had dropped the knife to the ground.
I brought my fist straight up between the thighs of the man who held me by the hair, sinking it into his scrotum. I saw his body buckle, the knees come together, the shoulders pitch forward as though his lower bowels had been touched with a hot iron.
Then headlights shone in my driveway, bounced across the chicken run, and filled the barn and horse lot with shadows.
The three men were motionless, like stick figures caught under a pistol flare. I rolled sideways, stumbled and ran into the barn, my arms cupped over my head as one of them aimed and fired a pistol, a.22 perhaps, pop, pop, pop, in the darkness and I heard the rounds snap into wood like fat nails.
I thought I saw L.Q. Navarro, his tall silhouette and cocked ash-gray Stetson and gunbelt and holstered.45 double-action revolver superimposed against an eye-watering white brilliance.
Moments later Mary Beth Sweeney squatted next to me in Beau's stall, her nine-millimeter pushed down in the back of her blue jeans. My nose was filled with blood and I had to breathe through my mouth. She ran her hand through my hair and wiped the straw and dirt out of my eyes. My face jerked when she touched me.
'Oh Billy Bob,' she said.
'Where are they?'
'They took off in a four-wheel-drive through the back of your property… Let's go inside. I'll call the dispatcher.'