“ Can we, like pay a fine, and go home?” he asked, slouching in the cushioned client chair in my office.
I couldn’t help it, but I kept looking at his smile. “You have nice teeth.”
“ Huh?”
“ They all real?”
“ Yeah, sure. What of it?” He self-consciously licked his lips and forced the smile closed.
“ Does it bother you when I look at your teeth?”
He shook his head and shot nervous glances around the office. Except for a full-size cardboard cutout of Joe Paterno, we were alone.
“ Nice teeth,” I repeated.
I riffled some papers, finding the A-form and the dentist’s report. “Two incisors, two canines, upper and lower. Eight in all. That right?”
“ Huh?”
“ The crowns you repossessed.”
“ Yeah, I guess. I dunno. What difference does it make? I mean, how much is it going to cost?”
“ Eight teeth,” I said, and then I counted aloud from one to eight, trying to imagine the pain and the terror he had caused. He watched me as if he had a lunatic for a lawyer. He did.
“ Stand up, shithead!” I ordered him.
“ What?” Confusion. The beginning of fear.
“ A tooth for a tooth.”
He bolted from the chair and started for the door. I jumped up, danced around my desk, caught him by a shoulder and spun him around. He screamed before I could slug him, and the sound, a high-pitched girlish squeal, threw me off. I swung high, glancing an overhand right off his nose, which nonetheless squirted blood and closed his eyes. The next shot was on target. I came up from below with a left that connected flush on his mouth, splitting his upper lip and breaking off two incisors right at the gum line. I felt a stinging in my hand and looked down to find the teeth embedded in my knuckles. I still have tiny scars to prove it.
He was wailing, blood pouring from his nose and gurgling from his mouth, and looking far worse than he was.
“ Six more to go,” I told him, but by now, my office door had flown open, and crowding inside were three of my partners, my secretary, a paralegal, and, mouth agape, the general counsel of an insurance company we were trying to woo. I decided to regain some sense of decorum, so I chose that moment to extract the two teeth from my knuckles and toss them into my wastebasket where they ping-pinged to the bottom.
“ My client,” I said to the crowd, as if that somehow explained everything. Then I turned to the insurance company lawyer, trying to salvage the moment. “You ought to see what we do to the opposition.”
So it was not without some history that I approached the ranch of K. C. Cimarron this cool summer night in the high country.
Light spilled across the countryside from a three-quarter moon. Cattle stood motionless in fenced fields, and as we slowed for a curve, a deer bolted in front of our headlights, prancing out of our way. We followed the dirt road as it wound toward the Red Canyon Ranch. I parked the car outside the gate, pulling off the road into some sagebrush, where we began walking the mile or so to the barn. By daylight, the barn was a faded red. At night, it was the black maroon of dried blood.
“ Kip, there’s a lesson about life I need to give you now, I hope you’ll remember as you get older.”
“ Oh brother.”
“ Listen up. You never strike a girl. Never. You never touch-
“ I know, Uncle Jake. Granny told me all that.”
“ Already?”
“ Yeah, plus, I shouldn’t cheat or steal or say nasty stuff.”
“ You got the whole course. Anyway, I’m glad you’re here. I want you to videotape Jo Jo.”
“ For my movie?”
“ No, for evidence. I’ll interview her on tape. I want visible proof of her injuries. It’ll help prosecute Cimarron and might help in my defense if he claims I assaulted him.”
“ Are you going to pick a fight?”
“ I’m going to tear him into little pieces.”
“ Uncle Jake.”
“ Yeah?”
“ He’s too big. He’s the only man I know who’s bigger and stronger than you, and in the mean department, he’s got it all over you.”
“ Don’t underestimate your uncle when he’s all angered up,” I told him.
The barn door was open, and inside, in the darkness, I could make out the shadows of horses in their stalls, a saddle sitting astride a railing, bales of hay silhouetted against a corncrib by the moonlight streaming in a window. Kip reached for my hand and stayed close. I was aware of the sound of my breathing, of the rumbling exhalation of one of the horses, the caw of a nighttime bird in the distance.
“ Nobody’s here, Uncle Jake,” Kip whispered. “Shhh.”
A few more steps. Then, “Jake. Is that you?”
It was her voice, coming from above.
“ In the loft. Up here.” She flicked on one of those lanterns that runs off a nine-volt battery but is made to look like an old kerosene lamp.
I scrambled up the ladder to the loft, Kip right behind me. Jo Jo was huddled in a corner, wrapped in a blanket. Her face was smudged with tear-streaked dirt. Her eyes were puffy. The beginning of a bruise was apparent on one cheek, and an angry red scratch was visible on her neck.
I crouched down next to her and reached out, but she dug herself deeper into the corner like a frightened animal. When I gently touched her cheek, she trembled.
“ Jo Jo. I’m here for you.”
“ Oh, Jake, you shouldn’t have come. And the boy, what’s-”
Kip was already shooting, using the hand focus ring, rather than the automatic. “Light’s a little low,” he said, “but this lens has tremendous sensitivity. Plus, the mike is incredible. This baby can pick up a rat farting at fifty yards.”
“ No, Jake, please. I’m so ashamed. The boy shouldn’t be here.”
“ Uncle Jake, please, you’re cutting off the angle.” The temperamental director was pouting. “I want to zoom from medium close up to extreme close up.”
“ Jake, no! Haven’t you done enough to me already?”
Now what did that mean? I was trying to help her. She seemed on the edge of hysteria. I turned to my nephew. “Okay, Kip. Cut! I’ve got enough.”
He shrugged and clicked off the camera.
“ Now, head back down the ladder and wait until I come get you.”
He frowned but took off.
Jo Jo huddled under the blanket, and when I reached for her hand, she let go. The blanket fell away, revealing bare shoulders and breasts.
“ He threw my clothes in one of the filthy stalls and told me that sluts sleep with the horses. He was so hateful, so ugly. Oh, Jake, I’ve made such a terrible mistake coming back here. I knew from before what he was like. It’s almost like he has a split personality. He can be so good, so kind and caring, and then, if something goes wrong with a claim or the leases, he becomes…I don’t know…irrational, unhinged, violent.”
“ I’ll take care of him, but first I want to make sure you’re all right.”
I moved close to Jo Jo, and she wrapped her arms around me, the blanket slipping farther away, her breasts pressing against me.
“ Oh, Jake. I must smell like a horse.”
“ Hush. You’re as beautiful and sweet and precious as the day we met.”
“ Mi angel. So long ago. I’ve changed so much.”
“ No you haven’t. Maybe you’re not as sure about everything as you were then, but that’s natural. The young know it all.”
She was crying again. “I was always too hard on you. I shouldn’t have tried to change you, but I could never accept things the way they were. It was the same with Luis.”
I pressed my face against hers, and her arms tightened around my neck. I kissed her, softly, and her lips yielded, and for a moment it seemed her breathing had stopped, but then she sighed, a long vast release of tension, and her body molded itself to mine.