“I had put it under my shirt. I was going into a store.”
“Did you intend to rob the store?”
“No. Who’d try to rob a supermarket?”
“Then why were you carrying the gun?”
“It felt good against my skin.”
“You have trouble getting it up, son?”
Jack’s eyebrows raised. “No.”
“I don’t see why you were carrying the gun.”
Jack said, “You’ve got a gun stuck into your jeans. Right now.”
“By order of the sheriff.” Fletch got up and went to the open French doors. “I’m surrounded by fugitives from justice. A least one of them, of you all, is a murderer.” He had his back to Jack. “You’re all murderers, come to think of it. Kidnapping, drugs: you’ve all taken big holes out of people’s lives. In this life, who are the bastards?”
Jack muttered, “The fathers, or the sons?”
From the window, through the rain, Fletch saw the headlights of the Jeep high on the hill, well above the gully. One of the big flashlights was piercing the dark from the passenger side of the vehicle.
“Aren’t you afraid to stand in the lit window?” Jack asked. “Under the circumstances?”
“No.” Fletch turned his back to the window.
Knees apart, arms at his sides, Jack was slouched on the divan.
Fletch said, “You have your mother’s skin.”
“Not all of it.” Jack stretched his arms. “By a dam’s site.”
“How come you’re tanned?” Fletch asked. “How long have you been in prison?”
“Five weeks. Before that I was out on bail. Just hanging around. Can’t get much of a day job when you’re out on bail on charges of attempted murder.”
“Why didn’t you come here?”
“Didn’t want to bother you. Besides, I wasn’t supposed to leave Kentucky, State of.”
“You escaped from a maximum-security federal penitentiary after only five weeks?”
“I didn’t like it there,” Jack said. “Noisy. Food could have been better. I’d read all the books in the library.”
“You know karate?”
“A type of.” Again, Jack looked at Fletch in surprise. “Ah! You were outside, weren’t you? You watched me lead my ‘traveling companions’ to the gully.”
“What’s the name of the big one you disciplined with your foot and the side of your hand?”
“Leary. He’s crazy.”
“And which is Kriegel?”
“The short, bald guy, with eyeglasses. His name is Kris Kriegel, with a K Would you believe that? How did you follow me?” Jack looked at Fletch’s sneakers, the cuffs of his jeans. “You’re not wet.”
In a more conversational tone, Fletch asked, “Where is Crystal?”
“Generally, or at the moment?”
“Generally. And at the moment.”
“Indiana.”
“Is she working as a journalist?”
“Sort of. No.” Jack sat forward. “She owns five radio stations.”
“Good for her.”
“She calls them her money machines. We live, lived outside Bloomington.” He poured himself more milk. “At the moment, she’s on her semiannual sojourn on a fat farm. She locks herself up for two weeks twice a year. Incommunicado. Concentrates on losing weight. She has to. If she doesn’t, she can’t walk …” Fletch saw an exasperation based on love in Jack’s face. “Her legs will crack under her. Her veins … her heart…”
Jack had eaten every bit of food from the tray.
“You want more food?” Fletch asked.
Quickly, Jack sat back. “No. No, thanks. Maybe later.”
Fletch sat at the desk. “How did you know where I live?”
“We see your name in the newspapers once in a while. Ever since you wrote the book Pinto: The Biography of Edgar Arthur Tharp, Junior. That was a big success, wasn’t it?”
Fletch asked. “Did you read it?”
“Yeah.”
Fletch waited for Jack to say more. After a moment of silence, Fletch said, “I guess it’s been praised enough.”
“Big book,” Jack said.
Fletch said, “It took a while.”
Jack took a deep breath. “Where do you get off writing a book concerning Native Americans—Indians—white man?”
Fletch said, “Where did Edgar Arthur Tharp, Junior, get off painting Native Americans—Indians—sculpting them? He was a ‘white man,’ too.”
“Exactly. He painted and sculpted them as part of their horses. You said so yourself. In your book. You wrote, Tharp stretched and lit the naked muscles of the Indian riders exactly as he did the muscles of the horses on which they rode.’ Right?”
“Right.”
“‘He painted the women, rounded, with babies on their backs, in the same configurations as the earth mounds behind them.’”
“So,” Fletch said. “You read the book.”
“I read the book.”
“You giving me an argument about my work?”
“I’m giving you an argument.”
“Okay.” Fletch sighed. “Where did a Harvard-educated, Jewish American male get off writing, composing West Side Story about urban Puerto Rican youngsters, based on a play about youngsters in Verona, Italy, called Romeo and Juliet written by a white, male Englishman named William Shakespeare, who had never been to Italy?”
Jack grinned. “I guess you’re familiar with this argument.”
“Yeah. I’ve confronted it, once or twice. I have been surprised to perceive the prejudice against my work, in one or two quarters.”
“What’s the answer?”
“In the first place, it never occurred to me. I know what I am. And I know what I am not. At least unlike some, I know I cannot be someone else, truly see and feel from someone else’s experience and heart. Nevertheless, I have always believed in empathy, in the broad commonality of being human. Admittedly, we cannot understand. But we can try. Too, although Native Americans had and have a great art, Tharp’s representation of them, and the cowboys, the steam locomotives, the horses, the buffalo, were representations the Indians and the settlers were not about to do themselves. Tharp memorialized them, with empathy and love. Without his works, we would know less, understand less. And I tried to memorialize Tharp and his works with empathy and love.”
“You’re lecturing.”
“You asked a question. I answered it.”
“You believe in straight lines, don’t you?”
“Nature does not love the straight line,” Fletch said. “Man is compelled to it.”
“‘Man’?”
“Broadly speaking.”
“Is that a pun?”
“I think I’ve just learned not to feed you.”
Jack folded his arms across his chest. “My mother tried to write a book once. She only did about eighty pages. Half of it was about you. Half of it was about me. She loves to tell stories about you.”
“She used to beat people over their heads with stories about me.”
“Any of them true?”
“Not really.”
“How about the time you were in Brazil and the people there took you for the ghost of someone murdered even before you were born, and you had no choice but to solve the murder of yourself?”
“Crystal told you that story?”
“What about it?”
“A ghost story.”
“My mother loved you. She still does. She loved you sexually as well, you know.”
“I guess I didn’t understand that.”
“You married a royal princess? I saw that in the newspapers, too.”
“I was married to a princess, yes.”
“She was murdered.”
“Assassinated.”
“Why?”
“Middle Europe. Politics. Ethnicity.”
“Is ethnicity politics?”
“Oh, yes. In our coming together and our moving apart. Just politics. Always just a few people seeking power for themselves.”