“Say you do?” Bull said.
“Don’t you?” Sunset said.
“Maybe. But I do this. Zendo wants the help. You got to do something else. You got to stop these men want his land. Ain’t that your law job?”
“It is.”
“It would please me big to see a colored make big money, and that oil could do it.”
“And it could make him a target,” Lee said. “You can’t spend money in the grave.”
“Yeah, well, there’s that,” Bull said. “White folks can’t hardly stand a nigger if he’s gonna have money, especially if he might get more than them.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Sunset said.
“Lady,” Bull said, “you can trust me to do what you want, but I got to trust you to do what I’m saying. You got to go after them bad men and take them down. Arrest them, whatever it is needs doing, you got to do it.”
“All right,” Sunset said.
“You got a gun, Bull?” Lee said. “Cause I figure you might need it.”
Bull pulled up his shirt. A little pistol was in his waistband. “This just for close up. Leaning against a gum tree in the woods there, got me a pump ten-gauge. Thought maybe you’d take better to me I didn’t stroll in with it in my hand.”
“Ten-gauge will do,” Lee said.
“You’re telling me,” Bull said.
“Sunset, is there anyone else you can go to for help?” Lee said. “More the merrier, something like this.”
“Problem is,” Sunset said, “I don’t know who’s in Henry’s pocket, and who isn’t. Don’t know all who’s Klan. I could take a chance here and there, but I’m thinking more people know about this, bigger we might make the problem. I could be lining up people I think are on my side, and they could be on Henry’s.”
Lee nodded. “That sounds right.”
“What about you, girl?” Bull said. “Your family? You think on that?”
“All the time. I thought about sending Karen to her grandmother’s, but that would just put Marilyn into it too. Wouldn’t be any safer. Goose, course he don’t know. Guess he ought to, so he’ll have a choice to leave or stay. And Clyde, he knows everything, except he don’t know about you.”
“That him over there with his foot on the dash of that truck?” Bull asked, pointing to Clyde’s old battered truck in the drive.
“That’s him,” Sunset said.
“All right, then,” Bull said, “I know what needs to be. I’m gonna see Zendo, talk to him.”
“When?” Sunset asked.
“Figure since I don’t sleep much nohow, I’ll go over there now, stay near till morning, watching. Zendo comes out tomorrow for work, I’ll talk to him.”
“Is Zendo’s place close by?” Lee asked.
“No,” Bull said. “But I can go through the woods, cut down on some distance.”
“Better yet, I can drive you there, drop you off near the place,” Lee said. “That is, if Sunset will loan me her car, and you’ll show me the way.”
After Bull recovered his ten-gauge and Lee drove off with him, Sunset walked by the truck where Clyde lay, peeked in. A flashlight shone in her face. She flinched, put her hand to her eyes.
“Sorry,” Clyde said sitting up, turning off the light.
“I thought you were asleep,” Sunset said.
“No. Just lying here. Listening to you and Lee and Bull talk.”
“That’s eavesdropping.”
“It wasn’t on purpose. I was sleeping here.”
Sunset opened the truck door and slid in beside him as he sat up behind the steering wheel.
“You got a place of your own,” she said.
“Sort of. If you count burned-up lumber.”
“You saw Bull?”
“I rose up for a peek. He’s large.”
“I’ll say.”
“Do you think you can trust him?”
“He came to me. He told me to put a strip of cloth on that tree when I needed him, and he came. So, yeah. Clyde?”
“Yeah.”
“I been pretty stupid-about Hillbilly, I mean.”
“I agree.”
“Sometimes, well… you can have something beautiful right in front of you, not see it because you’re looking around it, trying to see something else.”
“You’re not talking about me, are you?”
“I am.”
“Listen, Sunset… if I thought you meant that… I mean, I know you don’t mean it… that way. But if you meant something good by it. Anything. It would make me happy. But I don’t want pity.”
“Don’t make me mad, Clyde. I’ll borrow that slap jack of yours and hit you with it. I’m an idiot. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not proposing or anything. I’m not saying I’m in love. But I’m saying I was an idiot and you tried to tell me. You’re a good friend.”
“Again,” Clyde said, “I got to agree with you.”
“Be all right if I give you a kiss?”
“Just friendly, you mean?”
“Sure.”
Sunset leaned over and kissed Clyde on the cheek.
“That kiss wasn’t pity, was it?” Clyde asked.
“Don’t be silly, Clyde. There’s nothing to pity about you.”
“You’re not just saying that?”
“I’m not. It was what it was.”
“Whatever it was, it was good enough. Good night,” Clyde said.
34
Next morning, when Zendo got his mules out of the shed out back of his house, fed them, dressed them in harness and took them to the field, he found Bull sitting under his oak where he stopped for lunch every day. He had seen Bull only a few times before, but now, up close, he was frightened by him. He was huge and his hair was wild and he had a kind of dead look in his eye, way a fish does when it’s laid out of water too long.
Zendo had been leading the mules with their lines, ready to hook them to the plow he had left in the field, but when he saw Bull he stopped by calling “Whoa” to the mules.
“You Zendo?” Bull asked.
Zendo nodded.
“How you doing, Mr. Bull?” Zendo said, walking around from behind the mules, standing to the side of one, holding the long lines.
“Oh, I’m making it. Ain’t no reason to complain, I reckon, as it don’t change much if I do.”
“Well, me too, I reckon.”
“Naw,” Bull said, “you ain’t doing so good.”
Zendo felt a sensation akin to someone suddenly poking a stick up his ass. If there was one thing he didn’t want, it was having the legendary Bull Stackerlee mad at him. It amazed him Bull even knew who he was.
“How’s that, Mr. Bull?” Zendo said, surprised at how high his voice sounded.
“Well, now, let me say on that different,” Bull said, standing up from the tree. “In one way, you doing so good the angels would sing, and you don’t even know it, and in another, you got your dick in a wringer and whitey, he’s got his hand on the crank.”
“That’s quite some difference, one from the other,” Zendo said.
“It is,” Bull said. “You want the good news first, or you want the shit?”
Zendo, as confused as if he had awakened in another town and found himself naked, said, “Well, Mr. Bull, I think it would be best to get the bad news out of the way, then have the sugar.”
Hillbilly half filled a cup with water from a pitcher, held the cup under his balls, and by spreading his legs and bending his knees, lowered them into it. It helped ease the pain a mite. He stood like that, as if riding an invisible horse, his left hand holding the cup of water and his balls, and with his other hand, he drank directly from a bottle of whisky.
Last night he had been drunk, and he awakened this morning feeling terrible, had to have enough of the hair of the dog to take the edge off the buzz, but he wasn’t drunk now and he wasn’t going to get drunk today. What he was going to do was get dressed, go over to see this McBride fella.
It took him a while to scrape his life into a heap, but he finally got dressed and went out. It was a hot day and the sky, though blue, looked heavy, as if it might fall and crush him. There were a few strands of clouds, like strips of cotton torn from a blue mattress, stretched out across the sky.