She put her hand over her mouth, bent double. Clyde reached out and patted her gently on the shoulders.
Clyde found that he was breathing heavy. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly through his nose.
Easy, now, he told himself.
Easy, now. It didn’t sound that close. It was just loud. It might have been a gun, but it didn’t sound like one. No. It wasn’t a gun. The more he thought on it, the more certain he was it wasn’t a gun.
But what was it?
They waited about five more minutes, Clyde counting out what he thought was five minutes in his head.
Clyde thought: No, don’t go up there. That could be just what they’re waiting for. Us to show our faces. Maybe that’s what they’re doing. Lying in wait.
But the explosion? What was that?
Clyde rested the shotgun across his knees, wiped his damp hands on his shirt. He used his hand to wipe sweat from his eyes, dried his hands on his shirtfront again.
They waited. Twenty minutes or so went by. Again, Clyde figuring it in his head, deciding maybe twenty or so was long enough.
Clyde leaned over and put his mouth over Karen’s ear.
“You take the shotgun. I’m going to slip out and into the creek. Go up a ways.”
“No,” Karen said.
“I’m going to go up a ways and cut back, see if anyone is up there. If not, I’m going to call down to you. If I don’t call, if anyone shows their face over the edge, starts to come into the wash, you shoot to kill.”
“Clyde.”
“Keep it soft,” he said.
Karen lowered her voice again. “Just wait. I’m scared. Just wait.”
“We’ll wait a while longer, but just a while,” he said.
They did wait, and it was a long wait, and finally Clyde slipped out of the wash and dangled off the roots and down into the water. He was quiet about it, but still the water splashed as he waded through it, the dead grasshoppers washing along as he waded. He took to the bank on the side the wash was on, climbed up and flipped open his knife.
He was down some distance from the wash, and he could see along the moonlit trail, could see where they had been standing, but they weren’t there anymore. He crept down that way, and through a gap in the trees, high up, he could see a lick of brightness as if the sun had risen early and blown up.
It was a fire.
He went over to the bank, got down on one knee, said, “It’s me, Karen. Hand up the shotgun if you can.”
Karen’s hand poked out and took hold of a root, and she swung out with her back to the water, one hand holding her up, and she extended the shotgun to him with the other. He took it, and Karen swung out on the root and got her feet on other roots, started working up the bank. Clyde grabbed her wrist and helped pull her the rest of the way up.
“Are they gone?” she said.
“From here. They’ve gone back to the tent.”
He pointed toward the brightness shining through the trees.
“Lord-what about Goose?”
Clyde shook his head. “I don’t know.”
They crept back the way they had come and found Goose lying in the trail. His mauled hand lay close to his chest and the revolver he had tried to shoot Two with lay busted by his side.
Karen got down on her knees and touched his head and cried softly. “They didn’t have to do that. They didn’t have to do none of this. Why?”
“Money, dear,” Clyde said. “I’ll take care of him later. Leave him.”
Karen bent forward and kissed Goose’s cold forehead.
They waited out in the woods for a time, and Clyde finally slipped back by himself. He saw there was a terrific blaze, and he realized now what the explosion had been. They had set fire to his truck, probably a rag in the gas tank, and that had blown it up. They had set fire to the tent and his tarp as well. One thing about them, they didn’t just do a thing halfway.
He eased up that way, the shotgun ready, but there was nothing to shoot. Henry’s body still lay by the post, and Ben’s nearby.
Clyde went back to find Karen and when they came back they got the well bucket, some pans from under the tarp, and went about trying to wet the ground down around the fire, keep it from spreading to the kindling-dry woods beyond.
36
The house in the woods that had been Pete and Jimmie Jo’s was small but much nicer than the one Zendo and his family had lived in.
“You trying to tell me this is our house,” Zendo said to Sunset.
“I’m saying when it all works out, it will be,” Sunset said. “Ain’t no one else using it now, and no one would expect you to be here, so it’s safer than your place. And I’d stay out of the fields for a couple days. You can afford that, can’t you?”
“I suppose.”
“Just a couple of days,” Lee said.
“And Bull will be with you,” Sunset said. “Right, Bull?”
“Right,” Bull said, and he found a chair and sat, the ten-gauge across his lap.
“I just feel funny being in someone else’s house,” Zendo said.
“Your dog’s on the front porch and he’s happy,” Lee said. “He knows it’s home. And the pig, he’s here in the room with you.”
The pig lay on its back on the floor, its feet in the air, happy because it didn’t know what its future was, couldn’t foresee itself as bacon.
“Look here,” Sunset said, “they built this place on land that’s yours. All that oil under the ground on this land, it’s yours, Zendo. You’re rich.”
“I’ll be dead, that’s what I’ll be,” Zendo said. “Rich don’t do a man no good if he’s dead.”
“That’s what we’re going to change,” Sunset said. “You getting dead and this land not being yours. We’ve got Henry arrested, and when I figure how to go from there, we’ll do the rest. In the meantime, I think you’re safer here. And it’s built on your land, and that makes it yours as far as I’m concerned.”
“And she’s the constable,” Bull said.
Zendo’s wife, the toddler clinging to her leg, said, “We didn’t know about all this, we wouldn’t be hiding. We wouldn’t have no oil, but we wouldn’t be hiding.”
“Eventually, they would come for you,” Sunset said, “you knew about it or not.”
“I don’t like it none,” Zendo said.
“I’m sorry it’s this way,” Sunset said. “But that’s how it is. Me and Daddy, we got to go back now. I got to figure what to do with Henry, who to go to so I can be backed up. Bull, you need anything?”
“Outside of being twenty years younger,” Bull said, “I don’t reckon so.”
The first thing Sunset saw through her bug-splattered window were roaring flames licking high at the sky and the shapes of high-flying grasshoppers. Then she saw Clyde’s truck, or the blazing skeleton of it; the windows had blown out, the doors had been knocked open by the blast, and the truck bed was torn off; the remains of the bed lay nearby, the ass end of it pointed toward the sky.
“Jesus,” Sunset said. “Karen.”
She drove faster and would have driven right up on the blaze had Lee not yelled at her to stop. She slammed on the brake, leaped out of the car and started running, screaming Karen’s name. Lee slid over and took the rolling car out of gear and pulled the hand brake, got out.
He began to call. First for Karen, then for Clyde. He saw Sunset bent over something on the ground. When he got close, he saw it was Ben and where Sunset had put her hands on the dog, they came away red.
They found Henry. The blaze had gotten to him and burned off one of his legs and it was working its way up. Lee stamped on him until the flames went out. They walked around the blaze that was the tent, and Sunset, seeing there was nothing left of it but fire, lost the strength in her legs. She sagged and Lee caught her.
“It don’t mean she was in there,” Lee said.
There was movement, shapes seen through the fire. Then the shapes came around the fire, one carrying a syrup bucket, the other a large pan.