“You two haven’t found your way up the road yet?” Wade said. He’d taken Rebecca’s chair, sat facing Arlen. Rebecca was standing back by the door, and Tate had circled around behind Paul and was leaning on the railing, the one they’d just repaired. Paul shifted uneasily, as if he didn’t like having Tate behind him. Arlen didn’t like it either.
“What’s keeping y’all in Corridor County?” Wade asked when no one responded to him.
“They’re helping me,” Rebecca said from the doorway. “I told you that, Solomon. I needed help and-”
“I was asking them,” Wade said.
Arlen took a long drink of his beer. “Maybe you didn’t catch it the last time you were out here and spoke to us, but we were robbed. Tough to move on down the road without a single dollar.”
Wade gave him a long, cold stare. Arlen wanted to meet his gaze, but he also couldn’t help glancing at Tate every few seconds. There was something damned unsettling about the old bastard. He had a face like untreated saddle leather, dark eyes, strings of unkempt gray hair trailing along his neck and down to his shoulders. There were scars over almost every inch of the backs of his hands, a variety of colors and textures to them, souvenirs of different incidents. When the breeze pushed in off the Gulf, Arlen could smell the odor of stale sweat coming from him.
“So you want to make some money before you move on,” Wade said. He had a distant way of speaking, as if he always had minimal interest in the conversation.
“Want to,” Arlen said, “and need to.”
Wade blinked and looked out at the sea, purple and black filling in around the edges now, a shrinking pool of orange in the center.
“I believe you were offered a chance to make your money back overnight. I believe you passed on the opportunity.”
Paul turned his head and looked at Arlen, a frown on his face.
“There was no opportunity,” Arlen said. “You tried to bribe me with my own dollars, and what you wanted, I didn’t have. I still don’t.”
“Supposing you made back your losses as well as an additional profit, might you be inclined to reconsider?”
Arlen looked at him for a long time. Then he said, “No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
It was the first time Wade had shown any spark of emotion. His eyes had narrowed behind the glasses.
“Even if I’d been holding out on you,” Arlen said, “I wouldn’t tell you a damn thing now. I don’t like being pushed around, by money or muscle.”
He’d spent most of his life without money in his wallet; he had not and would not spend any of it being run around by men like Solomon Wade. The man wanted him to cower like a whipped dog, expected him to. After all the things Arlen had seen in this life, he’d be damned if he’d cower for this son of a bitch.
“You know who you are?” he said. “You’re Edwin Main.”
Wade tilted his head and stared. “What?”
“A man I used to know back home. You remind me of him.”
Arlen could remember going to get the sheriff, walking down the street with his legs trembling and two faces trapped in his mind: his father’s bearded one and a dead woman’s pale-lipped one. When the law came back, it came with Edwin Main, who wasn’t a member of it but thought he was and had the rest of the town convinced of the same.
When Arlen spoke again, his voice was harder than he’d heard it in years.
“We’ve told you again and again all that we can tell you about Sorenson-nothing. You tried to beat it out, threaten it out, and buy it out. How you can be so damned stupid not to realize that we’ve been telling the truth the whole time, I don’t know. But I’m done with it. And something you need to understand, Wade? I’ve been around for a while, done a lot of hard living, seen a lot of tough boys. You ain’t the first.”
Wade didn’t answer. Arlen hadn’t seen Tate move, but the older man’s hand was resting high on his thigh now, near the pistol.
“Your business is of no interest to me,” Arlen said. “None. Nor to the… nor to Paul. But I’ll tell you something else: ours ought not to be of any interest to you. It better not be.”
It was quiet for a long time. The sun was all the way gone now, the porch covered in darkness. Wade finally spoke.
“Fourteen days left,” he said. “You be ready for him?”
Arlen didn’t understand what in the hell he was talking about. Then Rebecca Cady spoke, and it became clear the comment had been intended for her.
“You know the answer,” she said. Her voice was strained.
Wade nodded congenially. “Yes, I do. I just wanted you to know I can keep track of the days, too.”
He stood up, scraping his chair back across the porch floor. “Becky, let’s take a moment inside. In private. Just you, me, and Mr. McGrath.”
McGrath was apparently Tate’s last name. The three of them started for the door, but Arlen interrupted.
“Hold on. You can stay right out here and have your talk.”
Wade spun back to him. “You were just telling me the virtues of minding your life while I mind my own. Weren’t you?”
Arlen ran his tongue along the inside of his lip and stared at him but didn’t say anything. Wade gave a short nod and pulled the door open and went inside.
“Who do you think he really is?” Paul said in a whisper when they were alone. “Doesn’t behave like a judge.”
I am the match, Wade had said.
“He’s a big fish,” Arlen said, “in a small pond. Sharp teeth, though. Even the ones in the small ponds got their teeth.”
He was watching them through the shadowed glass. Wade was standing close to Rebecca, talking to her, while Tate McGrath floated around in silence. Arlen thought of McGrath’s three sons and the man they’d loaded into the black Plymouth the previous night, of the way his legs wouldn’t support his weight and his mouth couldn’t form words. He thought of the woman in the yellow dress.
Rebecca’s face was flat, betraying no emotion. She turned away from Wade and lit an oil lamp while he talked, the light throwing a pale glow across his face, making his glasses shine again. At length he turned to Tate and snapped a few words, and the older man went out through the front door. He was gone for only a minute, and when he came back he had a box in his hands, what looked like a large wooden cigar box wrapped with twine. He set it on the bar in front of Rebecca, who kept her eyes down and didn’t look at it.
Wade leaned close, his face within inches of hers, and he spoke softly into her ear, tapping the box with his index finger as he talked. Still she didn’t look up. Wade wrapped his fingers in her hair and pulled slowly, until her chin lifted.
“Hey,” Paul said, “what’s he doing? That son of a bitch.”
Arlen said, “Paul,” but it was too late: the kid was out of his chair and through the door. Arlen swore and went after him.
Solomon Wade still had a fistful of Rebecca’s hair, and he turned to them and a small smile showed on his face as Paul rushed forward.
“Get your hands off her,” Paul was saying. “Damn you, take your hands off-”
Tate McGrath stepped in front of Wade and swung. He hit Paul square in the forehead with the punch, stepping into it, a good solid crack that sounded as if someone had dropped a clay pot. Paul’s feet went out from beneath him, and he fell straight backward. He got his hands out, kept his head from drilling into the floorboards. Rebecca Cady gave a little cry when he went down.
Paul struggled to his feet, unsteady, and charged back at McGrath, who sidestepped the rush, hooked his right hand around Paul’s arm, and sent him spinning into one of the tables. He went down again, this time in a clattering mess, taking three chairs and the table with him.