Bitterroot

Chapter 31

That night Temple stayed at Doc's and I gave her my bunk bed and slept in the tent by the river with Lucas. During the night I heard rain on the canvas and the pop of lightning on the ridges, then the dawn broke clear and cool and deer were grazing in the pasture behind Doc's barn when I opened the tent flap in the morning.

Lucas had already built a fire and made coffee. He squatted down and filled a tin cup for me and added canned milk to it and handed it to me, then looked thoughtfully at the smoke drifting out on the water.

"You can make a fellow nervous sleeping with that dadburn gun," he said.

"Next time I'll leave it somewhere else," I said.

"Doc's gonna get out of his troubles?"

"I think so."

"Then let the law take care of all them bad people out there."

"It doesn't work that way, bud. When you're the victim of a violent crime, most of the time you're on your own."

"I ain't gonna argue. You're a lot smarter than me. Can you loan me two thousand dollars?"

"What?"

"I signed up at the University of Montana for the fall semester. I got to pay out-of-state tuition."

"If it's for your education, it's not a loan. You know that."

"Thanks, Billy Bob. Me and Dogus are going upstream. I'll catch you later," he said.

He picked up his fly rod and creel and slung his fly vest over his shoulder. He and the mongrel dog walked through the trees to a white, pebbly stretch of shoreline where the water had receded and Lucas could back-cast without hanging his fly in the trees.

If indeed I was smarter than my son, I thought, why did I feel I had just been had?

When I walked up the slope, Doc opened the front door and tossed me the portable phone.

"Tell this guy to work on his speaking skills. He's a little incoherent," he said.

"Which guy?"

"The sheriff."

I put the receiver to my ear.

"Hello?" I said.

"What'd be say?" the sheriff asked.

"Sorry, I wasn't listening," I replied.

"Then you'd better listen to this. We just pulled Terry Witherspoon out of a tree. He's alive but that's about all. His back's broken. Guess who did it to him?"

"Wyatt Dixon?"

"Witherspoon left a knife blade in Dixon's chest. He says Dixon has plans for you and the Voss girl and Ms. Carrol."

"Thanks for telling us."

"You're responsible for all this bullshit, Mr. Holland. I hope you can sleep at night."

"Like a stone. Good-bye, sir," I said, and clicked off the phone.

But my lie hung in my throat.

An hour later Holly Girard drove a hand-waxed, fire-engine-red Corvette across the field behind the house and came to a stop two feet short of the front steps and got out and slammed the door behind her. Her hair was blown into a tangle on her head, her face red with windburn around her brown-tinted aviator's glasses.

"Has Xavier been here?" she said.

"Not to my knowledge," I said.

"Go inside and ask Doc and Maisey."

"Pardon?"

"Do I have to say it more slowly so you understand? Go inside and find out if that drunk idiot has been here."

"No, he hasn't. I can't think of any reason he'd want to come out here, Ms. Girard."

"He went up to the set of my new picture and accused the director of being a money launderer for

Nicki Molinari. He had a gun with him. He starting screaming about protecting the river. I may be fired off my own picture."

"A gun?"

"Oh, you are listening."

"I'd appreciate it if you'd take your anger out on somebody else."

"You twerp," she said, and went past me and into Doc's house.

Doc was reading in a chair by the window, his granny glasses down on his nose. His eyes lifted up into Holly Girard's.

"Eventually the poor, self-deluded weakling I married will be out here. That's because you've been stoking him up ever since you moved to Montana and he can't pee in the morning without first praising the noble Dr. Voss. If you don't call the sheriff the minute you see him, your troubles with rapists will be the least of your problems," Holly said.

Doc folded his book and removed his glasses and dropped them into his shirt pocket and gazed at her face.

"I'm really sorry to hear you take that point of view, Holly," he said.

"You and your friends are so smug, with your books that nobody reads. Did you ever have to make a payroll or tell people they were laid off because of a revolution in Malaysia?" she said.

He started to reply when Temple came out of the kitchen.

"Doc and Billy Bob are gentlemen. I'm not. Get out of here, you stupid bitch," she said, and shoved Holly Girard through the door.

I WA L K E D down in the trees by the river and sat on a pink and gray rock above a pool filled with cotton-wood leaves that had turned yellow and sunk to the bottom. I had lied to the sheriff about my peace of mind. The fact was I got no rest, not with L.Q.'s wandering spirit, not with the anger and the thirst for blood and vengeance that was like a genetic heirloom in the Holland family.

Witherspoon and Dixon deserved whatever happened to them, I told myself. Their violence lived in them like a succubus; I wasn't the catalyst for it. The law had failed Maisey; it had failed Doc; in a way it had failed Sue Lynn Big Medicine. Sometimes you had to shave the dice or be consumed by the evil that society or government, for whatever reason, allowed to exist.

My carefully constructed syllogism almost had me out of the woods.

But a strange sense of guilt and depression seemed to settle on me, and it had nothing to do with Dixon or Witherspoon. For the first time I knew with certainty why L.Q. Navarro's spirit haunted me.

I had broken the troth the preacher had described to me when I was river-baptized in the Winding Stair Mountains of eastern Oklahoma. While I was still shivering inside my father's old Army shirt, the preacher had leaned his long face through the truck window and had told me I never needed to be afraid again, that there was no mistaking the significance of the green-gold autumnal light that had broken like shattered crystal across my eyes when I was lifted gasping for breath from the stream. The burning in my skin was like no sensation I had ever experienced, as different from prior association as the landscape had become, the way the leaves of the hardwoods fluttered with red and gold, flowing for miles like a field of flowers, all the way up the slope to the massive blue outline of the Ozarks.

But fear that L.Q. and I would not prevail, that we would not be vindicated or avenged, got L.Q. killed in an insect-infested arroyo over amounts of narcotics that were minuscule in terms of the larger market, that probably did not change the life of one addict or put one dealer out of business. What a trade-off, I thought.

"I make you mad up there, throwing Holly Girard out?" Temple said behind me.

"No, not at all. You were eloquent," I replied.

"So what are you thinking on?"

"Carl Hinkel's gone missing. I know where he is."

"Oh?"

"I made sure Nicki Molinari knew about Hinkel's connection to the murder of Cleo Lonnigan's son. Molinari's going to use Hinkel to get his money back from Cleo. I think Molinari might let Cleo pop him."

"It's their grief," Temple said.

"Maybe."

"Where you going?" she asked.

"To pull the plug on this if I can," I said.

But there was no answer at Cleo Lonnigan's house and her message machine was turned off. I went back outside and took L.Q.'s revolver and a box of.45 rounds from Lucas's tent and found Temple down by the river.

"Want a ride home?" I said.

"No. But I'll go with you wherever it is that you and I need to go together," she replied.

e DROVE out to the Jocko Valley and Cleo Lonnigan's place, but she wasn't home. I left a note inside her door that read:

Dear Cleo,

Do not go out to Nicki Molinari's ranch, regardless of what you might consider the necessity of the situation. I'm contacting the sheriff and informing him I think Molinari is involved with a kidnapping. Eventually Carl Hinkel's fate will probably be worse than anything you or I could design for him.

I wish you all the best, Billy Bob Holland

I got into the truck and used Temple's cell phone to call 911. A dispatcher patched me in to the sheriff. Once again I had caught him on the weekend. I told him what I believed had happened to Carl Hinkel.

"You're telling me it was Molinari grabbed him in front of that barbershop?" the sheriff said.

"Yes," I replied.

"And you set it up?"

"Not exactly."

"No, you set it up."

"Okay."

"I'll pass on your information to the sheriff in Ravalli County."

"When?"

"When I get hold of him. In the meantime I'd better not hear from you again till Monday morning," he said.

I clicked off the cell phone and started the truck.

"I have a feeling the sheriff isn't sweating the fate of Carl Hinkel," I said.

"What do you want to do?" Temple asked.

"I have to go out there. I'll drop you off at your motel."

"Forget it," she said.

We drove into the Bitterroot Valley, into its mead-owland and meandering river lined with cotton-woods and canyons that were like dark purple gashes inside the green immensity of the mountains in the west. Up ahead I saw four or five cars and a wrecker on the side of the road and a highway patrolman interviewing two people and writing on a clipboard.

One of the interviewees was Cleo Lonnigan. She seemed to recognize my truck as we sped past her. In my rearview mirror I saw her hand raised momentarily in the air, like someone trying to flag down a bus.

"You think she'd shoot Carl Hinkel?" Temple said.

"Maybe. It's not easy to do when you have to look the victim in the eye."

"Hinkel and Wyatt Dixon aren't victims. I wish I'd been there when Terry Witherspoon was taken down from the tree. I had something I would have liked to say."

"What?"

"He would have remembered it."

We turned off the highway at Stevensville and drove through town toward the Sapphires. I pulled into the entrance of Molinari's but stopped when I saw the preacher from next door standing on top of his church, an electric saw in his hand, staring at Molinari's stucco house.

I got out of the truck and walked to the fence that separated the preacher's and Molinari's property.

"Anything wrong?" I said.

The preacher draped his saw across the crest of the roof and climbed down a ladder and walked toward me.

"There was a drunk man around here last night and again this morning. I think he was looking for that greaser. But he couldn't raise nobody," he said.

"What was he driving?" I asked.

"A Jeep Cherokee. He knocked down the mailbox."

"Where'd he go?" I said.

"He come back a little while ago. That's why I was trying to see what went on."

"I don't understand," I said.

"I heard about fifteen pops. They sounded like they all come from the same gun."

I got back into the truck and started the engine and Temple punched in a 911 call to the Ravalli County Sheriff's Department.

"Y'all going in there?" the preacher said.

"Yeah, I think we'd better."

"Wait a minute," he said, and went into his church house and came back out with a Bible. He climbed up into the bed of the truck and scrunched down like a squirrel and hit the cab with his fist.

We drove up to the stucco house and parked behind Molinari's convertible and a white Cherokee. When we got out of the truck, our footsteps seemed as loud as rocks on slate. Out in a field an unmilked cow, its udder hard and veined, bawled in the wind. I picked up L.Q.'s revolver from the seat and let it hang from my right hand. We walked through the arcade that fronted the house, past the ceramic urns spilling over with passion vine, around the side to the heated pool that looked like a chemical green teardrop.

"Good God," Temple said.

A fat woman in a dress floated stomach-up in the pool, her face goggle-eyed beneath the surface, her blood already breaking up in the water. The man named Frank sat in a lawn chair, a cigarette burning in his lap, a small bullet hole above one eyebrow.

A second man, one I didn't know, with a pink face and thinning blond hair, lay on the grass, as if he had curled up and gone to sleep, an exit wound in his neck. There were bees in the clover where he lay, and one of his hands twitched involuntarily. When I felt his throat he opened his eyes and tried to breathe and a hard piece of chewing gum fell out of his mouth.

The preacher squatted beside him and stared into his face. He patted the man's chest with the tips of his fingers.

"You ain't got to talk. I'll say the words for you. You just pretend in your own mind they're your words. 'I commend my soul into the hands of the Lord.' The prayer's that simple, son. Don't be afraid. Ain't nothing bad can happen to you now," the preacher said.

Temple and I walked on into the backyard. The barn door was open and I could see Carl Hinkel tied to a chair inside the batting cage. The area around his feet was covered with scuffed baseballs. Hinkel's face didn't look human.

Xavier Girard sat on a plank table, drinking from a huge red plastic cup that rattled with ice and smelled of mint leaves and bourbon. His face was gloriously happy. A Ruger.22 automatic and two spare magazines lay next to his thigh. "Where's Molinari?" I asked.

"In the shower. He almost made it to his clothes. He might have been trouble," he replied.

"Did you kill Hinkel?" I said.

"You bet. In the ear. Twice."

Xavier leaned forward and peered out the door at the preacher bending over the man on the grass. Xavier smiled fondly, then looked up at me and Temple, his eyes full of expectation, as though somehow he had liberated himself from all the baggage of a dull existence and he waited for us to usher him into his new life.

"Why'd you kill the woman?" Temple asked.

"Frank's wife?" Xavier seemed to review a scene in his head. "Yeah, she got it, too, didn't she? It's hard to put the bottle down when it's half full. What a rush. I'm still high."

The wind fluttered the barn doors. The air was cool and filled with the smells of horses and alfalfa and distant rain in the mountains. I didn't want to stand any longer among the creations of Xavier Girard's alcoholic madness.

Xavier picked up his.22 and rested it on his thigh, the balls of his fingers rubbing the checkered grips.

"Molinari left you a message. He said, 'Tell the counselor I'm square.' What do you think he meant by that?" he said.

"You going to do anything else with that Ruger?" I said.

"I haven't decided."

"Yeah, you have," I said. I gave L.Q.'s.45 to Temple and wrapped my hand around Girard's pistol and removed it from his grasp and pulled the magazine from the butt and ejected the unfired round in the chamber and sailed the pistol by its barrel into the barnyard. I stuck his spare magazines and the ejected round into my pocket and poured his booze and ice into the dust and set his empty cup next to him, then Temple and I walked back into the wind and sunlight and the rumble of thunder out in the hills.

"Don't quote me about the rush. That was off the record," Girard called out behind us.

Temple and I had to go into Hamilton with the Ravalli County sheriff, then we drove back to Doc's place on the Blackfoot. Fires were burning in Idaho, and the western sky was red with smoke, but a sun shower was falling on the Blackfoot Valley and the light was gold on the treetops along the river and there were carpets of Indian paintbrush and lupine on the hillsides.

I wanted to scrub all the sounds and sights from Molinari's ranch out of my mind. But I knew I would dream about dead people that night and the collective insanity that caused human beings to kill one another and justify their deeds under every flag and banner and religious crusade imaginable. Any number of people were probably delighted that Carl Hinkel and Nicki Molinari were dead, and each of them would find a way to say a higher purpose had been served. But I've always suspected the truth of the human story is to be found more often in the footnotes than in the text.

Carl Hinkel would be lionized in death by his followers, then replaced by someone just like him, perhaps someone who had already planned to assassinate him. Molinari was a passing phenomenon, an ethnic gangster caught between the atavistic bloodletting of his father's era and Mob-funded gaming corporations in Chicago and Las Vegas that now operate lotteries and casinos for state governments.

If Nicki Molinari's life and violent death had any significance, it probably lay in the fact that he had volunteered to fight for his country and had been left behind in Laos with perhaps four hundred other GIs, whose names were taken off the bargaining list during the Paris peace negotiations at the close of the Vietnam War.

But those are events that are of little interest today.

The only real winner in the mass murder committed by an Edgar Award-winning novelist was an individual whose name would not be reported in a news story. The man responsible for killing Cleo Lonnigan's child had not only been tortured and executed, but Cleo now could keep the seven hundred thousand dollars her husband had stolen from Nicki Molinari and almost no one, including Xavier Girard, the shooter, would ever know the enormous favor the fates had done her.

Doc fixed a late supper for all of us and we ate in the kitchen, then I took a walk by myself along the river, through the lengthening shadows and the spongy layer of pine needles under the trees. The air was heavy with the smell of damp stone and the heat in the soil as it gave way to the coldness rising from the river. But I couldn't concentrate on the loveliness of the evening. I listened for the sound of a car engine, the crack of a twig under a man's shoe, strained my eyes into the gloom when a doe and a spotted fawn thudded up the soft humus on the opposite side of the stream.

Then I saw a track, the stenciled outline of a cowboy boot, in the sand at the water's edge. It was too small to be either mine or Lucas's, and Doc didn't wear cowboy boots. I picked up a stone and cast it across the stream into a tangle of dead trees and listened to it rattle through the branches, then click on the stones below.

But there were no other sounds except the rush of water through the riffles and around the beaver dams and the boulders that were exposed like the backs of gray tortoises in the current.

The sky was still light but it was almost dark inside the ring of hills when I walked back to Lucas's tent. He had built a fire and had turned on his Coleman lantern and was combing his hair in a stainless steel mirror that he had hung from his tent pole. His guitar case lay by his foot.

"Is Temple staying up here tonight?" he said.

"That's right."

"He's out there, ain't he?"

"Maybe. Maybe he holed up in a canyon and died, too. Maybe nobody will ever find him."

"Doc propped his '03 behind the kitchen door," Lucas said.

"Then Wyatt Dixon had better not get in his sights."

"You aim to cool him out, don't you?"

"I wouldn't say that."

"You can go to church all you want, Billy Bob, but you don't fool nobody. You get the chance, you're gonna gun that fellow."

"Would you hold it against me?"

He slipped his comb into his back pocket and picked up his guitar case and removed his hat from the top of the tent pole and put it on his head.

"You mind if I borrow your truck?" he asked.

"You didn't answer my question," I said.

"Like you say, maybe he holed up and died in a canyon somewheres. See you later, Billy Bob. It don't matter what you do. I love you just the same," he replied.

Sunday morning Temple and I drove up the Blackfoot into the Swan Valley to look at property. The lakeside areas and the campgrounds along the river were full of picnickers and fishermen and canoeists, and we walked with a real estate agent along the shore of Swan Lake and I stood in a copse of shaggy larch that was cold with shadow and cast a wet fly out into the sunlight and watched it sink over a ledge into a pool dissected by elongated dark shapes that crisscrossed one another as quickly as arrows fired from a bow.

Something hit my leader so hard it almost jerked the Fenwick out of my hand. The line flew off my reel through the guides and the tip of my rod bent to the water's surface before I could strip more line off the reel, then suddenly the rod was weightless, the leader cut with the cleanness of a razor.

"What was that?" Temple asked.

"A big pike, I suspect," I replied.

"We have to get us a place here, Billy Bob."

"Absolutely."

I looked at the severed end of my leader. The air seemed colder in the shade now, damp, the sunlight out on the water brittle and hard.

"What's wrong?" she said.

"I don't want to leave Lucas alone," I replied.

But my anxieties about my son seemed groundless. When we got back to Doc's he was sitting on the front porch, the belly of his Martin propped across his thigh, singing,

"I wish they'd stop makin' them ole pinball machines.

They've caused me to live on crackers and sardines. "

"Everything okay, Doc?" I said in the kitchen.

"The sheriff called. He said Wyatt Dixon's car was found in a ditch the other side of the Canadian line. No sign of Dixon," he replied. He was washing dishes, with an apron tied around his waist, and his arms were wet up to the elbows.

"What's your read on it?" I asked.

"I think Dixon and General Giap would have gotten along just fine. When the NVA drew us into Khe Sanh, Sir Charles tore up Saigon."

"Maybe Dixon's not that smart," I said.

"Right," he said, and threw me a dish towel. Outside the window I saw a flock of magpies rise from the top of a cottonwood and freckle the sky.

Later we would discover he had boosted the skinned-up brown truck outside a pulp mill in Frenchtown, west of Missoula. How his own car ended up in Canada no one would ever know. But during the night Wyatt Dixon had crossed the Blackfoot above us and slept in a campground, dressing the wound in his chest, from which he had extracted the knife blade with a pair of needle-nose pliers, eating candy bars and drinking chocolate milk for strength.

He had snaked his way across Forest Service land and parked in a low spot sheltered by trees on the river and watched the front of Doc's house through binoculars, a.44 Magnum revolver on the seat, waiting until he could assess who was home and who was not.

He watched me and Temple leave and return. Then he saw Doc and Maisey come outside together and walk past Lucas and get in Doc's truck and drive through the field in back and return a few minutes later with a horse trailer they had bought from a neighbor.

Wyatt Dixon could feel himself growing weaker, see the inflammation in his wound spreading beyond the edges of the bandages on his chest. He pulled the tape loose and poured from a bottle of peroxide into the gauze. He watched the peroxide and the infection it had boiled out of the wound seep down his stomach.

Time was running out, he thought. All because he had let a jail bitch like Terry get a shank in him. Maybe if he was that dumb he deserved to be cooled out. He shook his head in dismay and finished a carton of chocolate milk and pitched the carton out the window.

Then the moment came. Raindrops ticked on the canopy overhead and sprinkled the surface of the river with interlocking rings, as though hundreds of trout were feeding on a sudden fly hatch. Lucas stood up from the steps and put his Martin inside its case and snapped down the latches, then carried the guitar in its case down to his tent on the riverbank and got inside and pulled the flap shut. A moment later Dogus scratched on the flap and went inside, too.

Wyatt Dixon fired up his truck and floored it out of the trees, snapping the wire on a fence, scouring dirt and pinecones into the air. The steering wheel spun crazily in his hands, then he righted the truck and bore down on the tent, shifting into second gear now, the truck's body bouncing on the springs, the cleated tires thumping across rocks and driftwood.

The truck tore through Lucas's tent, splintering the poles, crushing Lucas's guitar case, blowing cook-ware and fire ashes and camp gear in all directions. But Wyatt Dixon's efforts were to no avail. While he had come powering out of the woods, he had not seen Lucas exit the opposite side of the tent with Dogus and walk down to the water's edge to cast a spinner into the riffle.

Wyatt Dixon braked the truck and stared through the back window at Lucas, who had dropped his rod and picked up a piece of driftwood the thickness and length of a baseball bat. I was out on the porch now and I saw Wyatt Dixon shift into reverse, the front of his beige shirt stained as though he had left an open bottle of Mercurochrome in his pocket. I cocked L.Q.'s revolver and fired at the truck without aiming.

The round cut a hole in the back window and exited the windshield and whined away in the woods. I gripped the revolver with two hands and steadied my arm against a post and sighted on the side of Wyatt Dixon's face, then squeezed the trigger. But the shot was low and must have hit the steering wheel. Dixon's hands flew into the air as though they had been scalded.

He shifted into first and drove into the field, headed for the dirt road and the log bridge that would take him across the river. I walked into the yard and fired until the cylinder was empty, the recoil jerking my wrists upward with each shot, my ears almost deaf now. The entry holes on the truck cab looked like dented silver coins embedded in the metal.

I watched the truck grow smaller in the distance and I thought Wyatt Dixon had eluded us again. Then the truck swayed out of the track and cruised through a long swath of Indian paintbrush and came to a stop six inches from the trunk of an aspen tree.

I went back into the house and removed a box of hollow-point.45 rounds from the kitchen table and shucked out the spent shells from L.Q.'s cylinder and began reloading. Temple and Doc were out in the backyard, staring at the truck in the distance. Doc worked the bolt on his Springfield rifle and ejected a spent cartridge in the dirt and locked down the bolt again. The keys to his pickup were on the table. I picked them up and dropped them into the drawer I had taken the box of.45 rounds from and closed the drawer, just as Doc entered the room.

"Where you going?" Temple said.

"I'll check on our man. Y'all call the sheriff's office," I said.

"He's alive in there, Billy Bob. The truck stopped because Doc hit the engine," Temple said.

"Really?" I said, and went out the front door before they could say anything else and drove into the field.

Through the rain I could see Wyatt Dixon moving around inside the cab of his truck. The wind had grown cold and torn pieces of cloud hung in the hills, like smoke rising out of the trees. In the rearview mirror I saw Doc and Temple and Lucas standing in the yard, like three figures trapped inside an ink wash.

I cut my engine just as Wyatt Dixon opened the passenger door on his truck and half fell into the weeds. He raised himself to one knee and reached for the.44 Magnum that now lay on the floorboards. I grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him away from the cab, and was surprised at the level of his physical weakness. He tried to get up but fell again, then pushed himself up against the rear tire, his face bloodless, his eyes blinking against the rain.

"Are you hit?" I asked.

He shook his head and breathed through his mouth, as though he were trying to oxygenate his blood. His eyes looked up at the revolver in my hand, then at my face.

"I told you, you'd know when it was my ring," he said. His teeth showed at the edge of his mouth when he smiled.

"I got a problem, Wyatt. I'm afraid you'll be on the street again one day."

"Folks love a rodeo clown. They don't got no love for lawyers."

"Why'd you bury Temple?"

"It made me feel good."

I squatted down next to him, L.Q.'s revolver propped across my thigh.

"You a praying man?" I asked.

"My daddy was. I never took to it."

"Your clock's run out, partner."

He nodded and looked out into the rain. "Give me my hat."

"Pardon me?"

"My hat. It fell on the floor. I want my damn hat."

I reached inside the open passenger door and picked up a white Stetson with a gray feather in the band and knocked the dust off it against my thigh and handed it to him. He pulled it down on his head and stared out under the brim into the field of flowers. His shirt was buttoned at the throat, and the flesh under his chin looked old, wrinkled, peppered with white whiskers.

I knelt on one knee, three feet from him, and pointed L.Q.'s.45 at his jawbone.

"My notion is nobody knows what goes on inside a man like you. But all your life you look for a bullet. If need be, you make the state your executioner," I said.

He turned his head slowly toward me, the pain rippling upward into his face.

"I ain't afraid of no man. Do it and be done. I'll live in your dreams, motherfucker," he said.

I removed a hollow-point round from L.Q.'s revolver and dropped it into his lap.

"That's why you're going into a cage, Wyatt, where somebody can study you, the way they would a gerbil. We plan to have a good life. You won't be part of it, either."

I stood up and felt the bones pop in my knees. I steadied myself against the side of the truck, kicking the stiffness loose from one leg, like a man who knows he's a little older, a little more worn around the edges, a little more prone to let the season have its way.

I got into my truck and drove through the rain toward Lucas and Temple and Doc and Maisey, who were walking toward me under a huge red umbrella, indifferent to the lightning that split the sky.