Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Seventeen

Three days have passed. I have not been bothered by the authorities regarding the drop-off I did at the post office with the Wetzel belongings. I suspect this is because Jeremiah McNally has already told his colleagues I intend to stonewall whatever questions they ask me. When they have evidence, they’ll come after me with a chainsaw.

Tuesday morning I call Ruby Spotted Horse on her cell phone. “What is it now?” she answers before I can speak.

“Has your ex been sticking anything up his nose besides virus swabs?”

“You had trouble with him?”

“He thinks I have an agenda.”

“An agenda with me?” she replies. “He’s paranoid. He always has been.”

“Do you have any information about the murder of the waitress in Ronan?”

“No one has called it a homicide. The body was found on a federal reservation, so the FBI may have gotten involved.”

“You ever hear about a hundred thousand dollars being buried on the res?”

“Where’d you hear that?” she asks.

“From your ex.”

“It’s one of those legends. Except I heard five hundred thousand. Some dealers drove in a house-trailer load of crank that’d been cut with lithium and hydrochloric acid, and there was a big firefight with the mules and a lot of people got killed and the money got buried in an iron box, and the only guy who knew the location got capped. It’s the kind of crap Ray would believe.”

I feel my attention draining. “I saw Eugene Baker. I looked right into his face. I saw him burn the village. I pumped sixteen rounds into him with no effect.”

“You saw this in a vision or what?”

“On the hillside behind my home.”

“When did this happen?”

“Six days ago.”

“You’re just telling me now?” she says.

“I’m cautious about what I tell people. So are you, Miss Ruby.”

There’s a long silence. Through the window I see a yellow rust-eaten battered Mazda with no hubcaps, oil smoke welling from under the frame, come up the drive and stop. John Fenimore Culpepper gets out and peers at my windows, the car door open, one foot still on the floor, as if he’s afraid to disengage from his portable fortress.

“I’m a little hurt, Mr. Broussard,” Spotted Horse says. “I’ve trusted you. You should have told me you had an encounter with Baker.”

“There’s one other thing I need to tell you. Your former husband said I shouldn’t come around you. In fact, he used the word ‘touch.’ ”

“He did, did he? Well, fuck him.”

“I’d better run.”

“Did you hear what I just said?” she asks.

“You mean fuck him? Yes, that came through pretty clearly.”

“Meet me at Applebee’s at noon.”

“Ten-four on that,” I say, and ease the phone receiver into the cradle. When I turn around, Fannie Mae is standing three feet from me. Bad Da-da, she says.

“Stop giving me those stupid names.”

How about “Parental Unit”?

I go through the front door and greet Johnny B. Goode Culpepper before she can say another word.

Culpepper is wearing a plain billed gray cap and a rumpled white shirt and a suit coat that doesn’t match his trousers. I walk down the grade to his car. “What can I do for you, sir?”

“You mind if I come on your property and talk?” There’s a tremolo in his voice.

“No, sir, I don’t mind at all.”

“I heard you taught at the university here.”

“I was an instructor many years ago.”

“They got a vocational program. I wondered what you thought of it.”

“I think it’s good.”

His foot is still propped on the floor of the car, his arms stretched across the roof, his face windburned, his eyes almost colorless, the pupils like burnt match heads. He studies a sparrow hawk gliding above the trees. “My boy is a little slow, but he’s a good worker,” he says. “His hobby is bow-making. They got anything like that out there?”

“I can find out for you.”

“It’s the dyslexia that holds him back. It runs in our family. Both sides.” His eyes go away from mine.

“You looking for a tutor?”

“Yessir, one that don’t cost a lot.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“I got to ask you something. That note you give me at the courthouse, somebody was asking for he’p. I said you was doing the devil’s work. I did that because I was scared. Was somebody really wanting he’p?”

“I’m not sure, Mr. Culpepper.”

But there’s no relief in his face, and I have the conviction that I’m talking with a man who will never find peace.

“There’s things I just don’t understand,” he says. “The way the world is. The way nothing adds up.”

“Have you thought about getting away from Sister Ginny’s crowd?”

“Judge not, lest you be judged.”

“Using common sense is not a judgment on others, sir.”

My words break across his face. He takes a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and hands it to me. “That’s my phone number. If you can he’p Leigh, I’ll be in your debt. I didn’t treat you right, Mr. Broussard. You’re a man of principle, and I admire you for it.”

I watch him drive away, a blue-black cloud of oil smoke trailing him, then go back into the house. Fannie Mae is waiting for me. “Why are you giving me that look?” I say.

I don’t trust Culpepper. If he was a wizard in the Alabama Klan, at the least he had to know the friends and families of the men who blinded and killed the little girls in the Birmingham church bombing.

“We don’t know that.”

Stop it.

“People change, Fannie.”

You used to say people grow into what they always were.

“I was a cynic.”

No, you refused to lie to yourself. You said it was the one sin we never forgive ourselves for.

I will not reply.

Where are you going?

“To take a shower.”

Having lunch with Short Stuff?

Even as a little girl, Fannie Mae could be jealous when my attention went to others. “I won’t listen to this.”

Sorry, Pops. I get lonely when you’re gone. Give her my best.

Because of virus restrictions, Applebee’s is working at half capacity, and Spotted Horse and I are able to find an isolated table at the back of the restaurant. She’s in uniform and her cruiser is parked on the other side of our window. I have never gone out in public with a woman who is fifty years younger than I. It feels strange and a little embarrassing, and I wonder if my discomfort indicates a degree of hypocrisy in my behavior — namely, I had no problem when I was alone with her.

There is another factor at work. Forty feet from me is a neatly dressed middle-aged mustached man eating with two other men of approximately the same age and dressed with the same level of neatness. The first man is looking straight at me, not with anger, not with recognition or even curiosity, but like a man looking at a dream or a memory or a mirage on a tar-patched desert highway or perhaps a decaying film negative about to flicker and light up in a space no bigger than a match flame and disappear into the world of inconsequence, leaving behind no trace of pain or irreparable loss.

I pick up a breadstick and bite off a small piece and chew it slowly and sip from my iced tea, my gaze focused on neutral space. “You’re a quiet one today,” Spotted Horse says.

“Officer Bronson said the Wetzel brothers were from Albuquerque. I thought they were from Idaho.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“A lot of crank is coming out of Albuquerque. A bartender told me the younger brother burned up his father. Where’s the mother?”

“I don’t know. You know how many boys like the Wetzels are running around?”

Her voice is thinning out on me. I cannot resist looking at the middle-aged man at the table forty feet away. I pick up my bread knife with the tips of my fingers and set it back down. Spotted Horse looks over her shoulder and back at me. “That’s Joe Latour. He’s a detective with the sheriff’s department. He’s from Boston originally.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“You know him?”

“I met him the night my daughter was beat up.”

“Latour caught the 911?”

“Yeah, he was in uniform then. He wouldn’t allow her to sit in his cruiser. She had lost her coat and was cold.”

“Maybe it was the end of his shift. Maybe he didn’t want someone throwing up in his vehicle. Sometimes you just don’t know.”

“He didn’t dump the cameras at the nightclub where she got beat up. He was going on vacation the next day.”

“I don’t want to say the wrong thing, Mr. Broussard, but from what I hear, your daughter had a few problems.”

“Want to order?” I say.

“Sometimes cops have their problems, too.”

“I got the message. Don’t worry about it.”

We order, then the food comes. My taste buds are still shot. I might as well be chewing wet newspaper.

“Mr. Broussard,” she says.

“Call me Aaron.”

“I didn’t mean to sound hard-nosed.”

“I didn’t tell you the whole story. My daughter got herself to the ER. The hospital called the cops on their own. Latour showed up again. I felt the back of my daughter’s head. It felt like a softball. I told him that by anyone’s measure, this was felony assault. He blew it off. That’s what happened. I don’t hold it against him. Everybody has to stack his own time.”

“Where’d you learn that expression?”

“Who cares? Y’all have a wire inside Ginny Stokes’s congregation, don’t you?”

The skin on her face shrinks. “Shut up,” she whispers. I start to speak anyway, but she takes my hand and digs her nails into the palm. She speaks with her head down. “He reads lips. What you said could get someone killed.”

The mustached man says something to his two friends. They turn around and look at us. I look directly at them, then pick up the check.

“What are you about to do?”

“Pay the check, then go to the men’s room.”

“If you go to their table, you and I are done.”

I start to get up.

“Let me say something,” she says. “Then make your choice.”

It doesn’t take her long. She says the loss of her niece is like the loss of the child she was never able to have. The daily acceptance of that loss is the reason she is drawn to me, and for that reason alone she will consider me a kindred spirit forever, and she doesn’t care what others think of our being together.

When she finishes, I look down at my plate.

“You’re just going to sit there?” she says.

My Stetson is crown-down on the table. I take a bite of a french fry and wipe my mouth with a paper napkin and flip my Stetson on my head. “Let’s take a ride.”

“What for?”

“Call it the wild side of life.”

Her mouth opens. “If you’re saying what I think, you’re the most disappointing man I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet.”

“My taste buds are back. I once ate twelve Buster Bars. I’m going to go for thirteen. There’s a Dairy Queen on Higgins.”

“You don’t really intend to do that, do you, Mr. Broussard?”

“Aaron.”

The three men get up and walk past our table. The detective named Latour walks within three feet of my shoulder. I can see the pistol clipped on his belt, his flat stomach, the silk shirt and gold tie clip he wears, the black hair on the backs of his wrists, and smell the cigarette smoke in his clothes and the fried food he has eaten and the hint of deodorant under his arms. I lift my eyes to his. He looks right through me. It’s obvious he has no idea who I am and probably no knowledge of Fannie Mae’s death. Spotted Horse sees the look on my face. “What are you thinking about?”

“My daughter said to give you her best.”

She takes a breath and holds it and then lets it out slowly. Her eyes are sleepy, as though she’s drifting away.

“Do I sound strange?” I ask.

“You’re a good man.” She touches my ankle with the toe of her shoe. “Good people are the ones who get hurt the most. Don’t let the world I live in suck you into its maw.”

Ten minutes later we walk outside into the sun-spangled coolness of the day. The mountains are etched sharply against a flawless blue sky that arches from one horizon to the other. One hundred yards away are the water tower and the original buildings of old Fort Missoula, where Black bicycle troops were stationed to help dispossess the Indians of the lands they had owned for over ten thousand years. The story of the fort is one of exploitation and the deliberate division of oppressed people, and I try not to dwell upon it. But I cannot help it, just as I cannot help thinking about my ancestors who fought for the South at Shiloh and Gettysburg. Spotted Horse follows me to the Dairy Queen and shares one Buster Bar with me at a cold plank table under a tree that has no leaves. It’s not a very romantic setting, but it’s a special moment just the same, and when she asks what I’m thinking about, I lie and tell her nothing because her words to me about kindred spirits are in a category you hide in a secret place, maybe a magical pool where one day, when the world is too much with you late and soon, you dip your hand into a source of strength that becomes your light, your sword, and your shield, and after that moment you join a pantheon that’s for the ages.