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"I mean how do I look?" He turned his face toward me and looked into my eyes.
"You look fine, Tony."
"It's been two days since I put anything in the tank. It's got butterflies fluttering around in my head."
"What tank, Daddy?" Paul said.
"I'm trying to get on a diet and get my blood pressure down. That's all, son," Tony said.
"What butterflies?" Paul said.
"When I don't eat what I want, the butterflies start flitting around me. Big purple and yellow ones. Boy, do I got 'em today. Listen to those guys shooting back there. You go out to a quiet spot in the country, they turn it into a war zone."
"Who's trying to hurt us, Daddy?" Paul asked.
"Nobody. Who told you that?"
"Jess. He said some bad man wants to hurt us."
"Jess isn't too bright sometimes, son. He imagines things. Don't pay attention to him." Tony looked back over his shoulder at the grove of oak trees, where his hired men lounged around the automobile fenders in sport clothes and shoulder holsters. His eyes were dark, and he rubbed his tongue hard against the back of his teeth. Then he took a deep breath through his nose.
"Paul and me have got a place down in Mexico, don't we, Paul?" he said. "It's not much, thirty acres outside of Guadalajara, but it's got a fishing pond, a bunch of goats and chickens and stuff like that, doesn't it, Paul? It's quiet, too. Nobody bothers us there, either."
"My mother says it's full of snakes. She won't go there anymore."
"Which means there's no shopping mall where she can spend three or four hundred bucks a day. You ever been down there, Dave?"
"No."
"If I could ever get some things straightened out here in the right way, I might want to move down there. If you're a gringo, you've got to pay off a few of the local greasers, but after that, they treat you okay."
"Can we go eat now, Dad?"
"Sure," Tony said. "You want to eat, Dave?"
"That's a good idea."
We could hear the flat popping sound of the pistols in the wind. We would see the smoke first, men hear the report carried to us across the flattened grass.
"Those guys and their guns. What a pain in the ass," Tony said.
"You said not to use bad words, Daddy," Paul said.
Tony smiled and popped up the bill of his little boy's cap.
"You got me there. But what do you do with a bunch like that? Not one of them could rub two thoughts together on his best day." Then Tony twisted in the saddle and lifted his finger at me. In the chill sunlight his face looked as though it had been boiled empty of all heat and coherence. "I've got to talk with you, man," he said.
We tethered our horses in the oak grove, and Tony put Paul in his wheelchair and fixed him a paper plate of fried chicken and potato salad. Then he picked up a half-filled bucket of chicken, tossed it at me, and climbed over the barbed-wire fence out onto the beach. I followed him out onto the damp gray sand.
"I got something bugging the fuck out of me," he said. "I got to get rid of it, or I'm gonna shoot up again. I get back on the spike, I'm gonna end. I've got no illusions about that."
"Maybe it's time to unload, Tony."
"I already did. It didn't do any good. It just made it worse."
"Then you're holding on to it for some reason."
"That's what you think, huh?" He had a half-eaten drumstick in his hand. He flung it hard at a sea gull that was hovering above the waves. The water was dark green and full of kelp. "Try this. I went to a psychiatrist, a ninety-buck-an-hour Tulane fruit, in a peppermint-stripe shirt with one of these round white collars. You dig the type I'm talking about? A guy about six and a half feet long, except he's made out of marshmallows. So I told him finally about some stuff back there in Vietnam, and he starts to make fun of me. With this simpering voice, like psychiatrists use when they got no answers for the problem. He says, 'Ah, I see, you're the big brave warrior who can't have weaknesses like everybody else. Tony's the superstud, the macho man from Mother Green's killing machine. Tony's not going to let anyone know he's human, too. Why, that'd be a disappointment to the whole human race.'
