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As was typical of Weldon, which was to do everything possible in a contrary and unpredictable fashion, he came up the front walk of the sheriff’s department at eight o’clock sharp, dressed in a pair of khakis, sandals without socks, a green-and-red-flowered shirt hanging outside his trousers, and a yellow panama hat at a jaunty angle on his head. His jaws were clean and red with a fresh shave.
He helped himself to a Styrofoam cup of coffee from the outer office, then sat in a chair across the desk from me, folded one leg over the other, and played with his hat on his knee. My shoulder still throbbed, down in the bone, like a dull toothache.
“What were they after, Weldon?” I asked.
“Search me.”
“You have no idea?”
“Nope.” He put an unlit cigar in his mouth and turned it in circles with his fingers.
“It wasn’t money or jewelry. They left that scattered all over the place.”
“There’re a lot of weird guys around these days. I think it’s got something to do with the times. The country has weirded out on us, Dave.”
“I haven’t had to talk with any of Deputy Garrett’s family yet. It’s something I don’t want to do, either. But I hope I have something more to offer them than a statement about the country weirding out on us.”
He looked momentarily shamefaced.
“What do you want me to say?” he asked.
“Who are these guys?”
“You tell me. You saw them. I didn’t.”
“Eddy and Jewel. What do those names mean to you? Who’s the guy with a mouthful of metal?”
“I’m sorry about your friend in the basement. I wish he hadn’t gone in there.”
“It was his job.”
He gazed out the window at a cloud that hung on the edge of the early sun. His face became melancholy.
“Do y
ou believe in karma? I do. Or at least I came to believe in it when I was in the Orient,” he said. His eyes wandered around the room.
“What’s the point?”
“I don’t know what’s the point. You ever hear of a flyer named Earthquake McGoon? His real name was Ed McGovern, from New Jersey. He was kind of a legend among certain people in the Orient. He was a huge fat guy, and one time he and his copilot, this Chinese kid, got locked up in a Chinese jail. Earthquake kept yelling at the guards, ‘Goddamn it, you haven’t fed me. Give me some goddamn food.’ They told him he’d already had his rice bowl and to shut his mouth. That night when the guards went home Earthquake bent the bars apart and told his copilot to beat it, then he pushed the bars back into shape. The guards came back in the morning and said, ‘Where’s the other guy?’ Earthquake said, ‘I told you to feed me, and you wouldn’t do it, so I ate the sonofabitch.’
“He was one of those indestructible guys. Except he was doing a supply drop for the French at Dien Bien Phu and he got hit by some ground fire. He tried to get his parachute on but he was too fat. He told his kickers to jump and he was going to set it down on Highway One going into Hanoi. They said if he was going to ride it down, they would, too. He came in like a powder puff. It looked like they were home free, then his wing tipped a telephone pole, and they flipped and burned.”
He looked at me as though I should find meaning in his face or his story.
“That’s what karma is,” he said. “Highway One outside of Hanoi is waiting for us. It’s all part of a piece. I’m sorry about your friend.”
“Have you ever been in jail?” I said.
“No. Why?”
I walked around the side of the desk.
“Let me see your hand,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Let me see your hand.”
