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“I’d like to buy that acreage you have behind Albert Hollister’s place.”
“It’s owned by the Nature Conservancy. I lease the grazing rights.”
Younger’s eyes dropped to Wyatt’s shoulders and back. “Where’d you get those scars, boy?”
“On the circuit. Before that, my pap give them out free.”
“He was a harsh disciplinarian?”
“He couldn’t spell the goddamn word.”
Younger opened his straw creel and took out a bottle of dark German beer. “You want one?” he said.
“No, thanks.”
“You look like you’re part Indian. Your profile, I mean.”
“That’s what people tell me. I ain’t.”
“What’d your folks do?”
“Chopped cotton and broke corn. My pap taught me how to put dirt clods in the bag when we weighed in. Sometimes my mother cleaned at a motel on the highway, at least when they was still drilling there’bouts.”
“My father made shine and transported it up to Detroit,” Younger said. “I was fifteen before we had a wood floor. Your pap wasn’t much good, huh?”
“I don’t know what he was. I don’t study on it no more.”
Younger gazed at the mountains that bordered the river and at the cottonwoods that grew along the banks, their boughs swelling in the breeze. “You’ve got yourself a fine place here,” he sa
id.
Wyatt popped a pimple on the top of his shoulder and didn’t reply. He wiped his fingers on his jeans.
“Name your price.”
“I ain’t got one. That’s ’cause it ain’t for sale.”
“You sound like a man who’s at peace.”
“Peace is what you get in the graveyard, Mr. Younger.”
“I get you mad about something?”
Wyatt pulled the weed out of his mouth and flipped it down the bank. “I went up to your place to tell you Bill Pepper was trying to put your granddaughter’s death on me. You had me thrown off the property. Now you cain’t wait to give me a suitcase full of cash.”
“Maybe we have a lot in common, boy.”
“I don’t like nobody calling me that.”
“I had a son like you. He had no fear. He was an aviator.”
“What happened to him?”
“He crashed in a desert and died of thirst. Another son died in a car wreck. I had my daughter lobotomized.”
Wyatt didn’t reply. He could feel the older man’s eyes on the side of his face.
“In ancient times, you would have been a gladiator, Mr. Dixon.”
