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“I am. Remember the guy in the Charles Atlas ads? The ninety-pound weakling who was always getting sand kicked in his face? I look at you and think about that ad from forty years ago. It’s a nostalgic moment.”
“You’re a fun guy. I like you. I can see why she likes you, too,” Caspian said. “But dildos are dildos. I hope it’s been worth it.”
Clete removed the nozzle from the tank and began to screw the gas cap back on the funnel, his expression flat, his eyes neutral. One of the fluorescent tubes above the gas island had shorted and started buzzing, like a wasp trapped inside a crawl space. Caspian leaned forward, within six inches of Clete’s ear, and spat on him.
Clete finished screwing the cap back on the gas tank, his green eyes as dispassionate as marbles. He pulled two paper towels from a dispenser and wiped the spittle from his cheek and ear and hair and dropped the towels into a trash barrel. Felicity opened the passenger door on the Caddy and stepped outside. “Can’t you leave us alone, Caspian?” she said. “You’ve gotten everything you wanted. Why do you want to go on hurting people?”
Caspian grinned at Clete. “Did you go downtown with her?” he said. “I have a feeling that’s one reason she’s kept you around. The bigger they are, the easier they are to control.”
“You guys win,” Clete said.
“Win what?” Caspian asked.
“You guys have got your way. Y’all are a whole lot smarter than me. What can I do?”
“Sorry, I don’t understand Sanskrit,” Caspian said.
“Really?” Clete said. “See how this translates.” He kicked Jack Boyd so hard in the groin that his face turned beet-red, then eggplant, as he went down on his knees, both hands clenched to his privates, his mouth locking open with pain that was so intense, no sound came out of his throat.
The roundhouse that caught Caspian lifted him into the air and sent him crashing into the side of the Caddy. Clete turned his attention back to Jack Boyd and kicked him in the face and stomped his head with the sole of his loafer, breaking his lips and nose and teeth. When Caspian tried to get up, Clete grabbed him by the back of the shirt and drove his face down on the Caddy’s fin, then whipped his head into a gas pump again and again, finally flinging him to the concrete.
He wasn’t finished. He ripped a small automatic from Boyd’s clip-on holster and released the magazine and threw it into the darkness, then ejected the round in the chamber and threw the gun on the roof of the convenience store. “Where’s your drop, asshole?” he said.
Boyd was trying to sit erect, coughing teeth and blood on his shirt.
“Clete, stop it! Please!” Felicity said. “Please don’t hit them anymore!”
“See this?” Clete said to Felicity, jerking up Boyd’s trouser leg. “It’s called a throw-down. He was going to pop me. Maybe you, too.”
He pulled the small revolver from the Velcro-strapped holster and flipped out the cylinder and shook the five .22 rounds from the chambers into Boyd’s face. The revolver was rust-pitted, the bluing on the cylinder worn, the sight filed off, the wood grips wrapped with electrician?
?s tape that was inverted, sticky side out. Clete shoved the revolver into Boyd’s mouth and hammered it down with the heel of his hand.
“We’re done, Cletus. Back away,” I said.
“They were going to take both of us out, Streak. These guys need special handling. Yes, indeedy they do. You ever see a ville trashed with Zippo tracks, boys? You can’t believe what ran out of the hooches.”
At that moment I knew Clete had gone into a separate time zone, one where reason and morality held no sway and psychosis was the standard. He drenched both men with gasoline, spraying it in their faces and mouths and eyes. He fished his lighter out of his pocket. “Nobody does a number on the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. You got that? Show me you understand, or you’re going to be a pair of human pinwheels.”
“Clete, don’t!” Felicity begged. “This isn’t you. No matter what they’ve done, you can’t do this.”
“Listen to her,” I said. “It’s over. Look at them. They’re pitiful. They’ll never forget this night as long as they live.”
I put my hand over the lighter and squeezed, splaying his fingers and thumb. He stared at me woodenly. I saw the glaze go out of his eyes, the heat leave his face, like the glow of a hot coal dying inside its own ashes.
“They knew I was kidding,” he said. “No big deal. Right? You boys copacetic down there? How about a soda?”
Through the window of the convenience store, I saw a clerk dialing the phone and talking into the receiver, his mouth moving rapidly.
“We’re in Ravalli County,” I said. “I don’t want to explain this to the locals.”
I started toward the pickup. I thought we were done. Then I heard Caspian get to his feet and stumble against the pumps, grabbing the trash barrel for support, gasoline and blood running down his face, his broken lips twisted into a grin. He started to speak, then had to spit and begin again. “Neither one of you has any idea what this is about, do you?” he said. “Know why that is? You’re the little people, but you’re too stupid to realize it. Ask Felicity what kind of guy my father is. She ought to know. He fucked her. Now they’re both going to fuck you, just like they both fucked me.”
He started laughing, sliding down the side of the pump like a scarecrow collapsing on its own sticks.
THE SUN HADN’T risen above the mountain when Gretchen woke the next morning. The inside of the cabin was cold, and when she washed her face, the water was like ice on her skin. Clete had just lit the woodstove, and she could see the fire through the slits in the stove’s grate, the condensation on the iron shrinking and disappearing into wisps of steam. She pulled aside the curtain on the kitchen window and looked at the fog on the pasture and the snow flurries blowing out of the darkness, as white and fluttering as moths trapped inside a closet.
She had not remembered the dream she was having when she woke, but as she looked at the outside world, she knew the man who had fingers with lights on the tips but no face had come to visit her again.
