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“It was Surrette?” I said.
“How does the expression go? There’s no fool like an old fool?” he said.
ON SATURDAY, WYATT Dixon emerged from his Airstream trailer at the fairgrounds and flexed his shoulders in appreciation of the summer evening and the salmon-colored sky and the neon ambience of the amusement rides and game booths and concession stands that had defined his youth and were, in his opinion, as much a stained-glass work of art as any fashioned from stone by medieval guildsmen. He had put on his puff-sleeved sky-blue shirt with red stars on the shoulders, his championship buckle, and his soft lavender red-fringed butterfly chaps and a Stetson that fit tightly on his head, down low on the brow, one that didn’t fly off with the first bounce out of the bucking chute. The summer light was trapped high in the sky, as though it had no other place to go, the breeze balmy and redolent of meat fires. What finer place was there?
If only Bertha would close her mouth for a little while. “You’re too old for it,” she said, following him out the door onto the apron of grass where they had dropped the trailer. “Do you want to be a quadriplegic? Do you want to wear a drip bag under your clothes for the rest of your life?”
“I rode Bodacious to the buzzer, woman,” he replied. “There ain’t many can say that. We used to call him the widow-maker. I rode him into a tube steak. What do you think of that?”
“Call me ‘woman’ again, and I’m going to slap you cross-eyed.”
“Bertha, I’m not exaggerating, blood is leaking out of my ears.”
“Where are you going?”
“To get a brain transplant.”
“Please, Wyatt.”
“I got the message. Even though I am near deaf, by God, I got the message.”
“You won’t ride?”
“I don’t think I said that. You want some cotton candy or a tater pig?”
“No, I do not. I want you to act like a reasonable human being.”
“There ain’t no fun in that.”
She threw a slipper at his head.
Oh, well, he’d known worse, he consoled himself. When he was seventeen, he’d married a Mexican woman who used to blow flaming kerosene out of her mouth in a carnival. Or at least he thought he’d married her. The two of them had eaten enough peyote buttons to start a cactus farm and had woken up on top of a bus loaded with stoned hippies on their way to San Luis Potosi. He remembered a ceremony conducted by an Indian shaman dressed in feathers; he was almost sure of that. But maybe the ceremony was a funeral, because somebody had dropped a wooden casket off a mountainside, and Wyatt had seen it bounce and break apart on the rocks. Or maybe the fire-eater was in the casket. Or maybe that was her mother. It was somebody, for sure.
He had decided long ago that memory and reliving the good times weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Anyway, Bertha Phelps was a good woman. The problem was, she was too good. She worried about him day and night and made love like it was about to be outlawed, sometimes leaving him worn out in the morning and afraid she would corner him in the bedroom by midafternoon.
He bought her a tater pig whether she wanted it or not, and a great big fluffy cone of cotton candy for himself. He heard the announcer on the loudspeaker in the box above the bucking chutes tell the crowd to stand up for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Th
rough an aisle lined with game booths, he saw a familiar figure walking toward him, followed by three men wearing suits and shades.
Wyatt was not up for another session with a billionaire oilman who just wouldn’t let it alone, whatever “it” was. Wyatt had never given much thought to rich people; he’d always assumed they had the same vices and compulsions as everyone else but were a whole lot smarter about hiding them. He didn’t care what they were, as long as they tended to their own business, which was buying politicians and making sure the toilets flushed and the cops got paid off, and nobody told him what he could and couldn’t do.
Too late.
“I just want a couple of minutes,” Love Younger said.
“Not a good idea,” Wyatt said.
“Come on, sit down, son. Let me have my say, and I’ll be gone.”
They were standing on a grassy spot under a birch tree by the bingo concession, the grandstand not far away, buzzing with noise. “Is that Jack Shit with you?”
“That’s Jack Boyd.”
“What happened to him?” Wyatt asked.
“Excuse me, I have to rest a minute,” Younger said, easing himself down at one of the plank tables. “Age is a clever thief. It takes a little from you each day, so you’re not aware of your loss until it’s irreversible.”
Wyatt could hear the announcer in the grandstands trading jokes with one of the rodeo clowns. “Tell me what you’re after and be done with it,” he said, and sat down at the table.
