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For Love Younger, depression was another term for self-pity. He had only one problem: He could not reason himself out of the black box he found himself inside. What was the truth about his life? The truth was, he woke every morning with a bête noire that he crowded out of his mind with sums and debits and concerns about the Saudi bench price on the barrel of oil in the same way a drunkard fills himself with whiskey to avoid acknowledging the catastrophe he has made of his life. The story of Love Younger was simple. He had committed the worst crime of which an ordinary human being was capable: He had destroyed his family.
He set down the heavy Navy Colt .44 on a spool table and waded into the creek. The coldness ran over the tops of his shoes and into his socks with a brittleness that reminded him of drawing water with a bucket from the stream that ran through Snakey Hollow, Kentucky, the place of his birth. As he stared at the long silvery ribbon winding through the canyon, he realized the gleam on the surface he had taken for granted was dying, as though the light were being drawn up through the trees and the canyon walls by the heavens, a shutting down of the day that was more an act of theft than a natural phenomenon.
He wondered what would happen if he began wading up the creek into the crack in the mountains that gave onto the great Idaho wilderness, disappearing inside its gathering shadows, crunching on the soft bed of sand and coppery pebbles that had been polished as bright as pennies. Could he keep going all the way to the top of the Bitterroots, where the snowmelt formed chains of lakes surrounded with miles of velvet greenery on which deer and elk and moose grazed in the sunrise?
Like the deerslayers of pre-Revolutionary America, could he walk all the way to the Missouri Breaks and follow the tributaries and the riparian paths of Indians to the inception point of the Mississippi, then find his way to Louisville and west through the bluegrass to the edge of the Cumberlands? Would his birthplace be changed significantly? Would there be a ragged child there who resembled another impoverished Kentucky child, one born during the first administration of Herbert Hoover? Was there some way to go back in time and undo his mistakes and set a straight path that would make his legacy acceptable in the eyes of others?
He knew these were foolish and vain thoughts, but if a man were contrite of heart, would not a merciful Creator make an exception and return, if only in token fashion, the children who had chosen either physical or spiritual death rather than live under the dominion of their father?
He walked farther up the creek, into a pool up to his knees, where the current was so cold that his shinbones felt as though they had been beaten with wood mallets. Holding on to a tree branch, he kept going deeper into the canyon, pulling himself along the edges of the current until he was up to his thighs and had no feeling at all beneath the dark wet line across his fly. He wondered if this would not be a bad way to go. He would simply keep walking up the creek into deeper and deeper pools until his entire body was numb and he was subsumed by the woods and the wild roses on the banks and the mist boiling at the bottom of a waterfall. Be my rod and staff, he thought.
The words angered him. Am I becoming one of the herd, the nitwits who roll in sawdust at camp meetings and dip their hands in boxes of copperheads? Get ahold of yourself.
He stepped out of the creek, water draining from his trouser cuffs onto the bank, the wind blowing as cold as an icicle through his thin shirt. He had thought his way through his problems and done what he could. The only concern that nagged at the edge of his conscience was his daughter-in-law, Felicity Louviere. But she was not a Younger. She was the offspring of a professional do-gooder and, from what he’d heard, a profligate working-class girl who had decided to enrich herself by marrying his pitiful son. Her fate had nothing to do with him.
He began walking back down the bank toward the cabin. He could hear bats flying by his head, their leathery wings throbbing, and he remembered how they had frightened him when he was a little boy, at dusk, when the hollow turned into a winter set, no matter what the season. Now he gave them no thought whatsoever, although he was sure some of them were rabid, just as they had been in Snakey Hollow. Why didn’t he fear them? The answer to the question was not complex. A king did not die from the bite of a rodent.
He went back inside with his .44 cap-and-ball revolver and hung it in a holster on the back of a wicker chair. Then he went outside again and gathered an armful of wood he had split and stacked under a pole shed. He thought he saw a pickup truck, one with a camper mounted on the bed, wending its way out of the dusk toward him, its headlights jiggling with a strange blue-stained white radiance that Love Younger associated with fairy tales more than he did with motorized vehicles.
Fornicators have to go somewhere, he thought. In the barn or the woods or on top of a corn-shuck pallet. Nothing will ever stop them from mating and pumping out legions of the same mentally defective creatures the world never seems to tire of. Well, have at it. I hope you have better luck with the product of your misspent seed than I did.
He started a fire in the stone fireplace. As he stood in its heat, steam rose from his wet khakis, and he felt a sense of tranquillity he hadn’t experienced in years. From down below, he heard a vehicle clank across the cattle guard. Was it the fornicators? Or perhaps Caspian’s ex-convict security people coming to tell him that Felicity Louviere had been released by the predator from Kansas
? He didn’t care one way or another.
Love Younger walked to the door, a bourbon and branch water in his hand. He started to turn the doorknob, then paused and glanced over his shoulder at the blue-black walnut-handled thumb-buster hanging from the back of the chair. What a fine weapon, he thought. Kicks like a jackhammer and, in the dark, throws out a six-inch muzzle flash that would make the devil jump. One hundred and fifty-two years old and deadly as the day of its manufacture. He clicked on the porch light without unlocking the door and pulled aside the window curtain. An orange pickup with a chrome grille was just turning off the dirt road onto Younger’s property. A man wearing a starch-white cowboy hat was behind the wheel, his left arm propped on the window, a purple garter snugged around his upper arm. The man in the white hat drove to within fifty feet of the cabin and cut the engine.
Dixon again, Younger thought. So it’s about money after all. They claim they don’t want it. They love Jesus and country and their mothers. But it’s always about money and then more money, and if they could, they’d all get naked and wallow in it in the middle of a Walmart. Okay, Mr. Dixon, maybe it’s time you heard a wrathful voice, since you seem to understand no other kind.
Love Younger set down his tumbler and pulled open the door, his irritability overriding caution. He was staring straight into the high beams of the truck, his eyes tearing and blind to what might be taking place in the truck’s cab.
“Begone, Wyatt Dixon,” he said. “Disappear into the primeval soup that bred you, and never let the name of my family issue from your lips.”
The wind had dropped, and he thought he could hear the heat of the engine ticking under the hood.
AT 8:47 P.M. the phone rang in the kitchen. Molly picked it up. I could hear a man talking on the other end. Molly cut him off. “Sheriff, why don’t you just do your job and stop bothering us?” she said. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you’re a genuine test of Christian charity, if not a pain in the ass.”
Then she handed the phone to me. Great start, I thought.
“Can I help you?” I said.
“Agent Martini thinks you and Purcel are concealing information from us,” the sheriff said.
Only minutes earlier, Alafair had told me of Gretchen’s speculations on the whereabouts of Asa Surrette. “Why would he think that?” I asked.
“Surrette was living within a quarter mile of Albert Hollister’s house, but you had no suspicions that he was there. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“The agent doesn’t believe that.”
“If I thought Surrette was living up the road, why wouldn’t I tell you or the FBI?”
“Because you wanted to bust a cap on him yourself.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
He was silent a moment. “Maybe it is. Here’s the second reason for my call. A short while ago Wyatt Dixon caused a disturbance at the truck stop in Lolo. He tried to put air in his tires, but the hose was leaking, and he lost ten pounds of pressure on a tire that was already low. He pulled the clerk over the counter and threw him into a stack of oil cans.”
