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I walked down through the pasture, past Albert’s four-stall barn, to the cabin made of split logs where Clete Purcel was staying. The cabin had been built next to a streambed shaded by cottonwoods and a solitary birch tree. The streambed carried water only in the spring and was dry and sandy the rest of the year, crisscrossed by the tracks of deer and wild turkeys and sometimes the long-footed imprints of snowshoe rabbits.
Clete’s hip waders were hanging upside down from the gallery roof, rainwater slipping down their rubbery surfaces; his fly and spinning rods were propped against the gallery railing, the lines pulled tightly through the eyelets and doubled back along the length of the rods, the hooks on the lures notched into the cork handles. He had washed his canvas creel and fishnet in a bucket and had hung them and his canvas fly vest on pegs that protruded from the log wall. His restored maroon Cadillac convertible was parked behind the cabin, a tarp draped over its starched white top, the tarp speckled with the droppings of ravens and magpies.
Through the window, I could see him eating at the breakfast table, his massive upper body hunched over his food, the grate on the woodstove behind him slitted with fire. Before I could knock, he waved me in.
If space aliens ever wanted to take over the planet and wipe out the human race, they simply needed to convince the rest of us to eat the same breakfast that Clete Purcel did. With variations depending on the greasy spoon, he daily shoveled down the pipe a waffle or three pancakes soaked in syrup, or four eggs fried in butter, with toast, grits, and a bowl of milk gravy on the side; a pork chop or breakfast steak or a plate of ham and bacon; and at least three cups of café au lait. Because he knew he had filled his digestive system with enough cholesterol and salt to clog the Suez Canal, he topped it off with a cup of stewed tomatoes or fruit cocktail, in the belief that it could neutralize a combination of grease and butter and animal fat with the viscosity of the lubricant used on train wheels.
I told him about Alafair’s encounter with Wyatt Dixon and our exchange with him at the casino. Clete opened the grate to his stove and dropped two blocks of pinewood into the flames. “Dixon allowed the deputy to search his truck?” he said.
“He was completely cooperative. The only weapon in there was an old lever-action Winchester.”
“Maybe he’s not the guy.”
“Alafair says nobody else was in the parking area or on the ridge. She’s sure Dixon is the only person who could have shot the arrow.”
“You think he has a jacket?”
“I called the sheriff an hour ago. Dixon has been around here for years, but nobody is sure what he is or who he is. He was mixed up with some militia people in the Bitterroot Valley who were afraid of him. When he went down for capping a rapist, Deer Lodge couldn’t deal with him.”
“A prison in Montana can’t deal with somebody?”
“They sent him to electroshock.”
“I didn’t think they did that anymore.”
“They made an exception. Dixon was kicked out of the army when he was fifteen for cutting the stripes off a black mess sergeant behind a saloon in San Antonio and stuffing them in the guy’s mouth. At a rodeo he knocked a bull unconscious with his fist. He says he’s born-again, and some people say he can speak in tongues. A university professor was recording a Pentecostal prayer meeting up on the rez when Wyatt Dixon got up and started testifying. The university professor claims Dixon was speaking Aramaic.”
“What’s Aramaic?”
“The language of Jesus.”
Clete was looking at his coffee cup, his expression neutral, his little-boy haircut freshly combed and damp from his shower, his face unlined and youthful in the morning sunlight. “Dave, don’t get mad at me for what I’m about to say. But we got the living shit shot out of us on the bayou. Not once but twice. Alafair went through a big trauma, just like us. I shut my eyes and I imagine things.”
“Alafair’s ear was cut.”
“We don’t know that the arrow did it. You said something about ravens fighting in a tree. Maybe it’s all coincidence. Easy does it, right?”
“Alafair is nobody’s fool. She doesn’t go around imagining things.”
“She gets into it with people. This time it’s with a wack job. The guy’s truck was clean. Leave him alone and quit borrowing trouble.”
“Do you know what I feel when you say something like that?” I asked.
“No, what?”
“Forget it. Have a few more slices of ham. Maybe that will help you think more clearly.”
He blew out his breath. “You want to roust him?”
“He doesn’t roust.”
“You said he went down on a murder beef. How’d he get out?”
“A technicality of some kind.”
“Okay, we’ll keep an eye out, but the guy has no reason to hurt Alafair. And he doesn’t add up as a guy who randomly hunts people with a bow and arrow, par
ticularly on his home turf.”
