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“It’s important, Wyatt.”
“Not to me it ain’t.”
“We’re just doing our job. How about hooking yourself up? It’s not personal.”
“Speaking of job performance, I’d rate y’all’s somewhere between mediocre to piss-poor.”
“Is it true you can speak dead languages?”
Wyatt blew his breath up into his face and looked at the sunlight wobbling inside the riffle on the river, then jumped down from the flatbed into the middle of the deputies. All of them stepped backward before they could check themselves. He began picking pieces of hay off his arms and chest, dropping each one into the wind. “How’d Pepper go out?” he asked.
“Hard,” the lead deputy said.
“How hard?”
“Hard as it gets.”
“It happened this morning?”
The deputy shook his head noncommittally. Wyatt lifted his T-shirt off the outside mirror on the driver’s side of the flatbed truck. He studied his reflection in the mirror, touching at a razor nick on his jaw, then worked his shirt over his arms and head and neck. The T-shirt fitted him so tightly, it looked like latex on his skin. His eyes were empty when he looked at the deputy. “Did Pepper go out with a bag over his head?”
“I don’t know all the details,” the deputy said. “I can’t discuss them with you, anyway.”
“Did you know Angel Deer Heart?”
“Afraid not,” the deputy said.
“Did you ever wonder why rich people would adopt a raggedy-ass little girl from the rez?”
“Put on the cuffs, Wyatt.”
“Half of them come out of the womb with alcohol on the brain. The other half are crack babies.”
“You could ask the lead investigator about a
ll this, except he’s dead.”
“You ever hear Southerners talk about the ‘dumbest white person’ they ever met?”
“Nope.”
“Most people think that’s an insult to people of color. What that really means is the dumbest person on earth is a stupid white man. You can teach a horse, a dog, or even a tree frog to tap-dance before you can teach toilet training to a white man who is willfully ignorant. All colored people know that.”
The deputy cupped his hand around Wyatt’s upper arm. “You’re a puzzle, buddy.”
“Did you know y’all are living in the middle of biblical events?”
“Biblical?”
“That’s what I said.”
The deputy walked with him to the cruiser. “I love your accent, Wyatt. Watch your head getting in,” he said.
AT ONE-THIRTY P.M. on Saturday, the sheriff called me again. “You want to come down here and talk to this crazy bastard?” he said.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Most of the DIs I knew in the service were from the South. I always thought someone had pissed inside their brains when they were infants. Now I’m sure of it. I just spent twenty minutes listening to Wyatt Dixon talk about the history of the earth and the coming of the Antichrist. Did you know the world is sixty-four hundred years old?”
