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“I thought you might be a bad man. You’re not. There’s a deep sense of goodness in you, that somebody tried to take away from you.”
“That ain’t true. Nobody’s ever taken anything away from me. They know better than to try.”
“You consider yourself saved, don’t you?”
“I don’t take nothing for granted. The state shot my head full of electricity and made me drink a bathtub-load of chemicals. Sometimes I think I hear my brain gurgling.”
“Fix us some lemonade. It’s so pleasant out here. When I come to a place like this, I stop thinking about all my cares and worries. Smell the wind? I bet that’s what the world smelled like when this was a field of ice lilies.”
“What cares and worries would a lady like you have?”
“More than you know. But you’re not the source of them.”
He removed his cowboy hat and set it on her head.
“Why’d you do that?” she said.
“It looks better on you than on me.”
The entirety of her face seemed suffused with a pink loveliness that he never thought he would associate with a woman who had upper arms as big as hams. His hat slipped down on the corner of her eye. “Go ahead,” she said.
“Go ahead what?”
“Do whatever you’re fixing to do.”
“I knew you were from the South.” He lifted his hat off her head and let it hang from his fingers behind her back while he kissed her on the mouth. Then he put his arms around her and did it again. She leaned back, still in his arms, and looked into his eyes, her stomach against his, her face glowing. “You feel like a stack of bricks,” she said. “Or maybe a leather bag full o
f rocks. Did anyone ever tell you that?”
“Not recently.”
“Your physique is very appealing, Mr. Dixon.”
“It’s mighty bright out here in the sun. Can we take our blanket over yonder in the trees?”
She blew out her breath. “Right here is lovely,” she said. “Oh, my heavens, what a marvelous afternoon. Hurry, now. Don’t be embarrassed. What finer place for love than the earth? That’s Robert Frost.”
He didn’t catch that last part, but he didn’t really care. Congress with Bertha Phelps was not what he’d expected. Over the years most of his relationships with women had little to do with any consideration outside his skin. This time he felt he had stepped inside a rainbow. No, that wasn’t correct; it was more than that. Bertha’s sexual embrace of his body was like riding a winged horse or giving himself up to a cresting wave or swimming through warm water carpeted with flowers, and all the while she kept moaning his name in his ear. A few minutes later he felt a weakness shudder through his body and a dam break in his loins, and he held her tighter, more dependently, than he’d ever held a woman in his life, his breath coming hard in his throat, his head on her breast.
Then he felt her stiffen under him and knew that something was terribly wrong. When he pushed himself up on his arms, her face was sweaty and white and disjointed with fear and surprise, her eyes fastened on someone standing directly behind him.
HE LOOKED OVER his shoulder and saw not one but three men silhouetted against the sky, all wearing gloves and plastic masks that were a bright metallic gray and gave the impression of a weeping specter with a downturned mouth and cheeks pooled with shadow. One of the men was holding a police baton, a lanyard looped around his wrist. He stepped forward as though on cue and swung it across Wyatt’s ear, putting his shoulder into it, snapping it like a baseball batter connecting with a fat pitch.
Wyatt suspected his eyes rolled but couldn’t be sure. The trees and mountains and sky suddenly reduced themselves to a pinpoint of light inside a sea of blackness, then the pinpoint disappeared, too. Wyatt fell sideways into the grass, naked except for his unsnapped cowboy shirt, a trickle of blood sliding down his neck.
When he woke, the shadow of his truck was in the same place where it had been when he was hit with the baton, but Bertha Phelps was gone. His hands were tied behind him with rope, and his wallet and its contents were scattered on the ground. He got on his knees and worked the rope under the bumper, then rose to a squat and strained against the rope to the point where he thought his molars would break. He took a breath and tried again, this time tearing the skin off his knuckles. Suddenly, he was free and standing erect, his head throbbing, his hands bleeding. He pulled on his underwear and Wranglers and searched for his Tony Lama boots and the six-inch bone-handled Solingen clasp knife he carried. They were not there. Neither was the money in his wallet.
Who were they? Some guys fresh out of the can, maybe wiped out on crystal? These days the jails were full of guys with no class, all rut and penis and shit for brains. Where was Bertha?
The wind changed and he heard her voice up the slope, deep in the trees, and he had no doubt what the three men were doing to her.
He opened the back of the camper shell. His 1892 lever-action Winchester lay on the floor, but the shells for it were at his house. He reached into a duffel bag where he kept his camping gear and removed an army-surplus entrenching tool. The blade was locked into the straight-out position of a shovel, the edges of the blade filed clean and sharp. His gaze swept across the hillside, then he ran to the left of where the men had probably entered the trees with Bertha, the hatched scar tissue on his back as white as snow.
The floor of the forest was soft with damp grass and seepage from a spring in the hillside. To his right, inside a widely spaced stand of ponderosa lit by a solitary band of sunlight, two men were holding Bertha on her back while the third man attempted to mount her. When she tried to cry out, one man scooped a handful of dirt from the ground and poured it into her mouth.
They were still wearing their masks and apparently had not heard him coming. When they heard his bare feet running across the forest floor, they twisted their heads toward him in unison, frozen in time, like men who’d thought they possessed total control of the environment only to discover they had just locked themselves in a box with the most dangerous man they had ever met.
Wyatt’s upper body was streaming sweat and stenciled with nests of veins when he struck the first blow, catching the man on top of Bertha across the back, slicing through his shirt, slinging blood through the air. He wielded the e-tool like a medieval battle-ax and didn’t aim his blows or plan his attack. The power of his swing and the level of energy and rage that went into each blow was devastating and similar in effect to a jackhammer deconstructing a plywood house. Oddly, there was little sound inside the grove of columnlike pines, other than the muffled grunts his adversaries made behind their masks whenever he hit them.
