Sunday morning Skyler Doolittle went to a fundamentalist, Holy Roller church in the West End, one that had trailed its legends of snake handling, drinking poisons, and talking in tongues all the way across the chain of southern mountains into the hill country of rural
When he left the church he ate lunch at a truck stop and returned to his room in a backstreet sandstone hotel that had no air-conditioning and where the dust from a feeder lot blew through the windows above the old wood colonnade.
He turned the key in the lock and stepped inside the door. On his bed and floor and nightstand were photographs of children. The draft through the door blew the photographs into a vortex, one filled with images that made his eyes water.
Two uniformed deputies in shades stepped through the door behind him. The taller of the two was named Kyle Rose; a pale, shaved area still showed in the back of his scalp where I had driven his head into the log wall of Hugo Roberts’s office. He removed the sunglasses from his face and pinched the red marks on the bridge of his nose. His mouth was a stitched line, hooked downward on the corners. He pulled the shades on the windows.
“Ain’t nobody here but us chickens now,” he said.
The call came to my house Sunday night, not from Skyler Doolittle but from a janitor in the jail section of the county hospital.
“It happened out in the parking lot. I seen it from the upstairs window. They had him between two cars. This cop had some kind of electric gun in his hand,” he said.
“Skyler told you to call me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
He started to speak, then hung up.
A half hour later an orderly at the hospital unlocked a plain metal door on an isolation room whose floor and walls were overlaid with mattresses. Skyler Doolittle stood in a corner, wearing nothing but boxer undershorts that were printed with smiling blue moons. His body was streaked with red abrasions, like rope burns.
“They beat you?” I said.
“At my hotel, ’fore
they took me out to the car. In the parking lot a man put a stinger on me. His name’s Kyle Rose. He done it all over my back.”
“I’m going to get you transferred to a bed, Mr. Doolittle. My investigator will check on you later tonight, and I’ll be back to visit you in the morning.”
Then I noticed a change in his eyes; they had taken on a color they hadn’t possessed before, like lead that’s been scorched in a fire. His posture, even his muscular tone, seemed different, the tendons in his fused neck like braided rope, his chest flat-plated, the upper arms swollen with glandular fluids.
“This fellow Deitrich and the man with that stinger?” he said.
“Yes?”
“My thoughts don’t seem like my own no more. I ain’t never hurt nobody on purpose. I’m a river-baptized man. I fear a great evil is fixing to draw me inside it. I got no place to turn with it.”
12
I was to be of little help to Skyler Doolittle. Five days later, I watched him leave Deaf Smith in a blue state bus with grilles on the windows for a state mental hospital in Austin. At the time I even thought he would be better off, safe from the torment visited upon him by Hugo Roberts’s deputies.
I paid little attention to the man with fan-shaped sideburns chained hand and foot next to him.
That evening Lucas asked me to come out and see the farmhouse he had rented forty miles west of town. He said he had rented it in order to be closer to his job on an oil rig. But his pride in living on his own and paying his own way was obvious.
We stood in the front yard, surveying the bullet-pocked window glass, the scaled white paint, the gutters clogged with pine needles, the collapsed privy and the windmill wrapped with tumble brush in back. In the side yard the branches of a dead pecan tree were silhouetted like gnarled fingers against the sun.
“I got an option to buy. With a little fixing up, it’d be a right nice place,” he said.
“Yeah, it looks like it’s got a lot of promise,” I said, trying to keep my face empty. From inside I could hear Elmore James singing “My Time Ain’t Long” on a CD. “Who lives in the trailer out back?”
“Nobody reg’lar.” He looked about the yard, his expression blank.
“Nobody regular?”
“Yeah, I mean a friend or two might stay over. Come on inside. I’ll show you my new electric bass.”