“You’d do that?” she asked.
“Pay me back when y’all punch into your first oil sand.”
“Wilbur’s scared. He sits by himself in the kitchen in the middle of the night. He thinks I’m going to prison.”
“Listen, Kippy Jo, men like Earl Deitrich steal people’s dreams. They have no creative vision of their own, no love, and no courage. They envy people like you and Wilbur. That’s why they have to destroy you.”
She was quiet a long time. The sun was hot and bright in the sky, and the pools of rainwater in the alfalfa glimmered like quicksilver. Kippy Jo set down the tin pan of snapbeans and kneaded the thick folds of skin on top of the beagle’s neck. The wind blew her hair in a black skein across her eyes.
“He won’t listen,” she said.
Earl Deitrich was one of those who believed that when force, control, and arrogance did not get you your way, you simply applied more of the same.
That night the moon was down, and rain clouds sealed the sky and heat lightning flickered over the hills in the west. Wilbur and Kippy Jo slept under an electric fan, the drone of the motor and the tinny vibration of the wire basket over the blades threading in and out of their sleep as the fan head oscillated on its axis. At 2 A.M. Wilbur heard a crunching sound, like car tires rolling slowly across pea gravel. He rose from the bed in his underwear and lifted the .308 Savage lever-action from the rack and walked barefoot into the living room. He looked out into the drive and at the road in front and saw nothing. He leaned down on the windowsill, the curtains blowing against his skin. He stared into the darkness until his eyes burned and he imagined shapes that he knew were not there.
He walked into the kitchen and took a quart of milk from the icebox and drank from it. Then he heard car tires crunching on the gravel again, rolling faster this time, and he realized the sounds had come from the back of the house, not the front.
He opened the screen door and stepped into the yard just as three men pushed his pickup truck out onto the road, turned over the engine, and jumped inside. He ran to the side of the house, threw his rifle to his shoulder, and levered a round into the chamber.
He moved the iron sights just ahead of the driver’s window, saw the man silhouetted against a light on a neighbor’s barn, and felt his finger tighten on the trigger. Then he blew out his breath and lifted the barrel into the air, resting the stock in the cradle of his left arm. He watched the truck disappear down the road toward the hills in the west.
He heard Kippy Jo behind him.
“I’ll call 911,” she said.
“It won’t do no good. It’ll just bring Hugo Roberts and them thugs of his back out here.”
“Come back in the house,” she said, tugging at his arm.
“No. They turned off the road into the hills. They’re stopping for something. I’m going after them sons of bucks.”
“That’s what they want you to do.”
“Then they should have thought twicet about what they prayed for. That’s a Wilbur T. Pickett guarantee.”
Wilbur put on a cotton shirt and jeans and a pair of boots and hung a flashlight on a lanyard around his neck and bridled one of his palominos and rode it bareback out to the hills, the lever-action Savage propped across the horse’s withers. He rode through arroyos and a sandy wash dimpled with pools of red water. He rode up a steep incline into mesquite and blackjack that had been scorched black from brushfires, into stands of green trees, across rocky ground, and onto a plateau that looked out on the railroad trestle.
Heat lightning leaped between the clouds and he saw his truck parked down below, under the stanchions of the trestle.
He brought his boot heels into the ribs of the palomino, leaning his weight back toward the rump, his rifle held vertically in his right arm, and rode down the slope into the ravine.
The wind shifted and an odor struck his face that was like a green chemical, like the smell of a river that has receded from flood stage and exposed the remains of drowned livestock.
Both of the truck doors were open and Wilbur could hear blowflies droning in the darkness. He unhooped the flashlight from his neck and slipped from the horse’s back and walked around to the front of the truck.
A figure sa
t stiffly behind the steering wheel, the hands resting motionlessly on each side of the horn button. Strands of gray hair lifted in the hot wind around a face that seemed to have no features, that was as black as leather that had molded in the ground.
When he flicked on the flashlight he saw his mother in her burial clothes, now stained by groundwater, her chin and the corners of her mouth puckered tightly against the bone in an eternal scold, her slitted eyes staring at him as brightly as fish scale.
• • •
The following morning Wilbur recounted all the above in my office, spinning his hat on his index fìnger.
“They dug up your mother’s grave?” I said incredulously.
“They sure did. My bet would be on that Fletcher fellow. Anyway, I already called Earl Deitrich,” he replied.