She turned and went into the women’s room. A few minutes later she walked past the convertible again, her eyes focused on the movie screen, her white dress bathed in light. Jeff watched her while he drank from the bourbon tumbler with both hands.
“You’re slurping like a pig. Maybe you and the south-of-the-border cutie should still be an item,” Rita said.
Jeff took the paper shell of french fries from her hands and ground it into her face, smearing her eyes and hair and blouse with catsup and salt and potato pulp while she struck blindly at him with her fists, her elbows blowing the horn in staccato.
Sunday morning Skyler Doolittle walked up a wooded slope and sat on a boulder that was webbed with lichen and read from a Gideon Bible. The pages of the Bible were water-stained, the thick cardboard cover bleached like ink diluted with milk. The sun was not over the hill yet, and the woods were smoky and wet, the air suffused with a cool green light that seemed to have its origins in the river down below rather than in the sky.
Jessie Stump, shirtless, his belt notched into his bony ribs, was shaving without soap, over a bowl outside a shack that had once been a deer stand. Jessie had packed a duffel bag with their pots, pans, blankets, road maps, clothes, and food. On his belt was a heavy, saw-toothed hunting knife, the edge honed so sharp it cut fine lines in the opening of the scabbard when he slipped it in and out of the leather.
Jessie wiped his face dry with his arm and squatted by a map and counted out their money on top of it. Thirty-two dollars and eleven cents were left over from the money Billy Bob Holland had given to Skyler. Jessie looked down at the map and the lines he had drawn in pencil along all the roadways that led to Matagorda Bay, over which he had written the words “Cousin Tyson’s shrimper,” as though somehow his hand could create the journey and escape by salt water before they actually took place.
He looked up the slope at Skyler, who seemed consumed by the Gideon he had found in a shack down by the oxbow. So what if Skyler spent his time with that stuff, Jessie thought. It didn’t do no harm. Besides, Skyler’d sure been shortchanged in this world and maybe had something good coming in the next. In fact, Skyler was the only decent man he ever recalled meeting, except for maybe Cousin Tyson, who’d been in the pen four times and probably did a good turn for Jessie only because he hated cops on general principles.
Skyler wore a clean plaid shirt and suspenders and gray work pants they had gotten a black man to buy for them at the Wal-Mart. Skyler wet his thumb and forefinger each time he turned a page in his Bible, then he studied one passage for a long time and smiled down at Jessie.
The passage was about John the Baptizer, and John’s words seemed to rise off the page for Skyler and re-create the forest around him. The smoky green canopy overhead became the roof of a granary, and wind was blowing through the slats and separating out the chaff and lifting the grain into the sunlight, so that it became as golden as bees’ pollen.
Skyler lifted the Bible in front of him to reread the passage, sitting up higher on the boulder. In his mind’s eye he was already inside a gilded dome, one in which all the imperfections of the world disappeared, and he did not see the circular glint of glass on top of the ridge.
The soft-nosed .30-06 round tore through the book’s cover and half the pages and pierced Skyler through the lungs before the report ever rolled down the hillside.
Jessie Stump ran toward Skyler, his face lunatical, his knife drawn like a foolish wand.
Skyler had slipped to the ground and was on his hands and knees, coughing red flowers on the stones that protruded from the soil. The torn pulp from his Bible floated down on his head like feathers from a white bird.
28
The shooting was reported over the phone an hour later by a weeping man who refused to give his name to the dispatcher.
Marvin Pomroy and I drove to the crime scene together. The paramedics zipped up a black bag over Skyler’s face and loaded the body into an ambulance and drove away with it, and Hugo Roberts’s deputies strung yellow crime scene tape through the trees that surrounded the lichen-painted rocks where Skyler had died.
“You got any fix on Jessie Stump?” Marvin asked Hugo.
“The 911 come in from a convenience store three miles down the highway. A car was stole out of a lady’s driveway not far away about the same time,” Hugo said. also run a powder-residue test on Jeff Deitrich and any of his friends who happen to be hanging around,” I said.
“Right now the number one suspect is Jessie Stump,” Hugo said.
“The entry wound was at the top of his chest. The exit wound was in his rib cage. What does that suggest to you, Hugo?” I said.
“That a bullet goes in one place and out the other,” he replied, and pared a fingernail with a penknife.
A young uniformed deputy, new to the department, walked down the hillside through the pine trees, holding a .30-06 shell on the tip of a pencil.
“Found it on the crest up there. You can even see the sho
oter’s boot and knee prints in the pine needles. It looks like he fired from the right side of the trunk, which means he’s probably right-handed …” He paused. “I do something wrong?” he said, looking at Hugo’s face.
That afternoon I drove down the long valley and across the cattleguard in front of the Deitrich home and walked up the huge slabs of black stone that formed the front steps. When no one answered the chimes I walked around the side of the house to the terrace, which was shaded by a black-and-white-striped canopy. Peggy Jean and Jeff and Earl sat at a glass-topped table, drinking daiquiris, while shish kebab smoked on a barbecue pit and young people I didn’t know swam in the pool.
Fletcher Grinnel, the ex-mercenary, stepped out of the French doors with a drink tray, paused momentarily when he saw me, smiling either deferentially or to himself, then set down the tray and painted the shish kebab on the grill with a small brush.
“Why don’t you invite yourself over?” Earl said.
“Hugo Roberts wouldn’t get a warrant on your home. But I thought I should let you know what you’ve done,” I said.
“Sit down with us, Billy Bob. It’s Sunday. Can’t we be friends for today?” Peggy Jean said.
“Skyler Doolittle is dead. If I had to bet on the shooter, I’d put my money on either Fletcher over there, grimacing into the smoke, or Jeff and his friends wondering if they should go to a swimming party this afternoon or, say, gang-rape a Mexican girl,” I said.