He lost both his sight and his consciousness as though he were watching a red-black liquid slide down the lens of a camera.
When he awoke his head snapped upward, like that of a man rising from a coffin, and the room, with all its familiar gunracks and deer and elk antlers and assortment of western hats and Indian blankets on the furniture and logs burning in the woodstove, came back into focus, everything in its right place, even the plastic suction device on the kitchen table that he used to clean impurities from the pores of his facial skin.
He realized he was seated in a chair and the wire loop that had razored into his flesh was no longer around his throat but on the floor by his foot and he saw that the loop had been fashioned from guitar strings. But his arms had been pinioned behind the chair and his wrists crossed and taped together, and his calves were
secured to the chair's legs with wide strips of silver tape from his ankle to the knee. He looked at the intruder who sat on a straight-back wood chair no more than three feet from him.
"Howdy do, sir? My name is Wyatt Dixon. What might yours be?" he said.
"You don't know?" the intruder said.
"My guess is you're Maisey Voss's daddy. If that be the case, I'm honored to meet a decorated soldier such as yourself. That Bowie knife on your hip could saw the head off a hog, couldn't it?"
"You were going back into the men's room at the truck stop to buy rubbers?" Doc said.
"That's not a fit question to be asking a man, sir."
"You planned to rape my daughter."
"Some weight lifters or football farts, I don't know which, was trying to get into her pants. Excuse the language I use to describe what could have been a repeat scene for your poor little girl. But that's what happened, sir."
"What I don't understand about you is that evidently you're a brave man. Cruel people are almost always cowards. How would you explain the discrepancy, Mr. Dixon?"
"I can tell you are Mr. Holland's friend. You both are natural-born orators. Your speech is filled with philosophic content that is far beyond the understanding of a rodeo cowboy."
Doc got up from his chair and walked to the butane cookstove that was set in a small curtain-hung alcove that served as a kitchen. He turned the butane on and listened to it hiss through the unlit jets, then turned it off.
"It won't give you no satisfaction," Wyatt Dixon said.
"Why not?" Doc asked.
"'Cause you'll have given me power. 'Cause I'll live in you every morning you get up. Ask them who run Old Sparky at Huntsville Pen. They don't never eat breakfast alone."
"That doesn't apply to you?" Wyatt Dixon's silky red hair hung in his eyes like a little boy's. He shifted his weight on his small, hard buttocks and wet his lips.
"There's people that's different. We all know each other, though. It's a bigger club than you might think," Wyatt Dixon said.
"I think you've convinced me, Mr. Dixon."
"I don't rightly follow you, sir. But I have to say I'm in awe of your military background. You had Lamar Ellison spotting his drawers."
"I'm glad to hear that," Doc replied. The woodstove was inset in an old stone hearth. Doc picked up two chunks of split pine from the woodbox and opened the stove's doors and threw them on the fire. Then he opened the damper on the chimney and watched the flame bloom inside the stove's iron walls.
All the while Wyatt Dixon watched him as though he were a spectator rather than a participant in the events taking place around him.
"Cut me loose and give me a knife and let's see how it shapes up. I'm making a bona fide gentleman's offer to you, sir," he said.
But Doc had walked past Wyatt Dixon's line of vision and was now at the cookstove again, where this time he reached behind it and ripped a length of flex pipe from a steel container. Suddenly the smell of butane filled the room.
"I can see you are a man of purpose, sir," Wyatt Dixon said. "Was you in that bunch over there that would slip into a village and cut people's throats in their sleep and paint their faces yellow so their folks would get a major surprise at daylight?"
When Doc went out the door and closed it behind him, Wyatt Dixon was staring at the fire in the woodstove, his face whimsical, as though an idle and insignificant thought were hovering in front of his eyes.
But whatever passions had driven Doc as a Navy SEAL had become little more than ashes on a dead fire. He came back into the log house and screwed down the valve on the butane tank and opened the windows and filled a plastic bucket in the sink and threw the water on the flames in the woodstove. Smoke billowed up into the room.
Wyatt Dixon watched him with a bead in his eye, his hands opening and closing behind him.
Doc flung the bucket at the sink and walked back outside, leaving the door open behind him.