"I told you, you'd know when it was my ring," he said. His teeth showed at the edge of his mouth when he smiled.
"I got a problem, Wyatt. I'm afraid you'll be on the street again one day."
"Folks love a rodeo clown. They don't got no love for lawyers."
"Why'd you bury Temple?"
"It made me feel good."
I squatted down next to him, L.Q.'s revolver propped across my thigh.
"You a praying man?" I asked.
"My daddy was. I never took to it."
"Your clock's run out, partner."
He nodded and looked out into the rain. "Give me my hat."
"Pardon me?"
"My hat. It fell on the floor. I want my damn hat."
I reached inside the open passenger door and picked up a white Stetson with a gray feather in the band and knocked the dust off it against my thigh and handed it to him. He pulled it down on his head and stared out under the brim into the field of flowers. His shirt was buttoned at the throat, and the flesh under his chin looked old, wrinkled, peppered with white whiskers.
I knelt on one knee, three feet from him, and pointed L.Q.'s.45 at his jawbone.
"My notion is nobody knows what goes on inside a man like you. But all your life you look for a bullet. If need be, you make the state your executioner," I said.
He turned his head slowly toward me, the pain rippling upward into his face.
"I ain't afraid of no man. Do it and be done. I'll live in your dreams, motherfucker," he said.
I removed a hollow-point round from L.Q.'s revolver and dropped it into his lap.
"That's why you're going into a cage, Wyatt, where somebody can study you, the way they would a gerbil. We plan to have a good life. You won't be part of it, either."
I stood up and felt the bones pop in my knees. I steadied myself against the side of the truck, kicking the stiffness loose from one leg, like a man who knows he's a little older, a little more worn around the edges, a little more prone to let the season have its way.
I got into my truck and drove through the rain toward Lucas and Temple and Doc and Maisey, who were walking toward me under a huge red umbrella, indifferent to the lightning that split the sky.
Epilogue
Wyatt Dixon's.44 Magnum proved to be the weapon that had killed the biker and rapist Tommy Lee Stoltz. The death of the third rapist, the one who was found drowned in his chest waders, was written off as accidental. But I suspect Carl Hinkel ordered the attack against Maisey as a way of hurting her father, then, after Lamar Ellison was killed, had the other two men murdered in order to hide his own culpability.
But we'll never know the entire truth of what happened. Wyatt Dixon went to trial and gave up no one, even though he was facing a capital sentence. Oddly, the jury seemed to like him. At least two female jurors couldn't keep their eyes off him. When Dixon was sentenced to sixty years in Deer Lodge, he drew himself to attention and saluted the judge and called him a great American.
Terry Witherspoon confessed to burying Temple alive, not out of remorse but to incriminate Dixon and pile as much time on him as he could. The irony is that while Witherspoon was hospitalized in a body cast, his bloodwork came back HIV positive. Dixon may leave prison one day but Witherspoon will not.
I received a letter from Xavier Girard, written from the same penitentiary where Dixon and Witherspoon were being held. It was short and did not contain either the litany of grief or the self-pronounced redemption that is characteristic of most people who have made a holocaust of their lives. It read:
Dear Mr. Holland,
I wanted to apologize for making a nuisance of myself. You seemed like a nice gentleman and I'm sure you had more to do than put up with a lot of grandiose and silly behavior from an expatriate coonass.
I've given up fiction for a while and have gone back to writing poetry. I think some of my new poems are pretty good. I can't say I've learned very much in here, unless an old truth that I knew as a young man and forgot as I reached my middle years. A writer's art is only as good as his devotion to it. I forgot that I didn't do anything to earn my talent. I burned my own kite but I hurt a lot of other people as
well.