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."
He had scrubbed out the interior of the house with lye water and set coffee cans planted with petunias in the windowsills and hung his twelve-string and slide guitars, mandolin, banjo, and fiddle from felt-covered hooks on the living room walls. His musical talent was enormous. He referred to country and blues and rock musicians, both living and dead, by their first or nicknames, as though he and his listener knew them intimately: Hank and Lefty, Melissa, Lester and Earl, Janice, Kitty, Emmylou, Stevie Ray, Woody and Cisco. The irony was that in his humble reverence he was unaware he was as good as or better than most of them.
I heard a car turn off the county road into the yard.
"Check out this next cut on the CD. It's 'Rocket '88,' Jackie Brenston. The first real R amp;B record ever made," Lucas said.
Through the side window I saw a yellow convertible park in front of the dented and sagging silver trailer that was set up on cinder blocks. The driver wore a hard hat and a denim shirt that was spotted with drilling mud. The Mexican girl next to him pushed her hair back on her head with one hand. Her hair was long and dark and looked as though it had been stained with iodine.
"Jeff Deitrich and Esmeralda Ramirez are living here?" I said.
"I got him a job on my rig. The guy's trying to straighten out his life. It ain't gonna be easy for them two."
"He's putting you in harm's way."
"What if you'd taken that attitude when I was in trouble? I'd be chopping cotton in Huntsville Pen."
Through the window I watched Jeff walk inside the trailer with his arm around Esmeralda's shoulders, a lunch bucket in his left hand. I let out my breath and sought words that would seem reasonable and hide the fear that gripped my heart. The wind slapped the door of the trailer into the frame like a pistol shot.
The man chained hand and foot next to Skyler Doolittle was named Jessie Stump, an armed robber, speed addict, and psychopath who shot a Mexican judge in a courtroom, jumped through a second-story glass window, and escaped into the heart of Mexico City. He was also one of my ex-clients. When I got him off on a forgery charge, he paid my fees with a bad check.
There were five inmates in jailhouse orange jumpsuits sitting on the passenger seats in the rear of the bus, and two uniformed deputy sheriffs in front, their backs protected by a wire-mesh partition. Jessie was the only inmate who had been locked in both wrist and leg manacles. He leaned forward, his chains tinkling, and removed a leather-craft tool from his shoe, one with a thin, needle-sharp steel hook on the end. Then he inserted the tip into the lock on his right wrist and twisted gingerly, as though he were correcting the mechanism m the back of a clock.
When the serrated steel tongue of the manacle popped loose, Jessie slipped a small bar of soap into his mouth and started to work on his leg chains. Skyler Doolittle's hand closed around his like a large ball of bread dough.
"You go, I go," Skyler whispered.
Jessie's hair was coal black, his narrow face cratered with acne scars, his dark eyes wired. His lips were pinched together to hold the soap that was melting inside his mouth. A thought, a moment's resentment, the consideration of alternatives, perhaps, seemed to hover in front of his eyes, then disappear. He inserted the tool in the manacle on Skyler's left wrist. His fingertips were black with grime, his nails as thick as tortoiseshell, but he rotated the shaft of the leather-craft tool as delicately as a surgeon.
A minute later Jessie rolled a topless container of Liquid-plumr down the aisle and collapsed on the floor, writhing, his feet thrashing, his mouth white with foam.
The deputy riding shotgun stared back through the wire mesh.
"Pull it over. Stump's done swallowed drain cleaner," he said to the driver.
The bus stopped on the swale. The guard by the front door got up out of his seat, unholstered his revolver and set it on the dashboard. He unlocked the wire-mesh door that gave onto the aisle.
The guard was near retirement, his face ruddy with emphysema, his stomach hanging over his belt like a sack of grain. His hand touched Stump's shoulder.
"Hold on, son. We'll get the medics here. They'll pump you out," he said.
Then Jessie was on his feet, the tape-wrapped shank pressed against the guard's jugular.
"You key that radio and I'll slice his pipe," he said to the driver, who was young, only two years on the job, and had suddenly realized the cost of underestimating the potential of the men he ferried back and forth daily from a half dozen service institutions.
Jessie pushed the older guard down the aisle, through the wire-mesh door, and picked up the revolver off the dashboard. He pointed it at the side of the driver's head and pulled the driver's gun from its holster.
"Drive the bus down that side road into them pines," he said.
The bus bounced down a dirt road into deep shade, past a pond that was green with lichen and dimpled with the tracings of insects and dragonnies. Jessie reached past the steering wheel and turned off the ignition.
"Y'all get out," he said.
"What you gonna do, Jessie?" the driver said.
"Some days a guy just gets up and brushes his teeth in the commode," he replied.
"Them state hospital people are gonna certify you. You won't never do time," the older guard said.
"They give me electroshock, bossman. I bit right through that rubber hose they put in my mouth. Lordie, I cain't go through that un again," Jessie said.
He herded the two guards out the door, pushing them in the back toward the pond that rang with a greenish-yellow light. The other inmates stared from the bus windows, some already starting to turn their faces away, as though they were being forced to watch the showing of a film they didn't want to see.
"Just look the other way and kneel down. Look at the water. It's full of frogs. They're jumping all over the place. See?" Jessie said to the guards.
"My salary is all my old woman's got. You must have gone to a church at one time, son. Ain't none of you boys all bad," the older guard said. Then his words broke in his throat and died and his lungs heaved in his chest for breath.
"I didn't just go to church. My daddy was a preacher. He burned me with cigarettes and choked to death on a woman's glass eye in a motel room. You look at them frogs. There's one yonder fat as a football," Jessie said. He stepped back from the two guards, his hand tightening and untightening on the grips of the pistol, his palm making a popping sound, as though there were adhesive on his skin.
Then Skyler Doolittle was standing behind him, a clutch of chains and manacles dripping from one hand.
"Have they did something bad to you?" Skyler asked.
" They ain't. Back at the jail, a couple of them others took me down for midnight Bible study. Magpies all set on the same bush," Jessie said.
"You aiming to walk through a woods in these orange suits?" Skyler asked.
"What?" Jessie said.
"Get their uniforms off and chain them up. Don't you hurt them, either," Skyler said.
"Who put you in charge? Don't you walk off like that. You listening to me?" Then Jessie stared at Skyler's bare skin. "Man, they done the same thing to you, ain't they?"
Skyler had unzipped and stepped out of his orange jumpsuit and mounted the bus's steps. His body was striped with bruises, like the color in rotten fruit. He reached under the dashboard with both hands and tore the radio out of its fastenings and threw it out on the ground like a dead animal.
"What's the name of them two give you midnight Bible study?" he said.
At false dawn the next morning I drove out to Wilbur Pickett's place. The sun was still below the horizon, and the air was a dense blue and the shapes inside it not quite formed. When I got out of the car I could smell the heavy, cold odor of well water and coffee boiling and pork frying in the kitchen. Then I saw Wilbur riding his Appaloosa through the grass from the west, his face covered with shadow under his hat, a lamb gathered against his stomach with one arm. He dismounted by the barn and set the lamb on a worktable inside the door and stroked its head.
"Reach me that first-aid kit, will you?" he said.
"What happened?" I asked.
"Some dumb bastard left a steel trap out there in the hills. I'd like to slam his hand in a car door and see how he likes it."
There was a bright red bracelet incised around the lamb's right leg. Wilbur poured disinfectant on the wound and washed and applied salve to it, then began cutting strips of gauze and tape with a pair of scissors while I held the lamb.
"You left a message on my machine. Something about this fellow Fletcher who works for Earl Deitrich?" I said.
Wilbur twisted his head and looked back at his house. The curtains were flapping whitely in the kitchen window.
"I come home yesterday and this guy Fletcher was parked in the drive, leaning against his limo, watching Kippy Jo hang wash in back," Wilbur said.
"What'd he want?"
"Wait a minute," Wilbur said, and bandaged the lamb's wound and set the lamb down on a bed of straw in a stall. He removed a sealed gallon jar from a plank shelf. It was filled to the top with loamy, reddish-brown dirt that was marbled with black streaks against the glass. He unscrewed the top of the jar and handed it to me.
"Smell it," he said. Then he waited, and said, "Just like salt water and humus and rotten eggs, ain't it?"
"Oil?"
"Sweet crude, as black and pure as it gets. You can eat it on ice cream. Kippy Jo inherited two hundred acres in Wyoming her grandfather owned. That's the core sample on what's gonna be the Kippy Jo Number One. Don't nobody know about it. At least that's what I thought till this guy Fletcher showed up.
"I asked him what he was doing in my damn driveway. He goes, 'We hear you got a drill site located in Wyoming. If you want to unload it, we can introduce you to the right people.'
"I say, 'Even if I knew what you was talking about, why would I want to deal with anybody mixed up with Earl Deitrich?'
"He goes, 'To make your troubles go away, Mr. Pickett.'
"I say, 'My wife's charged with murder. You gonna make that go away?'
"He says, 'With one phone call, my friend.' Then he looked at Kippy Jo in the backyard, smiling, like he was thinking of a private joke."
Wilbur watched the lamb trying to get to its feet in the stall. The interior of the barn was dissected with beams of bluish light.
"How would Earl Deitrich know about your land?" I asked.
"He's a big man in extractive industries. I had the core tested at a lab in Denver. They all know each other," Wilbur said. "That pipeline deal in Venezuela? Every dollar we make is going into our own drilling company. Billy Bob, I'm talking about an oil and natural gas dome big as that Tuscaloosa strike back in the seventies."
"That's what all this has been about, hasn't it? He wants your oil property," I said. "What'd you tell Fletcher?"
"To keep his eyes off my wife. To get his damn car out of my driveway."
"That's the ticket."
He pulled the saddle off the Appaloosa and flung it across a sawhorse.
"It's all bluff. If I got to give it up to get Kippy Jo off, that's what we'll do." He replaced the jar of oil sand on the shelf. "It's funny what can happen just from setting down at the wrong man's table, ain't it?"
He took off his hat and wiped his forehead with his sleeve, then grinned, blade-faced, in the sun's first pink light.
Then something happened that I would not quite be able to get out of my memory. His innocent nature, his devotion to his wife, his concern for an injured animal, seemed exquisitely caught in the moment, until I smiled back at him and looked directly into his eyes. When I did, he dropped his head and buttoned a shirt pocket, as though he did not want me to see beyond an exterior that I obviously admired.