“Did you call Trooper Moody?”
“Well, he didn't point it at anyone.”
“You mean it was in the rack.”
“In the back window. Very visible, very obviously there.”
“He's not the only man in town with a shotgun in his truck. It doesn't mean anything more than wearing a cap.”
“I found it very threatening. Frightened my staff. What if I had been entertaining clients when he came roaring up my driveway?”
“How'd he get past the gate and the spikes?”
“The place was wide open for my lunch guests. Now, I want something done about him before someone gets hurt.”
“What did he come for?”
“He was yelling to stay off his land.”
“Is this the fence thing?”
“Well⦔ King hesitated.
“Please,” I said. “I can't talk to him if I don't know what's going on.”
“I'm building a lakeâhere, I'll show you.” He whipped aside the plot plan, revealing a landscape designer's rendering of a twenty-acre lake to be formed by erecting a fair-size dam across a brook that started up on Butler's farm, cascaded through their adjoining woodlots, and emerged from the leased pasture.
“Fantastic,” I said.
It sported an island, with a Corinthian avant-garde gazebo. One could imagine rowing out to it in the moonlight with a bottle of Moët and Ms. Devlin.
“That's going to be a hell of a dam.”
“It's going to be the biggest dam in the county,” said King. “But my engineers have to divert the stream to work on it. Run it through a temporary pipe, here.”
“Here” was on Butler's leased pasture. I turned back to the plot plan and traced the topo lines.
“You know you could simplify this by running the pipes here.” I pointed to a gully well on his own land.
“My engineersâ”
“Anything else I should know?”
“No. That's pretty much my side of it. Why don't you go hear his?” He took my elbow in a friendly way, again, and walked me back through the library. “I don't know where the hell your coat is with the goddammed butler quitting.”
“I'll find a closet near the door.”
“Here. Here's something to amuse you.” He plucked a DVD from a shelf that contained a row of them and scribbled his signature on it. “A&E just shot my biography. It's mostly kind. And fairly accurate.”
I didn't know what to say but thank him, so I did, and hunted up my winter jacket. I looked for Julia Devlin on the way to my car. But the Range Rover herd had migrated to the old house, where King Incorporated had set up offices.
I wondered if Mr. Butler could make King so unhappy that he'd sell Fox Trot. The commission would beat amateur diplomacy hands down. Except he would blame me for failing to make peace and list with my competitors.
As I came down the driveway, emerging from Sherwood Forest and crossing the barraged meadow, I saw Mr. Butler's rusty Ford pickup parked askew outside the gate. Nearby, Dennis Chevalley was pummeling a man whom Albert was holding in a firm grip.
I stepped on the gas and blew the horn. Mr. Butler was a little long in the tooth to be scrapping with twenty-year-olds. But closer, I saw that it wasn't Mr. Butler the Chevalleys were beating up. It was Dicky, prison white, head shaved to a reddish stubble. He'd lost his jacket in the struggle and his bare arms were dark with tattoos.
In the time it took to stop the car and jump out yelling, the situation changed radically. Dicky Butler flung his head up and back, butting Albert's chin. Albert staggered and lost his grip on Dicky's arms. Dicky buckled him over with an elbow in the gut and tore into Dennis like a stump grinder.
Dicky Butler was half a head shorter than the Chevalleys. But he was wide, and lightning fast. For every punch Dennis threw, Dicky slammed two into his face. The bigger man planted his feet solidly when he swung. Dicky's feet moved like pistonsâup-down-up-downâdoubling the power of every punch and whisking his body out of range like quicksilver.
Albert roared to his feet and charged his back.
Dicky whirled to him, grinning, and decked him with a roundhouse right whose impact Albert increased by running into it. Before Albert hit the ground, Dicky whirled again and broke Dennis' nose with a crack I heard from twenty feet away.
The gate was closed. I found a man door in the ironwork.
Dicky pivoted toward me. Hot eyes gauged a new threat while tracking Dennis, who was coming at him spitting blood, and Albert writhing on the ground. Before I covered the distance, he sidestepped Dennisârabbit-punched him off his feet as he lurched byâand kicked Albert in the groin.
“Get out of my way, Ben. Not your fight.”
“Can't. It's family.”
Dicky went up on his toes, again, leading with his left, dropping his right.
“Besides,” I said. “You won.”
“I'm not done with 'em.”
“It's over.”
“Get out of my way.”
I circled out of earshot of the brothers, to avoid forcing Dicky to defend his honor. “I can take you, Dicky. You're tired.”
He measured me. He
was
tired. And no one floored two Chevalleys without sustaining damage. He was hunched over to the left where Dennis had landed body blows he'd feel for weeks. I was hoping his mind worked the way it used to. He wasn't afraid of meâhe wasn't afraid of anyoneâbut he hated to lose.
I kept my hands down and my voice conversational. “Congratulations on getting out. I was just heading up to see you.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I got a bottle of dago red in the car.” He liked red wine a lot. It was ruining his face, the fair Irish skin veined like a much older man's.
“Oh yeah?” he said at last. I could see the heat fading in his eyes as they filled with the broader surroundings. They settled on my car, which was sitting inside King's gate, like a prisoner. “Hey, you're still driving the Olds.”
“Pink keeps it going for me. Repairs don't cost much more than leasing a new BMW.”
Dicky's eyes flared toward movement. Dennis was trying to stand up. “Stay there,” I told him. “Catch your breath.” And to Dicky I said, “Can I ride up with you?”
Dicky looked over the carnage as if he would miss it. Finally, as Dennis lay back, holding his face, he shrugged and headed for my car. “I'll get the wine.”
He came back through the gate with the bottle tucked under his arm, and opened his fly.
Dennis said, “What the hell's he doing?”
“Reminding you who won the fight.”
“He jumped us.”
“Yeah, I saw. Guy's got no morals.”
Dicky cleared his zipper and pissed on Henry King's wrought iron like a wolf marking territory.
“The son of aâ”
I told my cousin to shut up.
Dicky Butler took aim at King's shiny black Chevy truck. Dennis tried to stand. I didn't let him.
Dicky marked the Chevy, zipped up and swaggered to his own truck. Dennis tracked him, eyes burning. The broken nose make him sound whiny as a bitter old man.
“I'm going to get my gun and shoot 'im.”
“If you do you'll go to prison and make your mom real unhappyâyou up to driving?”
“Where?”
“Emergency room. Get your nose taped.”
“I gotta watch the gate.”
“Albert's waking up. He can watch the gate. Take my carâdon't worry, you can tell Mr. King you tripped over a stump.”
I checked out Albert's eyes to make sure that they were focusing in unison. Then I climbed into Dicky's pickup. He popped the clutch, scattering mud on King's new four-by, and tore up the road.
“What was that all about?”
“Son of a bitchin' neighbor's bugging my old man.”
I'd have bought deeper into his filial concern if I didn't know the hoops he'd run his father through for the past twenty years.
“I went down to see him. Your cousins tried to stop me.”
“Just doing their job.”
“I fired 'em.”
Blood was trickling from his nose, so I reached out with a handkerchief. “Here. You're bleeding.”
Dicky recoiled. “Don't touch me!”
“Easyâ¦.Easy. You're bleeding. I'm just handing you a handkerchief. Here.” Again I extended my handkerchief. He took it gingerly, and pressed the linen to his nose. Only then did I realize he was wearing deerskin gloves and had been the whole time.
He drove fast, beating the old truck, whipping it through the switchbacks that worked their way up the mountain, skidding the rear end, spinning the tires on the muddy surface of the frozen ground. A month of this treatment and his father would need a new one he couldn't afford.
“What's the neighbor doing to your father?”
“Trying to force him off our land. Bugging him with lawyers. Said if he didn't sell Pop would be living in a tent. Rich bastard.”
“What were you going to say to him?”
“I
am
going to say it to him: Leave my old man alone or I'll be down there kicking ass and taking names.”
“Dicky, you threaten a guy with his kind of money he'll have lawyers on you like paint. Before you know it you'll be right back inside.”
“Hey, I'm not on parole. I'm clear as you are. They can't touch me.”
“Dicky,” I said very firmly. “I worked on Wall Street. I know these people. They buy what they want.
They can touch you.
”
“What do you care?”
“King asked me to talk to you and your Dad. He doesn't want to keep fighting and I don't think you guys do either, do you?”
“Shit, man, I don't care. But Pop, he just wants to be left alone. Is that too damned much to ask? Man just wants to pay his taxes and be left alone.”
“Is he behind?”
“Behind what?”
“On his land taxes.”
“Ask him.”
Henry King would put the screws to him when he caught wind of that.
“It ain't fair,” Dicky went on. “Ain't fair a guy reaches that age and gets pushed around. Especially a guy who served his country.”
Some of the most ardent patriots I'd known I'd met in prison. But I heard in Dicky's voice a strange and unexpected note of compassion.
“Pop suffered, Ben. What you and me been through's nothin' compared to the shit he saw in Vietnam. We can't begin to
know
what he went through. You know what I'm saying? For him thirty-forty years ago is like yesterday.”
“I know what you're saying. But I never heard you say it before.”
“Yeah, I never thought it before. Seeing a lot of things different now.”
I had a feeling he was going to tell me next he got religion. It happened. Lots of people inside found God.
“Ben, the shit I put that poor bastard through. And blaming him for my mother cutting outâ¦.Who the hell knows why she left.”
Now I wondered if the prison shrink had gotten hold of him. But it wasn't that either.
He said, “I don't even know what happy women are thinking. Who knows what the sad ones want?”
My responses were down to near-silent grunts. Just enough to get him back to his father's land feud.
“I figure my mother was one of the sad ones, right?”
“Couldn't have been happy leaving a little kid.”
“You realize my father raised me all by himself?”
We emerged from the scraggly woods hugging the road. He stomped the brakes. The truck stopped on a little bump of a rise from which we could see the weather-beaten house and barns of the Butler farm. A rare flash of humor lit his face. “'Course Pop had some help from the state.”
“Dicky, you seem a little different.”
He turned off the engine. We sat quietly for awhile, gazing out at the gray monotones of a Connecticut farm in winter. If I ever wondered why farmers moved to town, graphic evidence lay before me. Mud everywhere. Cows bunched unhappily in bare pastures. Rickety buildings scattered like the crash site of a gigantic wooden airplane.
“I got the AIDS, Ben.”
“What?” He had spoken so softly I hoped I'd heard him wrong.
“I got the AIDS.”
“Oh, Jesusâ¦I'm sorry. What do you mean? HIV-positive? Or⦔
“Positive. Ready to roll.”
“Not full blown?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, that's something. Any luck you got some time.”
“Get it tomorrow. Get it next year.”
“Next year they may get a cure. Already, they're slowing it down. Right?”
“Feel like I swallowed an alarm clock. Wait for that baby to wake me upâ¦.Wake up and die, Dude.”
I didn't ask how he'd got it. We both knew the opportunities inside. Or maybe he'd picked it up years ago between convictions. Either way, it was his business. But there was something that was my business. Mine and everyone else in town.
“You jumped when I reached with the handkerchief. You know it's transmitted by blood.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You can't go around punching people, Dicky, it's like shooting them with a gun.”
He held up his gloved hands. “I'm not a goddammed killer, Ben.”
“Yeah, what would have happened if you duked it out with me and I cut a knuckle on your tooth?” I shivered at the thought. “Jesus Christ, Dicky. You scare the hell out of me.”
“Yeah, well no one's ever knocked out my teeth. I'm too fast. They taught me so good in Cheshire I could have fought pro.”
I looked at him. I was angry. And scared silly by the near miss of potentials and possibilities. “Dicky, they taught you damned good footwork. And that's a nice fast left you got. Dennis Chevalley hadn't a clue. But you ever fight a real boxer you'll lose a tooth every time you throw a right.”
“Think so?”
“I
know
so. And you'll kill the poor bastard in the process. The gloves aren't enough. You're a weapon. You got to give up the fighting.”
“Hey, I didn't start it. I was just going to talk to that rich son of a bitch running the gears on Pop.”
“Treat fighting like it's booze and you're a drunk. Give it up.”
“Maybe I should get a girlfriend? Kill her instead?”
“You could do worse than a girl who's a friend. Just don't sleep with the poor woman.”
Dicky shrugged. “I got used to not getting laid inside. Maybe I'll pretend I'm insideâ¦.” He grinned again, with little humor this time. “Life's a bitch.”
I had to agree.
“And then I die.”
We stared out the windshield for a while and finally I asked, “Have you told your dad?”
“Not yet.”
The cows started drifting toward the barn.
“Here he comes.”
Dicky opened the window, leaned into the cracked side-view mirror, and began wiping the blood off his face.