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HACKBERRY WAS FIXING dinner on his wood cookstove when he heard the screech of Willard Posey’s car door out in the yard. He waited for the knock on the door; it didn’t happen. He flipped the two boned pork chops in the skillet with a fork and watched them sizzle. He cut two huge slices of bread from a loaf and browned them in butter and stuffed the pork chops between them with a layer of ketchup and skillet gravy and onions and tomatoes and mayonnaise on top; then he filled a glass with buttermilk and sprinkled hot sauce in it. He looked out the front door. The car, absent the roof that had been hacksawed off, was parked on the edge of the lawn. No Willard.
He put his sandwich on a plate and pushed the back door open with his foot and filled his mouth with meat and bread and saw Willard down at the river, lobbing pebbles in the current, his back turned. Hackberry walked down the slope, his boots crunching on the gravel. Willard’s cotton shirt was bunched where the strap of his shoulder holster angled between his shoulder blades; his back was stiff, like that of an angry man on a parade ground. The river was low, a dull green, insects hovering in clouds above the riffle in the fading light.
“Does strange behavior intrigue you, or do you just enjoy prowling around behind people’s houses at dinnertime?” Hackberry said.
Willard sidearmed a rock across the river and watched it bounce off the opposite slope and roll down to the water. He turned around, his badge and holstered white-handled revolver at odds with his sun-darkened skin and the shadow and gloom that seemed to surround his person.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Hackberry said.
“Not a goddamn thing.”
“When did you start swearing?”
“Just now.”
“Your wife throw you out?”
“I’m not married.”
“In my case, that would mean there’s at least one less unhappy woman in the world. I don’t know about you.”
Willard dusted off his hands. “You don’t square with me, Hack. But you keep leaving your problems on my doorstep. What do you think I should do about that?”
“I wish I knew what we’re talking about.”
“The sheriff in Bexar called me about this woman DeMolie or whatever—”
“It’s DeMolay. You’re an intelligent man. Stop talking like an ignorant peckerwood.”
“The sheriff doesn’t believe she’s just an ordinary businesswoman who got rich in the oil patch. He says she ran a place called the House of the Rising Sun in New Orleans. When it got shut down, she went to Mexico. Now she’s here.”
Hackberry sat on a stump and set his plate by his foot, making sure he didn’t kick dirt in it. “Tell me what you’re so hot about, and don’t tell me it’s because of Miz DeMolay.”
“I’m mad because I have to protect an old, willful, blockheaded, womanizing crazy man from himself.”
“I’m not old.”
“You came out of the womb old. You walk around like every page in the Bible is glued on your clothes. One match and you’d go up in flames.”
“I’ve never heard it put like that.”
“That’s because sane people fear provoking someone who left his mush in the oven too long. What’s that red stuff floating in your milk?”
“Hot sauce.”
Hackberry went back to eating, pausing only to drink from his buttermilk. Willard’s face looked like smoked pig hide under the brim of his hat.
“I’m going to tell you what the sheriff told me,” Willard said. “If you act on this information, I’m going upside your head with a two-by-four.”
Hackberry stood up with his plate and glass in hand, then leaned down without bending his knees and set them on the riverbank. “Don’t speak to me in that fashion again, son.”
“You test people’s charity,” Willard replied.
“Maybe so. But I’m done on this.”
“The sheriff said a man tried to throw acid in the DeMolay woman’s face.”
Hackberry’s gaze drifted down the river to a canebrake where a calf was caught in the mud and bawling for its mother. His eyes were unfocused, seemingly disconnected from emotion. “Who was the man?”
