Lyon is being pressed against an expanse of uniform that looks as if it was manufactured by a tent and awning company. Above the left pocket is stitched the word Deputy. Above the right pocket, in the same bowling shirt stitching, is Carl.
After struggling out of those massive arms, Lyon staggers back to see how many people are stuffed in that uniform.
“In a hurry, asshole?” the fat man asks, even his speech seemingly garbled by an excess of flesh.
Lyon tries to look around him. “Did you see someone out in the woods there?”
Carl turns ponderously toward the forest and then back to Lyon. The deputy says nothing.
“And where’s your car? I have to drive an hour from town to get up into these mountains, but everyone else keeps showing up here without a vehicle.”
Carl doesn’t comment on that either.
Lyon steps back for another look. “So I finally get to meet Le Grand Carl I’ve heard so much about — and there’s so much of you to hear about too.” Lyon isn’t sure why he’s acting so jocular. Nerves — or maybe it’s because of Claire. “What can I do for you, Deputy?”
“Come to see that nigger woman you got.”
When Carl takes a step toward the door, however, Lyon puts himself — shoeless, pants unzipped, shirt unbuttoned and hanging out — in the way. Feeling small and frail next to Carl, Lyon is surprised when the deputy retreats.
“Sorry, Deputy, but you can’t enter my residence without a warrant or probable cause, in pursuit of a felony suspect with reason to believe he might destroy evidence or endanger someone — it’s a constitutional thing.” Why am I being such a smartass?
But Lyon’s comments seem not to register with Carl, who removes a foil pouch from his pants pocket, takes out a plum-size handful of black tobacco, which he stuffs with some difficulty into his surprisingly small mouth.
“Nice touch.”
Carl offers an incomprehensible reply, working the plug to his cheek and then spitting. “Come to see that nigger woman you got.”
“So I gather.” Then Lyon connects with Carl’s sunken eyes, like something feral in there, staring out from a cave — Lyon realizing that this man, fat and stupid though he be, is not someone to be treated frivolously.
Carl spits over the porch railing and then reaches out to grab Lyon’s shoulder, the deputy grunting either from the effort or with contempt. “Move, asshole.”
“Take your hand —”
Carl moves him out of the way as easily as you would a child.
Lyon follows him into the kitchen. “Listen to me, Deputy —”
“Where’s the bitch?” he asks in a grim voice.
“To whom are you referring?”
Another grunt as Carl turns his bulk and heads for the living room like a sumo wrestler in a hurry. Lyon catches up with him in the middle of the room, grabbing his elbow, Carl swinging around to put one hand at Lyon’s neck, the other grasping the front of Lyon’s trousers, Carl suddenly — breathtakingly — lifting Lyon into the air, lifting him so high his head actually touches the ceiling, then carrying Lyon like that — head bumping along the ceiling — across the room to slam him against a wall.
Lyon has no breath left.
“Touch me again and I will fuck you.” He says this with surprising clarity. Then he drops Lyon to the floor.
By the time Lyon recovers his composure, Carl is moving — fitting himself—through the bedroom doorway.
Lyon is desperate now. “Claire!”
But when he enters the bedroom he sees only Carl there — opening a closet, looking into the bathroom, and finally turning to face him.
“Where’s the bitch?”
Lyon shakes his head.
“Going to fuck you, man,” Carl announces as he resumes searching, pulling aside the shower curtain and then with considerable effort actually getting down on his knees to check under the bed.
After finally struggling back to his feet he walks out of the bedroom without acknowledging Lyon, searching through the rest of the cabin, finding nothing that interests him.
In the kitchen he asks Lyon, “Who you calling to? Claire?”
“I didn’t call to anyone.”
“Claire,” Carl repeats. “Heard you. That nigger nurse?”
“Fuck if I know.”
Carl steps out onto the porch and spits over the railing, Lyon following, excited, on an adrenaline high. Wherever Claire has hidden, she’s safe for now, and Lyon wishes he had the nerve to pick up some kind of club and hit this fucking fat man right across his jack-o’-lantern head.
Instead, he settles for this: “On second thought, Carl, I don’t think you’re the fattest man I ever met. When I was a young reporter I was sent out on one of those weird-character stories that newspapers sometimes do, this was decades ago when I worked for the Tribune, and I went to interview a guy who hadn’t left his house for eight years, mostly just staying in bed, relatives coming over to feed him. He was too fat to fit on a toilet so he had to shit in the bathtub, sitting over the edge of the bathtub, and then when he finished he had to turn on the shower to wash the mess down the drain. My editor wouldn’t let me use that part, of course. I was wondering, Carl — can you still fit on a toilet?”
The deputy has listened to this without reaction, unless you count the rolling of that tobacco plug in his cheek. When he realizes Lyon is done, Carl sucks to gather a mouthful and then spits a thick brown stream right into Lyon’s face.
“Jesus! Damn you!” Lyon wipes at his eyes, getting what feels like warm, sticky snot all over his hands, trying to wipe it on his shirt but it won’t come off.
“Har … har … asshole.”
“You son of a bitch!” Lyon takes a swing which Carl catches in his hand, twisting Lyon’s arm, stepping one boot — a surprisingly small boot — on Lyon’s bare foot, knocking him to the floor of the porch. Then Carl puts that boot on the side of Lyon’s face.
Lyon is cursing, trying to wriggle free.
Carl eases a hundred or so of his pounds behind that boot, Lyon afraid now that the deputy is going to press down until Lyon’s head splits open like an overly ripe cantaloupe.
“Har … har … asshole,” Carl says again, spitting another brown-snot tobacco stream into Lyon’s face.
He can’t get away, Carl’s foot on him the way a circus elephant places a foot on the beautiful trapeze artist — and to crush her, all the beast has to do is step down.
“Going to fuck you,” Carl says, jamming that boot on Lyon’s face — once, hard — before pulling back and then just standing there to see what Lyon is going to do about it.
He’s crying. Lying in a mess of tobacco spit, a reddened imprint of a boot tread on the side of his face, Lyon doesn’t move, remaining on the porch exactly the way he was when Carl had that boot on him, staying there, crying.
Carl laughs before lumbering away toward his patrol car, parked a hundred yards down the road.
In the cabin’s tiny bathroom Lyon is washing his face for the third time, the tobacco juice already cleaned away, Lyon trying without success to obliterate the idea of it — and he can’t seem to stop this goddamn crying either. It’s not a sobbing breakdown this time, just a constant womanlike weeping.
“Claire.”
Where is she, he needs her. Lyon leaves the bathroom to stumble through the rest of the cabin, calling her name, going to windows and looking out, assuming that’s how she escaped, through a window, and now she’s hiding in the forest somewhere, maybe that freakish little hermit caught up with her.
“CLAIRE!” Lyon bleats at each window he opens, still weeping, still needing her.
He ends up scrounging for some proof that she ever existed, but the evidence is sketchy: a second cup among the breakfast dishes, that dull ache in his pubic bone, the way his heart hurts.
He’s back on the bed, begging her to come out from wherever she’s hiding, calling her name, unable to stop crying.