We would never be sure about the events that occurred next, not unless we accepted the explanation given to us later by Kippy Jo Pickett.
Earl wandered into his front yard, the Smith & Wesson hanging from his hand. The wind was blowing hard now, but his skin felt numb, dead to the touch, as though it were freezer-burned. To his left he saw the fire in the ravine glowing against the clouds and sparks fanning across the sky, drifting onto his roof.
There was no sound anywhere. He opened and closed his mouth to clear his ears and tried to rethink what he had just done. But it was like waking from an alcoholic blackout. The images and voices had become shards of glass that he couldn’t reassemble in his mind. Could he have killed his own son only moments ago?
The fire had climbed out of the ravine and was burning through the soft pad of dead grass in the woods, crawling up the trunks of trees into the canopy. The sky was red and yellow now, swirling with ash and smoke, and the heat was as bright and hot on his cheek as a candle flame.
Why hadn’t Peggy Jean called the county fire department?
He turned and stared at his house. It looked enveloped in heat, shrunken, the symmetrical lines distorted, smoke rising from the eaves. The black-and-white-striped canopy over the side patio burst into flame, snapping dryly in the wind; the flowers in the beds stiffened and their petals fell like confetti into the baked dirt.
Then he saw her at a downstairs window, talking urgently into a phone.
Finally she did something right, he thought.
The fire truck came hard up the road, sooner than he expected, almost out of nowhere.
He probably looked pretty foolish, standing in the front yard, with a revolver in his hand.
Well, to hell with them.
It was a pump truck, the windows filmed with mud, the running boards full of dark, hatted figures who clung to handrails. The driver pulled parallel to the house and left the engine running and got out and walked around the front of the truck and grinned at Earl.
“Cholo?” Earl said.
“The job’s got its moments. Hop on. There’s a space next to your son.”
“Jeff’s there?”
Cholo shrugged good-naturedly, but he didn’t speak. The other men on the truck were stepping down from the running boards. They wore slouch hats and bleached, nineteenth-century canvas dusters and laced boots and tightly belted, baggy khaki pants, and Earl realized they were not firemen at all but men who had worked in Africa with his great-grandfather and who carried braided leather whips folded around wood handles in their coat pockets.
“You thought you had me on that first take-down scam, remember?” Earl said. “You handed me a gun with a blank in it.”
“Yeah, man, you surprised us. It took cojones to stick it up to your head and snap it off.”
“I still don’t rattle, Cholo. Ready for this? Because I don’t know if I popped off six rounds or not.”
“Do what you gotta do, man.”
“Beaners don’t take down River Oaks white boys. You’re not a bad kid. You’re just dumb,” Earl said, grinning.
Earl pulled back the hammer and placed the muzzle of the Smith & Wesson against his temple. He looked directly into Cholo’s eyes and smiled again, then squeezed the trigger.
There was no report, in fact, no sound at all, not even the metallic snap of the firing pin against a spent cartridge.
Earl felt a wall of heat from his house baking the clothes on his back. Then the hatted men approached him and took him by his arms and led him toward the truck. Through the muddy window in the cab, he thought he saw Jeff’s bloodless and terrified face staring back at him from the rear seat, a bullet hole below one eye.
Early the next morning Temple Carrol and I followed Marvin Pomroy out to the crime scene. The sky was a cloudless blue, the air crisp, the trees turning color on the hills. The Deitrich home was half in shadow, the immense white walls speckled with frost. The chrysanthemums were brown and gold in the flower beds, and the zebra-striped canopy over the side terrace puffed with wind.
“His wife said he was hollering about a fire truck. With Cholo and Jeff and dead slavers on it. She came outside and he put a big one right through his head,” Marvin said.
“Fire truck?” I said.
“He told two of Hugo’s deputies the ravine was on fire. There was a fire way on up the river but none around here,” Marvin said.
“Where is Peggy Jean?” I asked.
“Sedated at the hospital. Did I tell you we got Stump?” Marvin said.
“No.”
“He fell and broke his leg up on the ridge … You bothered about something?”
“No, sir,” I replied.
“You dimed Peggy Jean with her husband, so you think you share some responsibility for Earl’s craziness?” Marvin asked.
“No, I don’t think anything, Marvin. I think we’re going to breakfast. You want to join us?”
“Today’s Pee-Wee football day,” he said.
I walked back to my Avalon. Temple was studying the ground on the far side.
“Look at this,” she said, and pointed at the imprints of heavy, cleated tires in the grass.
“There were a bunch of emergency vehicles in here,” I said.
“Not with this kind of weight. They don’t lead back to the road, either. They go up the hill,” she said.
“I think the story of the Deitrichs is over, Temple.”
“Not for me,” she said, and began walking across the lawn and up the hill.
We followed the tracks onto a rough road that wound up to the plateau and meadow above the house. The ground was heavy with dew and the grass was pressed flat and pale in two long stripes that led up a sharp slope to the edge of the ravine where Pete and I hunted for arrowheads.
“I don’t believe this,” Temple said.
We walked between the imprints to the top of the ravine. At the edge of the cliff the soil was cut all the way to the rock by a vehicle that had rolled out onto the air and had disappeared. Down below, the tops of the pines were deep in shadow, blue-green, the branches symmetrical and unbroken; mist rose like steam off the water and exposed stones in the creekbed.
“I think we’re looking down at the entrance to Hell, Temple. I think Cholo and Jeff came back for Earl Deitrich,” I said.
Temple chewed the skin on the ball of her thumb.
“I don’t want to remember seeing this. I don’t want to ever think about this again,” she said.
I studied her face, the earnestness and goodness in it, the redness of her mouth, the way her strands of chestnut hair blew on her forehead, and I wanted to hold her against me and for us both to be wrapped inside the wind and the frenzy of the trees whipping against the sky and the whirrings of the earth and the mystical green vortex of creation itself.
I picked up a pinecone and slapped it out over the ravine, like a boy stroking an imaginary baseball.
“Let’s go out and watch Marvin’s kids play Pee-Wee League today,” I said, and rested my arm across her shoulders as we walked back toward the Deitrichs’ home.