Leech had heard enough about the almighty moon, pituitary of the wheat field and cow in foal; down one step he went and, catching the Sheriff around his waist, set him on the ground. He was light, round with talking gas. Cap Leech pushed back the head and folded the numb fingers in the pinched cup of the lap. He turned and for a few moments walked a circle some way apart, hands in long pockets, pausing now and then to stare for twenty miles through the darkness where rose one discolored furrow, a rib of earth that wormed for half an inch above the rest, as if it had been plowed up and left to dry, a spot on the horizon, the dam. Out there not a living creature, no wrist to count or old flank needing salve — he had lain his touch on animals also, in a stockyard razed by fire, had peeled the white fat glue from under bellies or driven his knife through an open eye to the brain — and he returned to the doped figure of the Sheriff. He rocked back and forth on his heels.
The Sheriff looked up, tenderly felt his temples, tried to speak, and stomach doubling in noiseless spasms at the same time, swayed as if someone boxed the sides of his head. “Quackery,” he said, awakening, “quackery,” and searched for the bars of the jail. His mouth was full of aspirin and the taste of steel.
Cap Leech unpocketed one slender hand, drew out the squeaking tongs carried in his trousers like a small key, and pushed the Sheriff down again to the step. He aimed and held the fat man with the ball point of the instrument, gently tapped the softened breastbone. The Sheriff wriggled at the end of it, ogled upward with drugged eyes.
“Now,” said Cap Leech, “I’ll talk.”
“Wade there will clear my head.”
“What you been doing to the Sheriff?”
As the law officer tried his legs and wobbled in the dark fernless yard behind the jail and Wade bounced after him, Cap Leech climbed to the top of the splintered steps, sat quietly and watched them. His mouth cracked a line to see the Sheriff sternly sway, nearly topple, an aged guinea hen with shattered cerebellum and aimless walk.
“What did you do with his revolver?”
Leech, the goat who sat in the hunched position of a man, shrugged, stroked the two long forks of hair at the end of his chin. He picked the back of his hand blotched with the corrosive action of cheap chemicals. He watched the Sheriff feel himself with wet fingers while the moon-faced friend, calling in a hurt voice now and then, attempted to learn what he had tampered with. It was a warm night and Cap Leech had cut again as he wished into a foreign town, a soft head. Sight of the Sheriff still on his feet gave him as much pleasure as those whom long before he had left helpless on a bed of white.
Wade and the Sheriff rolled from the shadow on stiff, rubber tires, a topheavy tin pickup truck. They swung it silently in a half circle on the edge of the light from the nearby wagon, stepped back and admired it. The Sheriff, suddenly stooped to spit forth a long dark string, motioned Wade to attend the truck and tottering, amazed at the slime, felt a bird body hot from his intestines lodge in his throat.