“Ain’t room for us and her too,” Harry Bohn boomed into the wind, “I better come up front!”
“Stay where you are,” answered the Sheriff. Seven skirted Mistletoe, raced for the lake.
In the wagon Cap Leech trailed behind the suspicious travelers, hearing their wordless clutter in the darkness. He had the power to put them all to sleep, to look at their women if he wished, to mark their children. Tie strings streaming, eyelids fluttering in the wind, he pulled from his vest pocket a roll of powdered lifesavers, began to chew.
In the truck Luke tied the whipping hat cords under his chin. Camper cowed before the patched white head of the calf and the near naked Finn hung his stiff legs over the speeding track. Chicken grit was caked on the accelerator.
In the wagon a lone occupant rode the bow of fire and with a tarnished frozen thermometer pinned to his breast brought something of clear vision and bitter pills to the fields of broken axles. A tin can fell backward and landed at his horse’s front hoofs, sprigs of straw whirled out of the air ahead to stick crookedly in his ears. They threw a dirty glove in his path.
In the truck Harry Bohn caught Camper around the ribs. For the first time that night he allowed the fisherman to stare at his humming-bird lipless mouth. “You,” he shouted, “untie that rope!”
In the wagon Cap Leech watched its body float down upon him, larger and larger. Horizontal, feet out straight, Pegasus of a branded species, he expected to catch it flattening in his lap. The calf lay on her side in the air, about to crash, pink spots spun on the red hide and a gentle whistling loomed over the wagon. She disappeared. Then Leech looked down and there on her back in the road she sprawled with milk rolled jaws, albino eyes in wrinkled pads, and a clean crack splitting the amorphous skull that struck; nothing more ugly than the placid mask — its mouth roared wide enough to eat meat — of a shocked cow twisting upwards in the moonlight.
And in the truck, “Sheriff,” Bohn knelt at the windowless hole in the back of the cab, “I’ll owe you for your cow.”
“Don’t stop,” the Sheriff kept Wade’s hand from the brake, “we’ll catch her on the trip home. If those devils don’t come upon her first.”
t he last time Luke Lampson fished the bottleneck his brim hung down with rain and, amidst lonely flotage, he had felt the water dragging at his feet. It was a rain of sickness that drove the rest away, that filled the bottoms of a few cattle lofts with alcohol. A rotted poncho wrapped the sentry who, for an hour, was left alone in the floating countryside. The beady cigarette smoldered in the damp mouth, and his eyes looked to the right and left at the grass rising above water, at the sunken clouds. He would never again be dry. Some vast spider lay on its back with a shellful of warm fluid, sleeping through the rain of an afternoon. A pool began to whirl, then disappeared; distance had never been so great nor so flatly ruinous as when the twigs rolled by on the lagging current. He moved only once to shake the water from his hands. Otherwise he merely listened, watching the end of the bamboo pole. A small frog rose from a ripple, blinked its head, clung for a moment to his boot. His wide misshapen brim dripped in a steady circle. Across the western body of water not a fire burned.