"What would be the purpose?"

"I would sort of like to know how somebody set me up."

"That"s under investigation. We don"t need help."

"Are you getting anywhere with it?"

"I"d rather not comment at this time."

"It"s your best approach, isn"t it?"

"I"d appreciate it if you"d stay inside my jurisdiction, Mr. McGee."

"So be it, Sheriff."

I glowered at the unspottable, unbreakable rug for a time, then looked up Arnstead in the phone book. No Lew, Lou, Louis, or Lewis. There were three of them. J. A., and Henry T. and Cora.

I tried J. A. "Lew around?"

"Not around this house, ever, mister." Bang. So I tried Henry T. "Lew around?"

"Not very G.o.ddam likely, buddy." Bang.

Started to try Cora, then decided I might as well drive out to the address and see for myself. The book said 3880 Cattleman"s Road. I found Cattleman"s Road a half mile west of the White ibis, heading north off of Alternate 112. Flat lands, and frame bungalows which were further and further apart as I drove north.

A big rural mailbox on the right-hand side with red stick-on letters spelling Arnstead. Sand driveway leading back to a pink cement-block house, a small place with a lot of unkempt Mexican flame vine climbing its walls. Cattle guard at the entrance to the drive. Outbuildings beyond the house, and some fenced pasture with a big pond. A dozen head of runty Angus grazed the green border of the pond. A small flock of Chinese Whites cruised the blue pond, and after I rumbled over the cattle guard and parked near the house and turned the engine off, I heard their goose-alarm, like a chorus of baritone kazoos. In an acre of marsh across the road, tree toads were beginning to tune up for evening. An inventive mockingbird swayed in the top of a punk tree, working some cardinal song into his repertoire.

A leathery little old woman was yanked out of the front door by a crossbreed dog the size of a bull calf, mottled black and brown, hair all ruffed up around his neck and standing erect down his spine. He made a rumbling in his throat, and showed me some very large white fangs. "b.u.t.tercup!" she yelled. "Hold! Hold!"

b.u.t.tercup stopped, all aquiver with anxiety to taste me. The old woman wore ancient blue jeans, a dark red pullover sweater, and blue canvas shoes. She clung with both hands to the hefty chain fastened to the studded dog collar. She was thin as one of the stick figures children draw.

"Hoped it was Lew," she said. "Or maybe Jase or Henry coming around finally to see I"m all right. But he"s still growling. Who are you? They can"t do my eyes till the cataracts get ripe, and I can tell you I"m sick and tired of waiting. Who are you?"

"My name is Travis McGee. I was looking for Lew."

"What for?"

"Just a little talk."

"You stand right still. I got to tell this here dog everything is all right. b.u.t.tercup! Okay! Okay! Hush your noise! Down!"

He sat. The rumbling stopped. Tongue lolled. But the amber eyes looked at me with an obvious skepticism.

"Now you come slow right toward him, Mr. McGee, right up to where he can snuff at you. Don"t come sudden."

So I made the slow advance. He growled again and she scolded him. He sniffed at a pant leg. She told me to hold my hand out and he sniffed that. Then he stood again and the tail wagged. She said I could scratch behind his ears. He enjoyed it.

"Now he won"t bother you. If you come in here and he was loose, he"d come at you running low and fast and quiet, but stand your ground and he"ll get a snuff of you and he won"t bother you none. I"d get edgy out here alone so much if I didn"t have b.u.t.tercup."

"He must be a comfort to you. Do you know when Lew..."

"Before we get into that, would you kindly do me a favor. I been wondering if I should phone somebody to come help me. That black horse of Lew"s has been bawling off and on since early morning, and I can"t see enough to take care of whatever"s bothering him. It"s the near building, and he"s in a stall that opens on the far side. Know anything about horses?"

"They"re tall, have big teeth, give me a sweat rash, and they all hate me on sight."

"Well, what I think it is, Lew having so much on his mind, he could have forgot feed and water."

I walked out behind the house and found the stall, the top halves of the doors open and hooked back. There was a black horse in there, standing with his head hanging. His coat looked dull. The stall had not been cleaned out for too long. Flies buzzed in the heavy stench. Feed bin and water trough were empty. He s.n.a.t.c.hed his head up and rolled wild eyes and tried to rear up, but his hooves slipped in the slime and he nearly went down. From the dried manure on his flanks, he had already been down a couple of times.

I went back to the house and told Mrs. Arnstead the situation and asked her if there was any reason he couldn"t be let out.

"Lew was keeping him in the stall on account of he had a sore on his shoulder he had to put salve on, and it was too much trouble catching him. I guess you best let him out and hope he don"t founder himself sucking the pond dry."

When I unlatched the bottom halves and swung the doors open and stepped well back to one side, he came out a lot more slowly than I expected. He walked frail, as if he didn"t trust his legs, but slowly quickened his pace all the way across to the pond. He drank for a long time, stopped and drank again, then trudged away from the pond, visibly bigger in the belly, and went slowly down onto his knees and rolled over. I thought he had decided to die. But then he began rolling in the gra.s.s, squirming the filth off his black hide.

I looked around, saw rotten sprouting grain in an outdoor bin, saw trash and neglect.

Mrs. Arnstead sat in a cane chair on the shallow screened porch. She invited me in. I sat and b.u.t.tercup came over and shoved his big head against my knee, awaiting the scratching.

There was a golden light of dusk, a smell of flowers.

"I just don"t know anymore," she said. "Shouldn"t heap my burdens on a stranger. Lew is my youngest, the last one left to home. Did just fine in the Army and all. Came back and got took on as a deputy sheriff. Worked this place here and kept it up good, and he was going with the Willoughbee girl. Now being a mother doesn"t mean I can"t see things the way they are. Jason was my first and Henry was my second, and then it was sixteen long years before I had Lew. Lord G.o.d, Jason is forty-three now, married twenty-four years, and their first was a girl, and she married off at sixteen, so I"ve got a great-grandson near six years old. I know that Lew was always on the mean side. But he always worked hard and worked good, and cared for the stock. It"s the last six months he turned into somebody else, somebody I don"t hardly know. Broke off with Clara Willoughbee, took up again with a lot of cheap, bright-smelling, loud-voice women. Got meaner. Got so ugly with his brothers, they don"t want to ever see him again. Neglects this place and me to go run with trash like them Perrises. Now he"s done something, I don"t know what, to get himself fired off his job, and he might even have to go to jail. I just don"t know what"s going to happen. This place is free and clear and it"s in my name, but the little bit of money that comes in won"t cover food, electric, taxes, and all that. Jase and Henry, they"d help out, but not with me staying out here this way. They got this idea I live six months with one and six with the other, like some kind of tourist woman all the rest of my days. What was it my boy did to get Mister Norm so upset he fired him? Do you know?"

"Yes. It isn"t very pretty."

"It"s like I"ve run out of pretty lately."

"A very pleasant and gentle and friendly man was picked up for questioning. He knew nothing about the matter under investigation. Your son gave him a savage beating for no apparent reason. The man is in the hospital in Fort Lauderdale."

She shook her head slowly. In that light, at that angle, I suddenly saw what she had looked like as a young girl. She had been very lovely.

"That"s not Lew," she said. "Not at all. He was always some mean, but not that kind of mean. It isn"t drinking, because since my eyes have been going bad my nose has got sharp as a hound"s. It"s something gone bad in his head. Acts funny. Sometimes not a word to me. Set at the table and eat half his supper and shove his chair back and go out and bang the door and drive off into the nighttime. And sometimes he"ll get to talking. Lord G.o.d, he talks to me a mile a minute, words all tumbling to get out, and he keeps laughing and walking around and about, getting me to laughing, too."

"When was he here last, Mrs. Arnstead?"

"Let me think back. Not since noontime on Thursday. I keep fearing he went off for good. It was yesterday toward evening somebody told me on the phone about him getting fired off his job. I was wishing I could see good enough to... well, to look through his stuff and see if I could find something that"d tell me where he"d be. Hate to ask my other sons to come here. What did you say you wanted to talk to him about?"

"I guess I wanted to make sure he was Lew Arnstead, and then I was going to give him the best beating I could manage. That man in the hospital is the best friend I have ever had."

She stared in my direction with those old frosted blue eyes, then laughed well. A husky caw of total amus.e.m.e.nt. She caught her breath and said, "Mr. McGee, I like you. You don"t give me sweet lies and gentle talk. And you wouldn"t be a man if you didn"t come looking for him. But you got to be a lot of man to take my Lew. When I see your shape against the light, you looked sizable enough. But size isn"t enough. You got to have some mean, too."

"Probably enough."

"Well, you want to find him and I want to know where he is, so you could maybe come to his room with me and tell me what you can find."

Work clothes and fancy clothes and uniforms. Barbells and hair oil and a gun rack with two rifles, two shotguns, a carbine, all well cared for. Police manuals and ranch journals and comic books. Desk with a file drawer. Farm accounts. Tax papers. She sat on the bed, head tilted, listening to me scuffle through drawers and file folders. Tried the pockets of the clothing in the closet. Found a note in the side pocket of a pair of slacks, wadded small. Penciled in a corner torn off a sheet of yellow paper, a childish, girlish, illiterate backhand.

"Lover, he taken off Wesday after work drivin to Tampa seen his moma. I will unhook the same screen windo and please be care you don"t bunk into nothing waken the baby. I got the hots so awful I go dizy and sick thinken on it."

No signature.

"What"d you find?" the old woman asked.

"Just a love note from a woman. No signature. She wants to know why he hasn"t come to see her."

"No help to us with no name on it. Keep looking." I kept looking. There wasn"t enough. The man had to have keepsakes of some kind. So he hid them. Probably not with great care. Just enough to keep them out of sight. Easy to get at. But after a dozen bad guesses I was beginning to think that either he had used a lot of care, or threw everything away. Finally I found the hidey-hole. I had previously discovered that the drawer on the bedside stand was a fake. Just a drawer pull and a drawershaped rectangle grooved in the wood. But when I reached under, I found there was enough thickness for a good-sized drawer. I took the lamp and alarm clock off the table. The top had concealed hinges.

Plenty of room for dirty books, and for some vividly clinical love notes from female friends. Room for a few envelopes of Polaroid prints. Room for three chunky bottles of capsules. About one hundred per bottle. One was a third empty. All the same. Green and white, and inside the one I pulled open were hundreds of tiny spheres, half of them green and half of them white.

"What did you find now?" she asked.

"The stuff that changed your boy."

"You mean like some kind of drugs? My Lew wouldn"t take drugs. Not ever."

"He"s got about two hundred and seventy Dexamyl spansules hidden away in here. They"re a mix of dexedrine and phen.o.barb. One of them keeps your motor racing for eight hours. It"s what the kids call "speed." Super stayawakes. Take two or three for a real good buzz. You can hallucinate on an overdose."

"Speed?" she said. "They said that on the radio way last October. That was the name of some of the stuff they took out of the lockers at the high school. Mister Norm and my Lew and Billy Cable went in with a warrant and went through all the lockers. And that was... about when he started changing."

"At least we know that if he wasn"t coming back, he would have taken this along."

"Thank the Lord for that, at least. Anything else in there?"

"A lot of letters."

"From those women of his I expect."

"That"s right."

"Well, don"t you be shy about reading them. But you don"t need to read them to me. Just see if you can find out where he might be."

No need to tell her I was looking for some clue as to who he had entertained in the shed when he was supposed to be guarding the Baither place.

Few of them were dated. But I came across one with a mid-March date that was more literate and less torrid than the others, and interested me mightily.

Dear Lew, I ran into Frannie in the Suprex yesterday and she was trying to stick the needle in, like always, and she told me she saw you twice with Lito. Now you can tell me it"s none of my business because the thing we had going is over and done, and you know why we had to quit for good. But this is like old times sake, because for a while before it got sour, I really and truly loved you, and I guess you know that. I have never really forgiven you for beating me up for no reason and I guess I never will, but I couldn"t stand for you to get in some kind of stupid trouble. LEAVE LILO ALONE!!!! She is bad news for one and all. I know all about her because for a while she and a girl I know well were friends. The reason she went with her mother after her the divorce was on account of her father knew he couldn"t handle her. He had custody of both kids, but he let Lilo go. Her mother and her stepfather couldn"t control her either, and not many people know this, but when she was seventeen, like a year after she dropped high school, she was fooling around with Frank Baither, and he"s old enough to be her father, and they say he"s getting out soon, and if he wants her back, you better not be in the way. Now I"ll tell you something else I happen to know, and I hope it turns your stomach. I"m not making it up because I haven"t got the kind of sick mind that can make up something ugly. It happened on a Sunday afternoon last December. Roddy Barramore broke down on Route 112 down by where Sh.e.l.l Ridge Road turns off. A water hose busted, and he decided the best thing to do was walk into Sh.e.l.l Ridge Road to the Perris place, figuring Mr. Perris would have some hose and clamps or at least some tape. It was a warm Sunday and when he got near the house he could hear through the screen in the open windows that Mr. Perris had the football pro game on turned up loud. So he thought instead of ringing the door, he"d go holler in the window, and he had his mouth open to holler and then he saw Lilo and Mr. Perris on the couch, making out like mad, all their clothes in a pile on the floor. Roddy scrunched down quick before they seen him, and walked back and first he told Rhoda there was n.o.body home, and she said he was quiet for a while and then he told her what really happened. What do you think of a girl who"ll make out with her stepfather knowing her own mother is there helpless in the bedroom maybe fifteen feet away, unable to speak or move much since she had the stroke over two years ago which some say was the judgment of G.o.d, but I say we aren"t to judge because we don"t really know what reasons she had for breaking up her own marriage the way she did. Rhoda told me about it, it made me want to throw up. I hope it does the same for you. I don"t care that you aren"t seeing me anymore, really. I wish the best for you always, Lew, but you won"t have anything but heartache and bad trouble if you run around with Lilo. Always your friend, Betsy I went through the Polaroid prints. Amateur nude studies. Thirty-two different poses. Many different girls. A lean blonde with an insipid leer and huge meaty b.r.e.a.s.t.s figured in ten of them, p.r.o.ne, supine, standing, reaching, kneeling. Five were of a woman with a superb body, a body good enough to overcome the incompetence of the photographer. In each she kept the lens from seeing her face.

Then there were thirteen different females, which I suppose could be thought of as trophy shots, all head-on, naked, some taken by flash, rome by available light, some indoors, some outdoors. Estimated ages, eighteen to thirty-two. A variety of expression, from timorous uncertain smile to dazed glaze of s.e.xuality, from broad grin to startled glance of herself surprised, to theatrical scowl. The sameness of the pose removed all erotic possibility. They became record shots, and could have been taken in the anteroom of the gas chamber after a short ride in a cattle car.

It was the remaining four shots which gave me a p.r.i.c.kling sensation on the backs of hands and neck.

Solid, shapely, dark-haired, suntanned chunk of girl. Evenly and deeply tanned everywhere, except for the surprisingly white bikini-band, low slung around the functional swelling of the st.u.r.dy hips. One of those pretty, engaging, amusing little toughy faces. An easy-laugher. A face for fun and joy, games and excursions. Not at all complicated unless you looked more closely, carefully. Then you could see something out of focus. A contradiction. There was a harsh sensuality in that face which was at odds with the merry expression. There was a clamp-jawed resolve contradicting that look of amiable readiness for fun and games.

I had seen that face, for a micro-instant, several busy seconds before Miss Agnes squashed into the ca.n.a.l. I felt sure of it. And this chance for a more careful examination confirmed the fleeting feeling that my young volunteer mechanic, Ron Hatch, had to be related to her by blood. Though his face was long instead of round, doleful rather than merry, the curves of the mouth, the set of the eyes, the breadth and slant of forehead were much alike. "Must be a lot of letters," the old woman said.

I put everything back except the most explicit picture of the dark-haired girl, closed the lid, put the lamp and clock back in position.

"Nothing that helps much. But I want to ask some questions, if you don"t mind, Mrs. Arnstead."

"Don"t mind a bit. Talked too much already, so I might just as soon keep right on. That"s what happens when you"re old and alone. Talk the ear off anybody that wants to stop by and listen. But let"s go back to the porch. Lew could come roaring in, and he"d get mean about a stranger being in his room."

The sun was down and the porch faced the western sky, faced a band of red so intense it looked as if all the far cities of the world were burning. It will probably look much like that when they do burn.

"Mrs. Arnstead, I remember you said something about your son running around with trash like the Perrises. Is there a Perris girl?"

"There"s Lillian, but she"s not rightly a Perris. I did hear she"s tooken the name, but whether legal in a court, I don"t know. Her real name is Hatch. Her daddy is John Hatch, and he has a lot of friends and business interests around Cypress City. He"s the kind that"s real shrewd about a deal and sort of stupid about women. Anyway he married one that turned out to be trashy for sure. Wanda. He brought her back here from Miami. Must be... let me see now... oh, many years ago. The first baby was Lillian, and then there was Ronnie, then there was one that died. I"d say there was trouble all along between John Hatch and Wanda. Maybe he worked so hard he left her too much time on her hands, and she was built for trouble. They fought terrible, and the way they tell it, Johnny Hatch finally had enough, and so he set out to get grounds to get rid of that woman. About seven years ago, it happened. He had a good mechanic working at his garage name of Henry Perris, and he had the idea Henry was getting to Wanda every chance that came along. So he brought in a fellow and he got the goods on them for sure, tape recordings and pictures and all. She had no chance of child custody or alimony or anything. Soon as the divorce was final, Henry surprised everybody by marrying her. Lillian was fourteen or fifteen then, and wild as any swamp critter, and when she made up her mind she"d rather be with her mother, John Hatch had the good sense not to fight it. They say Ron is a nice boy. John married again a couple years ago and there"s a couple babies now. Let me see. Where was I? Wanda and Henry moved into a place way south of town, down there on the edge of the swamps. She took on a lot of weight they say, and I guess she had the high blood, because she was always high-colored. She had a little stroke about three years ago I guess it was, and then she had a big one and she"s been in the bed ever since, helpless as a baby. There"s some other Perrises down there, trashy folk, fighting and stealing, running in a pack with the other trash. Lillian is as bad as the worst. Lilo they call her. And my Lew has been messin" with those trashy people."

"You"re sure of that?"

"She was calling here, giving me orders, telling me to tell my son Lilo called. I told him to tell her not to call him here. He got ugly about it." She sighed. "He turned from my youngest into a stranger. I guess it was those pills, not really him at all."

"Where does Henry Perris work?"

"He sure doesn"t work for Johnny Hatch. He could work anyplace he wants to go, on account of being so good of a mechanic, they say. I heard he works someplace south."

"In a station on the Trail?"

"Could be. I don"t rightly know."

"What kind of a car does Lew have?"

"He had a real nice car up till three months back, and then he smashed it all up so bad it was a wonder he wasn"t killed. There was something wrong about the insurance, so what he"s driving now is the old jeep that was here on the place, fixed up some. It was dirty yellow and he got it painted black, he told me. I"ve been wondering something."

"Yes?"

"I"m a silly old woman but I"m not foolish. Seems like you have the thought in your mind my Lew might be in some kind of trouble more than from Just beating up your best friend."

"He might be. I don"t know."

"Then... if he is, I hope you find out and I hope you tell Mister Norm. If he is, I want him put away someplace because he"s getting so wild he might kill somebody, then he wouldn"t have any life left at all. Better he loses a piece of his life and gets over what those pills done to him than lose the whole thing. Unless maybe... already he killed somebody?" The dread in her voice was touching and unmistakable.

"Are you thinking about Frank Baither?"

"It was on the radio."

"I think he was on duty when that happened."

"Thank the Lord."

She asked me to phone her if I heard anything about Lew. I told her to let me know if he came home. She said she could use the phone by counting the holes in the dial. I gave her the White Ibis number. I started to repeat it and she said not to bather, that her memory seemed to be getting better instead of worse as time went by. But she sure did miss the television. It was just shapes and light that didn"t mean anything. She wished the cataracts would hurry and get ripe enough.

As I drove back toward town I was thinking about that ancient and honorable bit of homely psychology, that myth of the ripeness of cataracts. The lens capsule can be removed as soon as it begins to get cloudy. But postoperative vision with corrective lenses is a poor resource at best, compared with normal sight. So the ripeness they speak of is the psychological ripeness of the patient, a time of diminishing vision which lasts long enough, and gets bad enough, so that the postoperative vision is, by comparison, a wonder and a delight. The patient is happy because the basis of comparison has changed.

There are some extraordinarily cruel men in the primitive rural areas of India who travel from village to village curing cataracts for a few rupees. Their surgical tool is a long, very slender, very sharp and hard thorn. They insert it from the side, behind the lens, and puncture the lens capsule. The cloudy fluid leaks into the eye itself and is replaced, or diluted, by the clear fluid within the eye. Sight is restored. It is a miracle. In sixty to ninety days the patient becomes totally and permanently blind, but by then the magician is a dozen villages away, busy with new miracles. Perhaps they do not think of themselves as cruel men. In a country where the big city syndicates purchase children, and carefully maim and disfigure them in vividly memorable ways, and distribute them by truck throughout the city each morning to sit on busy sidewalks with begging bowls, and collect them at dusk as impersonally as one might empty coin machines, cruelty itself is a philosophical abstraction.

The April night was turning cool, so after I stopped back at the White Ibis and picked up an old blue sailcloth sportcoat, laundered and pressed as a courtesy of the Cypress County taxpayers, I went to a place I had spotted when driving around the town. The Adventurer. A lot of blue neon, tinted gla.s.s, an acre of asphalt packed with local cars. Frigid air conditioning, exhaust fans hustling the smoke out, ceiling prisms beaming down narrow areas of glare on the Sat.u.r.day night faces. Long bar packed deep, and people sitting at small tables, leaning toward each other to shout intimacies over the shattering din of a hundred other people shouting to be heard over the sound of a trio on a high shelf in the corner, three dead-faced whiskery young men boosting by about five hundred watts the sound of an electric guitar, electric ba.s.s, and a fellow who stood whapping at a tall snare drum and singing sounds which may or may not have been words into the microphone. The obligatory birdcage girl had her own high shelf. She was meaty and energetic, snapping her hair across her closed eyes, tromping out the big beat with a simple repet.i.tive pattern of b.u.mp and grind, belly dance and Tahitian flutter. She was not strictly topless because she had a narrow band of fabric around the busy bouncing b.o.o.bs. There was a spotlight on her that changed from pink to black to blue to black, and in the black light only her teeth and the two narrow bands of fabric, and her high silver shoes glowed with an eerie luminescence.

As I waited to move in close enough to the bar to got my order in, I looked the crowd over. High school kids and ranch hands and packing-house workers. Single swingers and young marrieds. Bank clerks and secretaries and young realtors. Carpentors and plumbers, electricians and hard-wall plasterers, along with young dentists and soldiers and sailors home on leave and hospital technicians and nurses and bag boys and store clerks, and a handful of the customary predators, middle-aged men in youthful clothing, watching, appraising, singling out potential prey of either s.e.x, planning their careful, rea.s.suring campaigns: It was half beer and half hard. The beer was draft, in chilled heavy gla.s.s mugs that hold half what they appear to hold. Waitresses hustled the tables, serving either roast beef sandwiches or bowls of shrimp boiled in beer. So the fun place was a nice money machine, because when the waitress slapped the check on the table you either paid and left, or ordered more. I got hold of a cold mug and got back thirty cents change from my dollar and too much head on the dark beer.