Free Black Angus by Newton Thornburg Page B

now, adjusting the sound as Linda Ronstadt’s big voice began to fill the room. Satisfied, Ronda got up and went around the dining bar into the kitchen to make coffee. While she worked, Blanchard watched her, the awful robe flowing and ripplingunder her long thick hair as she turned and reached and measured, her movements as swift and sure as a dancer’s, and suddenly he felt an ineffable sense of loss and failure, as if he had already put it to death, whatever it was between them. And the feeling must have shown, for she stopped suddenly and looked at him.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?”
    â€œNothing.”
    â€œIt doesn’t look like nothing.”
    â€œMaybe I just need some coffee.”
    â€œCoffee’s not that good,” she said.
    â€œA week of sleep, then.”
    But she continued to stand there watching him, and for once he could not read her look, could not tell what it was tempering the usual hardness of her gaze. And he was not to find out, for suddenly in the distance he heard the sound of car tires ripping through gravel and engines revving and cutting out, and he knew it was not just another car passing down the river road in the night. Moving to the front door, he opened it just as the lead car turned into Ronda’s driveway, careening in the gravel, almost overturning. Behind it came three pickup trucks, the first one so close its front bumper ripped into the car’s trunk while both vehicles were still moving, skidding off the driveway into the small patch of lawn, demolishing a birdbath and a wheelbarrow planter. Even before the car came to rest, the driver’s door had flown open and Little came scampering out of it like a steer out of a rodeo gate, heading for the trailer. And though Blanchard recognized the car by now as Shea’s Continental, only dust-covered, tan instead of maroon, he saw no sign of the big man, only Little racing toward him—and stopping abruptly now, almost falling, as a shotgun was fired behind him, fired into the air from the nearest pickup.
    â€œJist you hold it there, Little,” a voice drawled, the voice of Jiggs, voice of sweet revenge.
    Little turned toward it, toward the headlights and the gathering men, turned to their guns with his hands outstretched, innocent, begging.
    â€œJiggs, I just drivin’ the sumbitch, that’s all. I didn’t have no part in what he did. You know that.”
    Backlit by the truck headlights, Jiggs swaggered forward, gesturing with his shotgun as if it were a pointer, a tool of pedagogy.
    â€œI know you with him,” he said. “That’s what I know.”
    â€œAnd that’s all! How could I know he’d do what he did? I left with him just to cool things, that’s all! Honest to Jesus!”
    Jiggs had moved in between Little and the Continental, whose other door came open now, slowly, as Shea struggled out, blinking in the glare like a baby waking from sleep. But he was alert enough to move no farther, to keep the car between him and Jiggs.
    â€œYou just tell me what to do, Jiggs,” Little begged. “You say the word and I do it.”
    â€œYa do it, will ya?”
    â€œYou know it, Jiggs. You just say it, you got it.”
    â€œOkay, I say it, then—git me a bucket of water.”
    â€œYou got it!”
    Blanchard was still standing on the small front porch of the trailer, had moved that far before the shotgun blast stopped him too, rooted him in place. He sensed that Ronda was behind him, but he was not sure, and could not bring himself to look, for that would have meant taking his eyes off Jiggs and his friends. Even as Little scurried past him into the trailer, Blanchard did not look at him.
    Jiggs was reaching out with his pointer again. “Hey, Sandy,” he said, “gimme that deer gun of yers.”
    He and the mechanic from Rockton exchanged weapons. Moving closer to the car, Jiggs raised the rifle and sighted down it at Shea, held it