Heat Lightning

thing. I hate to see it go like this, you know that.”
    Louis said, “I know it, but you got a crazy man there. Hey, crazy man—fuck you.”
    Virgil gave him the finger, over his shoulder without looking back, and heard Louis start to laugh, and Virgil put Bunton in the truck, cuffed him to a seat support, shut the door. Then he stepped back and put his head against the window glass, leaning, and stood like that for a moment, cooling off.
    After a moment, he walked back to the two Indians and said to the older man, “I’ll come and talk to you about this sometime. I drove from St. Paul to here at a hundred miles an hour—I’m not kidding. Hundred miles an hour, just to take this jack-off. He put me in the hospital a couple of days ago, and there really are four dead men down there, executed, shot in the head, and he knows about it. If you’d taken him on the res, you’d be up to your ass in FBI agents. This is better for everybody.”
    “Well, you were pretty impolite about it,” Louis said.
    “Yeah, well.” Virgil hitched up his pants. “Sometimes it just gets too deep, you know? You can have the other guy and the van, if you want them. I’m not interested in him.”
    “Still gonna kick your ass,” the younger man said.
    “Keep thinkin’ that,” Virgil said, and clapped him on the shoulder before he could step back, and walked back to his truck.
    The DNR guy was there, looking stoned, like most of them do. “That was way fuckin’ cool,” he said.

12
    IN THE TRUCK, Virgil backed in a circle, careful on the narrow road, held a palm up to the deputy, and headed back east, away from the reservation.
    “Where’re we going?” Bunton asked. One hand was pulled forward and down between his legs, almost under the seat, and Bunton was humped over and down.
    “Bemidji. I’m gonna put you in a little dark room in the county jail and I’m gonna kick your ass. By the time you get out of there, you’re gonna look like a can of Campbell’s mushroom soup.”
    “Ah, bullshit,” Bunton said. “Why don’t you undo my hand? This is gonna kill my back, riding to Bemidji this way.”
    Virgil looked at him, sighed, pulled the truck over. “If you so much as twitch the wrong way, I’ll break your goddamn arm,” he said, and he got out, walked around the truck, unsnapped the cuff, and snapped it back onto the safety belt. As he was walking around to get into the truck again, the deputy rolled by, dropped his passenger-side window.
    “If I were you, I’d get out of rifle range,” he said.
    “Think I’m okay,” Virgil said.
    The deputy shook his head. “Don’t call me again,” he said. “You might be okay, but I gotta roam around here on my own.”
    Virgil opened his mouth to apologize, but the deputy was rolling away. The DNR guy came up, dropped his window, and said, “You’re the writer guy, huh?”
    Virgil said, “Yeah, I do some writing.”
    “I read that piece on ice-fishing on Winni . . . Wasn’t as bad as it might have been, but, anyway, you just weren’t drinking enough.” He said it with a smile.
    “Well, thank you, I guess,” Virgil said.
    “We got a regional meeting up here in September, we’re looking for a speaker . . .”
    What he meant was cheap speaker . Virgil gave him a business card, told him he was available to talk if he could get the time off.
    “We’ll be in touch,” the guy said. “Hell of a run; that’s why I love this shit. But I gotta tell you, man, it’s better in a boat.”
    “I hear you,” Virgil said.
     
 
WHEN HE GOT BACK in the truck, Bunton had managed to dig a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and light it. Virgil said, “This is a no-smoking truck.”
    “I’ll blow the smoke out the window,” Bunton said.
    “One cigarette,” Virgil said, and he touched the passenger-window button and rolled it down.
    Bunton nodded. “You lost. I made it across the line. You had to cheat to get me.”
    “Wasn’t a race, Ray. There are four people dead now, and you know who did it,” Virgil said.
    “No, I don’t.”
    “Ray, goddamnit, you know something. What I want to know is, are there more people gonna get killed? Are you gonna get killed?”
    “Maybe,” Bunton said. “But I need to talk to a lawyer.”
    “Fuck a bunch of lawyers. Talk to me. I’ll give you absolution right here. Your sins won’t count.”
    “How about the crimes?” Bunton asked.
    “Those might count,” Virgil admitted. “But you’re obligated—”
    Bunton cut