Waylon held up a finger to pause the conversation, then got out of the truck and came around to my side. Reaching up with his tree-trunk arms, he lifted me down like a child, and began walking me around the parking lot. “Dip is just tobacco, Doc, but they pump up the nicotine somehow; I don’t know how. You don’t hear much about it, but nicotine packs a pretty good wallop, you get enough of it. A lipful of dip is worth ten unfiltered Camels. It’ll knock you on your ass if you ain’t used to it. Hell, I knowed that; I shoulda thought about it before waving that tin under your nose.”
I shook my head. “I’m a big boy, Waylon. Didn’t have to take it.” The walking was helping, but I still felt woozy. “When I was a kid, my granddaddy used to smoke a pipe. Prince Albert. Never liked cigarette smoke, but I loved the smell of Granddaddy’s pipe. Whenever he came to visit, I would beg for a puff on his pipe. He’d always say, ‘No, it’ll make you sick,’ but I’d plead and whine and wear him down. Sure enough, I’d get sick every time. But nothing like this, man. I’m amazed this stuff is legal.”
“Wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t. People get hooked on it, they’ll get ahold of it anyhow. Just like moonshine or weed or chicken fights. Scary thing is, I see kids ten or twelve year old already doing a can a day. Gonna be losing their lips and tongues time they’s forty.” He scratched his chin. “I got me a late start, and I’m what you might call moderate. Figure my mouth won’t fall off till about sixty-five.”
The image almost pushed me over the edge again. I concentrated hard on another question that had been nagging at me. “Waylon, that first day you took me up to meet Jim—how come Leon Williams, the sheriff’s deputy, helped you shanghai me?”
Waylon rubbed his chin, and I heard a sound like coarse sandpaper rubbing on rocks. “You want the short answer or the long ’un?”
“Give me the long ’un, if you don’t care to.”
“First I’ll give you the short ’un: bullshit walks, money talks. Deputy sheriffs in Cooke County don’t make too much. Leon’s probably pulling down about twenty thou a year, which ain’t what it used to be. So he’s open to a little extry income, if the deal ain’t gonna get him thowed in jail hisself.”
“So how much extra income did he get for handing me over to you the other day?”
“Hell, you was pretty cheap, Doc. Couple hunnerd, I think.”
“That is cheap. Should I be insulted?”
“Naw, that weren’t about what you was worth; that was about how bush-league Leon is. If Orbin had-a been carrying you ’stead of Leon, he woulda charged ten times that much.”
I wasn’t sure whether that made me feel better or worse. “What’s the rest of the answer?”
“Well, they’s some history between Leon’s people, the sheriff’s people, and Big Jim. Some of it goes way back—some bad blood about fifty, sixty years ago between the Williamses and the Kitchingses.”
“I might’ve heard something about that. Leon’s grandfather dying in a shootout or a fire at the jail. Is that the thing?”
“Right. He’d been arrested by Tom’s granddaddy, who was the sheriff way back then.” Williams hadn’t told me that piece of the story. “So if Leon gets a chance to thumb his nose at a Kitchings behind his back, he’s probably gonna do it. Nothing big; he’s just disrespectin’ Tom to feel better about his own self and his people.”
“And where does Big Jim fit into all that?”
“Well, he’s got a little history with the Kitchingses, too. He ain’t never quite forgive ’em for standing between him and that girl. And they ain’t never quite forgive him, either, for I don’t know what—maybe just for bein’ a better man than what they are. Sometimes a real good person just rubs you the wrong way, you know?” I nodded; I did know. “Well, Jim—I think he’s that person for the Kitchingses.”
By now my head had cleared, and my stomach and I seemed to have reached an uneasy truce. I checked my watch; I had been unconscious or asleep for three hours in the truck as the big man kept vigil over me. The afternoon was waning, and my trip to the cave would have to wait. I thanked Waylon for watching out for me, said good-bye, and pulled onto I-40, heading into a blood-red sunset that kept me in mind of fighting cocks and feuding clans all the way back to Knoxville.
When I got home, I showered and fell into bed. Before drifting off, though, I made up my mind, and dialed the phone number I’d pulled from my Rolodex the day Tom Kitchings pulled a gun on me.
CHAPTER 20