—
WHEN HE HEARD someone knocking on the back door, Jasper was lying half-asleep on his mother’s couch. In all the time he’d lived here by himself, the only person who had ever visited him was Itchy, and he thought at first that he must be mistaken. But then the taps started again, and he jumped up. A sharp pain shot through his groin. He’d had another one of those evenings when his situation had gotten the best of him, and he had quelled it the best way he knew how, by thrashing his cock against the furniture until he could hardly walk. Holding a candle, he cracked open the kitchen door, and for a moment all he saw was a pistol stuck in his face. “Don’t make a sound,” he heard someone hiss. For a few seconds, he stood frozen, but then he made out Cob standing behind the one with the gun, and he took a step back, allowing them to enter.
Cane shut the door quietly, and motioned for Jasper to move into the next room. As they passed the stinking work gear piled in front of the cookstove—the helmet, measuring stick, truncheon, and rubber boots—he remembered that this was the same man he’d seen in the store the other day looking wistfully at bathroom fixtures. In the dim light from the candle, he glanced around the parlor at the faded embroideries hanging on the walls and the dust-covered saints on the mantel and the little wooden shrine to the Virgin Mary. He recalled something Bloody Bill had said one time, after an old Mennonite woman hid him under her hoop skirts and saved him from certain death, about how salvation is sometimes found in the strangest places.
“Howdy, Jasper,” Cob finally said, smiling a little sheepishly.
“Hey, Junior.”
Through the open window came more yelling, then a car horn beeping, and the echo of a gunshot. Cane wiped some sweat from his brow. It suddenly occurred to him that there was no way he and Cob could make it out of town tonight, not together anyway. There had to be another solution, another way to save them both. “Sit down,” he told Jasper. Cane watched the man limp toward the couch, figured he must have a bad rupture from the looks of that bulge in his pants. “My brother keeps talkin’ about you, says you’re his friend. Is that right?”
“Yes,” Jasper said, looking nervously at the pistol Cane still had pointed at him. “I’d like to think so anyway.” He hesitated, then blurted out, “I know who you are. I saw your pictures on a poster over at the jail this morning.”
“Heck, why didn’t ye say nothing?” said Cob. “We was measurin’ them ol’ shithouses all day.”
“I don’t know,” Jasper said, shrugging his thin shoulder blades. “I guess I didn’t want to scare you off.”
“Have ye told anyone about us?” Cane asked.
“No, no, I swear. I wouldn’t do that.”
Sensing that perhaps the man could be trusted after all, Cane sat down in a chair, laid his pistol on top of one of the saddlebags. “All that commotion you’re hearin’ out there, that’s people huntin’ us,” he told Jasper.
“Yeah, they done caught Chimney,” Cob added.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Now they’ll hang him and he won’t ever get a chance to sit at the heavenly table. Well, shoot, I don’t reckon we will, either, for that matter. Yes, sir, I sure would’ve liked to seen it.”
“The what?” Jasper said.
“The heavenly table. Like I told Miss Eula, it’s where you—”
“Hold up,” Cane interrupted. Once again, just by making some offhand remark, Cob had given him an idea, and though it certainly wasn’t perfect, it was better than nothing. “You know a place called Nipgen?” he said.
Jasper nodded. He and Itchy had rented a horse and buggy on several occasions and spent the day riding around the county talking to strangers and pretending they were looking for land to buy. “Yeah, out west of town. I been through there once.” From what he could remember, they’d stopped at a little store there and bought some baloney heels and crackers from a man who wore an eyeshade.
Cane bent down and opened one of the saddlebags, started pulling money out. He counted for several minutes, then put a tall stack of bills next to one of the Bibles lying on the table in front of the sofa. “What I need is a big favor, and I’ll understand if you don’t want to do it, but I need to know tonight.”
“A favor?” Jasper said, trying not to look at the money. “What is it?”
“There’s a man and his wife got a farm three or four mile past there, and they—”
“The Fiddlers!” Cob said excitedly. “They’re the—”