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Richard Ford

A Piece of My Heart

Prologue

W. W. came down over the levee in the rain, his old Plymouth skidding out of the ruts and his gun barrel pointed wildly out the window, still warm from being shot. He looked down on the boat camp through the willows and for a moment saw nothing but the house and the dock shielded in the rain, though he had watched from a distance as Robard's truck had topped the levee three minutes ago and disappeared over the side, and had come on after him. He drove more slowly through the willows as the rain began to let go harder. Fat droplets plowed down the rifle barrel and dripped on his pants, though he didn't notice. He saw Robard's truck finally, sitting down in the cover of the low limbs, steaming and ticking in the rain. He left the car, left it rolling until it rolled into the back of the truck, and stepped cautiously toward the dock, still in his baseball uniform, where a blond boy was standing over the water with a rifle held barrel-to-toe, watching an empty boat drift down the lake corridor toward the shallows.

When the boy sensed the presence of someone else, he whirled and threw up his rifle and pointed it squarely into his belly.

“Now who the hell are you?” he said, the corners of his mouth quivering so that he seemed to want to smile.

W. W. looked out on the water, fingered the warm trigger guard, and wondered if he could shoot the boy and somehow in the scrap avoid being shot himself. He decided he could not, and smiled.

“I’m W. W. Justice from Helena. ”

“What are you doing in your baseball uniform and totin a rifle, W. W. ?” the boy said, displaying the absence of three front teeth, behind which could be seen his tongue at work trying to fill up the space.

“I come after Robard Hewes.

“Come who?”

“Robard Hewes. ”

“Well, W. W. ,” the boy said, flicking the corners of his mouth with his tongue and letting the tip of his rifle sink back to his foot, “I never did hear of him. But I’ll tell you one thing. ”

“And what’s that?” W. W. said.

“I just did kill a man here, wasn’t a minute past you drivin up. ”

“Who’d you kill?” he said, watching the empty boat dawdling in the rain breeze.

“Damned if I know. Whoever it was, though, didn’t have no business being here. I’ll tell you that. I’ll tell you that right now. ”

Part I. Robard Hewes

1

In the dark he could see the long tubular lights nose down the mountain toward Bishop. They crossed the desert after dark, leaving Reno at dusk and slipping across the desert at midnight toward Indio. He sat in the front room in the dark and stared through the doorway, smoking and listening to the beetles swarm the screen and the air sift through the window. Someplace away a cab-over ground down and started across the meadow to the mountains. In town he could hear a car horn blowing a long time and tires squealing, and then it faded and sank back into the night. He breathed a plume of smoke in the dark and ran his fingers through his hair.