Minutes later, Fanta had composed another mock headline.

Meat Beats Heat

A cattle truck full of steers had broken down on the side of the highway. The poor doomed steaks-to-be had been roasting to death, prematurely, until the VFD had arrived to strafe the perforated trailer with Pumper 2’s full power, wetting the steers as they stamped and bellowed and for their inscrutable reasons started mounting one another. As Fanta rolled down his window he amended his headline.

Meat Beats Heat, Meat

Over the dozen onlookers settled a torrid mist of atomized manure. While Fanta held his breath and watched, an old white pickup, northbound, slowed as if to rubberneck. He was admiring the truck, an International Harvester, sixties vintage—a version of the last truck he ever drove, traded it for a VW after coming home, always wanted another—when the heavy vehicle jerked to a squeaky stop right beside him and he understood that the driver meant not to look at the wet steers but apparently to glower purposefully at him, the editor.

This kind of thing happened. “Disgruntled Reader Shoots Messenger.” Was she vaguely familiar? Through her open window she fixed him with an especially bitter glare: knit brow, fevered cheeks, damp forehead, wild blond-gray hair twisted in a braid down her back, a faint twitch of calculation in her aqua eyes, a wrinkle in her chapped lips. Braless cleavage descended through the stretched neck of a soiled men’s undershirt. Her hands were work-gnarled, her forearms scratched and veined.

Fanta was about to say hello when from beyond came a harsh splat. The fire hose had turned on again. The steers bellowed and assaulted one another. Manure mist descended. Did she give him a nod? A heifer clambers up, he recited, feeling her baleful inspection. Nighthawk goes out, horses trail back to the barn. Good words by Gary Snyder. Spider gleams in his new web. He had renewed his intent to greet her when the woman hit the gas and the white truck rumbled away, showing him a license plate too muddy to read and a rusty oil drum wobbling in the bed.

Well?

Ruined Scribbler Follows Hunch

Fanta U-turned on the highway, bumped over the pumper truck’s thick hose, and floored the Tercel up to its full-out putter, racing to catch up.

CHAPTER 10

The ambulance bearing Gabriel Goodgolly took the rough driveway slowly. The EMTs had left the gimlet right where it had been inserted, its corkscrew shaft jammed into uncertain tissues of the old man’s chest.

Sheriff Kick, two deputies, and three EMTs had carefully tilted the outhouse sideways off its base. In the grass beside it lay the items recovered from the pit: a .22 rifle, the six Busch Light cans and their torn carton that had been in the yard, and a square-bladed trenching shovel, the one she had seen standing up in fresh dirt behind the barn. Someone had rearranged the scene.