audible in the distance, the air scented by tobacco smoke, nervous sweat, greasy food, and hair oil. How better to make a Nevada newcomer antsy?
Yet Cledge surprised Dubykky. He did not fidget or perspire. He sat still and straight in his chair, hands on his lap. He met Dubykky’s eyes expectantly. His smile, if tentative, was pleasant, unassuming. Dubykky was charmed despite himself. For that reason, he skipped the usual opening pleasantries. He asked straight off, “What would you do if you discovered I was cheating our clients out of their money?”
The bluntness was rewarded. Cledge’s grimace of revulsion was pure reflex. “Tell them,” he answered tightly.
“Tell them? Really? Not ask me about it first?” Dubykky pretended to be affronted.
Bewilderment wrinkled Cledge’s brow. “No. If I knew it to be true, you’d be untrustworthy. It would be best to warn off clients.”
“So you’d favor clients over our partnership.”
A moue of offense, then a squint of craftiness, and Cledge replied, “There would be no law practice without clients.” His eyes widened. He evidently realized the answer was evasive.
It amused Dubykky, both the evasion and the telltale expression. If principled, Cledge was yet eager for the job.
Dubykky pressed, “I suppose you’d report me to the Bar. Or would it be the police?”=
Cledge’s eyebrows leapt in astonishment, then came rushing back down from indignation. “Not right off! Of course not. I’d confront you first.” He shifted in his chair while his eyes wandered uncertainly. When he continued, he tried to sound reasonable, and it was wonderfully stilted. “Sometimes there are mitigating circumstances. Defrauding, that is to say mulcting, may be redressed privately.”
Honest, unsubtle, labored, naïve. Dubykky was content.
“Do you gamble, philander, or patronize brothels?”
Cledge reddened. His chin lifted, and he put his hands on the chair arms to hoist himself to his feet. Dubykky waved for him to remain seated.
“I take it that means no to all three.”
Incredulous outrage distorted Cledge’s whole face. “I’m a Catholic, and a devout one.”
Earnest, sensitive, upright. At that point Dubykky ceased evaluating Cledge simply as a prospective partner. He began considering him as a husband for Mildred. As the interview progressed, Cledge proved himself to be sensible and intelligent as well, if only reasonably so. He was also reasonably slow to recognize humor, reasonably strong in physique, and reasonably homely in appearance. As such he was the sort of man who would feel lucky winning the hand of a lovely, educated young woman like Mildred and temperamentally mild enough to put up with her waywardness. Best of all, he was completely unable to dissemble. Even someone as self-absorbed as Mildred could read his heart. Nothing would be so conducive to a solid, functional marriage for her than actually recognizing what her husband was thinking at any given time, rather than imputing to him what she wanted him to be thinking. Dubykky hired Cledge on the spot.
Seated in the pickup pondering his unexpected affection for Cledge and the uneasy sense that his own nature was somehow changing, Dubykky thought back to when his partner had walked into his office earlier that day.
“Were you talking to yourself?” Cledge inquired.
Dubykky had been venting to himself about Mildred’s inattention during a phone call he had just ended. Cledge’s expression was jocular, yet perplexity also lurked there. He must have already come to the conclusion that Dubykky was eccentric, perhaps even downright odd, and was trying to define its extent. Cledge had the lawyer’s propensity to gather information. That Dubykky talked to himself interested him, and it wasn’t an idle, finicky interest. Only sensible. Cledge needed to understand his partner if they were to work together effectively.
“That’s right,” Dubykky lied straight-faced. “I was exclaiming to myself how much violence, turmoil, and misery there is in the world.” He gestured open-handed at the Nevada State Journal, the Reno morning paper, lying open on his desk. Cledge knit his brow. The headline only involved celebrities: “Lucille Ball Divorced from Desi Arnaz.” But he took the point. The day before, the headline had announced the electrocution of the author Caryl Chessman, which was controversial worldwide, and there was a nearly constant drumbeat of impending war with the Soviet Union, or the Warsaw Pact, or China, or North Korea, or any combination of them. News was bad news, and it was frequently bad for the very reasons that Dubykky mentioned.
Yet too, news was just news. To Cledge, it was born old and quickly faded. What truly occupied his mind was more immediate and durable: working during the work week and during free time pursuing his true passion. That passion had come as a second surprise to Dubykky during the job interview. After satisfying himself that Cledge was well trained in family and property law, he asked about hobbies, as if an afterthought. It was most definitely not that. A man’s hobby expressed how he attached himself to the world around him. A useful thing for Dubykky to know.
“I’m a rockhound,” Cledge replied, showing pleasure, pride, wistfulness.
Dubykky was delighted. A collector’s mentality was acceptable because it was simple to manipulate. More than that, Cledge’s hobby revealed his brand of good sense. For a rockhound, the west-central Great Basin was like Hollywood to a film buff. Everything that glittered, or could glitter with a bit of polish, was here, from amethysts to zeolites. Though not a native Nevadan, that rare breed, Cledge was in his natural habitat, for Mineral County was well named. It could not have a more appreciative, knowledgeable immigrant.
Any collector of rare beauty like Cledge yearned to show off his discoveries. If Mildred were to display interest—Dubykky tucked the thought away for now and laid out the contract that Cledge had come to ask about. It involved water rights. A ticklish issue in Nevada, water. There was so little of it.
“Oh, Milt?” he said as, their discussion concluded, Cledge was turning for the door. “Do you remember Mildred Warden? We had dinner with her at the El Capitan.”
The question was disingenuous. Dubykky knew that Mildred would be remembered. Cledge’s face told him that was so: remembered and with keen interest. Mildred had that effect on men.
He continued, “She and her mother, Gladys, would like you to join them for dinner tomorrow night. I’ll be there too—I’m practically a member of the family—and I took the liberty of accepting on your behalf. Does that suit you?”
It did. Cledge’s expression of gratitude was far more restrained than the eager anticipation his face broadcast.
ALTHOUGH THESE RECOLLECTIONS sped through Dubykky’s mind as he sat in the dark, he was by now thoroughly chilled, and deeply put out with himself for drifting from his trance. He gently transferred Jurgen to the seat and put on a jacket he had brought.
Backing the truck onto the yard’s hardpan, he turned around and moved on to the next hovel, a gray travel trailer propped on railroad ties, a quarter-mile farther downslope. There, stopped and in his trance, he sensed a faint vibration, like a velvet puff of air in his mind. This was not the right place either, though. The source of the sensation remained distant. He moved on.
At the next shack Dubykky had hardly stilled himself when evil irritated him like a mote in his inner
