AT TWO A.M. the air-conditioning compressor outside Hackberry’s window gasped once, made a series of clunking sounds like a Coke bottle rolling down a set of stairs, and died. Hackberry opened the windows and the doors, turned on the ceiling fan in his bedroom, and went back to sleep.
A huge bank of thunderclouds had moved out of the south and sealed the sky. The clouds were lit by igneous flashes that rippled across the entirety of the heavens in seconds and died far out over the hills. It was cool in the room under the revolving blades of the fan, and Hackberry dreamed he was in a naval hospital in the Philippines, sedated with morphine, a hospital corpsman no older than he pulling the syringe from his arm. A sun shower was blowing in from the bay, and outside his window, an orchid tree bloomed on the lawn, its lavender petals scattered on the clipped grass. In the distance, where the bay merged with water that was the dark blue of spilled ink, he could see the gray hulking outline of an aircraft carrier, its hard steel edges smudged by the rain.
The hospital was a safe place to be, and the memories of a POW camp south of the Yalu seemed to have little application in his life.
He heard thunder and wind in his sleep and the twang of wire on his back fence and tumbleweed bouncing against the side of his house and matting in his flower beds. Then he smelled rain blowing through his screens, sweeping in a rush across the housetop, filling the room with a freshness that was like spring or memories of hot summers when raindrops lit upon a heated sidewalk and created a smell that convinced you the season was eternal and one’s youth never faded.
The mist drifted through the window, touching his skin, dampening his pillow. He got up and closed the window and, in the distance, saw lightning strike a hillside, flaring inside a grove of blighted oaks that looked like gnarled fingers inside the illumination. He lay back down, his pillow over his face, and fell asleep again.
OUT ON THE road, a compact car passed in the darkness, its headlights off. There was a solitary hole in the back window, its edges shaped into a crystalline eye superimposed on the car’s dark interior. The driver steered with both hands around a rock that had rolled onto the road, avoiding a fence post and a tangle of barbed wire that had tilted out of a hillside. He passed a barn and a pasture with horses and a water tank in it, then turned out into a field and drove across a long stretch of Johnson grass and parked his car in a streambed next to a hill, the dry rocks crackling under his tires. He removed the submachine gun from behind his backseat, and the paper bag that contained two ammunition drums, then sat down on a flat rock, his hat tilted on his face, his unpressed secondhand pin-striped suit dotted with rain, a walking cane propped against his knee.
The wind blew open his coat and ruffled the brim of his hat, but his eyes did not blink, nor did his face show any expression. He stared listlessly at the grass bending around him and at a stump fire smoldering in the rain. The smoke from the fire smelled like burning garbage and made him clear his throat and spit. He fitted the ammunition drum onto his Thompson and pulled and released the bolt, feeding a round into the chamber. He remained seated for a long time, staring at nothing, the Thompson resting on his lap, his hands as relaxed as a child’s on its barrel and stock.
He did not know the hour and never wore jewelry or a watch when he worked. He did not measure the passage of time in terms of minutes or hours but in terms of events. There were no vehicles on the county road. There was no sign of activity inside the house he was about to invade. There were no insomniacs or early risers turning on lights in the neighborhood. There was a fire burning in the grass, and horses were nickering in the darkness, the smoke providing a plausible explanation for their sense of alarm. The sky was booming with thunderous explosions; not those of dry lightning but the kind that promised serious rain, perhaps even the kind of monsoon that gave back life to a desert. In spite of the acrid tinge of smoke inside the mist, the night was as lovely and normal as one could expect during the late summer in Southwest Texas.
Preacher stuffed his trousers inside the tops of his boots and upended his Thompson in one hand, the other gripping his cane, then began walking through a thicket toward the ranch house in the distance, his face as impervious as molded plastic to both the brambles and the rain.
WHEN SERGEANT KWONG visited Hackberry in his dreams, a burp gun was always hanging on a strap from his shoulder, and an ice hook dripped from the fingers of his right hand. Hackberry could even see the half-moons of dirt inside Kwong’s nails and the shine of his quilted coat that was slathered with dried mud, the sleeves marked with mucus where he had wiped his nose.
In the dream, Kwong fitted the hook through one of the iron squares in the sewer grate above Hackberry’s head and hoisted the grate onto a cusp of yellowed snow where Kwong had urinated. Hackberry was sitting with his back against the dirt wall of the hole, his knees drawn up before him, the inverted steel pot he defecated in resting by his foot. Kwong’s massive body was silhouetted against a salmon-colored sky, his face dark with shadow under a short-billed cloth cap tied with earflaps under his chin. His unshaved jaw was as big as a gorilla’s, the hair in his nose white with ice crystals, his breath fogging. Hackberry could hear other POWs being pulled out of their holes, shoved into a line, the guards talking louder, more clipped, angrier than usual, kicking anyone who didn’t move fast enough.
Kwong dropped the iron grate heavily onto the snow, shaking the hook free. “Climb up, cocksuck. Today your day,” he said.
Inside his dream, Hackberry tried to force himself back to the hospital in the Philippines, back to the moment when the navy corpsman had injected him with morphine and he could arbitrarily turn his head on the pillow and see the orchid tree blooming on the lawn and in the distance the misty gray outline of the aircraft carrier in the rain.
On the north side of the pasture, Preacher walked steadily through the Johnson grass, its wetness glistening on his boots, the butt of the Thompson riding on his hip, his walking cane spearing into the soft dirt. The palomino and chestnut geldings in the horse lot were spooking in the curds of smoke from the stump fire, whinnying, their ears back. High overhead, a plane with lighted windows was making an approach to a private airport, gliding through the rain and flickers of lightning to a safe harbor. The sheriff’s neighbors were sound asleep, confident of the sunrise and the goodness of the day that awaited them. As Preacher thought of these things, his energies grew in magnitude and intensity, like bees stirring to life inside a hive after a boy has disturbed it with a rock. He cast aside his walking cane and climbed through the rails of the horse lot and continued toward the house, the discomfort gone from his leg and foot, a marching band blaring in his head.
The two horses ran in different directions from him, their back hooves kicking blindly at the air. Up ahead, the house was dark, the windmill on the far side chained up, the blades and rudder trembling stiffly in the wind.
WHEN HACKBERRY JERKED awake, he tried to sit up in bed, then heard metal clink and felt his left wrist come tight against a chain. He pushed himself up against the bedstead, his vision unfocused, his left hand suspended foolishly in the air as though his motor controls had been cut.
“Whoa, hoss,” Preacher said. He was sitting in a chair in the corner, the Thompson across his lap. He had removed his hat and placed it crown-down on the dresser. His clothes were damp and smudged with ash and mud, his face and boots shiny with rainwater. “It’s already a done deal. Don’t hurt yourself unnecessarily.”
Hackberry could hear himself breathing. “You’re the one they call Preacher?”
“You knew I was coming, didn’t you?”
“No. For me, it’s not personal.”
“I was told you were asking Arthur Rooney about me, about my private life and such.”
“Whoever told you that is a damn liar.”
“Yeah, he probably is. But nonetheless, you’ve been looking for me, Sheriff Holland. So I found you instead.”
“I should have locked my door.”
“Think your broken air conditioner was coincidental?”
“You did it?”
“No, a man who works for me did.”
“What’s your business here, Mr. Collins?”
“You have to ask that?”
“Jack Collins is your real name? The one given you at birth?”
“What difference does it make?”
“In case you haven’t figured it out, nicknames are forms of disguise. I hear you’re supposed to be the left hand of God.”
“I never claimed it.”
“You let others do that for you. You don’t discourage them.”
“I don’t study on what other people say or think. Why do you keep favoring the other side of your bed, Sheriff?”
“I have problems with sciatica. I can’t lie in one position.”
“Is this what you’re looking for?” Preacher said, holding up Hackberry’s revolver.
“Maybe.”
“If you’re going to keep a weapon close by your bed, it should be a small one, a derringer or an Airweight you can tuck under your mattress or pillow so an intruder cain’t find it without waking you up. You favor a thumb-buster forty-five? That’s a lot like carrying around a junkyard on your hip, isn’t it?”
Hackberry looked through the screen door at the rain blowing in the pasture, his horses playing in it, rearing in mock combat, a stump fire glowing orange and hot under a log each time the wind fed fresh oxygen into the flames. “Do what you came to do and be done,” he said.
“I wouldn’t rush my fate if I were you.”
“You lecture others, a man who killed nine unarmed women, some of them hardly more than children? You think you’re the scourge of God? You’re a pimple on creation. I’ve known your kind all my life. You’re always looking for a cause or a flag to hide under. There’s no mystery to your psychological makeup, Collins. Your mother probably wanted you aborted and cursed the day you were born. I think you were despised in the womb.”
Preacher’s mouth was a stitched seam, as though he were taking the measure of each word Hackberry used. He huffed air out his nostrils indifferently. “Could be. I never got to know her real well. You’re a recipient of the Navy Cross.”
“So what?”
“I checked out your background. You don’t fit easily into one shoe box. You were a womanizer and a drunkard. While you were married and running for Congress, you were hiring Mexican girls down on the border. You ever carry diseases home to your wife?”
The ammunition drum on the Thompson rested between Preacher’s knees; the index finger of his right hand was poised outside the trigger guard. “The question isn’t a complicated one,” he said.
“You name it and I did it. Until I met the woman who became my second wife.”
“The Marxist?”
“She was an organizer for the United Farm Workers and a friend of Cesar Chavez.”
“That’s how you took up with the papists?”
“There’re worse groups.”
“The situation with those Oriental women wasn’t of my selection.”
“I dug them up. I saw your handiwork up close and personal. Run your bullshit on somebody else.”
“You found them?”
“At least one girl had dirt clenched in her palm. You know what that indicates?”
Preacher raised his index finger in the air. “I didn’t have control of what happened out there.”
“You’re using the passive voice.”
“What?”
“It involves manipulation of language to avoid admission of guilt.”
“You a grammarian besides a war hero?”
“There’s nothing heroic about my history. I informed on two fellow POWs.”
Preacher seemed to have lost interest in the subject. He scratched idly at his cheek with four fingers. “You afraid?”
“Of what?”
“The other side.”
“I’ve already been there.”
“Say again?”
“I looked into the eyes of a man just like you. He carried a burp gun that was made in China or Russia. He was a cruel man. I suspect his cruelty masked his innate cowardice. I never met a cruel man or a bully who wasn’t a coward.”
Preacher waved his hand at the air. “Be quiet.”
At first Hackberry thought his words had reached inside Preacher’s defense system, then realized the vanity of his perception. Preacher had risen from his chair, his attention fixed on the road, the Thompson slanted downward. He moved to the window. “She’s not the brightest bulb in the box, is she?”
“Who?”
“Your deputy, the one who killed Liam. She just turned on her interior light to write in her log.”
“She patrols this road when she has the night shift. She’s not part of this, Collins.”
“Oh, yes, she is, my friend.”
“You sonofabitch, you motherfucker.”
“What did you call me?”
“I’m the guy who came after you, Collins. Not my deputy. She takes orders. She’s not a player.”
“You insult my mother, but you ask immunity for your female friend? Her fate is on your conscience. Think back: the unlocked doors, pursu ing me outside your jurisdiction, the killing of Liam Eriksson. You engineered this, Sheriff. Look into my face. Look inside me. You see yourself.”
Preacher had leaned down to speak, his breath sour, a tiny web of saliva at the corner of his mouth. Hackberry grabbed Preacher’s shirt with one hand and knotted the cloth in his fist and pulled Preacher toward him. He spat full in his face, then gathered his spittle a second time and spat on him again and again, until his mouth was empty of moisture.
Preacher jerked away from him and drove the butt of the Thompson into the bridge of Hackberry’s nose, using both hands. He hit him again, this time in the head, splitting the scalp, raking the steel butt plate down Hackberry’s ear.
Preacher picked up his hat from the dresser and walked toward the side door. “I’ll be back to deal with you later. I’ll be the last thing you ever see. And you’ll beg to take back every word you said about my mother.”
Blood leaked out of Hackberry’s hair into his eyes. He watched impotently as Preacher went out the door into the yard, the Thompson tilted downward in his silhouette like a black exclamation point against the glow of the cruiser’s headlights.
Hackberry strained against the manacle on his left wrist, forming his fingers into a cone, trying to pull the back of his hand through the steel’s circumference, blood running in strings down his thumb, braiding off his nails. He got to his feet and, with both arms outstretched, jerked against the chain, which was locked by the other manacle around a thick dowel on the bedstead. Through the window, he could see Preacher far down the driveway, approaching Pam Tibbs’s cruiser, the rain swirling like spun glass around him, thunder rippling across the sky.
Hackberry saw Pam reach up and turn off the dome light. Then, for a reason he didn’t understand, the light went back on. Hackberry yelled at the top of his voice just as the bedstead splintered apart. Preacher fitted the Thompson to his shoulder, his right elbow pointed outward like a chicken’s wing, and aimed through the iron sights.
The eruption of fire from the barrel was like the jagged and erratic contortions of an electrical arc. The.45-caliber rounds blew the glass out of the back and side windows and stitched across the doors, ripping stuffing out of the seats, exploding a side mirror, tattering the hood, flattening a tire in under a second.
Hackberry tore the handcuffs loose from the destroyed bedstead and found his holstered revolver on the floor where Preacher had placed it. He ran barefoot into the side yard just as Preacher let off another burst, this time holding the Thompson against his hip, spraying the cruiser from one end to the other. A flame glowed under the hood, then seemed to drip from the engine onto the asphalt and race backward toward the gasoline tank. There was no transition between the moment of ignition and the explosion that followed. A fireball exploded from the car’s frame, filling the windows, roasting the interior, rising into the darkness in a dirty red-black scorch that gave off a smell like an incinerator behind a rendering plant. Hackberry felt the whoosh of heat float across the lawn and touch his face.
“Collins!” he shouted. He saw Preacher turn, framed against the burning car. Hackberry raised his revolver and aimed with both hands and fired once, the report deafening, the recoil like the kick of a jackhammer. He steadied the front sight and fired two more shots, but he was too far away from his target, and he heard the rounds strike stone or the top of a rise and whine into the darkness with a sound like the tremolo of a broken banjo string.
He saw Preacher move out of the light and head for the north pasture, unhurried, holding the Thompson by the pistol grip, the barrel pointed at the sky, glancing back at Hackberry only once.
The rain steamed on the smoldering remains of the cruiser, the flames in the grass burning outward in a ring, the mesquite starting to catch and flare like fireflies. There was no movement anywhere near the cruiser. The airbags in the front seat had inflated and exploded in the heat and were now draped on the steering wheel and blackened seats and dashboard like curtains of ash. Hackberry could feel his eyes brimming with water. He followed Preacher into the pasture, the rain blowing in his face, his two geldings terrified. Inside the flash of lightning in the clouds, he thought he saw Preacher climbing through the rails of the north fence. He fired once, or was it twice, with no effect.
He stepped on a fence clip and felt the aluminum tip slice through the ball of his foot. Then Preacher was out in the pasture, out of the shadows, past the stump fire. Hackberry paused at the fence and fired again. This time he saw Preacher’s coat jump, as though a gust of wind had caught it and flapped it loose from his side. Hackberry climbed through the fence and went deeper into the Johnson grass, toward a thicket behind which a compact car was parked.
Preacher opened the compact’s door. Almost as an afterthought, he turned and faced Hackberry, his Thompson lowered. He smiled at the corner of his mouth. “You’re a persistent man, Holland.”
Hackberry raised his revolver with both hands, cocked back the hammer, and sighted on Preacher’s face. “Send me a postcard and tell me how you like hell,” he said. He squeezed the trigger. But the hammer snapped on a spent cartridge.
“You lose, bub,” Preacher said.
“Be done with it.”
“I don’t have to. I’m stronger than you are. I’ll live inside your thoughts the rest of your life. The woman I just killed will become my friend and haunt your sleep. Welcome to the great shade.”
Preacher got in his car, started the engine, and drove slowly out of the field. After he had passed the burned shell of the cruiser, he turned on his headlights and proceeded down the county road toward town, the pocked hole in his rear window glinting like a crystal eye.
Hackberry walked out of the field onto the asphalt, the blood in his hair mixing with the rain, running through his eyebrows and down his face. In the way that dreams turn out to be only dreams, he saw an image in the mist that made no sense, that was out of place and time, that was like the reversal of a film whose frames contained material that was unacceptable and had to be corrected.
Pam Tibbs was climbing from the rain ditch that paralleled the far side of the road, her clothes powdered with soot, her face smudged and streaked with rain.
“Oh, Pam,” he said.
She stepped out on the road, her eyes watering in the black smoke blowing off the cruiser’s tires. She seemed disoriented, as though the earth were shifting under her feet. She looked at him woodenly. “I’d gotten out of the cruiser. I thought I hit a deer. A doe with two fawns ran in front of me. One of the fawns was making a sound like it was hurt or frightened. But they’re not here. I think the explosion knocked me unconscious.”
“I was sure you were dead.”
“You’re hurt,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
“Is Collins still here?”
“He’s gone. You have your cell?”
He saw that it was already in her hand. He took it from her, but his fingers were shaking so badly that she had to make the 911 call for him.