THE PREVIOUS DAY Hackberry Holland had given over the back bedroom and the half-bath of his house to Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores. In the first silvery glow on the horizon the next morning, he could not account to himself for his actions. He owed Flores and Gaddis nothing on a personal basis. He was incurring legal and political risk, and at the least, he was ensuring the permanent enmity of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI. Age was supposed to bring detachment from all the self-evaluative processes that kept people locked inside their heads. As with most of the other aphorisms associated with getting old, he thought this one a lie.
He showered and shaved and dressed and went out to the horse lot to clean off the top of the tank for his foxtrotters and to fill it with fresh water. On the lip of the tank, he had constructed a safety “ladder” out of chicken wire for field mice and squirrels who, during drought or severe heat spells, would otherwise climb up the water pipe onto the tank’s edge in order to drink and fall in and drown. The chicken wire was molded over the aluminum rim, extending into the water, so small animals could climb back out. While Hackberry skimmed bird feathers and bits of hay off the tank’s surface, his two foxtrotters kept nuzzling him, breathing warmly on his neck, nipping at his shirt when he paid them no mind.
“You guys want a slap?” he said.
No reaction.
“Why’d we bring these kids to our house, fellows?”
Still no response.
He went inside the barn and used a push broom to begin cleaning the concrete pad that ran the length of the stalls. The dust from the dried hay and manure floated in the light. Through the barn doors, he could see the wide sweep of the land and hills that were rounded like a woman’s breasts, and the mountains to the south, across the Rio Grande, where John Pershing’s buffalo soldiers had pursued Pancho Villa’s troops fruitlessly in 1916. Then he realized there was a difference in the morning. Dew was shining on the windmill and the fences; there was a softness in the sunrise that had not been there yesterday. The air was actually cool, blessed with a breeze out of the north, as though the summer were letting go, finally surrendering to its own seasonal end and the advent of fall. Why couldn’t he resign himself to the nature of things and stop contending with mortality? What was the passage from Ecclesiastes? “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever”?
Eleven thousand years ago people who may or may not have been Indians lived in these hills and wended their way along the same riverbeds and canyons and left behind arrowheads that looked like Folsom points. Nomadic hunters followed the buffalo here, and primitive farmers grew corn and beans in the alluvial fan of the Rio Grande, and conquistadores carrying the cross and the sword and the cannon that could fire iron balls into Indian villages had left their wagon wheels and armor and bones under cactuses whose bloodred flowers were not coincidental.
Right here he had found the backdrop for the whole human comedy. And what was the lesson in any of it? Hackberry’s father the history professor had always maintained the key to understanding our culture lay in the names of Shiloh and Antietam. It was only in their aftermath that we discovered how many of our own countrymen-who spoke the same language and practiced the same religion and lived on the same carpet like, green, undulating, limestone-ridged farmland-we would willingly kill in support of causes that were not only indefensible but had little to do with our lives.
At six A.M. Hackberry saw Pam Tibbs’s cruiser turn off the asphalt road and come under the arch and up his driveway. She parked the cruiser and unchained the pedestrian gate on the horse lot and walked toward him with a big brown paper bag hanging from her right hand.
“Are Gaddis and Flores up yet?” she said.
“I didn’t notice.”
“Did you eat?”
“Nope.”
“I brought you some melted-cheese-and-egg-and-ham sandwiches and some coffee and a couple of fried pies.”
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me something.”
“Talk to the state attorney’s office. Get somebody on your side.”
“Wars of enormous importance are always fought in places nobody cares about, Pam. This is our home. We take care of it.”
“That’s what this is about, isn’t it? The outside world came across the moat.”
Hackberry propped the push broom against a stall and took two folding chairs out of the tack room and set them up on the concrete pad. He took the paper bag from Pam’s hand and waited for her to sit down. Then he sat down and opened the bag but did not remove anything from it.
“Some of the Asian women had eight-ball hemorrhages. I see their eyes staring at me in my sleep. I want Collins dead. I want this guy Arthur Rooney dead and this guy Hugo Cistranos dead. The feds are after a Russian out in Phoenix. Their workload is greater than ours, and their priorities are different from ours. It’s that simple.”
“I doubt they’ll be that tolerant.”
“That’s their problem.”
“Flores seems like a nice kid, but he’s a five-star fuckup.”
“Y’all talking about me?” Pete said from the doorway.
Pam Tibbs’s face turned as red as a sunburn. Pete was smiling, silhouetted against the sunrise, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of fresh jeans he had tucked into his boots.
“We were wondering if you and Vikki would like to have breakfast with us,” Hackberry said.
“There’s something I didn’t pass on yesterday,” Pete said. “I don’t think it’s a big deal, but Vikki did. When Danny Boy picked us up, he had to stop for gas at that filling station run by Ouzel Flagler’s brother. I just thought I’d mention it.”
Pam Tibbs looked at Hackberry, her lips pursed, her eyes lidless.
“Some people say Ouzel is mixed up with Mexican dope mules and such, but I don’t set a lot of store in that. He seems pretty much a harmless guy to me. What do y’all think?” Pete said.
THE FIRST MORNING that he woke in Preacher’s tent, Bobby Lee could feel the difference in the temperature. He pushed open the flap and felt a great cushion of cool air rising off the earth, glazing the mesas and monument rocks and creosote brush and spavined trees with dew, even staining the soil with dark areas of moisture, as though an erratic rain shower had blown across the land during the night.
Preacher was still asleep on his cot, his head deep in a striped pillow that had no pillowcase and had been stained by the grease from his hair. Bobby Lee went outside and used the chemical toilet and started a fire in the woodstove. He filled a spouted metal pot with water from the hundred-gallon drum Preacher had paid four Mexicans to mount on eight-foot stanchions; he poured coffee grounds into the pot and set it on the stove. When the sun broke above the horizon, the wood framing of Preacher’s new house, constructed by the same Mexicans-all illegals who spoke no English-stood out in skeletal relief against the vastness of the landscape, as though it did not belong there or, if it did, it marked the beginning of a great societal and environmental change about to take place. The wind came up, and Bobby Lee watched the burned books from Preacher’s house that had been bulldozed into a pile of debris blow away in gray and blackened scraps of paper. Was a change of some kind taking place before Bobby Lee’s eyes? Was he witness to events that, as Preacher constantly suggested, were prophesied thousands of years ago?
Preacher had told Bobby Lee he would be part of the new place. If his name was not on the deed, he would nonetheless be bonded to the property and the house by Preacher’s word. Was it possible for Preacher and Bobby Lee to get the mow-down behind them and resolve their problems with Hugo Cistranos and Artie Rooney and this Russian Sholokoff? It happened. He knew retired button men in Miami and Hallandale who had done thirty or forty hits in New York and Boston and Jersey and never gone down on a serious beef and today had no one looking at them. The guys who had killed Jimmy Hoffa and Johnny Roselli had never been in custody, guys who might have even been involved with the murder of John Kennedy. If those guys could skate, anybody could.
When the coffee boiled, he used a dish towel to pour a tin cup full from the pot, then lifted the cup to his mouth. The coffee, grounds and all, scalding hot, landed on his stomach lining like a cupful of acid.
He went back inside the tent. Preacher was up, pulling on his pants. “You look like you’re having some kind of discomfort there, Bobby Lee,” he said.
“I think I got an ulcer.”
“You got coffee out there?”
“I’ll get you some.” Thanks for the concern, Bobby Lee said to himself. He went back outside and filled a second tin cup. He opened the wooden icebox and took out a perforated can of condensed milk and a box of sugar cubes. “You take sugar or you don’t?” he called out.
“You don’t remember?” Preacher said through the flap.
“I get it mixed up.”
“Two cubes and a half teaspoon of canned milk.”
Bobby Lee brought the cup back inside the tent and placed it in Preacher’s hand. “You’re not diabetic?”
“No, I told you that.”
“So you avoid alcohol out of principle rather than for health reasons?”
“Why should you care, Bobby Lee?”
“Just one of those things. Liam and me were talking once about how you got medical issues of some kind.”
Preacher was standing up over his writing table, unshaved, wearing an unironed white shirt. He drank from his cup, touching his lips gingerly against the rim. “Why would you and Liam be talking about my health?”
“I don’t remember the circumstances.”
“You think I have a health problem that people need to know about?”
“No, Jack, I know you’re good about taking care of yourself, is all. Liam and me were just making conversation.”
“But a man like Liam Eriksson was intensely concerned about my well-being?”
“Wish I hadn’t brought it up.”
“Did Liam bring it up?”
“Maybe. I don’t remember.”
Preacher sat down on his unmade cot and set his coffee on the writing table. Before going to bed, he had been playing blackjack against himself. The deck was splayed facedown on the table. Two cards had been dealt faceup to the imaginary player. The dealer’s hole card was facedown. The second dealer’s card had not been dealt. “What do you reckon has given you that ulcer?”
“Everything went south because of the Asian women. It was a mistake that just happened. You and me shouldn’t have to pay the price. It’s not fair.”
“You’re still a fish.”
“About what?”
“We weren’t hijacking the women. We were hijacking the heroin in their stomachs. They started going nuts on us, and Hugo decided to waste the whole bunch and use the lot behind the church as a storage area. He was going to dig them up later.”
“That’s sick.”
“But this Holland fellow came along and changed all that. What I’m saying to you is there are no accidents.”
Bobby Lee wasn’t about to enter into Preacher’s psychotic frame of reference. “What if we get out of the country for a while? Let everything cool off?”
“You disappoint me.”
“Come on, don’t talk to me like that, man.”
“We’ve got Arthur Rooney and Hugo to deal with. Sholokoff is going to send another hit team after us. I’ve got all that federal heat coming down on me because of that fellow from ICE. I don’t think I’m quite finished with Sheriff Holland, either. He spat on me. The girl did, too.”
“Jesus, Jack.”
“Also, I’ve still got my commitments with the Jewish family.”
“That last bit just won’t go down the pipe. I can’t fathom that, man. It’s absolutely beyond me.”
“That I’m not bothered because Mrs. Dolan got upset and attacked me?”
“In a word, yeah.”
“Mrs. Dolan is Jewish royalty. For some, a woman is a pair of thighs and breasts, something you can put your seed in so she can wash it out. But I don’t think you’re that kind, Bobby Lee.”
Bobby Lee let the image slide off his face. “I got to ask you something.”
“Is my mother really buried under this tent?”
“That’s part of it.”
“What’s the rest?”
“Like what happened to her?”
“How did she end her days?”
“Yeah, I mean like she got sick or she was old or she got hurt in an accident?”
“That’s a complex question. See, I’m not sure if she’s under this tent, or if only part of her is. I buried her after a hard freeze. I had to build a fire on the ground and use a pickax to chop the grave. So I didn’t go very deep with it. Not knowing a lot back then about predators and such, I didn’t cover the mound with stones. When I came back a year later, critters had dug her up and strung her around about forty or fifty yards. I put what I could back in the hole and packed the dirt down tight, but to tell the truth, I’m not sure how much of her is down there. There were a lot of other bones around.”
“Jack, did you-”
“What?”
“Shit happens. Like did you have to do something to your mother?”
“Yeah, it does. Get me a refill, will you? My leg is hurting.”
Bobby Lee went outside with Preacher’s cup just as the Mexican carpenters arrived to resume the framing on Preacher’s house. Bobby Lee went back inside the tent, forgetting to add either sugar or condensed milk to the cup. Preacher was staring into space, his expression like a blunted ax blade. He took the cup from Bobby Lee’s hand. The coffee was even hotter now than when Bobby Lee had first made it.
“Answer the question, Jack.”
“Did I kill my own mother? Good God, son, what kind of person do you think I am? Let me show you something.” Preacher picked up the splayed deck from the writing table and squared the cards between his palms. He turned up the dealer’s hole card and looked at it blankly. It was the ace of spades. The imaginary player’s two cards were a ten and an ace of hearts. Preacher squeezed the top card off the deck with his thumb and flopped it faceup on top of the dealer’s ace. “Queen of spades,” he said. “Blackjack. See, the story is already written, Bobby Lee. A fellow just has to be patient, and his queen comes along.”
“You actually let the Gaddis girl spit on you?”
Preacher placed his tin cup to his mouth and drank it to the bottom without ever flinching, his lips discoloring from the intense heat. He thought for a long time and pulled at the corner of his eye. “She did it because she was scared. I don’t fault her for it. Besides, she’s not the woman I want or I’m supposed to have.”
“I never can figure you out.”
“Life is a flat-out puzzle, isn’t it?” Preacher said.
“CAN YOU CLIP a horse’s feet?” Hackberry said.
Pete was mucking out a stall in the back of the barn with a broad-billed coal shovel. He straightened from his work, his skin and hair damp in the gloom. “Sir?”
Hackberry repeated the question.
“I’ve done it once or twice,” Pete said.
“Good, you can help me now. You ever give a horse his penile procedure?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You’d remember.”
They put headstalls on both colts and tethered one to the hitching post in front of the barn and walked the palomino named Love That Santa Fe around the side into the shade.
“Santa Fe doesn’t like people messing with his back feet, so he tends to spook,” Hackberry said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Hold the lead.”
“Yes, sir, got it.”
“You say you’ve done this before?”
“Sure.”
“When you hold the lead and the farrier is working in back, don’t stand catty-corner to him. If the horse spooks, he’ll pull away from you and fall backward on the farrier.”
“I can see that might be a problem.”
“Thank you.” Hackberry bent over and cradled the hind left foot of the horse against his thighs and began trimming the edges of the hoof, the half-moon strips of horn dropping into the dust. He felt Santa Fe surge and try to straighten his leg and pull against the lead. “Hold him,” Hackberry said.
“I’m not exactly playing with myself up here,” Pete said.
Hackberry smoothed the edges and bottom of the hoof with his rasp, still fighting the resistance of a three-year-old horse weighing eleven hundred pounds. “Dammit, boy, hold him,” he said.
“I’d sure like to get a job in your department. I bet it’s fun,” Pete said.
Hackberry dropped Santa Fe’s foot to the ground and straightened up, closing his eyes, waiting for the pain in his lower back to go to the place that pain eventually went to.
“You got sciatica?”
“Get the chairs back out of the tack room, will you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Hackberry pressed his hands against the barn wall and stretched one leg at a time behind him, like a man trying to push down a building. He heard Pete unfold the chairs and set them on the ground. Hackberry sat down and removed his hat and wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist. It was comfortable in the shade, the heat of the day trapped inside the sunshine, the wind puffing the mulberry tree in the backyard.
“Who was the shooter at the church?” Hackberry said.
“The one actually did it?”
“Who was he?”
“This guy Preacher, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I didn’t see it. I got out of the truck to take a leak and took off when the shooting started.”
“Who had the Thompson?”
“The guy named Hugo. It was in a canvas bag with the ammo pan. He said it belonged to the most dangerous man in Texas.”
“Did you ever see Preacher?”
“No, sir, I never saw him. The only guy I saw up close was Hugo. It was in the dash light of the truck. There were other guys out there in the dark, but I don’t know who they were. One guy had a beard, I think. I just saw him in the headlights for a second. Maybe the beard was red or orange.”
“Was his name Liam or Eriksson?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Who hired you for the job?”
“An ole boy I was drinking with. But he didn’t show up at the convoy.”
“Convoy?”
“There was one truck and an SUV and a couple of cars.”
“Where were you drinking when you met the guy who hired you?”
“At Ouzel’s place. Or at least I think I was.”
“What was this ole boy’s name?”
“I don’t know. I was drunk.”
“So as far as you know, the shooter could have been Hugo, not Preacher?”
“It could have been anybody. I told you, sir, I took off.”
“Did you see the women?”
“Yes, sir.”
Pete was sitting in one of the two folding chairs he had set up, his eyes averted, his shoulders rounded like the top of a question mark. He folded his arms across his chest and lowered his chin.
“Did you talk to the women?”
“A girl fell down getting into the truck, and I he’ped her up.”
Hackberry could hear the wind gusting through the grass and the screens on the far side of the barn. “By that time you knew you weren’t bringing in wets?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who did you think these women were?”
“I didn’t want to know.”
“Housemaids?”
“No, sir.”
“Fieldworkers?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you think they were going to start up a laundry?”
“I figured they were prostitutes. And I figured if they weren’t prostitutes already, somebody was fixing to turn them into prostitutes.” Pete’s eyes were shiny when he glanced sideways at Hackberry.
“You think I’m being too hard on you?”
“No, sir.”
“That’s good, because the feds are going to be a lot harder.”
“I don’t care. I got to live with what I did. Fuck them.”
“They’re just doing their job, Pete. But that doesn’t mean we won’t do ours.”
“I cain’t translate that.”
“What that means is I don’t think your legal value is worth horse piss on a hot rock.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“I suspect both of us will find out directly.”
Pete stared in confusion at the sky and at the wind in the trees and at the shimmer of sunlight on the water brimming over the edge of the horse tank. “I wish I’d ate an AK round in Baghdad.”
HACKBERRY HAD TOLD Pete and Vikki to stay close to the house, then had gone to town in his truck to buy groceries. Pete and Vikki sat on the gallery in the late-Saturday-afternoon haze and drank limeade from a pitcher that was beaded with moisture from the icebox. In the west, great orange and mauve-tinted clouds rose out of the hills, as though a brush fire were racing up the arroyos on their opposite slopes. Vikki tuned her sunburst Gibson and formed an E chord and ticked the plectrum across the strings, the notes rolling out of the sound hole.
Pete wore his straw hat, even though they were sitting in shade. “You know those big herds the drovers used to move from Mexico up the Chisholm and the Goodnight-Loving? Some of them came right through here. Lot of those cows went plumb to Montana.”
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Montana.”
“Maybe Montana is not all you think it is.”
“I suspect it’s that and more. People say British Columbia is even better. They say Lake Louise is green like the Caribbean and has a big white glacier at the head of it and yellow poppies all around the banks. Can you imagine having a ranch in a place like that?”
“You’re the dreamer, Pete.”
“A song-catcher is calling me a dreamer?”
“I said ‘the’ dreamer. Of the two of us, it’s you who has the real vision.”
“You sing spirituals in beer joints.”
“They’re not really beer joints. So there’s nothing special about what I’ve done. You’re the poet. You have faith in things there’s no reason to believe in.”
“Want to take a walk?”
“Sheriff Holland wants us to stay close by.”
“It’s Saturday evening, and we’re sitting on the front porch like old people,” he said. “What’s the harm?”
She put away her Gibson, snapped the latches on the case, and set the case inside the door. In the south pasture, the quarter horses had moved into the shadows created by the poplar trees. The sky was golden, the tannic smell of dead leaves on the wind. Up on a hillside, Vikki thought she saw a reflection, an ephemeral glitter, like sunlight striking on a piece of foil that had gotten caught in the branch of a cedar tree. Then it was gone. “I’ll leave a note,” she said.
They walked up the road into shade that was lengthening from a hill, the breeze at their backs, the two foxtrotters walking along the railed fence with them. They rounded a curve and saw a deer trail that switch-backed up a hillside. Vikki shaded her eyes with one hand and stared at the place where the trail disappeared into an arroyo strewn with rocks that looked like yellow chert. She stared at the hillside until her eyes watered.
“What are you looking at?” Pete asked.
“I thought I saw a reflection behind that boulder up there.”
“What kind of reflection?”
“Like sunlight hitting glass.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“I don’t, either. At least not now,” she said.
“In Afghanistan, I’d pray for wind.”
“Why?”
“If there were a lot of trees and the wind started to blow and one thing in the trees didn’t move with the wind, that’s where the next RPG was coming from.”
“Pete?”
The change in her voice made him turn his head and forget about the reflection on the hillside or his story about Afghanistan.
“I’m afraid,” she said.
“You’ve never been afraid of anything. You’re braver than I am.”
“I think you’re right about Montana or British Columbia. I think we’re about to turn over our lives to people we don’t know and shouldn’t trust.”
“Sheriff Holland seems to be on the square.”
“He’s a county sheriff in a place nobody cares about. He’s an elderly man whose back is coming off his bones.”
“Don’t let him hear you say that.”
“It’s the goodness in you that hurts you most, Pete.”
“Nothing hurts me when you’re around.”
He put his arm over her shoulders, and the two of them walked past the last fence on Hackberry Holland’s property and followed a trail between two hills that led to a creek and the back lot of an African-American church where the congregation had assembled in the shade of three giant cottonwoods. The creek was of a sandy-red color and had been dammed up with bricks and chunks of concrete, forming a pool that swelled out into the roots of the trees.
The men were dressed in worn suits and white shirts and ties that didn’t match the color of their coats, the women in either white dresses or dark colors that absorbed heat as quickly as wool might.
“Will you look at that,” Vikki said.
“You didn’t get dunked when you were baptized?”
“There’re no white people there at all. I think we’re intruding.”
“They’re not paying us any mind. It’s worse if we walk away and make noise. There’s a willow tree yonder. Let’s sit under it a minute or two.”
The minister escorted a huge woman into the pool, the immersion gown she wore ballooning up like white gauze around her knees. The minister cupped one hand behind her neck and lowered her backward into the pool. Her breasts were as taut and dark and heavy as watermelons under her gown. The surface of the pool closed over her hair and eyes and nose and mouth, and she grasped the minister’s arm with a rigidity that indicated the level of her fear. On the bank, the leaves of the cottonwoods seemed to flicker in the wind with a green-gold kinetic light.
The minister raised his eyes to his congregants. “Jesus told the apostles to go not unto the Gentiles. He sent them first unto the oppressed and the forlorn. And that’s how our shackles have been broken, my brothers and sisters. I now baptize Sister Dorothea in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And we welcome our white brethren who are watching us now from the other side of our little Jordan.”
Vikki and Pete were sitting in the shade on a pad of grass under the willow tree. Pete plucked a long, thin blade of grass and put it in his mouth. “So much for anonymity,” he said.
She brushed at a fly on the side of his face, then looked in a peculiar way at the back of her hand. “What’s that?” she said.
“What’s what?” Pete said. His arms were locked around his knees, his attention fixed on the baptism.
“There was a red dot on my hand.”
“Just then?”
“Yes, it moved across my hand. I saw it when I touched your face.”
He got to his feet and pulled her erect, looking up through the leaves at the side of the hill. He pushed her behind him, deeper into the shade, under the cover of the tree.
“Give me your hand,” he said.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for an insect bite.”
“I wasn’t bitten by an insect.”
He looked out again from under the tree’s canopy at the hillside, his eyes sweeping over the scattered rocks, the piñon and juniper spiked into soil that was little more than gravel, the shadows inside an arroyo and the scrub brush that grew along its rim, the shale that had avalanched down from a collapsed fire road. Then he saw a glassy reflection at the top of a ridge and, for under a second, an electric red pinpoint racing past his feet.
“It’s a laser sight,” he said, stepping backward. “Get behind the tree trunk. They don’t have the angle yet.”
“Who? What angle?”
“That bastard Hugo or whoever works for him. That’s what Collins said, right? Hugo wanted to do both of us? They cain’t get a clear shot yet.”
“There’s a sniper up there?”
“Somebody with a laser sight, that’s for sure.”
She took a deep breath and blew it out. She opened her cell phone and stared at it. Her blue-green eyes were bright in the shade, locked on his. “No bars,” she said.
“We don’t have a lot of time. A nine-one-one call wouldn’t he’p us.”
“What do you want to do?”
The fact that her question indicated options seemed testimony to the quality he admired most in her, namely her refusal to let others control her life, regardless of the risk she had to incur. He wanted to hold her against his chest. “Wait them out,” he said.
“What if they work their way down the hill?”
His head was hammering. If he yelled out to the congregants, they would scatter and run, and the rifleman on the hill would have no reason not to fire round after round through the branches of the willow.
“Pete, I’d rather die than live like this.”
“Live like how?”
“Hiding, being afraid all the time. Nothing is worth that.”
“Sometimes you have to live to fight another day.”
“But we don’t fight another day. We hide. We’re hiding now.”
“You told Jack Collins to go to hell. You spit on him.”
“I told him to rape me if he wanted. I told him I wouldn’t resist.”
Pete rubbed his palm across his mouth. His hand was dry and callused and made a grating sound on his skin. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“Because I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“I think I’m going to kill that fellow if I catch up with him. You don’t think I’ll do it, but there’s a part of me you don’t know about.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“You stay here. Don’t move for any reason. I need your word on that.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m gonna take it to them.”
“That’s insane.”
“It’s the last thing that guy up there expects.”
“No, you’re not going out there by yourself.”
“Let go of me, Vikki.”
“We do it together, Pete.”
He tried to pry her hands from his arm. “I can make that boulder over yonder, then head up the arroyo.”
“I’ll follow you if you do.”
There was nothing for it. “We cross the creek and get into the cottonwoods. Then we go through the back door of the church and out the front.”
“What about the black people?” she said.
“We’re out of choices,” he replied.
THE TWO MEN had followed the couple down below by first climbing the hill and then walking the ridgeline, peeking over the summit when necessary, threading their way through rocks and twisted juniper trunks that had been bleached gray by the sun. One of the men carried a bolt-action rifle on a leather sling. A large telescopic sight was mounted above the chamber, the front lens capped with a dustcover. Both men were breathing hard and sweating heavily and trying to avoid looking directly into the western sun.
They couldn’t believe their bad luck when they crawled up to the edge of the summit and saw the couple walking under a willow tree.
“We stumbled into a colored baptism,” the man with the rifle said.
“Keep the larger picture in mind, T-Bone. Let the coloreds take care of themselves,” the other man said.
T-Bone peered through his telescopic sight and saw a flash of skin through the branches. He activated his laser and moved it across the leaves until it lit upon the side of someone’s face. Then the wind gusted and the target disappeared. He paused and tried again, but all he could see was the pale green uniformity of the tree’s canopy. “I’d scrub this one, Hugo,” he said.
“You’re not me,” Hugo said. His browned skin was powdered with dust so that the whites of his eyes looked stark and theatrical in his face. He folded a handkerchief in a square and positioned it on a rock so he could kneel without causing himself more discomfort than necessary. He drummed his fingers on a piece of slag and took the measure of the man he was with, his impatience and irritability barely restrained. “Keep your head down, T-Bone.”
“That’s what we’ve been doing. My back feels like the spring on a jack-in-the-box.”
“Don’t silhouette on a hill, and don’t let the sunlight reflect on your face. It’s like looking up at an airplane. You might as well be a signal mirror. Another basic infantry lesson-you shouldn’t have all that civilian jewelry on you.”
“Thanks for passing that on, Hugo. But I say we wait till dark and start over at the house.”
Hugo didn’t reply. He was wondering if they could work their way down the arroyo for at least two clear shots, then get back over the ridge and down to their vehicle before the black people realized what had happened in their midst.
“Did you hear what I said?” T-Bone asked.
“Yes, I did. We take them now.”
“I just don’t get what’s going on. Why’d Preacher and Bobby Lee turn on us? Why didn’t they pop the kid and his girl when they had the chance?”
“Because Preacher is a maniac, and Bobby Lee is a treacherous little shit.”
“So we’re doing this for Arthur Rooney?”
“Don’t fret yourself about it.”
“Those bikers Preacher hosed down?”
“What about them?”
“They worked for Josef Sholokoff?”
“Could be, but they’re not our concern,” Hugo said, cupping his hand on T-Bone’s shoulder. T-Bone had sweated through his clothes, and his shirt felt as soggy as a wet washcloth. Hugo wiped his palm on his trousers. He looked down at the top of the willow tree and at the sandy-red stream and at the black minister and his congregants, who seemed distracted by something the white couple were doing.
“Get ready,” Hugo said.
“For what?”
“Our friends are about to make their move. Put a little more of your heart in it. That boy down there made a fool out of you, didn’t he?”
“I never said that. I said Bobby Lee double-crossed us. I never said anybody made a fool out of me. People don’t make a fool out of me.”
“Sorry, I just misspoke.”
“I don’t like this. This whole gig is wrong.”
“We take them now. Concentrate on your shot. The priority is the boy. Take the girl if you can. Do it, T-Bone. This is one thing you’re really good at. I’m proud of you.”
T-Bone wrapped the rifle sling around his left forearm and clicked off the safety. He moved into a more comfortable position, his left elbow anchored in a sandy spot free of sharp rocks, the steel toes of his hobnailed work shoes dug into the hillside, his scrotum tingling against the ground.
“There they go. Take the shot,” Hugo said.
“The minister is walking a little girl into the creek.”
“Take the shot.”
“Flores and the girl are holding hands. I cain’t see for a clear shot.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The minister and a little girl are right behind them.”
“Take the shot.”
“Stop yelling.”
“You want me to do it? Take the shot.”
“There’s colored people everywhere. You whack them and it’s a hate crime.”
“They can afford to lose a few. Take the shot.”
“I’m trying.”
“Give me the rifle.”
“I’ll do it. Let them get clear.” T-Bone raised the barrel slightly, leading his target, his unshaved jaw pressed into the stock, his left eye squinted shut. “Ah, beautiful. Yes, yes, yes. So long, alligator boy.”
But he didn’t pull the trigger.
“What happened?” Hugo said.
T-Bone pulled back from the crest, his face glistening and empty, like that of a starving man who had just been denied access to the table. “They went up the steps into the back of the church. I lost them in the gloom. I didn’t have anything but a slop shot.”
Hugo hit the flat of his fist on the ground, his teeth gritted.
“It’s not my fault,” T-Bone said.
“Whose is it?”
T-Bone worked the bolt on his rifle and opened the breech, ejecting the unfired round. It was a soft-nosed.30-06, its brass case a dull gold in the twilight. He fitted it back into the magazine with his thumb and eased the bolt back into place and locked it down so the chamber was empty. He rolled on his back and squinted up at Hugo, his eyelashes damp with perspiration. “You bother me.”
“I bother you?”
“Yeah.”
“You care to tell me why?”
“’Cause I never saw you scared before. Has ole Jack Collins got you in his sights? ’Cause if you ask me, somebody has got you plumb scared to death.”