WHEN HACKBERRY GOT back home from the grocery store in town, the sun had melted into a brassy pool somewhere behind the hills far to the west of his property. The blades on his windmill were unchained and ginning rapidly in the evening breeze, and inside the shadows on his south pasture, he could see well water gushing from a pipe into the horse tank. Once again he thought he smelled an odor of chrysanthemums or leakage from a gas well on the wind, or perhaps it was lichen or toadstools, the kind that grew carpetlike inside perennial shade, often on graves.
For many years Saturday nights had not boded well for him. After sunset he became acutely aware of his wife’s absence, the lack of sound and light she had always created in the kitchen while she prepared a meal they would eat on the backyard picnic table. Their pleasures had always been simple ones: time with their children; the movies they saw every Saturday night in town, no matter what was playing, at a theater where Lash La Rue had once performed onstage with his coach whip; attending Mass at a rural church where the homily was always in Spanish; weeding their flower beds together and, in the spring, planting veg etables from seed packets, staking the empty packets, crisp and stiff, at the end of each seeded row.
When he thought too long on any of these things, he was filled with such an unrelieved sense of loss that he would call out in the silence, sharply and without shame, lest he commit an act that was more than foolish. Or he would telephone his son the boat skipper in Key West or the other twin, the oncologist, in Phoenix, and pretend he was checking up on them. Did they need help buying a new home? What about starting up a college fund for the grandchildren? Were the kingfish running? Would the grandkids like to go look for the Lost Dutchman’s mine in the Superstitions?
They were good sons and invited him to their homes and visited him whenever they could, but Saturday night alone was still Saturday night alone, and the silence in the house could be louder than echoes in a tomb.
Hackberry hefted the grocery sacks and two boxed hot pizzas from his truck and carried them through the back door of the house into the kitchen.
Pete Flores and Vikki Gaddis were waiting for him at the breakfast table, both of them obviously tense, their mouths and cheeks soft, as though they were rehearsing unspoken words on their tongues. In fact, inside the ambience of scrubbed Formica and plastic-topped and porcelain perfection that was Hackberry’s kitchen, they had the manner of people who had wandered in off the highway and had to explain their presence. If they had been smokers, an ashtray full of cigarette butts would have been smoldering close by; their hands would have been busy lighting fresh cigarettes, snapping lighters shut; they would have blown streams of smoke out the sides of their mouths and feigned indifference to the trouble they had gotten themselves into. Instead, their forearms were pressed flat on the yellow table, and there was a glitter in their eyes that made him think of children who were about to be ordered by a cruel parent to cut their own switch.
Whatever was bothering them, Hackberry did not appreciate being treated as a presumption or an authority figure with whom they had to reconcile their behavior. He set the groceries and the pizza boxes on the table. “What did I miss out on?”
“Somebody was trying to take a shot at us,” Pete said.
“Where?”
“Up yonder from your north pasture. On the other side of a hill. There’s a church house by a stream.”
“You said ‘trying.’ You saw the shooter?”
“We saw the laser sight,” Pete said.
“What were y’all doing at the church?”
“Taking a walk,” Vikki said.
“Y’all just strolled on up the road?”
“That about says it,” Pete replied.
“Even though I said stick close by the house?”
“We were watching some people get baptized. We were sitting under a willow tree. Vikki saw the red dot on my face and on her hand, then I saw it on the ground,” Pete said.
“You’re sure?”
“How do you mistake something like that?” Pete said.
“Why wouldn’t the shooter fire?”
“Maybe he was afraid of hitting one of the black people,” Pete said.
“The bunch we’re dealing with doesn’t have those kinds of reservations,” Hackberry said.
“You think we made this up?” Vikki said. “You think we want to be here?”
Hackberry went to the sink and washed his hands, lathering his skin well up on his arms, rinsing them a long time, drying the water with two squares of thick paper towel, his back turned to his guests so they could not see his expression. When he turned around again, his neutral demeanor was back in place. His gaze dropped to Pete’s pants legs. “You ran across the creek?” he said.
“Yes, sir. Then on inside the church house. You could say we were bagging ass.”
“You think it was Jack Collins?”
“No,” Vikki said. “He’s done with us.”
“How do you know what’s in the head of a lunatic?” Hackberry said.
“Collins let us live, so now he feels he’s stronger than we are. He won’t test himself again,” she said. “He tried to give me money. I spit on his money and I spit on him. He’s not a lunatic. Everything he does is about pride. He won’t risk losing it again.”
“So who was the guy with the laser sight?” Hackberry said.
“It’s got to be Hugo Cistranos,” Pete said.
“I think you’re right,” Hackberry said. He opened the top on one of the boxed pizzas. “You spat on Jack Collins?”
“You think that’s funny?” she said.
“No, I did the same. Maybe he’s getting used to it,” he said.
“Where you going, Sheriff?” Pete said.
“To make a phone call.” Hackberry walked through the hallway toward the small room in back that he used as a home office. He heard footsteps behind him.
“I apologize for my rudeness,” Vikki said. “You’ve been very kind to us. My father was a police officer. I’m aware of the professional risk you’re taking on our behalf.”
Better hang on to this one, Pete, Hackberry thought. He sat behind his desk and called Maydeen at the department and told her to put a cruiser on his house. Then he left messages at both of the phone numbers he had for Ethan Riser. Through the side window, he had a fine view of his south pasture. His quarter horses and the windmill and poplar trees were silhouetted against the purple coloring in the west like dimly backlit components in an ink wash. But the fading of the light, the gray aura that seemed to rise from the grass, gave him a sense of terminus that was like a knife blade in his chest. If the two young people had not been staying with him, he would have driven to town and visited his wife’s grave, regardless of the hour.
In some ways, Vikki Gaddis and Pam Tibbs reminded him of Rie. Rie’s detractors had called her a Communist and jailed her and her friends and turned a blind eye to the acts of violence done to them inside and outside of jail, but never once did she allow herself to be afraid.
Hackberry turned off his desk lamp and looked through the window into the darkness that seemed to be spreading across the land. Was it a suggestion of the Great Shade that we all feared? he wondered. Or a visual harbinger of what some called end-times, that morbid apocalyptical obsession of fanatics who seemed to delight in the possibility of the world’s destruction?
But the greater question, the one that sank his heart, was whether or not he would ever see his wife again, on the other side, reaching through the light to take his hand and ease him across.
The phone made his face jerk. It was Ethan Riser.
“I’m returning your call. What’s up?” Riser said.
“Hugo Cistranos may be in my neighborhood,” Hackberry said. “What kind of leash did you have on this guy?”
“You’re asking me if he’s under surveillance?”
“I know you have him tapped. Where is he?”
“I don’t know. Somebody saw him?”
“We may have a guy with a laser sight in the neighborhood, but I can’t confirm that. Have you gotten any more feedback on those license numbers that may belong to Jack Collins?”
“I’m at my granddaughter’s wedding reception right now. I returned your call as a professional courtesy. Either tell me specifically what is on your mind or call me back during business hours on Monday.”
“I need your assurances about Pete Flores.”
“In regard to what?”
“If I bring him in, you don’t stuff him into the wood chipper.”
“We don’t stuff people in wood chippers.”
“Sell that stuff to somebody else.” The line was silent. Hackberry felt a rush of blood in his head that made him dizzy. He swallowed until his mouth was dry again and waited for the tautness to go out of his throat before he spoke. “Flores didn’t see the mass killing. All he can do is put Cistranos at the scene. You already know Cistranos is dirty on the mass homicide. You must have wiretap evidence by this time. You must have information from CIs. Maybe you’ve already flipped Arthur Rooney. I think the only reason you haven’t picked up Cistranos is he’s bait. You don’t need the kid, do you?”
“If you’re in contact with Pete Flores, you tell him he’d better get his ass into an FBI office.”
“That kid got fried in a tank because he believed in his country. You think he belongs in a federal prison or a place like Huntsville?”
“I’d like to say it’s been good talking to you. But instead, I think I’ll just say goodbye.”
“Don’t blow me off, Agent Riser. You guys are determined to hang Josef Sholokoff from a meat hook, and you don’t care how you get him there.”
But Hackberry was already talking to a dead connection.
EARLY SUNDAY MORNING, the sun was barely above the hills when Pam Tibbs turned the cruiser, with Hackberry in the passenger seat, in to Ouzel Flagler’s place. They rumbled across the cattle guard, the cloud of dust from the cruiser drifting back amid the junked farm tractors and construction machinery and rusted-out tankers and tangles of fence wire strewn over the property. The Sunday-morning quiet was starkly palpable, almost unnatural, in its contrast to the visual reminders of Ouzel’s customers’ Saturday-night fun at the blind-pig bar he operated: beer cans and red plastic cups and fast-food containers scattered across a half acre, a discarded condom flattened into a tire track, ashtrays and at least one dirty plastic diaper dumped on the ground.
“We’re not any too soon,” Hackberry said, peering through the windshield.
Ouzel and his wife and two grandchildren were exiting the side door of their house. All of them were dressed for church, Ouzel in brown shoes and a blue tie dotted with dozens of tiny white stars and a dark polyester suit that shone as brightly as grease.
“You want to take him in?” Pam asked.
But Hackberry’s attention was fixed on the abandoned machinery.
“Did you hear me?”
“I think I underestimated Ouzel’s potential,” he replied. “Cut off his vehicle. Keep his wife away from a phone while I talk to him.”
“You look like somebody put thumbtacks in your breakfast cereal.”
“This place is really an eyesore, isn’t it? Why in the hell do we allow something like this to exist?”
She looked at him curiously. When they got out of the cruiser, she picked up her baton from between the seats and slipped it through the ring on her belt. Hackberry stepped in front of Ouzel, raising his hand. “Hold up, partner, you’ll have to be late for the sermon this morning,” he said.
“What’s wrong?” Ouzel said.
“Ask your family to go back inside. My deputy will stay with them.”
“We get too loud here last night?”
“Deputy Tibbs, leave me your baton,” Hackberry said.
She looked at him strangely again, then slipped the baton from its ring and handed it to him, her eyes lingering warily on his.
“I don’t know what’s going on here,” Ouzel said.
Pam placed her hands on the two small children’s shoulders and began walking them toward the side door. But the wife-a broad-faced, hulking peasant of a woman who was known for her bad disposition and her clean brown beautiful hair-did not move and stared straight into Hackberry’s face, her dark eyes like lumps of coal that were no long capable of giving off heat. “These are our grandkids,” she said.
“Yes?”
“We take them to church because their mother won’t,” she said. “They’re good kids. They don’t need this.”
“Mrs. Flagler, you and your husband are not victims,” Hackberry said. “If you cared about those children, you wouldn’t be involved with criminals who transport heroin and crystal meth through your property. Now go back in your house and don’t come out until you’re told to.”
“You heard him, ma’am,” Pam said. Before she entered the Flagler house, she looked back over her shoulder at Hackberry, this time with genuine concern.
Ouzel’s Lexus was parked incongruously under a cottonwood tree, its tinted windows and waxed surfaces darkly splendid in the shade.
“You aren’t afraid birds will corrode your paint?” Hackberry said.
“I parked it there a few minutes ago so it’d be cool when we got in,” Ouzel said.
“There’s a man in the neighborhood with a laser-sighted rifle. I think you brought him here,” Hackberry said.
“I don’t know anything about that. No, sir, I don’t know anything about rifles. Never did. Never had much interest.” Ouzel’s gaze swept the great panorama of plains and mountains to the south, as though he were simply passing the time of day in idle conversation with a friend.
Hackberry placed the flat of his hand on the hood of the Lexus. Then he picked a leaf off a ventilator slit and let it blow away in the wind. “What’d it cost you, sixty grand, something like that?”
“It wasn’t that much. I got a deal.” Ouzel looked back at his house from the shadows the tree made. When he rotated his neck, the bulbous purple swellings in his throat raking against the stiffness of his collar, his small eyes sunk into black dots, Hackberry thought he could detect an odor that was reminiscent of a violated grave or the stench given off by an incinerator in which dead animals were burned. He wondered if he was starting to step across an invisible line.
“Why you staring at me like that?” Ouzel said.
“We let you skate on the sale of illegal booze because it was easier to keep an eye on you than it was to monitor a half-dozen vendors we couldn’t keep track of. But that was a big mistake on our part. You got mixed up with the dope traffickers across the river, and they’ve been using the back of your property as a corridor ever since. How much of your construction equipment is operational?”
“None of it. It’s junk. I sell parts off it.”
“When is the last time you saw Hugo Cistranos, Ouzel?”
“I cain’t say that name rings bells.”
Hackberry laid Pam Tibbs’s metal baton on the hood of the car. It rolled off, bouncing on the bumper before it struck the dirt with a pinging sound. He picked it up and reset it on the hood, then grabbed it when it rolled again, resetting it until it balanced, the tiny scratches showing like cats’ whiskers in the paint. He watched the baton contemplatively and moved it once more, pushing it audibly across the hood’s surface. “A couple of young people were almost killed yesterday. You sicced the shooter on them. Now you’re on your way to your church with your grandchildren. You’re a special kind of fellow, Ouzel.” Hackberry spun the baton on the car hood the way one might spin a bottle. “What do you think we ought to do about that?”
Ouzel’s eyes flicked back and forth from the baton to Hackberry’s face. “About what?” he said.
“I’m going to bring a forensic team out here. They’re going to examine every grader and dozer and front-end loader on the place. They’ll take soil samples from the blades and buckets and treads and see if they match the soil behind the church at Chapala Crossing. If your equipment was used in a mass burial, the DNA from the dead will still be on the metal. That will make you an accessory to a mass murder. If you don’t ride the needle, you’ll go down for the rest of your life. I’m talking about Huntsville, Ouzel. Do you understand what kind of place Huntsville is?”
“I didn’t know anything about those Asian women till I saw it on TV.”
“Who used your equipment?”
“I don’t control what happens here. Sometimes I see lights in the dark at the south end of my property. Maybe somebody put one of the dozers on a flatbed and took it away. I kept the blinds shut. In the morning it was back. Other people have keys to everything I own here.”
“Which people?”
“They’re in Mexico. Maybe a couple come from Arizona. They don’t tell me anything. After the dozer was back, some guys came to see me.” Ouzel touched his wrist and the back of his left hand, a sorrowful light swimming into his eyes. “They-”
“They what?”
“Walked me out to my shed and put my hand in my own vise.”
“Was Hugo Cistranos one of them?”
“I don’t know his last name. But the first name was Hugo.”
“Who did you call about my young friends?”
“All I got is a phone number. I don’t have the name that goes with the number. When something happens, when I see something that’s important, I’m supposed to call that number. Sometimes Hugo answers. Sometimes a woman. Sometimes other guys.”
“Give me the number.”
Ouzel took a ballpoint pen from his pocket and a piece of paper from his wallet, his hands shaking. He started to write on top of his car hood but instead propped one foot on the bumper and smoothed the paper on his leg and wrote out the number there so he would not risk damaging the finish on his car.
“When did you last call this number?”
“Friday.”
“When you saw Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores?”
“I was at my brother’s filling station. They were riding in Danny Boy Lorca’s truck. They came in for gas.” Ouzel’s eyes wandered to the baton. “Can you take that off my car?”
“Do you have any idea at all of the suffering you’re party to?”
“I never made anybody suffer. I just tried to support my family. You think I want these animals running my life? I’m sorry for those women who died. But tell me this: They didn’t know what happens when you become a prostitute and have yourself smuggled into somebody else’s country? How about what they did to my hand? How about the trouble I’m in? I just wanted to take my grandkids to church this morning.”
Hackberry had to wait a long time before he replied. “Is there anything else you want to tell me, Ouzel?”
“I get immunity of some kind, right?”
“I’m not sure you’ve really given me anything. Your memory comes and goes, and a lot of what you say is incomprehensible. I also think for every true statement you make, you surround it with five lies.”
“How about this? The one they call Preacher. You know that name?”
“What about him?”
“He was here.”
“When?”
“Yesterday. He was looking for the guy named Hugo. I gave him that phone number just like I did you. It belongs to a resort or something. In the background I’ve heard people talking about shooting cougars and African animals, the kind that got those twisted horns on their heads. I gave it to Preacher, and he looked at it and said, ‘So that’s where the little fellow is.’ If you’re gonna bust me, don’t cuff me in front of the kids. I’ll get in the cruiser on my own.”
Hackberry picked up the baton from the car hood and let it hang from his right hand. It felt heavy and light at the same time. He could feel the comfortable solid warmth of the metal in his palm and the blood throbbing in his wrist. In his mind’s eye, he could see images of things breaking-glass and chrome molding and light filaments.
“Sheriff?” Ouzel said. “You won’t let the kids see me in cuffs, huh?”
“Get out of my sight,” Hackberry said.
ON THE WAY back to the department, with Pam Tibbs behind the wheel, the weather started to blow. Directly to the north, giant yellow clouds were rising toward the top of the sky, dimming the mesas and hills and farmhouses in the same way a fine yellow mist would. Hackberry rolled down his window and stuck his hand into the wind stream. The temperature had dropped at least ten degrees and was threaded with flecks of rain that struck his palm like sand crystals.
“When I was about twelve years old and we were living in Victoria, we had a downpour on a sunny day that actually rained fish in the streets,” he said to Pam.
“Fish?” she said.
“That’s a fact. I didn’t make it up. There were baitfish in the gutters. My father thought a funnel cloud probably picked up a bunch of water from a lake or the Gulf and dropped it on our heads.”
“Why are you thinking about that now?”
“No reason. It was just a good time to be around, even though those were the war years.”
She removed her sunglasses and studied the side of his face. “You’re acting a little strange this morning.”
“Better keep your eyes on the road,” he said.
“What do you want to do with that phone number Ouzel gave you?”
“Find out who it belongs to, then find out everything you can about the location.”
“What are you planning to do, Hack?”
“I’m not big on seeing around corners,” he replied. He heard her drum her fingers on the steering wheel.
At the office, Maydeen Stoltz told him that Danny Boy Lorca had been picked up for public drunkenness and was sleeping it off in a holding cell upstairs. “Why didn’t somebody just drive him home?” Hackberry asked.
“He was flailing his arms around in the middle of the street,” she replied. “The Greyhound almost ran over him.”
Hackberry climbed the spiral steel stairs at the back of the building and walked to the cell at the far end of the corridor where overnight drunks were kept until they could be kicked out in the morning, usually without charges. Danny Boy was asleep on the concrete floor, his mouth and nostrils a flytrap, his hair stained with ash, his whole body auraed with the stink of booze and tobacco.
Hackberry squatted down on one haunch, gripping a steel bar for balance, a bright tentacle of light arching along his spinal cord, wrapping around his buttocks and thighs. “How you doing, partner?” he said.
Danny Boy’s answer was a long exhalation of breath, tiny bubbles of saliva coming to life at the corner of his mouth.
“Both of us have got the same problem, bub. We don’t belong in the era we live in,” Hackberry said. Then he felt shame at his grandiosity and self-anointment. What greater fool was there than one who believed himself the overlooked Gilgamesh of his times? He had not slept well during the night, and his dreams had taken him back once again to Camp Five in No Name Valley, where he had peered up through a sewer grate at the gargoyle-like presence of Sergeant Kwong and his shoulder-slung burp gun and quilted coat and earflapped cap, all of it backlit by a salmon-pink sunrise.
Hackberry retrieved a tick mattress from a supply closet and laid it out in front of Danny Boy’s cell and lay down on top of it, his knees drawn up before him to relieve the pressure on his spine, one arm across his eyes. He was amazed at how fast sleep took him.
It wasn’t a deep sleep, just one of total rest and detachment, perhaps due to his indifference toward the eccentric nature of his behavior. But his iconoclasm, if it could be called that, was based on a lesson he had learned in high school when he spent the summer at his uncle Sidney’s ranch southeast of San Antonio. The year was 1947, and a California-based union was trying to organize the local farmworkers. Out of spite, because he had been threatened by his neighbors, Uncle Sidney had hired a half-dozen union hands to hoe out his vegetable acreage. Somebody had burned a cross on his front lawn, even nailing strips of rubber car tires on the beams to give the flames extra heat and duration. But rather than disengage from his feud with homegrown terrorists, Uncle Sidney had told Hackberry and an alcoholic field picker named Billy Haskel, who had pitched for Waco before the war, to mount the top of the charred cross on the roof of the pickup and chain-boom the shaft to the truck bed. Then Uncle Sidney and Billy Haskel and Hackberry had driven all around the county, confronting every man Uncle Sidney thought might have had a hand in burning a cross on his lawn.
At the end of the day, Uncle Sidney had told Hackberry to dump the cross in a creek bed. But Hackberry had his own problems. He had been ostracized by his peers for dating a Mexican girl he picked tomatoes with in the fields. He asked his uncle if he could keep the cross on the truck for a few more days. That Saturday night he took his Mexican girlfriend to the same drive-in theater where he had already lost a bloody fistfight after the one occasion when he had tried to pretend the color line for Mexicans was any different than it was for black people.
As the twilight had gone out of the sky and the theater patrons had filtered to the concession stand in advance of the previews, Hackberry’s high school friends had assembled around the pickup, leaning against its surfaces, drinking canned beer, touching the boomer chain on the cross, touching the blackened shell-like wood of the cross itself, talking louder and louder, their numbers swelling as an excoriated symbol of rejection became a source of ennoblement to all those allowed to stand in its presence. That moment and its implications would stay with Hackberry the rest of his life.
Perhaps only fifteen minutes had passed before he opened his eyes and found himself looking squarely into Danny Boy Lorca’s face.
“Why were you waving your arms in the middle of the street?” Hackberry said.
“’Cause all my visions don’t mean anything. ’Cause everything around us is kindling waiting to burn. A drunk man can flip a match into the weeds on the roadside and set the world on fire. Them kind of thoughts always make me go out there flapping my arms in the wind.”
Danny Boy didn’t say where “there” was, and Hackberry didn’t ask. Instead, he said, “But you did your job. It’s on us if we don’t listen to guys like you.”
“Then how come I got this gift? Just to be a wino in a white man’s jail?”
“Think of it this way. Would you rather be sleeping overnight in my jailhouse or be one of those people who have no ears to hear?”
Danny Boy sat up, his thick hair like a helmet on his head, the bleariness in his eyes unrelieved. He looked at the ceiling and out into the corridor and at the clouds of yellow dust moving across the skylight. Then his head turned as he focused on Hackberry’s face. His eyes seemed to possess the frosted blue sightlessness of a man with severe cataracts. “You’re gonna find the man you been looking for.”
“A guy named Preacher?”
“No, it’s a Chinaman, or something like a Chinaman. The guy you always wanted to kill and wouldn’t admit it.”
“WE’VE GOT THE location of the phone number,” Pam said from the top of the steel stairs. “It’s a game farm up by the Glass Mountains.” Her gaze wandered over Hackberry’s face. “Have you been asleep?”
“I dozed off a little bit,” he said.
“You want to contact the sheriff in Pecos or Brewster?”
“See who’ll give us a cruiser at the airport.”
“We’re not sure Cistranos is at the game farm.”
“Somebody is there. Let’s find out who they are.”
“There’s something else. Maydeen got a call from a guy who wouldn’t identify himself. He wouldn’t talk to anyone but you. His number was blocked. She told him to hold on while she got a pad and wrote down his remarks. He hung up on her.”
“Who do you think it was?”
“He said you and he had unfinished business. He said you and he were the opposite sides of the same coin. He said you’d know what he meant.”
“Collins?”
“Know anybody else who makes phone calls like that?”
“Get the plane ready,” he said.
An hour later, they lifted off into bad weather, wind currents that shook the single engine’s wings and fuselage and quivered all the needles on the instrument panel. Later, down below, Hackberry could see the sharp crystalline peaks known as the Glass Mountains, the column-like mesas rising red and raw out of volcanic rubble or alluvial flood plain that had gone soft and pliant and undulating, as tan as farmland along the Nile, dotted with green brush, all of it besieged by a windstorm that could sand the paint off a water tower.
Then they were above a great wide fenced area where both domestic and exotic animals roamed among the mesquite and blackjack and cottonwoods, like a replication of a mideastern savannah created by an ecologically minded philanthropist.
“What’s your opinion on game farms?” Pam said.
“They’re great places for corporation executives, fraternity pissants, and people who like to kill things but can’t pull it off without their checkbooks.”
“You shock me every time,” she said.