THAT’S HAIL,” PREACHER said to the woman sitting on the cot across from him. “Hear it? It’s early this year. But at this altitude, you cain’t ever tell. Here, I’ll open the flap. Look outside. See, it looks like mothballs bouncing all over the desert floor. Look at it come down.”
The woman’s face was gray, her eyes dark and angry, her black hair pulled straight back. In the gloom of the tent, she looked more Andalusian than Semitic. She wore a beige sundress and Roman sandals, and her face and shoulders and underarms were still damp from the wet cloth she had washed herself with.
“A plane will be here tomorrow. The wind is too strong for it to land today,” he said. “The pilot has to drop in over those bluffs. It’s hard to do when the wind is out of the north.”
“You’ll have to drug me,” she said.
“I just ask you to give me one year. Is that a big price, considering I protected your family and spared your husband’s life when Arthur Rooney wanted him dead? You know where Arthur Rooney is today, maybe at this very moment?”
He waited for her to reply, but the only sound in the tent was the clicking of hailstones outside.
“Mr. Rooney is under the waves,” he said. “Not quite to the continental shelf, but almost that far.”
“I wouldn’t give you the parings from my nails. I’ll open my veins before I let you touch me. If you fall asleep, I’ll cut your throat.”
“See, when you speak like that, I know you’re the one.”
“One what?”
“Like your namesake in the Book of Esther. She was born a queen, but it took Xerxes to make her one.”
“You’re not only a criminal, you’re an idiot. You wouldn’t know the Book of Esther from a telephone directory.”
Bobby Lee Motree bent inside the open tent flap, wearing a denim jacket, his top hat tied down with a scarf. He held a tin plate in each hand. Both plates contained a single sandwich, a dollop of canned spinach, and another one of fruit cocktail.
“Molo picked up some stuff at the convenience store,” Bobby Lee said. “I seasoned the spinach with some bacon bits and Tabasco. Hope y’all like it.”
“What the hell is that?” Preacher said, looking down at his plate.
“What it looks like, Jack. Fruit cocktail, spinach, and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches,” Bobby Lee said.
Preacher threw his plate outside the tent into the dirt. “Go to town and buy some decent food. You clean that shit out of the icebox and bury it.”
“You eat sandwiches every day. You eat in cafés where the kitchen is more unsanitary than the washroom. Why are you always on my case, man?”
“Because I don’t like peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Is that hard to understand?”
“Hey, Molo, Preacher says your food sucks!” Bobby Lee shouted.
“You think this is a joke?” Preacher said.
“No, Jack, I’m just indicating maybe you don’t know who your friends are. What do I have to do to prove myself?”
“For starters, don’t serve me shit to eat.”
“Then get your own damn food. I’m tired of being somebody’s nigger.”
“I’ve told you about using language like that in my presence.”
Bobby Lee flipped the tent flap shut and walked away without securing it to the tent pole, his hobnailed boots crunching on the hailstones. Preacher heard him talking to the Mexican killers, most of his words lost in the wind. But part of one sentence came through loud and clear: “His Highness the child in there…”
At first Esther Dolan had set down her plate on the table, evidently intending not to eat. But as she had listened to the exchange between Bobby Lee and the man they called Preacher, her dark eyes had grown steadily more thoughtful, veiled, turned inward. She picked up the plate and set it in her lap, then used the plastic knife to cut her sandwich into quarters. She bit off a corner of one square and chewed it slowly, gazing into space, as though disconnected from any of the events taking place around her.
Preacher tied the flap to the tent pole and sat down heavily on his cot. He drank the coffee from his cup, his fedora snugged low on his brow, the crown etched with a thin chain of dried salt.
“You should eat something,” she said.
“My main meal is always at evening. And it’s a half meal at that. Know why that is?”
“You’re on a diet?”
“A horse always has a half tank in him. He has enough fuel in his stomach to deal with or elude his enemies, but not too much to slow him down.”
She feigned attention to his words but was clearly not listening. Bobby Lee had put a paper napkin under her plate. She slipped it out and set one of the sandwich squares on it. “Take this. It’s high in both protein and sugar.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Your mother gave you too many peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches when you were little? Maybe that’s why you’re always out of sorts.”
“My mother fixed whatever a gandy dancer brought to the boxcar where we lived. That was where she made her living, too. Behind a blanket hung over a rope.”
“What happened to her?”
“She took a fall off some rocks.”
When Esther didn’t reply, he said, “That was after she poisoned her husband. Or deliberately fed him spoiled food. It took him a while to die.”
“You’re making that up.” Before he could answer, she wrapped the piece of sandwich in the napkin and set it on his knee.
“I’ve always heard Jewish women are compulsive feeders. Thanks but no thanks,” he said, setting the sandwich square on the table.
She continued to eat, her shoulders slightly stooped, a demure quality settling over her that seemed to intrigue and arouse him.
“A woman like you is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of person,” he said.
“You’re very kind,” she said, her eyes lowered.
BY DARK HACKBERRY Holland and Pam Tibbs had had no luck finding the residence that might have been occupied by the man using the name B. Traven. On the back roads, in the blowing rain and tumbleweeds and darkness, they could find few mile markers or rural mailboxes with numbers or houses that were lighted. A crew on a utility truck told them there had been a giant power failure from Fort Stockton down to the border. No one, including the sheriff’s department, had any knowledge of a man by the name of B. Traven. One deputy who had worked previously at the tax assessor’s office volunteered that Traven was an absentee landowner who resided in New Mexico and rented his property to hippies or people who came and went with the season or tended to live off the computer.
At nine-thirty P.M. Hackberry and Pam took adjoining rooms at a motel south of Alpine. The motel had a generator that created enough power to keep the motel functional during the storm, the outside lights glowing with the low intensity and yellow dullness of sodium lamps. A number of revelers had taken refuge there, talking loudly in the parking lot and on the concourse, slamming metal doors so hard the walls shook, carrying twelve-packs and fast food to their rooms. As Hackberry looked out the window at the darkness of the night, at the lightning flashes in the clouds, at the leak of electric sparks from a damaged transformer that was trying to come back on line, he thought of candles flickering in a graveyard.
He closed the curtain and sat on the bed in the dark and called the department. Maydeen Stoltz picked up.
“You’re not on duty tonight,” he said.
“You and Pam are. Why shouldn’t I be?”
“So far we haven’t gotten any leads on B. Traven or the guy calling himself Fred C. Dobbs. Did you hear anything from Ethan Riser?”
“Nothing. But Nick Dolan was here. Boy, was he here.”
“What happened?”
“I put some earplugs in. I mean that literally. That guy has a voice like a herd of pygmies. He went into your office without permission and said he’d wait there until you got back. That’s not all.”
“What’s the rest of it?”
“Did you have the flag folded up in your drawer?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“I think he took it. The drawer was open when he left, and the flag wasn’t in it.”
“What does he want with our flag?”
“Ask him.”
“Where is he now?”
“I’m not real sure. He went to your house.”
“Don’t tell me that.”
“What can Dolan do at your house?”
“I gave Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores an approximate idea where we were going. I thought Collins might have said something to Gaddis that would link him to the properties he’s bought and sold under an alias.”
“That was the right thing to do, Hack. Don’t worry about it.”
“Early in the morning, get on the horn to Riser.”
“What do you want me to tell him?”
“Give him all the information we have on Collins. Tell him to send the cavalry or stay home. It’s his call.”
“Hack?”
“What?”
“Pam thinks Collins is trying to steal your soul.”
“So?”
“Pam’s feelings are not objective.”
“What are you telling me?”
“Don’t take chances with Collins.”
“The man has a hostage.”
“In one way or another, they all do. It’s what they use most effectively against us. You blow that bastard out of his socks.”
“Maydeen, you’re a good woman, but you’ve got a serious character defect. I can never be quite sure where you stand on an issue.”
After he closed his cell phone, he continued to sit on the side of the bed in the dark, the long day starting to catch up with him. Someone had left the engine running on a diesel-powered vehicle immediately outside Hackberry’s window. The sound vibrated through the wall and floor, staining the air with noxious fumes and a ceaseless hammering that was like a deliberate assault on the sensibilities. It was the signature act of the modern correspondent of the classical Vandal-senseless and stupid and at war with civilization, like someone graffiti-spraying a freshly painted white wall or smearing his feces on someone’s furniture.
Nazis were not ideologues. They were bullies and sackers of civilization. Their logos and ethos were that simple. Hackberry felt that he had lived into a time when gangbangers who sold crack to their own people and did drive-bys with automatic weapons were treated as cultural icons. Concurrently, outlaw white bikers muled crystal meth into every city in the United States. When they went down, it was only because they were murdered by their own kind. They were like creatures that had been incarnated from a Mad Max script. And like any form of cognitive dissonance in a society, they existed because they were given sanction and even lionized.
Who was to blame? Maybe no one. Or maybe everyone.
He opened the door and stepped out on the concourse. A bright red oversize pickup truck with an extended cab was parked two feet from him. The sound of the diesel engine was so loud he had to open and close his mouth to clear his ears. He could hear a party roaring two doors down. He walked out onto the lawn by the parking lot and picked up a brick from the border of the flower garden. The brick felt cool and heavy in his hand and smelled faintly of moist soil and chemical fertilizer.
He returned to the pickup truck and broke the driver’s window with the brick, setting off the alarm. Then he reached inside and unlocked the door and ripped the wiring from under the dashboard. He tossed the brick into a shrub.
A minute later, the driver, an unshaved man in greasy denims, was at his truck, aghast. “What the fuck?” he said.
“Yeah, too bad,” Hackberry said. “I’d file a report if I was you.”
“You saw it?”
“A guy with a brick,” Hackberry said.
Pam Tibbs had opened the door to her room and was drinking a beer in the doorway. She was dressed in jeans and a maroon Texas Aggie T-shirt. “I saw him running across the lawn,” she said.
“Look at my fucking truck.”
“The world is really sliding down the bowl,” Pam said.
A few minutes later, she tapped on the bolted door that connected her room to Hackberry’s. “Are you having a nervous collapse?” she said.
“Not me,” he said.
“Can I come in?”
“Help yourself.”
“Why are you sitting in the dark?”
“Why waste electrical power?”
“You thinking about Jack Collins?”
“No, I’m thinking about everything.” He was sitting at the small wood table against the wall. There was a telephone on it and nothing else. The chair on which he sat was as utilitarian as wood was capable of being. She walked into a blade of light from the window so he could see her face. “You think we’re firing in the well?” she said.
“No. Collins is out there. I know it.”
“Out where?”
“Someplace we don’t suspect. It won’t be part of a pattern. It won’t be in a place we look for the bad guys. He won’t be surrounded by whores or dope or stolen goods or even weapons. He’ll be in a place that’s as ordinary as rocks and dirt.”
“What are you saying, Hack?”
He shrugged and smiled. “Where’s your beer?”
“I drank it.”
“Open another one. It doesn’t bother me.”
“I only bought one.”
He stood up, towering over her. Her shadow seemed to dissolve against his body. She lowered her head and folded her arms across her breasts. He could hear her breathing in the dark.
“I’m really old,” he said.
“You’ve said that.”
“My history is suspect, my judgment poor.”
“Not to me.”
He cupped his hands on her shoulders. She hooked her thumbs in her back pockets. He could see the gray part in the shine on her hair. He bent over her, his arms circling her back, his hands touching her ribs and sliding up between her shoulder blades into the stiffness of her hair on the nape of her neck. Then he drifted his fingers across her cheek and the corner of her eye, brushing a lock of hair back from her forehead.
He felt her step on top of his feet, and before he knew it, she had raised her mouth inches from his, the yeasty smell of beer touching his lips.
WHEN PREACHER UNZIPPED the flap on Bobby Lee’s polyethylene tent, the storm had passed and the heavens were ink-black again, bursting with stars that stretched from horizon to horizon, the mesas in the east pink and barely visible against the few distant thunderheads that still flickered with lightning.
Bobby Lee pushed his head out of his sleeping bag, his hair matted, his eyes bleary with sleep. “Is the plane here?”
“Not yet. But I made coffee. Get up. I want to take care of some business,” Preacher said.
“It’s cold.”
“Put your coat and hat on. Take my gloves.”
“I’ve never seen it this cold this time of year.”
“I’ll get your coffee. Where are your boots?”
“What’s going on, Jack?”
Preacher lowered his voice. “I want to give you your money now. Don’t wake up Molo and Angel. Nor the woman.”
“You’re really taking her with us?”
“What did you think I was going to do?”
“Shoot your wad and get it out of your system?”
Preacher was squatting, balancing on his haunches. He looked at the fire curling and then flattening under the tin coffeepot he had set on the refrigerator grille propped across a ring of blackened rocks. His eyes were as empty as glass in the firelight, his shoulders poking through his suit coat. “Coarseness toward women doesn’t behoove a man, son.”
“You slept in the tent with her?” Bobby Lee said, pulling on his boots.
“No, I wouldn’t do that, not unless I was invited.”
“She invited us to kidnap her? You’re one for the books, Jack.” Bobby Lee climbed out of the tent, pulling on a black sheep-lined leather coat that was spiderwebbed with cracks. “Where’s the spendolies-”
Preacher placed a finger to his lips and began walking up the compacted footpath to the cave opening in the side of the mountain, his body bent slightly forward into the incline, his right hand hooked through the bail of a battery-powered lantern. He glanced back at the large tent where the two Mexican killers slept, then smiled enigmatically at Bobby Lee. “The freshness of the predawn hour has no equivalent,” he said. When he stepped inside the cave, the darkness enveloped him like a cloak.
“Jack?” Bobby Lee said.
“In here,” Preacher said, turning on the lantern, which gave off a glow that was gray and dim and created wispy shadows on the cave walls.
Bobby Lee sat down on a rock and watched Preacher pull a suitcase from behind a wood pallet that he sometimes dried his clothes on.
“I promised you ten percent. That’s twenty thousand dollars,” Preacher said, squatting to unlatch the suitcase. “Looks nice bundled in rubber bands, doesn’t it? What are you going to do with all that money, Bobby Lee?”
“I’m thinking about leasing a building in Key West and starting up an interior decorating business there. The place is full of rich fudge-packers building condos.”
“I’ve got a question to ask you,” Preacher said. “Remember when you told me you and Liam had been talking about my health, about what I ate and didn’t eat, that sort of thing? I just cain’t quite get that image out of my head. Why would you two be so concerned about my food intake? It seems a peculiar subject for young fellows to have any investment in. Wouldn’t you say so?”
“I don’t even remember what we were talking about.” Bobby Lee yawned, his eyes going out of focus with fatigue. He turned his face to the cold air puffing through the cave entrance. “The stars are beautiful over those bluffs.”
“I don’t talk about what you eat and drink, Bobby Lee. It’s of no consequence to me. So why would you and Liam be having these discussions about my diet?”
Bobby Lee shook his head. “It’s too early in the morning for this stuff.”
“You’ve always been loyal to me, Bobby Lee. You have, haven’t you? No temptations, so to speak?”
“I’ve modeled my life on you.”
“Can you see the little crack of light in the east? It’s behind those thunderheads. A little rip in all that blackness. Our pilot is going to fly us right through that hole into the sunlight. Then we’ll make a wide turn to the south and cross into Mexico and fly all the way to the ocean. This afternoon we’ll be eating pineapple and mangoes on a beach and watch people race horses in the surf. But first you have to tell me the truth, or our relationship will remain permanently damaged. We cain’t allow that to happen, boy.”
“Truth about what? How’d I damage our relationship?”
“You were plotting with Liam to hurt me, Bobby Lee. People are frail. They get scared and betray their friends. I forgive you for it. You thought you’d go where the smart bet was. But you’ve got to own up to it. Otherwise I can only conclude you think I’m a stupid man. You think I’ll abide someone letting on like I’m a stupid man?”
“You’re not stupid, Jack.”
“Then what am I?”
“Pardon?”
“If I’m not stupid or ignorant, then what am I? Somebody you can deceive and not pay any price for it? Somebody with no honor or self-respect who lets other people wipe their feet on him? Which is it?”
Bobby Lee propped his hands on his thighs. He stared at his feet and at the cave opening and at the landscape starting to gray with the coming of dawn. “Everybody thought you were losing it. I did, too, at least for a while. You’re right, though, I was selfish and thinking of myself. Then I realized you were the only guy I admired, that Liam and Artie and Hugo and the others weren’t real soldiers, but you were.”
“You and Liam were going to pop me?”
“It didn’t get that far.”
Preacher was smiling. “Come on, Bobby Lee. You’ve given honest witness about your failure. Don’t water the drink now. You’ll undo the courage and the principle you’ve shown me.”
“Yeah, we talked about popping you.”
“You and Liam?”
“I told Liam that was the order from Artie Rooney and Hugo. But I decided all of them were a bunch of dirtbags, and I called you up on my cell phone and told you how much I respected you.”
“That was just before you decided to let Liam eat a bullet point-blank in the women’s restroom? I’ll hand it to you. You can slide around and reshape yourself faster than quicksilver.”
Bobby Lee started to speak, then realized Preacher had already disengaged from the conversation and was standing in the cave’s entrance, his hands on his hips, watching the wind ripple the tents down below, watching the mysterious transformation of the desert from darkness to a pewterlike stillness that resembled a photograph defining itself inside developing fluid. Then Preacher said something Bobby Lee couldn’t quite hear.
“Say again?” Bobby Lee asked.
Preacher turned and reached behind the wood pallet. Unconsciously, Bobby Lee fastened the top button on his cracked sheep-lined coat as though protecting himself from a gust of cold air.
“I told you I always wanted you to be a piece of this property,” Preacher said. “That sentiment has not changed one iota.”
Down below, the Mexican killers and Esther were wakened by a burst of machine-gun fire and a tinkling of brass hulls on stone. But the sounds were absorbed so quickly inside the earth, they each wondered if they had been dreaming.
AT FIRST LIGHT Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs talked to an elderly man and a small boy at a dirt crossroads where they were picking up trash out of a ditch. The land was level and hard, marked by little other than fence lines and loading pens that were gray with rot and impacted with tumbleweed. Far to the east, the sun was pale and watery behind a low range of hills that looked coated with frost, ragged like glass along the crests.
“Traven?” the old man said. “No, there’s nobody here’bouts by that name.”
“How about Fred Dobbs?” Hackberry said.
“No, sir, never heard of him, either.” The old man was very large and straight in physique for his age, his hands horned with calluses, his face oblong, as big as a jug, the creases so deep there were shadows in them. He wore strap overalls and a yellow canvas coat and no cap. He studied the departmental logo on the cruiser’s door, obviously noting Hackberry was out of his jurisdiction. “It’s the frozen shits this morning, ain’t it?”
Hackberry showed him photographs of Jack Collins, Liam Eriksson, Bobby Lee Motree, and Hugo Cistranos.
“No, sir, if they live around here, I ain’t seen them. What’d these fellows do?”
“Take your choice,” Hackberry said from the passenger window. “Did you know a woman by the name of Edna Wilcox?”
“Died of an accident or a fall of some kind?”
“I think she did,” Hackberry said.
“She owned a big chunk of land about ten miles up the road and to the east. People have rented there off and on, but the house burned down. There’s some Mexicans been working there. Show your pictures to my grandson. Look right at him when you talk. He cain’t hear.”
“What’s his name?”
“Roy Rogers.”
Hackberry opened the passenger door and leaned over so he was eye level with the little boy. The boy’s hair was jet-black, his skin brown, his eyes filled with a black luminosity sometimes characteristic of people who live inside themselves.
“You know any of these men, Roy?” Hackberry said.
The boy’s eyes slid across the photographs that Ethan Riser had sent to Hackberry’s office. He remained immobile, the wind tousling his hair, his face as expressionless as clay. In the silence, he wiped at his nose with the back of his wrist. Then he glanced sideways at his grandfather.
“Want to help me out here?” Hackberry said to the grandfather.
“Not much gets by him. Roy’s a smart little boy.”
“Sir?”
“You wouldn’t tell me what these men had done, but now you want me and him to he’p you out. I suspect that seems like a one-sided deal to him.”
Hackberry got out of the vehicle and squatted down, suppressing the pain that flared in the small of his back. “These men are criminals, Roy. They’ve done some very bad things. If I can, I’m going to put them in jail. But I need people like you and your grandfather to tell me where these guys might be. If you’ve seen one of them, just point your finger.”
The boy looked at his grandfather again.
“Go ahead,” the grandfather said.
The boy touched one photograph with the end of his finger.
“Where’d you see this fellow?” Hackberry said.
“The store, last spring,” the boy said, his words like wood blocks that were rounded on the edges.
“We run a store up at the next crossroads,” the grandfather said.
Hackberry patted the boy on the shoulder and stood up. “How many houses are there on the old Wilcox property?” he said to the grandfather.
“A shack here and there, sweat lodges and tepees and such that a bunch of hippies smoke marijuana in.”
“You said there was a place that burned down.”
“That’s the place the Mexicans were cleaning up. That’s where the Wilcox woman lived. By the way, y’all are the second people to come by this morning asking about those fellows.”
“Who else was here?”
“A little round man in a Cherokee with an American flag flying on it and a young fellow and girl with him. The young fellow had a scar on his face like somebody glued a pink soda straw on it. Y’all grow them a little strange back where you come from?”
“Where’d they go?”
“Up the road. I can tell you how to get there, but the Mexicans will probably run off when they see y’all coming.”
“They’re illegals?”
“Oh, hell no.”
Hackberry got directions and got back in the cruiser. Pam dropped the transmission into gear and drove slowly up the road headed north, waiting for him to speak. A piece of the moon still hung low in the sky, like a carved piece of ice.
“The boy picked out Liam Eriksson, the only guy we know for sure is dead,” he said.
“You want to talk to the Mexicans?”
“For all the good it’s probably going to do, why not?” he replied.
WITHOUT ANY SENSE of grandiosity, Esther Dolan could say she had never feared mortality. Accepting it in the form it came to most people-in their sleep, in hospitals, or by sudden heart attack-seemed an easy trade-off considering the fact that one did nothing to earn his birth. The stories of violent death told her by her grandparents, who had survived the pogroms in Russia, were another matter.
The word “pogrom” came from an early Russian word that meant “thunder.” It meant destruction and death caused by irrational forces. It meant hatred and suffering that descended on helpless people without cause or motivation or reason. And the perpetrators of it were always the same group: those who wished to infect the world with the same self-loathing that had been the three-6 tattoo they had brought with them from the womb.
In the aftermath of the gunfire, she had stood motionless outside the polyethylene tent, the cold leaching the strength from her body, the wind swelling the tent on the support poles, the hillside black against a sky that was fading to dark blue in the east.
She watched the man called Preacher descend from the cave, his submachine gun clenched against his side with one hand, his coat collar pulled up and the brim of his fedora pulled down, smoke leaking from the barrel of his weapon. He watched each step he took on the compacted path as though his own life and safety and well-being were of enormous importance, whereas the man he had just killed was a disappearing memory.
The Mexican killers had also come out of their tent. The smoke from the cook fire contained a dense sweet smell, like burning sage or unopened flowers that had been consumed by the flames. Preacher leaned over the fire and, with his bare hand, picked up the metal pot boiling on the refrigerator grille and poured coffee into a tin cup, never setting down the Thompson. He drank from the coffee, blowing on the cup. He gazed at the frost on the hills. “It’s going to be a fine day,” he said.
“¿Donde está Bobby Lee?” Angel said.
“The boy made his peace. Don’t be worried about him.”
“¿Está muerto?”
“If he’s not, I’d better get a refund on this gun.”
“Chingado, hombre.”
“Molo, can you fix up some huevos rancheros? I could eat a washtub load of those. Just cook it on the coals. I didn’t fire the woodstove this morning. A man shouldn’t do more work than is required of him. It’s a form of greed. For some reason, I could never get those concepts across to Bobby Lee.”
While Preacher spoke, he had not looked directly at Esther. His back was turned toward her, his bone structure as stiff as a scarecrow’s inside his coat, the Thompson hanging straight down from his arm. His face lifted toward the sky, his nostrils swelling. Now he turned slowly toward her, taking the measure of her mood, his gaze seeming to reach inside her head. “I’ve scared you?” he said.
“He was your friend.”
“Who?”
“The man in the mine.”
“It’s not a mine. It’s a cave. You know the story of Elijah sleeping outside the cave, waiting to hear the voice of Yahweh? The voice wasn’t to be found in the wind or a fire or an earthquake. It was to be found at the entrance to a cave.”
As she looked into his face and listened to his words, she believed she had finally come to understand the moral vacuity that lived behind his eyes. “You’re going to kill us all, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“You weren’t listening. I said you’re going to kill us all.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’re going to kill yourself, too. That’s what this is all about. You have to die. You just haven’t found somebody to do it for you yet.”
“Suicide is the mark of a coward, madam. I think you should treat me with more respect.”
“Don’t call me madam. Did the man in the cave have a gun?”
“I didn’t ask him. When Molo is done cooking, fix me a plate and one for yourself. The plane will be here by ten.”
“Prepare you a plate? Who do you think you are?”
“Your spouse, and that means you’ll damn well do what I say. Get in the tent and wait for me.”
“Señora, better do what he say,” Angel said, wagging an admonishing finger. “Molo already gave him food that makes him real sick. Señor Jack ain’t in a very good mood.”
She went back inside the tent, her temples pounding. She sat down on the cot and picked up the box of uneaten brownies she had prepared for Mrs. Bernstein. She placed her hand on her chest and waited until her heart had stopped racing. She hadn’t eaten since the previous evening, and her head was spinning and gray spots were swimming before her eyes.
She slipped the string off the box and took out one brownie and bit off a corner. She could not be sure, but she believed she might be holding a formidable weapon in her hand, at least if her intuitions about Preacher’s refusal to eat the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches were correct. She had learned the recipe from her grandmother, a woman whose life of privation had taught her how to create culinary miracles from the simplest of ingredients. One of the grandmother’s great successes had been brownies that were loaded with government-staple peanut butter but were baked with enough chocolate and cocoa powder to disguise their mundane core.
Esther closed her eyes and saw Nick and her son and her twin daugh ters as clearly as if she were looking out the front window of their home on the Comal River. Nick was cooking a chicken on the barbecue grill, standing downwind, his eyes running, his glossy Hawaiian shirt soaked with smoke, forking the meat as though that would improve the burned mess he was making. In the background, Jesse and Ruth and Kate were turning somersaults on the grass, their tanned bodies netted with the sunlight shining through a tree, the river cold and rock-bottomed and swift-running behind them.
For just a moment she thought she was going to lose it. But this was not a time either to surrender or to accept the terms of one’s enemies. How did her grandmother put it? We didn’t give our lives. The Cossacks stole them. A Cossack feeds on weakness, and his bloodlust is energized by his victim’s fear.
That was what her grandmother had taught her. If Esther Dolan had her way, the man they called Preacher was about to learn a lesson from the southern Siberian plain.
When Preacher opened the tent flap, she caught a glimpse of mesas in the distance, an orange sunrise staining a bank of low-lying rain clouds. He closed the flap behind him and started to fasten the ties to the aluminum tent pole, then became frustrated and flung them from his fingers. He was not carrying his weapon. He sat down on the cot opposite her, his knees splayed, the needle tips of his boots pointed outward like a duck’s feet.
“You’ve been around men who didn’t warrant your respect,” he said. “So your disrespect toward males has become a learned habit that isn’t your fault.”
“I grew up not far from the Garden District in New Orleans. I didn’t associate with criminals, so I didn’t develop attitudes about them one way or another.”
“You married one. And you didn’t grow up by the Garden District. You grew up on Tchoupitoulas, not far from the welfare project.”
“Lillian Hellman’s home on Prytania Street was two blocks from us, if it’s any of your business.”
“You don’t think I know who Lillian Hellman was?”
“I’m sure you do. The public library system gives cards to any bum or loafer who wants one.”
“You know how many women would pay money to be sitting where you are right now?”
“I’m sure there’re many desperate creatures in our midst these days.”
She could see the heat building in his face, the whitening along the rims of his nostrils, the stitched, downturned cast of his mouth. She picked up a small piece of brownie with the ends of her fingers and put it in her mouth. She could feel him watching her hungrily. “You haven’t eaten?” she asked.
“Molo burned the food.”
“I made these for my friend Mrs. Bernstein. I don’t guess I’ll ever have the opportunity to give them to her. Would you like one?”
“What’s in them?”
“Sugar, chocolate, flour, butter, sometimes cocoa powder. You’re afraid I put hashish in them? You think I bake narcotic pastries for my friends?”
“I wouldn’t mind one.”
She held out the box indifferently. He reached inside and lifted out a thick square and raised it to his mouth. Then he paused and studied her face carefully. “You’re a beautiful woman. You ever see the painting of Goya’s mistress? You look like her, just a little older, more mature, without the sign of profligacy on your mouth.”
“Without what on my mouth?”
“The sign of a whore.”
He bit into the brownie and chewed, then swallowed and bit again, his eyes hazy with either a secret lust or a sexual memory that she suspected gave birth to itself every time he pulled the trigger on one of his victims.