Hackberry looked through the front windshield at the long, flat, sunbaked rawness of the land and at the purple haze that seemed to rise from the creosote brush and the greasewood and the patches of alkali along streambeds that were hardly more than sand. In the distance, he could see hills in the moonlight and stovepipe cactus in the yard of an adobe house whose roof had collapsed. He looked through his binoculars at the hills and at the house and thought he could see a dirt road behind it that switchbacked up the side of the hill, but he couldn’t be sure.
The bartender with the swastika tattooed on his scalp had given him and Pam Tibbs directions to the place where he believed Negrito was taking the young Texas lawman. When Hackberry had asked whether he was sure, the bartender had replied, staring at the broken pool cue Hackberry had almost stuffed down his throat, “It’s where Negrito always disposes of people he has no more use for. It’s the underground prison he likes to stand on top of. Maybe he comes back for them. Maybe that’s where you will end up seriously jodido, that’s what I hope.”
Hackberry’s cell phone vibrated on the Jeep’s dashboard. He picked it up and put it to his ear. “Sheriff Holland,” he said.
“It’s Maydeen. Did you find R.C.?”
“Not yet.”
“Let me try to get you some backup.”
“There’s nobody down here I trust.”
“Hack, I called because I’m at the hospital. Anton Ling says she saw the guy she put a screwdriver in. He and another guy were in the hallway right outside her room.”
“How did she know it was the guy she hurt? He was wearing a mask when she put the screwdriver in his face.”
“She said she recognized the guy with him. She said she was mixed up in an intelligence operation of some kind years ago, and this guy was part of it. Felix and I are in her room now. She wants to talk with you.”
“Put her on.”
Hackberry heard Maydeen speaking to Anton Ling, then Maydeen got back on the cell. “She wants us to leave the room. When y’all get finished, I’ll come back in. Felix will stay here the rest of the night.”
“Tell Anton Ling that anything she wants to tell me, she can say in front of you.”
“Don’t worry about it, Hack. I need a cup of coffee,” Maydeen said.
A moment later, Anton Ling got on the cell. “I’m sorry to bother you with this, Sheriff Holland, but I needed to get something off my chest,” she said.
“Miss Anton, in my department, we don’t have private conversations, and we don’t keep secrets from one another,” Hackberry said. “I’m making an exception in this instance because your life may be in jeopardy.”
“I didn’t want your deputies to hear our conversation for the same reason. I have knowledge that can get people killed.”
“Knowledge about what?”
“There was a political scandal years ago that flared and died. A reporter broke a story that the Contras were introducing cocaine into American cities to pay for the guns that were being shipped to Nicaragua. A couple of newspapers in the East debunked the story, and later, the reporter committed suicide. But the story was true. The guns were AK-47s and came from China. They were assembled in California and shipped south. The dope went to the West Coast first, then other places later. I was involved in it.”
“Why didn’t you tell someone about this?”
“No one cares. They didn’t care then, they don’t care now. It was The Washington Post and The New York Times that debunked the story.”
“Do you know the names of the guys you saw outside your room?”
“No, but I think they were here to wipe the slate clean. The man I recognized was a connection between the Contras and some dope mules in California.”
“Do you know the name Josef Sholokoff?”
“I do. He was part of the drug deal with the Contras. There’s no end to this,” she said.
“To what?”
“To the grief I’ve caused others.”
“People like us don’t make the wars, Miss Anton. We just get to fight in them,” he said. “I’ve lost a deputy sheriff down here in Mexico. For all I know, he’s dead now. When I catch the guys who did this, I’m going to cool them out proper and not feel any qualms about it.”
“I think you’re not served well by your rhetoric.”
“I’ve got a flash for you, Miss Anton. The only real pacifists are dead Quakers. Ambrose Bierce said that when reflecting on his experience at Shiloh.”
“It’s also cheap stuff. Good-bye.” She broke the connection.
“Look up ahead,” Pam said, steering down into the streambed. “There’re tire tracks in the sand. They go through the backyard of that adobe house. This has to be the hill the bartender was talking about.”
Hackberry turned on the spotlight mounted on the passenger side of the Jeep and shone it through the darkness. A yellow dog with mange on its face and neck, its sides skeletal, its dugs distended, emerged from the shell of the house and stared into the brilliance of the beam before loping away.
“You want to try the switchback up the hill or go around?” Pam asked.
“We take the high ground. Park behind the house. We’ll walk over the hill and come down on top of them.”
“Back there in the cantina, I saw a side of you that bothers me, Hack,” she said.
“I don’t have another side, Pam. You stand behind your people or you don’t stand behind your people. It’s that simple. We get R.C. back from this collection of cretins. When I was at Inchon, I was very frightened. But a line sergeant told me something I never forgot. ‘Don’t think about it before it happens, and don’t think about it when it’s over.’ We bring R.C. home. You with me on that?”
“I’m with you in everything. But my words mean little to you,” she replied. “And that bothers me more than you seem able to understand.”
He didn’t speak again until they had parked the Jeep behind the adobe house, and then it was only to tell her to walk behind him when they went over the crest of the hill.
The man wearing the hat and holstered thumb-buster squatted on his haunches, eye level with R.C. His breath was as dense and tannic as sewer gas. Two Mexicans wearing jeans that looked stitched to their skins stood stiffly on either side of him, like bookends fashioned from wire. “You have a bad moment or two down there?” the man asked.
R.C. nodded, meeting the strange man’s eyes briefly.
“Enough to make you wet your britches?” the man asked.
“No, sir, I didn’t do that.”
The man lifted his chin and pinched the loose flesh under his throat. He was unshaved, and his whiskers looked as stiff as pig bristles. “What’s it like under the ground, with a mask on your face and a lifeline anyone can pinch off with the sole of his boot?”
“Dark.”
“Like the inside of a turnip sack, I bet.”
“That comes right close to it.”
“Your heart start twisting and your breath start coming out of your windpipe like you swallowed a piece of glass?”
“That pert’ near says it,” R.C. replied.
“I can sympathize.”
“You been buried alive?”
“Not in the way you have.”
“You either have or you haven’t.”
“When I was a little boy, my mother would stick me eight or nine hours inside a footlocker. I’d pretend I was on the spine of a boxcar, flying across the countryside under the stars. Did you have fanciful notions like that? Then you opened your eyes and thought somebody had poured an inkwell inside your head.”
“Maybe your soul can go somewhere else. That’s the way I figure it. That’s how come people don’t go crazy sometimes,” R.C. said. Then he added, as though he were in the presence of a confidant, “I got wrapped up in a rubber sheet when I was a little baby and almost suffocated. My mother was in the yard and looked through the window and said I’d already turned blue. She ran inside and saved my life.”
“You saying you had a real mother but mine was cut out of different cloth, maybe burlap?”
“No, sir, I didn’t say that,” R.C. replied, looking away.
“I wouldn’t care if you did. Do you think I care about your opinion of my mother?”
“No, sir.”
“What’s the nature of your relationship with Sheriff Holland?”
“Sir?”
“You deaf?”
“I’m his deputy. My name is R. C. Bevins. I grew up in Ozona and Del Rio and Marathon. My daddy was a tool pusher in the oil field. My mother was a cashier at the IGA till the day she died. She went to work one day and never came home.”
“Why should I care what your parents did or didn’t do?”
“’Cause I know who you are. ’Cause I know what happens to people when you get your hands on them. So if you do the same to me, I want you to know who I am, or who I was.”
“Who do you think I am?”
“A stone killer who don’t take prisoners.”
“For somebody who was just dug up from a grave, maybe you should take your transmission out of overdrive.”
“Maybe you should have practiced a little self-inventory before you murdered all them Asian girls.”
“You’re ahead of the game, boy. Best respect your elders.”
“I ain’t the one trying to get inside somebody else’s thoughts, like some kind of pervert.”
“You were in the whorehouse to play the piano?”
“If that’s what it was, I was there because I blew out my tire. So don’t go belittling me.”
The man in the hat glanced up at the two Mexicans, his eyes amused, the soles of his boots grating on the gravel. “You thirsty?”
R.C. swallowed but didn’t reply.
“You ever kill a man?”
“I never had to,” R.C. said.
“Maybe that’s waiting for you down the pike.”
“If I got choices, it ain’t gonna happen.”
“You want a drink of water or not?”
R.C. sat erect and pulled his knees up before him, the dirt and pea gravel shaling off his clothes. “I wouldn’t mind,” he said.
The man with yellow fingernails that were as thick as horn signaled for one of the Mexicans to pass R.C. a canteen that was attached to a looped GI web belt.
“Does Sheriff Holland treat you all right?”
“We share commonalities. That’s what he calls them, ‘commonalities.’”
“In what way?”
“We both pitched baseball. I pitched all the way through high school. He pitched in high school and three years at Baylor. He got an invitation to the Cardinals’ training camp. I wasn’t as good as him, though.”
“I declare.”
“He has the Navy Cross and a Purple Heart. He treats everybody the same, black or Mexican or Indian or illegal, it don’t matter. That’s the kind of man he is.”
“He sounds like a father figure.”
“If he is, it’s nobody else’s business.”
“The sheriff is a widower and doesn’t have family close by. It must be a comfort for him to have a young fellow like you around. Someone he thinks of as a son.”
“I got to use the restroom.”
The man found a more comfortable position by easing his weight down on one knee. “You might be hard put to find one out here,” he said. He gazed into the distance, his eyes dulled over, seemingly devoid of thought. The collar of his white shirt was yellow with dried soap. “What if I gave you a choice, one that would he’p you define your loyalties in a way you wouldn’t forget? That nobody would forget?”
R.C. had taken one sip from the canteen and had started to take another. But he stopped and set the canteen down on the edge of the grave and stared at it, his hand still cupped on the canvas snap-button pouch that held it. He waited, his eyes fixed in empty space, the wind flattening the mesquite along the banks of the streambed. He knew what was coming.
“Here’s the situation as I see it,” the strange man said. “The sheriff tried to kill me by firing a whole magazine down a mine shaft. He has also insulted me several times on a personal level without provocation, even though I have always treated him with respect. So principle requires that I do something in kind to him, otherwise I’ll be guilty of what’s called a sin of omission. Are you following me?”
“You’re Preacher Jack Collins. Around here, that translates into ‘crazy.’ I don’t have conversations with crazy people.”
Collins shifted his weight and pulled his revolver from its holster and fitted his thumb over the hammer. “You’d better listen up, boy.” He pulled back the hammer to full cock and touched the muzzle to R.C.’s temple. “With one soft squeeze, I can scatter your buckwheats all over that streambed. There will be a flash of light and a loud roar in your ears, then you’ll be with your dead mother. I’ll make sure the sheriff understands I did this as payback for what he’s done to me. In that way, I’ll rob him of any peace of mind for the rest of his life. But there’s a problem with that choice. Other than not knowing how to stay out of a hot-pillow joint, you’re an innocent boy and shouldn’t have to pay the price for the sheriff’s actions. So I’m going to create a choice for you that most people in your situation don’t have.”
Collins lowered the hammer and released the lock on the cylinder and tipped it sideways from the revolver’s frame. He shucked the six brass cartridges into his palm. “Are you a gambling man?” he said.
“Whatever it is you’re thinking about, I’m not interested.”
“Believe me, you will be.”
“Sheriff Holland is gonna hunt you down in every rat hole in Coahuila. Don’t be talking down to me about no whorehouses, either. You got whores working for you as informants, and I suspect that ain’t all they’re doing for you, provided they’re not choosy.”
Collins stood up. “I’m going to put one in the chamber and spin the cylinder. When I hand you the revolver, I’m going to cover the cylinder so you cain’t see where the load is. If you’ll hold the muzzle to your head and pull the trigger twice without coming down on the wrong chamber, I’ll turn you loose. If you refuse, I’ll pop you here and now.”
“Why you doing this to me?”
“Boy, you just don’t listen, do you?”
“Let me think it over. Okay, I have. Kiss my ass. And when you’re done doing that, kiss my ass again.”
“Why don’t you have another sip of water and rethink that statement?”
“I don’t need no more of y’all’s mouth germs.”
“Get up.”
“What for?”
Jack Collins laughed to himself. “You’re fixing to find out.”
“I’m tired of all this.”
“Tired?”
“Yeah, of being treated like a sack of shit. Just like I told that guy who took me out here, go on and do what you’re gonna do. Fuck you, I couldn’t care less. Hackberry Holland is gonna turn you into the deadest bucket of shit that was ever poured in the ground.”
Jack Collins let the revolver hang loosely at his side, outside the holster. “Stand up and look me in the face.”
R.C. got to his feet, his knees popping. He wiped the sweat and beaded rings of dirt from his neck and looked at his hand. His eyes drifted to the revolver in Preacher Jack’s right hand. He closed his eyes and opened them again, forcing them wide, refusing to blink. On the edge of his vision, he thought he saw his mother watching him, a cone of cotton candy clutched in her hand.
“Just to set the record straight, the breed who buried you wasn’t coming back. He’s in Durango now, drunk out of his senses,” Jack Collins said. “You would have died underground of thirst and starvation. If I had my druthers, I’d take a bullet anytime.”
“I’ll take a bullet just so I don’t have to listen to you no more,” R.C. said.
Jack Collins laughed again and picked up the canteen and looped the web belt over R.C.’s head, easing it down so as not to clip his ear. “Stay on the edge of the hillside and go due north for about three miles, and you’ll hit a dirt road. Follow it eastward, and you’ll intersect an asphalt two-lane that’ll take you to the border.”
R.C. stared at him dumbly, the backs of his legs shaking. He tried to think about what Collins had just said. The words made no sense. He felt as though the horizon were tilting sideways, the mountains going in and out of focus.
“You really thought I was going to cap you?” Collins said.
R.C. didn’t answer. He glanced sideways at the spot where his mother had been standing, but she had disappeared.
“I wouldn’t do that to you, kid. You’ve got sand,” Collins said.
With that, he and his friends walked away like Halloween trick-or-treaters who had lost interest in their own pranks.
A few minutes later, Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs came over the crest of the hill and looked down on the riparian landscape and the empty streambed that resembled a pale scar cutting across it, and the graves where the half-breed named Negrito had buried his victims, some of whom may have been alive when they went into the ground.
There was no one down below. Pam swept the area with her binoculars and then pointed at the north, handing the binoculars to Hackberry. In the moonlight, he saw a solitary figure walking alongside the streambed, a canteen slung from his shoulder, his shirttail hanging out, his shadow as sharp as a fence post on the ground. “R.C.,” he said.
“How’d he get loose from the guy who kidnapped him?” Pam said.
“I don’t know,” Hackberry said. He focused the lenses on the southern horizon and thought he saw headlights dip over a rise and briefly reflect off a sandstone bluff and then disappear. “Let’s find out.”
They climbed back down the opposite side of the hill and drove north in the Jeep until they were out on the flats again and could drive past the hill and intersect the streambed R.C. was following. As they drove toward him, their high beams suddenly defining him among the pale greenery that grew out of the sand, burning the shadows away from the youthful angularity of his face, Hackberry experienced one of those moments doctors at the navy hospital in Houston defined as post-traumatic stress disorder but that Hackberry thought of as the natural entwining of events and people, past and present, that seemed to take place as one reached the end of his life.
The totality of a man’s days eventually became a circle rather than a sum, and one way or another, he always ended up at the place where he had begun. Or at least that was what Hackberry believed.
As he looked through the windshield at R.C., he saw himself in the late summer of 1953, crossing the wooden pedestrian bridge at Panmunjom, the last man in a column of prisoners being returned from the camps south of the Manchurian border. He had been emaciated, barely able to walk and control his dysentery, his marine utilities stiff with salt and faded almost colorless. A photographer from Stars and Stripes took his picture with a big Speed Graphic camera, and later, the photo was picked up by the wire services and published all over the country above a cutline that began, “The last American soldier to cross Freedom Bridge…”
But he had not been the last man across Freedom Bridge. Others would follow and others would be left behind, perhaps four hundred of them who were moved by their captors across the Yalu River into Communist China and forgotten by the rest of the world.
Was it worth it? The great irony was that no one cared enough to even ask the question. The dates, the battles, the strafing of civilian refugees by American F-80s, the misery of the Chosin Reservoir, the red-hot thirty-caliber barrels they unscrewed with their bare hands, leaving their flesh on the steel, the systematic cruelty inside the gulag of prison camps in the north, Hackberry’s time in a place called Pak’s Palace, which had been housed in an abandoned brick factory where the North Koreans refined a method of torture known as Pak’s Swing, all these things were smudged entries in a tragedy that had become little more than an inconvenient memory. But the participants never forgot the details of their experience, and like the Wandering Jew, they were condemned to remain their own history books, each containing a story they could not pass on to others and from which no one would learn anything of value.
Hackberry could see himself in R.C., walking down the flume of an ancient riverbed, staring back into the Jeep’s headlights, his mouth cut with a grin, the soft white baked clay cracking under his weight. Youth was its own anodyne, Hackberry thought. For R.C., the world was still a fine place, his faith in his fellow man renewed by the arrival of his friends, his life unfolding before him as though it had been charted with the same divine hand that had placed our progenitors in an Edenic paradise. For just a second, Hackberry wanted to take all the experience out of his own life and give it to R.C. and pray that he would do better with it than Hackberry had.
He rolled down the passenger window. “Miss your turnoff to San Antone?” he said.
“I knew y’all would be along,” R.C. said, grinning broadly, getting in the back. “What kept you? I was starting to get a little antsy.”
“Bad traffic jam. What kept us? What the hell happened out here?” Hackberry said.
“This half-breed Negrito buried me after he almost took my head off with a shovel, that’s what happened. Then Jack Collins and two Mexicans dug me up.”
Pam put her foot on the brake. “Collins is down here?”
“He was.”
“Where?” she asked.
“Him and the two Mexicans walked over a rise and just went poof, gone, just like that.”
“Did they have a car?” Hackberry said.
“I didn’t hear one. But the wind was blowing out of the north. Maybe I just didn’t hear them start it up.”
“What did Collins say to you?” Hackberry said.
“He said I had a choice. I could play Russian roulette or he’d pop me. When I told him I wouldn’t do it, he gave me directions to the highway. I cain’t figure it out. Maybe everything people say about him ain’t altogether true.”
“Don’t fool yourself,” Hackberry said.
“So why’d he cut me loose?”
“He told you to tell me something, didn’t he?”
“He’s got you on his mind, that’s for sure, but he didn’t send no message. No, sir.”
Hackberry looked straight ahead at the countryside and at the stars that were going out of the sky.
“Did I miss something back there?” R.C. asked.
Collins wants me in his debt, Hackberry thought. But that was not what he said. “You did just fine, R.C. Who cares what goes on in the head of a madman?”
“I do. He’s a scary guy.”
“He is. He kills people.”
“No, in a different way. His breath. It smells like gas. His skin, too. It doesn’t smell like sweat. He doesn’t smell human.”
The Mexicans say he walks through walls, Hackberry thought.
“Sir?”
“There’s a town not far away. You hungry?”
“A twenty-ounce steak and five pounds of fries and a gallon of ice cream would probably get me through till breakfast,” R.C. replied.
“You got it, bub,” Hackberry said.
By dawn Hackberry was back home. He called Ethan Riser’s cell phone and left a message, then slept four hours and showered and called Riser again. This time Riser answered. “I need you here, partner,” Hackberry said.
“I got your message about Collins. We’ve contacted all the authorities in Coahuila.”
“That’s like telling me you just masturbated.”
“Why do you go out of your way to be offensive?”
“Anton Ling told me she was involved in an arms-for-dope operation. The dope went into American ghettos, the guns went to Nicaragua. She says Josef Sholokoff was a player in the deal.”
“I’ve heard all that stuff before.”
“Is it true?”
“Maybe on some level it is. But it’s yesterday’s box score. Sholokoff is our worry, Sheriff. You worry about Collins and this guy Krill. It’s clear they’re both operating in your jurisdiction. Sholokoff is a separate issue.”
Hackberry could feel his hand clenching and unclenching on the phone receiver. Through his window, he could see his horses running in the pasture and yellow dust rising off the hills, plum-colored rain clouds bunching across the sun. He has cancer. He’s at the end of his row. Don’t insult him, he heard a voice say.
“I’m against the wall,” he said. “My deputy was drugged and buried alive. Federal agencies and their minions, people like Temple Dowling, are wiping their ass on my county, and I can’t do anything about it. I’m throwing away the rule book on this one, Ethan.”
“That’s always the temptation. But when it’s over, the result is always the same. You end up with shit on your nose.”
“You coming down here or not?”
There was a long silence. “I’m tied up. I can’t do it. Listen to me, Hack. Stay out of events that happened years ago. Stay away from this Anton Ling woman, too. She’s an idealist who’s full of guilt, and like all idealists, she’d incinerate one half of the earth to save the other half. She had a chance to return Noie Barnum to his own people-that’s us, the good guys, we’re not Al Qaeda. Instead, she chose to hide and feed him and dress his wounds and let him end up in the hands of Jack Collins. Are you going to put your bet on somebody like that? Use your head for a change.”
That evening Danny Boy Lorca entered a saloon off a two-lane highway that wound through hills that resembled industrial waste more than compacted earth. The saloon was built of shaved and lacquered pine logs and had a peaked green roof that, along with the Christmas-tree lights stapled around the window frames, gave it a cheerful appearance in a landscape that seemed suitable only for lizards and scorpions and carrion birds. The saloon’s name was spelled out in a big orange neon sign set on the roof’s apex, the cursive words LA ROSA BLANCA glowing vaporously against the sky. The owner went by the name Joe Tex, although he had no relationship to the musician by the same name. When patrons asked Joe Tex where he had gotten the name for his saloon, he would tell them of his ex-wife, a big-breasted stripper from Dallas who had a heart of gold and a voice that could break windows and a thirst for chilled vodka that the Gulf of Mexico couldn’t quench. The truth was, Joe Tex had never been married and had been a mercenary in Cambodia, operating out of Phnom Penh, where he had been close friends with the owners of a brothel that specialized in oral sex. The name of the brothel had been the White Rose.
Danny Boy had parked his deuce-and-a-half army-surplus flatbed and walked unsteadily across the gravel to the entrance, the drawstring of a duffel bag corded around his forearm, the weight in the bottom of the bag bumping against his hip as he scraped against the doorframe and headed for the bar.
Next door was a 1950s-style motel bordered with red and yellow neon tubing whose circular porte cochere and angular facade and signs gave it the appearance of a parked spaceship. The customers in the saloon were long-haul truckers staying in the motel; women who carried spangled purses and wore eyeliner and lip gloss and had mousse in their hair and whose voices seemed slightly deranged; locals who had been in Huntsville and were probably dangerous and not welcome at other clubs; and college boys looking to get laid or get in trouble, whichever came first.
Joe Tex dressed like a Latino, his cowboy boots plated on the toes and heels, his black cowboy shirt stitched with red roses. He smiled constantly, regardless of the situation, his teeth as solid as tombstones, the black hair on his forearms a signal to others of the power and virility wrapped inside his muscular body, one that pulsed with veins when he lifted weights in nothing but a jockstrap out back in 110-degree heat.
Danny Boy skirted the dance floor, walking as carefully as a man aboard a pitching ship. He set the duffel bag on the bar, the canvas collapsing on the hard objects inside.
“A beer and a shot?” Joe Tex said.
“I want to pay my tab,” Danny Boy said.
Joe Tex took a frosted schooner out of the cooler and drew a beer from a spigot and set it in front of Danny Boy, then poured a shot glass up to the brim with Jim Beam and set it on a napkin next to the schooner. His expression made Danny Boy think of a profile carved on the handle of a Mexican walking cane-fixed, slightly worn, the paint chipping away. Joe Texas opened a drawer below the bar and looked in a metal box and removed a slip of paper columned with penciled sums. “Call it seventy-five even,” he said.
“I got some dinosaur eggs. I want to sell them.”
“If I was in the dinosaur business, wouldn’t I have to be worried about something called the Antiquities Act?” Joe Tex’s teeth were white against the deep leathery tan of his face when he smiled.
“These come from the back of my property. The government don’t care what I dig up on my own land. I got two eggs, big ones.” He raised the bag slightly by the drawstring, tightening the canvas against the shapes inside. “They’re worth five thousand apiece. You can have them both for four thousand.”
“That’s how you’re gonna pay your tab?”
“I saw a killing. It was done by a guy named Krill. I’m gonna put a bounty on this guy. I’m gonna put a reward on a guy named Noie Barnum, too, and maybe get him some he’p.”
Joe Tex propped his hands on the bar. He seemed to gaze at the college boys and women and truck drivers sitting at the tables and the couples dancing by the jukebox without actually seeing any of them. He seemed to look at all the illusions that defined the lives of his clientele and maybe think about them briefly and then return to the realities and deceptions that made up his own life. “What are you doing this for, Danny Boy?”
“’Cause I seen a murder and I didn’t do nothing to stop it. ’Cause maybe I can make up for it by he’ping a guy name of Noie Barnum. He got away from this fellow Krill. He run right past me. Maybe he’s hiding out with the one called the Preacher.”
Joe Tex studied the tops of his fingers and the hair that grew from the backs of his hands along his wrists and under the metal band of his watch and the snap-button cuffs of his embroidered shirt. “This isn’t the place to square a personal beef. The shot and the beer are on the house. Let’s eighty-six the eggs. This isn’t a souvenir shop.”
Joe Tex walked away, his metal-plated boots making dull sounds on the duckboards. Danny Boy’s eyes closed and opened as he tried to think his way through the haze and confusion that Joe Tex’s words had caused in his head. He drank from the shot glass, a small sip at a time, chasing it with the beer, slumping forward for balance, one work-booted foot on the bar rail, his facial muscles oily and uncoordinated, the row of bottles on the back counter sparkling with light. The shot glass and the schooner seemed to go empty by themselves, his foot slipping off the rail as he stared wanly at them. “Hit me again,” he said when Joe Tex walked past him to wait on a customer at the far end of the bar.
Danny Boy waited for his schooner and shot glass to be refilled, as though his level of desire were enough to make a reality out of a wish. But Joe Tex remained at the far end of the bar, talking to some college kids who were asking him about Big Bend National Park, and Danny Boy’s shot glass and schooner did not get refilled. “Give me another one,” he said to Joe Tex’s back.
He rested his hand on top of the heavy, solid, thick shapes of the fossilized eggs and stared at the way Joe Tex’s shirt stretched tightly across his shoulders, the tendon and sinew that tapered down to a thirty-two-inch waist, the wide belt he wore and the tight western-cut gray trousers and the polished Tony Lama boots. Couldn’t Joe hear him? Danny Boy knocked on the bar with his knuckles. “Give me a beer and a sandwich,” he said. “One of them ham and onion ones. Give me a shot, too.”
But no one was listening to him. Not Joe Tex or the college kids or the dancers or the people drinking and eating at the tables. Didn’t others understand the value of what he had found? The eggs proved a great antediluvian world was still out there, inhabited by stubby-legged creatures with reptilian necks. All you had to do was believe and you could see through time into the past and maybe even touch it with your hand. That’s what happened when you went inside the desert and were absorbed by the rocks and the layers of warm air rising off the sand. You became part of a place where there was no past or future and where all things happened at the same time. “Hey, Joe, why you talking to them people?” he said. “I want a drink. Forget them kids. I want a fucking drink.”
Did he just say that?
Joe Tex walked slowly toward him on the duckboards, a pocket of air forming in one cheek. He picked up the shot glass and schooner and set them in an aluminum sink filled with dirty water. The glass and the schooner sank down through the film of soap and grease and disappeared. “Time to go home, Danny,” he said.
“I come here to pay my tab. I come here to drink like anybody else.”
“Another time.”
“I’ll pay my tab tomorrow. I’ll find somebody to buy the eggs.”
Joe Tex lifted his hands and set them on the bar again. “I can get someone to drive you home, or you can sleep it off in back,” he said. “That’s it. We’re done.”
When Joe Tex walked away, Danny Boy felt like he was standing on a street corner by himself, watching a city bus lumber away from the curb, his reflection on the windows sliding past him, the passengers inside reading newspapers or talking to one another or listening to music through earphones as though he didn’t exist. His lips were caked, his throat clotted, the veins tightening in his scalp, the bottles of rum and bourbon and tequila and vodka as mysterious and alluring as the radiance in a rainbow. “I been a good customer. I been your friend,” he heard himself say.
Then he felt instantly ashamed at his plaintive tone, the pathetic role of victim once again his public mantle.
“Want a drink, chief?” a voice said.
When Danny Boy turned around, he saw a tall, clean-shaven man with wavy brown hair standing behind him. Three other men were sitting at a table behind the tall man, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer from the bottle. The tall man could have been a cowboy or a buyer of rough stock for a rodeo, but in reality, he probably did something else, Danny Boy thought, like manage a big-game ranch up in the Glass Mountains or cater to the needs of a rich man who hired others to do his work for him. He wore mirrored sunglasses and a sky-blue silk shirt and Wrangler jeans belted high up on his flat stomach. He had an easy smile and big hands with knuckles that looked like walnuts. Maybe he was a cowboy after all, Danny Boy thought, a regular guy who didn’t mean anything by the word “chief.”
“I’m tapped out,” Danny Boy said.
“That’s not just booze talking. You got some dino eggs in there?”
Danny Boy tried not to acknowledge the first part. “They come from the back of my place. I dug them up.” He glanced at the bottles on the back counter and wiped his nose with a handkerchief. He watched the cowboy drink from the bottle of Mexican beer, his throat working smoothly, his cheeks glistening with aftershave, the label on the bottle gold and red and translucent and somehow beautiful. Danny Boy waited for the cowboy to offer him a drink.
“Maybe I could help you out,” the cowboy said.
Danny waited, trying not to let his gaze settle on the bottles of whiskey and rum and gin and vodka.
“Can I look at them?” the cowboy said, cupping his hand on the outline of the eggs.
“Maybe this ain’t the place.”
“I don’t see any problem.” The cowboy slipped a wallet from his back pocket and set it on the bar. The edges of a thick sheaf of crisp bills protruded from the braided edge of the wallet.
Danny Boy loosened the drawstring on the duffel bag and stuck his arm inside and slowly removed each dinosaur egg and placed it carefully on the bar. When he looked back into the cowboy’s mirrored sunglasses, he saw the reflected image of a dark-skinned, truncated man in a dirty olive-colored T-shirt and canvas trousers he had probably pissed in without remembering.
“How much you want for them?” the cowboy asked.
“Two thousand for each.”
“They look like a pair of petrified titties to me, and not very good ones, at that.”
Danny Boy made a snuffing sound down in his nose and looked at the far wall and at the people on the dance floor and at the layers of smoke that flattened and sometimes swirled under the ceiling. “I could go eighteen hunnerd for each.”
“And you’re gonna use this money to round up a fellow name of Noie Barnum? You’re kind of a specialist in solving big-picture problems? Tell you what, before you answer that question, how about one-fifty for both your busted titties here, and then you take yourself and your stink out of here? Have you noticed that your britches look like somebody shoved a wet towel in your crotch?”
Danny Boy stared at his reflection of the man trapped inside the cowboy’s sunglasses. The trapped man’s hair was cut in bangs, his skin so dark it looked as though it had been smoked on a fire; his emotionless expression was like that of a retarded man who absorbed insults without understanding the words; the scar tissue in his eyebrows and the gaps in his teeth and the rounded mass of his shoulders were those of a man who had been pounded into the ground for a lifetime, a hod carrier working under the scaffolding of a cathedral while stone dust filtered down on his head. He stared into the cowboy’s sunglasses until the image of himself seemed to break into gold needles.
“I dug them up on my place,” he said. “I’m gonna use the money to he’p this fellow Noie Barnum. I think you know who he is or you wouldn’t be talking down to me.”
The cowboy gripped Danny Boy’s upper arm tightly with one hand, leaning over to whisper in his ear, his words wet with the smokeless tobacco tucked inside his lip. “I’m gonna walk you outside, boy, then we’re gonna have a talk. In the meantime, you keep your mouth shut.”
“I was a middleweight. I fought at the Olympia in L.A. I knew Tami Mauriello. He give me some pointers once. He sat in my corner and said I was as good as him. Tami almost nailed Joe Louis.”
“You get your goddamn worthless stink-ass Indian carcass out front. You hear me, boy? You know what no God or law west of the Pecos means? It means this is still a white man’s country.”
The cowboy’s teeth were clenched, his anger telegraphing through his grip, his breath wet against the side of Danny Boy’s face.
Maybe it was the use of the word “boy” or the ferocity of his grip. Or maybe it was the years of contempt and ridicule and insult that Danny Boy had come to accept as a way of life, part of the tab that came with being a drunk and a swamper of saloons and bathrooms where people vomited in the lavatory and threw their paper towels on the floor and shit on the edge of the bowl. Or maybe it was none of these things. Maybe he just wanted to be seventeen again, fresh out of the Golden Gloves, lean and hard, his left as quick as a snake’s head, his right hook under the heart enough to make a grown man’s eyes beg.
This time Danny Boy’s right didn’t hook in to an opponent’s rib cage; it went straight into the cowboy’s mouth, breaking his lips against his teeth, knocking his mirrored shades off his face. The shock and pain in the cowboy’s eyes could be compared to that of a man stepping out of a car and being hit by a bus. Before the man could raise his hands to protect himself, Danny Boy threw the whole factory at him: two left jabs, one in the eye, one high up on the cheekbone and the bridge of the nose, then a right delivered straight from the shoulder with his weight solidly behind it, his fist driving into the bloody hole he had already created in the bottom of the cowboy’s face, breaking off his teeth at the gums, knocking a wad of blood and phlegm and smokeless tobacco down his throat.
All sound in the saloon stopped except for the voice of Willie Nelson on the jukebox. He was singing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” his voice like a long strand of baling wire being pulled through a hole in a tin can. Danny Boy replaced the dinosaur eggs in the duffel bag and wrapped the drawstring around his forearm and started toward the door. The fight should have been over. The cowboy was sprawled backward on the floor, his nose and mouth dripping blood on his sky-blue shirt. Even Joe Tex, who usually broke up fights immediately, was observing silently from behind the bar, indicating that it was over, that all Danny Boy had to do now was walk out of the saloon.
That was how it should have gone. But it didn’t. Danny Boy had taken only three steps when he heard the cowboy coming hard behind him. He turned, the duffel hanging from his left forearm, automatically setting himself, ready to unload with his right and this time click off the cowboy’s switch.
Except the cowboy came in under the swing, gripping an antler-handled knife with a four-inch blade, the blade protruding from the heel of the hand and the fingers, his forearm and elbow raised in front of his face to absorb Danny Boy’s next blow. Danny Boy tried to jump backward but tripped against a chair. He felt the knife go into his thigh like an icicle, all the way to the bone, thudding dully against it, a pocket of pain and nausea spreading out of the wound into his groin and stomach. He remembered hearing about an artery the heart depended on, and then he was outside himself, watching Danny Boy Lorca labor toward the door, his duffel bag swinging from his arm, his right leg as stiff as wood, the knife driven all the way to the hilt against his canvas trousers. Outside, bathed in the orange glow of a neon sign that advertised a Texas saloon and a Cambodian brothel, the entire world and the stars above it were draining down his leg into shale that creatures with long serpentine necks had probably once walked upon. It was a funny way to catch the elevator going south, he thought, just as the parking lot rose up and hit him between the eyes with the impact of a fist.