The attendant who stayed in the back of the ambulance with Danny Boy during the ride to the county hospital had acne on his forehead and on the bridge of his nose and on the point of his chin, so that his profile looked like it had been sawed out of a shingle with a dull knife. His skin and clothes were rife with the smell of nicotine, his hair flecked with dandruff, his arms as thin as sticks inside his shirtsleeves. The asphalt road was badly cracked, and Danny Boy’s gurney and the equipment inside the ambulance were vibrating loudly, but the attendant seemed to take little notice.
“What do you call that artery in the thigh?” Danny Boy asked. “The one you don’t want to get cut?”
“The femoral,” the attendant said.
“Is that where he got me?”
“Guess.”
“He didn’t?”
The attendant untwisted the cellophane on a piece of peppermint. “I got dry mouth,” he said. “I’d offer you one, but you’re not supposed to have anything right now.”
“The artery is okay?”
“Jesus, buddy, what do you think?”
“I think I used to know you. Your nickname was Stoner or something like that.”
“That doesn’t sound familiar.”
Danny Boy continued to stare at the attendant’s profile. “I worked at a carnival in Marathon. I saw you at the free clinic. You were trying to get clean.”
“Yeah, that could have been me. You were in a program there?”
“I went to the clinic ’cause of my headaches.”
“The guy you decked, he’s a private detective. He works for Temple Dowling.” The attendant waited. Danny Boy stared at him without replying, the inside of the ambulance rattling each time the tires thudded across a tar-patched crack in the road. “You don’t know who Temple Dowling is?”
“No.”
“His father was a senator.”
“Of what?”
The attendant shook his head. “The bartender told the cops you wanted to put a reward on a guy named Barnum. You know, same name as the circus?” He blew his nose on a tissue and stuck the tissue in his shirt pocket, sniffing, his gaze shifting sideways onto Danny Boy. “Maybe I know where he is. Or who he’s with. You following me?”
“Tell the sheriff.”
“Were you ever in N.A.?”
“What’s that?”
The attendant sniffed again. “I sold some medical supplies to a guy. A guy I don’t like to think about. He had me meet him at night out in the desert. You know who I’m talking about?”
“Maybe. What’s his name?”
“If you meet this guy, you don’t use his name.”
“The one they call Preacher?”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
Through the back window, Danny Boy could see the reflection of the emergency lights racing along the sides of the highway. “That guy’s a killer,” he said. “You were selling him dope you stole?”
“Maybe I don’t feel good about it.”
“My leg hurts. I don’t want to listen to this no more.”
“I want to go to California and get clean and start over. Give me one of the eggs. I got the information you want.”
Danny Boy looked at the attendant for a long time, his eyes going dull with fatigue. “My duffel bag is on the floor.”
“You’re doing the right thing, man. But I got to ask you something. Why you want to help this guy Barnum?”
“’Cause I got to make up for something.”
“Like what?”
“I was there when Barnum escaped from some killers. I saw the killers torture a man to death.”
“For real?”
“Where’s Noie Barnum?”
“I don’t know the exact place, but when I gave the man in the desert the medical supplies, he looked at the north and said, ‘It’s fixing to rain snakes and frogs up yonder.’ I go, ‘Where up yonder?’ He says, ‘In the Glass Mountains. You ought to come up there and stand in front of a gully washer. It’d flat hydrate all that dope out of your system, make a man out of you.’” The attendant looked into space. “He’s got a special way of making people feel small.”
Danny Boy didn’t reply.
“He made you feel the same way, didn’t he?” the attendant said.
“Not no more he cain’t,” Danny Boy said.
It rained that night. To the south, a tropical storm had blown ashore on the Mexican coast, and the air smelled as dense and cool and laden with salt as seawater, almost as if a great displaced ocean lay just beyond the hills that ringed the town. Before Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs arrived at the hospital to interview Danny Boy, a bolt of lightning knocked out the power all over the county. Flashes of white electricity flickered inside the clouds, and Hackberry thought he could smell tropical flowers and dried kelp in the wind and gas inside the trees on the hospital lawn. He was sure these were the musings of a self-absorbed old man, one who could not stop thinking about the past and the ephemerality of his life.
He and Pam Tibbs interviewed Danny Boy before he went into surgery, then tried unsuccessfully to find the ambulance attendant. Hackberry and Pam and their deputies and the surgeons and the other hospital personnel all did their jobs throughout the power outage, not thinking, just doing, never taking the time to wonder if any of it mattered or not. You did your job and you let the score take care of itself. How many times a day did Hackberry offer that same tired workhorse counsel to himself? Was that how one ended his days? Probably, he thought. No, there was no “probably” about it. If you thought about mortality in any other fashion, you’d go insane or put a gun in your mouth.
After the power came back on, he and Pam drove two blocks to a cafe on the courthouse square and had coffee and a piece of pie. Through the window, Hackberry could see the trees on the courthouse lawn and the mist blowing across the lawn and the streetlights shining on a bronze statue of a World War I doughboy, his ’03 Springfield gripped in one hand, his other hand raised above his head as though he were rallying his comrades.
“You look tired,” Pam said.
“You mean I look old.”
“No, I don’t mean that at all.”
“I’m fine. I’ve never been better.”
“Pray that liars aren’t kept a long time in purgatory.”
“Pam, you should have been a low-overhead dentist, someone who does fillings and extractions without the extra cost of Novocain.”
She gazed out the window at the rain and at the drops of water beaded on the glass. Her eyelashes were reddish brown against the glow of the streetlamp; a wet strand of hair curved against her cheek. He couldn’t tell if she was thinking about the two of them or all the events of the past few days. She seemed to read his thoughts. “Why does a mass killer make himself vulnerable to arrest by buying stolen medicine from a junkie in order to take care of a stranger?” she said.
“That’s what every one of them does.”
“Every one of who does what?” she said.
“All sociopaths. They do good deeds as a tribute to their own power and to convince others they’re like the rest of us.”
“You don’t think Collins has any feelings about Noie Barnum?”
“I think the only genuine emotion he’s capable of is self-pity.”
“I don’t like to see you bitter.”
He placed his fork on the side of his plate and poured cream from a small pitcher on top of his half-eaten wedge of blueberry pie. He picked up his fork and then hesitated and set it down again. “By the seventh-inning stretch, this is what you learn. Evil people are different from the rest of us. Redneck cops, Klansmen, predators who rape and murder children, ChiCom prison guards, and messianic head cases like Jack Collins, all of them want us to think they’re complex or they’re patriots or they’re ideologues. But the simple truth is, they do what they do because it makes them feel good.”
“Would you have put that broken pool cue down that bartender’s throat?”
“The bartender thought so. That’s all that counts.”
“Don’t stop being who you are because of these guys. You’ve always said it yourself: Don’t give them that kind of power.”
Hackberry stared out the window at the electricity trembling on the tree above the bronze figure of the doughboy. The statue’s head was turned slightly to one side, the mouth open, as though the doughboy were yelling an encouraging word over his shoulder to those following him across no-man’s-land. Did they know what awaited them? Did they know the Maxim machine guns that would turn them into chaff were the creation of a British inventor?
Hackberry wondered who had erected the monument. He wanted to call them idiots or flag-wavers or members of the unteachable herd. But words such as those were as inaccurate as they were jaundiced and hateful, he thought. In our impotence to rescind all the decisions that led to war, we erected monuments to assuage the wandering spirits whose lives had been stolen, and to somehow compensate the family members whose loss they would carry to the grave. Who were the greater victims? Those who gave their lives or those who made the war?
He said none of these things and instead watched a man in a wilted hat park his car in front of the cafe and come inside.
“Ethan Riser is here,” Hackberry said. “There’s something I didn’t tell you about him. He found out recently he has terminal cancer. No matter what he says tonight, he gets a free pass.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t think he wants other people to know. He’s one of those guys who never shows his hole card, even when the game is over.”
She pinched her eyes with her thumb and index finger, then widened them, the lines in her face flattening. “I’m not to be trusted?” she said.
“Don’t do that.”
“You treat me like I’m some kind of burden you have to put up with, someone you have to instruct regarding decent behavior.”
“Come on, Pam, stop it.”
“You have no sense at all of the pain your words cause, particularly to someone who cares about you. Goddammit, Hack.”
He let out his breath and tried to keep his face empty when he waved at Ethan Riser.
“Just go fuck yourself,” she said.
“Did I walk in on anything?” Ethan said, not looking directly at either one of them, his smile awkward.
“How you doin’?” Hackberry said.
“Pretty good. Can I join you?”
“Yes, sir,” Hackberry said.
“You sure?”
“Sit down, Ethan,” Hackberry said, moving over, not looking at Pam.
“Lorca is out of surgery,” Riser said. “It’s nice to see you, Chief Deputy.”
“You, too,” Pam replied.
“Lorca told me about the ambulance attendant and the possibility of Jack Collins and Noie Barnum being in the Glass Mountains. I have the feeling you might be headed up there, Sheriff.”
“I can’t say I’ve given it any thought,” Hackberry replied.
“I have trouble believing that,” Riser said. “This time out, you and Chief Deputy Tibbs need to stay in your own bailiwick. I can’t order you to do that, but I can ask you.”
“Whatever we decide to do, we’ll coordinate with the Bureau,” Hackberry said.
“Ever hear how Pretty Boy Floyd died?”
“Shot down while running from some federal agents on a farm in Ohio?”
“Something like that. Except there’s an unofficial account to the effect that he didn’t die right away. He was wounded and lying on his back when the agents got to him. One agent asked him if he was Pretty Boy Floyd. Floyd answered, ‘I’m Charles Arthur Floyd.’ Then somebody gave the order to finish him off, and that’s what they did.”
“Why are you telling us this?” Hackberry said.
“It makes for a good story, that’s all.”
“It’s not your style.”
“Probably not,” Riser said. “I’d sure like some of that pie.”
“Ethan, did you hear me? That’s not your style.”
“I’m all talk. You know that. Miss, could I have a piece of that blueberry pie with some ice cream on it and a cup of coffee?”
“It’s on us,” Pam said.
“I appreciate it.”
“Listen to Hack, Agent Riser.”
“Of course.”
The waitress brought the pie and ice cream and coffee, and Pam and Hackberry watched Ethan Riser eat. They also watched the way his eyes crinkled and the way his gaze seemed to probe the darkness outside the window, and each sensed in the other the embarrassment they felt while they watched a brave man try to mask the fact that he was under a death sentence.
“This area has never been quite real to me,” Riser said. “It’s a place where nothing is what it seems. A piece of moonscape where improbable people live and lunatics can hide in plain sight.”
“All empires have their dustbins,” Hackberry said. “It’s the place we bury our sins.”
“That’s too deep for me.”
“What do I know?” Hackberry said.
“A lot more than the Bureau wants to concede,” Riser said. “They consider you a pain in the ass. Stay out of the Glass Mountains, my friend.”
Pam drove Hackberry home in the rain. The fields were sodden on either side of the road, the sky black, the long lines of cedar fence posts and barbed wire glistening in the cruiser’s headlights. “He’s going to cool out Collins?” she said.
“I think that was all rhetoric. He’s angry because he has to die. Ethan’s a straight arrow. People like him make a pact with themselves and never violate it.”
“I told you to go fuck yourself earlier.”
“Forget it.”
“No, I meant it. I just shouldn’t have put it that way.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“I’m old, Pam. You think it’s honorable for an old man to take advantage of a young woman’s affections? You want to become romantically involved with a man who would use a young and attractive woman, knowing eventually he would be a burden to her?”
“I think age doesn’t have crap to do with any of it. With you, it’s all about pride. You’ve never forgiven yourself for the mistakes of your youth, so you have to create a standard that’s superior to everyone else’s. It’s not a lot different from the bad guys who are always trying to convince themselves of their own humanity.”
“That’s a rotten thing to say.”
“Too bad.”
He could feel his left temple throbbing again, and he knew that in the next few seconds, a sliver of pain as cold and hard as a stalactite would slide through his eye and the muscles of his left cheek. Up ahead, he saw his house suddenly illuminated by a bolt of lightning that struck in the trees behind his office, the same trees where Jack Collins had hidden and trained a laser sight on him. “You don’t have to pull into the drive. Just drop me on the road,” he said.
“You like walking in an electric storm?”
“In this case, I do.”
“Too bad again,” she said.
She drove across a wood bridge that spanned a creek running high with rainwater, the wild roses along the bank trailing in the current; then she turned in to his driveway and stopped at the picket fence that enclosed the front yard. “You think I’m unfair?” she said.
“I don’t think anything,” he said, getting out of the cruiser.
“There’s an umbrella in the backseat.”
“I’ve got my hat,” he said, closing the passenger door.
She reached into the backseat and gathered up the umbrella and stepped out into the rain. She tried to pop it open, but the catch was jammed.
“Get back in the cruiser,” he said.
But she didn’t. She followed him up the flagstones to the gallery. She was wearing a department-issue campaign hat, and the rain was beating on the crown and the brim, rolling in rivulets down her shoulders and shirtfront. “I think I should resign, Hack. I think I should go back to Houston,” she said.
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Who the hell are you to tell me anything?”
“I’m your boss, that’s who.”
“I can’t tell you how bad you piss me off.”
He walked back down the flagstones and took the umbrella from her hand and popped it open above both their heads. He could hear the rain thudding as hard as marbles on the nylon. “You’re the most stubborn woman I have ever met. Why do you act like this?”
“Why do you think?”
“Come in.”
“For what?”
“Just come in.”
He put his arm over her shoulders and walked her up the steps and unlocked the door and held it open for her. The living room was unlit and smelled of the couch and the carpet and the drapes and the wallpaper and the polished hardwood floors; it smelled like a home; it smelled like a fine place to be while lightning flashed on the hillsides and the wind and rain blew against the windowpanes and whipped an unfastened door on the barn and bent the trees and scattered the lawn with leaves and broken flowers. He dropped the umbrella on the rug and touched her face with his fingers, and in seconds felt her against him, her feet standing on top of his boots, her loins and breasts tight against his body, her hair wet against his cheek, her arms clenched around his back, all his personal resolve and his concerns about age and mortality and honor draining like water through the bottom of a paper bag.
“Oh, Hack,” she said. “Oh, Hack, Hack, Hack.”
From his deck Cody Daniels watched the storm move out of the south and seal the sky, trapping the light between a blue-black layer of clouds and the desert floor and mesas that were pink and talc-colored and that made him think of pictures of ancient Phoenician ships he had seen. When the power outage spread across the county, he saw the reflected glow of the town flatten against the clouds and die, a surge of cool air rising from the valley floor into his face. Hailstones clattered on the hardpan and on the deck, dancing in a white haze, and in the smell of ozone and the drop of temperature, he felt as though the world were fresh and clean, as though every bad memory of his life were being washed away, every failure and personal affliction slipping over the edges of the earth.
If only things were that easy.
Cody started up his gas-powered generator and went back in the house to resume the most difficult task in his life-writing a letter to the FBI. He had attempted a half-dozen versions on his computer and had been unhappy with all of them. His language was either stilted and sounded self-serving, or it became so confused it was almost unintelligible. The last attempt was two double-spaced pages long and gave details about his recruitment into a small group of anti-abortion activists in northern Virginia. It wasn’t a bad statement, except it indiscriminately included the names of his fellow travelers, some of whom may have been unaware of the group’s ultimate goal.
He had gone out on the deck without saving the letter on his hard drive, and the power outage had wiped his screen clean. When he reentered the house, the lights burning dimly on the low wattage produced by his generator, he sat down at his desk and picked up a felt-tip pen and addressed an envelope to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C., no zip code. He put his return address in the upper-left-hand corner of the envelope. Then he wrote the following letter on a yellow legal pad:
Dear Sirs,
I am the pitiful son of a bitch who bought the oven timer for the bomb that blew up the abortion clinic outside Baltimore three years back. I thought the bomb would go off in the middle of the night. But that doesn’t help the woman who got her face blown off. I can’t give you the names of any of the other people involved. This letter is about the evil deed done by one son of a bitch and one son of a bitch only, and as I have stated, that son of a bitch is yours truly,
Sincerely,
Rev. Cody Daniels
From outside, he heard the hiss of air brakes and the sound of a tractor-trailer shifting down. He looked through the window and, in the rain-streaked fading of the twilight, saw an eighteen-wheeler parked by the Cowboy Chapel, its high beams on, the engine still hammering, and what appeared to be a lead car parked in front of it. Cody had seen the lead car before, without the clamped-on brace of yellow lights on the roof; it belonged to a musician, a man who stopped by on occasion at the Cowboy Chapel and drank coffee and ate doughnuts in the hospitality room Cody left open for truckers or travelers on their way to the Big Bend country.
Cody draped a slicker over his head and went down the wood steps to the coffee room in the back of the chapel. “Getting out of the storm?” he said to a small tight-bodied man sitting at the long table in the middle of the room, a chrome-plated guitar across his thighs.
“Hey, Reverend, I didn’t see you, so I just come inside,” the man said. “Hope you don’t mind.”
“That’s what it’s for. The name is Rector, isn’t it?”
“Dennis Rector, that’s me,” the man replied. “I saw your nail gun there. You’ve been doing some carpentering.”
“You play a Dobro?”
“You know your instruments. That’s what it is, resonator and all.” The small man had the dark skin of a field hand and hair that looked like it had been cut with fingernail clippers. He wore lace-up boots and a tie-dyed T-shirt and denim work pants. His upper torso was bent like a question mark. “It’s a Fender, built on the old National model. It feels like a Coca-Cola box packed with ice hanging from your neck.”
Dennis Rector ran a steel bar up and down the neck of the Dobro and began playing a tune with the steel picks on the thumb and index and middle fingers of his right hand. “Recognize that piece? That’s ‘The Great Speckled Bird.’ Same tune as ‘The Wild Side of Life.’ Same tune as ‘It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels.’”
Through the window, Cody could see two men sitting in the cab of the eighteen-wheeler. “What are y’all carrying?” he asked.
“Exotic animals. Want one?”
“You work for a zoo?”
“I guess you could call it that.” Dennis Rector was smiling as though he possessed private knowledge that he might or might not share. “We supply a wild-game ranch up in Pecos County.”
Cody nodded and didn’t reply.
“You’re not keen on them kind of places?”
“Live and let live.”
“That’s the way I figure it. Their misfortune and none of my own. You know you got some beaners parked down yonder on your road?”
“Pardon?”
“Some pepper-bellies in a beat-up old car with a busted headlight.”
“Who are they?”
“Maybe a couple of people fucking. How should I know? I couldn’t see them that good.” The small man was still smiling.
“This is a church house, even if it’s just the coffee room,” Cody said.
“Sorry.”
“Did you catch the tag?”
“I wasn’t paying them much mind. They looked away from our lights when we passed. That’s why I figure they were people making out. Mexicans tend to breed in the spring and domino in the winter.”
Cody studied Dennis Rector from behind his eyelashes. “You from here’bouts?”
“Wherever I hang my hat. Jobs are kind of thin these days. Seems like there’s less and less work for a white man. What’s your feeling about that?”
“I never lost a job ’cause of my skin color.”
“That sounds different from a couple of your sermons.”
“Could I he’p y’all with something?”
“No, I just wanted to show my friends your church and get out of the storm.”
Cody nodded again, looking out the door at the truck and the animals he could see behind the ventilation slots in the sides. “You mind locking up when you leave? I’ve got some work to do in the house.”
The small man filled his mouth with a jelly doughnut, pushing the overflow back into his mouth with his wrist. His chrome-plated instrument swam with an oily blue light. “No problem, Reverend,” he said.
Cody walked back up the stairs and across his deck into the house, forcing himself not to look back over his shoulder. He felt a sense of ill ease that he couldn’t define. Was it the rawness of Dennis Rector’s language? Or the fact that Cody had helped encourage the role of victim in many of his congregants? Or did he see a reflection of his former self in the lewdness of mind that characterized men like Rector? Why was a man like that playing “The Great Speckled Bird,” a spiritual that was as deep-seated in southern religion as “The Old Rugged Cross”? Something wasn’t a right fit.
There was also the business about the Hispanics parked on the road. He should have pumped Rector about them. Could the car have contained Krill and Negrito? It couldn’t be them, could it? They were professional criminals, hunted by the local sheriff and the FBI and probably the Texas Rangers. Why would Krill and Negrito invest their lives in persecuting Cody Daniels, a mail-order minister who was awakened at two each morning by a blind woman with a disfigured face rattling his bedroom windows?
Just as the power went back on, Cody saw the eighteen-wheeler turn in a wide circle, led by Dennis Rector’s car, and head south down the road, the edges of the trailer etched with chains of gold running lights. He folded the confessional letter he had written to the FBI and placed it in the envelope and licked the seal, his stomach churning, his head as light as a helium balloon. Then he sat at his desk, his head in his hands, and wondered how he had made such a catastrophe out of his life.
The wind was swirling out of the desert, the rain driving hard on the roof, dancing on the handrails of his deck, blowing in the blue-white radiance of the neon cross he had mounted above the entrance to the Cowboy Chapel. Maybe it was time to pile a few belongings into the cab of his truck, drop his letter to the FBI in a mailbox, and disappear inside the vast anonymity of the American West.
He could sell his truck in California and pick fruit in the San Joaquin, harvest beets up in Oregon and Washington, maybe lumberjack in Montana or get on a fishing boat in Alaska. If the law caught up with him, fine. If it didn’t, that would be fine, too. Why not just roll the dice and stay out of the consequences? In the United States a person could get a new identity and start a new life as easily as acquiring a library card. He had to wonder at the irony of it all. In his fantasy, he was joining the ranks of the migrant workers he had railed against.
He went into his bedroom and began stuffing the clothes from his dresser and closet into a duffel bag. That was when he felt the air decompress around him and the cold smell of rain surge through the house, the joists and wood floors creaking as the temperature dropped inside. He turned around and stared into the faces of two men whose hats were wilted on their heads, their brown skin shiny with water, their clothes smelling like horses and wood smoke and sweat that had dried inside flannel.
“Why won’t y’all leave me alone?” Cody said.
“You know,” Krill said.
“I don’t know anything.”
“Yes, you know. Do not pretend you don’t know. Do not make an insignificance of my children.”
“I’m worthless as a minister. I’m no different from you. I he’ped put together a bomb that was used on an abortion clinic. I ruined a woman’s life. I’m not worth shooting.”
Krill was already shaking his head, indicating Cody’s wishes had little to do with what was about to occur. Negrito was smiling broadly. “We told you we’d be back, man. But you don’t listen,” he said. “You got anything to eat? I’m really hungry. What was that about a bombing?”
“You got a hearing defect?” Cody said.
“End this silly talk and come with me,” Krill said.
“Where?”
“Out into the rain, hombre.”
“I’m no count as a pastor, no count as a man. That’s not humility talking, either. It’s the truth.”
“ Venga conmigo. Now. No more talking.”
“You don’t have to point a gun at me. I’m plumb worn out with people pointing guns at me.”
“It’s necessary, hombre. Your ears are wood, your thinking processes like cane syrup. It is clear you’re of low intelligence.”
“You want to hold a gun on me? Here, I’ll he’p you.”
“Let go of my wrist.”
“Put one through my heart. I’m tired of y’all pestering me.”
“Show him,” Negrito said.
“Don’t underestimate me,” Krill said to Cody. “I have taken many lives. I have machine-gunned a priest.”
“Then pull the trigger,” Cody said.
Cody’s hand remained clenched tightly on Krill’s wrist. He could feel Krill’s pulse beating against his palm. Krill’s eyes were inches from his, the onions and wine and fried meat on Krill’s breath as damp as a moist cloth on Cody’s face. “Are you going to help me?” Krill asked.
“Maybe, if you put the gun away,” Cody said.
Krill’s eyes were black and as flat as paint on a piece of cardboard. “It is as you request,” he said, lowering his pistol. A curtain of rain slapped against the window and across the top of the church. “My car is parked behind your church.”
“Let me put on my coat,” Cody said.
“You will not try to deceive us?” Krill said.
“Why should I deceive you?”
“We know of your message to your flock. You have not been our friend. You make them feel comfortable with their hatred of us.”
“I think maybe you aim to kill me when this is over.”
“Would that be a great loss to the world?”
“Maybe not. But that doesn’t mean I’d necessarily enjoy it.”
“You are a very funny man,” Krill said.
They went out the door and into the rain and down the stairs to the back of the Cowboy Chapel, where Krill’s gas-guzzler was parked in the lee of the building. Krill opened the trunk and lifted out a large wood box tied with rope. Cody stared at the box and wiped his mouth. “They’re in there?”
“Of course.”
“I’ve always baptized by immersion,” Cody said, the rain beating on his bare head.
“What does ‘immersion’ mean?”
“I take people down by the creek and put them under. If the water is low, I have to dam up the creek. If everything is completely dried out, we go to the river. The creek is probably running pretty good now.”
“No, we aren’t going to a creek.”
“Then come inside,” Cody said.
They walked through the lighted coffee room and into the chapel, both of Krill’s hands cupped under the rope that bound the box, the weight hitting against his knees and sides. Cody removed his coat and wiped his face on his sleeve. He noticed that Negrito never touched the box, even though it was apparent that Krill was struggling with it. Krill set the box down heavily by the altar and untied the rope and let it snake to the floor.
The only light in the room came from a small stage hung with a blue velvet curtain. The interior of the chapel was immaculate, the pews gleaming, the floors polished. For some reason, as though for the first time, Cody realized what good care he had taken of the building. He had just installed new support beams under the peaked roof, heightening the effect of a cathedral ceiling, and had reframed the windows and painted birds and flowers on the panes. He had built a stage out of freshly planed pine in hopes that next year he could put on an Easter pageant and attract more children to his Bible-study classes. The air around the stage was as sweet-smelling as a green woods in spring, not unlike a deferred promise of better things to come.
“You have a very nice church here,” Krill said.
“I’m going to get a pitcher of water out of the coffee room. I’m not gonna call anybody or give y’all any trouble. What I’m doing here might not be right, but I’m gonna do it just the same.”
“What do you mean, ‘not right’?”
“The papists anoint at death. We baptize at birth.”
“These are considerations that are of no importance to me. Go get the water. Do not let me hear you talking on a telephone.”
“Don’t trust him, jefe. He’s a capon, the friend of whoever he needs to please at the moment,” Negrito said.
“No, our friend here has no fear. He has no reason to lie. Look at his eyes. I think he doesn’t want to live. He’s a sadder man than even you, Negrito.”
“Don’t talk of me that way, jefe.”
“Then don’t call others a capon, you who are afraid to touch the box in which my children sleep.”
Cody went into the coffee room and filled a small pitcher with tap water. His head was pounding, his breath short, but he didn’t know why. Was it just fear? Krill may have been a killer, but he was no threat to him. Krill was totally absorbed with the status of his children in the afterlife. What about Negrito? No, Negrito was not a threat, either, not as long as he was under Krill’s control. So what was it that caused Cody’s heart to race and the scalp to shrink on his head?
This was the first time he had ever done anything of a serious nature as a minister. And he was doing it at a time when he was about to flee his church and home and become a fugitive, just like the road kid who had forged checks and ended up on a county prison farm. He walked back into the chapel, knocking against a worktable he had fashioned from two planks and sawhorses, spilling a nail gun and a claw hammer to the floor.
Krill had opened the top of the wood box and was standing expectantly beside it, his gaze fixed on Cody. “How do you want to do it?” he asked.
Cody hadn’t thought about it. The images that went through his mind were too bizarre to keep straight in his head. He looked into the box and swallowed. “Put them on the edge of the stage,” he said.
“They’re watching,” Krill said.
“They’re watching?”
“From limbo. They want to be turned loose. That’s what you’re going to do.”
“Listen, I don’t know about those kinds of things,” Cody said. “Don’t make me out something I’m not.”
“You have cojones, hombre. I misjudged you.” Krill placed his children, one after another, on the apron of the stage. The oldest child could not have been over four when he died. The younger ones might have been three or two. All three were wrapped tightly in cloth and duct tape. Only their faces were exposed. Their eyes were little more than slits, their skin gray, their tiny cheekbones as pronounced as wire. There was no odor of decomposition. Instead, they smelled like freshly turned dirt in a garden, or like damp shade in woods carpeted with mushrooms.
“What are you waiting for?” Krill said.
“I feel like I’m doing something that’s dishonest,” Cody said.
“Your words make no sense. They are the words of a man with thorns in his head instead of thoughts.”
“Your children are innocent. They never hurt anybody.”
“Do not make me lose my patience, hombre. Do what you need to do.”
Cody poured water from the pitcher on the thumb and the tips of his fingers and made the sign of the cross on each child’s forehead. “I baptize these children in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
“That’s good. I’m proud of you, man,” Krill said.
“But it’s me and these two men who need absolution, Lord. These children didn’t commit any sin,” Cody said. “I left a woman blinded and maimed for the rest of her life, and the two men standing beside me are covered with blood splatter. We’re not worthy to touch the hem of Your garment. We’re not worthy to baptize these children, either, particularly the likes of me. But You’re probably used to hypocrites offering up their prayers, so I doubt if two or three more liars in Your midst is gonna make a lot of difference in the outcome of things.”
“You better shut your mouth, gringo,” Negrito said.
“I’m done. I’m sorry for what happened to your children, Krill. If y’all are fixing to kill me, I reckon now is the time.”
He walked into the coffee room, his back twitching. Out the window, he could see the deck of his house glimmer in a bolt of lightning, like the bow of an ark sliding out of a black wave. He sat down in a folding chair, his back to the doorway that gave onto the chapel. A phone was on the counter by the sink, and for a moment he thought about picking it up and dialing 911. But what for? If Krill planned to kill him, he would do it before a sheriff’s cruiser could arrive. Also, Cody would eventually have to tell the sheriff or one of his deputies about the clinic bombing, and Cody had no intention of going back to jail, or at least no intention to actively aid and abet his own imprisonment.
One minute clicked on the clock mounted on the wall, then two, then three. He heard Krill’s and Negrito’s boots walking across the chapel floor. He closed his eyes and clasped his hands between his thighs. He could hear his breath rasping in his throat. His fingers were trembling, his sphincter constricting. Then he heard the front door of the chapel swing open and felt a rush of air sweep through the pews. A moment later, he heard the gas-guzzler start up and drive away.
Cody opened his eyes and got up from the chair and began stacking dirty cups and saucers and plates in the sink and wiping down the long table in the center of the room. He had never thought the act of cleaning up a coffee room could be so pleasurable. Why had he spent so much of his life concentrating on every problem in the world rather than simply enjoying the small pleasures that an orderly life provided? Why did wisdom come only when it was too late to make use of it?
He poured a cup of coffee and put a small teaspoon of sugar in it and gazed out the window at the rain blowing off the hills and mesas in the west. Tumbleweed was bouncing as high as a barn, smacking his church, skipping through the yard, embedding under the stairs that led to his deck. A storm was a fine and cleansing thing, he thought, not to be feared or avoided but welcomed as one would a cool finger touching one’s brow.
He heard the front door open a second time, and the wind cut through the chapel and blew a stack of hymnal sheets fluttering in the air. He set down his coffee cup but remained seated at the table. “I told y’all we were done,” he called into the chapel.
A small, muscular man appeared in the doorway. “Brought some friends with me,” Dennis Rector said. “You met them before, but they had masks on. Look, I’m just making a buck. Don’t take this as personal.”