Anton Ling opened the back door of her house to let in her cat and smelled the smoke inside the rain. She looked up into the bluffs and, in the blackness of the storm, saw a fire burning as bright and clean as the red point of flame on an acetylene torch. She dialed 911 and reported the fire, then got into her truck and headed down the dirt road for Cody Daniels’s house, a fire extinguisher bouncing on the passenger seat.
Cody Daniels knew his fate was not up for discussion when he saw that the men who had followed Dennis Rector into the chapel had not bothered to mask their faces. What he had not anticipated was the severity of design they were about to impose on his person. They pulled back the velvet curtain on the stage in the chapel and lifted him above their heads, as college kids might at a fraternity celebration, trundling him on their extended arms and hands to the wood cross he had constructed for a passion play that had never become a reality. They were smiling as though Cody were in on the joke, as though it were a harmless affair after which they would all have a drink.
The man actually in charge was not Rector but a diminutive man who spoke in an accent that sounded like Russian. His chin was V-shaped, his teeth the color of fish scale, his nose beaked, his cheeks and neck unshaved, his maroon silk shirt unbuttoned on a chest that looked almost skeletal. He wore three gold chains on his neck and a felt hat cocked jauntily on his head. He had the face of either a goat or a pixie, although the purple feather in his hatband suggested a bit of the satyr as well.
“Have you seen my good friend the Preacher lately?” he asked.
The men had set down Cody on the stage so he could face the man in the cocked hat. “The killer? I saw him once at Miss Ling’s house. But I don’t know him,” Cody said.
“I need to find my friend the Preacher and his companion Noie Barnum. I think Ms. Ling has probably told you where they are.”
“No, sir, she didn’t do that.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Why shouldn’t you? I don’t know anything about Barnum. I wish I had never heard of him.”
“But you do know Temple Dowling.”
“I wish I’d never heard of him, either.”
“Did you know he was a pedophile?”
“No.”
“When you went to work for him, he didn’t ask you to find young girls for him?”
“I’m not gonna even talk about stuff like that.”
“Before this is over, you’ll talk about many things. We have all night.”
Cody felt himself swallow. The man with the Russian accent sat down in the front pew and smiled and made a gesture to his men with his right hand. His men picked up the cross that had been propped against the back wall and laid it down on the stage, then spread Cody Daniels on top of it and removed his shoes. Cody had constructed the cross out of railroad ties, and he could smell the musky odor of the creosote and oil and cinders in the grain and feel the great hardness of the wood against his head and back and buttocks and thighs.
They’re only going to scare me. They won’t do this, a voice inside him said.
Then he heard the pop of the nail gun and felt a pain explode through the top and bottom of his foot. He tried to pull himself erect, but a man on either side of him held his arms fast against the cross’s horizontal beam. He closed his eyes and then opened them and stared upward into the cathedral ceiling. For the first time in his life, Cody Daniels had a sense of finality from which he knew there was no escape. “I shot over the heads of poor Mexicans coming into the country,” he said. “When I was a boy, I made a fifteen-year-old colored girl go to bed with me. I wrote a bad check to some old people who let me charge groceries at their store. I stole a woman’s purse in the bus depot in Denver. I took a watch off a drunk man in an alley behind the Midnight Mission in Los Angeles. I almost killed a woman outside Baltimore.”
“What is he saying?” said the man with the Russian accent.
“He’s sorry he’s on the planet,” said a man holding one of Cody’s arms.
“See what else he has to say,” said the man with the Russian accent.
Cody heard the nail gun again and felt his other foot flatten against the vertical shaft of the cross and try to constrict against the nail that had pinioned it to the wood. This time he thought he screamed, but he couldn’t be sure, because the voice he heard did not seem like his own. The popping of the nail gun continued, the muzzle working its way along the tops of his feet and his palms and finally the small bones in his wrists. He felt himself being lifted up, the top of the cross thudding against the wall behind him, his weight coming down on the nails, the tendons in his chest crushing the air from his lungs. Through a red haze, he could see the faces of his executioners looking up at him, as though they had been frozen in time or lifted out of an ancient event whose significance had eluded them. He heard himself whispering, his words barely audible, his eyes rolling up into his head.
“What’d he say?” one man asked.
“‘I’m proud my name is on her book,’” another man said.
“What the fuck does that mean?” the first man asked.
“It’s from the song ‘The Great Speckled Bird,’” Dennis Rector said.
“What is this speckled bird?” asked the man with the Russian accent, standing at the foot of the stage.
“In the song, it’s supposed to mean the Bible,” Dennis Rector replied.
The man with the Russian accent gazed through the side window at the rain striking the glass.
“What do you want us to do, Mr. Sholokoff?” Rector asked. “Is he alive?”
“I think he is.”
“You think?” Sholokoff said.
“Just tell me what you’d like me to do, sir,” Rector said.
“Do I have to write it down?”
“No, sir.”
“Don’t come into this county again.”
“I come through here to deliver the animals to your game ranches.”
“You need to take a vacation, Dennis. Maybe go out into the desert for a while. Here, I have some money for you. I’ll call you when it’s time to come back to work.”
Sholokoff began walking down the aisle toward the front of the church.
“I did what you wanted,” Rector said. “You shouldn’t treat me like this. I ain’t somebody you can just use and throw away.”
Sholokoff continued out the front of the church into the night without replying or looking back. Dennis Rector pinched his mouth with his hand and stared at Cody Daniels and the blood running from his feet and hands and wrists and down his forearms. He stuck Sholokoff’s wad of bills into his jeans. “I’m gonna get the gas can out of my car,” he said. “Did you guys hear me? Don’t just stand there. Take care of business.”
None of the other men spoke or would look directly at him.
Alocal rancher flying over the church saw the flames burst through the roof of the Cowboy Chapel and reported the fire before Anton Ling did. By the time she had headed up the road to the church, the volunteer fire department truck and Pam Tibbs and Hackberry Holland and another cruiser driven by R. C. Bevins were right behind her.
“Jesus Christ, look at it,” Pam said.
The building was etched with flames that seemed to have gone up all four walls almost simultaneously and had been fed by cold air blowing through all the windows, which probably had been systematically smashed out. The fire had gathered under the ceiling and punched a hole through the roof that was now streaming sparks and curds of black smoke into the wind.
“Somebody used an accelerant,” Hackberry said.
“You think it’s the same guys who broke into Anton Ling’s house?”
“Or Temple Dowling’s people.”
“You believe in karma? I mean for a guy like Cody Daniels.”
“You mean is this happening to him because he was mixed up in the bombing of an abortion clinic? No, I don’t believe in karma, at least not that kind.”
“I thought maybe you did,” Pam said.
“Who gets the rougher deal in life? Beggars on the streets of Calcutta or international-arms merchants?”
Pam’s attention was no longer focused on their conversation. “Hack, Anton Ling is getting out of her truck with a fire extinguisher.”
Hackberry saw Anton Ling run from her truck directly through the front door of the church, a ropy cloud of blue-black smoke funneling from under the top of the doorframe. Pam braked the cruiser behind the pickup, and she and Hackberry and R. C. Bevins and two volunteer firemen ran up the steps behind Anton Ling.
When Hackberry went inside the church, the intensity of the heat was like someone kicking open the door on a blast furnace. The walls were blackening and starting to buckle where they were not already burning, the sap in the cathedral beams igniting and dripping in flaming beads onto the pews below. Hackberry could hardly breathe in the smoke. Anton Ling went down the main aisle toward the stage, the fire extinguisher raised in front of her. Through the smoke, Hackberry could see a man crucified on a large wooden cross at the rear of the stage, his face and skin and bloodied feet lit by stage curtains that had turned into candles.
Hackberry caught up with Anton Ling, his arm raised in front of his face to protect his eyes from the heat. “Give it to me,” he said.
“Take your hand off me,” she said.
“Your dress is on fire, for God’s sake,” he said.
He tore the fire extinguisher from her hands and pulled the pin from the release lever and sprayed foam on her clothing. Then he mounted the stairs at the foot of the stage, the heat blistering his skin and cooking his head even though he was wearing his Stetson. He sprayed the area around the man on the cross while the volunteer firemen, all of them wearing ventilators, sprayed the walls with their backpacks and other firemen pulling a hose came through the front door and horse-tailed the ceiling with a pressurized jet of water pumped from the truck.
“Let’s get the cross down on the stage and carry it through the door,” Hackberry said. “He’s going to die in this smoke.”
But when Hackberry grabbed the shaft of the cross, he recoiled from the heat in the wood.
“Sheriff?” R.C. said.
“What?”
“He’s gone.”
“No, the wounds aren’t mortal.”
“Look above his rib cage. Somebody wanted to make sure he was dead. Somebody shot nails into his heart,” R.C. said.
The flashlights of the firemen jittered and cut angles through the darkness and smoke, the rain spinning down through the hole in the ceiling. “Nobody from around here could do something like this,” one of the firemen said.
“Not a chance, huh?” Hackberry said.
“No, this kind of thing don’t happen here,” the fireman said. “It took somebody doped out of his mind to do this. Like some of those smugglers coming through Miss Ling’s place every night.”
“Shut up,” Anton Ling said.
“If they didn’t do it, who did? ’Cause it wasn’t nobody from around here,” the fireman said.
“Give us a hand on this, bud. We need to get Reverend Daniels off these nails and onto a gurney. You with me on that?” Hackberry said to the fireman.
Outside, fifteen minutes later, Hackberry watched two paramedics zip a black body bag over Cody Daniels’s face. The coroner, Darl Wingate, was standing two feet away. The rain had almost quit, and Darl was smoking a cigarette in a holder, his face thoughtful, his smoke mixing in the mist blowing up from the valley.
“How do you read it?” Hackberry said.
“If it’s any consolation, the victim was probably dead when the nails were fired into his rib cage. Death probably occurred from cardiac arrest. The main reason crucifixion was practiced throughout the ancient world was that it was not only painful and humiliating but the tendons would tighten across the lungs and slowly asphyxiate the victim. The only way he could prolong his life was to lift himself on the nails that had been driven through his feet or ankles. Of course, this caused him to increase his own torment a hundredfold. It would be hard to invent a more agonizing death.”
“I’d like to believe this poor devil didn’t go through all that, that he died early,” Hackberry said.
“Maybe that’s the way it went down, Hack,” Darl said, his eyes averted. “Did you know I got a degree in psychology before I went to med school?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I wanted to be a forensic psychologist. Know why I went into medicine instead?”
“No, I don’t,” Hackberry said, his attention starting to wander.
“Because I don’t like to put myself into the minds of people who do things like this. I don’t believe this was done by a group. I think it was ordered by one guy and a bunch of other guys did what they were told,” Darl said.
“Go on.”
“The guy behind this feels compelled to smear his shit on a wall.”
“Are you thinking about Krill?”
“No. The perp on this one has a hard-on about religion.”
“How about Temple Dowling?”
“Stop it. You don’t believe that yourself.”
“Why not?”
“Dowling is inside the system. He’s not a criminal.”
“That’s what you think.”
“No, the problem is the way you think, Hack. You’d rather turn the key on a slumlord than a guy who boosts banks. You’ve also got a grudge against Dowling’s father.”
“Say that again about religion.”
“I have to give you an audiovisual presentation? We’re talking about a murder inside a church, on a cross. It was done by a believer.”
“A believer?”
“Yeah, and he’s really pissed.”
“How about Jack Collins?”
“Collins is a messianic killer, not a sadist.”
“You should have been a cop, Darl.”
“That’s what I did in the army. It sucked then and sucks now.”
“Why?”
“Because arresting these bastards is a waste of time,” Darl said.
Hackberry walked toward his cruiser, where Pam and R.C. were waiting. The hair was singed on the backs of his arms, and the side of his face was streaked with soot. The churchyard was filled with emergency vehicles, the red and blue and white flashers pulsing in the mist.
“Wrap it up here,” he said to Pam.
“You tried to save him, Hack. When you went inside, you didn’t know if the roof was coming down or not,” she said.
“Call Ethan Riser.”
“Riser is no help,” she said.
“She’s right, Sheriff. Them FBI people wouldn’t take time to spit in our mouths if we were dying of thirst,” R.C. said.
Hackberry opened his cell phone and found Riser’s number and punched it in, then walked off into the darkness and waited for the call to go to voice mail. Surprisingly, the agent picked up.
“Ethan?” Hack said.
“Yeah, who’d you expect?”
Hackberry told him what had happened. “I need everything you can get me on Josef Sholokoff. I need it by noon tomorrow.”
“Can’t do it, partner.”
“Cut this crap out, Ethan. I’m not going to put up with it.”
“There’re probably fifty agents in half a dozen agencies trying to shut down this guy. If you screw things up for the government, they’re going to drop a brick shithouse on your head.”
“Where are you?”
“In the Glass Mountains.”
“Who’s with you?”
“A friend or two.”
“I think you’re trying to take on Collins by yourself.”
“Collins is long overdue for retirement.”
“You don’t know him. I do. Let me help you.”
“I wish you’d been with me when we had bin Laden’s family on the tarmac. But this one is all mine,” Riser said.
“That’s a dumb way to think.”
“Did you ever hear of this black boxer who went up against an Australian who was called ‘the thinking man’s fighter’? The black guy scrambled his eggs. When a newsman asked how he did it, the black guy said, ‘While he was thinking, I was hitting him.’”
“Don’t hang up.”
“See you around, Hack. I’ve been wrong about almost everything in my life. Don’t make my mistakes.”
Early the next morning, as Jack Collins listened to Noie Barnum talk at the breakfast table in the back of the cabin, he wondered if Noie suffered from a thinking disorder.
“So repeat that for me, will you? You met the hikers on the trail and you did what?” Jack said.
“I wanted to try out that walking cane you gave me, and I made it down the hill just fine and along the edge of the creek out to the cottonwoods on the flat. That’s when my breath gave out and I had to sit down on a big rock and I saw the hikers. They were a very nice couple.”
“I expect they were. But what was that about the Instamatic?”
“At least I think it was an Instamatic. It was one of those cheap cameras tourists buy. They said they belonged to a bird-watching club and were taking pictures of birds along the hiking trail. They asked me to take a snapshot of them in front of the cottonwoods. It was right at sunset, and the wind was blowing and the leaves were flying in the air, and the sky was red all the way across the horizon. So I snapped a shot, and then they asked if they could take my picture, too.”
“But you’ve left something out of the repeat, Noie.”
“What’s that?”
“The first time around, you mentioned this fellow’s line of work.”
“He said he was a Parks and Wildlife man. He didn’t look to be over twenty-five, though. He said he and his wife were on their honeymoon. She had this warm glow in her face. They put me in mind of some folks I know back home.”
“And where do they live?”
“He said Austin. I think. Yeah, that was it. Austin.”
“Austin. That’s interesting.”
Jack got up from the table and lifted a coffeepot off the woodstove with a dishrag and poured into his cup. The coffee was scalding, but he drank it without noticing the heat, his eyes fastened on Noie. “You like those eggs and sausage?”
“You know how to cook them,” Noie replied. “What my grandmother would call ‘gooder than grits.’”
“You’re a card, Noie. So this fellow was from a law enforcement agency?”
“I don’t know if I’d call Parks and Wildlife that.”
“And he lives in the state capital?”
“Yep, that’s what he said.”
“And you let him take your photograph? Does that come right close to it?”
Noie seemed to reflect upon Jack’s question. “Yeah, I’d say that was pretty much it.”
In the early-morning shadows, Noie’s nose made Jack think of a banana lying in an empty gravy bowl. His long-sleeve plaid shirt was buttoned at the collar, even though it was too tight for him, and his suspenders were notched into the knobs of his shoulders like a farmer of years ago might have worn them. He was freshly shaved, his sideburns etched, his face happy, but his jug-shaped head and big ears would probably drive the bride of Frankenstein from his bed, Jack thought. Noie preoccupied himself with whittling checker pieces he kept in a shoe box, and he had the conversational talents of a tree stump. Plus, Noie had another problem, one for which there seemed to be no remedy. Even though he bathed every night in an iron tub by the barn, his body constantly gave off an odor similar to sour milk. Jack decided that Noie Barnum was probably the homeliest and most single man he had ever met.
“Did it strike you as unusual that this couple would want to photograph a man they’d known for only a few minutes?”
“My grandmother used to say people who are rank strangers one minute can turn out the next minute to be your best friends.”
“Except we’re not rank strangers to the law, Noie.”
“That brings me to another topic,” Noie said. “I know the government wants to get their hands on me, but for the life of me, I can’t figure why you’re running from them.”
“You’ve got it turned around, pard. I stay to myself and go my own way. If people bear me malice, I let them find me. Then we straighten things out.”
“I bet you give them a piece of your mind, too.”
“You could call it that.”
“You ever take your guitar out and play it?”
“My guitar?”
“You keep the case under your bed, but you never take your guitar out and play it.”
“It sounds like it was tuned to a snare drum. That’s because I tuned it.”
Noie’s expression had turned melancholy. He set down his fork and studied his plate. “That couple I met on the trail don’t mean us any harm, Jack. Particularly toward a fellow like you. I don’t know why you choose to be a hermit, but you’re the kindest man I’ve ever known, and I’ve known some mighty good ones.”
“I believe you have, Noie.”
“I worry about you because I think you’re bothered about something in your past, something you probably shouldn’t be fretting yourself about.”
Through the back window, Jack could see the rain from last night’s storm still dripping off the barn roof and dew shining on the windmill and steam rising off the horse tank. The blueness of the morning was so perfect, he didn’t want to see the sunlight break over the hill. “We’ve got us a fine spot here,” he said. “Sometimes if you listen, you can hear the earth stop, like it’s waiting for you to catch up with it. Like it’s your friend and it wants you to be at peace with it. That’s why I live alone and go my own way. If you don’t have any truck with the rest of the world, it cain’t mess you up.”
Noie seemed to study the content of Jack’s words, then he stared at his plate again and put his arms below the table. “I got blood on my hands,” he said.
“From what?”
“Those Predator drones.”
“It’s not your doing.”
“Those things have killed innocent people, Stone Age peasants who don’t have any stake in our wars.”
“That’s just the way it is sometimes.”
“My grandmother used to say there’re two kinds of men never to associate with. One is the man who’ll shed the blood of the innocent, and the other is a man who’ll raise his hand to a woman. She always said they’re cut out of the same cloth. They’re of Cain’s seed, not Abel’s.” Noie picked up his fork and waited for Jack to speak. Then he said, “Go ahead.”
“Go ahead what?” Jack asked.
“You looked like you were fixing to say something.”
“If you see that Parks and Wildlife guy again, don’t be in a hurry to have your picture taken,” Jack said.
“Where you headed?” Noie asked.
“I thought I might tune my guitar. I’ll be up yonder in the rocks.”
“Why are you taking your binoculars?”
“After a storm, there’re all kinds of critters walking around, armadillos and lizards and such. They’re a sight to watch.”
That same morning Anton Ling received the most bizarre phone call of her life. “This is Special Agent Riser, Ms. Ling,” the voice said. “You remember me?”
“I’m not sure,” she replied. “You’re with the FBI?”
“I was the supervising agent who talked to you after your home was invaded.”
“I’d like to believe you’re calling to tell me you have someone in custody.”
“You don’t think much of us, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“I don’t blame you. I want to tell you a couple of things, Ms. Ling. We have a file on you that’s three inches thick. I’ve tapped your phones and photographed you from a distance and looked with binoculars through your windows and invaded every other imaginable aspect of your privacy. Some of my colleagues have a genuine dislike of you and think you should have been deported years ago. The irony is you worked for the CIA before a lot of them were born. But my issue is not with them, it’s with myself.
“I want to apologize for the way I and my colleagues have treated you. I think you’re a patriot and a humanitarian, and I wish there were a million more like you in our midst. I think Josef Sholokoff was behind the invasion of your home. I also think we’ve failed miserably in putting his kind away. In the meantime, we’ve often concentrated our efforts on giving a bad time to people such as yourself.”
“Maybe you’re too hard on yourself, Mr. Riser.”
“One other thing: Be a friend to Sheriff Holland. He’s a lot like you, Ms. Ling. He doesn’t watch out for himself.”
“Sir, are you all right?”
“You might hear from me down the track. If you do, that’ll mean I’m doing just fine,” Riser said.
Ethan Riser closed his cell phone and continued up a deer trail that wound along the base of a butte with the soft pink contours of a decayed tooth. He passed the rusted shell of an automobile that was pocked with small-caliber bullet holes and beside which turkey buzzards were feeding on the carcass of a calf. The calf’s ribs were exposed and its eyes pecked out, its tongue extended like a strip of leather from the side of its mouth. The air was still cool from the storm, the scrub brush and mesquite a darker green in the shadow of the butte, the imprints of claw-footed animals fresh in the damp sand along the banks of a tiny stream. Ethan was sweating inside his clothes, his breath coming short in his chest, and he had to sit down on a rock and rest. Behind him was a young man dressed in pressed jeans and a white shirt with pockets all over it and canvas lug-soled shoes. He wore an unpretentious black-banded straw hat with the brim turned down and a western belt with a big, dull-colored metal buckle that fit flat against his stomach.
When the young man reached the rock where Ethan was sitting, he unslung a canteen from his shoulder and unscrewed the cap and offered Ethan a drink before drinking himself. “I got to be honest with you. I think this is a snipe hunt,” he said.
“Hard to say,” Ethan said, blotting his face with a handkerchief.
“That fellow was standing in the shade and wearing a hat when I took his picture. He could be anybody.”
“That’s why I want you to go back now. I’ve wasted enough of your time.”
“You shouldn’t be out here by yourself.”
“It beats twiddling my thumbs in a motel.”
“Let me treat you to lunch.”
“What’s farther up?”
“Jackrabbits and open space and some more hills. A game ranch or two, maybe one guy running cows. A gun club has a couple of leases where some oil-and-natural-gas guys bust skeet and drink whiskey. I think there might be a cabin that somebody uses during deer season.”
“Who might that be?”
“Not somebody anyone ever paid much mind to. Ethan, you don’t look well. Let’s go back.”
“I got no reason to. You’re the one on his honeymoon.”
“I shouldn’t have ever told you about that fellow we ran into. On the homely scale, he was just this side of a mud fence. About as harmless-looking, too. If this guy is a threat to national security, we’re all in deep doo-doo.”
“You also said he talked like he had a mouthful of molasses. Noie Barnum is from northern Alabama.”
“A Quaker from Alabama?”
“I grant you he’s a strange duck. But compared to Jack Collins, he’s as normal as it gets.”
“My folks have always lived here’bouts, and they haven’t heard any talk about hermits wandering around with Thompson machine guns.”
A single-engine plane passed overhead, its shadow racing across the treetops and boulders on the sunny side of a hill.
“It’s a fine day to be out and about, isn’t it?” Ethan said.
“I cain’t argue that.”
“Help me up, will you?”
Ethan Riser’s friend remained motionless.
“What are you looking at?” Ethan asked.
“I thought I saw a reflection of some kind up there on that hill.” The young man removed a small pair of binoculars from a leather case on his belt and adjusted them to his eyes. “I declare, it’s a book.”
“A what?”
“Yeah, its pages are fluttering on top of a rock. Cain’t anybody say people in Southwest Texas aren’t literary. Stop looking at me like that, Ethan. There’s nobody there. It’s just a book somebody left on a rock.”
Preacher Jack Collins was reading in the Book of Kings, the wind and sun on his face, when he glanced up long enough to see the single-engine plane coming out of the southeast, its wings tilting in the updrafts, its engine sputtering as though it were low on gas. He stepped backward into some pinon trees growing out of the rocks, his body motionless, his face pointed at the ground, his thumb inserted as a bookmark in the pages of his Bible. He heard the plane pass overhead, then the engine caught again, and when he climbed to the crest of the hill and looked between two boulders, he saw the plane disappearing over a long stretch of flatland, its wings level and parallel with the horizon.
Feds? Maybe. Probably a rancher who was burning the valves out of his engine with ethanol. Jack resumed reading in his comfortable spot among the rocks, the pages of the Bible as white as snow in the sunlight, the print on them as clear and sharp and defining as the lettering that Yahweh had seared with a burning finger in the Mosaic tablets. For Jack, there was no such thing as “interpretation” of the Scripture; there was also no such thing as “metaphor.” These were devices that allowed the profligate and the libertine to consecrate behavior that made Jack’s stomach curdle.
Homosexuality? Sodomy? Not exactly. It was a type of behavior that somehow remained nameless. It was more like a memory or the shadow of a person or an event that hid behind a corner on a long street he was forced to walk in his sleep. The street was uniformly gray, as though all the color had been leached out of the concrete and asphalt and stone. There were no people on the sidewalks or in the buildings, and when he crossed an intersection, he hoped to hear a roar of traffic or at least the footsteps of other pedestrians on a side street, but instead, he heard no sound except the pounding of blood in his ears.
In his dream, he would try to wake himself before he reached the last block on the street, but his willpower had no influence on his dream. At the corner of a building on the end of the street, a figure was moving into full view on the sidewalk. The figure wore a hooded workout jacket and a print dress and pink tennis shoes and a sequined belt, as though she had dressed randomly off the rack at a Goodwill store. Everything about her was in some fashion a frightening contradiction. She looked too young and pretty for the damage the world had probably done her. Her mouth was down-hooked at the corners, her brow dimpled with anger, her eyes lit with a quiet scorn that showed she was not only privy to Jack’s most private thoughts but disgusted by them. Her meanness of spirit and the depth of her disdain for him did not seem to fit with the youthfulness of her face. How could he possibly understand the physiological riddle that she presented to him?
She beckoned to him, confident he would come to her, even as she removed her belt and wrapped one end around her palm.
When he would wake from the dream, he would sit on the side of his bed, his hands clenched between his knees, filled with self-loathing that seemed to have no cause.
The degradation that invaded his soul in his sleep never left him during his daylight hours, unless he could transfer its origins onto someone else. It might have seemed a twisted way to think, Jack told himself, but he did not invent the world, nor did he create the people who had bedeviled him without cause for a lifetime or gone out of their way to reject him.
It was the latter category that bothered him most. He did not subscribe to the belief that woman was man’s downfall. Nor did he blame women for their vanity or the fact that guile was sometimes their only defense against man’s exploitation of their bodies. No, it was the strange light in their eyes when they looked upon his person that caused a match to flare on the lining of his stomach. They not only feared him, they were viscerally repelled by him, a man who, in his entire life, had never referred to a woman in a profane or unseemly manner.
So he had found another kind of woman, one he could trust and who was worthy of a man people on both sides of the border referred to as the left hand of God. She lived inside the Scripture and was always waiting on the attention of his eyes when he turned to the thumb-creased pages where her story began but never ended. This woman did not have one name; she had many. She was Esther, who told Xerxes he would have to walk in her blood before she would allow him to harm her people; she was Rebecca, with the water jug on her shoulder, the strong-willed, intelligent wife of Abraham’s son; she was the Samaritan woman with whom Jesus had the longest conversation in the New Testament; and ultimately, she was Mary of Magdala, who subsidized Jesus’ ministry and stayed with him at the cross and became the first apostle of the new religion when she announced on Easter morning, “He is risen.”
The figure who hid behind the wall at the end of the street could lay no claim upon Preacher Jack as long as he had his Testament.
He heard the plane again. This time it was coming out of the northwest, retracing its earlier flight path. He crouched inside the shade of the pinon trees and removed his panama hat and focused his binoculars on the side of the plane as it passed dangerously low over the crest with at least three men inside the cabin. Jack doubted they were feds. Feds didn’t take unnecessary risks; self-important corporate douchebags who paid large sums of money to shoot captured animals on a game farm did. Just for fun, Jack picked up his submachine gun and aimed through the iron sights at the tail of the plane. “Pow,” he whispered as softly as smoke.
Then he realized the distraction of the plane and his idle thoughts about game farms and douchebags had just cost him. Across the flatland to the southwest, two figures had emerged from a rocky basin and were headed in his direction. In fact, if they stayed on course, they would follow the creek up into the buttes to the natural fort where he had built his cabin.
He lay on his stomach, his elbows propped on grit, his binoculars aimed through the pinon branches. Both of the figures were men. One was young and athletic-looking, a canteen slung on his shoulder, wearing a hat that a tourist or rock collector would wear. The other man had meringue hair and a flushed face and was sweating and obviously slowing the younger man. The sun was white in the sky and had robbed the morning of all its redemptive qualities. These two men, particularly the older one, were not here to enjoy the Texas landscape.
What to do? Jack asked himself.