The Influence

by Bentley Little

  “There weren’t no arguing or nothin’. We all felt the same way. We knew it was what we had to do. I don’t…I don’t think there was even any talk about who would do what. Some of us just stepped back, and some moved forward, and some of Cameron’s farmhands went over to the barn to get blankets and such, gloves or what have you, and Cameron told the other ranchers and everyone to put the body in his smokehouse.”

  “Cameron ordered them? And they obeyed him? Cal Denholm? And Joe Portis?”

  “He wasn’t exactly orderin’ them. He was just sayin’ what everyone already kind of knew, although, lookin’ back on it now, he was prob’ly schemin’ to keep that angel for himself, knowin’ how he is. For all I know, he’s tryin’ right now to use it to help himself get more land or money or whatever. But that night, everyone was just ashamed that they’d shot it out of the sky, ashamed and scared and…and horrified, I guess, and we all just wanted to hide that angel’s body and pretend it hadn’t happened. Even Father Ramos. Even Vern Hastings and his crazy little churchies. So the farmhands brought out stuff to cover it up and pick it up with, and about ten or twelve guys brought it over to that smokehouse and put it inside. It looked real heavy, and it was still kinda bleedin’ but they got it in, and then afterward, a whole buncha people chipped in and got shovels and buried all the blood in the dirt, and then they closed and locked the smokehouse door, and that was it.”

  Lurlene exhaled heavily. “Boy, it feels good to talk about that.”

  “Maybe everyone should be talking about it.”

  “Everyone should,” Lurlene agreed. “But they won’t. That angel has…some kinda power, I think. And no one wants God to find out that we killed it. So everyone’s just pretendin’ it didn’t happen.” She looked at Lita. “I guess that’s what you picked up on, why you kinda felt outta the loop.”

  One of the washers had long since turned off, and Shelley Martin came back into the laundromat from wherever she’d gone and started taking her laundry out of the machine, putting it into an adjacent dryer.

  Lita leaned in closer so Lurlene could hear her above the noise. “Was she there?” Lita whispered, motioning toward Shelley.

  Lurlene nodded. “Yep.”

  Lita didn’t know Shelley well, but she’d seen her around and knew her by sight. She’d always thought Shelley was extremely pretty, but today the other woman looked tired, haggard and far older than her years. That angel has…some kinda power, Lurlene said, and Lita wondered if everyone who had been there that night had been affected by that power. It would certainly explain Darla’s and JoAnn’s recent odd behavior.

  She was glad she and Dave had decided to leave early.

  Although, Dave and Ross had been acting kind of strange themselves lately. And Ross hadn’t been there at all.

  She started examining her own thoughts and actions to see if she’d been behaving differently than normal.

  Lurlene tapped her on the arm, and Lita nearly jumped. “You all right?” her friend asked.

  “Yeah. I’m fine.”

  “You kinda spaced out there for a minute.”

  Lita looked at her. “Do you really think that was an angel?”

  Lurlene’s expression was deadly serious. “I know it.”

  “Do you think…I mean, there’re some weird things happening around here lately. Do you think…?”

  “Do I think it’s because we killed that angel?” Lurlene nodded. “Yes, I do. Is there anything we can do about it?” She shrugged. “According to Father Ramos, pray.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Not really.” Lurlene met her eyes. “But I’m doing it anyway.”

  Lita felt uneasy on the drive home. She wasn’t sure how much of what Lurlene had told her she bought, but she believed most of it, believed that something had been shot down on New Year’s Eve, even if it wasn’t an angel, and believed that its body was in Cameron Holt’s smokehouse. She recalled the black creature that had flown low over their truck on the way back from the party that night and shivered at the memory.

  She decided to tell Dave and Ross what she’d learned, and when she arrived home, she gathered them together in the kitchen. “Do you know about what happened at the New Year’s Eve party?” she asked.

  They both looked blank. “No. What?” Dave said.

  She told them, repeating the story Lurlene had related to her. “They think it’s an angel.”

  “Who thinks it’s an angel?” Ross asked.

  “Everyone, apparently.” She addressed Dave. “I think it’s that thing that nearly made us go into the ditch on the way home. Remember? The black flying thing that swooped over us?”

  “Of course I remember. But that sure as hell wasn’t an angel.”

  Ross had a weird look on his face.

  “Rossie?” she said.

  “I think I saw it, too. On Christmas night.”

  Her heart was pounding. “Really?”

  “Yeah, when you guys were gone. I was sitting out there at night, just looking up at the stars, and something flew over me, bigger than a bird but smaller than an airplane. I didn’t know what it was, but it was black and silent, and it kind of spooked me, so I went inside.”

  The three of them were silent for a moment.

  “Can something like that actually be real?” Dave wondered.

  “I’m pretty sure it is,” she said.

  “What do you think it could be?”

  None of them had an answer for that, and she thought about some of the things that had happened lately around Magdalena, some of the things she’d heard about, and she realized that the world was not as rational as she’d thought it was when she woke up this morning. And she knew that it never would be again.

  TWENTY

  Monday was free, no work lined up, so Jackass McDaniels did what he always did on such days—he worked his mine.

  Well, it wasn’t really a mine. It was more of a big hole in the desert behind his house. But he’d been digging that hole for over a decade now, and it looked like a miniature version of an open-pit. Roughly circular, big enough in diameter to swallow his home twice over, and wider at the top than it was at the bottom, it went down a good sixty feet. A series of ladders and ledges allowed him to reach the pit floor. Although several layers of earth had been uncovered—striations on the sides made it look like a miniature Grand Canyon—he hadn’t yet found what he was looking for.

  Gold.

  He knew what the geologists said, what other prospectors had told him. This wasn’t gold country. This wasn’t even copper country, although Clifton-Morenci was only an hour or so away and the Copper Queen lode in Bisbee had yielded high grade ore for nearly a century before petering out.

  But he had faith. He didn’t know why he was so sure when all signs pointed the other way, but he was and always had been, and it had kept him working on his mine for the past twelve years.

  McDaniels had always been a rockhound. Collecting rocks and minerals had come natural to him, and as a youngster he’d been obsessed with lost mines of the old west, especially the Dutchman. He’d found more than his share of pyrite in the hills and mountains hereabout, and one day, as a teenager, he’d looked at his collection of pyrite and thought that if that fool’s gold was real gold, he’d be a millionaire. So for a lot of years, when he’d had a regular job working for the Terry Brothers doing roofing and construction, he’d spent his vacations gallivanting around the state, looking for lost mines and the caches of gold that were supposed to still be there. Gradually, he came to realize that many of the desert ranges that were said to be home to those mines looked a lot like the Magdalena mountains, and he started to wonder if the land around here might not have some veins of gold running through it. No one had ever tried to look for gold around Magdalena and he decided to be the first.

  He’d been at it ever since, and though he’d never found so much as a single flake in a piece of rose quartz, he’d continued on, growing ever more certain as the prospects of find
ing the precious metal grew increasingly more unlikely.

  This morning, with no jobs scheduled, he’d come out here after breakfast with his pickaxe and his goggles, and he’d fired up the gas-powered sandblaster he kept at the bottom of the pit and started his mining operation. He’d been at it for nearly three hours, had sifted through a lot of loose rock and sand, and was about to quit for lunch, when a dazzling light hit his left eye. He was looking in a different direction, but it was bright enough to make him tear up and force him to close his eye against the glare, and he shifted position and saw that it was some sort of mirrored surface at the bottom of the pit reflecting back a powerful ray of the sun.

  Although he knew right away that it wasn’t just a “mirrored surface.”

  Dropping his tools, he ran over to the shiny object and picked it up, hefting it in his hand.

  It was a gold nugget, as big as a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

  McDaniels’ heart began beating crazily. Was it possible? Could it be real?

  Yes. He knew it was authentic without even testing it. Dusting off the nugget on his shirt, he held it up to examine it more carefully, acutely conscious of its weight in his hand. Were there more like this? Had he happened upon a deposit that would yield him not just ounces of gold but pounds?

  He put the nugget in his pocket, feeling it press coldly against his thigh through the material. His brain was buzzing. What would he do if he was suddenly rich? Buy a house in Acapulco? Move to Switzerland? Nah, he thought. He’d stay right here. This was his home, these were his people. He might quit working or might not. He’d probably build himself a nicer house, but chances were that he’d just continue on with a slightly more comfortable version of the life he already had.

  It occurred to him that nuggets were usually found through panning or sluicing, where rock had been worn down by water. Mines or pits usually exposed veins of gold that had to be smelted to separate the metal from the surrounding minerals. It was strange to find a nugget in a situation such as this.

  Dropping to his knees, he started digging through the pile of rubble where he’d found the first nugget and, moments later, he uncovered another. Again, he dusted it off and held it up. Smaller than the first, the shape and size of a peanut shell, it gleamed brightly in the morning sunlight. Looking at the gold—his gold!—McDaniels smiled broadly. So much for the experts. They were wrong, he was right, and now he was going to be wealthier than he’d ever dared hope.

  Thank God for his good fortune.

  Although maybe he should be thanking the angel.

  McDaniels put the second nugget in his pocket. He paused for a moment, thinking about the bullet-ridden body he’d helped carry into Cameron Holt’s smokehouse. It might sound crazy, but in the past few weeks he’d noticed something that no one else seemed to have picked up on: the angel was good luck. It didn’t matter that they’d shot it down, its mere presence here had brought unexpected windfalls to people in the community. Shane Garner had struck a big bucks deal with some winery, Xochi and Maria had won the lottery, he was finding gold on his property…

  This was luck of biblical proportions.

  Providence, as his mother used to say, was smiling on them.

  Jackass McDaniels was not a religious man. Though he’d been raised to have a healthy fear of God, life had made him more practical and realistic. He hadn’t seen too many examples of miracles performed by an invisible, all-knowing, all-powerful deity. In fact, most people he knew who prayed regularly never got what they wanted from the man in the sky. They were still poor and unhappy, and afflicted loved ones were never cured of the diseases they contracted.

  But this was something different. This wasn’t a made-up story but a concrete reality. The angel’s physical body, whatever it was made out of, seemed to possess a measurable power. And, because it was an angel, that power was good.

  McDaniels stood. But was it good? He’d heard things lately about other occurrences not quite so happy. And the Ingrams had lost their son, who’d been torn apart by wild animals. Were those a result of the angel as well? He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think so. Those were just the ordinary problems of everyday life. The angel hadn’t gotten rid of them, but she hadn’t caused them.

  Couldn’t the same thing be said about the winning lottery ticket and his gold? After all, he’d always thought there was gold here; he’d been working his mine for years.

  It didn’t pay to examine the situation too carefully. Hell, he wasn’t even sure the angel was a she. He thought about picking up that body and unconsciously wiped his hands on his Levi’s, as though he could still feel the weird sliminess that had gotten on his section of blanket on the way to Cameron Holt’s smokehouse.

  No, it wouldn’t do to think too hard about the angel. Best to just accept the gift for what it was and move forward.

  He walked over to the opposite side of the pit, grabbed the shovel that was leaning against the wall, and used it to turn over a big scoop of earth. Several shiny gold nuggets stood out against the tan blandness.

  Smiling, McDaniels bent down to pick them up.

  ****

  There wasn’t a lot to do on the bus ride from school when he didn’t have any homework, especially for the last twenty minutes, when it was just the ranch kids: him, his brother Ray, that retard Mitt Stevens, and the three cholo girls. So Bill Haack usually just slept.

  But today he was too hyped-up to sleep, just as he’d been too hyped-up to pay attention in his classes.

  Tumbleweed Connection had gotten a gig. An honest-to-shit paying gig.

  He hadn’t told the other members of the band—hadn’t even told his brother—because he was trying to think of a way to explain to his parents that he was dropping out of school and following his dream without his old man beating the crap out of him. For the fiftieth time today, he unfolded and reread the email he’d printed out last night, the paper so worn from use that it looked like it was a year old instead of a day.

  It was a legitimate offer from Desperados, a club in Nogales. Monday through Thursday for three months, fifty bucks a night. Plus whatever tips they got. They could even sell merchandise! They didn’t have merchandise, but that was definitely something he needed to look into. He knew the money wasn’t much, but this was a real place. Dierks Bentley had played here on his way up. So had Trace Adkins. It was a launching pad, and that’s what he needed to stress when he talked to his dad.

  Of course, that was going to be one tough conversation, which was why he’d already put it off twice. His dad had been acting like an even bigger asshole than usual since New Year’s Eve. He’d brought his holster to the party and, like everyone else, had shot off his guns at the stroke of midnight to celebrate the arrival of the new year. Bill suspected that his old man thought he’d been the one to actually kill the angel, which was why he’d been so ornery lately. Bill could use that in an argument against him, if necessary, and he was fully prepared to do so, even though it would probably piss off the old bastard even more.

  The bus dropped off the cholo girls in front of the dirt drive that led to Mr. Holt’s ranch, then headed out to that crappy little farmhouse where Mitt Stevens lived, before taking him and Ray home. The two of them walked up the long driveway, past the corral to the house.

  “What’s up with you?” Ray asked. “Why’re you so quiet? And why did you keep looking at that piece of paper all the way home?”

  Bill stopped walking. He took the email out of his pocket, unfolded it and handed it to his brother. “We got an offer. Desperados in Nogales. They want to make us the house band!”

  “Oh my God!” Ray grabbed the email, growing more excited as he read on.

  “They need an answer by tomorrow, and I’m just trying to figure out how to tell Dad. Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime offer. We don’t take it, they’ll find someone else.”

  “We’re taking it!”

  “We’re gonna have to quit school.”

  “Who gives a shit?”
r />   “Dad will.”

  “Yeah, but he’ll understand—”

  “He won’t understand anything. He has no clue how these things work. This is either take-it-or-leave-it, and if we don’t step up, we’re spending the rest of our lives in Magdalena. This is the big time, dude. You know how many famous people started out at Desperados?” Bill took his email back and started walking again.

  “We’ll just tell him. We won’t ask him. You’re seventeen; I’m sixteen. He can’t tell us what to do.”

  Bill hoped his brother kept up that attitude. Because it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  They walked up to the house and inside. As he’d expected, the old man was sitting on the couch, half-drunk and watching a judge show. He’d been avoiding the cattle since they’d started dying, since they’d turned. Bill was pretty sure his dad was afraid of the animals, which was why he spent most of his time hiding in the house. That gave Bill a psychological advantage, and having the upper hand made him feel brave. He dropped his backpack on the floor and motioned for Ray to follow him.

  “Dad?” he said.

  The old man did not even look up from the TV. “What?”

  He’d decided the best way to bring it up was just to blurt it out. “Tumbleweed Connection was offered a gig. At a club in Nogales. We’re going to take it.”