“What do you think?”
“I say give Liam a break. The guy’s out there, he’s trying.”
“Out where?”
This time Bobby Lee ignored Preacher’s constant attempts to correct his language and somehow turn it against him. “Look, I’ll call you back later. I’ve got a plan.”
“You’ve been wandering around on the border for two days. That’s a plan?”
“You ever know a junkie who was farther than one day away?”
“What’s your point?”
“There’s no difference between a junkie and a drunk. A rat goes to its hole. The soldier is a juicer and drifts in and out of A.A., at least that’s the word. Hugo says he’s got a pink scar on his face as thick as an earthworm. I’ll find him. I guarantee it. I called the A.A. hotline and got an area schedule. You still there, Jack?”
Had the service simply gone down, or had Preacher hung up? Bobby Lee hit the speed dial, but his call went immediately to voice mail. He closed and opened his eyes, the mountain in front of him like a dark volcanic cone cooling against the evening sun.
THERE WERE FEW twelve-step groups in the area, or at least few that met more often than once a week, and the following day Pete Flores felt he was lucky to hitch a ride to one called the Sundowners that met in a fundamentalist church thirty miles down the road from the motel where he and Vikki were staying. The church house was a white-frame building with a small false bell tower on the apex of the roof and a blue neon cross mounted above the entranceway. In back were a mechanic’s shed and, next to it, a cemetery whose graves were strewn with plastic flowers and jelly glasses green with dried algae. Even with the windows wide open, the air inside the building was stifling, the wood surfaces as warm to the touch as a cookstove. Pete had arrived early at the meeting, and rather than sit in the heat, he went outside and sat on the back steps and looked at the strange chemical-green coloration in the western sky, the sun still as bright as an acetylene torch on the earth’s rim. The sedimentary layers of the mesalike formations were gray and yellow and pink above the dusk gathering on the desert floor. Pete felt as though he were sitting at the bottom of an enormous dried-out riparian bowl, one shaped out of potter’s clay in a prehistoric time, the land giving off an almost feral odor when rain tried to restore it to life.
The man who sat down next to Pete on the step was wearing an immaculate white T-shirt and freshly pressed strap overalls. He smelled of soap and aftershave lotion, and his dark hair was boxed on the back of his neck. His thick half-moon eyebrows were neatly clipped, the cleft in his chin shiny from a fresh shave. There was a bald spot in the center of his head. When he stared southward at the desert, his mouth was a gray slit without expression or character, his eyes dulled over. He pulled a cigarette out of his pack with his lips, then shook another one loose and offered it to Pete.
“Thanks, I never took it up,” Pete said.
“Good choice,” the man said. He lit his cigarette and blew the smoke from the side of his mouth deferentially. “I’m new at this meet. How is it?”
“Don’t know. This is my first time here, too.”
“You got some sobriety in?”
“A few days, that’s about it. I’ve got a twenty-four-hour chip.”
“Twenty-four hours can be a bitch.”
“You work here’bouts?” Pete asked.
“I was hauling pipe between Presidio and Fort Stockton, up to last month, anyway. I got a service-connected disability, but my boss was a pretty hard-nosed character. According to him, time in the Sandbox was for jerks.”
“You were in Iraq?”
“Two tours.”
“My tank got blown up in Baghdad,” Pete said.
The man’s eyes drifted to the long welted scar that ran like a pink raindrop down the side of Pete’s face. “You start drinking when you came home?”
Pete studied the deepening color in the sky, the hills that seemed humped against a fire burning just beyond the earth’s rim. “It runs in my family. I don’t think the war had much to do with it,” he said.
“That’s a stand-up way to look at it.”
“How much sobriety you have?”
“A couple of years, more or less.”
“You have a two-year chip?” Pete said.
“I’m not big on chips. I do the program my own way.”
Pete folded his hands and didn’t reply.
“You got wheels?” the man said.
“I hitched a ride with a guy who smelled like a beer truck. I asked him to come in with me, but he said Jesus’s first miracle was turning water into wine, and his followers weren’t hypocrites about it. I couldn’t quite fit all that together.”
“Want to get some coffee and a piece of pie after the meet? I’m springing,” the man in overalls said.
During the meeting, Pete forgot about his conversation with the man he’d met on the back steps. A woman was talking about going on a dry drunk and experiencing flashbacks that returned her to the inside of a blackout. Her voice, like that of a benighted soul forced to witness light, became threaded with tension as she told the group she might have killed someone with her automobile. The room was quiet when she finished speaking, the people in the pews and folding chairs staring at their feet or into space, their faces wan, each knowing the speaker’s story could have been his or her own.
After the meeting, the man in overalls helped stack chairs and wash out cups and the coffeemaker. He glanced in the direction of the woman who thought she might have committed vehicular homicide. He lowered his voice. “That one is about to talk herself into Huntsville pen,” he said to Pete.
“What you hear and who you see here stays here. That’s the way it’s supposed to work,” Pete said.
“Anybody who believes that has a lot more trust in people than I do. Let’s get something to eat, and I’ll take you home.”
“You don’t know how far I live.”
“Believe me, I got nothing better to do. My girlfriend boosted my truck and took off with a one-legged Bible salesman,” the man in overalls said. He stared across the row of pews at the woman who had spoken of a dry drunk earlier; his forehead creased with furrows. The woman stood at a window, her attention fixed on the darkness outside, her hands resting on the sill as though they weren’t attached to her arms. “Goes to show you, doesn’t it?” he said.
“Show you what?” Pete said.
“That woman over there, the one confessed to killing somebody who might not exist. She looks like she just figured out she’s created a bigger mess than the one she was already in.”
Pete didn’t answer. Ten minutes later he drove to a restaurant with the man in overalls, who said his name was Bill, and ordered a piece of cake and a glass of iced tea.
“You got a girl?” Bill said.
“I like to think I do,” Pete replied.
“She’s in the program, too?”
“No, she’s normal. I never could figure why she got involved with the likes of me.”
“Where y’all living?”
“A low-rent joint up the road.”
Bill seemed to wait for the next words Pete would speak.
“I’ve been thinking about something,” Pete said. “That woman back yonder at the meet?”
“The wet-brain?”
“I wouldn’t call her that.”
Bill picked up the check and studied it, then looked irritably in the direction of the waitress.
“She was willing to confess to something maybe she didn’t do,” Pete continued. “Or if she did do it, she was willing to confess to it and maybe go to prison. For her, it didn’t make any difference. She just wants to be forgiven for whatever she’s done wrong in her life. That takes guts and humility I don’t reckon I have.”
“That broad can’t add,” Bill said, getting up with the check in hand. “I’ll meet you outside. We need to haul freight. I got to get some shut-eye.”
Pete waited in the parking lot, chewing on a plastic soda
straw, looking at the stars, Venus winking above a black mountain in the west. What had Bill said earlier about a two-year sobriety chip? He hadn’t bothered to accept it? That one didn’t quite slide down the pipe. That would be like turning down the Medal of Honor because the ceremony conflicted with an evening of color-matching your socks.
“Ready to roll?” Bill said, exiting the café.
Pete removed the soda straw from his mouth and looked at Bill in the glow of a neon beer sign.
“Problem?” Bill said.
“No, let’s boogie,” Pete said.
“You still haven’t told me where you live.”
“At the red light, turn east and keep going till you run out of pavement.”
“I thought you said you lived up the road, not east,” Bill said, trying to smile.
“I guess I’m not that sharp when it comes to the cardinal points of the compass. Actually, our place is so far back in the sticks, we got to bring the sunshine in on a truck,” Pete replied. “That’s a fact.”
Bill was quiet as they drove eastward through hardpan countryside dotted with mesquite and old tires and scrap metal that sparkled like mica under the moon. He put a mint on his tongue and sucked on it and looked sideways at Pete as the SUV hit chuckholes that jarred the frame. “How much farther?”
“Another five or six miles.”
“What the hell do you do out here?”
“I’m shaving and treating fence posts for a fellow.”
“That’s interesting. I didn’t know there was that much wood around here.”
“It’s what I do.”
“How about your girl?”
“She’s got a little Internet business.”
“Selling what? Lizard turds?”
“She does right well with it.”
Bill drove past another mile marker. Set back between two hills was a lighted house with a gasoline truck parked in the yard and a windmill in back. Horses stood motionlessly in a railed pen where the grass was nubbed down to the dirt.
“Excuse me,” Bill said, reaching across Pete.
“What are you doing?”
“It’s my Beretta. You see that jackrabbit go across the road? Hang on.”
Bill pulled onto the shoulder and got out, staring at a dry wash running from a culvert into a tangle of brush that had leaves like thick green buttons. Out in the moonlight, away from the shadows, were cactuses blooming with yellow and red flowers. A nine-millimeter semiauto hung from Bill’s right hand. “Want to take a shot?” he said.
“What for?”
“Sometimes in hot weather, they get worms. But if you gut and skin them right and hang them from wire overnight, so all the heat drains out, they’re safe to eat. Come on, hop out.”
Pete opened the SUV’s door and stepped down on the gravel, the wind warm on his face, a smell like dried animal dung in his nostrils. The highway was empty in both directions. On the other side of the border, he thought he could see electric lights spread across the bottom of a hill.
“Follow me down here,” Bill said. “You can have the first shot. He’s gonna spook out of the brush in just a minute. Jackrabbits always do. They don’t have the smarts to stay put, like a cottontail does. You never hunted rabbits when you were a kid?”
Pete took his soda straw out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. “Not often. Our farm was so poor the rabbits had to carry their own feed when they hopped across it.”
Bill grinned. “Come on, we’ll flush him out. Afraid of rattlers?”
“Never given them much thought.”
“Think I’m gonna rape you?”
“What?”
“Just a bad joke. But your behavior strikes me as a little bit queer.”
“How are you using the word ‘queer’?”
“That’s what I mean. You’re wrapped too tight, trooper. If you ask me, you need to get your pole polished.”
Bill seemed to lose interest in the conversation. He reached down and picked up a rock. He studied the clump of brush with buttonlike leaves at the bottom of the wash and flung the rock into it hard enough to break a branch and make a clattering sound far down the wash. “See him scoot? Told you he was in there,” he said.
“Yeah, you called it.”
Bill turned and faced Pete. His nine-millimeter was pointed downward, along his thigh, the butterfly safety pushed to the fire position. He formed a pocket of air in one cheek, then the other, like a man rinsing his mouth. “Yes, sir, you’re a mite spooky, Pete. A hard man to read, I’d say. I bet you blew up some hajji ass over there, didn’t you?”
Pete tried to remember giving his name to Bill. Maybe he had, if not at the meet, perhaps at the café. Think, think, think, he told himself. He could feel his scalp tightening. “I’d better be getting on home. I’d like to introduce you to my girlfriend.”
“She’s waiting on you, huh?”
“Yeah, she’s a good one about that.”
“Wish I was you. You bet I do,” Bill said. He looked southward into the darkness, his thoughts hidden. Then he released the magazine on his gun and stuck it in his pocket. He cleared the chamber and inserted the ejected round into the top of the magazine and shoved the magazine back into the frame with the heel of his hand. “Think fast,” he said, throwing the gun to Pete.
“Why’d you do that?”
“See if you were paying attention. Scared you, didn’t I?”
“Pert’ near,” Pete replied. “You’re quite a card, Bill.”
“Not when you come to know me,” Bill said. “No, sir, I wouldn’t say I was a card at all. Just stick my piece back in the glove box, will you?”
Five miles farther down the road, the hills flattened and the moon sat on the horizon like a huge, bruised white balloon. Up ahead, Pete could see a passing lane, then a brightly lit convenience store and gas-pump island. “We’re just about two miles or so from the dirt track that goes to our house,” he said. “I can get off up yonder if you want.”
“In for a penny, in for a pound. I’ll take you all the way.”
“I got to be honest about something, Bill.”
“You kill somebody with your car while you were in a blackout?”
“The reason I don’t have a lot of sobriety is I want to drink.”
“You mean now?”
“Now, yesterday, last week, tomorrow, next month. When I catch the bus, the undertaker will probably have to set a case of Bud on my chest to keep me in the coffin.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“Like they say, unless you’ve reached your bottom, you’re just jerking on your dork. Pull into the store yonder.”
“Sure that’s what you want to do?”
“Hell, yes, it is. What about you?”
“One or two cold brews wouldn’t hurt. I’m no fanatic. What about your girlfriend?”
“She doesn’t complain. You’ll like her.”
“I bet I will,” Bill said.
He pulled the SUV into the gas island and got out to fill the tank while Pete went inside the convenience store. The air was thick and warm and smelled of burned diesel. Hundreds of moths had clustered on the overhead lights. Pete took two packs of pepperoni sausage from a shelf and two cartons of king-size beers from the cooler. The cans were silver and blue and beaded with moisture and cold inside the cardboard. He set them on the counter and waited while another customer paid for a purchase, clicking his nails on top of one carton, looking around the store as though he had forgotten something. Then he adjusted his belt and made a face and asked the cashier where the men’s room was. The cashier lifted his eyes only long enough to point toward the rear of the store. Pete nodded his thanks and walked between the shelves toward the back exit, out of view from the front window.
Seconds later, he was outside in the dark, running between several eighteen-wheelers parked on a grease-compacted strip of bare earth behind the diesel island. He dropped down into an arroyo and ran deeper into the night, his heart beating, c
louds of insects rising into his face, clotting in his mouth and nostrils. The heat lightning flaring in the clouds made him think of the flicker of artillery rounds exploding beyond the horizon, before the reverberations could be felt through the earth.
He crawled through a concrete culvert onto the north side of the two-lane state highway, then got to his feet and began running across a stretch of hill-flanged hardpan traced with serpentine lines of silt and gravel that felt like crustaceans breaking apart under his shoes.
He had created a geographic forty-five-degree angle between his present location and the Fiesta motel, where Vikki waited for him. The distance, by the way the crow flies, was probably around forty-five miles. With luck, if he ran and walked all night, he would be at the motel by sunrise. As he raced across the ground, the lightning threw his shadow ahead of him, like that of a desperate soldier trying to outrun incoming mail.
12
WHEN HACKBERRY HOLLAND was captured by the Chinese south of the Yalu and placed in a boxcar full of marines whose clothes smoked with cold, he tried to convince himself during the long transportation to the POW camp in No Name Valley that he had become part of a great historical epic he would remember one day as one remembers scenes from War and Peace. He would be a chronicler who had witnessed two empires collide on a snowy waste whose name would have the significance of Gallipoli or Austerlitz or Gettysburg. A man could have a worse fate.
But he quickly learned that inside the vortex, you did not see the broad currents of history at work. No grand armies stood in position behind rows of cannons that were given the order to fire in sequence, almost in tribute to their own technological perfection rather than as a means of killing the enemy. Nor did you see the unfolded flags flapping in the wind, the caissons and ambulance wagons being wheeled into position, the brilliant colors of the uniforms and the plumes on the helmets of the officers and the sun shining on the drawn sabers. You saw and remembered only the small piece of ground you had occupied, one that would forever be filled with sounds and images that you could not rinse from your dreams.
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