Nick walked back across the lawn toward the carriage house. He could hear chairs scraping behind him and the voice of Josef Sholokoff starting to rise, like that of a man tangled inside his own irritability and his unwillingness to concede its origins.
Be there for me, Mohammed, Nick thought.
Mohammed was having his own troubles. He had moved the cab from near the carriage house to a spot by the corner of the building—probably, Nick suspected, to avoid seeing women dressed only in bikini bathing suits. But two of Sholokoff’s men had come out the front door and were blocking the driveway. Nick headed straight down the drive toward the electronic gates. Behind him, he heard Mohammed stepping on the gas, then the sound of tires whining across a slick surface.
Nick looked over his shoulder and saw Sholokoff’s cardplayers coming around the side of the house. Nick broke into a jog, then a run.
The cab was fishtailing across the lawn, blowing fountains of black soil and water and divots of grass from under the fenders, exploding a birdbath across the grille, destroying a flower bed in order to get on the driveway again. Mohammed swerved past Nick and hit the brakes. “Better get in, sir. I think we’re in deep excrement,” he said.
Nick piled into the backseat, and Mohammed floored the accelerator. The front end of the cab crashed into the gates just before they could lock shut, flinging them backward on their hinges, breaking both of the cab’s headlights. The cab careened into the street, one hubcap bouncing over the opposite curb, rolling like a silver wheel down the mountainside.
Nick sat back in the seat, his lungs screaming for air, his heart swollen the size of a bass drum, sweat leaking out of his eyebrows. “Hey, Mohammed, we did it!” he shouted.
“Did what, sir?”
“I’m not sure!”
“Why are you shouting, sir?”
“I’m not sure about that, either! Can I buy you a drink?”
“I don’t drink alcohol, sir.”
“Can I buy you a late dinner?”
“My ears are hurting, sir.”
“Sorry!” Nick shouted.
“My family is waiting supper for me, sir. I have a wife and four children at home. I have a very nice family.”
“Can I take all of you to a late dinner?”
“That’s very good of you, sir. My family and I would love that,” Mohammed said, pressing his palm to one ear, starting to shout himself. “I could hear you talking to those men. These are very dangerous men. But you spoke up to them like a hero. You are a very nice and brave man. Hang on, sir.”
24
THE PREVIOUS DAY Hackberry Holland had given over the back bedroom and the half-bath of his house to Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores. In the first silvery glow on the horizon the next morning, he could not account to himself for his actions. He owed Flores and Gaddis nothing on a personal basis. He was incurring legal and political risk, and at the least, he was ensuring the permanent enmity of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI. Age was supposed to bring detachment from all the self-evaluative processes that kept people locked inside their heads. As with most of the other aphorisms associated with getting old, he thought this one a lie.
He showered and shaved and dressed and went out to the horse lot to clean off the top of the tank for his foxtrotters and to fill it with fresh water. On the lip of the tank, he had constructed a safety “ladder” out of chicken wire for field mice and squirrels who, during drought or severe heat spells, would otherwise climb up the water pipe onto the tank’s edge in order to drink and fall in and drown. The chicken wire was molded over the aluminum rim, extending into the water, so small animals could climb back out. While Hackberry skimmed bird feathers and bits of hay off the tank’s surface, his two foxtrotters kept nuzzling him, breathing warmly on his neck, nipping at his shirt when he paid them no mind.
“You guys want a slap?” he said.
No reaction.
“Why’d we bring these kids to our house, fellows?”
Still no response.
He went inside the barn and used a push broom to begin cleaning the concrete pad that ran the length of the stalls. The dust from the dried hay and manure floated in the light. Through the barn doors, he could see the wide sweep of the land and hills that were rounded like a woman’s breasts, and the mountains to the south, across the Rio Grande, where John Pershing’s buffalo soldiers had pursued Pancho Villa’s troops fruitlessly in 1916. Then he realized there was a difference in the morning. Dew was shining on the windmill and the fences; there was a softness in the sunrise that had not been there yesterday. The air was actually cool, blessed with a breeze out of the north, as though the summer were letting go, finally surrendering to its own seasonal end and the advent of fall. Why couldn’t he resign himself to the nature of things and stop contending with mortality? What was the passage from Ecclesiastes? “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever”?
Eleven thousand years ago people who may or may not have been Indians lived in these hills and wended their way along the same riverbeds and canyons and left behind arrowheads that looked like Folsom points. Nomadic hunters followed the buffalo here, and primitive farmers grew corn and beans in the alluvial fan of the Rio Grande, and conquistadores carrying the cross and the sword and the cannon that could fire iron balls into Indian villages had left their wagon wheels and armor and bones under cactuses whose bloodred flowers were not coincidental.
Right here he had found the backdrop for the whole human comedy. And what was the lesson in any of it? Hackberry’s father the history professor had always maintained the key to understanding our culture lay in the names of Shiloh and Antietam. It was only in their aftermath that we discovered how many of our own countrymen—who spoke the same language and practiced the same religion and lived on the same carpetlike, green, undulating, limestone-ridged farmland—we would willingly kill in support of causes that were not only indefensible but had little to do with our lives.
At six A.M. Hackberry saw Pam Tibbs’s cruiser turn off the asphalt road and come under the arch and up his driveway. She parked the cruiser and unchained the pedestrian gate on the horse lot and walked toward him with a big brown paper bag hanging from her right hand.
“Are Gaddis and Flores up yet?” she said.
“I didn’t notice.”
“Did you eat?”
“Nope.”
“I brought you some melted-cheese-and-egg-and-ham sandwiches and some coffee and a couple of fried pies.”
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me something.”
“Talk to the state attorney’s office. Get somebody on your side.”
“Wars of enormous importance are always fought in places nobody cares about, Pam. This is our home. We take care of it.”
“That’s what this is about, isn’t it? The outside world came across the moat.”
Hackberry propped the push broom against a stall and took two folding chairs out of the tack room and set them up on the concrete pad. He took the paper bag from Pam’s hand and waited for her to sit down. Then he sat down and opened the bag but did not remove anything from it.
“Some of the Asian women had eight-ball hemorrhages. I see their eyes staring at me in my sleep. I want Collins dead. I want this guy Arthur Rooney dead and this guy Hugo Cistranos dead. The feds are after a Russian out in Phoenix. Their workload is greater than ours, and their priorities are different from ours. It’s that simple.”
“I doubt they’ll be that tolerant.”
“That’s their problem.”
“Flores seems like a nice kid, but he’s a five-star fuckup.”
“Y’all talking about me?” Pete said from the doorway.
Pam Tibbs’s face turned as red as a sunburn. Pete was smiling, silhouetted against the sunrise, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of fresh jeans he had tucked into his boots.
“We were wondering if you and Vikki would like to have breakfast with us,” Hackberry said.
Pam Tibbs looked at Hackberry, her lips pursed, her eyes lidless.
“Some people say Ouzel is mixed up with Mexican dope mules and such, but I don’t set a lot of store in that. He seems pretty much a harmless guy to me. What do y’all think?” Pete said.
THE FIRST MORNING that he woke in Preacher’s tent, Bobby Lee could feel the difference in the temperature. He pushed open the flap and felt a great cushion of cool air rising off the earth, glazing the mesas and monument rocks and creosote brush and spavined trees with dew, even staining the soil with dark areas of moisture, as though an erratic rain shower had blown across the land during the night.
Preacher was still asleep on his cot, his head deep in a striped pillow that had no pillowcase and had been stained by the grease from his hair. Bobby Lee went outside and used the chemical toilet and started a fire in the woodstove. He filled a spouted metal pot with water from the hundred-gallon drum Preacher had paid four Mexicans to mount on eight-foot stanchions; he poured coffee grounds into the pot and set it on the stove. When the sun broke above the horizon, the wood framing of Preacher’s new house, constructed by the same Mexicans—all illegals who spoke no English—stood out in skeletal relief against the vastness of the landscape, as though it did not belong there or, if it did, it marked the beginning of a great societal and environmental change about to take place. The wind came up, and Bobby Lee watched the burned books from Preacher’s house that had been bulldozed into a pile of debris blow away in gray and blackened scraps of paper. Was a change of some kind taking place before Bobby Lee’s eyes? Was he witness to events that, as Preacher constantly suggested, were prophesied thousands of years ago?
Preacher had told Bobby Lee he would be part of the new place. If his name was not on the deed, he would nonetheless be bonded to the property and the house by Preacher’s word. Was it possible for Preacher and Bobby Lee to get the mow-down behind them and resolve their problems with Hugo Cistranos and Artie Rooney and this Russian Sholokoff? It happened. He knew retired button men in Miami and Hallandale who had done thirty or forty hits in New York and Boston and Jersey and never gone down on a serious beef and today had no one looking at them. The guys who had killed Jimmy Hoffa and Johnny Roselli had never been in custody, guys who might have even been involved with the murder of John Kennedy. If those guys could skate, anybody could.
When the coffee boiled, he used a dish towel to pour a tin cup full from the pot, then lifted the cup to his mouth. The coffee, grounds and all, scalding hot, landed on his stomach lining like a cupful of acid.
He went back inside the tent. Preacher was up, pulling on his pants. “You look like you’re having some kind of discomfort there, Bobby Lee,” he said.
“I think I got an ulcer.”
“You got coffee out there?”
“I’ll get you some.” Thanks for the concern, Bobby Lee said to himself. He went back outside and filled a second tin cup. He opened the wooden icebox and took out a perforated can of condensed milk and a box of sugar cubes. “You take sugar or you don’t?” he called out.
“You don’t remember?” Preacher said through the flap.
“I get it mixed up.”
“Two cubes and a half teaspoon of canned milk.”
Bobby Lee brought the cup back inside the tent and placed it in Preacher’s hand. “You’re not diabetic?”
“No, I told you that.”
“So you avoid alcohol out of principle rather than for health reasons?”
“Why should you care, Bobby Lee?”
“Just one of those things. Liam and me were talking once about how you got medical issues of some kind.”
Preacher was standing up over his writing table, unshaved, wearing an unironed white shirt. He drank from his cup, touching his lips gingerly against the rim. “Why would you and Liam be talking about my health?”
“I don’t remember the circumstances.”
“You think I have a health problem that people need to know about?”
“No, Jack, I know you’re good about taking care of yourself, is all. Liam and me were just making conversation.”
“But a man like Liam Eriksson was intensely concerned about my well-being?”
“Wish I hadn’t brought it up.”
“Did Liam bring it up?”
“Maybe. I don’t remember.”
Preacher sat down on his unmade cot and set his coffee on the writing table. Before going to bed, he had been playing blackjack against himself. The deck was splayed facedown on the table. Two cards had been dealt faceup to the imaginary player. The dealer’s hole card was facedown. The second dealer’s card had not been dealt. “What do you reckon has given you that ulcer?”
“Everything went south because of the Asian women. It was a mistake that just happened. You and me shouldn’t have to pay the price. It’s not fair.”
“You’re still a fish.”
“About what?”
“We weren’t hijacking the women. We were hijacking the heroin in their stomachs. They started going nuts on us, and Hugo decided to waste the whole bunch and use the lot behind the church as a storage area. He was going to dig them up later.”
“That’s sick.”
“But this Holland fellow came along and changed all that. What I’m saying to you is there are no accidents.”
Bobby Lee wasn’t about to enter into Preacher’s psychotic frame of reference. “What if we get out of the country for a while? Let everything cool off?”
“You disappoint me.”
“Come on, don’t talk to me like that, man.”
“We’ve got Arthur Rooney and Hugo to deal with. Sholokoff is going to send another hit team after us. I’ve got all that federal heat coming down on me because of that fellow from ICE. I don’t think I’m quite finished with Sheriff Holland, either. He spat on me. The girl did, too.”
“Jesus, Jack.”
“Also, I’ve still got my commitments with the Jewish family.”
“That last bit just won’t go down the pipe. I can’t fathom that, man. It’s absolutely beyond me.”
“That I’m not bothered because Mrs. Dolan got upset and attacked me?”
“In a word, yeah.”
“Mrs. Dolan is Jewish royalty. For some, a woman is a pair of thighs and breasts, something you can put your seed in so she can wash it out. But I don’t think you’re that kind, Bobby Lee.”
Bobby Lee let the image slide off his face. “I got to ask you something.”
“Is my mother really buried under this tent?”
“That’s part of it.”
“What’s the rest?”
“Like what happened to her?”
“How did she end her days?”
“Yeah, I mean like she got sick or she was old or she got hurt in an accident?”
“That’s a complex question. See, I’m not sure if she’s under this tent, or if only part of her is. I buried her after a hard freeze. I had to build a fire on the ground and use a pickax to chop the grave. So I didn’t go very deep with it. Not knowing a lot back then about predators and such, I didn’t cover the mound with stones. When I came back a year later, critters had dug her up and strung her around about forty or fifty yards. I put what I could back in the hole and packed the dirt down tight, but to tell the truth, I’m not sure how much of her is down there. There were a lot of other bones around.”
“Jack, did you—”
“What?”
“Shit happens. Like did you have to do something to your mother?”
“Yeah, it does. Get me a refill, will you? My leg is hurting.”
Bobby Lee went outside with Preacher’s cup just as the Mexican carpenters arrived to resume the framing on Preacher’s house. Bobby Lee went
back inside the tent, forgetting to add either sugar or condensed milk to the cup. Preacher was staring into space, his expression like a blunted ax blade. He took the cup from Bobby Lee’s hand. The coffee was even hotter now than when Bobby Lee had first made it.
“Answer the question, Jack.”
“Did I kill my own mother? Good God, son, what kind of person do you think I am? Let me show you something.” Preacher picked up the splayed deck from the writing table and squared the cards between his palms. He turned up the dealer’s hole card and looked at it blankly. It was the ace of spades. The imaginary player’s two cards were a ten and an ace of hearts. Preacher squeezed the top card off the deck with his thumb and flopped it faceup on top of the dealer’s ace. “Queen of spades,” he said. “Blackjack. See, the story is already written, Bobby Lee. A fellow just has to be patient, and his queen comes along.”
“You actually let the Gaddis girl spit on you?”
Preacher placed his tin cup to his mouth and drank it to the bottom without ever flinching, his lips discoloring from the intense heat. He thought for a long time and pulled at the corner of his eye. “She did it because she was scared. I don’t fault her for it. Besides, she’s not the woman I want or I’m supposed to have.”
“I never can figure you out.”
“Life is a flat-out puzzle, isn’t it?” Preacher said.
“CAN YOU CLIP a horse’s feet?” Hackberry said.
Pete was mucking out a stall in the back of the barn with a broad-billed coal shovel. He straightened from his work, his skin and hair damp in the gloom. “Sir?”
Hackberry repeated the question.
“I’ve done it once or twice,” Pete said.
“Good, you can help me now. You ever give a horse his penile procedure?”
“I don’t remember.”
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