“That’s the place the Mexicans were cleaning up. That’s where the Wilcox woman lived. By the way, y’all are the second people to come by this morning asking about those fellows.”
“Who else was here?”
“A little round man in a Cherokee with an American flag flying on it and a young fellow and girl with him. The young fellow had a scar on his face like somebody glued a pink soda straw on it. Y’all grow them a little strange back where you come from?”
“Where’d they go?”
“Up the road. I can tell you how to get there, but the Mexicans will probably run off when they see y’all coming.”
“They’re illegals?”
“Oh, hell no.”
Hackberry got directions and got back in the cruiser. Pam dropped the transmission into gear and drove slowly up the road headed north, waiting for him to speak. A piece of the moon still hung low in the sky, like a carved piece of ice.
“The boy picked out Liam Eriksson, the only guy we know for sure is dead,” he said.
“You want to talk to the Mexicans?”
“For all the good it’s probably going to do, why not?” he replied.
WITHOUT ANY SENSE of grandiosity, Esther Dolan could say she had never feared mortality. Accepting it in the form it came to most people—in their sleep, in hospitals, or by sudden heart attack—seemed an easy trade-off considering the fact that one did nothing to earn his birth. The stories of violent death told her by her grandparents, who had survived the pogroms in Russia, were another matter.
The word “pogrom” came from an early Russian word that meant “thunder.” It meant destruction and death caused by irrational forces. It meant hatred and suffering that descended on helpless people without cause or motivation or reason. And the perpetrators of it were always the same group: those who wished to infect the world with the same self-loathing that had been the three-6 tattoo they had brought with them from the womb.
In the aftermath of the gunfire, she had stood motionless outside the polyethylene tent, the cold leaching the strength from her body, the wind swelling the tent on the support poles, the hillside black against a sky that was fading to dark blue in the east.
She watched the man called Preacher descend from the cave, his submachine gun clenched against his side with one hand, his coat collar pulled up and the brim of his fedora pulled down, smoke leaking from the barrel of his weapon. He watched each step he took on the compacted path as though his own life and safety and well-being were of enormous importance, whereas the man he had just killed was a disappearing memory.
The Mexican killers had also come out of their tent. The smoke from the cook fire contained a dense sweet smell, like burning sage or unopened flowers that had been consumed by the flames. Preacher leaned over the fire and, with his bare hand, picked up the metal pot boiling on the refrigerator grille and poured coffee into a tin cup, never setting down the Thompson. He drank from the coffee, blowing on the cup. He gazed at the frost on the hills. “It’s going to be a fine day,” he said.
“¿Donde está Bobby Lee?” Angel said.
“The boy made his peace. Don’t be worried about him.”
“¿Está muerto?”
“If he’s not, I’d better get a refund on this gun.”
“Chingado, hombre.”
“Molo, can you fix up some huevos rancheros? I could eat a washtub load of those. Just cook it on the coals. I didn’t fire the woodstove this morning. A man shouldn’t do more work than is required of him. It’s a form of greed. For some reason, I could never get those concepts across to Bobby Lee.”
While Preacher spoke, he had not looked directly at Esther. His back was turned toward her, his bone structure as stiff as a scarecrow’s inside his coat, the Thompson hanging straight down from his arm. His face lifted toward the sky, his nostrils swelling. Now he turned slowly toward her, taking the measure of her mood, his gaze seeming to reach inside her head. “I’ve scared you?” he said.
“He was your friend.”
“Who?”
“The man in the mine.”
“It’s not a mine. It’s a cave. You know the story of Elijah sleeping outside the cave, waiting to hear the voice of Yahweh? The voice wasn’t to be found in the wind or a fire or an earthquake. It was to be found at the entrance to a cave.”
As she looked into his face and listened to his words, she believed she had finally come to understand the moral vacuity that lived behind his eyes. “You’re going to kill us all, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“You weren’t listening. I said you’re going to kill us all.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’re going to kill yourself, too. That’s what this is all about. You have to die. You just haven’t found somebody to do it for you yet.”
“Suicide is the mark of a coward, madam. I think you should treat me with more respect.”
“Don’t call me madam. Did the man in the cave have a gun?”
“I didn’t ask him. When Molo is done cooking, fix me a plate and one for yourself. The plane will be here by ten.”
“Prepare you a plate? Who do you think you are?”
“Your spouse, and that means you’ll damn well do what I say. Get in the tent and wait for me.”
“Señora, better do what he say,” Angel said, wagging an admonishing finger. “Molo already gave him food that makes him real sick. Señor Jack ain’t in a very good mood.”
She went back inside the tent, her temples pounding. She sat down on the cot and picked up the box of uneaten brownies she had prepared for Mrs. Bernstein. She placed her hand on her chest and waited until her heart had stopped racing. She hadn’t eaten since the previous evening, and her head was spinning and gray spots were swimming before her eyes.
She slipped the string off the box and took out one brownie and bit off a corner. She could not be sure, but she believed she might be holding a formidable weapon in her hand, at least if her intuitions about Preacher’s refusal to eat the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches were correct. She had learned the recipe from her grandmother, a woman whose life of privation had taught her how to create culinary miracles from the simplest of ingredients. One of the grandmother’s great successes had been brownies that were loaded with government-staple peanut butter but were baked with enough chocolate and cocoa powder to disguise their mundane core.
Esther closed her eyes and saw Nick and her son and her twin daughters as clearly as if she were looking out the front window of their home on the Comal River. Nick was cooking a chicken on the barbecue grill, standing downwind, his eyes running, his glossy Hawaiian shirt soaked with smoke, forking the meat as though that would improve the burned mess he was making. In the background, Jesse and Ruth and Kate were turning somersaults on the grass, their tanned bodies netted with the sunlight shining through a tree, the river cold and rock-bottomed and swift-running behind them.
For just a moment she thought she was going to lose it. But this was not a time either to surrender or to accept the terms of one’s enemies. How did her grandmother put it? We didn’t give our lives. The Cossacks stole them. A Cossack feeds on weakness, and his bloodlust is energized by his victim’s fear.
That was what her grandmother had taught her. If Esther Dolan had her way, the man they called Preacher was about to learn a lesson from the southern Siberian plain.
When Preacher opened the tent flap, she caught a glimpse of mesas in the distance, an orange sunrise staining a bank of low-lying rain clouds. He closed the flap behind him and started to fasten the ties to the aluminum tent pole, then became frustrated and flung them from his fingers. He was not carrying his weapon. He sat down on the cot opposite her, his knees splayed, the needle tips of his boots pointed outward like a duck’s feet.
“You’ve been around men who didn’t warrant your respect,” he said. “So your disrespect toward males has become a learned habit that isn’t your fault.”
“I grew up not far fro
m the Garden District in New Orleans. I didn’t associate with criminals, so I didn’t develop attitudes about them one way or another.”
“You married one. And you didn’t grow up by the Garden District. You grew up on Tchoupitoulas, not far from the welfare project.”
“Lillian Hellman’s home on Prytania Street was two blocks from us, if it’s any of your business.”
“You don’t think I know who Lillian Hellman was?”
“I’m sure you do. The public library system gives cards to any bum or loafer who wants one.”
“You know how many women would pay money to be sitting where you are right now?”
“I’m sure there’re many desperate creatures in our midst these days.”
She could see the heat building in his face, the whitening along the rims of his nostrils, the stitched, downturned cast of his mouth. She picked up a small piece of brownie with the ends of her fingers and put it in her mouth. She could feel him watching her hungrily. “You haven’t eaten?” she asked.
“Molo burned the food.”
“I made these for my friend Mrs. Bernstein. I don’t guess I’ll ever have the opportunity to give them to her. Would you like one?”
“What’s in them?”
“Sugar, chocolate, flour, butter, sometimes cocoa powder. You’re afraid I put hashish in them? You think I bake narcotic pastries for my friends?”
“I wouldn’t mind one.”
She held out the box indifferently. He reached inside and lifted out a thick square and raised it to his mouth. Then he paused and studied her face carefully. “You’re a beautiful woman. You ever see the painting of Goya’s mistress? You look like her, just a little older, more mature, without the sign of profligacy on your mouth.”
“Without what on my mouth?”
“The sign of a whore.”
He bit into the brownie and chewed, then swallowed and bit again, his eyes hazy with either a secret lust or a sexual memory that she suspected gave birth to itself every time he pulled the trigger on one of his victims.
29
PAM TIBBS PULLED the cruiser onto the shoulder of the dirt road and stopped between two bluffs that gave onto a breathtaking view of a wide sloping plain and hills and mesas that seemed paradoxically molded by aeons and yet untouched by time. Hackberry got out of the vehicle and focused his binoculars on the base of the hills in the distance, moving the lenses across rockslides and flumes bordered by mesquite trees and huge chunks of stone that had toppled from the ridgeline and looked as hard and jagged as yellow chert. Then his binoculars lit on a large pile of bulldozed house debris, much of it stucco and scorched beams, and four powder-blue polyethylene tents and a chemical outhouse and a woodstove and an elevated metal drum probably containing water. A truck and an SUV were parked amid the tents, their windows dark with shadow, hailstones melting on their metal surfaces.
“What do you see?” Pam asked. She was standing on the driver’s side of the cruiser, her arms draped over the open door.
“Tents and vehicles but no people.”
“Maybe the Mexican construction guys are living there.”
“Could be,” he said, lowering the glasses. But he continued to stare at the sloping plain with his naked eyes, at the bareness of the hills, the frost that coated the rocks where the sun hadn’t touched them. He looked to the east and the growing orange stain in the sky and wondered if the day would warm, if the unseasonal cold would go out of the wind, if the ground would become less hard under his feet. For just a second he thought he heard the sound of a bugle echoing down an arroyo.
“Did you hear that?” he said.
“Hear what?”
“The old man back there said hippies were living in tepees and smoking dope out here. Maybe some of them are musicians.”
“Your hearing must be a lot better than mine. I didn’t hear a thing.”
He got back in the vehicle and shut the door. “Let’s boogie.”
“About last night,” she said.
“What about it?”
“You haven’t said much, that’s all.”
He looked straight ahead at the hills, at the mesquite ruffling in the wind, at the immensity of the countryside, beveled and scalloped and worn smooth by wind and drought and streaked with salt by receding oceans, a place where people who may have even preceded the Indians had hunted animals with sharpened sticks and crushed one another’s skulls over a resource as uncomplicated in its composition as a pool of brown water.
“You bothered by last night?” she said.
“No.”
“You think you took advantage of an employee?”
“No.”
“You just think you’re an old man who shouldn’t be messing with a younger woman?”
“The question of my age isn’t arguable. I am old.”
“You could fool me,” she said.
“Keep your eyes on the road.”
“What you are is a damn Puritan.”
“Fundamentalist religion and killing people run in my family,” he said.
For the first time that morning, she laughed.
But Hackberry could not shake the depression he was in, and the cause had little to do with the events of the previous night at the motel. After returning from Korea, he had rarely discussed his experiences there, except on one occasion when he was required to testify at the court-martial of a turncoat who, for a warmer shack and a few extra fish heads and balls of rice in the progressive compound, had sold his friends down the drain. Even then his statements were legalistic, nonemotional, and not autobiographical in nature. The six weeks he had spent under a sewer grate in the dead of winter were of little interest to anyone in the room. Nor were his courtroom listeners interested, at least at the moment, in a historical event that had occurred on a frozen dawn in the third week of November in the year 1950.
At first light Hackberry had awakened in a frozen ditch to the roar of jet planes splitting the sky above him, as a lone American F-80 chased two Russian-made MiGs back across the Yalu into China. The American pilot made a wide turn and then a victory roll, all the time staying south of the river, obeying the proscription against entering Red Chinese airspace. During the night, from across a snow-filled rice paddy spiked with brown weeds, the sound of bugles floated down from the hills, from different crests and gullies, some of them blown into megaphones for amplification. No one slept as a result.
At dawn there were rumors that two Chinese prisoners had been brought back by a patrol. Then someone said the Korean translator didn’t know pig flop from bean dip about local dialects and that the two prisoners were ignorant rice farmers conscripted by the Communists.
One hour later, a marching barrage began that would forever remain for Hackberry as the one experience that was as close to hell as the earth is capable of producing. It was followed throughout the day by a human-wave frontal assault comprised of division after division of Chinese regulars, pushing civilians ahead of them as human shields, the dead strung for miles across the snow, some of them wearing tennis shoes.
The marines packed snow on the barrels of their .30-caliber machine guns, running the snow up and down the superheated steel with their mittens. When the barrels burned out, they sometimes had to unscrew and change them with their bare hands, leaving their flesh on the metal.
The ditch was littered with shell casings, the BAR man hunting in the snow for his last magazine, the breech of every M-1 around Hack locking open, the empty clip ejecting with a clanging sound. When the marines were out of ammunition, Hackberry remembered the great silence that followed and the hissing of shrapnel from airbursts in the snow and then the bugles blowing again.
Now, as he gazed through the windshield of the cruiser, he was back in the ditch, and the year was 1950, and for a second he thought he heard a series of dull reports like strings of Chinese firecrackers popping. But when he rolled down the window, the only sound he heard was wind. “Stop the car,” he said.
“Wha
t is it?”
“There’s something wrong with that scene. The old man said the Mexicans working here were illegals. But the vehicles are new and expensive. Undocumented workers don’t set up a permanent camp where they work, either.”
“You think Collins is actually there?”
“He shows up where you least expect him. He doesn’t feel guilty. He thinks it’s the rest of us who have the problem, not him.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Call the locals for backup, then call Ethan Riser.”
“I say leave the feds out of it. They’ve been a cluster-fuck from the jump. Where you going?”
“Just make the calls, Pam,” he said.
He walked twenty yards farther up the dirt track. The wind was blowing harder and should have felt colder, but his skin was dead to the touch, his eyes tearing slightly, his palms so stiff and dry that he felt they would crack if he folded them. He could see a haze of white smoke hanging on the ground near the tents. A redheaded turkey vulture flew by immediately over Hackberry’s head, gliding so fast on extended wings that its shadow broke apart on a pile of boulders and was gone before Hackberry could blink.
An omen in a valley that could have been a place of bones, the kind of charnel house one associated with dead civilizations? Or was it all just the kind of burned-out useless terrain that no one cared about, one that was disposable in the clash of cultures or imperial societies?
He could feel a pressure band tightening on the side of his head, a cold vapor wrapping around his heart. At what point in a man’s life did he no longer have to deal with feelings as base as fear? Didn’t acceptance of the grave and the possibility of either oblivion or stepping out among the stars without a map relieve one of the ancestral dread that fouled the blood and reduced men to children who called out their mother’s name in their last moments? Why did age purchase no peace?
But he no longer had either the time or luxury of musing upon abstractions. Where were the men who lived in the tents? Who was cooking food inside a fire ring no different from those our ancestors cooked on in this same valley over eleven thousand years ago?
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