“My best friend.”
“Some guy who bought it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should go to the VA, Aaron.”
My eyes were fully open now. Cotton was sitting on the side of my bunk.
“I wasn’t in the army,” I said. I sat up and pressed the heels of my hands against my temples. “I just have to clean out my head. I’ve had nightmares all my life. Don’t pay attention to me.”
“I took this from under your pillow,” he said. “You were trying to get your hand on it.”
He flipped open the cylinder of the .38 snub nose and dumped the rounds from the chambers and tilted them out of his palm onto the nightstand. “In a war, we all do things we’re ashamed of,” he said. “You don’t have the copyright on that.”
I went into the latrine and fell on my knees in front of a commode and retched for almost five minutes.
* * *
THE DAWN WAS gray and misty, the pastures wet and lime green, the hills barely visible. I got up before anyone else and walked down to the dining hall. Through the window, I could see Chen Jen, our Chinese cook, stirring pancake batter in a big bowl. I walked past the dining hall and down to the small wood bridge over the creek and through the cottonwoods into the fog.
I heard elk glunking, then I saw their antlers and the steam rising from their backs and the brightness in their eyes. Maybe they had been bugling. It was that time of year. Perhaps their bugling was the origin of my dream, I told myself. Maybe I was not the driven man who feared his nocturnal thoughts or who, in the middle of the day, could step sideways through an invisible door just the other side of his fingertips and not come back for hours.
I kept walking toward the elk, then realized I was not alone. A figure shrouded with fog was standing stock-still ten yards from me. “Spud?” I said.
“It’s me,” he replied. He was wearing bib overalls and rubber boots and his fedora. He had a tree branch in his hand.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“There were some hunters up there on the hill. That’s Lowry property.”
“The season’s not open.”
“They start nosing around early.”
“You talked with the hunters?”
“You might call it that.”
“You got in their face?”
“I told them to get their sorry asses down the road before I went upside somebody’s head.”
I tried to see through the fog. An elk bugled, then I heard the clatter of their racks and the huffing sounds of combat and the thud of hooves and a sickening screech, as though one of them had been hooked in the eye. “Hunting doesn’t set well with you?” I said.
“Shooting animals for sport is cruel. I hate those sons of bitches.”
“What time did you get up?”
“About the time you were yelling in your sleep.” He sailed the branch like a boomerang into the fog.
“You didn’t take one of the vehicles into town and get your ashes hauled, did you?” I said.
“What, you think I’m in rut, like those elks out there?”
“I was just kidding,” I lied. “Want to get some grub?”
We walked back to the dining hall, the grass streaking our trousers, the sun like a frail pink rose behind the mountains. The only other trail of broken grass in the field was the one I had made earlier.
* * *
WHETHER JO ANNE wanted me to or not, after ten that morning I called the hamburger joint to see if I could save her job. I was surprised to learn that she had not been fired. The owner told her the situation was not her fault and that he was proud of her. I was even more surprised that afternoon when Mr. Lowry came out to the barn where six of us were putting on a new roof. “You got a call, Aaron,” he said. “You can get it in the dining hall.”
“Do you know who it is?”
He walked away without answering. I climbed down the ladder and went into the dining hall. Chen Jen was mopping down the tables. “Mr. Lowry said I had a call,” I said.
“Yes, you have call from stupid man who yell to show how stupid he is.”
I went to the counter and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“That you, Broussard?”
“Who do you think it is, Mr. Vickers?”
“Pull your dork out of the lamp socket. I was out of line. I told the hamburger guy that.”
“You called the owner of your own volition?”
“Of my own what?” he said.
“What do you want from me?”
There was a long silence.
“Are you still there?” I asked.
“Am I here? Are you retarded? Where would I go? Why do you think I called?”
“Sir, I have no idea.”
“That’s what I mean. You just said ‘sir.’ You got manners. When you got manners, you got a leg up on other people. I can’t teach my boy that. I’ve got an IQ twenty points higher than Wernher von Braun, but I’m from Jerksville on manners.”
“I’ve got a crew on our barn roof, Mr. Vickers. I had better get back to work.”
“What I’m telling you is I’m a hothead. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about my son. I’ve done everything I could. I gave him the strop. That didn’t work. I sent him to military school. He got thrown out. So what I’m telling you is watch out for that girl.”
My ear felt dirty, as though someone had put spittle in it. “You’re telling me Darrel plans to hurt Jo Anne?”
“I got no idea what’s in his head. He fell off an electric hobbyhorse when he was a little boy. That’s what I’m saying.”
“You need to talk to Detective Benbow.”
“I call him Bimbo.”
“You do him a disservice,” I said.
“You walk around with a thesaurus? Where’d you learn to talk English? Protect your girl, but don’t you hurt my boy. If you have trouble, you call me. Got a pencil?”
* * *
SUNDAY AFTERNOON JO Anne and I saw Lonely Are the Brave at a theater in Trinidad. It was written by Dalton Trumbo and Edward Abbey and starred Kirk Douglas and George Kennedy and Gena Rowlands. Douglas plays a cowboy named Jack Burns who cuts wire fences wherever he has the opportunity and punches out a cop in order to be jailed so he can free a friend who was imprisoned for aiding illegal immigrants. The friend is a family man and cannot risk a jailbreak, so Jack removes the hacksaw blades he has hidden inside the tops of his cowboy boots and cuts through the bars and escapes with two Indians. In the last scene, Jack tries to ride his horse across a highway into Mexico and is run over by a truck loaded with commodes, driven by Carroll O’Connor.
After the show, we walked toward a coffee shop. The neon lighting on the bars and restaurants was just coming on. The shadows were long in the street, the wind unseasonably cold. Jo Anne had said hardly a word since we left the theater.
“You okay?” I said.
“It’s a dark film,” she replied.
“Look at it this way. Jack Burns is the outsider who sets the standard for the rest of the cast. Even the sheriff, the Walter Matthau character, is actually on Jack’s side.”
“The good people of the world get it in the neck, and nobody cares,” she said. “That’s the message.”
We went inside the coffee shop and ordered pie and coffee. I wished we hadn’t seen the film.
“Is something wrong, Jo Anne?”
“Somebody broke out the back windows of my house. I also lost my scholarship at the juco.”
“When were your windows broken?”
“Two nights ago.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want you to go after Darrel Vickers.”
“Are you sure he did it?”
“Take it to the bank,” she said.
“What happened with the scholarship?”
“Henri is my academic adviser. He told the dean my commitment and my attendance had become erratic and he couldn’t recommend me any longer.”
&
nbsp; “I wish I had known.”
“What would you have done? Beat him up again in his office?”
I remained silent while the waitress put down our coffee and pie. Outside, a woman was chasing her hat in the wind. On it was a long feather like a thin black quill. The feather went one way and the hat another. “I’m sorry, Jo Anne.”
“Stop it. It’s just the way things are.” She gazed at the woman outside. “That poor lady. Somehow she makes me think of my father.”
I really didn’t want to hear it, but I said, “How so?”
“He believed nature was his friend,” she said. “Then a cyclone pulled him into the sky. Sometimes I think he’s still out there, wandering in his blindness.”
Chapter Sixteen
AT NOON MONDAY Mr. Lowry came to the dining hall door and signaled to me at the table where Spud, Cotton, and Maisie were eating. I took my coffee with me. “Yes, sir?” I said.
“Wade Benbow wants you to call him,” he said. He handed me a slip of paper with a telephone number on it. “He doesn’t want it known he’s contacting you.”
“Has something happened to Jo Anne?”
“He just said he wanted to have a private talk with you.”
“I’m sorry all this trouble keeps overflowing on your farm, Mr. Lowry.”
“Maybe it’s time to stay away from the wrong people, Aaron.”
“Sir?”
“Trinidad is a small town. I heard about you knocking around that art professor. You think that achieved something?”
“He did serious injury to Jo Anne, Mr. Lowry.”
“You made him the victim and yourself the villain. I’d call that a bad trade.”
He walked away without saying goodbye. He had never corrected me before. My coffee cup felt like lead in my hand.
* * *
AT QUITTING TIME, I called the number Wade Benbow had given Mr. Lowry.
“Hello?” Benbow said.
“You wanted to talk to me, Detective?”
“I need your help. I’d like for you to come out to my house. Now.”
“I was fixing to drop by Jo Anne’s workplace.”
“What’s stopping you from doing both?”
His metal-roofed log house was high up on a hill and deep in the woods above the opening to Ratón Pass. Down below I could see a motel, its neon lights already on, and to the north the sloping brick streets of Trinidad and the glimmering of the sun’s reflection on the magical razor-blue mountain that rose like a tombstone above the city.
Benbow stood on the porch, wearing a beat-up bomber jacket, half-top boots, and a slouch hat, a revolver tucked inside his belt. A can of beer was balanced on the porch rail. In back a pickup truck was parked in a paintless, ancient garage so narrow in its construction it resembled a coffin.
“Want a beer?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“Come in back. Let’s see what kind of shot you are.”
“What’s this about, Detective?”
“Call me Wade.” He stepped down from the porch with his can of beer and began walking around the side of the house. “Coming?”
“I have to leave in the next fifteen minutes.”
“What’s the urgent situation in fifteen minutes?”
“I’ll think of something,” I replied.
The backyard was sliced with the shadows of pine trees, a cold wind puffing out of a dry creek bed that threaded through an arroyo behind the house. I thought I saw a mountain lion jump across the rocks in the creek bed and clamber uphill through the tree trunks.
“Is that what I think it is?” I asked.
“They come down sometimes. They think this country is still theirs. There’re things up on that hill that are worse than cougars, though.”
“Like what?”
“This was the northern tip of a Comanche empire. They did things with fire it’s better not to think about. I can show you tipi rings and the remains of human bones up there, some of them children’s.”
“I don’t want to hear about it, Detective.”
“Wade.” He pulled the revolver from his belt. It was a .357 Magnum snub. “See that bucket on the post about twenty feet up the creek? Think you can punch a hole or two in it?”
“Expensive ammunition for target practice.”
He handed me a pair of earplugs wrapped in cellophane. “Since I contracted the big C, I find myself less inclined to worry about the cost of bullets.”
I aimed with both hands, my feet slightly spread, and fired six times before I lowered the weapon. I pulled the plug from one ear.
He took a sip of his beer. “You learn to shoot at Braille school?”
I looked back at the bucket.
“I’m joking,” he said. “You’re heck on wheels, Broussard.”
“Why are you doing this, Detective?”
“Wade.”
“Sorry, I was raised to address my elders in only one fashion.”
“I know the pawnshop owner who sold you the thirty-eight. I hope you’re not entertaining cowboy fantasies.”
“I gave up being other people’s litter box.”
“I was afraid you’d say something like that. Let’s sit down a minute.”
He eased himself down on a back step and looked blankly into the woods. Some might call his eyes dead. But for something to die, it must first be alive, and I saw no sign of loss or anger or remorse or even injury in his face, as though I were looking at a prosthesis rather than tissue. The lack of expression in Detective Benbow was the kind you see in people who have witnessed events that forever change their view of the world. They never talk about it or struggle with it. Instead, they accept the fact that human beings are capable of deeds Satan couldn’t think up.
“Mr. Benbow?” I said.
“What?”
“Were you in the war?”
“Yeah. Why do you ask?”
“I just wondered.”
He shook it off. “Yesterday the body of another woman was found way back in some rocks down the Pass. The body might have been there several days. Cause of death, broken neck. She could have fallen from a cliff. Or somebody could have dragged her there. She was a hooker.” He held his eyes on mine.
“Okay?” I said.
“Got any reason to believe your friend Spud Caudill might have been involved?”
I tried to keep my face empty and not to swallow. In my mind’s eye, I saw Spud in the fog and heard the bugling of the elk and his claim that he was up early driving off poachers.
“Well?” Benbow said.
“Why pick on poor Spud?”
“Because he frequents the cathouse where the hooker worked on and off.”
“I have nothing to say about Spud, sir.”
“How about Marvin Fogel, the driver of the four-wheel zoo?”
“I think he’s a junkie and a meltdown.” I studied my watch and avoided his eyes.
“Meaning?”
“I had a misunderstanding with him. He was carrying a splintered board, one with a sixteen-penny nail in it.”
“One that could make a wound like an ice pick?”
“That’s possible.”
“And you decided to keep this information to yourself?”
“You know why jails are filled with pitiful people?”
“Tell me,” he said.
“They’re easy to catch.”
He stood up and flicked the last drops of his beer into the flower bed, then dropped the can in a trash bag swollen with more cans. “Actually, I made us a couple of sandwiches.”
“I promised to eat with Jo Anne.”
He wiped his nose with the back of his wrist. “You asked me about my service time. I was with the 103rd, the Cactus Division. We liberated a subcamp of Dachau. It was quite a place.”
“I appreciate the invitation, Detective Benbow.”
“Wade,” he replied.
* * *
FRIDAY NIGHT THE United Farm Workers of America sponsored a candlelight ser
vice at the site of the Ludlow Massacre. Jo Anne and I went, and so did Spud, Cotton, Maisie, Mr. and Mrs. Lowry, and most of the crew who hadn’t drug up (as it was called) and headed for the Rio Grande Valley. There must have been at least two hundred people gathered by the horizontal metal door and the steps that led down to the cellar that had been built to preserve the hole in the earth where the two women and eleven children were killed by the Colorado militia and Rockefeller’s goons.
The sun was purple in the west, the snow scarlet on the mountain peaks, the hardpan black with shadow, a cold, dusty smell like alkali in the air. The crowd lit their candles, and a Catholic priest with a microphone said a prayer in English and Spanish for the dead miners and their families. The waving yellow glow of the candles on the faces of the two hundred people was the greatest spiritual moment I’d ever known. Jo Anne squeezed my hand, and I knew she felt the same way.
The faces of the people could have come from a Bruegel painting—leathery and work-worn and inured by hardship. Their story was also written in their clothes. The colors were mismatched. Women wore men’s coats. Almost all of them wore tennis shoes. Nearly every couple had children with them, in their arms or around their knees. Most of them did stoop labor and other kinds of backbreaking work but were fat because of their diet. If ever there was a group that resembled Jesus’s early followers, I suspected I was looking at it.
Afterward, a union leader from California made a short speech and gave everyone directions to a dinner at a Catholic church a few miles away. The church was old and small and made of stucco and had settling cracks around the windows and all the other marks of an impoverished parish. Next door was a grammar school with a cafeteria, the serving tables loaded with food. As we were walking to the cafeteria, I saw a school bus turn off the highway and pull into the pasture that served as a parking lot. Marvin was behind the wheel and the first down the steps. He had shaved off his beard, giving his face a liberated look, in his case the angularity of an ax blade. A man I couldn’t see clearly followed him down the steps, then the girls and Stoney.
“Who’s the guy with Marvin?” Jo Anne said.
“I don’t know. Don’t pay attention to them.”
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