Or maybe he thought none of these things. Maybe he was simply intrigued with the frenetic bouncing of his headlight on the pines, the latent sexual power girded between his chaps, the way reefer wrapped a soft gauze around the uppers surging in his veins, as though his skin was a border between his universe and the one other people lived in.
Darl swerved around the barrier his father had moved, opened up the Harley, the back wheel ripping a trench through the earth, and plowed into the steel cable that was stretched neck-high between two pine trunks.
His bike spun away into the trees, the engine roaring impotently against the ground.
The cable was thinner in diameter than a pencil, and Darl had tightened each end until the steel loops had bitten so deeply into the pine bark that the cable looked like it grew horizontally out of the trunks.
He died on his back, the headlight of his Harley shining across his face. His mouth was open, as though he wanted to speak, but the cable’s incision had cut his windpipe as well as his jugular. When his father found him, three misshapen, emaciated dogs with spots like hyenas were licking Darl’s chest, and Jack had to drive them from his son’s body with a stick. The medical examiner later said the dogs were rabid. He refused to answer when a reporter asked if the dogs had found Darl before the time of death.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX
BUT WHEN I drove down the rutted road to the Hart Ranch that same night I knew of none of the events I just described.
The gate that gave onto the ranch was open, the padlocked chain snapped by bolt cutters. I turned off my headlights and drove the Avalon across the cattle guard, parked in a grove of mesquite, and slipped L.Q.’s revolver from its holster. Then I pulled six extra rounds from the leather cartridge loops on the belt and dropped them in my pocket and stepped out into the darkness. The revolver felt heavy and cold and strange in my hand.
The moon was above the hills, and I could see deer grazing in the glade between the woods and the river, and in the distance the roofless Victorian home that had been gutted by fire and the log and slat outbuildings and rusted windmill in back, wrapped with tumbleweed.
The edges of the house were silhouetted by a white light that glowed in the backyard. I moved along the perimeter of the woods, spooking coveys of quail into the darkness. The grass was almost waist high from the rain, and a set of car tracks stretched through the glade and ended where a 1970s gas-guzzler was parked in the shadows. A second set of car tracks, fresher ones, the grass pressed flat and pale-sided into the wet sod, led past the parked car to the back of the house.
I walked between the woods and parked car and looked through the car window. In the moonlight I could see the ignition wires hanging below the dashboard. From behind the house I heard a metallic, screeching sound like a board with rusted nails in it being pried loose from a joist.
I walked to the right of the house, through a side yard that was strewn with plaster and broken laths that looked like they had been ripped from the interior walls and thrown outside. A Coleman lantern as bright as a phosphorous flare hissed on the ground in the center of the backyard. Farther on, a blue van was parked by a barn with a tractor shed built onto one side, and through a dirty window in the shed a second lantern burned inside and the shadows of at least two men moved back and forth across it.
I crossed the yard, outside the perimeter of light. My foot went out into a pool of shadow, where there should have been level ground, but instead I stepped into a hole at least a foot deep, my ankle twisting sideways inside my boot, a pain as bright as the sting of a jellyfish wrapping around the tendons in my lower back.
The shadows beyond the window froze against the light.
Then I thought I heard L.Q. Navarro’s voice say, “The dice are out of the cup. Make ’em religious, bud.”
I limped forward and flung the door back on its hinges and pointed L.Q.’s revolver into the room.
Felix Ringo and a second man stood just beyond a worktable where Garland T. Moon was wrapped fast against the wood planks with chains that were clamped and boomed down on his chest and thighs. Moon’s face was turned away from me, as though he were napping. The clothes of Ringo and the second man were streaked with soot and bits of hay and dried horse manure. Behind them, the flooring in the barn had been ripped up, the plaster board gouged out of a bunk area, a rusty hot water tank split open with an ax.
The room was hotter than it should have been, filled with a hot smell that at first I thought came from the lantern.
“You don’t look too good, man,” Ringo said.
I could feel the muscles constrict across my back, just like someone had taken pliers to my spine. I propped one arm against the doorjamb and held the pistol level with the other. The second man clutched a plastic bag full of credit cards in his hand. He had the scarred eyebrows of a prizefighter and small ears and hair so blond it was almost white.
“Both you boys put your hands behind your head and get down on your knees,” I said.
The second man studied my face, his tongue moving across his bottom lip. “Fuck you, buddy,” he said, and bolted into the barn, crashing out the door into the yard.
But I didn’t fire. Instead, I kept the .45 pointed at Ringo’s face, my other hand holding on to the doorjamb for balance. When I took a step forward, the pain caused my jaw to drop open. I heard the van start up outside and drive out of the yard.
“You want to go to a hospital? I can do that for you, man,” Ringo said.
I eased my hand onto the worktable, inches from the JOX running shoe on Moon’s foot, stiffening my arm for support. An odor like the smell of burned scrapings from a butchered hog rose into my face.
“Last chance, Ringo. Get on the floor,” I said.
“You’re all mixed up. This is DEA. You don’t got no business here.”
I pulled back the hammer on the revolver.
“Okay, man. My friend gonna come back with some local law. They gonna jam you up, man,” Ringo said, and knelt on the floor and laced his fingers behind his neck. He crinkled his nose, his mustache wiggling on his lip, as though he were about to sneeze.
I worked my way around the other side of the table. Moon’s eyes were staring at nothing. The skin of his face looked shrunken on the bone, puckered and red like a rubber Halloween mask. The cloth of his flowered shirt was crisscrossed with scorch marks, and inside the scorch marks were lesions that looked like they had been cut into the skin with a laser.
The blowtorch was turned on its side by the far wall.
“I’ll take a guess. Crystal coming in, counterfeit credit cards going out,” I said.
“Hey, the guapa you was in the sack with? Ask her. This is a federal operation, man. She gonna fuck you again, except this time you ain’t gonna enjoy it.”
“If y’all were looking for some of your stash, you tortured the wrong guy. It was probably Darl Vanzandt and his friends who ripped you off.”
“You want to take me in? That’s good, man. ’Cause I’m gonna be on a plane back to Mexico City tomorrow morning. So let’s go do that, man.”
“I don’t think so.”
His eyes studied my shirt front.
“What’s that you got in your pocket?” he asked.
“This? It’s funny you ask. A friend of mine dropped it down in Coahuila.”
A dark and fearful recognition grew in his face, like smoke rising in a glass jar.
I moved toward him, my hand sliding along the table for support. Inches away from my forearm, a viscous tear was glued in the corner of Moon’s receded blue eye.
“I bet ole Moon spit in your face,” I said.
Felix Ringo rose to his feet and began running toward the back of the barn, his head twisted back toward me. He grabbed onto a stall door and pulled an automatic from an ankle holster and fired three times, the rounds slapping into the front wall, then he
began running again. He passed a tack room and flung the plywood door open in his wake, his arms waving almost simultaneously, as though hornets were about to torment his flesh.
I held on to a wood post by a stall and fired one round after another, the powder flashes splintering from the cylinder and the barrel. The explosions were deafening, the recoil knocking my wrist high in the air. Each round blew divots out of the tack room door that yawned open in the passageway, tore even larger holes in the outside door, whined away into the woods with a sound like piano wire snapping.
Dust and lint and smoke drifted in the light from the Coleman lantern. My right ear was numb, as though frigid water had been poured inside it. I put the hammer on half-cock and shucked out the empty shell casings on the floor and rotated the cylinder and inserted six fresh rounds in the loading gate, then lowered the hammer again and locked the cylinder into place.
I limped slowly past the stalls and closed the splintered door of the tack room. Felix Ringo lay on the floor, the slide on his automatic jammed open by a partially ejected shell casing. Blood welled from a wound that looked like a crushed purple rose inserted inside the torn cloth on his hip.
“My friend L.Q. Navarro used to say ankle hideaways are mighty cool, but the problem is they only work for midgets,” I said, and sat down heavily on a hay bale that puffed dust and lint into the air.
“I got to have a doctor,” Ringo said.
I felt weak all over. Gray threadworms floated in front of my eyes. I touched my upper chest and my hand came away coated with something that was warm and damp and sticky.
“Looks like we both got a problem here, Felix.” I breathed slowly and wiped the sweat out of my eyes. From my shirt pocket I pulled the playing card emblazoned with the badge of the Texas Rangers and marked with the date of L.Q.’s death. “You remember the rules down in Coahuila. When you lose, you get one of these stuck in your mouth.”
“I’m hurt bad. Look, man, I die here, I gotta have a priest.”
“You killed Roseanne Hazlitt, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, okay, we done that.” He breathed hard through his nose.
“And set up Lucas Smothers?”
“Yeah, that, too.”
“All that grief, just to protect Jack Vanzandt.”
“There was a lot at stake, things you don’t know about, man. Ask the guapa, the DEA woman, it’s like a war, man, there’s casualties. Hey, man, I work for your fucking government. That’s what you ain’t hearing.”
He stared at me for a long time, waiting, his eyes lustrous with hate and apprehension.
“What you gonna do, man?” he said, his voice climbing into a higher register.
“I guess you’re just up shit’s creek, bud,” I replied.
His face was gray from loss of blood, beaded with sweat. He closed his eyes, his mouth trembling.
“No, you got it all wrong, Felix,” I said. “L.Q. Navarro used to own this card. I wouldn’t soil it by putting it on your body. But you parked one in my chest. So the medics won’t be coming for either one of us tonight.”
I winked at him and grinned.
Or thought I did. The passageway was slatted with moonlight, redolent with dust and the musky smell of field mice and moldy hay and fresh deer droppings in the barnyard and wind and flowers in the glade and wet fern and creek water coursing over stone. I felt myself slip in and out of time, then the darkness bled out of the sky and a pink light glowed through the holes in the barn’s walls and out in the fields I saw a group of federal agents in blue hats and vests walking through the mist, their weapons at port arms, like the emissaries of Empire, a statuesque woman with brown freckles in the lead whose fingers would be as cool and bloodless as alabaster when they touched my brow.
EPILOGUE
FELIX RINGO WAS DOA at the country hospital. I had the feeling the DEA considered his passing his greatest public service. To my knowledge, no investigation into his background was ever made. I tried to tell newspapers in Dallas and Houston about Felix Ringo, then the wire services, and finally anyone who would listen. But the time came when I accepted the fact that societal hearing and sight are a matter of collective consent, and I desisted from trying to undo the cynicism and cruelty of governments and learned to walk away when people spoke of the world as a serious place.
Jack Vanzandt plea-bargained down to three years in a federal facility. It seemed like a light sentence, at least for a man who had trafficked in crystal meth and counterfeit credit cards and indirectly caused the death of a young woman, until the morning I read in the paper that Jack had taken poison in the psychiatric unit of a federal hospital and had suffered a brain seizure that cost him his eyesight.
Emma divorced him after their home and their assets were confiscated by the government. I heard her stepson’s ashes were left behind in an urn on the mantelpiece and she never tried to recover them. Today she runs her parents’ mail-order wedding cake business in Shreveport and sometimes appears on a televangelical cable program and denounces drug use among teenagers.
I never saw Mary Beth again, at least not when I was fully conscious. After the surgery that removed the .25-caliber round from my chest, I floated for days through a warm pool of morphine and was sure I saw her in the room with L.Q. Navarro. But one morning I woke to sunlight and the realities of physical recovery and spoke both their names repeatedly, my hands as useless as blocks of wood, my face tingling with thousands of needles, until a black male nurse pushed me back on the bed and held me there, his eyes lighted with pity.
On a Friday evening in late summer Temple Carrol and I went to watch Pete play in a ball game at the Catholic elementary school. I had let him ride Beau to the game by himself, and later we walked from the diamond to the café down the street and ate buffalo burgers and blackberry milkshakes. Outside the window, Beau pulled his tether loose and walked into the grove of pines by the stucco church and began grazing in the grass. The attic fan in the café drew the air through the open door and windows, and I could smell the evening coming to its own completion, the dusk gathering in the streets, the water that ebbed out of the irrigation ditch into the grass, the pine boughs etched against the late sun, the hot sap cooling on the bark of the trees.
“That’s good about Lucas going to A&M this fall, ain’t it?” Pete said.
“It’s a fine school,” I said.
“Can I ride Beau back by myself tonight?”
“You’re the best, Pete,” I said.
“He’s a mighty good little boy, that’s what he is,” Temple said, and hugged him against her.
“I’m gonna ride Beau out on the hardpan, where that Chisholm Trail is at,” Pete said, and grinned as though he had already begun an extravagant adventure.
Temple’s eyes settled on mine, and I looked at the redness of her mouth and wanted to touch her hands.
Outside, I heard Beau’s hooves thumping on the earth and I dipped a strip of buffalo steak in catsup that was as thick as blood and for just a moment, in my mind’s eye, I saw dust clouds filled with hail swirling across the high plains, and I thought of Comanche Indians and saddle preachers and trail drovers and outlaws and was sure that somewhere beyond the rim of the world Great-grandpa Sam and the Rose of Cimarron turned briefly in their saddles and held up their hands in farewell.
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THE NEXT MORNING I drove to Lake Charles and took Rosita with me because I didn’t want her home alone with the likes of Harlan McFey roaming around, perhaps seeking revenge. Before I left the house, I picked up the morning newspaper from the lawn and stuck it in my coat pocket without looking at the front page. Hershel met us at the motel on the south end of town, out by the lake. The air was cool, the sun buried inside rolling clouds that reminded me of the dust storms in the earl
y 1930s. Waves full of sand and tiny nautical creatures were scudding up on the shoreline, then receding into the water. I thought I could smell gas on the wind from the swamp, a hint of early winter and a drawing down of light from the shingles of the world. Hershel was standing in the porte cochere, staring at the southern horizon, his face as hot as a lightbulb. “I’ve got us a boat. Let’s get out to the rig,” he said. “These guys aren’t listeners.”
“You have to explain that to me.”
“This bonehead driller didn’t have the blowout preventer on. He said the dome was at least another two thousand feet, if it was there at all.”
“What does the geologist say?”
“Same thing. They’re down in the mouth about our prospects. I told them if they didn’t get the blowout preventer on, the sky was going to be on fire tonight.”
“It’s down there?” I said.
“I could smell it.”
I didn’t want to think about the two dusters we brought in outside of New Roads, a direct result of Hershel’s conviction that a huge pay sand lay under our feet.
“Come on, Weldon. We need a diplomat. If those guys don’t get the blowout preventer on, every guy on the floor is going to be incinerated.”
“Let’s don’t get out of the paddock too fast on this one, Hershel,” I said.
His face was stretched as tight as a helium balloon, his system hitting on all eight cylinders. “It’s going to blow. I’ve never felt so strong about anything in my life. I’m sweating all over.”
“I believe you, Hershel,” Rosita said, placing her hand on his arm. “Can I come along?”
I saw the rigidity leave his face; he smiled.
The boat was a sixteen-footer with a console and a canvas top and two big outboard engines. The sky was darkening, the barometer dropping, the groundswells in the Gulf long and green and as flat as slate, tilting sideways, as though the horizon were out of kilter, then suddenly cresting in waves that could cover the gunwales. Each time we slid down the far side of a wave, cascades of foam slapped across the windshield. If Rosita had any fear, it never showed.
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