I noticed she was a little out of breath. She continued not looking at me and reached over and moved my water glass across to her side of the table and quickly drank down half, then took a menu out of the rack and began to study it, as if we were about to order lunch but she couldn’t make up her mind. I finally lowered my paper and looked at her without saying anything. Her back was to the door and I glanced at it—to remind myself where it was, in case I needed to use it in a hurry, but also because I had the feeling that someone would be coming through it any minute now, looking for her.
I was fairly certain I had watched exactly this scene in an old movie, but nothing remotely like it had happened to me. The waitress came over and asked if she wanted to order anything. She continued studying the menu as if it actually offered desirable dining options, then she raised her head and looked into the waitress’s eyes and her face became illuminated with the most genuinely delighted smile I had ever seen on someone I knew to be faking it.
“I think I’ll have a cup of coffee with my husband here and we’ll share a piece of that pie over there under the glass. What kind do y’all have today?”
The waitress returned the smile with unqualified pleasure. “That’s a pecan. Made just this morning.”
“Does that sound all right by you, honey?”
I was holding my paper halfway up now, a position of defensive uncertainty. For the first time, she met my eyes, scanning them, trying to figure out if I was really playing along or if I was just stunned into speechlessness. I didn’t say anything but I allowed a smile to pass almost imperceptibly over my lips, an acknowledgment of professional admiration.
She looked back at the waitress and winked. “He’s always after me about the sweets. But life’s short, ain’t it?”
“A slice of pie never hurts is what I say.”
“You said it. We’ll go ahead and split one, then, à la mode.”
“All righty, we’ll sure get you fixed up,” the waitress said and wrote down the order and then made no move whatsoever to go fulfill it, looking up at us again sociably from her pad.
“Now where’re y’all from?”
This I wanted to hear. I looked across the table and scanned her face closely for a tell but picked up nothing, not the slightest hint of pause or calculation in her eyes.
“We live over in Longview,” she said. “We’re just on our way through to Ruidoso.”
This was fine professional work: She had chosen a place in East Texas, the other side of the state, far enough away that the waitress was unlikely to know anyone from there. Friona was a place that people passed through on their way west to the mountains in New Mexico, and Bettie knew not only this but the name of the right mountain town to mention. She had thought it through in half a second, or more likely she’d had it all ready before she sat down.
“It’s real pretty up there this time of year—a whole lot prettier than around here, that’s for sure,” said the waitress, who was probably about a decade out of high school but appeared a decade older than that. Looking at Bettie seemed to make her feel better about herself.
When the front door to the café opened a couple of minutes later I was still, against all judgment, seated at the table, watching this woman who was pretending to be my wife, with whom I still hadn’t exchanged a word. The only way I can account for why I hadn’t gotten up and walked straight to my car is that I didn’t have a sense of myself as a participant in her performance; it felt more like something I was watching from a great distance, and I wanted to see how it would end. The pie and coffee had arrived; she poured in as much cream as the cup would hold to cool it and quickly drank half, to make it appear as if she had been sitting in the booth longer than she had.
The man who finally came through the door was on the small side but solidly built. He wore a good Western suit and a felt hat with a fan of gray hawk feathers cresting from the front of a woven leather band. His glasses were the brown half-tinted kind that are supposed to go clear indoors but that remain obscured much longer in West Texas because of the ferocity of the sunshine they have been defying. His suit jacket hung away from his paunch and I could make out no holster, though he could have had one on the back of his belt or down under his pants leg. As soon as he took in the room—our waitress; a young farmer; an old rancher in a back booth beneath a sweat-stained hat; a Mexican kid slouched on a counter stool; two other women, retired-teacher-or-church-secretary-types sitting in another booth—I could tell he wasn’t sure who he was looking for and I breathed a little easier.
Everyone turned to see who was coming in, staring for longer than would have been polite in a bigger town. She acted as if the door hadn’t opened, appraising a piece of pie on the end of her fork. The man went to our waitress where she stood near the cash register and said something quietly to her and she smiled reflexively, then she looked pained and said something back to him and turned her head uncertainly in our direction. The man’s head didn’t turn to follow. He pushed his hat back and hitched his belt and seated himself at one of the tables along the far wall, almost behind Bettie but where I could see him and he could see me. He didn’t look in our direction again. He signaled for the waitress and I heard him order a plate of enchiladas and an iced tea.
I looked across at her, to see how she was taking all of this. She finished her pie calmly and stared back at me, hard, as if a thought had just occurred to her. Then she reached a hand across the table and put it on top of mine in a friendly, married sort of way and said softly: “What do you do for a living?”
I left my hand where it was and smiled a bland domestic smile back at her and answered, more softly: “I think if anyone gets to ask questions, it’s probably going to be me, don’t you?”
Maybe because she knew the man couldn’t see her face, she gave me what I took to be a sincere look, though I had no way of knowing. “It just seems to me like you know what’s happening here and you know what you’re doing. So I’m starting to think maybe you’re not from around here. And that you and I might be in a similar line of work. And that picking this booth was the best luck I’ve had in a while.”
“Why did you pick this booth?”
“It was the closest one to the door. And you were by yourself.”
“Maybe I’m a cop. Maybe you picked wrong.”
She looked at me in a way that told me not to insult her intelligence.
I fixed her straight in the eye for the first time and slowly retrieved my hand, keeping my filial smile in place for the man’s sake: “Lady, I don’t know what you’ve got going, but I’m in no position to be in the middle of anything right now. So I’m going to get up and walk out of here unless that little goat roper over there is someone I need to be afraid of personally.”
For a second she seemed happy that I’d gotten the lay of the land so quickly. But then a look of weariness came over her. “I’ve never seen that sack of shit before today. It’s probably the goddamned car. I caught him following me in Hereford and thought I lost him going west but when I got into town, there he was coming around the corner. My windows are tinted so I don’t think he got a look at me. He’s probably sitting over there trying to figure out if I’m really the one and who the hell are you.”
I gave the man another look. “I’d put him at insurance or dealership or private help somebody hired just for your sake. Where’d the car come from?”
The hard look came back into her eyes.
“Where do cars come from? Streets, parking lots, car factories. How the hell do I know? It came with a promise I wouldn’t have to worry and here I sit.”
I took a sip of coffee and kept up my smile. “Let’s say Señor Repo over there decides to make something of it. Would that put you in bigger trouble than a misplaced car?”
“It might.”
“Might how much?”
“More than I need.”
“Why do you think he hasn’t just called the sheriff to help him take care of this?”
She
looked annoyed again. “He’s working his own line. Or the insurance company is. Or they both are.”
Probably just to give herself some business she dug around methodically in her purse and retrieved a piece of gum and unwrapped it and put it in her mouth.
“If you help me get out of here and take me to the bus stop in Hereford, I swear I can make it worth the trouble.”
I stirred more cream in my coffee, to give myself some business. “Then he’ll take down my plates.”
She put up a different kind of smile, one that looked marital and malicious at the same time. “Would that be a problem for you?”
“It might.”
She was getting visibly antsy now, starting to lose some of her composure. She tried to keep her voice down without whispering too noticeably. “He wants the car. He’s not going to leave it . . . What are you driving? Is it in front?”
I decided to tell her the truth, for the hell of it. “Coronet Brougham. Around back.”
“A Brougham? Are you a family man?”
“It helps to look like one sometimes.”
“Go get it. Take your time, make him think you’ve left. Pull around front, and as soon as I see you I’ll be out of here before he can make the door.”
“Give me a reason. I won’t take your money.”
“Because I know you don’t want that fuckhead to make his quota on me any more than I do.”
“Maybe if you’d been careful you wouldn’t be in a position for that to happen. Or to put me in the middle of it.”
The color ran out of her face. “Believe me, it’s not something that’s happened before.”
I did believe her. And she was right—it would bother me to walk out of there and let a common insurance dick have his day. But what made my mind up wasn’t that. It was this: It occurred to me with considerable clarity that as dangerous as it would be to help her, it would be much more so to leave her there and run into her or whoever she worked with somewhere down the road. The fact was that I’d picked the wrong café that morning. And if you don’t operate according to facts, facts operate on you. I put down some money for the check and walked out the door. She got in as soon as I rounded the corner, and the little man didn’t even make the parking lot before we turned off.
Instead of going to a bus stop, we went to my motel and checked out and drove to Amarillo, where I’d have an easier time picking up a new car. We drove that one to the other side of the Panhandle, stopping at nightfall in Childress (which I’d avoided for a good six months) and took a room at the Trade Winds Motel. During every minute of the next three days, I fully expected the end to come; I could hear the sirens; I could feel the thunder of half a dozen cruisers rolling up and a dozen men with rifles pouring out, the sound of the bathroom window shattering as more came in that way. Or I envisioned myself waking up to two or three strangers, her standing across the room getting dressed, telling them in Spanish what to do with me. I had exposed myself completely and I deserved whatever happened.
But nothing did. She could have rolled me herself—I slept the sleep of the dead for the first time in months—but she didn’t even do that. For two days, we barely got out of bed or ate or spoke. On the third, while I was showering, she went through my wallet and started to call me Cliff, laughing when she said it because she knew the name on the license wasn’t mine. I said I didn’t want to know her name but she told me anyway, so I assumed it was as genuine as mine.
She wasn’t much good in bed. She was too selfish for that. But I hadn’t been with a woman for almost two years so it seemed to me as if everything she did was a holy miracle. She was generally undemonstrative, but every time she climaxed she made a series of short, sharp squeals, like a coyote’s yip at dusk. I was sure everybody in the motel complex could hear. It seemed to be the only time she ever fully forgot herself, and it might have been her only endearing quality—that and the fact that she didn’t leave me broke and stranded when I lowered all my defenses.
Of course, what she did after she lulled me into this false sense of security made up for all of that.
*
New Cona was bisected by a shallow draw that cut roughly northwest to southeast, the same direction as the imperceptible grade of the land to sea level. The draw had once run with seasonal water plentiful enough for horses, and so its course had been the roadway that conveyed the earliest settlers, rugged people who, for reasons lost to history, had chosen this particular declivity dwarfed by this particular immensity of mesaland to end their travels, put down stakes, and spend the rest of their lives. They platted a town on the cardinal points, a mile on each side, a square that hadn’t yet been filled out with paved streets. The town lay a hundred miles west of the ninety-eighth meridian—not near enough for the rain that most years fell sufficiently east of that line. A land-sale pamphlet from the turn of the century, coaxing farmers west to the llano, had been artfully equivocal on this point: “The climate here is all that could be expected.” Troy didn’t know where the name came from. Was there an Old Cona? Probably just a Cona—in Mexico? If there was a Cona, what had made it worth memorializing? The name sounded a little like the one Mexican boys called you in school sometimes, coño, laughing when they said it.
Troy had left the house and was driving warily through the draw into town. In his memory the draw had never had water, no more than stood after a rare collected rain, and he still found it hard to envision anything resembling a river running through it. He felt the familiar plunge as the road dropped down into the bottom, a good paved road, evidence that no more water was expected; the aquifer springs that carved out the land had long since dried up, the water siphoned by irrigation pumps to the endless miles of cotton fields that never had enough.
The bottom of the draw supported what passed on the plains for a wooded patch, with low soapberry and bumelia trees, so the county park had been put there to the east of the road, centered around a little tree-topped man-made hill, an exotic site for children. Rising out of the draw the road passed the county swimming pool, the only place in town where the seasonal return of standing water was guaranteed, closed now, drained until summer. The aquamarine paint from the pool bed reflected upward in the glow of the parking lot lights, giving the impression of daylight being stored just below ground.
Next was the New Cona Motel, one of only a handful of motels in the Panhandle whose layout Troy didn’t know by heart. Slowing, he saw the face of an old man in the office window, whitened by a fluorescent lamp. Like most businesses in this part of the state that had once catered to passers-through on their way to the mountains in New Mexico or returning from them, the motel had become a relic; interstate motels and Winnebagos had taken its place and its lifeblood was down to long-haul truckers and migrant farm labor. The street corner nearest the office was fenced in by three eighteen-wheelers, nose to tail, and the parking lot itself was nearly empty, save for a few dirt-covered pickups whose positions indicated the occupied rooms.
Troy took a left at the main road and drove past the squat cinder-brick diner, the feed store, and the one surviving gas station, whose four Exxon pumps sat beneath an orphaned Humble sign. In his absence, the First Baptist Church had built an impressive lighted road sign at the edge of its parking lot, an evangelizing tool many small-town churches had begun using to beam mini-sermons through the windshields of late-night drivers. The vinyl block letters up on the sign read:
You Can’t Fall
If You Are Already
On Your Knees
—Genesis 33:3
In his thousands of miles behind the wheel, Troy had become a connoisseur of these kinds of homilies, and he admired this one, though he felt obliged to observe that whoever coined it must have never suffered the singular indignity of being unable to prevent himself from going all the way to the floor after already finding himself on his knees, as Troy had a couple of times during his drinking days.
For a year or so after their mother died Bill Ray had taken Troy and Harlan
to this church, but only during Wednesday-night services. Bill Ray could never bear the social pressure and hollow concern of Sundays. On Wednesdays the pews were usually only about a third full and those who came were either the deeply and openly devout, viewed with a certain wariness by regular churchgoers, or simply people who were lonely and too shy to address Bill and the boys.
Troy remembered being allowed to stretch out on the long, nubby, golden-colored pew cushions, where he would fall into a deep sleep staring sideways at the hymnals in their holders and at the cylindrical receptacles for the miniature grape juice glasses that would be passed along the aisles occasionally for the Lord’s Supper. He tried to remember other particulars about the church but he could recall only the baptismal, which was hidden behind a pair of heavy blue-velvet curtains that were drawn apart from a rectangular opening behind the choir seats, revealing the preacher and the suppliant standing together in robes in a sunken fiberglass tub of warm waist-high water. Behind them was a large trompe l’oeil oil painting of a river receding into a coral sunset—a sight never beheld in a waterless country and therefore practically heavenly. He thought about how a single, usually impulsive decision at the age of twelve or thirteen to believe in the Lord and permit oneself to be submerged in water in public was supposed to have the power to change everything for all eternity. After Troy himself had done it, he remembered wondering where the water from the baptismal tank went when it drained away—did it run into the regular sewer?
Troy had no memory of Bill Ray speaking about what he believed but he once said that if church was a place where people gathered under false pretenses at least it was one of the nicer places where they did so. He would sit very still and straight in his good brown suit between his sleeping sons with his arms stretched out on the pew back above them.
Troy drove past the school building, which like most small schools in West Texas was impressively consolidated. Children entered the low, plain, boxy western end at the age of five, matriculated through the Spanish-mission-style junior high in the middle, and emerged at eighteen—if they were lucky, as Harlan had been and Troy had not—at the larger, boxy eastern end, where the twin civic theaters of the auditorium and the gymnasium sat.
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