He stretched out and put his hands behind his head. After a while, he said: “The night your mama and me got married a few boys in town decided to give us a shivaree. We was at the church, and they snuck out and locked all the windows and padlocked the doors on the little house we rented for our honeymoon north of Bronco. We got out there and saw what they’d done. They drove up, every one of ’em drunk as a fiddler’s bitch, and announced their intention to kidnap me for the night.
“Rube was wearing a borrowed wedding dress a size too big for her and she had trouble moving around in it at the church. But all of a sudden there she was beside me, out of the pickup without me even hearing her. And when she stood clear I saw she’d reached my Winchester down from the rack behind the seat. She let off a barrel over their heads and one of the boys, the drunkest one, got so scared he fell down like he’d been shot. The others stood there staring at him for a minute to see if he really was shot and then they laughed so hard they nearly pissed. Rube didn’t even smile. She let the shotgun come level and said: ‘Now let’s see which one of you assholes is man enough to come over here and get him.’ ”
Bill Ray laughed until he fell into a cigarette cough. “They left us there locked out of our own honeymoon bed, so we spent the night on top of an old tarp in the field, staring at the stars, happier than if we was on a goose down mattress.”
He looked up at the sky for a while longer, then turned toward me. “You remember much about her?”
“Some,” I said. “But it’s getting harder to tell what’s real and what I’ve just made up.”
“What about Harl?”
“He hasn’t said a thing about her for years now.”
He put his head back and lay still for a long time.
I told him I needed to take a piss.
“Come on, then.”
He got to his feet and pulled me up and walked to the edge on the west side and took a long, leisurely piss onto the strip of sandy Bermuda grass between the fence and the house. I was too scared to go down that far, but I was close to pissing myself, so I pigeon-stepped as far as I dared and unzipped my pants with my shaking hands and saw with gratitude that it made it over the edge into the darkness.
We walked back up the rise to the Y-shaped crest where the three planes of roof intersected. It couldn’t have been more than fifteen feet higher than the edge but now it felt like nothing except sky was above us. Bill Ray stood on the peak and looked out over the land for a while. He started to laugh again, quietly at first but then so much that he had to take his cigarette out of his mouth. He stood up completely straight like an Indian in a Western movie and swept the cigarette west toward the featureless pasture and south toward the sparse lights of town. “Verily I say unto thee, my son,” he said in a booming bass voice. “Someday this will all be yours.” I was too young then to understand what was so funny about that, but I laughed along anyway.
*
Troy and Harlan found a little drop in the lunette formed by the wind along the east side of the lake. Past this ridge the lake seemed to be in rapid retreat—a shocking green rim of salt grass and algae gave way to pale gray sand that grew lighter until it became indistinguishable from the near-white surface of the gyp water, about fifty yards in diameter, rippled whiter with cat’s-paws by the evening breeze.
Troy looked up the ridge and saw Harlan with his back to him, silhouetted against the dimming sky, relieving himself at the highest, most conspicuous point possible in the landscape. He stood the way he always did when he pissed, with his hands on his hips and his head bowed, as if presiding over some kind of solemn occasion. Past him a small herd of cattle darkled against the horizon, moving toward a stand of Sudan grass. When Harlan returned the light was almost too low to see him. His arms were wrapped around a tangle of leafless mesquite limbs dangling with long dried bean pods, the kind that underfed horses sometimes ate and died of the colic. Troy, squatting, looked up at him.
“What’re you doing?”
“Somebody’s been clearing brush. And I found a little outcrop of chert, managed to chip a piece off.”
“Chert?”
“Chert. Flint. We don’t need matches now.”
“I told you no campfire, Harlan, goddamn it. You’ll get us spotted.”
“You can go to hell. There’s nobody to spot anything for thirty miles and I ain’t staying out here tonight without a fire. If you want to sleep with the coyotes and rattlers, go out yonder and be my guest.”
He squatted down and dumped the wood and arranged the smallest pieces in a tight pile and took a wad of dry buffalo grass from his shirt pocket. He felt the direction of the wind on his face and turned his back to it and hunched down on his knees with the grass almost between them. Digging into his pocket he took out a lock-blade folding knife and opened it and turned it so that the blunt edge of the blade faced out. Then he bent over and began striking the light brown shard of chert against the fattest part of the blade, rhythmically, as if trying to coax music from the steel. At first nothing happened but then thick orange sparks like phosphorescent water droplets began to tumble downward in the dark. He kept hammering the chert against the metal for much longer than seemed necessary and then he picked up the tangle of grass and held it almost against his lips and blew into it gently and then harder, until Troy could smell the grass burning and see smoke begin to curl out. Suddenly, it burst into flame in Harlan’s hand and he thrust it rapidly into the woodpile and took a stick and nudged it into the middle and got down on his hands and knees and blew again, into the smoke and flame. He tended it for several minutes, until the larger limbs were burning, then he got up and went to a flat patch of ground five feet away and cleared the weeds out with the heel of his boot and lay down using his bag as a pillow.
Troy stayed where he was, well back from the fire, sitting cross-legged, scanning what was left of the horizon.
The first limbs burned down to coals and Troy thought Harlan had gone to sleep until he grunted and got up and laid on more wood. The din of toads that filled the early night had died down to a stray murmur.
“I’m goddamned thirsty,” Troy said after a while. “Lying here next to so much water is making me thirstier. I can smell it.”
“You’d rue the day you drank any of that alkaline shit,” Harlan said. “It’s no good for anything except birds to land on. It’s too shallow even to drown in.”
Harlan lay down closer to the fire this time.
“I wish I had a Navajo blanket.”
“I wish I had a hamburger,” Troy said.
“When do the sandhills come here? I can’t remember anymore.”
“About now. I’m surprised some aren’t out there already.”
“I didn’t realize this was that place. Until we got right up on it. I don’t think I ever saw it in good daylight.”
“You remember that morning?”
“A little,” Troy said. “I remember thinking it was dark enough that we were all going to shoot each other.”
Harlan shifted himself on the hard ground so that he was lying on his back. “It was so pitch black I couldn’t even tell where the lake was.”
Troy was still sitting but he leaned back now and put his elbows on his bag and looked up into the sky. It had been so many years since he had slept outdoors he couldn’t believe how many stars there were, how closely strewn, how clear. He scanned the blackness trying to find a constellation but couldn’t identify any, even the Little Dipper.
“Jim Bob and Crip had come the winter before,” Harlan said. “They knew which way the cranes would come off for food, where we needed to stop. Not too close but close enough so they’d be low when they came over. Those bastards dropped like ten-pound sacks of flour. It sounded like grown men hitting the ground. I’d never seen birds that big before.”
Troy badly wanted to sleep but kept his eyes open, looking away from the fire, trying to adjust his vision to the darkness. The morning with the cranes—they were maybe fourteen or fiftee
n then—started to come back.
“They say they fly through here all the way from Siberia, across thousands of miles of communist airspace, down the whole of America. Then when they stop for a little breather they get shot out of the sky by a bunch of shit-for-brains farm boys with nothing better to do.”
“I remember hearing them before I could see them. It didn’t sound like wings beating—it almost wasn’t a sound at all, but then I knew something was over my head, bodies moving through the air. I started to be able to see them, so many of them, paired up like bombers. It was kind of scary. But pretty, too, I guess. I forgot we’d come out here to kill them ’til Crip pulled the trigger right next to my ear. One fell in front of me. The other of the pair veered and lost altitude, like it was coming down after its mate, but then it straightened out and went on.”
Harlan took his hat from his chest and laid it on his forehead, over his eyes. “There wasn’t no sport in it. I got five or six before I stopped. I bet Crip and Jim Bob and that other boy killed forty. The ground looked like a goddamned massacre.”
“Did we even pick any up? You couldn’t eat the damned things.”
“I’d sure try now,” Harlan said. “Wouldn’t you?”
Troy let his eyes close.
“Ask me again in the morning.”
Oct. 15, 1972
West Lubbock, sometime in the mid-sixties, the last house I ever robbed. It was a nice ranch-style brick on a residential corner near a shopping strip. The parking lot at the strip stayed busy, giving me cover to case the house in my car in the afternoons and evenings, following the comings and goings. The owner was an older woman, almost certainly a widow—no dog, few visitors, dependable routine; somebody came to take her to buy groceries on Monday mornings, to a ladies’ club on Thursday afternoons, to church Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings.
Two weeks in on a Wednesday evening I saw her Pontiac Star Chief gone from the driveway where she kept it. I came back an hour after sunset and parked at the shopping center and crossed to the alley and opened the backyard gate and entered the living room through an unlocked sliding door. I slipped off my shoes, as I always did, and put them in my back pockets, heels out.
I was inside working for twenty minutes, bent down over the jewelry boxes in the bedroom, before I suddenly became aware that I wasn’t alone. She moved as soundlessly as a cat—before I saw her, before I even heard her, the woman was standing directly over me. I made an audible sound and fell backward, scattering necklaces and earrings all over the carpet. I thought my heart was going to burst in my chest. I tried to crawl away on my elbows between the bed and the wall.
She walked after me holding out both hands—hands I expected to see clutching a kitchen knife or a pistol but they were empty, reaching toward me.
“Oh, hon!” she said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to spook you.”
She knelt down in front of me and shook her head scornfully. Up close, she looked far older than she had from a distance.
“My lord, Jimmy! Do you know what time it is? It’s too late to be up playing now. You put these toys away and you get back to bed.”
She bent down and began scooping up jewelry and putting it back in the boxes and I watched her in the weak light coming in from the street. She had me pinned between the bed and the wall and the only way past without knocking her down was over the bed. When she’d cleaned up she stood and drew the quilt coverlet slowly back and waited, looking at me, right at me so hard it seemed she was staring through me at the wall or something on the other side of it.
I stood up, ready to run, but my knees were too weak beneath me.
“What on earth are you still doing up, son?”
I wondered what year it was for her and how old I was supposed to be. I wondered where whoever she thought I was was now.
“I guess I just wasn’t tired, mama,” I said finally, trying to see what would happen if I played along.
“Well sometimes you’re tired and you don’t know it. You have to close your eyes and lie real still to find out.”
I was dressed in my clothes for night work—dark slacks, dark sweater, black socks. She patted the queen-size bed where the covers were turned down. She didn’t move and I finally sat where she indicated. I took my shoes out of my back pockets and put them on the floor. She put a hand on my shoulder and I slumped over and eased my head onto the pillow and pushed my feet clumsily under the sheets looking up at her face over me, wreathed by snow-white hair. She covered me up to the neck and bent down and kissed me clumsily on my cheek very near my mouth. I could feel her cool, odorless breath against my skin.
“Rain’s coming,” she whispered. “Daddy’s taking you and Sis with him tomorrow to help break the new section. You need a good night’s sleep, you hear me?”
I don’t know how long I lay unmoving in the bed, listening to the quietest quiet I’d ever known. It was like a silence at the bottom of another silence. It didn’t matter to me whether I got caught or not; I wanted to spend the rest of the night sleeping in that bed.
Eventually I got up and walked into the hallway and looked into the small adjoining bedroom, which was frilly and must have been Sis’s when Sis had lived there. The woman was sleeping in the room, on the twin bed, fully clothed like I was, except that she was lying above the covers, on her back, her arms extended rigidly along her sides.
I couldn’t bring myself to take her jewelry, so I stole her small television set instead. Later, it struck me what a terrible decision that had been—she wouldn’t have missed the jewelry but the television was probably her best friend.
*
Martha had no idea how near daylight might be—the darkness outside was still deepest black. Towing the hunting coat behind her, she climbed quickly over the backseat and found the passenger door handle and pushed it down with great caution, trying to keep it from making any noise. But the handle suddenly gave way under her and she sucked in her breath as the door released and swung open heavily, almost pulling her out of the car before she let go. The door stopped halfway but its opening caused the dome light on the ceiling to burst to life like a powder flare, flooding the car with brightness. Martha sat back up on the seat and turned to stare at the malevolent eye of the dome staring back at her. Before she thought about what she was doing she rolled onto the broad of her back and hoisted both legs in the air and kicked viciously at the light, knocking its plastic cover off with the second kick of her heel and with the third crushing the thumb-size bulb that somehow burned so fiercely.
The darkness covered her again, and she balled up on the floorboard behind the front seat, breathing hard, feeling panic rising in her throat. She clenched her eyes and tried to listen. The wind was completely still now and noises would carry. She waited for voices, feet coming toward her on the hard ground. She raised the top of her head over the seat to look through the back window toward the rise: no human form visible, no movement, yet. She scanned wildly around in the darkness and suddenly realized she could see the horizon, a nearly indiscernible black line running beneath a purplish-yellow blur, still very faint but not for long. She shoved her arms into the sleeves of the canvas hunting coat and dug around in the pockets hoping that Brother Ted had forgotten a pocketknife or a screwdriver, but felt nothing except what seemed to be the ridged casing of a spent shotgun shell.
She could see a little better now but there was almost no moon and the grass-pocked prairieland outside the car door quickly dropped off into void as she tried to make it visible. Where was the dirt road and how long had they been on it? Even if she found it, how many miles would she need to run to get back to pavement and the poor chance of a passing car? If the sun came up and they drove along the road after her where would she hide in this treeless, featureless, colorless godforsaken country?
She started to cry but choked it back, swallowing so hard she couldn’t breathe. Rage rose into her chest. She leaned out and slowly pulled the passenger door closed again, not hard enough to shut it
completely but enough until she heard it click. Looking out the back window again, she climbed over the front seat to check the glove box for something she could use as a weapon. It was even darker in the car than it was outside. She felt like a sightless creature groping its way through a burrow. Inside the glove box the first thing she felt was plastic and hard and long—an ice scraper, which she shoved into the chest pocket of the coat, in case it might come in handy later, though she couldn’t think of how—and then a soft bottle, lotion, maybe car wax, which she dropped on the floor—and a cardboard box that she fumbled to open, spilling out a handful of what she realized were tampons, smooth and medical-feeling. Some sort of folded paper, most likely a state map. A small zipper pouch that she felt around in and recognized the form of a lipstick, a compact, and a bottle of mascara. The compartment was nearly empty but the next time she reached in she felt something that her fingers instantly recognized as crackers. She had to bear down and steady herself to keep from ripping the papery cellophane away and losing them in the dark. She managed to get a fingernail beneath the triangle folded over one end and her hand flew to her mouth. The crackers had probably once been peanut-butter flavored but they were so ancient they tasted like sawdust and she almost gagged as she worked her jaw on the mass and swallowed it and crammed in the next two and the last two, feeling around inside the compartment for more.
At the bottom of the glove box lay the worn plastic bag she knew contained the car papers, the ones that proved the vehicle belonged to you and others apparently so essential you needed to carry them with you always. She was about to leave the bag alone but she swiped her hand beneath it to make sure she wasn’t missing anything and heard the jingle of metal, a sound so familiar she thought she must have imagined it. She grabbed one end of the bag and ripped it open and felt around inside; she could hear the metal but couldn’t feel it, so she turned the bag over and shook it and crouched down in the mess of the footwell and came up with what she was looking for, two long keys on a small wire loop.
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