25
THE JUDGE
There was a clock ticking all the time in his head.
If he questioned it, which he really didn’t, he might think it was just the memories of that old West Country Longcase clock his grandfather had been so proud of, dominating the foyer of the big ranch house outside Pecos. It had been mahogany, shined so bright each and every day by the nigger house help he could see his face trapped in the thick wood. He’d been switched in front of it, knelt down by both his father and his grandfather at one time or another—Hollis sometimes looking on—with their rough hands on his neck, leaning hard into the birch rod and bloodying his shoulders, his back, his ass.
If he thought much about that, which again, he didn’t, he might wonder why he remembered the beatings in front of that damn clock, but never the reasons that had him kneeling there to begin with.
He sipped coffee while Caleb finished breakfast and got ready for school. He timed the boy’s movement to the ticking in his head, found him always moving too goddamn slow. He knew Caleb had let someone in while he hunted at El Dorado, guessing it was that wetback girl he’d been sneaking around with. She’d changed the very air trapped in the house; if he stood close enough to the boy, he’d probably smell her on him. He both cared and didn’t. Not so much the boy would try such things, but that he imagined himself safe enough to get away with them.
Like his truck, or his phone. The phone had been in his mother’s name, her account and Caleb’s held jointly down at Murfee’s only cellular store. The boy paid the bill in cash from his allowance and always in person, no records ever showing up at the house. He thought he could keep a handful of secrets that way, but the boy was wrong. Caleb’s life was like one of Evelyn’s snow globes, the ones she used to collect and set out at Christmas. All that occurred under the boy’s clear heavens were the movements of his hand, tilting it one way or another. They were his acts of God, granting an illusion of freedom. Caleb might look up and see sky, but he’d never touch it—never know it wasn’t real.
He dealt with his son no different from how he might a horse, giving just enough rein to keep the animal content . . .
Once Caleb was out the door, still silent, he checked his watch. In an hour he’d visit his old friend Mimi Farmer down at the Verizon store. She’d been the manager for more than a decade, and worried about Caleb, and knew how much he worried about and loved his only son. She’d been kind enough several times in the past to pull up Caleb’s phone records so he could keep an eye on what his boy might be up to. She knew it was a father’s duty. No reason she wouldn’t do it again.
• • •
Later, he sat in the truck. It was cold, Thanksgiving the next day. The sun was distant, retreating, a hint of itself. The desert was always cold at night this time of year and the days warmer, but not now. He couldn’t remember a spell of weather like this—this soon for this long. Cold all the time. Where the sun was farther away, the Chisos and the Santiagos felt closer, clearer. They were all bright and dark, capped with white snow.
Men who wore guns, like his grandfather and his grandfather before him, once rode at the feet of those mountains, carving a place for themselves out of the very rock. They fought and died and killed in the shadows of the peaks, down along the Rio Grande’s muddy banks—lives worth no more than whatever they had in their pockets. The strong rode on, the weak did not. It made sense. It was the natural, violent order of things. They’d had plenty of blood on their hands, but the blood washed off eventually.
He’d always longed for that clarity of action and purpose, that awful, brutal simplicity. He’d practiced it when possible, but it was not always easy.
He neatly folded the papers Mimi had given him, a crease as sharp as an axe blade, sharp enough to draw blood if he held it wrong. He put them in the glove compartment. There were things he needed to do, calls he needed to make—a final dealing with Duane and more; clarity of action and purpose, brutal simplicity. Blood washes off.
He sat in the car with that ticking still in his head, even though the clock and the house that held it were long gone. They’d both burned, along with his grandfather in his bed—blind in one eye and too weak to rise as the flames found him. Flames so hot he’d melted to the bed’s frame, so you couldn’t tell bone from iron, blood from ash. No one had ever figured out how the fire started.
26
MELISSA
Chris was already out of bed when she woke, moving around in the house, and there was the smell of coffee; a hint, the potential, of other cooking. It was Thanksgiving, and although he could have had some of the elk meat he and the sheriff had killed up at El Dorado, he’d passed on it. Yesterday he bought instead a boneless Butterball turkey breast at the Hi n Lo. It was in the fridge when she got home last night, next to a six-pack of Mexican beer, with one bottle missing.
She wandered through the house, noticing that most of the boxes in the hall, in the living room, had disappeared. There were just a few left, only a stray book or two to be tucked away. She picked up one and slipped it into the box waiting for it.
She found him in the kitchen, sipping coffee, with the makings of a Thanksgiving dinner spread out around him on the counter. She hadn’t thought about cooking, but here he was, picking through cans of green beans and corn, a box of Stove Top they might have brought with them from Waco. He had a random assortment of spice shakers arrayed like soldiers on the kitchen table and was holding one now, squinting at it; too small in his hand.
He caught her staring, laughed. “Hey, babe, hope I didn’t wake you. I thought we ought to have a meal. It’s silly, I know.”
“No, no, it isn’t.” Mel wasn’t much of a cook; blamed the mother she’d never known for that, and had never in her life thought of making a Thanksgiving meal. If she remembered right, last year she and Chris had eaten at a Luby’s. Still, she could try. They could figure it out together. About mid-morning, as they fumbled around in the kitchen, talking, he switched to the beer he’d bought, and then, a little later, while she was taking a shower, he turned on the TV. She came out with her hair wrapped in a towel to find him watching football for the first time in forever, a warming beer bottle in his hand.
They ate their scraped-together meal, and afterward he went out to his truck, limping a bit from the hunt with the sheriff, and came in with a bag. It was turning dark outside, so he cranked up the big stadium lights and the backyard glowed beneath them, taking on a whole new dimension. Light poured through the back windows, pooling on the floor, and dust floated through the halls of the house, glimmering.
Chris shrugged on a jacket and took a fresh bottle of beer and his mysterious bag and went outside, standing for a while just looking up at the lights, before dumping the bag, spilling eight or ten brand-new footballs on the ground. Mel watched from the kitchen window as he picked one up, bounced it in one hand while holding the beer in the other. She could tell it felt uncomfortable—he almost dropped it before he found a good grip, swung back, and let it go into the night. It wasn’t the tightest spiral, but it sailed high, got lost in the lights, falling silent on the ground at the back of the yard.
Warming up a bit, putting the bottle down, he got another ball. He gingerly bounced on the balls of his feet, scanning downfield like there might be receivers there, patting the ball with his free hand, timing a pattern that didn’t exist. He put some muscle into this one, and it vanished into the night.
Even craning around the window, she couldn’t see where it landed, if it ever did.
He blew out, really starting to crank up. The next one he fired straight upward through his own cold, hanging breath. It trailed smoke, like a rocket ship, pulling free from the earth. He kept throwing deep balls into the night, to people who weren’t there to catch them. Maybe just to ghosts. He had one ball left to throw when he stopped to reach down to answer his phone, although she couldn’t hear it ring through the win
dow glass. He looked at it for a long minute before taking the call, but once he did, he forgot about the ball in his hand. When he came inside, he left the football behind, resting on that old chair on the porch.
The night following his bloody shower, after he’d mysteriously gone out for a while and then came back in, he sat her down and told her what had happened. Out on Route 67, and with the sheriff at El Dorado. He told her a little about a man named Garrison. So she told him some of the things she’d let slip to Duane Dupree, things that might have made everything worse. He held her and told her it was okay. It started and ended with him.
“I gotta go,” he said. She stood with her arms still crossed, waiting for a better explanation.
“It was Dupree and the sheriff. There are lights, engine noises out south of Indian Bluffs, way out at the Far Six. Something’s out there, maybe a plane landing.” He’d talked about that before, stories he’d heard of small planes out in the badlands, dropping off drugs.
“Chris, it’s Thanksgiving. You’ve had a beer, or five. Isn’t there anyone else who can go?”
“No, guess not. The others are with their kids, the rest . . .” He let it go—there weren’t that many to begin with. “It’s me and Duane. I’m going to meet him near there.” Chris was doing a few things at once, none of them well: looking for his duty gear, trying to talk to her, taking off and putting on his jacket at the same time.
She put her hands on him. “No, no, you’re not. You’re staying here with me. You’re not going with fucking Duane Dupree anywhere.” She searched around for his phone. It was sitting unattended on the kitchen counter while he fumbled around. All she could think about were all those boxes and books finally disappearing, those moments of watching him throw balls into the dark, so hard and so high no one might ever find them again. They might still be circling up there now, a handful of new stars. That’s how she wanted to remember today. That’s how she was going to remember it.
“This isn’t right, Chris. You know it isn’t. You stop and look at me.”
But he didn’t. “Mel, I have to go. That’s the right thing. If I don’t go, it all comes back here, to you . . . the town. I gotta see this through, all the way. Besides, nothing’s going to happen. You . . . the sheriff . . . hell, everyone knows I’m going out there. It’ll be fine.”
She kept her hands on him, trying to hold him down. “You better not be lying to me, Chris Cherry. Goddamn you, you better not be lying to me.”
He got to his phone before she did, didn’t know quite where to put it; he had the phone in one hand and his holstered gun in the other. To keep from crying, to hold it all in since she couldn’t hold him back, she hit him in the chest, hard. “All right, slow down, cowboy. If you gotta go, you gotta. But let’s get your shit together first.”
She kissed him before he went out the door, tasting that shitty Mexican beer on his mouth. She didn’t know why he’d bought it. But he wrapped her in his arms, strong as always, strong as forever. He kissed the top of her head, told her to watch TV. She wanted to say more, something that would keep him with her forever. But she’d said everything she knew how, and he was already gone.
27
ANNE
She told him she was sick.
She’d called the sheriff first thing Thanksgiving morning, embarrassed, begged off that she couldn’t make supper later that day. He held his end of the phone silent for a long time before telling her it was fine. He completely understood, hoped she felt better. If he was angry or hurt, he hid it well. After that, she’d curled up on her couch watching old movies.
She was still there, asleep without dreams, when Chris went out to meet Duane Dupree.
28
CHRIS
When Chris was far away from the house, before he hooked up with Duane, he pulled over to the side of the road and checked his gun, then checked it again. He hadn’t wanted to do that with Melissa watching him.
His hands were shaking.
He also called Garrison, left him a message when he didn’t answer. They were due to meet in a week, but he wanted the man to know what he was doing out here now, in case he wanted to talk Chris out of it. A part of Chris really hoped he could talk him out of it.
When his mother had been diagnosed, she came back from El Paso with his dad and they’d gone directly to their room, sat behind the closed door for two or three hours. Although Chris couldn’t hear them so well through the door, he thought she was crying. They both were. But when they came out, Chris saw no tears. They didn’t want him to know, as if he couldn’t understand why they all might need to cry at the news she had to tell. She’d put herself back together—what little makeup she wore was movie-star perfect—and held his hand as she told him she was going to die.
Yes, there were treatments, things she could do. But all of them would take her away from home, away from her husband and son. They’d make her feel worse than the sickness itself. It was no way for a person to live or die and no way to leave this world, so she would have none of it. She was going to stay there with them, with her little flower and herb garden at the side of the house. Life would go on without change, without panic. He wanted to argue, to fight with her, but there would be no more discussion, because there was nothing more to be said. Then she’d reached up, held his face with her fingers to steady them, so he wouldn’t see them tremble, and told him: “Chris, I love you, but I have to do this my way.” Then she went to the kitchen to finish the pot roast she’d planned for dinner. She walked away, smoothing her dress with her hands, and started to die.
By the end, when the porch was where she most often sat, wrapped in blankets against a chill that may not have existed, he’d watch her from the back door, wondering if she was already dead. She sat statue-still for so long, too weak to make the porch swing sway, with only the thinning wisps of her hair shifting in the breeze, and her eyes sunk into hollows so deep that her face seemed unfinished, incomplete. And in those moments, wrapped in anger and sadness as much as she was in her blanket, he absolutely wished her dead, so that the always waiting might finally fucking stop; hating himself for thinking such a thing, for believing his mother’s dry-eyed acceptance of her end was somehow selfish. But just when he couldn’t take it anymore, she would move, a slight uplift of the head; a subtle shift beneath the blanket, trying to follow a bird’s mysterious flight across the sky. A hawk rising higher and higher, turning in great circles, leaving everything below it until it was lost in the blue and haze.
He went to her then, always, adjusting the pillow behind her head—covered with the same pillowcase he’d been thinking about replacing when Garrison first called him but still hadn’t—and held her hand and felt its papery weight and tried, as she’d done for him, to not let her see how he’d been crying.
• • •
Yesterday, after getting the turkey at the Hi n Lo, he’d driven all the way out to Mancha’s, looking for Eddie Corazon. He wasn’t in uniform, and it was the first time he’d been out there since the incident with Delgado and Aguilar. Before he found Eddie, though, he found Amé Reynosa.
She was coming out of Mancha’s, lost in thought. She didn’t see him at first, maybe didn’t recognize him without his uniform. She was a pretty girl, prettier than even Caleb or Anne had described. A girl used to being looked at who had mastered the art of ignoring all the stares; staring right back, staring down everything and everyone. She reminded him of Mel, destined—he desperately hoped—to escape this fucking place if that’s what she wanted, to grow into one tough woman.
She wore a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, big sunglasses, although there wasn’t enough sun for them. She was smoking a cigarette, blowing smoke sideways, and nearly ran into him.
“Hey, you’re Amé, right? America? It’s Chris.”
She stopped, took a step back to open some space between them. “Lo siento. I wasn’t paying attention.” She hesitat
ed, brushed her hair back with a hand and looked around the parking lot, probably for more deputies, more gringos. “Why are you here?”
“Sightseeing,” he joked. When she didn’t smile, he pushed on. “Anyway, I wanted to talk to Eddie. Is he in there?”
She nodded, shoved more hair back. “He’s there. A piece of shit.”
“I’ve heard that,” he agreed. “Actually, I know it firsthand.” She was sizing him up from behind her glasses, waiting. He wasn’t sure if Caleb had told her anything yet, was less sure that Mancha’s parking lot was the place to talk about it. There was still so much he didn’t know, but he wanted her to know he was trying. That she wasn’t alone. “I’m working on this thing with your brother, Amé, I hope Caleb has told you that. I believe both of you.” He hit the last words slow and hard, but soft; hoped she understood.
She abandoned her cigarette, let it fall to the ground, and stepped on it. Her hidden eyes were drawn to the badge clipped to his belt, his department gold star. Even out of uniform, the sheriff felt his deputies were never really off duty, and he wanted them to wear the badge and their guns. “Do you think it matters, really?”
He looked past her, past Mancha’s, through the parking lot and the chain link to the little houses beyond. “It has to, right? We have to try. This is our goddamn town.” He was surprised by his own anger, his quick defense of a place he’d spent a good portion of his life trying to get out of.
She laughed, mocking. “Our town? No lo creo. This isn’t my town.”
He wanted to reach out a hand to her. “But it should be, Amé. It’s supposed to be. And it will. I’m going to do everything I can, but I just need a little more time. And I’m going to need your help . . . both yours and Caleb’s. I don’t think I can do it alone. I wish I could.”
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