High White Sun

by J. Todd Scott

  • • •

  AMÉ WALKED OVER, leaving Bravo’s girlfriend behind where she stood holding her arms, rocking in place. The grief looked legitimate, but Harp wasn’t completely sold, not yet.

  Amé cast one look down at the body and then ignored it. She had a pad in her hand that Harp hadn’t seen earlier, with notes from her interview with the other girl. America Reynosa was bright, a quick learner, and if she got that damn temper under control (as if he had room to talk), she might become Chris’s best deputy. She probably already was. There’d be some measure of hell to pay for that little stunt she pulled with that Avalos kid, but Harp would let Chris handle it. She knew she was in the wrong, and would accept the consequences. She was tough that way. She was also one of the most beautiful women Harp had ever seen, distractingly so, but she never drew attention to it . . . never used it or leaned on it. She had a magical ability to ignore herself and the obvious effect she had on other people, men mostly. She had history with Chris, back when Stanford Ross had been the Big Bend’s sheriff; when she would have been little more than a kid herself. But she never talked about that or the year she’d spent away from Murfee after Ross’s death and the final identification of her dead brother. In fact, he knew very little about her beyond the time they spent together on the job. Otherwise, she was a mystery. She never talked about herself or her hobbies or whatever interests she had outside the department, if any. When she was riding with him and he put on some Mingus or Billie Holiday, she never complained, never even said a word until a song was done. But she listened damn hard, like she was turning each song over in her head, just like she did with everything he told her about police work. He admired her and they’d developed a damn good working relationship, even their own silent, secondhand language. Like the way she’d brought him coffee and aspirin this morning, and the way she sometimes called him at night to ask him a question—to get his ideas on something—when all she was really doing was checking up on him and reminding him he wasn’t alone.

  He nodded in the direction of the girl. “What’d she say?”

  Amé bit her pen, checked her notes. “She is Vianey Ruiz. She works over in Presidio at a Valero and spends some of her free time here when Billy isn’t on the river. They’ve been together más o menos two years. They were drinking last night and she got tired and went back early to his trailer.” Amé stood high in her boots, pointed east. “Somewhere over there. He stayed behind at the Wikiup, still drinking. She woke up this morning, went to look for him, and found him. Here.” She motioned down to Bravo’s body with her pen.

  “So he’s a drinker?”

  Amé nodded. “Uno grande. It wasn’t strange for him to close down the bar. Era un problema.”

  “You know I still don’t speak Spanish, right?”

  Amé smiled. “Learning it should give you something to do instead of sitting in Earlys with Mrs. Cherry, drinking. Eso es un problema, mi amigo.”

  “They’re not married.”

  Amé waved it away. “Lo que sea. They might as well be. And you understand me well enough.”

  Harp laughed, wondering if the handful of gawkers noticed the two of them sharing a joke over a dead body. He’d done it plenty of times before, once even at a triple homicide in Odessa—an entire family, mother and two young daughters, shot dead by the father, who then didn’t have the decency to shoot himself. They’d found him sitting at the dinner table, shotgun still warm in his hand, dinner spread out all around him and his family’s blood drying on the dining room walls . . . his face . . . the food itself. After they’d handcuffed him and walked him out, Detective Bruce Cooper had said the guy must have really not liked the fucking meat loaf, and they’d laughed their asses off while the crime-scene techs took the photos, lighting that horrible room up over and over again. Gallows humor was the nature of the work. You needed it or it all got into your head and you couldn’t get it out again. Sometimes it did anyway, no matter how many laughs or how many beers you had. Cooper had put his own shotgun in his mouth three years ago.

  “Okay, niña, so what do we do now?”

  Amé turned serious again, stealing a glance back toward the other girl, Vianey. “I’ve got a list of names, people she remembered in the bar last night. We have to talk to them all, todo el mundo. Bar owner as well, and all the other raft guides he worked with.” She took in Terlingua as if seeing it for the first time; covering her eyes with a slim hand, blocking out the sun. “We’re going to have to find them.”

  Harp grunted, agreeing. “What do you think about the girl?”

  “I think she’s telling the truth. She doesn’t know why anyone would want to hurt Billy. Everyone loved him.” Amé chewed her pen again, the habit of a onetime smoker, unconvinced.

  Harp grunted again. “Of course they did.” He didn’t have to tell Amé that was complete bullshit, just like he didn’t have to tell her to look for bruising on the other girl’s arms or the dark stain of spilled blood under her fingernails—the telltale signs of struggle. Amé had the instincts of a good cop who knew the world was full of bad people, full of wolves. If it wasn’t, Harp wouldn’t have seen so many dead, attended to them; stood over them as he now stood over Billy Bravo. On TV shows and movies everyone was concerned with the reasons and the motives for all the horribleness that people inflicted on each other, but he’d learned long ago there was never enough rhyme or reason to any of it. The reasons, if there were any, rarely mattered. John Delaney, the father who’d shot his family in Odessa, had never offered one. Maybe he’d heard voices or his wife was stepping out on him or he just really, really hadn’t liked the fucking meat loaf that night, but who knew? Harp remembered the names of all the dead he’d met, but what he couldn’t remember was why they’d all died. All that’d mattered was death had finally come for them—on its huge black wings and wearing so many shapes—and as always, too goddamn soon. That awful, dark menagerie: car accidents and bullets and knives and lightning strikes and heavy objects within reach; or something as simple and horrible as a goddamn fucking stroke.

  Death took away everything that you loved; it was fucking ruthless that way. And it left you behind to struggle on, searching for answers where there were none to find, until it came for you, too.

  Jackie had always calmed dark thoughts like these. A devout Catholic, she’d been able to read his black moods better than her Bible. She’d always understood.

  How it all got into your head and you couldn’t get it out again . . .

  “Well, there was something,” Amé continued, sliding her notepad into her back pocket. She had sunglasses hanging from the front of her shirt, and admitting defeat from the sun, she finally put them on. “Or a someone. Some new people that have been coming into town and drinking at the Wikiup. They’re staying over at Killing.”

  Harp had heard the name but otherwise drew a blank. “What about them?”

  “Vianey didn’t like them . . . didn’t like being around them. Lots of tattoos, ugly stuff. She said they talked bad about Mexicans, blacks. Tough guys, bad men. They were loud even when they weren’t drunk. A few days ago Billy had words with one of them and I guess they didn’t like him dating a Latina. But she said they bought each other beers after and it was all good again.”

  “Or it wasn’t,” Harp said.

  “No, no lo creo.”

  “Were they in the bar with Billy last night?”

  Amé nodded, her face masked behind her big sunglasses.

  Harp thought about that. He’d seen his fair share of racists in their various stripes—bikers, militants and militia-folks, plenty of out-and-out skinheads in Midland, like the Aryan Circle. Some Hammerskins even had a clubhouse there once, and he’d helped serve a search warrant on the place for weapons and drugs. Most of them hadn’t been very old, little more than teenagers, but they’d been a definite breed, easy to spot. They brought with them lots of little trouble: drunk and dis
orderly, concealed weapons, terroristic threats, graffiti and drug dealing. But also lots and lots of fights . . . the kind that might just leave a man’s skull crushed. He wasn’t aware of any around the Big Bend, though, and being this close to the border should give them hives—it was practically enemy territory—but it was something to look into. A possible reason, that unnecessary motive. The world was full of bad men, even here, in one of the emptiest parts of it. It never took long to find them, and somehow it never took long for someone like Billy Bravo to run into them.

  Death on its dark wings . . . no place was too distant.

  “Bad men, huh?” he said, searching for his own sunglasses and reaching for his cell phone.

  Amé nodded. “Malos hombres. Muy malos.”

  4

  The first thing I always remember about my father’s funeral is the flags.

  The dozens that were snapping at half-mast over the cemetery, but more important, the lone one draped over the coffin that they later folded and handed to my mother, who, crying and shaking, tried to give to me. But I wouldn’t touch it. It looked heavy in her hands, impossibly heavy, and I was afraid I’d drop it on the ground. I left my mother clutching it to her chest, left her to carry all that weight all alone, while my father was put into the earth.

  I was nine years old.

  The second thing I remember is the gunshots, the salute. They came in rapid succession, and even though I’d been warned to expect them, I still jumped at each volley. Someone, I don’t know who, put their hand on my shoulder as if they thought I might run away. They held me in place, held me down, as the shots rang skyward. It was probably a good thing, because I really might have bolted then—straight across the green, clipped grass of the cemetery, beneath a gray sky threatening a rain that never quite fell. Running and running until I found a quiet place; I might have kept running and never stopped. Later, in Wanat, when things got bad and then worse and I was so scared and the only sounds I could hear were the metallic pop and crash of RPGs and mortars and the thunder of Camp Blessing’s 155mm artillery rounds, fired from five miles away—and still a thousand times louder than those rifles at my father’s funeral—all I’d wanted to do was run again, but there had been no need to hold me back. There had been nowhere to go, nowhere safe. In Wanat, you couldn’t get far away fast enough. You had to kill your way to a quiet place again.

  So I did.

  The last thing I remember from the funeral is the handshakes, one after another. Thick, calloused hands pressed into mine over and over again, sometimes with another hand patting my shoulder or placed on my head. I was told over and over again it would be okay, that things would turn out all right. One man knelt down and leaned over me so close I could smell the whiskey on his breath, and he looked right through me with eyes the color of the empty sky overhead and whispered, “Son, we’re gonna find the sons of bitches who done this thing and put them right in the fucking ground.” Then he cocked his fingers in the shape of an imaginary gun and pointed it at my heart before someone pulled him away; standing him up and walking him off unsteadily, the spurs on his boots scraping the ground. The man after him had winked at me to let me know he felt the same way, they all did, and that the drunken man’s words were the Devil’s truth, even if they all couldn’t or wouldn’t say it out loud. Finally, someone stood over me, a shadow there and then gone, and pressed a silver star into my hand, still warm to the touch from all the other hands it had passed through—so hot it was almost on fire. And although I had been afraid the coffin’s flag might be too heavy for me, I didn’t know real weight until that star sat in my hand.

  I had no idea at all how heavy something could be.

  * * *

  • • •

  T-BOB AND JESSE ARE STAINED in blood that’s not their own.

  T-Bob, like usual, is drunk—a fucking mess. But Jesse is cool and calm just like the first time I saw him in Lubbock, before I met his daddy, John Wesley Earl. Jesse’s been drinking, too, but he’s plenty sober, and he runs his hands underneath the outdoor hose to clean them, washing away blood, before stripping off his T-shirt and trying to do the same with that. Nothing’s working, though, nothing is going to get that blood out, and all he’s doing is making a mess. Then Earl himself walks out and raises hell and strikes his piss-drunk brother until he starts crying, kicking him a few times for good measure while he’s down in the dust made all muddy by Jesse’s hose water. It isn’t unusual for Earl to dump shit all over T-Bob for the smallest thing, but he’d warned all of us to steer clear of both Terlingua and Murfee . . . to stay the fuck out of trouble. It found them anyway, like it always does—like steel filings to a magnet or water flowing to the lowest land. Now it’s found me, too.

  Earl doesn’t say a word to his boy, though. He gives Jesse a wide berth; Jesse watches bored while his daddy beats his uncle and doesn’t raise a hand to stop it. T-Bob is getting whipped for Jesse’s mistake and we all know it, Jesse most of all, but none of us says a goddamn thing.

  We’re all defined by what we don’t do.

  Joker stands silent, tongueless, his eyes nothing but slits and his tattooed arms crossed. He could be a piece of carved earth, a sliver of a nearby mountain.

  Lee Malady tries not to laugh, hiding a smile behind a can of Pearl, while his cousin Cole smokes a cigarette, flicking ashes to the ground and intent on the dying flame reflected in his crossed eyes. Cole’s really not there anyway, not smart enough to understand exactly what’s going on. He’s got the wits of a fourth-grader, trapped in the body of a strong, brutal man five times that age.

  Sunny’s mouth opens—T-Bob has always had a bit of a thing for her even though she’s Earl’s old lady—but she decides against whatever’s on her lips and closes it just as fast again, turning away to stare at the high yucca, focusing on something in the distance that isn’t there. Maybe she’s looking for a way out, like there is one, or just searching for the crosses that line the old cemetery on the other side of the hill, counting them in her head.

  Little B, Earl’s other son and Sunny’s boy, hangs close to her. He orbits her like he always does. He won’t look away and watches every single strike that falls on his uncle, his thin lips moving, as if he’s doing some counting of his own . . .

  And Kasper, Little B’s already pale friend and wannabe musician—he most always has a guitar in hand—goes even whiter by the second, trying not to catch anyone’s eye but mine. When he does I nod to him that it’s okay, even if it isn’t. It’s so fucking far from okay that it might be my biggest lie of all. I’ve hinted to him a few times that he needs to get out of here, but he won’t. A different kind of gravity keeps him here, and it has everything to do with Little B. Kasper doesn’t even understand how strong that pull is . . . crushing his goddamn heart . . . but I see it in every glance he steals at Little B, in the way he watches Earl’s boy, who doesn’t suspect a thing. I suspect for him.

  Kasper’s hands are tight in front of him to keep them from shaking, and there’s no guitar in those hands now.

  As it winds down, Jesse orders his girlfriend, Jenna—who’s been standing near me the whole time—to go in and bring him out a cold Pearl, and she gets too close as she passes . . . almost brushing against me . . . close enough I pray he doesn’t notice. If he does, he doesn’t say anything. When she comes back and hands it over, Jesse pops the top with his freshly clean hands, but they aren’t really, not by a country mile, and then he downs the beer in one long gulp, his throat moving like a snake swallowing something live and whole.

  When he’s done, he crushes the empty and tosses it to me, along with his wet and still bloody T-shirt.

  He tells me to burn it, bury it, whatever. We both know he wants me to have my hands on it, so I’ll always remember that my hands are just as stained as his.

  Earl is finally done with T-Bob, who’s stopped crying and is lying still, and now he’s studying both me and his older son,
shaking the sting out of the right hand he used on his brother. The sun’s been up for a bit but it’s still too low in the sky, turning Earl into a shadow I can’t see through.

  He’s a hollow place where a man should be.

  I wonder what he sees when he looks at Jesse . . . at me. One his true son, and the other, what exactly?

  It’s been weeks now and is there something in my face he recognizes that I can’t anymore?

  Does he know?

  I remember holding my father’s badge—a silver star and all its damn weight.

  And now, holding this dripping T-shirt darkened by another man’s blood. A man I suspect—know—Jesse just killed, even though I’m trying hard to pretend I don’t.

  I’ve never had any idea how heavy something truly could be.

  5

  Él sabía su nombre . . .

  America sat quietly and let Sheriff Cherry finish his phone call, pretending to look at her own phone, although there were no missed calls there, no messages. Nothing personal. Nothing to show it belonged to her at all, just the photos she’d taken out at Terlingua: the body and the long blood trails it had left behind on the cenizos and sumac. They might tell a story, though, might help explain what had happened in the dark the night before. She and Ben would have to go back out there today and finish talking to other drinkers from the Wikiup, and then tomorrow they needed to run down these men in Killing. By then, hopefully, Doc Hanson would be done with Billy Bravo and they might have a better idea of how and when he’d died.

  A little bit more of the story . . . the ending.

  Her papa had a saying, un proverbio, maybe it was from an old song, she didn’t know—Nadie sale vivo de este mundo. Nobody leaves this world alive. She’d learned just how true that was after her older brother Rodolfo had been found murdered out in the desert, like Billy Bravo. She’d learned it again after she’d met the boy Máximo, who’d killed Chief Deputy Duane Dupree for her. After that they’d run away together as far as Houston, before she left both him and Texas behind for what she thought would be forever. Although she never saw Máximo again, she had come back to Murfee, which made her understand her papa’s words in a whole new way.