If he’s really lucky, maybe he can still go back to whatever shitty home he left, but at least he’ll be alive.
Jenna was with us that night, too, in tight jeans and a barely-there leather top, her faded butterfly tattoos taking flight across her shoulders and seemingly out of place in a sea of everyone else’s skulls and Celtic crosses. She’s originally from California and got into the skinhead scene there with a group called Fuck Shit Up, out of Huntington Beach. I didn’t know it then, but she also had some family here in Texas, the Joyces, and that’s how Jesse learned about Killing in the first place and aimed us here. At that point, she and I hadn’t talked much, because Jesse was always draped around her, but she was watching me all the time out of the corner of her eyes. Like Kasper, I want to get her away from all this, but I can’t afford any friction with Jesse and his daddy, so I’ve stayed clear of her. I can’t risk another Ballinger, but she doesn’t know anything about that. None of them do. I was originally vouched to Jesse by a Volksfront skin out of McKinney, a snitch working off a two-year assault-and-battery charge, and I had a different name in Ballinger, so my cover is strong and back-stopped, but back then—that night in Terry—Jesse was still pushing me hard; wary, feeling me out and not quite trusting me. He didn’t accept me, not yet, and in all the ways it matters it’s even worse now, but I knew if he didn’t take me in there was no way I would ever get close to his daddy. It didn’t help that Jenna reminded me so much of that girl in Ballinger, and still does.
That seems like someone else’s life, a lifetime ago.
Over the last two years I’ve met enough of these skins, these so-called white supremacists, to figure out that it’s a lot of smoke and mirrors. They’re just lost souls like Kasper or Jenna, running from something or just plain running in place. They talk tough and a few of them even talk smart, but they’re mostly hollow, empty. They’re pretending, just like I am. They drift in and out of the scene unless someone like Jesse or Thurman Flowers gets ahold of them and fills them up. But that doesn’t make some of them any less dangerous, particularly when they’re together. I’ve seen it again and again.
They draw strength in numbers, like a pack of dogs or wolves. Piranha.
In Terry, it was a big Confederate Hammerskin that started the fight, and the flashpoint was Kasper. Kasper had bumped into the Hammerskin’s girl, touched her somehow, and even though he would have been the last one at the party interested in that girl or any other, he was suddenly pinwheeling over the ground in front of me, spitting blood. He’s thin anyway, small and delicate, so it would take little more than the back of a hand to drive him to his knees, but he took a shot full to the face and never saw it coming. He’s less of a fighter than Jesse, doesn’t have the reflexes or instincts for it. He doesn’t know how to hurt people and doesn’t dream about it or wake up with his hands clenched and his palms bloody from the half-moons of his nails after throwing punches in his sleep . . .
But I do.
* * *
• • •
THE HAMMERSKIN WAS SHIRTLESS, his head uncovered and bald but scarred enough you could count his age on them like rings on a cut tree. He wore an iron chain tight around his neck and had crossed hammers on display across his torso, and 55/HFFH inked in red across his forehead. He had Kasper by about seven inches and more than a hundred pounds, and although he had a couple of inches on me, too, seeing Kasper nearly broken in half on the ground and Little B swinging wildly at anyone nearby gave me the opportunity I thought I needed, my chance to gain Jesse’s trust.
I hit the Hammerskin low, then started working high, using the inked hammers as my first target. He was faster, or a lot more sober than I gave him credit for, and the right cross I aimed at his eye went wide. He ducked under it, got his arms around me and lifted me up, spinning me high, trying to take me down to the ground in one move, but I hooked his leg for leverage and all we did was dance a tight circle. Holding each other close, his sweat on me and his breath on my face, I shot an elbow into his exposed ribs and then followed with two Krav Maga knee strikes, the second one breaking something important with a sickening crunch. When he howled and let go, taking a crazy, loose-limbed backhand at my head, I dipped under his flailing arm, threw a crossing elbow to his jaw and brought another one backward across his face, and as he started to go to his knees, helped him along with a straight-razor hand to his throat.
He threw up dark blood and beer and his eyes showed all white, slick and hard as exposed bone.
People were yelling, although I couldn’t hear them. We were standing in a darkened circle and all the light was around us, so it was like we were trapped together in a dark, dark hole. But there was a small part of me outside that hole as well, just above it, looking down along with the crowd as I beat this man to death. I’ve experienced this at other times and places—moments where I am unmoored and lost and where I’m desperate to find myself again.
Like my father’s funeral . . .
Like Wanat, when I killed that boy running at Sergeant Wahl . . .
Or like Ballinger, where I beat a man senseless for a girl I barely knew. She’d begged for my help, but her final words—screamed over and over again at me—were Not like this, never like this.
I tried to tell her there was no other way. This is how you stop a man’s heart. But no one was listening anymore.
And maybe there will come a moment like that in Killing, too. Soon, because as each day goes by, I’m less sure of who I am or what I’m doing anymore.
But after putting the Hammerskin out, I was able to get a deep breath and find a way to focus, pulling myself hand over hand back to sanity. I was even about to reach down and help him up, when all of his friends hit me from behind.
Like I said, they draw their strength in numbers, dogs and wolves.
I went down with hands all around me, dragging me over the grass and pushing me face-first into the baby pool where I’d seen some skins pissing into the water and ice earlier. My head hit a keg, and my mouth filled with that water. There was a flash of something bright and sharp—a knife—and fingers searching for the softness of my eyes while still holding my head down, and I had time to catch one glimpse of Jesse standing at the far edge of the yard, so far out of the fray it might as well have been the edge of the world. Jenna was hanging on his shoulder, pulling at him and pointing in my direction, but he turned away and I lost him in the shadows thrown by others.
More hands were at my throat and a boot was in the small of my back. My lungs were exploding and it felt like the whole party was standing on me, all to make sure I stayed under that water.
And then, even though there was no way I could see it or hear it, I sensed in the rolling movement of bodies around me and the sudden silence falling over all of us like a sharp intake of breath that someone had pulled a gun.
I was crushed beneath a pile of people and the water and piss were cold in my mouth and I was alone.
I fought harder to stand, still choking, still waiting for the shot I was sure was coming, when all the hands released me. I pushed away from the pool on my knees, covered in drifting cotton, and spit out what felt like an ocean of water, a deep black sea, to find an old man pointing a huge Ruger revolver—nearly as old and rusted as him—at the crowd. There was another man at his shoulder who I later learned was Joker, and he had a long knife pointed at the face of a skin he’d just pulled off of me. Joker wasn’t smiling, wasn’t moving, and didn’t even appear to be blinking. He just kept that knife steady and still and a breath away from the skin’s eye. He’d already helped Little B to his feet; he was wiping at his bloody mouth with a shaking hand. He’d never landed a punch, but at least he’d tried.
Kasper, whose face was already going black and blue, smiled at me, thankful in ways he’d never be able to say, and then passed out into Jenna’s arms.
The old man wore a stark white wife-beater that showed his tattoos. He had clea
n and pressed Dickies, and his gray hair was pomaded back. There was a long chain from his belt to his back pocket, and it shined so bright in the naked bulbs it hurt my eyes. All of the Hammerskin’s crew, who moments before had been trying to kill me, still circled us, but they wouldn’t approach him, and it wasn’t just because of the gun or Joker’s knife. He stared at me curiously as Jesse returned and hovered nearby, and the old man couldn’t hide the look on his face when he caught sight of him. A look that was there and gone again, but I saw it plain: disgust, disappointment. Jesse had stayed clear of the fight the whole time.
Then the old man shook his head and turned back to me and I knew who he was before he even said a word.
“I guess you’re some kind of goddamn hero, huh, takin’ on all these peckerwoods yourself? But I like it. That’s some goddamn big balls right there, ain’t it, Joker?”
And Joker with the knife didn’t say anything at all.
The old man continued. “Yep, a real hero. A real badass, not like some pussies ’round here.” His eyes slid over to Jesse and back again. “Hero, you’re gonna have to tell me where you learned to fight like that. I bet that’s a damn interestin’ story.” I knew then he’d been watching the fight right from the start, letting it play out to see how I handled myself; or maybe just to satisfy himself that Jesse wasn’t going to handle it at all.
He then slipped the gun into the front of his Dickies, where it was still visible and he could get to it fast . . . where it could still be dangerous. Just like him. Always.
I learned it that night and I try never, ever to forget it.
“Howdy, son, I’m JW Earl.”
And then John Wesley Earl reached out a hand to help me up.
* * *
• • •
I WAS WAITING IN THE CAR for T-Bob and Jesse, just like Earl asked me to. He ordered them to come here to Murfee and answer the deputy’s questions because he doesn’t want any more trouble down in Killing, but he won’t come into town himself. He’s hiding, laying low. He made me drive them, which pissed Jesse off to no end, and told me to keep one eye open and another on his son and brother, but there’s more going on than that, because with Earl there always is. I don’t know whose lies to believe anymore, his or mine. He’s like a movie set, but so am I. Nothing we show each other or anyone else is real. There are the faces we present and then nothing but our own empty hallways and rooms behind them. Our own ghosts move there, up and down the corridors, restless, always haunting us.
JW also asked me to draw a layout of Murfee for him: all the main buildings and streets, the sheriff’s department and the bank and the fire station.
Like a map to buried treasure, or something else.
The others are waiting in Killing for Thurman Flowers to arrive, so they can start building his Church of Purity, another Elohim City or Hillsboro or Hayden Lake. They have all these crazy plans and Jesse believes every one of them, but Earl doesn’t believe in anything, other than himself. He doesn’t give a damn about Killing or Flowers or any of that, even his own family. He’s always standing off by himself on the big bluff behind the house, staring at the sky, always on the phone.
Who is he talking to and what is he talking about?
Other ghosts, maybe; telling stories he won’t share with us.
Whatever he’s waiting for isn’t out in Killing and never was. That’s all Jesse’s doing. I think whatever Earl is looking for, whatever he wants, is right here in Murfee.
But when T-Bob and Jesse first got back in the car, it was Jesse who was fixated on Murfee, ranting on and on about the damn beaner deputies in the town. That Hispanic deputy, America Reynosa, must have gotten under his skin, the same way she did with Earl and Little B. And Jesse knows now he’s not going to be able to get out from under what happened in Terlingua, neither those deputies nor Earl will let him, for whatever reasons of his own. Jesse muttered something about blood and a fight and Bravo’s girlfriend, someone named Vianey, before lapsing into a cold silence. He still wasn’t ready to let it go, though, or ready to face his daddy. So we’ve been driving around Murfee since then. For almost two hours. Just circling.
Now, though, I decide on my own that we’ve all had enough, and I get us away from the town and back out in the desert and the mountains. He doesn’t stop me or say anything at all, and instead looks at the receding people and buildings with eyes dead and quiet and still as graves.
Eyes so much suddenly like his daddy’s. But where Earl is impossible to read or predict, everything about Jesse is an open book. There’s nothing subtle or measured about him at all, but it doesn’t make him any less of a threat to someone who crosses him.
Like father, like son.
* * *
• • •
IN 1999, John Wesley Earl killed my father, gunning him down in the middle of the night on a road outside of Sweetwater. Despite all the promises made to me at my father’s funeral, Earl was never tried or convicted for it, never put down for it, and I’ve been waiting over fifteen years to look him in those grave-like eyes of his and make him say it, so I can pull that trigger myself, only to find now that I can’t. I want to believe it’s because I need to find out what he’s doing down in Killing and in Murfee, but I don’t wear a badge anymore. This isn’t my town and none of these people, including Jenna and Kasper, are my responsibility, even if a part of me still wants to pretend I’m a cop and can’t leave them to the mercies of Jesse or Earl when I know they don’t have any.
But I know this is a lie, too.
I should have killed Earl that very first night I met him in Terry. But he saved my life and continues to treat me, day after day, almost like a son. Better, in most ways, than his true boys. Which should mean nothing to me since the man killed my father, yet somehow has come to mean everything to a kid who hasn’t had anything, or anyone, for a long time.
So I make myself look in every mirror, at my reflection in the car window as we drive back to Killing, just to remind myself I’m not that kid anymore. That boy died, I died, the same night my father did. Whatever I see there, whoever is looking back at me, it’s not that nine-year-old boy, but that’s the biggest damn lie of all.
Because I’ve always been just another lost soul, too; as hollow and empty as Kasper and all the rest of them, just waiting all these years for someone to fill me up.
Maybe it wasn’t that I always wanted Earl dead, as much as I just wanted a father back.
* * *
• • •
MURFEE REMINDS ME OF SWEETWATER, but it’s a lot prettier. Almost like a movie set, too, all the houses and buildings just pretty fronts without backs, spread out in perfect squares beneath the shadows of the mountains. By the time I left Sweetwater, the horizon had just started to disappear behind the turbines of the first wind farms. Now, as far as you can see, there’s nothing natural or beautiful anymore—there are no mountains or trees—just those damn turbines, turning and turning and turning. I’ve been back a dozen times to the place where my father was shot, to stand beneath those spinning blades and to touch the ground where he bled out, and there are always more of them, and soon they’ll block out the sky.
My father was on his back when he died, looking straight up, and for years I tried to imagine that the last thing he saw was a fresh night sky filled with a million new stars.
It’s a nice thought, but I need to let it go.
I need to remember, always remember, that the last thing my father really saw before he died was John Wesley Earl staring down at him, right before he pulled the trigger . . .
Like father . . . like goddamn son.
PART TWO
HOMBRES MALOS
We’re peckerwood soldiers, down for our cause
Texas convicts, soldiers, and solid outlaws!
The rules we live by are carved in stone,
Awesome and fearless, bad to the bone.
>
In joints all over and from around the ways
People try to down us with each passing day.
The strength we have when we go to war
Was passed on to us from brothers before.
We’ll go to war with our heads held high
Knowing some of us will get hurt and die.
None of that matters while the battle is on
We will fight to the finish, till all strength is gone.
Our bodies are solid, blasted with ink,
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