High White Sun

by J. Todd Scott

  “But he is a civilian. He quit. He walked out, nobody walked out on him,” Chris said. “You do understand he may not want to be helped?”

  Stackpole reached into his pocket, pulling out a DPS badge—round and gold with the state of Texas in the center—not the “star in the wheel” silver badge of the Rangers. “This was Danny’s. According to the major, it still is. All he’s got to do is get out of Killing and leave Earl and the rest of them to the feds. He needs to come home. You know how it is, once you pick it up, you can’t ever put it down again. Not really. Please give it to him and remind him of that. That you’re always a lawman, no matter what.”

  Harp touched Chris’s arm. “Danny doesn’t know he needs our help, but we do.”

  Chris hesitated, took it, let it weigh out in his hand, and thought about Harp, who had taken up a badge and gun again to work for him, to help him, long after his duty was done. And how a year ago he’d stood outside Duane Dupree’s burned-down house, under a hot and heavy sun . . . sol blanco . . . not much different from the one above him now, and put a similar heaviness into Amé’s hands.

  He’d done it several times since: for Dale Holt and Tommy Milford and the others.

  Always a lawman . . .

  Chris closed his fist around the badge, but didn’t put it away. He didn’t have an answer for Stackpole, not yet. He wanted to hold on to it for a while, on the whole drive back to Murfee. Instead, he turned to Harp.

  “Let’s go home.”

  18

  Chris came in late. Mel had told him he could stay in Lubbock for the night—that she was okay with it—but she knew he didn’t like leaving her alone out at the Far Six, and the truth was, she didn’t like it, either. So she was still awake, watching TV and not really reading the open book in her lap, when he walked through the door looking tired, run-down. It had been a long day and only part of it had anything to do with the drive. He said Ben had bothered him the whole way back about getting her those damn dogs, or that maybe it was time to have a child or two running around out here, so she’d have some company . . . someone to take care of.

  She told Chris she already did.

  * * *

  • • •

  EVEN GETTING IN at the hour he did, he woke up before her, when dawn was still just a bleeding edge on the horizon, so that she found him later sitting out on the porch, writing in one of those yellow pads of his. It was his black coffee that had finally roused her, the hard, smoky smell of it, and she poured herself what was left in the pot and came out to join him. Something was bothering him, and there was a time, not all that long ago, when he would have kept silent about it and held it all in. But that time had passed, just like Sheriff Ross and Duane Dupree, and she knew he’d share it if she was patient. She stood back and waited for the sun, waiting for him, when she realized Chris had put his pad down and was bouncing something in his hand . . . a doorknob.

  “Came off in the bathroom, got to get it fixed, I guess. Goddamn, babe, just one more thing.” He tossed it to her and she caught it one-handed, not spilling her mug.

  She turned it over, gave it a good look. “Oh, Chris, I can fix this, don’t worry about it.” She slipped it into the pocket of her robe and went back to sipping her coffee. The porch boards beneath them creaked, the only sound at all, since what little wind there might be for the day hadn’t woken up yet, either. Something, maybe an owl, turned on a wing and circled down into the ocotillo ahead of the rising sun, and the whole of the sky was empty and clean, momentarily colorless, unmarked by man or anything else. Chris looked like he might reach for his pad again, but thought better of it.

  “Babe, I think I got a bit of a mess with this whole Terlingua thing . . . Billy Bravo’s murder. And I don’t think my meeting in Lubbock helped. In fact, I think it made it a helluva lot worse. Harp warned me that it would, and by God, if he wasn’t right.” He was looking out toward the mountains, where it was still dark, where it had the look of a place that could stay dark forever.

  She waited a few heartbeats and took another sip of her coffee. Then, putting a hand on his shoulder, “You want to talk about it?”

  And he did.

  * * *

  • • •

  HE TOLD HER ALL about Danny Ford and John Wesley Earl and the FBI agent Austin Nichols, who, from the sound of it, she wasn’t sure she’d like if she ever met in person. He told her about standing in the bank parking lot with Lieutenant Stackpole and the badge Chris still had in yesterday’s jeans, draped over the old leather chair in their bedroom. He told her about the drive back with Ben and the debates they had about what they were going to do, if anything.

  She heard enough to know that when all was said and done, Chris had an idea in his head of what he wanted to do, he just wasn’t sure he should go through with it. And that’s what had gotten him out of bed so early in the morning, and had probably kept him up most of the night. It was probably that frustration more than anything else that had really pulled that silly doorknob free . . .

  She didn’t say much until he was done and had lapsed into another silence. He’d talked long enough that his coffee had gotten cold, and he poured it off the porch into the caliche.

  “We both know you aren’t going to let it go, Chris. You aren’t going to let that young man hurt himself or anyone else. Not after what you did for Caleb Ross. It’s not in you.” It was the first time she’d said Caleb’s name in a year, and she knew she didn’t even have to. Caleb was already, always, on Chris’s mind.

  “It’s not my problem. It’s Dyer’s, and Nichols’s. Hell, they created it.”

  “Chris Cherry, you’re not really trying to convince yourself of that, so don’t try to convince me.” She poured out the last bit of her coffee, too. “You once stood out here before the house was up and said as far as the eye can see, that’s my responsibility. Now, maybe you said it to impress me, or to get me to agree to live out here with you, or just because you were hoping to have a little fun that night, and I guess two out of three ain’t bad.” She laughed. “But those were your words, not mine.” She caught him smiling. “You believed them then, and you do now. If you can stop something bad before it gets a whole lot worse, isn’t that your responsibility, too?” She didn’t have to add her own words: before you get a call about another body.

  “Maybe I need to put a star on you and make you a deputy.” He shook his head, tired and frustrated, but smiling at her all the same. “But we did have a whole lot of fun that night, didn’t we?”

  “Yes, Sheriff, we did.” She put her arms around him and pulled him out of his chair. “Let’s have some more . . .”

  * * *

  • • •

  SHE TOOK HIM BACK INSIDE, slid her robe off with nothing underneath, and let him have a good long look, before she pulled off his T-shirt and peeled his shorts down to the floor. They fell together into their bed, which, like their coffee, had gone cold, as static lightning played on them beneath sheets that drifted cloudlike over their heads, settling softly against their skin. She guided him into her and said his name and rolled beneath him to give him everything and to let him know there was no part of her he didn’t know, that he couldn’t have if he wanted it, and she put her face into his chest and shoulder and moved along with him. He was slow, still tired from the long day before and the longer night that had followed, but she felt his strength return as he stayed tight against her, and when the sweat broke free on their skin and he was finally saying her name, over and over again, both bodies arching, she ran her hands all around him and held him as tight as she could so as not to lose a single drop of him, not afraid anymore to have her fingers brush against the bullet wounds that were still there and always would be.

  Just like she would . . .

  She thought at some point that the sun would finally come up, that dawn light would heat up their room even more than they had. But as they lay against each ot
her after they were done, Chris finally falling back asleep, the moment remained blessedly dark, as if the sun was kind enough to wait just for them . . .

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN SHE GOT UP SOMETIME LATER, Chris was just coming out of the shower. He’d laid out new jeans and a shirt and badge and gun on that old leather chair.

  He bent down to kiss her, dropping water from his still-wet hair onto her face, onto her eyelashes, and the sun that had waited on them before was out in full force, burning holes into the bare wood floor.

  “I need to get in to the office and call Royal Moody for a favor. I hate doing it, and he’ll raise hell about it, but . . .” Chris trailed off, letting the rest of that thought go. He put on the fresh jeans. “You think this heat’s finally going to break?” he asked. He didn’t say anything more about what they had talked about before the sun had come up. He was done with it, whatever it was had been decided, and there would be no more talking about it or second-guessing it. That was the new Chris, who had survived the Far Six.

  “I saw something on the weather yesterday. We may get some rain in a week or so.”

  He buttoned up his shirt over his scars and looked down at his badge, before clipping it onto his belt.

  “Well, we’re going to need it, a real good thunderstorm to wash all this damn heat and dust away.”

  19

  I’m trying to hide a gun when Jesse walks up on me.

  I’ve been doing this for a couple of weeks now, slipping a piece here and there around the Killing property. Earl really doesn’t want anyone other than himself walking around with a gun, although they have more than they can keep track of; T-Bob mostly, and it’s one of his old S&W 929s that I took out of the RV, wrapped in burlap, and am now wedging beneath a span of rusted car hood on the bluff behind the house. It’s the same spot where I always see Earl standing, smoking, and making phone calls because the reception is good, and I’m curious about what he’s doing up here. What does he see?

  Wondering, maybe, if he’s hiding things like me.

  With no rain, his boot prints are still visible, thin and ghostly in the dust. Not much walking around, just standing, looking south, toward the mountains. He takes his bike out there early some mornings, but the ground’s not good for a Low Rider like his. That’s hard riding and there’s nowhere to go anyway, or at least nothing I’ve found.

  I hear Jesse and smell his cigarette before I see him, so I’m already standing up when he calls me out.

  “Danny, what you doin’ up here?” he says to my back, because I still haven’t turned around. I’m counting the possible number of steps between us in my head and how fast I can close that space if I have to.

  When I do turn, he’s not staring at me at all, but down at the old car hood. It looks like a Bonneville, like the rest of the car sank right into the dust and this pitted piece of metal is all that’s left to see, but he doesn’t comment on it. I still don’t like the way he’s looking at it. “You’re getting to be like my daddy, creepin’ around, keeping to yourself. Makes me nervous.” He flicks ash and kicks at the dirt.

  “It’s nothing, Jess. I just get cooped up with everyone all the time. You know how it is.”

  “Yes, I s’pose I do. That’s why you shoulda been coming into Terlingua with me and T-Bob when we had the chance. Getting a drink, getting outta all this, at least for a little while.” He waves his hand with the cigarette at the empty desert circling Killing. I don’t bother to remind him there will be no more trips anywhere. His daddy will put a stop to that, if he has to chain Jesse to the bumper of the RV parked out front.

  Jesse smokes silently for a bit, looking back between me, the car hood, and the mountains. He’s got his father’s brains and his eyes so I wonder what he got from his mother, though Jesse doesn’t talk about her, and Earl doesn’t, either, for that matter. There was nothing about her in all the police files I read. Jesse’s brother, Little B, is Earl and Sunny’s boy, and I do know quite a bit about her. She’s got a decent criminal record and did some time of her own, and has been hooked up with Earl off and on for over twenty years. She had Little B in that window between Earl’s two stints behind bars, when he also found the time to kill my father, and she and T-Bob raised him; Jesse, too, more or less, who also spent a lot of time bouncing around on his own. T-Bob has this thing for Sunny and he gets nervous when Earl treats her bad, the same way he does with how Earl treats his sons. He won’t raise a hand against his brother, though, and turns to the bottle instead. It was through T-Bob that Jesse somehow first heard of Thurman Flowers, a man he now considers more of a father than Earl himself.

  The strain between Jesse and his daddy is like grit in my mouth; dry, so thick I sometimes think I’m going to choke on it. For the last couple of years, Jesse’s had his own thing going, trying to build something with Flowers. Most of those down in the house are supposed to be his people, but then Earl made parole and showed up. Now we all know where the real weight is settled.

  Earl is like gravity, a black star; bending light . . . bending us. Hard and unforgiving and pulling everything toward him.

  Earl is the only one keeping me around now, although I tell myself I have a choice in the matter; trying hard to convince myself there’s some greater good in me at work. I can’t escape Earl’s gravity, even though I could walk out of Killing at any moment. None of them would raise a hand to stop me, least of all Jesse. Maybe the friction I feel isn’t even between Jesse and his daddy, but between Jesse and me. Maybe he’s caught Jenna staring at me, or still resents that brawl at the skinhead party that went down in front of Earl. But I really think it all comes down to his daddy, that black star we’re all falling into. The more Earl relies on me and confides in me, the less Jesse wants to, and the more he looks to pick fights with both of us. It doesn’t help that the big guns and ordnance I’ve promised haven’t come through, and he’s beginning to realize they probably never will.

  We both know I’m lying about it, he just doesn’t know why, and that’s worked its way under his already thin skin. His suspicions about me and my relationship with Earl are probably the only thing keeping me alive, but it’s also what’s going to kill me in the end. He’s going to be washing my blood off his hands, like the morning after Terlingua.

  Jesse blows smoke. “I spoke to Thurman. He and Clutts will be here in three, four days, on the outside.”

  “That’s good, real good,” I say. Clutts is Marvin Clutts, Flowers’s right-hand thug. I only know him from intelligence reports.

  “Things are gonna be different then, you know that, right? Thurman will have his folks . . .”

  “Like Clutts?”

  Jesse stares at me, like he’s sizing me up for a hole in the ground. “There will be more than Clutts, a lot more, soon. We’re gonna buy all this up, acre by acre, make it ours.”

  This is a familiar story. I’ve heard it all before, and I’m not in the mood for one of Jesse’s white power rants today, but he’s not going to let it go.

  “We’ve got plans, Danny, Thurman and me. What’s that they say, build it and they will come? You can’t hide out here on this hill away from it. You don’t get a pass, no one here does. No matter what my daddy says, he can’t give you one . . . and he don’t get one, either.”

  “Then you better take it up with him, I guess. I said I’m working on it. Men I know are stationed up at Fort Bliss in El Paso, just like I said. They’re going to get you what you want, it just takes time. If you can do it faster on your own, then go ahead. Either way you’re going to need money. A lot of it.”

  Jesse nods, slow. The money is a sore point with him and it comes up again and again in his arguments with Earl. Flowers is pushing him about it, too. They both believe Earl’s got money stashed away from his time in prison, or even from before that, maybe from the bank job my father was investigating that cost him his life. “Okay, Danny-B
oy, okay. You say you’re working on it? Keep working. But unless you have that shit buried out here, right now, you’re just wasting time. My fuckin’ time.”

  He hits a little too close to home. “I got it, Jess, loud and clear.”

  Then, surprising me, he takes a few steps toward the car hood and me. Jesse is not one for a face-to-face fight. It’s not his way. “Guess this place reminds you of being over in that shithole on the other side of the world, right?”

  I tense up as he moves closer, pretending to look out toward the mountains; the wide desert and a small switchback road cut into the scrub that I’ve seen Earl churn into dust with his bike. Jesse steps through my shadow, keeps coming. “Well,” I counter, “that shithole was a lot nicer than this place. You sure picked a helluva spot to build your kingdom on earth.”

  Jesse flicks away his cigarette and bends down where I was kneeling moments before, like he’s going to search around for whatever I was doing. He grins. “Location, location, location, right? Land is cheap, Danny-Boy . . . land is . . .”

  His hand reaches out . . .

  “I wouldn’t do that.” I cut him short and point to the ground around the hood. “I thought I saw a rattler a second ago, curled up under there, heard it, too. Sounded big.”

  He laughs, but holds up, his hand suspended and still. “Sounded big? You can tell that, huh? More of that high-speed army training shit?”

  “No, but I had family in Sweetwater, where they hold the largest damn rattlesnake roundup in the world every year. I’ve seen a few.”

  Jesse is still hunched over like he’s almost hanging in the air. I’m unsure of what he’s going to do, and maybe he is, too, until we hear Earl walking up the hill, calling out for us. Both of Jesse’s hands are now out, reaching right toward where I slipped that 929, but he pulls them back and acts as if he was always just fishing another cigarette out of his shirt pocket.