High White Sun

by J. Todd Scott

  * * *

  • • •

  HE’D WANTED TO BE ANGRY at Harp for getting the dog, but couldn’t bring himself to be, not after watching how Mel had carried him around; how she’d sat on the couch petting him and tried to get him to stay in his makeshift bed. She put him there and surrounded him with blankets, just to have him immediately wiggle free and follow her into the bathroom or the kitchen. It had made both of them laugh, the new puppy proving as stubborn as both of them together. And he was beautiful, and would only be more so the older and bigger he got. Chris had no idea where Harp had found him or how much he might have cost, but he knew what he paid his deputies, and it wasn’t much. He’d called Harp to thank him and the older man had said he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. The dog was a gift, one they damn well couldn’t give back, so they’d just have to figure out how to live with it now.

  Harp had been drinking—it had been there in his voice—with his jazz playing a little too loud in the background. Chris had insisted that he was coming out to dinner over the weekend, that they’d grill some steaks, and Harp had tried to be noncommittal until Chris told him Mel absolutely wouldn’t take no for an answer. That she’d drive to Murfee and force him into the truck at gunpoint if she had to. Harp had softened at that, even laughed a bit, and said he’d see about clearing his social calendar, before hanging up.

  But not before he’d warned Chris never to cross that damn woman, ever.

  Chris checked the side panes by the door, but still didn’t turn on any porch or security lights, crouching down while his bad knee popped, opening the door from nearly a seated position. He couldn’t keep a hand on the door, the gun, and the dog, so he expected the latter to bolt out into the night, but he didn’t. He stayed close, scanning the darkness, moving forward only as Chris did.

  Chris swept the porch with the shotgun, giving his eyes a chance to adjust. There was no moon, just stars, a few here and there flickering brighter in that way that stars sometimes did; trembling, alive. On a night like this, when even the Milky Way was lost in the sky, Chris imagined he could see all the way to the end of the universe. Driving home he’d caught some lightning in the east, but the promised rain was still far away or never coming at all. He could make out his Big Bend truck and Mel’s older Ford, and found that darker line where the gravel gave way to the scrub, but the long drive up to the house was deserted.

  He searched for cars pulled over in the dark, hidden by ocotillos, but if they were there, he couldn’t find them.

  The dog was low to the ground, his body taut as a wire, almost humming . . . tracking something in the night only he could see and smell.

  Something or someone approaching the house.

  Chris moved out wide onto the porch so he wasn’t backlit by anything from inside. The ill-fitted planks creaked beneath his weight, calling out to the emptiness. The ugly noise carried far, echoing back only half as loud, but loud enough. He’d been anxious since coming face-to-face with Jesse Earl, since Jesse had approached Mel at Earlys, but still found it hard to believe the Earls would try something as foolish as attacking a sheriff in his home.

  Harp refused to put it past them, though, and Chris had his own share of enemies. He’d killed men out here before.

  Chris caught the licorice smell of creosote and the lighter tang of queen of the night, a cactus that bloomed heavy white flowers only on summer nights. Closer to the house was damianita, a shrub topped with a mess of yellow flowers that gave off its own recognizable scent when brushed against.

  Like now.

  Chris turned the shotgun toward the wide swath of damianita, the flowers moving with the slight breeze, or because of something else.

  Maybe it was just a coyote . . . a wolf.

  Chris reset the A5 into his shoulder, leaned hard into it, so when he pulled the trigger the recoil wouldn’t throw him off balance. He also wanted to be up and moving so he could retreat to the house and get to Mel.

  The dog inched forward, growling louder. He gave out one sharp bark and then relaxed. He sat up on its haunches and looked at Chris, as if to say: It’s okay, I’m here and there’s nothing to worry about now.

  No, nothing to worry about at all.

  * * *

  • • •

  CHRIS GOT BACK INTO BED, desperate to catch a few hours of sleep, the gun upright in the corner and within reach. Mel had woken at the dog’s bark, but when Chris told her it was nothing, she’d rolled back over, even though Chris still couldn’t relax. He turned again to Jesse Earl showing up at Earlys and Harp’s warning about the bank. He’d met with Jim Hannant, who’d managed the bank for ten years, and who walked him into the steel-reinforced concrete vault that had been built around 1920, and which, despite its age, still looked impregnable. With its Diebold vault door and the time lock and security cameras, it just didn’t seem feasible or worth the effort for someone like Earl to try to get into it, but he’d put Buck and Till on a rotation to swing by the bank a couple of times a day and night anyway, and was still left wondering if that was enough. Was he doing enough? Was there ever enough? He thought about America shooting round after round at her faceless targets and Harp bringing over the dog. Was Chris the only one just sitting around waiting for something to happen, like the rain that refused to come?

  It had been foolish to creep around in the dark outside the house, with all the cameras and lights at his disposal, but he’d wanted to feel in control of something. Take the lead, make a damn decision. He didn’t like worrying that everyone was in harm’s way, except for him.

  So maybe tomorrow morning before he went to El Paso he needed to pay a visit to Killing himself, to see this John Wesley Earl in person. He wasn’t sure what it would accomplish, but it was something. It was better than nothing.

  Like Chris, the dog wouldn’t let the night go and refused to get back into his pile of blankets. He was up on his hind legs on Chris’s side, peeking over the top, breathing and whining. Chris finally gave in and pulled him into bed and pushed him in between him and Mel. At some point he’d be too big, but for now, it was fine. Besides, he’d earned his keep tonight. Chris could feel him settle in, his large head up on a pillow, where he could see them both.

  Watching over them.

  30

  Victor was there waiting for her but didn’t say anything, just unlocked the door to let her into Avalos’s cell. She’d slipped her gun from her holster and left it on Victor’s desk, and told him to shut the door behind her and lock it again but stand by, just in case. If he heard anything strange, anything at all other than the low murmur of their voices, he was to call Ben Harper first, then the sheriff second.

  Then she told him if Avalos tried in any way to get out of the cell, he was to shoot him.

  * * *

  • • •

  FOR THE SECOND TIME THAT NIGHT, America talked only in Spanish.

  Avalos watched her warily from his bunk, still rubbing sleep from his eyes, as if he wasn’t sure she was really there.

  “I didn’t know if you would come.”

  “I’m here, so say whatever you have to say.”

  Avalos considered this. “In another time, another place, you’d think differently of me.” He pointed at the jail cell. “It’s hard to see past this.”

  “It’s hard to see past the deputy you ran over.”

  “I did not mean to hurt him. My lawyer said he will live, but I will still be here, or someplace worse.”

  “Because you panicked?”

  Avalos looked as if he was going to cry. “Because I was nervous, yes. Trust had been placed in me, the sort of trust that is given once and never again. My father wanted me to earn my place at his side. I know you understand this. You are the girl with the gun, the girl who avenged the death of her brother and then took his place.”

  At the mention of her brother, she hesitated. “I was young and foo
lish, as was he. Other than that, we are nothing alike.”

  Avalos shook his head. “No, they say you are tougher than your brother. I see that.”

  “Who says these things? I know nothing about what Rodolfo was involved in. Nothing. I was never a part of it.”

  “But your brother worked for Nemesio, because of your uncle, the one they call Fox Uno. He is a very important, powerful man, now more than ever. The wars on the border have weakened everyone, all the blood spilled over plazas and routes. They say there are not enough police for everyone to bribe and not enough foot soldiers to continue the fight. One day a man is raised up and the next he is cut down, and for what, a handful of pesos or a strip of road in the dust? Once we could all be rich, but no longer. There is one constant, however, and that is Fox Uno. Nothing happens here in the Big Bend without your uncle’s knowledge. He is a padrino, and even in this crazy time, all the narcos listen to him. They seek his advice even if they don’t work for him.”

  “So who do you work for?”

  “Not Nemesio, but others. My father does. I could not have come here without Fox Uno’s blessing. A payment was made in exchange for it.”

  America knew Avalos was talking about piso, the toll that the cartels allegedly paid each other to move drugs through their rival territories and to access their smuggling routes. For some reason she still didn’t understand, someone had paid the piso for Avalos to come through Murfee and the Big Bend.

  Avalos continued. “Ojinaga is still held fast by Nemesio, by your uncle, and that includes everything that touches it on both sides of the river. That includes Murfee, and you. He put out the word long ago that you are not to be harmed. Everyone on the border knows this.”

  He put out the word long ago . . .

  And there it was, finally, the answer to a question she’d asked herself two years ago, when Máximo had showed up at her door. Why? At the time she’d foolishly thought it some kind of magic, as if she had summoned him. But it had been blood instead—invisible ties to a man she’d heard about and met only once, if at all, when she was too young to remember. Her uncle never crossed the river and moved between towns like Coyame and Delicias, where both her mama and papa now lived. Fox Uno was her mama’s brother, one of six, and had always been just a name to America, nothing more. But Avalos assumed she’d been working for him all this time, just like Rodolfo, and it did make some kind of sense, even if it wasn’t true. Maybe this Fox Uno had spoken it aloud enough times that she was helping him, moving his drugs and money across the border and claiming to everyone that she was one more badge in his pocket, that the lie had taken on a life of its own.

  The girl with the gun.

  Blood demands blood . . . sangre exige sangre.

  He believes your hands are already dirty . . . that’s what Paez had said to her, and that’s why Avalos wanted her help. He thought she was already corrupted. That’s what the people in Murfee and Presidio and in the towns on the other side of the river were whispering: that America Reynosa was now the right hand of this uncle she barely knew.

  She’d replaced Rodolfo and was a narco, just like him.

  All the things she had tried to do and the person she’d wanted to be—the person Sheriff Cherry and Ben Harper and the others believed she was—had come to nothing. She’d spent the past two years wondering and worrying whether it was possible to outrun your mistakes, and in one night Avalos had shown her just how foolish she’d been.

  There’s only what people are willing to believe about you. That’s the only truth.

  Avalos hadn’t yet mentioned the money: Sheriff Ross’s, Nemesio’s, money. Her uncle’s money that she’d run off with. He was looking at her, eyes clouded, now suspicious.

  “You truly know nothing of this?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Tell me why you were sent here and what it is that you want me to do. Say it now or I walk away, and leave you to the men you work for. The men whose trust you’ve already broken.”

  Avalos hesitated, unsure. He stared at the four walls around him, the ceiling pressing down. All gray, again all the same, unchanging.

  “You can help me finish what I came to do. I have dishonored my father, but after you help me, you can tell your uncle that I did not falter. That I did not trade for leniency, and eventually my father will learn that, too. Then, even in prison, I will be safe.”

  “They can hurt you in prison?”

  Avalos nodded, looking at the ground. “They can hurt you anywhere. This you have to know . . .”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “My true name is Miguel Suarez, and there is money . . .” he started.

  Then he told her all of it.

  31

  There were all these things he remembered, things he could flip over one after another like the colored cards in a deck his daddy once gave him, the only present Mason William Earl had ever put in his hands.

  His daddy had claimed it was an original deck of Civil War–era cards—Highlanders—and goddamn if they hadn’t been a sight to see, fifty-five cards in all and no jokers, an ace of spades in faded blue ink with an eagle and thirteen stars, and a queen of clubs with a ragged black hole in the center that his daddy said had come from an actual bullet during a faro game gone bad. His daddy had also promised him that Billy the Kid had carried those cards in Lincoln County, New Mexico, and years later, even when a young John Wesley had figured out it was all bullshit and the cards were fakes, he’d still carried them with him everywhere. He’d had them during his first stint behind bars, flippin’ ’em end over end into the trash can at the far end of his cell in Coffield.

  He’d learned by then that if the cards really had been valuable, worth a damn thing at all, his worthless daddy would have taken them back and sold them off like everything else.

  * * *

  • • •

  STILL HE REMEMBERED . . .

  JACK OF CLUBS

  Being fourteen or fifteen years old and riding in his daddy’s big old Chevy, the engine knocking and banging, listening to some Johnny Rod and then Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown” on cassette, his daddy drinking a bottle of Wild Turkey and sharing some of it with him and how it goddamn burned all the way down his throat right into his stomach; how it stayed on his lips for miles and miles as his daddy weaved lane to lane, cryin’ or singing or both.

  How they stopped somewhere deep in a stand of trees that smelled of standing rainwater and pine, and how his daddy made him sit tight even as he pulled a big ole Ruger Blackhawk revolver out from under his seat. There were lights out past the windshield, like fallen stars trapped beneath the pines; a house or trailer in the dark, but they’d left Beaumont miles behind and he had no idea where he was anymore. His daddy told him to get in the driver’s seat and keep the engine runnin’; put the bottle of Wild Turkey in his lap and told him to take a big-ass swallow on each count of ten Mississippi, and just to wait . . . wait. He smiled, showin’ gold fillings and a missing front tooth, and disappeared into the dark.

  About the second or third Mississippi he heard the shot, then another.

  Then he watched those stars go brighter, turn to flames, and smelled thick smoke blowing into his face.

  His daddy turned back up with blood flecked all across his neck and hands, those bloody hands shaking. He tossed the still-hot Blackhawk into his boy’s lap and grabbed back up the Wild Turkey and finished it in one long gulp, and yelled—but it came out a whisper—for John Wesley to just drive, goddammit.

  And he did.

  DEUCE OF DIAMONDS

  His first day in the yard in Coffield . . .

  Standing in dust that might once have been grass, as some big beefy white guys worked weights on one side next to the fence, while some niggers just kind of shucked and jived across the way. There were the bulls high up on the corner towers, their eyes nothing but big mirrored shades, sometimes taking an
extra second to stare down their scopes at the inmates below them; just zeroin’ their sights and smokin’ their Luckies or their Camels and telling jokes. In a couple of years most of those bulls would work for him—they’d slip him packs of Camels for the sort of favors only he could grant—but not on that first day, not when he was a new fish.

  Not as he walked around the yard in smaller and smaller circles, like water goin’ down a drain. Too afraid to get close to any of the milling groups, too afraid they’d just suck him right down and he’d flat-out disappear.

  One of the niggers peeled off from the others and made a line right for him; the tar baby’s Afro spiked out all over his head and pushed up high with a dirty bandanna. Everyone’s eyes were on Earl, weighing him, taking bets on what he’d do, as Afro just kept getting closer, his hands in his pockets, smilin’, like they were both just standing on a street corner in Waco and he was going to bum a cigarette or ask directions. The rest of his time in Coffield came down to this moment—even the clanking of the weights had stopped—so he bent down like he just spotted something interesting on the ground, scoopin’ up a handful of dust and rocks in one long move that he followed through right into Afro’s face, catching that nigger off guard. Afro made a noise and reached up to protect his dusted eyes, while Earl hit him in one of those watering eyes just as hard as he could, feeling something soft give way, and the man’s spit all over his face, as Afro folded over and went down puking into the dust. That brought all the other niggers runnin’, but he stood his ground with his fists balled up, ready for the fight or the shankin’ or whatever, figuring that was better than the alternative; hoping the bulls might fire off a few rounds before one of those niggers straight up killed him. But no one laid a hand on him, as the weight lifters, all white except for their tats, rose up and surrounded him, so it all ended in a bunch of pussy pushin’ and shovin’ right until the bulls yelled over their bullhorns to stand down.