High White Sun

by J. Todd Scott

  “Jesse doesn’t matter?”

  “He’s my blood, so I have some measure of responsibility for him, but I don’t have to bleed for him, if you get my meaning. I won’t.”

  “So now it’s all about you, I guess.”

  Earl shrugged. “Well, I reckon it’s gotta be about something, ain’t that right, Sheriff?”

  Chris stared at Earl, who returned the look, not backing down. Although he thought about saying Special Agent Nichols’s name out loud, there was no need. He and Earl knew each other perfectly well enough now.

  “Just remember those folks in Murfee are my family. I’m not going to let anything happen to them, you understand that?”

  “And they feel the same about you? Are they ever gonna take care of you, the way you’re tryin’ to take care of them now?”

  It sounded like a threat and Chris knew that Earl had wanted it to.

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s not supposed to matter. I don’t expect anything from them.”

  Earl smiled. “That’s good, because you’re gonna be damn disappointed. I think you always end up disappointed. All you can do is know who you are, what you’re willing to do, and everything else don’t mean shit. It’s like this . . . all those years inside I thought I was makin’ deals with the Devil just to survive, just to get by. But I was just makin’ those deals with myself. That’s all we ever do. And once you know that, shit, every other choice is easy.”

  “And I’m going to make this even easier. As long as you keep your folks and your sons down in Killing and out of trouble, I’ll keep mine out of your way. This is just between you and me, no one else is listening. Finish up whatever it is you came here to do and then you’re gone for good, are we clear?” Again, Chris didn’t have to mention Nichols or Flowers or any of it. Earl understood what they were both really talking about.

  Earl went to throttle back up his bike, giving Chris a little three-finger salute, his middle finger most prominent. “No worries there, Sheriff, everything here’s about done, and then you won’t be seein’ me again. I can fuck-all promise you that.”

  Earl had to say it loud, over the revving bike.

  “I’ve had enough of this shithole to last a lifetime.”

  33

  Jenna is naked. It’s not the first time, but it’s got to be the last.

  She’s going to get me killed.

  Somehow she knows I’m here and comes out of the bathroom with her towel open, nearly off. She’s taller than me, her skin so pale like the moon, her hair slicked back wet. It’s shiny, dyed a hard metallic blond; her face still beaded with water. There’s a name, not Jesse’s, written in script along the soft curve of her hip, drawing my eyes to the small, dark arrow between her legs. Her breasts are heavy, another tattoo over her right one—a dolphin leaping over invisible waves. She claims she used to surf and I wonder if she wakes up and asks herself how she ended up here, so far from the ocean, so far from any real water at all. Her areolas are large, several shades deeper than her skin, surrounding perfect, raised nipples. Her breasts are still spotted with water, like her face, as if she hasn’t even bothered to use the towel that’s barely wrapped around her.

  If she turns around I’ll see the butterflies on her shoulders and another tattoo, a field of flowers across her waist, rising up her back, in a thousand bright colors against her pale skin. But none of them are the same color, or even half as bright, as her eyes.

  “I didn’t see you there, Danny,” she lies, making very little effort to do anything about her towel, her nakedness.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, standing aside and looking away, right into the face of Thurman Flowers, who is watching us both.

  Jenna makes a face, pulls her towel tight, and walks past me and him. He watches her go and licks his lips, and then turns back to me.

  “I think it’s time we talk.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I HAVE TO SUFFER with him for another hour, sitting outside in the morning heat, listening to him talk about niggers and beaners and big-nosed Jews and all the other mud people he hates; the race war that is coming that only he can prepare for. He’s a bad sketch of the worst kind of caricature—bullshit twice removed—describing a world we both know doesn’t exist and a future that is never going to come to pass. If you’re not in the middle of it, it’s hard to believe that anyone swallows this poison straight, but I’ve heard it all a thousand times before. I heard echoes of it in Afghanistan and even in the halls when I first joined DPS. I heard it full-throated in McKinney and Tyler and Ballinger—in those shitty clubhouses and dirty apartments and out in the farm fields and parties like the one in Lubbock where the young skins jumped around and fought each other because there was no one else to fight. And of course, I’ve heard Little B and Jesse spout it, almost word for word, even though Earl long outgrew this type of blind, silly hate. He just doesn’t like much of anyone, and it has nothing to do with the color of their skin. It’s no wonder he despises Flowers and what his son has become.

  But I listen to it all again and nod in all the right places and even throw in a Heil Hitler that makes Flowers smile, his teeth weirdly white, wondering how much of this shit even Flowers truly believes, and when he’s going to get around to the real reason he wants to talk to me. It’s even harder for me to concentrate now since I spoke with those deputies in Murfee, and not concentrating and focusing here is going to get me killed, just like Jenna.

  America Reynosa’s words circle like black birds.

  You don’t leave it behind. Blood demands blood. Sangre exige sangre.

  It’s at the very end when he finally gets around to what I know he wanted to talk about all along.

  * * *

  • • •

  “HOW MANY SAND NIGGERS do you think you killed over there?” he asks, pointing over my shoulder, as if he’s talking about the other side of the street, and not half a world away.

  “I don’t know.” Although the real answer—the only answer—is too many. “I don’t think about it that way.”

  “No, I’m sure you don’t, Daniel. But you should. Ultimately, it’s a numbers game, a math problem and a somewhat simple one, actually. Each one less of them means a little more for us and for our kind. The world is growing scarcer by the moment, space, food, water. Our world, our home, the one we’re trying to build for our children, is being eaten away by these termites. They take and take and take. They weaken the foundation and make our home unstable, unsafe. And what do you do when your house is infested with termites?”

  I don’t answer. He takes off his glasses and cleans them with a handkerchief, grinning broadly before settling them back on his nose. It’s unsettling, like watching a snake skull smile.

  He puts a hand on my shoulder and it’s weightless.

  Sangre exige sangre.

  Blood in, blood out.

  “Why, you call a good exterminator.”

  Then he asks me about the guns. About the explosives and the weapons and when I can get my hands on them.

  But more important, he also asks me about Earl’s money.

  * * *

  • • •

  LATER, WHEN I’M TRYING to find a moment to myself, when I just want to drink a beer even though it’s not even ten a.m., just to wash away the taste of things I had to say to Flowers, Sunny catches me alone in the kitchen. Sunny isn’t happy here and doesn’t like the way Earl treats their son. Little B is weak, brittle, not even as strong as Jesse, and Earl probably hates it that the one son who wants to listen to him is the one he wants even less to do with. Sunny isn’t blind to it, and she hurts enough for the both of them.

  She helped raise Jesse but can’t ignore what he is or how he acts; how in some ways, he’s only the worst parts of his daddy. The same parts she’s learned she can’t stomach in Earl anymore, either.

  She was pretty once,
but those years on the outside alone were a lot harder on her than Earl’s time inside was for him. She did a short stint, too, because of Earl, and all of it is etched on her face. There are deep lines around her mouth, at the edges of her eyes, which are always shadowed, too, like they’re permanently bruised. It’s hard to tell who she’s looking at or exactly what she’s thinking and she’s gotten pretty good through the years at hiding her real thoughts, even if I can guess. Her hands are spotted; she’s getting old and knows it . . . after all, she sees it in the mirror every day. And in the same way Jenna probably wonders where the ocean’s gone, Sunny wonders where her years have flown away to, and if there’s any way to get any of them back. She’s lost them and Killing is the only thing she has left to show for it all.

  Sunny and I don’t talk much, because Earl doesn’t like her talking to anyone, so I’m surprised when she gets me a second beer, opens it and takes a long drink herself, and then hands it to me.

  “So, I guess JW doesn’t know Jesse’s got Little B and Kasper out looking for some little wetback girl from that bar, the Wikiup?”

  I tell her I didn’t know that, either, and it’s one of the few things I’ve said in weeks that’s not a complete lie. “You really think he knows about that? I can’t believe that. What about Flowers? Have you talked to JW?”

  She shakes her head. “No, it’s not my business. You know that, and you know how he gets. We both have heard JW go on about it, and he isn’t too high on these boys’ out runnin’ around, particularly down that way, and if he doesn’t know, well . . . he’s gonna be more than pissed when he finally does find out. Little B don’t need that sort of trouble from his daddy, so I told him to knock it off, and if Jesse says different, he’s gotta come say it to me. And honestly, I got no idea why that little creep Kasper has anything to do with anything.”

  But she has a perfect idea of what Earl’s reaction will be when he finds out what Jesse is up to, and that’s why she doesn’t want to give him any reason to take it out on Little B.

  Kasper, and even Jesse, are another matter. She’s willing to give them up to protect her true son from Earl’s wrath.

  “So what do you want me to do about it, Sunny?”

  She looks at me with those eyes that hide everything. “Well, Hero, sometimes I think you’re about the only person JW will listen to. And I just kinda thought you should know. Someone needs to know what the hell is goin’ on around here.”

  Then she takes back the beer she gave me and walks out.

  * * *

  • • •

  I LIKE TO THINK I’m so fucking smart . . . all that bullshit I shoveled to Deputy Harper and Deputy Reynosa. All the lies I practice and the stories I tell, pretending I know the way Jenna and Sunny ask themselves how they ended up in this place, when I could just as easily ask myself the same damn thing.

  Was it really my father’s death out on that road that brought me all the way here, or was it something else?

  Was it always just me?

  Would all roads have led me here, one way or another?

  I asked Sunny what she wanted me to do about Jesse, but we both knew the answer all along.

  * * *

  • • •

  I FIND HIM out on the porch with Jenna, who now at least has some clothes on, but not much—tight shorts, tighter T-shirt. Flowers is out here, too, and his man, Clutts. They’re all laughing about something Jesse just said, and he turns to me as I walk up, to see if I’ve heard it, too . . . to see if I’m smiling.

  I am.

  So he’s completely off guard when I catch him with a hard right across his face, driving him out of his chair. That shot would put most men down. I put most everything I had into it, but to my surprise and his credit, Jesse rolls with it; comes up standing and swinging, blood blossoming from the gash I opened beneath his eye. There’s blood on Jenna’s face, too, Jesse’s blood, and then she’s screaming. Beneath that is the sound of metal on cloth, a gun being drawn, most likely Clutts. There’s a barrel aimed at the back of my head but I don’t have time for that. Jesse comes in low, fast, but I’m faster. He’s not really fighting anyway, just stumbling, falling. But he’s trying, maybe putting on a show for Flowers. I throw an elbow across his face, stand him straight up with a strike to his exposed throat, and then use his momentum to raise him up high, higher, spinning him so he sees the earth and sky in equal measure, and then toss him on a chair that explodes, throwing up dust and rotted wood.

  He lays there gurgling blood. He threw up whatever he had for breakfast, and it’s all over him, stinking. His eyes are wide and full of tears and his damaged throat is working, trying to catch his breath. He’s staring up at me, mouth opening and closing, and if he didn’t know it before, he knows it now: I could have killed him and still might.

  I turn to where I know there’s a gun, and I’m surprised to find that it’s Earl standing there, pointing his Ruger at me with Sunny at his back in the doorway. He lit out earlier this morning on his bike and I never heard him come back. Now he’s got the same Ruger he saved my life with in Lubbock pointed between my eyes. Clutts has a gun out, too, but he’s lowering it, hiding it, and Flowers is standing behind him, eyes as wide as Jesse’s.

  Earl thumbs back the hammer on the Ruger. “Boy, you better have a good story for why you just beat the ever-livin’ hell outta Jesse. Start talkin’, fast.”

  I pull torn skin from my knuckles. “Jesse’s got Little B and Kasper out searching for the girlfriend of that dead man in Terlingua. They’re out hunting her, like no one’s going to fucking notice, particularly if she ups and disappears. Is that what you want, JW? Are they doing that on your orders?” I turn to Flowers. “Or yours? We’re going to end up with even more goddamn cops down here, looking around with good reason. Jesse got into it with that sheriff’s girl up in Murfee and nearly got us all shot there. Now he’s out hunting the one potential witness they might have.” I bear down on Flowers. “Did anyone bother to tell you that Jesse is a goddamn murder suspect?”

  Before Flowers can answer, Earl flicks the gun in his direction, silencing him, and then puts it right back on me.

  “Nobody wants that. But you know this for sure? Who told you, Little B?”

  I look at everyone and everywhere but Sunny. “I just know. But if you ask Little B, he won’t lie about it. He’s doing it because Jesse told him to, probably because he thinks that’s what you want.” I wipe Jesse’s blood on my shirt. He’s now sitting upright, Jenna kneeling next to him, but hasn’t stood up. He won’t look at me or his daddy.

  “You”—Earl points the gun at Jesse for emphasis—“get inside and get yourself cleaned up. I’ll talk to you in a bit.” He glares at everyone else. “All the rest of you get the fuck outta my sight. ’Cept for you, Danny, you stay right the fuck here.”

  With the morning sun still rising in the sky, the porch is split, half in light, half in shadow. We each have our side, and I’m the one standing in the dark.

  After he’s sure everyone is gone, Earl decocks the gun and slips it into his jeans.

  “How long did you know about this?”

  “I just found out.”

  “And you didn’t think to talk to me first? This how you decide to handle it?” He motions at Jesse’s blood drying all over the dirty planks.

  “I wanted to get his attention.”

  “Well, that you did . . . that you motherfuckin’ did.” Earl lights a cigarette. “And I thought you were the goddamn sensible one around here. I was kinda countin’ on that, countin’ on you. You keep it up, Jesse’s gonna kill you, you know that, right? Not today, not tomorrow, but he will.”

  “He’ll try,” I agree. “But in the meantime, you better deal with him. You were the one saying we need to get a handle on him . . . you said he was going to get us all killed or thrown in jail.”

  “Right, I did at that,” Earl says, long
and drawn out, around a mouthful of smoke. “But you givin’ the orders around here now, too?”

  I rub the raw knuckles of my right hand. It should hurt, but it doesn’t, not at all. “No, I was doing what I thought you wanted me to do. I’ve been babysitting that boy of yours, drawing your goddamn maps. I’ve been waiting, ready, for whatever you got planned, and none of it’s going to matter if Jesse gets us all fucked first.”

  “No, I reckon it won’t.” He lets smoke build between us and looks at the blood going black on the porch planks. He studies it like it’s a map. “But it’s ’bout time now anyway. I had a little surprise run-in with the sheriff this morning. He ain’t too happy with Jesse, or any of us . . . Time’s runnin’ out, so I gotta ask, are you all in with me, Danny? I gotta know where you stand.”

  I’m surprised to hear about Sheriff Cherry, but I don’t blink; I don’t show a thing. And I almost can’t do what has to come next, can’t say what I know I have to. Each word hurts, like swallowing a knife; like throwing fresh dirt on my father’s grave. “Where the fuck am I standing right now?”

  “Well, okay then,” he says slow, looking up from his son’s blood. “We ain’t got no more time. We’re gonna do this thing tonight, tomorrow mornin’ at the latest.”

  I hesitate, wanting to push, needing to know for sure. “Flowers asked me about money. Your money, and I figure he thinks you’re about to come into some. It’s the bank in Murfee, right?”

  Earl breathes more slow smoke. “Something like that,” he says. “Let’s just call it Christmas in July. Fuck Jesse and Flowers. No matter what they suspect, they can’t know, hear me? None of ’em.”

  “Okay, I got it. But I need to know, JW. I need to know exactly what I’m getting myself into.”

  “Look around you, Danny. I think it’s a bit late to be wonderin’ that.”