by Urban Waite
“You’ll probably need one, too, by the time we get inside.” She was grinning now, looking at him in that way he knew there was no returning from.
Outside the stable doors he saw the rain falling against the bent wire fence. All the things that needed fixing in his life, and nothing ever seeming to get fixed. In the morning he’d go over and see about Deacon’s cattle. And it would be back to a life that—even for the shortest time—he’d allowed himself to forget.
Above, the night had gone cold. The sky flat and low across the valley as Kelly drove down from her house on her way into town for the meeting. Lights on in many of the windows now and the rain falling, gray, from an oyster-colored sky. She wasn’t looking forward to the meeting. No reason really for her to be there except that Eli had ordered her.
Pulling up in front of the church, she saw the basement lights on through the rain and heard the sounds of the men inside. The conversations carrying through the falling water, the door pushed open a hundred feet in front of her, light shining brightly out onto the parking lot, where it glistened like silver on the puddles.
The meeting hadn’t started yet when she walked in. Streamers hanging down the paneled room from a wedding a week or so before, highlighted in places by a rainbow of crepe flowers taped here and there along the wall. All down the hall, chairs had been set up and many of the oil workers sat waiting in them, while still more milled around a fold-out table where grocery store pastries and coffee were laid out.
“The mayor must be thinking we’re going to storm the courthouse,” a voice nearby said.
Kelly looked to the last row of chairs where the voice had come from and found Tom’s uncle, Gus Lamar, turned with his arm raised over the back of the chair beside him. “Investing in our futures,” Kelly said, walking over to stand behind Gus. “We’re always wondering when the oil companies will buy up the state government offices here in town.”
“The mayor told you to come?”
“Eli is just looking out for our futures,” she said, the sarcasm heavy in her voice as she came around and sat next to him.
Gus smiled and looked up toward the front of the hall, where the heads of the union were taking their seats. “You must have forgotten where you are,” Gus said, turning back to her. “This is a union meeting, we don’t give a damn what the oil companies do. As long as they keep paying a fair wage and stop laying men off every month.”
In the ten years she’d been sheriff she’d attended four meetings, always at the request of the mayor, and only if he thought there might be trouble. “I thought you retired, Gus. What’s all this us-against-them stuff?”
“I’ve been sitting in for a year or so now. I’d sit in on the corporate meetings over in Houston if I could, but I never made it into the billionaires’ club and my wells went dry a long time before the big guys came through and bought everyone out. I figure I’d just like to know what we’re in for in this town.”
“You looking out for our futures, just like the mayor?”
“Looking out for Billy’s future,” Gus said. “He’s going to need a job soon enough. I’m not getting any younger.”
“I just saw Tom, so I’m guessing you have Luis sober enough to watch Billy for the night.”
“Billy is most likely watching Luis,” Gus said. “He was too drunk to drive home last night and he left his truck in town.”
Kelly smiled, but didn’t say anything as she thought about Luis and what he’d said the other night, drunk on whiskey and tallboys. All of it a mess and Kelly sitting in on some meeting she didn’t have any desire to be part of.
One of the union reps was standing now, asking everyone to sit. Kelly recognized a few of the men she’d seen at the bar the night before, Andy Strope a head above the rest of them as he sat four rows up. “Last night I caught them talking about burning down a trailer over at the Tate Bulger,” Kelly said.
“Who said that?”
“Strope and some others.”
Gus shook his head like the whole thing was funny to him. “Andy doesn’t even work for the Tate Bulger. He’s just trying to get the rest of them all fired up.”
“Isn’t that why this meeting was called?”
“I don’t know about that,” Gus said. “What good would setting a fire do? They’re mad, but no one thinks if they lash out they’ll get their jobs back. It would never happen and all the union reps know it. I’d guess they’re going to talk strike, if they talk anything at all.”
Kelly looked up toward the front of the hall, where the union rep had raised his hands for quiet. She watched Andy Strope, four rows up, turn and whisper something to the man beside him. The union rep beginning to speak about the layoffs and what they meant for the union.
Beside her Gus sat up a little in his chair. Nearly eighty years old, he was still taller than most in the room and well built from the years he’d spent working his property. His had been a family operation at one time, but she knew that his son had fallen in with the wrong people many years before. The death of Gus’s daughter-in-law outside of town in a hit-and-run accident was still considered by many to be some sort of retribution for something Ray Lamar had done against the cartel.
Up in front a man stood to speak and then was shouted down, several in the audience, including those around Strope, standing up to protest whatever the man had been about to say.
Gus leaned toward her. “He was going to tell them he thought a strike wouldn’t do them any good and that they should just be grateful that those remaining still have jobs.”
“Really?” Kelly whispered. “You read minds now?”
“There was a big discussion over it before you came in. To tell you the truth, I think he’s right. The way things are going I doubt there’s much more than a year before the whole place goes dry.”
For a while Kelly tried to pay attention to the discussion, but most of it she couldn’t follow, the conversation going back and forth with the oil workers and the union reps as they tried to establish the basis for what they would do. A low chant arising from the crowd as the head of the union stood to speak. “What are they saying?” she asked Gus.
“Fire.”
“I thought you said it wouldn’t come to that.”
Gus shook his head. “It won’t. A few of the men that were laid off spent the day drinking in their trailers. They’re just spouting off, wasting their time. They should have been looking for work.”
“I certainly don’t need any of this right now,” Kelly said.
“I heard,” Gus said. “Tom stopped by on his way down from Las Cruces last night. He told me he’d seen you on the highway earlier.”
“Well, as you probably know, it didn’t get much better today.”
“Heard that, too,” Gus said, half listening to her and half watching something that was going on up front. “I’m sorry,” Gus said out of the side of his mouth, “this is a waste of your time.”
Kelly turned back to the front just in time to see Strope stand and let one of the store-bought pastries fly toward the union head where he stood at the table. The pastry caught the union man square in the chest and slipped off his shirt with the thick weight of its icing. “Jesus, Strope,” Kelly said, as she got to her feet, speaking low in the silence that followed. “You can’t really be this dumb, can you?” She took her time walking around toward him, making sure she was between Andy Strope and the door as she went forward up the row, one hand outstretched to keep the other men back, while the other clutched at the cuffs on her belt.
The whole time, Strope, square jawed and big as he was, just standing there looking at her with the same dull blaze in his eyes that Kelly had seen the night before at the bar. “You can’t take me in for this,” he kept saying. “What’s the charge? I threw a doughnut at a man, and you’re going to take me in?”
Kelly didn’t let her stare drop away from Strope.
She was aware of everyone watching her, the oil workers sitting and waiting to see what she would do as she forced her way up the row trying to get to Strope. “How about public drunkenness,” she said. “I can smell it on you from here.”
As big as he was, he went pretty easily, perhaps knowing it wasn’t going to do him any good to bullshit her. She’d been in the bar last night, she’d heard just about all he was going to say to her, and now she was just tired of the whole thing. Tired that this was getting to be her normal night in this town, oil workers pissed off and blowing off steam.
There was a dead kid in the morgue, and she was stuck doing work like this. It didn’t matter to her, and she had half a mind just to let him go on throwing pastries at the union heads. She sort of wanted to do it herself, but she didn’t, not even bothering to cuff Strope as she led him outside to the patrol car, where he’d get locked in the rear cage.
When she came back in, Gus was waiting for her at the door, looking out at the rain, the meeting already started back up again. “Now I’ll be spending the next couple hours babysitting a drunk till Hastings comes on for the night shift,” she said, looking to Gus. “Any other enemies of the state I should be watching out for?”
“I’d say you got public enemy number one, right there,” Gus said. “At least you know in this rain no one is going to light anything on fire. They’d have to light the wells if they lit anything, and even Strope isn’t that dumb.”
“Thanks,” Kelly said. “Please don’t mention that to the mayor, I might end up on a stakeout with more pastries.” She laughed and looked away to the patrol car, where Strope was leaning his forehead against the rear pane of the window.
“Good luck with him,” Gus said, exchanging a smile with Kelly before she turned away and went out to her cruiser, shielding her face from the rain with her hand.
Ray woke in the dark to the sound of a hard rain falling on the roof. Stiff from sleeping on the floor in the upstairs bedroom, he rolled over and pushed himself up. He couldn’t remember if he’d been dreaming. For years after his service he’d taken pills to help him sleep. Years traveling through jungle hills could do that. The unease he’d felt after returning to the quiet of the desert cityscape following all those years away, hiking through foreign forests before the war had even been official. The wooden stocks of their guns warped from the humidity. Every shot he took in those first months off by a centimeter or two, as he struggled to calibrate his rifle.
All of it only a moment in his life, a small blip along his timeline that kept replaying itself nightly in his dreams. The doctors even using the term “recalibrate” in his first months back as they gave him the pills, talking to him about his homecoming, talking to him like he was a rifle with a centimeter-or-two leftward pull.
The rain had woken him and he felt for a moment lost in the sound. How many hours had he been asleep? He’d let himself be pulled down into the black abyss. It had been too easy and he knew it. He should never have closed his eyes.
After he’d lost Marianne and given up his son he’d replaced the pills with alcohol, drinking himself to sleep. But since deciding to come home, he was back on them again, blending alcohol and medication every night in order to get his sleep. The pills helping him concentrate, a whole bottle to help him keep his mind from wandering. The empty beer cans there on the floor, taken from Sanchez, not enough to get him through the night. And the feeling of those pills mixed with the alcohol like a soft snow, coated heavy on his skin.
He stood in the dark of the second-floor bedroom, working his hands over his eyes. Through the window he saw the rain out there in the desert falling straight and hard from the sky, hard as ice and just as loud.
Taking a blanket he’d found in the back of the Bronco, he’d gone to sleep in his boxers and when he walked to the window, he felt the cold draft that had come with the rainstorm. The moon shrouded in clouds. Outside, everything a dark gray movement of rain and wind. The storm over the plain looking like some ancient picture show, speckled with flecks of dust, eaten away with time, crackling with age.
He’d felt uneasy standing there in the backyard with Sanchez, looking up at the mountains he’d once known. Talking about how to kill a man, how to put your two hands to his throat and pop the vertebrae apart like chicken bones. It wasn’t how he’d remembered it, how he’d thought killing would always be for him, it was cold-blooded and murderous, the boy never waking, just the body fighting it, subconsciously aware.
A growing unease moved through Ray now. Sanchez boasting about the things he hadn’t done. Each word seeming to close in tighter around them. A vision of Jacob Burnham in the dirt at Ray’s feet. The barrel of that shotgun to the old man’s heart and Ray’s finger bent down around the trigger.
Sanchez was just a kid, half Ray’s age, and kids did stupid things. They didn’t listen. They went to town when they weren’t supposed to. Ray had gone upstairs thinking it through, thinking how good it would be to get clear of all this, of Memo, of Sanchez, of the whole damn business. He was done with this thing, he knew it now, knew he didn’t have it in him, knew if he carried on with this life he’d be dead soon. He didn’t care. There wasn’t anything left and he stared out the window thinking about Burnham’s final words, and how if Ray had listened maybe he wouldn’t be here now.
Out on the rain-swept plain Ray saw headlights break over a far-off hill, nothing else around. The headlights dipping back beneath the earth, into the ground, then rising up again over the next hill, gradually coming closer.
He backed away from the window and took the Ruger from beneath his folded jacket, there on the floor. He saw the car fully now, metal body streaked in rain, moving across the plain with its two bright lights leading the way. He dressed and waited at the window. Watching, he saw the headlights slow and move up the drive toward the house.
He recognized it now as the Bronco. From the upstairs window, he saw Sanchez push open the Bronco door. Stand up into the rain, then run for the house in five long steps, trying as best he could to avoid the puddles.
The boy scared Ray. Not in a hurtful way, but in a reckless, broken way that carried with it no forgiveness. Ray didn’t know how well he’d handled the boasts Sanchez was making, trying to build himself up in Ray’s eyes. Perhaps he’d been too hasty in dismissing the boy, too ready to not believe.
Ray’s attention turned again to the dark desert landscape as two more cars materialized from the rain—brought up out of some deep crack in the earth—no headlights on. Just following along in the same rain-swollen ruts Sanchez had taken over the small rise a mile out, then dipping back beneath the earth, then rising once again.
Ray gripped the gun, the metal as solid and dangerous beneath his skin as those two darkened ghosts traveling in a line across the desert toward them. His first thought that they were Memo’s men come to get the heroin, but the reality sinking into him that it was too early and they were not Memo’s men at all. Watching, Ray knew Sanchez would never listen, would never stick to what he had been told, and that it was a mistake for Ray to have thought he could have trusted him.
From the lead car, Dario watched the man who’d been in his bar that night—too drunk to know they’d been following him—close the house door behind him. Medina was driving and they sat at the bottom of the drive with their lights off and the wipers pushing water across the windshield at a steady pace. Dario nodded his head toward the house. There in front of it was Burnham’s pickup truck. The same truck he’d loaded the heroin into only a couple days before.
Without needing to be told, Medina eased the car forward up the slight incline. Water everywhere on the drive and flowing down toward the road like a river. The man had come into the bar two hours before, already smelling of alcohol, speaking to Medina like he was underwater.
“All these people,” the man said under his breath, Dario sitting at the bar, three stools down. “They don’t know me, they d
on’t know what I’m about.” He threw up his arms, raising the tempo of his voice, trying for attention. “I’ve been to prison. I put my time in, earned my place here at this bar, in this town, running things for my uncle.”
He ordered a drink from the bar and sat mumbling to himself. After a while he turned and spoke to Lalo and the other men, sitting off a ways at one of the wooden tables. All of them watching him since he’d entered, following his movements from door to bar stool. The man trying to give back that same cold look, but his eyes drifting again toward the bar and then the drink before him.
Dario watched him drink two more whiskeys, doubles both. The night had been slow and Dario sat smiling over his cup of lukewarm coffee, watching this man, a few years younger than him, sinking deeper and deeper toward the bar.
Dario waved Medina over and told him to give the man one more double, on the house. There were no well workers in the place tonight, all of them staying away after the blowout they’d had the night before. Many, Dario thought, probably already gone back up north to look for work, heading for the interstate, Texas, and probably farther.
That the man was looking for someone to talk to was obvious, he would talk to anyone at this point. The cowboy hat he had been wearing cast out on the bar before him and Dario moving over on the stool as Medina brought the whiskey. “You should go,” Dario told him. “You should take off and get away from here. The police have been looking for someone like you.”
The man turned away from the whiskey to look at Dario with his linen suit, clean-faced from his shave that morning.
“I was listening to you,” Dario said. “I think you’re the man they’ve all been looking for.”
“Who’s been looking for me?”