by Urban Waite
As they’d ridden north, they’d searched out snakeskins, cast away on rocks and bits of brush. They’d made games out of it all, chasing each other and turning up the dust. The road they’d used now nothing but two tracks of open land, no more than a foot in width in places, now often slipping completely from sight.
With the one-room building a hundred yards away, Tom dismounted and moved on foot toward the closest window. Ahead, he saw where the oil well once stood, now a heap of rusted scaffolding on the ground. The moon behind him as he went and his own dark silhouette stretched out in front of him, touching brush and sand seconds before he, too, passed the very same spot.
He went with the pistol raised on the shack, the road he’d followed through the night flush against the oil station. Peering in through the first window, Tom saw nothing in there but shadow, dark corners, and broken wood floors dusted with the fine sediment of time. No Ray. No horse. Not a sign that his cousin had set foot in the place.
Tom looked back the way he’d come, the horse standing there, tied into a growth of sagebrush. Nothing else around.
Just twenty paces farther on, he saw the water pump he’d once used as a child. The iron rusted and flaky to the touch. Kneeling, he examined the ground. The road ending here, not all at once, but drifting off little by little, the desert eating it with time. Ray’s boot prints visible in the sand where he’d circled the pump trying for water. Tom’s own hands stained with small bits of rust as he tried the pump, cold and brittle under his palms. The metal so eaten away it came off in his hand like scales.
For a minute or more he just stood there taking it all in. The hillside rising a thousand feet up out of the desert, through barren rock outcroppings and thick stands of pine and juniper. The high landscape above and a million different places to hide. The road ending and the bare horse track moving on, upward, over the crest of the mountain, and probably down again, on toward the towns and cities beyond.
Tom moved back toward his own horse and untied the reins. He mounted and pushed the horse on. He was about a hundred feet past the oil station, riding through a small grouping of rock, when the bullet buzzed by and hit the sand a few feet behind him. The horse skittered beneath him, sidestepping. The crack of a rifle somewhere high above on the hillside. And then the next bullet whizzed over the head of the horse, causing it to rise, legs clawing the cool night air. Tom trying for a hold on the horse, his hands gripped tight to the reins but nothing there as the horse bucked. No support, and the brief uncontrollable terror as he fell, hitting the ground hard.
He came up with one side of his face covered in the fine desert sediment, his gun out, and his eyes looking from one rock to the next. Looking for anything that would offer the least bit of protection.
The brown mare he’d been riding now far behind him, running, and the crack of the rifle again, the horse jumping, then surging off through the desert in the direction she’d come.
Up the hill nothing moved. He looked behind him at the shack, and then he looked up the hill again. Nothing there to see. Dead if I do, dead if I don’t, he thought. The sand still clinging to his face. Perspiration showing now on his brow. He got up and ran, straight on to the hill, the cover of locust before him, the green tufted tops of a thicket of pinyon up ahead.
The crack of a bullet three feet in front of him, the sand jumping, and Tom sliding to a stop and then turning again for cover. He was halfway to the protection of a large rock when another bullet hit just behind him, clipping a stone, the echo of the ricochet carrying past him down the valley.
Kelly knelt in Gus’s living room, examining the blood dried in a rough pool beneath the chair and spattered up on the wall, the indentation of a single bullet hole in the frame of the door behind. Across the room Luis waited for her to say something, his hand up on Billy’s shoulder, keeping him from wandering. The boy dressed in his pajamas, his eyes turning from Kelly back over to Tollville, and then across the room to where the television sat on mute, showing an old movie on the screen.
Tollville stood a few feet away from the boy, near the door, looking out through the wire on the white bulk of the DEA helicopter. It was a quarter past one in the morning and they’d come up the valley with the spot on and the pilot guiding them along the highway until Kelly herself had shown them where to turn to the west.
Pierce’s cruiser sat in front of the house as if it had just been parked there for the night, looking just as it did in the department parking lot. The only difference a layer of blood soaked into the driver’s seat.
“You should have called us,” Kelly said, turning now toward Luis. There were a million different things she wanted to say to him, but not a one of them appropriate to the situation at hand. Just a few days ago she’d sat at a table with him and had a beer. The last couple days now feeling to her like some sort of layer built deep down into her skin, strong as mortar over brick, stopping her from saying all the things that might normally have come to her in that moment. “You say this is Gus’s blood?”
Luis nodded, he was watching Tollville now, and Tollville was watching him.
“And the blood in the bathroom?” Kelly said. “The bandages on the floor?” She didn’t want to come out and accuse anyone just yet. She knew time was a factor, that everything was a factor at this point. She hoped to God that Tom had been smarter than all this, but she knew, too, that he’d gone down this road before, and that she had probably been his only salvation. “If you want us to help,” Kelly went on, “I need to know what happened here, I need you to tell me the truth, Luis.”
Thirty seconds passed and no one said anything.
“You remember Raymond Lamar?” Tollville asked, his voice cutting through the silence. He walked over to the mantel and pulled one of the pictures down and handed it to Kelly.
Kelly stared down at the picture in her hand. It was an old photo of Ray, Luis, and Gus out at Gus’s well up the valley. “Of course I do,” Kelly said. “I was the one who brought the news about his wife.”
Tollville walked past Kelly into the kitchen and saw the smattering of blood that dotted the linoleum floor. “Tom came by your office and he was looking to talk with you,” Tollville said. “Right now I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. I want to say that he came by your office to tell you about whatever has been going on down here, and what happened to Gus.” He turned and went into the bathroom, where the bandages had been left on the floor. Kelly and Luis exchanged a look.
“I’m not accusing Tom of anything, but I know how this looks for him,” Tollville said from the bathroom. “Tom came into your office because he had something to say and for whatever reason, he wouldn’t say it to me.”
“I didn’t know about any of this,” Kelly said. She was looking to Luis with desperation in her eyes, urging the man to say something. To correct whatever it was that Tollville was implying.
“I’m not after Tom,” Tollville said. He had come out of the bathroom and he was standing in the living room again, speaking to Luis. “I know all about Billy over there, I know what was done to him, and what that did to Ray. I know there’s a lot this family has gone through, but I need to know anything you can tell me about Ray Lamar, and I need to know it now. You understand?”
Luis glanced toward the boy and then back to Tollville. “Tom always looked up to Ray,” he said. His voice low in the room.
“Luis,” Kelly said, but she didn’t finish. She wanted to tell him to stop, but she knew she c
ouldn’t. She didn’t want to go down this path with Tom again, she couldn’t.
“Can you give us a moment, Edna?” Tollville asked. He was standing there just as he had been before, his eyes now on her, waiting for her to leave.
She looked to Luis and he met her gaze and nodded. “It’s okay,” Luis said. “Why don’t you take Billy out back to my place and turn the television on for him.”
She was going out the door with an arm around Billy’s shoulder when she heard Tollville ask, “Tom and Ray pretty much grew up here, didn’t they?”
There was a fine soot of dust on Tom’s face where he sat with his back to the large rock. Five minutes ago he’d heard the steady beat of the helicopter come up the valley toward Gus’s place. Then watched the red and green navigation lights over the desert to the south. The helicopter circling the ranch, before drifting down in a slow descent.
A couple minutes before he heard the helicopter, he’d tried to look around the edge of the rock at the slope beyond. A bullet passed no more than a foot from his face and lodged in the ground near his feet. His body pulled back around the protection of the rock before he even heard the shot.
He was breathing hard, and when he had time to catch his breath, he yelled out, “Ray, goddamnit, stop shooting, it’s Tom.” He wanted to think that Ray was messing with him, that he wouldn’t shoot him, and that all of this was just a way of trying to slow him down—bucking the horse like that and forcing him to the ground. Even if Ray didn’t mean to shoot him, Tom knew Ray had been a good shot with a gun like that even when they were kids, and he could only assume he’d gotten better with his time in the army.
He waited, listening to the desert. The early-morning sounds of insects. The cold touch of the air on the skin of his face. He straightened his back on the rock. A miniature dust devil set loose at the heel of his boot, disappearing after a while as it moved off through the creosote.
“You hear me, Ray?” he yelled, listening for a response.
When Tollville found Kelly she was sitting on Luis’s small cot with her back against the wall, the boy sitting beside her watching TV. The words almost sour in her mouth as she asked about Tom, Luis, and what Tollville had been able to find on Ray Lamar. Though she could guess already what had been said.
“I suppose I should explain myself,” Tollville said.
“No,” Kelly said. “You don’t owe me that. You never did. I didn’t mean to get in your way back there.”
“I meant what I said in there. I’m not after Tom. I know he didn’t do any of this.”
“He helped though, didn’t he?”
“He had some part, but I know going after Tom would only confuse this, it would put another layer between us and the men I really want to see go to trial.”
“You’re saying you’re going to protect him?”
“Here,” Tollville said, and he handed her a cloth he’d taken from his pocket with a metal slug inside. “It’s a .45 round,” Tollville said. “Other than the shotgun we found, everything else has been from a nine-millimeter, hasn’t it?”
“Everything since Gil Suarez.”
Tollville moved his eyes from where she sat to the boy beside her. “Come outside with me,” he said.
After she’d risen and gone outside, she could see Luis out in front of the house, his truck doors open and a few things from the house gathered in the bed of the truck. “They’re going to go up the hill to the neighbor’s place for a while,” Tollville said. “The call has already been made and they’re expecting them.”
“What’s going to happen to Luis?”
“Nothing. I believe what he told me, and I’m going to keep him out of this if I can. I don’t know if either Tom or Luis will come out of this untouched, but I gave Luis a promise to do all I can.”
“You know where Tom is, then?”
“Luis said he took one of the horses from the stable and went after Ray.”
Tom waited five minutes, counting the seconds, too nervous to move from behind the protection of the rock. An awareness growing in his mind that by allowing Ray his revenge, Tom was now responsible for what had happened to Pierce. It had been his decision to let Ray go, and now he knew he needed to bring Ray in, whatever that might mean for him.
Tom waited, building his confidence. Trying to find the courage to go forward with the things he needed to do. Any one of those seconds he expected a bullet to come whistling through the air, and when none came he slowly rose into the open. Waiting still for the bullet to come and spin him sideways as it had done Gil Suarez three days before. No shot. No sound of ricochet, or thump of sand.
Ray and he weren’t family anymore, not in the way that Tom had always thought they’d be. They were something else now. Ray had put him in the sights of that rifle ten minutes before and pulled the trigger. He could have killed him, could have cut him down off that horse any time he wanted to. But he hadn’t, and Tom had to believe there was still some good in Ray. Some small bit of humanity that wouldn’t allow him to pull that trigger and kill him.
With the fear gradually dying back inside him, Tom went on up the hillside, following the trail left in the dusty soil, Ray’s boot prints in the ground and the white scrape of the horse’s hooves over rocks. The slope steep in front of him. Pinyon and aloe growing tight to the ground. Even without the horse, Tom thought he was making good time, the valley below, and the thin line of the highway that cut through its middle.
By the time he caught the first clank of a harness, the trees had thinned away in front of him and he could hear the rough mutterings of the horse up ahead and something else beneath—Ray’s labored breathing.
Ray was aware that Tom hadn’t given up. That he was still back there, behind him, following him up the hill. Down by the oil station he’d shot at Tom, meaning only to buck the horse, to scare Tom off, but Tom was still coming. He didn’t want to shoot him, but he would. He’d do whatever it took to get away.
Somewhere along the way Ray’s body began to fail him, the rasp and catch of spittle deep in his throat as he sucked at the air, searching for moisture. Hours since he’d shed a drop of sweat. And now a wheezing cough, a hand held to his mouth, and a thin speckling of blood on his hand. It was too steep to ride the horse, and all the effort he was putting into wrestling her up the hill was that much more of a strain against his weakened body.
Rounding a corner, he heard Tom’s footsteps through the trees, close behind. Without even a look, Ray cut into the forest, leaving the horse. His feet slipping on a loose rock, he slid down the mountain for thirty feet before managing to stop. Searing pain in his gut and a collection of rocks scattering out beneath him, tumbling down along the slope toward the valley below. Ray lay there at the bottom of a steep chute, a protective hand held down over his stomach.
Low pine trees everywhere growing up out of the burned red soil. The sound of boots on rock above, and Tom’s voice calling down the chute to him.
There was nothing left for Ray, the family he’d once planned to have, the fantasy of a happy life that just couldn’t be. The realization of this felt deep within him where he lay against the rock, fired all the way through and dimming away like an ashen piece of coal, slowly burning toward its death.
All he’d wanted was to go home. But everything had changed and nothing was as he’d thought it would be. Up the hill Tom’s voice calling down the chute to Ray. No hope left.
Ray brought up Dario’s
.45 and fired a shot in the direction of the voice. He heard the bullet hit rock, the echo caroming off over the valley below.
He was up and running before he heard the last reverberation fade away behind him.
Kelly rose from where she knelt with Tollville over the hoofprints in the sand. The far-off sound of a gunshot opening up in the air to the north. Her shoulders squared already, looking toward the mountains, ready for anything.
Still night out there and the echo of the shot drifting through the air.
Tollville stood, examining the Hermanos. The eastern sky lightening in shades of violet and blue with the valley stretched on before them. “Handgun,” Tollville said.
“Forty-five?” Kelly asked.
They were already moving back toward the helicopter as Tollville signaled the pilot.
The bullet had passed just over Tom’s head, close enough that he’d felt the air move. Much closer than Tom would have thought Ray was willing to take it.
Below, out of sight down the chute, the loose rocks from the strike of the bullet were skittering away down the hill toward the valley. Lifting his head now, he could almost see to the bottom of the chute, a rush of wind moving through the pine trees. Then across the slope, thirty feet below, the brief glimpse of Ray’s shirt flitting through a break in the trees. Tom up on his feet, gun raised—the back of Ray’s shirt again—then gone again.
Tom slid down along the rocky chute to where he’d seen Ray last, following him into the stand of pine. A thin stream of dust still hanging in the air from Ray’s movement. But no Ray, and the wind pushing the dust up along the slope and into the trees, where it too disappeared.