She balled her hands on her knees and stared at her plate. Then she exhaled and started eating again, her eyes veiled with a special kind of sadness.
“Pam?” he said.
“I’d better eat up and hit the hay. Tomorrow is another day and another dollar, right?”
HACKBERRY WOKE AT one A.M. in his third-story motel room and sat in the dark, his mind cobwebbed with dreams whose details he couldn’t remember, his skin frigid and dead to the touch. Through a crack in the curtains, he could see headlights streaming across an overpass and a two-engine plane approaching the airport, its windows brightly lit. Somehow the plane and cars were a reassuring sight, testifying to the world’s normality, the superimposition of light upon darkness, and humanity’s ability to overcome even the gravitational pull of the earth.
But how long could any man be his own light bearer or successfully resist the hands that gripped one’s ankles more tightly and pulled downward with greater strength each passing day?
Hackberry was not sure what an alcoholic was. He knew he didn’t drink anymore and he was no longer a whoremonger. He didn’t get into legal trouble or associate himself for personal gain with corrupt politicians; nor did he drape his cynicism and bitterness over his shoulder like a tattered flag. But there was one character defect or psychological impairment that for a lifetime he had not been able to rid himself of: He remembered every detail of everything he had ever done, said, heard, read, or seen, particularly events that involved moral bankruptcy on his part.
Most of the latter occurred during his marriage to his first wife, Verisa. She had been profligate with money, imperious toward those less fortunate than herself, and narcissistic in both her manner and her sex life, to the degree that if he ever thought of her at all, it was in terms of loathing and disgust. His visceral feelings, however, were directed at himself rather than his former wife.
His drunkenness and constant remorse had made him dependent on her, and in order not to hate himself worse for his dependence, he had convinced himself that Verisa was someone other than the person he knew her to be. He gave himself over to self-deception and, in doing so, lost any remnant of self-respect he still possessed. Southerners had a term for the syndrome, but it was one he did not use or even like to think about.
He paid Verisa back by driving across the border and renting the bodies of poor peasant girls who twisted their faces away from the fog of testosterone and beer sweat he pressed down upon them.
Why was he, the vilest and most undeserving of men, spared from the fate he had designed for himself?
He had no answer.
He turned on the night-light and tried to read a magazine. Then he slipped on his trousers and walked down to the soda machine and bought an orange drink and drank it in the room. He opened the curtain so he could see the night sky and the car lights on the elevated highway and the palm trees on the lawn swelling in the wind.
Not far away, 188 men and boys had died inside the walls of the Spanish mission known as the Alamo. At sunrise on the thirteenth day of the siege, thousands of Mexican soldiers had charged the mission and gotten over the walls by stepping on their own dead. The bodies of the Americans were stacked and burned, and no part of them, not an inch of charred bone, was ever located. The sole white survivors, Susanna Dickinson and her eighteenth-month-old child, were refused a five-hundred-dollar payment by the government and forced to live in a San Antonio brothel.
Pam Tibbs had taken the room next to his. He saw the light go on under the door that connected their rooms. She tapped lightly on the door. He got up from his chair and stood by the door, not speaking.
“Hack?” she said.
“I’m fine.”
“Look out your window in the parking lot.”
“At what?”
“Look.”
He went to the window and gazed down at the rows of parked cars and the palm trees on the lawn and the tunnels of smoky light under the surface of the swimming pool. He could see nothing of note in the parking lot. But for just a second he thought he saw a shadow cross the clipped grass between two palms that were scrolled with strings of tiny white lights, then disappear through a piked gate on the far side of the pool.
He went back to the door that connected his and Pam’s rooms and slid the bolt. “Open your side,” he said.
“Just a minute,” she said.
A few seconds later, she pulled open the door, wearing jeans, her shirt hanging outside her belt. Her hairbrush lay on top of her bedspread.
“What did you see?” he asked.
“A guy in a tall hat like the Mad Hatter’s. He was standing by our car. He was looking up at the motel.”
“He do anything to the car?”
“Not that I saw.”
“We’ll check it out tomorrow.”
“You couldn’t sleep?” she said.
“About every third night, a committee holds a meeting in my head.”
She sat down on the stuffed chair in front of him. She was wearing moccasins without socks and no makeup, and the side of her face was printed with the pillow. “I need to tell you something, and I need to do so because it involves something you won’t acknowledge yourself. Collins cuffed you to your bed, but you tore it apart trying to stop him from killing me. You went after him when you had only a pistol and he had a Thompson machine gun. He could have cut you in half, but you went after him anyway.”
“You would have done the same.”
“It doesn’t matter. You did it. A woman never forgets something like that.”
He smiled at her in the darkness and didn’t reply.
“Don’t you like me physically? Do you think I’m not pretty? Is it something like that?”
“The problem isn’t you, Pam. It’s me. I misused women when I was young. They were poor and illiterate and lived in hovels across the river. My father was a university professor. I was an attorney and a war hero and a candidate for Congress. But I used these women to hide my own failure.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“I don’t want to use someone.”
“That’s what it would be, then? ‘Use’?”
“How about we kill this conversation?”
She got up and walked past his chair, beyond his line of vision. He felt her fingers touch his collar and the hair on his neck. “Everybody is made different. Gay people. Young women who want father figures. Men who need their mothers. Fat girls who need a thin man to tell them they’re beautiful. But I like you for what you are and not out of a compulsion. I never put strings on a relationship, either.” She rested her palm on his shoulder blade. “I admire you more than any human being I’ve ever met. Make of that what you want.”
“Good night, Pam,” he said.
“Yeah, good night,” she said. She leaned over him, folding her arms on his chest, her chin on his head, pressing her breasts against him. “Fire me for this if you like. You were willing to give your life to save mine. God love you, Hack. But you sure know how to hurt someone.”
21
BOBBY LEE HAD driven through the darkness and into the morning with the sunrise at his back, the flood of warm air and light spreading before him across the plains, lifting mesas and piles of rock out of the shadows that had pooled on the hardpan, none of it offering any balm to his soul.
He had put his money on Preacher because Preacher was smart and Artie Rooney wasn’t. He was double-crossing Hugo because Hugo was a viper who’d park one behind your ear the first time the wind vane swung in the opposite direction. Where did that leave him? He had teamed up with a guy who was smart and had large amounts of money in offshore accounts and had probably read more books than most college professors. But Preacher was not necessarily smart in the way a survivor was smart. In fact, Bobby Lee was not sure Preacher planned to be a survivor. Bobby Lee wasn’t sure he liked the prospect of becoming the copilot of a guy who had kamikaze ambitions.
He drove across a cattle guard onto Preacher’s property and stared dis
believingly at the stucco house that the bikers had destroyed and Preacher had paid a dozer operator to blade into a two-story pile of scorched debris. Preacher was now living in a polyethylene tent at the foot of the mountain behind the concrete slab the dozer had scraped clean. His woodstove sat outside it, and next to it was a vintage icebox with an oak door and brass hinges and handle and a drawer underneath that could be filled with either crushed or chopped-up block ice. Behind the tent, against the mountain, was a portable blue chemical toilet.
Clouds had moved across the sun, and the wind was blowing hard when Bobby Lee entered the tent, the flap tearing loose from his hands before he could retie it. He sat down on Preacher’s cot and listened to the brief silence when the wind slackened. “Why do you stay out here, Jack?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“The cops aren’t interested in your house getting blown up?”
“It was caused by an electrical short. I make no trouble for anyone. I’m a sojourner who checks books out of the library. These are religious people. Disrespect their totems and feel their wrath. But they don’t take issue with a polite and quiet man.”
Preacher was sitting in a canvas chair in front of a writing table, wearing a soiled long-sleeve white shirt and small nonprescription reading glasses and unpressed dark slacks with pin stripes and a narrow brown belt that was notched tightly into his rib cage. On the table was a GI mess kit with a solitary fried egg and blackened wiener in it. A Bible was open next to it, the pages stiff and rippled and tea-colored, as though they had been dipped in creek water and left to dry in the sun.
“You’re losing weight,” Bobby Lee said.
“What are you not telling me?”
Bobby Lee’s brow furrowed, the implicit criticism like the touch of a cigarette to his skin. “Holland was at the Dolan house. Then he went to a motel with the woman who capped Liam. That’s all I know. Jack, let go of the Dolan family. If we got to take care of the Gaddis girl, let’s get on with it. Hugo told you where she’s working. We grab her and the soldier boy, and you finish whatever it is you got to do.”
“Why do you think Hugo told us where she was working?”
“If we see Hugo or any of his talent around, we splatter their grits. That number you did on those bikers was beautiful, man. A hooker dimed them for you after she screwed them? You know some interesting broads. Remind me not to get in the sack with any of them.”
“My mother is buried here.”
Bobby Lee wasn’t making the connection. But he seldom did when Preacher started riffing. The wind was blowing harder against the tent, vibrating the aluminum poles, straining the ropes tied to the steel pins outside. A ball of tumbleweed smacked against the side, freezing momentarily against it, then rolling away.
“You asked why I live here. My mother married a railroad man who owned this land. He died of ptomaine,” Preacher said.
“You inherited the place?”
“I bought it at a tax sale.”
“Your mom didn’t leave a will?”
“What business is it of yours?”
“It isn’t, Jack,” Bobby Lee said. “Those guys you had to deal with in the motel room? They were Josef Sholokoff’s people?”
“They didn’t have time to introduce themselves.”
“I have to line out something to you. About Liam. It’s eating my lunch. I set him up in that café. I called him on my cell and said that Holland had made him. I split and let him take the fall.”
Preacher gazed at Bobby Lee, his legs crossed, his wrists hanging off the arms of the chair. “Why you telling me this, boy?”
“You said I was like a son to you. You meant that?”
Preacher crossed his heart, not speaking.
“I got a bad feeling. I think you and me might go down together. But I don’t see that I’ve got a lot of choices right now. If we get cooled out, I don’t want a lie between us.”
“You’re a mixed bag of cats, Bobby Lee.”
“I’m trying to be straight up with you. You’re a purist. There’s not many of your kind around anymore. That doesn’t mean I like eating a bullet.”
“Why do you think we’re going to get cooled out?”
“You tried to machine-gun a deputy sheriff. Then you had a chance to clip the sheriff and didn’t. I think maybe you’ve got a death wish.”
“That’s what Sheriff Holland probably thinks. But you’re both wrong. In this business, you recognize the great darkness in yourself, and you go inside it and die there, and then you don’t have to die again. Why do you think the Earp brothers took Doc Holliday with them to the OK Corral? A man coughing blood on his handkerchief with one hand and covering your back with a double-barrel ten-gauge won’t ever let you down. So you fed ole Liam to the wolves, did you?”
Bobby Lee looked away from Preacher. Then he corrected his expression and stared straight into Preacher’s face. “Liam made fun of me after I stood up for him. He said I was lots of things, but I would never be a soldier. What was that about a great darkness inside us?”
If Bobby Lee’s question registered on Preacher, he chose to ignore it. “I’m going to rebuild my house, Bobby Lee. I’d like for you to be part of that. I’d like for you to feel you belong here.”
“That makes me proud, Jack.”
“You look like you want to ask me something.”
“Maybe we could put some flowers on your mother’s grave. Where’s she buried?”
The wind was thumping the tent so hard, Bobby Lee could not be sure what Preacher said. He asked him to repeat the statement.
“I never quite get through to you,” Preacher shouted.
“The wind’s howling.”
“She’s underneath your feet! Where I planted her!”
ON THE FAR end of the same burning, windswept day, one on which the monsoonal downpour had been baked out of the topsoil and dust devils formed themselves out of nothing and spun across the plains and, in the blink of an eye, broke apart against monument rocks, Vikki Gaddis walked from the Fiesta motel to the steak house where she waited tables and sometimes sang with the band. The sky had turned yellow as the heat went out of the day, the sun settling into a melted orange pool among the rain clouds in the west. In spite of the humidity and dust, she felt a change was taking place in the world around her. Maybe her optimistic mood was based on the recognition that no matter what a person’s situation was, eventually it would have to change, for good or bad. Perhaps for her and Pete, change was at hand. There was a greenish tint to the land, as though a patina of new life had been sprinkled on the countryside. She could smell the mist from the grass sprinklers on the center ground and the flowers blooming in the window boxes of the motel at the intersection, a watered date-palm oasis in the midst of a desert, a reminder that a person always had choices.
Pete had told her of his conversation with the sheriff whose name was Hackberry Holland and the offer of protection the sheriff had made. The offer was a possibility, a viable alternative. But to step across a line into a world of legal entanglement and processes that were irreversible was easier said than done, she thought. They would be risking the entirety of their future, even their lives, on the word of a man they didn’t know. Pete kept reassuring her that Billy Bob would not have given him Hackberry’s name if he were not a good person, but Pete had an incurable trust in his fellow man, no matter how much the world hurt him, to the point where his faith was perhaps more a vice than a virtue.
She remembered an incident that had occurred when she was a little girl and her father had been awakened at two in the morning by the chief of police in Medicine Lodge and told to pick up an eighteen-year-old black kid who had escaped from a county prison in Oklahoma. The boy, who had been arrested for petty theft, had crawled through a heating duct in January and had almost been fried before he kicked a grille from an air vent that, by sheer chance, gave onto an unsecured part of the building. He had ridden a freight train into Kansas with two twisted ankles and had hidden out in
his aunt’s house, where in all probability he would have been forgotten, since his criminal status was marginal and not worth the expense of finding and bringing him back.
Except the escapee had the IQ of a seven-year-old and phoned the county prison collect and asked the jailer to mail his possessions to Medicine Lodge. He made sure the jailer wrote down his aunt’s correct address. A ninety-day county bit had now been augmented by a mandatory minimum of one year in McAlester Pen.
Three days later, Vikki watched her father and an Oklahoma sheriff’s deputy lead the escapee in an orange jumpsuit and waist and leg chains to the back of an Oklahoma state vehicle and lock him to a D-ring inset in the floor. The escapee was limping badly and could not have weighed over a hundred pounds. His arms were like sticks. His skin seemed to be possessed of a disease that leached it of color. His hair had been cut so that it resembled a rusty Brillo pad glued to his scalp.
“What’s gonna happen to him, Daddy?” Vikki had asked.
“He’ll be cannibalized.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Honey, it means on a day like this, your old man would like to be a full-time musician.”
What would her father say about her and Pete’s situation now? She had always identified her father more with his music than with his career as a lawman. He was always happy, his tanned skin crinkling at the corners of his eyes, and seldom let the world injure him. He lent money to people who could not pay it back and befriended drunkards and minorities and didn’t allow either politics or organized religion to carry him away. He had collected all the Carter Family’s early music and was immensely proud to have known the patriarch of the family, Alvin Pleasant Carter, who, in a postcard to Vikki’s father, had called him “a fellow musicianer.” His favorite Carter family song was “Keep on the Sunny Side of Life.”
Where are you now, Daddy? In heaven? Out there among the mesas or inside the blowing clouds of dust and rain? But you’re somewhere, aren’t you? she said to herself. You always said music never dies; it lives on the trade winds and wraps all the way around the world.
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