The participants in the film he was forced to watch were people he had known and others who were little more than ciphers behind a window, bearded perhaps, their heads wrapped with checkered cloths, cutouts that appeared like a tic on the edge of his vision and then disappeared behind a wall that was all at once just a wall, behind which a family might have been sitting down to a meal.
Pete had read that the unconscious mind retains a memory of the birth experience—the exit from the womb, the delivering hands that pull it into a blinding light, the terror when it discovers it cannot breathe of its own accord, then the slap of life that allows oxygen to surge into its lungs.
In Pete’s film, all of those things happened. Except the breech was the turret in an armored vehicle, the delivering hands those of a dust-powdered sergeant with a First Cav patch on his sleeve who pulled Pete from an inferno that was roasting him alive. Once more on the street, the sergeant leaned down, clasping Pete’s hand, trying to drag him away from the vehicle.
But even as broken pieces of stone were cutting into Pete’s buttocks and back, and machine-gun belts were exploding inside his vehicle, he knew his and the sergeant’s ordeal was not over. The hajji in the window looked like he had burlap wrapped around the bottom half of his face. In his hands was an AK-47 with two jungle-clipped banana magazines protruding from the stock. The hajji hosed the street, lifting the stock above his head to get a better angle, the muzzle jerking wildly, whanging rounds off the vehicle, hitting the sergeant in at least three places, collapsing him on top of Pete, his hand still clasped inside Pete’s.
When Pete woke from the dream the third day in the motel, the room was cold from the air conditioner, blue in the false dawn, quiet inside the hush of the desert. Vikki was still asleep, the sheet and bedspread pulled up to her cheek. He sat on the side of the bed, trying to focus on where he was, shivering in his skivvies, his hands clamped between his knees. He stared through the blinds at a distant brown mountain framed against a lavender sky. The mountain made him think of an extinct volcano, devoid of heat, dead to the touch, a geological formation that was solid and predictable and harmless. Gradually, the images of a third-world street strewn with chunks of yellow and gray stone and raw garbage and dead dogs and an armored vehicle funneling curds of black smoke faded from his vision and the room became the place where he was.
Rather than touch her skin and wake her, he held the corner of Vikki’s pajama top between the ends of his fingers. He watched the way the air conditioner moved the hair on the back of her neck, the way she breathed through her mouth, the way color pooled in her cheeks while she was sleeping, as though the warmth of her heart were silently spreading its heat throughout her body.
He did not want to drink. Or at least he did not want to drink that day. He shaved and brushed his teeth and combed his hair in the bathroom with the door closed behind him. He dressed in a clean pair of jeans and a cotton print shirt and slipped on his boots and put on his straw hat and carried his thermos down to the café at the traffic light.
He put four teaspoons of sugar in his coffee and ate an order of toast spread with six plastic containers of jelly. A Corona beer sign on the wall showed a Latin woman in a sombrero and a Spanish blouse reclining on a settee inside an Edenic garden, marble columns rising beside her, a purple mountain capped with snow in the background. Down the counter, a two-hundred-pound Mexican woman with a rear like a washtub was bent over the cooler, loading beer a bottle at a time, turning her face to one side, then the other, each time she lowered a bottle inside. She wiped her hands on a dish towel and removed Pete’s dirty plate from the counter and set it in a sink of greasy water.
“Those bottles pop on you sometimes?” he asked.
“If the delivery man leaves them in the sun or if they get shook up in the case, they will. It hasn’t happened to me, though. You want more coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
“There’s no charge for a warm-up.”
“Yes, ma’am, I’ll take some. Thank you.”
“You put a lot of sugar in there, huh?”
“Sometimes.”
“You want me to fill your thermos?”
He’d forgotten he had brought it with him, even though it stood right by his elbow. “Thanks, I’m good,” he said.
She tore a ticket off a pad and put it facedown by his cup. When she walked away, he felt strangely alone, as though a script had been pulled preemptively from his hands. He could hear the bottles clinking inside the cooler as she resumed her work. He paid the cashier for his coffee and toast, and gazed out the front door at the sun lighting the landscape, breaking over arid mountains that seemed transported from Central Asia and affixed to the southern rim of the United States.
He walked back to the service counter. “It’s gonna be a hot one. I might need one of those singles with lunch,” he said.
“I don’t have any cold ones,” the Mexican woman said.
“I’ll put it on top of the air conditioner at the motel,” he said. “Fact is, better give me a couple.”
She put two wet bottles in a paper bag and handed them to him. The top of Pete’s shirt was unbuttoned, and the woman’s eyes drifted to the shriveled tissue on his shoulder. “You was in Iraq?”
“I was in Afghanistan, but only three weeks in Iraq.”
“My son died in Iraq.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s six-thirty in the morning,” she said, looking at the bottles in his hand.
“Yes, ma’am, it is.”
She started to speak again but instead turned back to her work, her eyes veiled.
He walked back to the motel and stopped by the desk. Outside, he heard an eighteen-wheeler shifting gears at the traffic light, metal grinding. “We got any mail?” he said to the clerk.
“No, sir,” the clerk said.
“What time does the mailman come?”
“Same time as yesterday, ’bout ten.”
“Guess I’ll check by later,” Pete said.
“Yes, sir, he’ll sure be here by ten.”
“Somebody else couldn’t have misplaced it, stuck it in the wrong box or something?”
“Anything I find with y’all’s name on it, I promise I’ll bring it to your room.”
“It’ll be from a man named Junior Vogel.”
“Yes, sir, I got it.”
Outside, Pete stood in the shadow of the motel and looked at the breathtaking sweep of the landscape, the red and orange and yellow coloration in the rocks, the gnarled trees and scrub brush whose root systems had to grow through slag to find moisture. He slapped a mosquito on the back of his neck and looked at it. The mosquito had been fat with blood and had left a smear on his palm the size of a dime. Pete wiped the blood on his jeans and began walking down the two-lane road that looked like a displaced piece of old Highway 66. He walked past the miniature golf course and angled through the abandoned drive-in theater, passing through the rows of iron poles that had no speakers on them, row after row of them, their function used up and forgotten, surrounded by the sounds of wind and tumbleweed blowing through their midst.
He walked for perhaps twenty minutes, up a long sloping grade to a plateau on which three table sandstone rocks were set like browned biscuits one on top of another. He climbed the rocks and sat down, his legs hanging in space, and placed the bag with the two bottles of beer in it by his side. He watched a half-dozen buzzards turning in the sky, the feathers in their extended wings fluttering on the warm current of air rising from the hardpan. Down below, he watched an armadillo work its way toward its burrow amid the creosote brush, the weight of its armored shell swaying awkwardly above its tiny feet.
He reached into his pocket and took out his Swiss Army knife. With his thumb and index finger, he pulled out the abbreviated blade that served as both a screwdriver and a bottle opener. He peeled the wet paper off the beer bottles and set one sweating with moisture and spangled with amber sunlight on the rock. He held the other in his left ha
nd and fitted the opener on the cap. Below, the armadillo went into its burrow only to reappear with two babies beside it, all three of them peering out at the glare.
“What are you guys up to?” Pete asked.
No answer.
He uncapped the bottle and let the cap tinkle down the side of the rocks onto the sand. He felt the foam rise over the lip of the bottle and slide down his fingers and the back of his hand and his wrist. He looked back over his shoulder and could make out the screen of the drive-in movie and, farther down the street, the steak house and beer joint where Vikki had used another last name and taken a job as a waitress, the money under the table. He wiped his mouth with his hand and could taste the salt in his sweat.
At the foot of the table rocks, the polished bronze beer cap seemed to glow hotter and hotter against the grayness of the sand. It was the only piece of litter as far as he could see. He climbed down from the rocks, his beer bottle in one hand, picked up the cap, and thumbed it into his pocket. The armadillos stared up at him, their eyes as intense and unrelenting as black pinheads.
“Are you guys friendlies or Republican Guard? Identify yourself or get shot.”
Still no response.
Pete reached for the bottle of beer on top of the rocks, then approached the burrow. The adult armadillo and both babies scurried back inside.
“I tell you what,” he said, squatting down, a bottle in each hand. “Anybody that can live out here in this heat probably needs a couple of brews a lot worse than I do. These are on me, fellows.”
He poured the first beer down the hole, then popped off the cap on the second one and did the same, the foam running in long fingers down the burrow’s incline. “You guys all right in there?” he asked, twisting his head sideways to see inside the burrow. “I’ll take that as an affirmative. Roger that and keep your steel pots on and your butts down.”
He shook the last drops out of both bottles, stuck the empties in his pockets, and hiked back to town, telling himself that perhaps he had just walked through a door into a new day, maybe even a new life.
At ten A.M. exactly, he went down to the motel office just as the mailman was leaving. “Did you have anything for Gaddis or Flores?” he said.
The mailman grinned awkwardly. “I’m not supposed to say. There was a bunch of mail for the motel this morning. Ask inside.”
Pete opened the door and closed it behind him, an electronic ding going off in back somewhere. The clerk came through a curtained doorway. “How you doing?” he said.
“I’m not sure.”
“Sorry, I didn’t see nothing in there for y’all.”
“It’s got to be here.”
“I looked, believe me.”
“Look again.”
“It’s not there. I wish it was, but it’s not.” The clerk studied Pete’s face. “Your rent is paid up for four more nights. It cain’t be all that bad, can it?”
THAT NIGHT VIKKI took her sunburst Gibson to work with her and played and sang three songs with the band. The next morning there was no mail addressed to her or Pete at the motel office. Pete used the pay phone at the steak house to call Junior Vogel at his home.
“You promised Vikki you were gonna pick up my check and send it to us,” he said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You damn liar, what’d you do with my check? You just left it in the box? Tell me.”
“Don’t call here again,” Junior said, and hung up.
AT TWO A.M. Nick Dolan watched his remaining patrons leave the club. He used to wonder where they went after hours of drinking and viewing half-naked women perform inches away from their grasp. Did their fantasies cause them to rise throbbing and hard in the morning, unsated, vaguely ashamed, perhaps angry at the source of their dependency and desperation, perhaps ready to try an excursion into the dark side?
Was there a connection between what he did and violence against women? A female street person had been raped and beaten by two men six blocks from his club, fifteen minutes after closing time. The culprits were never caught.
But eventually, out of his own ennui with the subject, Nick had stopped thinking about his patrons or worrying about their deeds past or present, in the same way a butcher does not think about the origins and history of the gutted and frozen white shapes hanging from meat hooks in his subzero locker. Nick’s favorite admonition to himself remained intact and unchallenged: Nick Dolan didn’t invent the world.
Nick drank a glass of milk at the bar while his girls and barmaids and bartenders and bouncers and janitors said good night and one by one went outside to their cars and their private lives, which he suspected were little different from anyone else’s, except for the narcotics his girls often relied upon.
He locked the back door, set the alarm, and locked the front door as he went out. He paused in front of the club and surveyed the parking lot, the occasional car passing on the four-lane, the great star-strewn bowl of sky overhead. The wind was balmy blowing through the trees, the clouds moonlit; there was even a promise of rain in the air. The .25 auto he had taken from his desk rested comfortably in his trousers pocket. The only vehicle in the parking lot was his. For some reason the night struck him as more like spring than late summer, a time of new beginnings, a season of tropical showers and farmers’ markets and baseball training camps and a carpet of bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush just over the rise on the highway.
But for Nick, spring was special for another reason: No matter how jaded he had become, spring still reminded him of his youthful innocence and the innocence his children had shared with him.
He thought of the great green willow tree bending over the Comal River behind his property, and the way his children had loved to swim through its leafy tendrils, hanging on to a branch just at the edge of the current, challenging Nick to dive in with them, their faces full of respect and affection for the father who kept them safe from the world.
If only Nick could undo the fate of the Thai women. What did the voice of Yahweh say? “I am the alpha and omega. I am the beginning and the end. I am He who maketh all things new.” But Nick doubted that the nine women and girls whose mouths had been packed with dirt would give him absolution so easily.
He walked across the parking lot to his car, watching the tops of the trees bend in the wind, the moon like silver plate behind a cloud, his thoughts a tangled web he couldn’t sort out. Behind him, he heard an engine roar to life and tires ripping through gravel down to a harder surface. Before he could turn around, Hugo’s SUV was abreast of him, Hugo in the passenger seat, a kid in a top hat behind the wheel.
“Get in, Nick. Eat breakfast with us,” Hugo said, rolling down the window.
A man Nick didn’t know sat in the backseat, a pair of crutches propped next to him.
“No, thanks,” Nick replied.
“You need to hop in with us, you really do,” Hugo said, getting out of the vehicle and opening the back door.
The man who sat in back against the far door was watching Nick intently now. His hair was greased, the part a neat gray line through the scalp, the way an actor from the 1940s might wear his hair. His head was narrow, his nose long, his mouth small and compressed. A newspaper was folded neatly in his lap; his right hand rested just inside the fold. “I’d appreciate you talking to me,” the man said.
The wind had dropped, and the rustling sounds in the trees had stopped. The air seemed close, humid, like damp wool on the skin. Nick could hear his pulse beating in his ears.
“Mr. Dolan, do not place your hand in your pocket,” the man said.
“You’re the one they call Preacher?” Nick asked.
“Some people do.”
“I don’t owe you any money.”
“Who said you did?”
“Hugo.”
“That’s Hugo, not me. What are you carrying in your pocket, Mr. Dolan?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t lie.”
“What?”
/> “Don’t be disingenuous, either.”
“I don’t know what that word means.”
“You’ll either talk to me now, or you’ll see me or Bobby Lee later.”
“Who’s Bobby Lee?”
“That’s Bobby Lee there,” Preacher said, indicating the driver. “He may be a descendant of the general. You told Hugo you wanted to meet me. Don’t demean yourself by pretending you didn’t.”
Nick could hear a brass band marching through his head. “So now I’ve met you. I’m satisfied. I’m going home now.”
“I’m afraid not,” Preacher said.
Nick felt as though a garrote were tightening around his chest, squeezing the blood from his heart. Face it now, when Esther and the kids aren’t with you, a voice inside him said.
“You say something?” Preacher asked.
“Yeah, I have friends. Some of them are cops. They come here sometimes. They eat free at my restaurant.”
“So where does that leave us?”
Nick didn’t have an answer. In fact, he couldn’t keep track of anything he had said. “I’m not a criminal. I don’t belong in this.”
“Maybe we can be friends. But you have to talk to me first,” Preacher said.
Nick set his jaw and stepped inside the SUV, then heard the door slam behind him. The kid in the top hat floored the SUV onto the service road. The surge of power in the engine caused Nick to sway against the seat and lose control of the safety strap he was trying to snap into place. Preacher continued to look at him, his hazel eyes curious, like someone studying a gerbil in a wire cage. Nick’s hand brushed the stiff outline of the .25 auto in his side pocket.
Preacher knocked on his cast with his knuckles. “I got careless,” he said.
“Yeah?” Nick said. “Careless about what?”
“I underestimated a young woman. She looked like a schoolgirl, but she taught me a lesson in humility,” Preacher said. “Why’d you want to meet me?”
“Y’all are trying to take over my businesses.”
“I look like a restaurateur or the operator of a strip joint?”