“No, I think the one at the church is the one I’m interested in. That’s the only one here’bouts on Tuesday nights, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Who can I talk to there?”
“Anybody at the meeting.”
“No, I mean right now.”
“You think you’re going to drink?”
“I’m an officer of the law, and I’m investigating a multiple homicide…Hello?”
“I have to think about what you just told me.” There was a short pause. “I finished thinking about it. Thanks for calling the A.A. hotline. Goodbye.” The line went dead.
Hackberry and Pam drove through town and found the church on the east side of the state highway. A rail of a man was hammering shingles on the roof, his denim shirt buttoned at the throat and neck against the heat, his armpits dark with sweat, his knees spread like a clamp on the roof’s spine. Pam and Hackberry got out of the cruiser and looked up at him, trying to shield their eyes from the glare.
“You the pastor?” Hackberry called up.
“I was when I got up this morning.”
“I’m looking for a young man named Pete Flores. Maybe he attended an A.A. meeting here.”
“I wouldn’t know,” the man said.
“Why not?” Hackberry said.
“They don’t use last names.”
“I’ve got a picture of him. Mind if I come up?”
“Doubt if it’ll do any good.”
“Why not?”
“I let them use the building, but I don’t go to their meetings, so I’m not real sure who attends them.”
“Give me the picture, Hack. I’ll take it up,” Pam said.
“I’m fine,” Hackberry said. He mounted the ladder and climbed steadily up the rungs, his neutral expression held carefully in place as a bright red fire blossomed in the small of his back. He worked the photo Ethan Riser had given him out of his pocket and handed it to the pastor. The pastor studied it, his uncut hair stuck like wet black points on the back of his neck.
“No, sir, I never saw this fellow at my church. What’d he do?” said the pastor.
“He’s a witness to a crime and may be in danger.”
The pastor looked at the photo again, then handed it back to Hackberry without comment.
“You said you never saw him at your church.”
“No, sir, I haven’t.”
“But maybe you saw him somewhere else.”
The pastor took the photo back, his face starting to show the strain of squatting on the roof’s slant. “Maybe I saw a kid in a filling station or up at the café. He wasn’t in uniform, though. He had a scar on his face. It looked like a long drop of pink wax running down his skin. That’s why I remember him. But the soldier in this picture don’t have a scar.”
“Think hard, Reverend. Where’d you see him?”
“I just don’t recall. I’m sorry.”
“You ever hear of a woman here’bouts who likes to sing country spirituals in nightclubs or beer joints?”
“No, sir. But you must do mighty interesting work. Let me know if you ever want to trade jobs.”
BOBBY LEE’S FRUSTRATION with events and with Liam’s weather-vane personality was starting to reach critical mass. It was Liam’s truck that had broken down on the state highway, forcing them to call for a tow to a shithole with one restaurant and one mechanic’s shop. It was Liam who had left vinyl garbage bags spread all over the bottom of his camper shell, causing the mechanic to ask if they were trying to get a jump on deer season. It was Liam who had droned on and on about how Bobby Lee had screwed up at the convenience store, his eyes as self-righteous and mindless as a moron’s, his tombstone teeth too large for his mouth.
They were in a booth at the back of the restaurant, Liam’s gym bag by his foot, a change of clothes and a shaving kit and the cut-down shotgun zipped inside. They were waiting for the mechanic’s brother-in-law to drive them forty-five miles to the motel where Bobby Lee’s SUV was parked under the porte cochere.
“If you hadn’t pulled your piece on a nerd in a convenience store, we wouldn’t be having this problem,” Liam said. “We could be using your vehicle instead of mine. I told you I had transmission trouble last week. You can’t get information out of a nerd without sticking a gun up his nose?”
“I didn’t pull my piece. You got that? It fell out of my belt. But I didn’t pull it deliberately, Liam. How about giving it a rest?”
The waitress brought their food and poured more water in their glasses. They stopped speaking while she tended to the table. She set a basket with packaged crackers between them, then retrieved salt and pepper shakers from another table and set them by the basket. Bobby Lee and Liam waited. She loomed over them, her big shoulders and wide hips and industrial-strength perfume somehow shrinking the space around them.
“You guys want anything else?” she asked.
“No, we’re good here,” Bobby Lee said.
“I need some steak sauce,” Liam said.
Bobby Lee smoldered in silence until the waitress brought a bottle of A.1. to the table and went away.
“What are you so heated up about?” Liam asked.
“Take off that hat.”
“What for?”
“It’s stupid. It looks like a woman’s.”
Liam stuffed a complete slice of white bread in his mouth and chewed it with his mouth open.
“We got to have an understanding, Liam. I trusted you when I told you maybe Preacher has got to go off the board. I got to know we’re on the same wavelength here. I can’t have you bitching me out all the time.”
“You don’t like to hear the truth, that’s your problem.”
Outside, the sun was red on the horizon, dust rising off the hills in a brown nimbus. Bobby Lee felt as though someone had stuck a metal key into the base of his neck and wound up his nerve endings as tightly as piano wire. He started to eat, then set down his fork and stared emptily at his plate.
He had played the whole deal wrong. Liam was not to be trusted or confided in; he was a whiner who scapegoated his friends. But if Liam wasn’t a bud, who was? Who was the purist in their midst? Who was the guy who did the work less for the money than for the strange visions that seemed to crawl across the backs of his eyelids?
“Looks like you’re doing some heavy thinking,” Liam said.
“You think I blew it for us at the convenience store, that I should have handled it different, that I should have let the soldier take off on me and not even go inside.”
“I thought you said to drop it.”
“I just want you to put yourself in my place and tell me what you would have done, Liam.”
“When this is over, we’ll both get laid. I got a couple of discount coupons from Screw magazine.” Liam waited, grinning idiotically.
Bobby Lee looked into Liam’s eyes. They were a translucent blue, their moral vacuity creating its own kind of brilliance, the pupils like dead insects trapped under glass. They were the eyes of a man to whom there was no significant reality beyond the tips of his fingers.
“When this is over, I’m going back to college. My sister has a house in Lauderdale. I’m gonna take her kids to Orlando,” Bobby Lee said.
“Everybody says that, but it doesn’t work that way. Can you see yourself selling shoes to old guys in Miami Beach with smelly socks?”
“I’m studying to be an interior decorator.”
But Liam wasn’t listening. His attention had shifted to a man and woman who were sitting at a booth by the entrance to the restaurant.
“Don’t turn around yet, but check out John Wayne over there,” he said. “I’m not kidding. From the side, he looks just like Wayne. He’s even got Calamity Jane with him. She must be his traveling punch. Who said western movies are dead?”
14
THE AIR-CONDITIONING WAS turned up full-blast in the restaurant, fogging the bottoms of the windows. Hackberry and Pam had taken a booth close to the front count
er. Family people were eating dinner in the back section, which was separated from the front by a latticework partition decorated along the top with plastic flowers. A church bus pulled up in front, and a throng of preteens came in and piled into the empty booths. Workingmen were drinking beer at the counter and watching a baseball game on a flat-screen television high on the wall. As the sun set on the hills, the interior of the restaurant was lit with a warm red glow that did not subtract from its refrigerated coolness but only added to its atmosphere of goodwill and end-of-the-day familiality.
Hackberry put his hand over his mouth and yawned and stared at the menu, the words on it swimming into a blur.
“How’s your back?” Pam asked.
“Who said anything about my back?”
“Back pain saps a person’s energy. It shows in a person’s face.”
“What shows in my face are too many birthdays.”
“Do you know we covered a hundred square miles of Texas today?”
“We might do twice that tonight.”
“I think they’re in Mexico.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what I would do.”
“Vikki Gaddis might. Pete won’t.”
The waitress returned to the table and took their order and went away. Pam sat stiffly in the booth, her shoulders pushed against the backrest. “Vikki will blow Dodge, but Pete will hang tough? Because that’s what swinging dicks do? Girls aren’t swinging dicks, you’re saying?”
“Pete is one of those unfortunate guys who will never accept the possibility that their country will use them up and then spit them out like yesterday’s bubble gum. Can you stop using that language?”
She scratched at a place between her eyes and looked out the window, her badge glinting on her khaki shirt.
As they waited for their food, Hackberry felt the day catch up to him like a hungry animal released from its leash. He ate three aspirin for the pain in his back and gazed idly at the people in the restaurant. Except for the television set on the wall and the refrigerated air, the scene could have been lifted out of the year 1945. The people were the same, their fundamentalist religious views and abiding sense of patriotism unchanged, their blue-collar egalitarian instincts undefined and vague and sometimes bordering on nativism but immediately recognizable to an outsider as inveterately Jacksonian. It was the America of Whitman and Jack Kerouac, of Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis, an improbable confluence of contradictions that had become Homeric without its participants realizing their importance to the world.
If someone were to ask Hackberry Holland what his childhood had been like, he would answer the question with an image rather than an explanation. He would describe a Saturday-afternoon trip to town to watch a minor-league baseball game with his father the history professor. The courthouse square was bordered by elevated sidewalks inset with tethering rings that bled rust like a ship’s scuppers. A khaki-painted World War I howitzer stood in the shadows of a giant oak on the courthouse lawn. The dime store, a two-story brick building fronted with a wood colonnade, featured a popcorn machine that overflowed onto the concrete like puffed white grain swelling out of a silo. The adjacent residential neighborhood was lined with shade trees and bungalows and nineteenth-century white frame houses whose galleries were sunken in the middle and hung with porch swings, and each afternoon at five P.M. the paperboy whizzed down the sidewalk on a bicycle and smacked the newspaper against each set of steps with the eye of a marksman.
But more important in the memory of that long-ago American moment was the texture of light after a sun shower. It was gold and soft and stained with the contagious deep green of the trees and lawns. The rainbow that seemed to dip out of the sky into the ball diamond somehow confirmed one’s foolish faith that both the season and one’s youth were eternal.
Now Hackberry dipped a taco chip in a bowl of red sauce and put it in his mouth. He picked up his glass of iced tea and drank from it. A bunch of the kids from the church bus brushed by the table on their way to the restroom. Then they were gone, and he found himself looking through the latticework partition at the face of a man who seemed familiar but not to the degree that Hackberry could place him. The man wore a gardener’s hat, the wide brim shadowing his features. The waitress working the back of the restaurant kept moving back and forth behind the latticework, further obstructing Hackberry’s view.
Hackberry pinched the fatigue out of his eyes and straightened his spine.
“You developed back trouble from your time as a POW?” Pam said.
“I guess you could say I didn’t have it when I went to Korea, but I did when I returned.”
“You draw disability?”
“I didn’t apply for it.”
“Why is it I knew you were going to say that?”
“Because you’re omniscient.”
He was grinning. She propped her knuckles under her chin and tried not to laugh, then gave it up, her eyes crinkling, holding on his, a smile spreading across her face.
The waitress brought their Mexican dinners to the table, gripping each plate with a damp dish towel, the heat and steam rising into her eyes. “Be careful. It’s real hot,” she said.
LIAM WAS ORDERING dessert, his eyes doing a breast inventory as the waitress leaned over and picked up his dirty dishes.
“Want a little R and R across the border tonight?” he said after the waitress was gone.
“What I can’t understand is why we haven’t been able to find the motel. It’s the Siesta motel, right?” Bobby Lee said, ignoring Liam’s suggestion.
“I looked on the Internet. There’s no such motel down here. You want to get laid tonight or not?”
“I want to find the soldier and his squeeze and do our job and go home.”
“That’s when we take care of Preacher?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Maybe it’s the smart move.”
“In what way?”
“He and Hugo always get the high end on payday. Why should a guy get extra pay because he’s crazy?”
“Preacher is smart in a different way. That doesn’t mean he’s crazy,” Bobby Lee said.
“Having second thoughts?”
“We’re soldiers. We do what we’re told,” Bobby Lee said, picking up the salt shaker and looking at it.
“You’re lots of things, Bobby Lee, but soldier isn’t one of them.”
“Want to explain that?”
“What did you say you’re studying? Interior design? I bet you’ll be good at it.”
Bobby Lee put a matchstick in his mouth. “I got to take a drain,” he said. He went into the restroom and soaped his hands and forearms and rinsed his skin clean and cupped cold water into his face with both hands. He had to swallow when he looked into the mirror. His bald spot seemed to be spreading outward. His eyebrows formed a single black line across his brow, giving his face a crunched look, as though a great weight were pressing down on his head. His throat was starting to sag under his chin; his unshaved jaw had specks of gray. He was twenty-eight years old.
This whole gig stank. Worse, he’d allied himself with Liam Eriksson, who had just mocked him to his face. Bobby Lee sat on the stool inside the toilet stall and checked the bars on his cell phone, then punched in Preacher’s number.
“Yeah?” Jack’s voice said.
“Jack, glad you’re there, man.”
“What’s going on, Bobby Lee?”
“Where are you?”
“Like the Beach Boys say, ‘I get—’”
“Yeah, I know, you get around.”
“Got some news for me?” Jack said, undisturbed by Bobby Lee’s impatience.
“Not exactly.”
“What did you call me for?”
“Just checking in.”
“Having trouble with Liam?”
“How’d you know?”
“You got a lot of talent, Bobby Lee. Of the seven deadly sins, envy is the only one that doesn’t have a trade-off.”
/> “You lost me.”
“Lust, hate, covetousness, pride, sloth, greed, and gluttony bring with them an appreciable degree of pleasure. But an envious man gets no relief. It’s like a guy drinking liquid Drano because another guy has wine on his table. One thing you can be sure about, though. The man who envies you will eventually blindside you proper.”
“Liam envies me?”
“What does a fellow like me know?”
“A lot. You know a lot, Jack.”
“Something going on, boy?”
“Nothing I can’t take care of.”
“That’s the way to talk.”
“See you, Jack.”
Bobby Lee closed his cell phone and stared at the back of the stall door. It was patinaed with drawings of genitalia that had been scratched into the paint. For just a moment he wondered if the drawings were not an accurate representation of the thoughts that went on inside Liam’s head. How could he have been willing to throw in his lot with a bozo like Liam and betray a pro like Jack? Jack might be a religious head case, but he was no Judas, and Hugo and Liam were. Taking off Artie Rooney’s finger seemed like an extreme measure, but at least with Jack, you always knew where you stood.
So where did that leave Bobby Lee?
Answer: playing it cool, gliding on that old-time R&B. A little time would pass and all this would be over and he’d be bone-fishing in the Keys, eating fried conch, drinking St. Pauli Girl beer, and watching a molten-red sun slip into the waters off Mallory Square.
As he started back toward the booth, he glanced through the latticework partition that separated him from the front of the restaurant. Suddenly, he realized he was looking at the couple Liam had told him to turn around and check out. The woman wore jeans and a khaki shirt and a badge on her breast. The tall man Liam had said looked like John Wayne was sitting across from her in the booth, his Stetson crown-down on the seat. He was cutting up his food, his profile silhouetted against the sunset. Bobby Lee could also see the holstered white-handled blue-black thumb-buster revolver that hung from his gun belt.
Bobby Lee also had no doubt who the tall man was. He had seen both him and the female deputy next to the diner where Vikki Gaddis had worked, with a guy who was probably a fed, maybe even the one Preacher capped later, all three of them talking to the owner of the diner, Junior Whatever in handcuffs. The tall guy’s name was Holland, that was it, Holland, the county sheriff, a big wheel in Dipshit, Texas, and the woman was his deputy, and now the two of them were right here, maybe forty feet from Bobby Lee and Liam’s booth.