The driver had a long nose and high cheekbones, the hair combed straight back, streaked with gel or grease. His facial structure could have been called skeletal except for the fact that the flesh was lumpy, as though it were covered with bee stings, suggesting carnality and decadence rather than deprivation. His gaze was focused on the traffic signal, like a modern parody of a Byzantine saint experiencing the dark night of the soul.
Pete started across the intersection, in front of the compact’s high beams, just as the traffic signal changed. The driver of the compact had to slam on his brakes. But Pete did not move. He continued to stare into the brilliance of the headlights, red and yellowish-green circles burning into his eye sockets. He spread his arms against the air. “Sorry for being on the planet,” he said.
The driver pulled slowly around him, his window down. “You have a problem of some kind?”
“Yes, sir, I do. See, the light was red when I started across the street. Because it turns from red to green doesn’t mean the driver of a car can run over whatever is in front of him.”
“That’s interesting to know. Now, how about taking your hand off the roof of my car? I don’t particularly enjoy looking into somebody’s armpit.”
“I like your ‘Support the Troops’ ribbons. You must have bought a shitpile of them. What d’you think about bringing back the draft so the rest of y’all can kick some rag-head ass over in the Sandbox?”
“Move away, kid.”
“Yes, sir, I’m very glad to,” Pete said. He began picking up rocks from the asphalt. “Let me he’p you on your way. Is there a late-night pinochle game down at the AMVETS tonight?”
The driver’s eyes roamed over Pete’s face. His expression was one of curiosity rather than fear or apprehension. “Get yourself some help. In the meantime, don’t ever fuck with me again.”
“I thank you for straightening me out, sir. Happy motoring. God bless and Godspeed.”
As the driver pulled away, Pete flung one rock after another at the compact, whanging them off the doors and roof and trunk. Then he picked up a half-brick and chased after the compact and threw the brick as hard as he could, pocking a hole in the rear window. But the driver never accelerated or touched the brake pedal. He simply drove steadily down the road toward the main highway that led out of town, leaving Pete in the middle of the street, wrapped in self-loathing and a level of impotent rage that sat on his brow like a crown of thorns.
AFTER PREACHER GOT back on the four-lane and resumed his journey, he looked in the rearview mirror at his broken window. Lunatic or drunken or drug-induced behavior had never been a source of worry or concern to him. Unhinged people like that kid back there flinging rocks at a stranger’s car were just a reminder that Preacher didn’t have to validate himself, that moral imbeciles had taken over the institution a long time ago. Check out the French General Assembly under Robespierre, he thought. Check out the crowd at a televangelical rally. If they had their way, there would be an electric chair on every street corner in Texas, and half the population would be bars of soap.
He pushed his speed up to sixty-five, staying under the seventy-mile-an-hour limit. The backseat was stacked with the boxed possessions he had salvaged from his destroyed house. His Thompson, for which he had paid eighteen thousand dollars, was concealed between the backseat and the trunk. He would miss his stucco house at the base of the mountain, but eventually, he knew he would return to it. He was sure the cave in the mountainside and the sounds the wind made blowing inside its walls held portent not only for him but for the unwinding scroll of which his story was a part. Was it too big a leap of faith to conclude the whistling of the wind was nothing less than the breathing of Yahweh inside the earth?
Weren’t all our destinies already written on scrolls that we unwound and discovered in incremental fashion? Perhaps the past and the present and the future were already written on the wind, not in transient fashion but whispered to us with unerring accuracy if we would only bother to listen. The three bikers had thought they would kill him in his own house, little knowing of the power that inhabited the environment they had invaded. He wondered what they’d thought when he’d let off on them in the motel room. There had been regret in their eyes, certainly, and desperation and fear, but most of all just regret. If they could have spoken, he was sure they would have renounced everything in their lives in order to live five more seconds so they could make their case and convince either Preacher or whoever governed the universe that they would devote the remainder of their lives to piety and acts of charity if they could just have one more season to run.
Preacher steered around an eighteen-wheeler, the tractor rig’s high beams turning his pocked rear window into a fractured light prism. Had the rock thrower been drunk? The man hadn’t smelled of booze. Obviously, he had been in Iraq or Afghanistan. Maybe the VA was dumping its nutcases on the street. But there was a detail about the kid Preacher couldn’t forget. In his obsession to find Vikki Gaddis, he had thought little about her boyfriend, the kid Hugo and Bobby Lee always referred to as “the soldier boy.” What had Bobby Lee said about him? That the kid had a scar on his face that was as long as an earthworm?
No, it was just coincidence. Yahweh didn’t play jokes.
Or did He?
19
AT TWO A.M. the air-conditioning compressor outside Hackberry’s window gasped once, made a series of clunking sounds like a Coke bottle rolling down a set of stairs, and died. Hackberry opened the windows and the doors, turned on the ceiling fan in his bedroom, and went back to sleep.
A huge bank of thunderclouds had moved out of the south and sealed the sky. The clouds were lit by igneous flashes that rippled across the entirety of the heavens in seconds and died far out over the hills. It was cool in the room under the revolving blades of the fan, and Hackberry dreamed he was in a naval hospital in the Philippines, sedated with morphine, a hospital corpsman no older than he pulling the syringe from his arm. A sun shower was blowing in from the bay, and outside his window, an orchid tree bloomed on the lawn, its lavender petals scattered on the clipped grass. In the distance, where the bay merged with water that was the dark blue of spilled ink, he could see the gray hulking outline of an aircraft carrier, its hard steel edges smudged by the rain.
The hospital was a safe place to be, and the memories of a POW camp south of the Yalu seemed to have little application in his life.
He heard thunder and wind in his sleep and the twang of wire on his back fence and tumbleweed bouncing against the side of his house and matting in his flower beds. Then he smelled rain blowing through his screens, sweeping in a rush across the housetop, filling the room with a freshness that was like spring or memories of hot summers when raindrops lit upon a heated sidewalk and created a smell that convinced you the season was eternal and one’s youth never faded.
The mist drifted through the window, touching his skin, dampening his pillow. He got up and closed the window and, in the distance, saw lightning strike a hillside, flaring inside a grove of blighted oaks that looked like gnarled fingers inside the illumination. He lay back down, his pillow over his face, and fell asleep again.
OUT ON THE road, a compact car passed in the darkness, its headlights off. There was a solitary hole in the back window, its edges shaped into a crystalline eye superimposed on the car’s dark interior. The driver steered with both hands around a rock that had rolled onto the road, avoiding a fence post and a tangle of barbed wire that had tilted out of a hillside. He passed a barn and a pasture with horses and a water tank in it, then turned out into a field and drove across a long stretch of Johnson grass and parked his car in a streambed next to a hill, the dry rocks crackling under his tires. He removed the submachine gun from behind his backseat, and the paper bag that contained two ammunition drums, then sat down on a flat rock, his hat tilted on his face, his unpressed secondhand pin-striped suit dotted with rain, a walking cane propped against his knee.
The wind blew open his coat and ruffled the
brim of his hat, but his eyes did not blink, nor did his face show any expression. He stared listlessly at the grass bending around him and at a stump fire smoldering in the rain. The smoke from the fire smelled like burning garbage and made him clear his throat and spit. He fitted the ammunition drum onto his Thompson and pulled and released the bolt, feeding a round into the chamber. He remained seated for a long time, staring at nothing, the Thompson resting on his lap, his hands as relaxed as a child’s on its barrel and stock.
He did not know the hour and never wore jewelry or a watch when he worked. He did not measure the passage of time in terms of minutes or hours but in terms of events. There were no vehicles on the county road. There was no sign of activity inside the house he was about to invade. There were no insomniacs or early risers turning on lights in the neighborhood. There was a fire burning in the grass, and horses were nickering in the darkness, the smoke providing a plausible explanation for their sense of alarm. The sky was booming with thunderous explosions; not those of dry lightning but the kind that promised serious rain, perhaps even the kind of monsoon that gave back life to a desert. In spite of the acrid tinge of smoke inside the mist, the night was as lovely and normal as one could expect during the late summer in Southwest Texas.
Preacher stuffed his trousers inside the tops of his boots and upended his Thompson in one hand, the other gripping his cane, then began walking through a thicket toward the ranch house in the distance, his face as impervious as molded plastic to both the brambles and the rain.
WHEN SERGEANT KWONG visited Hackberry in his dreams, a burp gun was always hanging on a strap from his shoulder, and an ice hook dripped from the fingers of his right hand. Hackberry could even see the half-moons of dirt inside Kwong’s nails and the shine of his quilted coat that was slathered with dried mud, the sleeves marked with mucus where he had wiped his nose.
In the dream, Kwong fitted the hook through one of the iron squares in the sewer grate above Hackberry’s head and hoisted the grate onto a cusp of yellowed snow where Kwong had urinated. Hackberry was sitting with his back against the dirt wall of the hole, his knees drawn up before him, the inverted steel pot he defecated in resting by his foot. Kwong’s massive body was silhouetted against a salmon-colored sky, his face dark with shadow under a short-billed cloth cap tied with earflaps under his chin. His unshaved jaw was as big as a gorilla’s, the hair in his nose white with ice crystals, his breath fogging. Hackberry could hear other POWs being pulled out of their holes, shoved into a line, the guards talking louder, more clipped, angrier than usual, kicking anyone who didn’t move fast enough.
Kwong dropped the iron grate heavily onto the snow, shaking the hook free. “Climb up, cocksuck. Today your day,” he said.
Inside his dream, Hackberry tried to force himself back to the hospital in the Philippines, back to the moment when the navy corpsman had injected him with morphine and he could arbitrarily turn his head on the pillow and see the orchid tree blooming on the lawn and in the distance the misty gray outline of the aircraft carrier in the rain.
On the north side of the pasture, Preacher walked steadily through the Johnson grass, its wetness glistening on his boots, the butt of the Thompson riding on his hip, his walking cane spearing into the soft dirt. The palomino and chestnut geldings in the horse lot were spooking in the curds of smoke from the stump fire, whinnying, their ears back. High overhead, a plane with lighted windows was making an approach to a private airport, gliding through the rain and flickers of lightning to a safe harbor. The sheriff’s neighbors were sound asleep, confident of the sunrise and the goodness of the day that awaited them. As Preacher thought of these things, his energies grew in magnitude and intensity, like bees stirring to life inside a hive after a boy has disturbed it with a rock. He cast aside his walking cane and climbed through the rails of the horse lot and continued toward the house, the discomfort gone from his leg and foot, a marching band blaring in his head.
The two horses ran in different directions from him, their back hooves kicking blindly at the air. Up ahead, the house was dark, the windmill on the far side chained up, the blades and rudder trembling stiffly in the wind.
WHEN HACKBERRY JERKED awake, he tried to sit up in bed, then heard metal clink and felt his left wrist come tight against a chain. He pushed himself up against the bedstead, his vision unfocused, his left hand suspended foolishly in the air as though his motor controls had been cut.
“Whoa, hoss,” Preacher said. He was sitting in a chair in the corner, the Thompson across his lap. He had removed his hat and placed it crown-down on the dresser. His clothes were damp and smudged with ash and mud, his face and boots shiny with rainwater. “It’s already a done deal. Don’t hurt yourself unnecessarily.”
Hackberry could hear himself breathing. “You’re the one they call Preacher?”
“You knew I was coming, didn’t you?”
“No. For me, it’s not personal.”
“I was told you were asking Arthur Rooney about me, about my private life and such.”
“Whoever told you that is a damn liar.”
“Yeah, he probably is. But nonetheless, you’ve been looking for me, Sheriff Holland. So I found you instead.”
“I should have locked my door.”
“Think your broken air conditioner was coincidental?”
“You did it?”
“No, a man who works for me did.”
“What’s your business here, Mr. Collins?”
“You have to ask that?”
“Jack Collins is your real name? The one given you at birth?”
“What difference does it make?”
“In case you haven’t figured it out, nicknames are forms of disguise. I hear you’re supposed to be the left hand of God.”
“I never claimed it.”
“You let others do that for you. You don’t discourage them.”
“I don’t study on what other people say or think. Why do you keep favoring the other side of your bed, Sheriff?”
“I have problems with sciatica. I can’t lie in one position.”
“Is this what you’re looking for?” Preacher said, holding up Hackberry’s revolver.
“Maybe.”
“If you’re going to keep a weapon close by your bed, it should be a small one, a derringer or an Airweight you can tuck under your mattress or pillow so an intruder cain’t find it without waking you up. You favor a thumb-buster forty-five? That’s a lot like carrying around a junkyard on your hip, isn’t it?”
Hackberry looked through the screen door at the rain blowing in the pasture, his horses playing in it, rearing in mock combat, a stump fire glowing orange and hot under a log each time the wind fed fresh oxygen into the flames. “Do what you came to do and be done,” he said.
“I wouldn’t rush my fate if I were you.”
“You lecture others, a man who killed nine unarmed women, some of them hardly more than children? You think you’re the scourge of God? You’re a pimple on creation. I’ve known your kind all my life. You’re always looking for a cause or a flag to hide under. There’s no mystery to your psychological makeup, Collins. Your mother probably wanted you aborted and cursed the day you were born. I think you were despised in the womb.”
Preacher’s mouth was a stitched seam, as though he were taking the measure of each word Hackberry used. He huffed air out his nostrils indifferently. “Could be. I never got to know her real well. You’re a recipient of the Navy Cross.”
“So what?”
“I checked out your background. You don’t fit easily into one shoe box. You were a womanizer and a drunkard. While you were married and running for Congress, you were hiring Mexican girls down on the border. You ever carry diseases home to your wife?”
The ammunition drum on the Thompson rested between Preacher’s knees; the index finger of his right hand was poised outside the trigger guard. “The question isn’t a complicated one,” he said.
“You name it and I did it. Until I
met the woman who became my second wife.”
“The Marxist?”
“She was an organizer for the United Farm Workers and a friend of Cesar Chavez.”
“That’s how you took up with the papists?”
“There’re worse groups.”
“The situation with those Oriental women wasn’t of my selection.”
“I dug them up. I saw your handiwork up close and personal. Run your bullshit on somebody else.”
“You found them?”
“At least one girl had dirt clenched in her palm. You know what that indicates?”
Preacher raised his index finger in the air. “I didn’t have control of what happened out there.”
“You’re using the passive voice.”
“What?”
“It involves manipulation of language to avoid admission of guilt.”
“You a grammarian besides a war hero?”
“There’s nothing heroic about my history. I informed on two fellow POWs.”
Preacher seemed to have lost interest in the subject. He scratched idly at his cheek with four fingers. “You afraid?”
“Of what?”
“The other side.”
“I’ve already been there.”
“Say again?”
“I looked into the eyes of a man just like you. He carried a burp gun that was made in China or Russia. He was a cruel man. I suspect his cruelty masked his innate cowardice. I never met a cruel man or a bully who wasn’t a coward.”
Preacher waved his hand at the air. “Be quiet.”
At first Hackberry thought his words had reached inside Preacher’s defense system, then realized the vanity of his perception. Preacher had risen from his chair, his attention fixed on the road, the Thompson slanted downward. He moved to the window. “She’s not the brightest bulb in the box, is she?”
“Who?”
“Your deputy, the one who killed Liam. She just turned on her interior light to write in her log.”