But he knew that, eventually, another position would come his way. Running the exams on the migrant workers wouldn’t be so bad, really, but it would require a lot of time on the road. What had chewed at him day and night for the past year was the memory of all the students who’d passed through his social studies class—hundreds of them, from red-haired American sons to copper-skinned Mexicans to Apache kids with eyes like bullet holes. Hundreds of them: doomed freight, passing through the badlands on tracks already warped. He’d checked; over an eleven-year period with a senior class averaging about seventy to eighty kids, only three hundred and six of them had enrolled as freshmen in either a state or technical college. The rest had just drifted away or set roots in Inferno to work at the mine, drink their wages, and raise a houseful of babies who would probably repeat the pattern. Only now there was no mine, and the pull of drugs and crime in the big cities was stronger. It was stronger, as well, right here in Inferno. And for eleven years he’d seen the faces come and go: boys with knife scars and tattoos and forced laughter, girls with scared eyes and gnawed fingernails and the secret twitches of babies already growing in their bellies.
Eleven years, and tomorrow was his final day. After the senior class walked out at last period, it would be over. And what haunted him, day after day, was the realization that he could recall maybe fifteen kids who’d escaped the Great Fried Empty. That was what they called the desert between Inferno and the Mexican border, but Tom knew it was a state of mind too. The Great Fried Empty could suck the brains out of a kid’s skull and replace it with dope smoke, could bum out the ambition and dry up the hope, and what almost killed Tom was the fact that he’d fought it for eleven years but the Great Fried Empty had always been winning.
Jessie kept massaging, but Tom’s muscles had tensed. She knew what must be going through his mind. It was the same thing that had slowly burned his spirit to a cinder.
Tom stared at the bars of fire on the wall. “I wish I had three more months. Just three.” He had a sudden, startling image of the day he and Jessie had graduated together from the University of Texas, walking out into a flood of sunlight and ready to take on the world. It seemed like a hundred years ago. He’d been thinking a lot about Roberto Perez lately, could not get the boy’s face out of his mind, and he knew why. “Roberto Perez,” he said. “Do you remember me talking about him?”
“I think so.”
“He was in my senior class six years ago. He lived in Bordertown, and his grades weren’t very high, but he asked questions. He wanted to know. But he held himself back from doing too well on tests, because that wouldn’t be cool.” His bitter smile surfaced again. “The day he graduated, Mack Cade was waiting for him. I saw him get into Cade’s Mercedes. They drove off. Roberto’s brother told me later that Cade got the boy a job up in Houston. Good money, but it wasn’t exactly clear what the job was. Then one day Roberto’s brother came to me and said I ought to know: Roberto had been killed in a Houston motel. Cocaine deal went bad. He got both barrels of a shotgun in his stomach. But the Perez family didn’t blame Cade. Oh, no. Roberto sent home a lot of money. Cade gave Mr. Perez a new Buick. Sometimes I drive by the Perez house after school; the Buick’s up on concrete blocks in the front yard.
He stood up abruptly, went to the window, and pulled the blinds aside again. He could feel the heat out there, gathering power and shimmering off the sand and concrete. “There are two boys in my last-period class who remind me of Perez. Neither one of them ever made higher than a C-minus on a test, but I see it in their faces. They listen; something sinks in. But they both do just enough to get by, and no more. You probably know their names: Lockett and Jurado.” He glanced at her.
Jessie had heard Tom mention the names before, and she nodded.
“Neither of them took the college entrance exams,” Tom continued. “Jurado laughed in my face when I suggested it. Lockett looked at me like I fell out of a dog’s ass. But their last day is tomorrow, and they’ll graduate a week from Sunday, and that’ll be it. Cade’ll be waiting. I know it.”
“You’ve done what you could,” Jessie said. “Now it’s up to them.”
“Right.” He stood for a moment framed in crimson light, as if on the rim of a blast furnace. “This town,” he said softly. “This damned, godforsaken town. Nothing can grow here. I swear to God, I’m beginning to believe there’s more use for a vet than there is for a teacher.”
She tried for a smile, but wasn’t very successful. “You take care of your beasts, I’ll take care of mine.”
“Yeah.” He summoned up a wan smile. He walked to the bed, cupped his hand to the back of Jessie’s head, his fingers disappearing into her dark brown, short-cut hair, and kissed her forehead. “I love you, doc.” He let his head rest against hers. “Thanks for listening to me.”
“I love you,” she answered, and put her arms around him. They stayed that way for a minute, until Jessie said, “Lizard eyeballs?”
“Yep!” He straightened up. His face was more relaxed now, but his eyes were still troubled and Jessie knew that, however good a teacher he was, Tom thought of himself as a failure. “I guess they’re good and cold by now. Come and get ’em!”
Jessie got out of bed and followed her husband through the short hallway into the kitchen. In this room also, a ceiling fan was turning, and Tom had pulled up the blinds on the west-facing windows. The light in that direction was still tinged with violet, but the sky was turning bright blue over Rocking Chair Ridge. Tom had already fixed all four of the breakfast plates—each with bacon, scrambled eggs (no lizard eyeballs today), and toast—and they were waiting on the little circular table in the corner. “Let’s go, sleepyheads!” Tom called toward the kids’ rooms, and Ray answered with an unenthusiastic grunt.
Jessie went to the refrigerator and liberally doused milk into her muscular coffee while Tom switched on the radio to catch the six-thirty news from KOAX in Fort Stockton. Stevie bounded into the kitchen. “It’s horsie day, Mama!” she said. “We get to go see Sweetpea!”
“We sure do.” It amazed her that anybody could be so full of energy in the morning, even a six-year-old child. Jessie poured a glass of orange juice for Stevie while the little girl, clad in her University of Texas nightshirt, climbed into her chair. She sat perched on the edge, swinging her legs and chewing at a piece of toast. “How’d you sleep?”
“Good. Can I ride Sweetpea today?”
“Maybe. We’ll see what Mr. Lucas has to say.” Jessie was scheduled to drive out to the Lucas place, about six miles west of Inferno, and give their golden palomino Sweetpea a thorough checkup this morning. Sweetpea was a gentle horse that Tyler Lucas and his wife Bess had raised from a colt, and Jessie knew how much Stevie looked forward to their trip.
“Eat your breakfast, cowgirl,” Tom said. “Gotta be strong to stay on a bronco.”
They heard the television snap on in the front room and the channels being clicked around. Rock music pounded through the speaker on MTV. In back of the house was a satellite dish that picked up about three hundred channels, bringing all parts of the world through the air to Inferno. “No TV!” Tom called, jarred by the noise. “Come on to breakfast!”
“Just one minute!” Ray pleaded, as he always did. He was a TV addict, particularly drawn to the scantily clad models in the videos on MTV.
“Now!”
The television set was clicked off, and Ray Hammond walked into the kitchen. He was fourteen years old, beanpole thin and gawky—looks just like me when I was that age, Tom thought—and wore eyeglasses that slightly magnified his eyes: not much, but enough to earn him the nickname of X Ray from the kids at school. He yearned for contacts and a build like Arnold Schwarzenegger; the first had been promised to him when he turned sixteen, and the second was a fever dream that no number of push-ups could accomplish. His hair was light brown, cropped close except for a few orange-dyed spikes on top that neither his father nor mother could talk him out of, and he was the proud possessor of a wardro
be of paisley-patterned shirts and tie-dyed jeans that made Tom and Jessie think the sixties had come back full vengeful circle. Right now, though, he wore only bright red pajama bottoms, his chest sunken and sallow.
“’Morning, alien,” Jessie said.
“‘Morning, ’lien,” Stevie parroted.
“Hi.” Ray plopped down in a chair and yawned hugely. “Juice.” He held out a hand.
“Please and thank you.” Jessie poured him a glass, gave it to him, and watched as he put it down the awesome hatch. For a boy who only weighed around a hundred and fifteen pounds in a soaking wet suit, he could eat and drink faster than a horde of hungry Cowboy linebackers. He began digging into his eggs and bacon.
There was purpose in Ray’s all-out attack on his plate. He’d had a dream about Belinda Sonyers, the blond fox who sat on the next row in his freshman English class, and the details were still percolating. If he got a hard-on here at the table with his folks, he would be in danger of serious embarrassment; so he concentrated on the food, which seemed the second-best thing to sex. Not that he knew, of course. The way his zits were popping up, he could forget about girls for the next thousand years. He stuffed his mouth full of toast.
“Where’s the fire?” Tom asked.
Ray almost gagged, but he got the toast down and attacked the eggs because the gauzy porno dream was making his pencil twitch again. After a week from tomorrow, though, he could forget about Belinda Sonyers and all the other foxes who paraded down the halls of Preston High; the school would be shut down, the doors locked, and the dreams would be just so much red-hot dust. But at least it would be summer, and that was okay too. Still, with the whole town closing down, summer was going to be about as much fun as cleaning out the attic.
Jessie and Tom sat down to breakfast, and Ray got his thoughts under rein again. Stevie, the red highlights in her auburn hair shining in the sunlight, ate her food knowing that cowgirls did have to be strong to ride broncos—but Sweetpea was a nice horse, who wouldn’t dream of bucking and throwing her. Jessie glanced at the clock on the wall—one of those goofy plastic things shaped like a cat’s head, with eyeballs that ticked back and forth to mark the passing seconds; it was quarter to seven, and she knew Tyler Lucas was an early riser and would already be waiting for her to show up. Of course she didn’t expect to find anything wrong with Sweetpea, but the horse was getting on in years and the Lucases treated it like a household pet.
After breakfast, as Tom and Ray cleared away the plates, Jessie helped Stevie get dressed in a pair of jeans and a white cotton shirt with the Jetsons pictured on its front. Then she returned to her own bedroom and pulled off her nightshirt, exposing the tight, lithe body of a woman who enjoyed working outdoors; she had a “Texas tan”—arms brown to the shoulders, a deeply bronzed face, and the rest of her body almost ivory in contrast. She heard the TV click on; Ray was grabbing some more of the tube before he and his father left for school—but that was all right, because Ray was an avid reader as well and his brain pulled in information like a sponge. And the way he wore his hair and his taste in clothes were no causes for alarm, either, he was a good boy, a lot shier than he let on, and he was simply doing what he could to get along with his peers. She knew about his nickname, and she remembered that it was sometimes tough to be young.
The harsh desert sun had added lines to Jessie’s face, but she possessed a strong, natural beauty that required no aid from jars and tubes. Anyway, she knew, vets weren’t expected to win beauty pageants. They were expected to be available at all hours and to work damned hard, and Jessie did not disappoint. Her hands were brown and sturdy, and the things she’d had to grab with them during her thirteen years as a veterinarian would’ve made most women swoon. Gelding a vicious stallion, delivering a stillborn calf jammed in a cow’s birth canal, removing a nail from the trachea of a five-hundred-pound prize boar—all those were operations she’d performed successfully, as well as hundreds of other tasks ranging from treating a canary’s injured beak to operating on a Doberman’s infected jaw. But she was up to the task; working with animals was all she’d ever wanted to do, even as a child when she used to bring home every stray dog and cat off the streets of her neighborhood in Fort Worth. She’d always been a tomboy, and growing up with three brothers had taught her to roll with the punches—but she gave as good as she got too, and she could vividly recall knocking her oldest brother’s front tooth out with a football when she was nine years old. He laughed about it now, whenever they spoke on the phone, and he kidded her that the ball might’ve sailed to the Gulf if his mouth hadn’t been in the way.
She walked into the bathroom to sprinkle on some baby powder and brush the taste of coffee and Blue Nun from her mouth. She quickly ran her hands through her short, dark brown hair. Flecks of gray were creeping back from the temples. The march of time, she thought. Not as startling as watching your kids grow up, of course; it seemed like only yesterday that Stevie was a baby and Ray was in third grade. The years were flying, that was for sure. She went to the closet, pulled out a pair of her well-worn and comfortable jeans and a red T-shirt, put them on and then a pair of white socks and her sneakers. She got her sunglasses and a baseball cap, stopped in the kitchen to fill up two canteens because you never knew what might happen in the desert, and took her veterinary satchel from its place on the upper shelf of the hall closet. Stevie was hopping around like a jumping bean on a hot griddle, eager to get going.
“We’re heading off,” Jessie told Tom. “See you about four.” She leaned over and kissed him, and he planted a kiss on Stevie’s cheek. “Be careful, cowgirls!” he said. “Take care of your mama.”
“I will!” Stevie clutched her mother’s hand, and Jessie paused to take a smaller-sized baseball cap off the hat tree near the front door and put it on Stevie’s head. “See you later, Ray!” she called, and he answered, “Check six!” from his own room. Check six? she thought as she and Stevie went out into the already-searing sunlight. Whatever happened to a simple ’Bye, Mom? Nothing made her feel more like a fossil, at thirty-four, than not understanding her own son’s language.
They walked along the stone path that led from the house past the small building next door, it was fashioned of rough white stone, and set out near the street was a little sign that read INFERNO ANIMAL HOSPITAL and, beneath that, Jessica Hammond, DVM. Parked at the curb, behind Tom’s white Civic, was her dusty, sea-green Ford pickup truck; in a rack across the rear window, where most everybody else carried their rifles, was an extendable-wire restraining noose that Jessie had fortunately only had to use a few times.
In another moment Jessie was driving west on Celeste Street, and Stevie was tucked behind her seat belt but hardly able to stand the confinement. She was fragile in appearance, her features as delicate as a porcelain doll’s, but Jessie knew full well that Stevie had an intense curiosity and wasn’t shy about going after what she wanted; the child already had an appreciation of animals and enjoyed traveling to the various farms and ranches with her mother, no matter how bone-jarring the trip. Stevie—Stephanie Marie, after Tom’s grandmother just as Ray had been named after Jessie’s grandfather—was usually a quiet child, and seemed to be absorbing the world through her large green eyes, which were just a few shades lighter than Jessie’s. Jessie had enjoyed having her around and helping at the animal hospital, but Stevie would start first grade next September—wherever they happened to end up. Because after the schools in Inferno closed and the exodus continued, the rest of Inferno’s stores and shops would shut down, and the few remaining spreads would dry up; there would be no work for Jessie, just as there would be none for Tom, and their only choice would be to pull up roots and hit the road.
She drove past Preston Park on her left, the Ringwald Drug Store, Quik-Check Grocery, and the Ice House on her right. She crossed Travis Street, almost crunching one of Mrs. Stellenberg’s big tomcats as it darted in front of the truck, and followed narrow Circle Back Road as it ran along the foot of Rocking Chair Ridge
and then, true to its name, circled back to connect with Cobre Road. She paused at the blinking yellow light before she turned west and put the pedal to the metal.
The desert’s bittersweet tang blew through the open windows in the blessed breeze. Stevie’s hair danced around her shoulders. Jessie figured this was the coolest it was likely to be all day, and they might as well enjoy it. Cobre Road took them past the chainlink fence and the iron gates of the Preston Copper Mine. The gates were padlocked, but the fence was in such bad shape an arthritic old man could’ve climbed over. Crudely lettered signs said DANGER! NO TRESPASSING! Beyond the gates was the huge crater where a red mountain rich with copper ore had once cast its shadow. In the last months of the mine’s existence, the dynamite blasts had gone off like clockwork out here, and Jessie understood from Sheriff Vance that there were still some charges in the crater that had been unexploded and left behind, but no one was crazy enough to go down in there and pull them out. Jessie knew that sooner or later the mine would be exhausted, but nobody had expected the veins of ore to fail with such startling finality. From the moment the jackhammers and bulldozers had scraped against worthless rock, Inferno had been doomed.
With a bump and shudder, the pickup’s tires passed over the railroad tracks that ran north and south from the mining complex. Stevie leaned toward the window, her back already getting damp. She caught sight of a group of prairie dogs atop the mound of their nest, standing motionless on their hind legs. A jackrabbit burst from its cover of cactus and shot across the road, and way up in the sky a vulture was slowly circling. “How’re you doing?” Jessie asked her.
“Fine.” Stevie strained against the seat belt, the wind blowing into her face. The sky was as blue as a Smurf, and it looked like it went on forever—maybe even a hundred miles. Something struck her that she’d been meaning to ask: “How come Daddy’s so sad?”
Of course Stevie had felt it, Jessie thought. There was no way for her not to. “He’s not sad, exactly. It’s because of school closing. You remember, we talked about that?”