"He fought Franco's fascists in Spain. That's a peculiar way to show envy."
"What's your purpose here?"
"Your daughter is haunted by something in the past she can't tell anybody about. It's connected to the Hanged Man in the Tarot. I wonder if it's Jack Flynn's death that bothers her."
He curled the tips of his fingers against his palm, as though trying to rub the machinist's oil off them, looking at them idly.
"She killed her cousin when she was fifteen. Or at least that's what she's convinced herself," he said. He saw my expression change, my lips start to form a word. "We had a cabin in Durango at the foot of a mountain. They found the key to my gun case and started shooting across a snowfield. The avalanche buried her cousin in an arroyo. When they dug her out the next day, her body was frozen upright in the shape of a cross."
"I didn't know that, sir."
"You do now. I'm going in to eat directly. Would you care to join us?"
When I walked to my truck I felt like a man who had made an obscene remark in the midst of a polite gathering. I sat behind the steering wheel and stared at the front of the Terrebonne home. It was encased in shadow now, the curtains drawn on all the windows. What historical secrets, what private unhappiness did it hold? I wondered if I would ever know. The late sun hung like a shattered red flame in the pine trees.
TWENTY
I REMEMBER A CHRISTMAS DAWN five years after I came home from Vietnam. I greeted it in an all-night bar built of slat wood, the floor raised off the dirt with cinder blocks. I walked down the wood steps into a deserted parking area, my face numb with alcohol, and stood in the silence and looked at a solitary live oak hung with Spanish moss, the cattle acreage that was gray with winter, the hollow dome of sky that possessed no color at all, and suddenly I felt the vastness of the world and all the promise it could hold for those who were still its children and had not severed their ties with the rest of the human family.
Monday morning I visited Megan at her brother's house and saw a look in her eyes that I suspected had been in mine on that Christmas morning years ago.
Had her attackers held her underwater a few seconds more, her body would have conceded what her will would not: Her lungs and mouth and nose would have tried to draw oxygen out of water and her chest and throat would have filled with cement. In that moment she knew the heartbreaking twilight-infused beauty that the earth can offer, that we waste as easily as we tear pages from a calendar, but neither would she ever forget or forgive the fact that her reprieve came from the same hands that did Indian burns on her skin and twisted her face down into the silt.
She was living in the guest cottage at the back of Cisco's house, and the French doors were open and the four-o'clocks planted as borders around the trees were dull red in the shade.
"What's that?" she said.
I lay a paper sack and the hard-edged metal objects inside it on her breakfast table.
"A nine-millimeter Beretta. I've made arrangements for somebody to give you instruction at the firing range," I said.
She slipped the pistol and the unattached magazine out of the sack and pulled back the slide and looked at the empty chamber. She flipped the butterfly safety back and forth.
"You have peculiar attitudes for a policeman," she said.
"When they deal the play, you take it to them with fire tongs," I said.
She put the pistol back in the sack and stepped out on the brick patio and looked at the bayou with her hands in the back pockets of her baggy khaki pants.
"I'll be all right after a while. I've been through worse," she said.
I stepped outside with her. "No, you haven't," I said.
"Excuse me?"
"It only gets so bad. You go to the edge, then you join a special club. A psychologist once told me only about three percent of the human family belongs to it."
"I think I'll pass on the honor."
"Why'd you come back?"
"I see my father in my sleep."
"You want the gun?"
"Yes."
I nodded and turned to go.
"Wait." She took her eyeglass case out of her shirt pocket and stepped close to me. There was a dark scrape at the corner of her eye, like dirty rouge rubbed into the grain. "Just stand there. You don't have to do anything," she said, and put her arms around me and her head on my chest and pressed her stomach flat against me. She wore doeskin moccasins and I could feel the instep of her foot on my ankle.
The top of her head moved under my chin and against my throat and the wetness of her eyes was like an unpracticed kiss streaked on my skin.
RODNEY LOUDERMILK HAD LIVED two weeks on the eighth floor of the old hotel that was not two blocks from the Alamo. The elevator was slow and throbbed in the shaft, the halls smelled bad, the fire escapes leaked rust down the brick sides of the building. But there was a bar and grill downstairs and the view from his window was magnificent. The sky was blue and salmon-colored in the evening, the San Antonio River lighted by sidewalk restaurants and gondolas that passed under the bridges, and he could see the pinkish stone front of the old mission where he often passed himself off as a tour guide and led college girls through the porticoed walkways that were hung with grapevines.
He was blind in one eye from a childhood accident with a BB gun. He wore sideburns and snap-button cowboy shirts with his Montgomery Ward suits. He had been down only once, in Sugarland, on a nickel-and-dime burglary beef that had gone sour because his fall partner, a black man, had dropped a crowbar off the roof through the top of a greenhouse.
But Rodney had learned his lesson: Stay off of roofs and don't try to turn watermelon pickers into successful house creeps.
The three-bit on Sugarland Farm hadn't been a wash either. He had picked up a new gig, one that had some dignity to it, that paid better, that didn't require dealing with fences who took him off at fifteen cents on the dollar. One week off the farm and he did his first hit. It was much easier than he thought. The target was a rancher outside Victoria, a loudmouth fat shit who drove a Cadillac with longhorns for a hood ornament and who kept blubbering, "I'll give you money, boy. You name the price. Look, my wife's gonna be back from the store. Don't hurt her, okay…" then had started to tremble and messed himself like a child.
"That goes to show you, money don't put no lead in your pencil," Rodney was fond of telling his friends.
He also said the fat man was so dumb he never guessed his wife had put up the money for the hit. But Rodney let him keep his illusions. Why not? Business was business. You didn't personalize it, even though the guy was a born mark.
Their grief was their own, he said. They owed money, they stole it, they cheated on their wives. People sought justice in different ways. The state did it with a gurney and a needle, behind a viewing glass, while people watched like they were at an X-rated movie. Man, that was sick.
Rodney showered in the small tin stall and put on a fresh long-sleeve shirt, one that covered the tattooed chain of blue stars around his left wrist, then looked at his four suits in the closet and chose one that rippled with light like a sheet of buffed tin. He slipped on a new pair of black cowboy boots and fitted a white cowboy hat on his head, pulling the brim at an angle over his blind eye.
All you had to do was stand at the entrance to the Alamo and people came up and asked you questions. Clothes didn't make the person. Clothes were the person, he told people. You ever see a gun bull mounted on horseback without a hat and shades? You ever see a construction boss on a job without a clipboard and hard hat and a pocketful of ballpoints? You ever see a hooker that ain't made up to look like your own personal pinball machine?