Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set (41 page)

When Vikki rounded the next curve, the headlights of the vehicle behind her reflected off a hillside and she clearly saw the Trans Am, riding low and sleek on good tires, the engine powerful and loud and steady. She mashed on the gas, but her vehicle did not accelerate. Instead, the pistons misfired, and a balloon of black oil smoke exploded out of the exhaust pipe. She felt as though she were in a bad dream in which she knew she had to run from an enemy but her legs were knee-deep in mud.

What a fool she had been. Why hadn't she confronted the two men in front of Junior and dealt with them in front of the diner, even called the cops if she had to?

She flipped open her cell phone on her thigh, trying with her thumb to punch in the diner's number. Up ahead, she saw the Nissan parked on the side of the road, the hatch open, the father of the three-month-old baby girl on his knees, pushing a jack under the rear bumper.

She slowed and pulled in behind him. He stared up into her high beams, his face white, distorted, his eyes watering, his narrow head and long nose and greased hair like those of a man who was out of sync with his own era, a man for whom loss was a given and ineptitude a way of life. She left the parking lights on and cut the engine.

The Trans Am streaked past her, the bearded passenger giving her a double thumbs-up, his friend in the top hat bent hard over the wheel.

But the driver of the Nissan was concentrated on Vikki, still looking up at her, blinking, his eyes straining in the darkness. “Who are you?” he said.

“I saw you at the diner. You needed milk for your little girl. Are you all right?”

She was standing directly over him. He had spread a handkerchief on the gravel to kneel on but had not taken off his coat. He had just placed the jack under the rear of the car frame, but neither of the back tires appeared to be flat.

“I think I got a bubble in my tire. I could hear it slapping. They do that sometimes when they're fixing to blow,” he said. He got to his feet,
brushing at one knee. “Problem is, I forgot I don't have a spare.” Because of the grease in his hair, it looked wet-combed and shiny on his collar, as though he had just emerged from a fresh shower. There were soft lumps in his facial skin, similar in size to the bites of horseflies. He glanced over his shoulder at the empty road. In the distance, a pair of high beams bounced off a hillside into the sky. “We're at the Super 8 in town. My wife probably thinks I got kidnapped. My sister's husband has a shoe store in Del Rio. I'm supposed to go to work for him day after tomorrow.”

He waited for her to speak. The stars were smoky, like dry ice evaporating on black velvet, the wind starting to gust through an arroyo behind her. She thought she could smell night-blooming flowers, water braiding along the edge of a bleached riverbed, an alluvial fan of damp sand cut by the hoofprints and the clawed feet of animals.

“Ma'am?” he said.

She couldn't concentrate. What was he asking her? “Do you want a ride to your motel?” she said.

“Maybe I can make it. It was you I was worried about.”

“Pardon?”

“I got the sense those fellows in the Trans Am were hassling you. You know those fellows? That was them that roared on by, wasn't it?”

“I don't know who they are. Do you want a ride?”

What had he just said? He had asked about the two men in the Trans Am, but he had been looking at her, not them, when they passed. He seemed to be thinking now, with an expression like that of a fool humorously considering his alternatives at someone else's expense. The headlights that had silhouetted a hill in the distance disappeared, and the outline of the hill dissolved into the darkness. “I can limp in with this tire as it is, I guess. But it's kind of you to stop. You're mighty attractive. Not many women traveling alone would stop on the road at night to help a man in distress.”

“I hope your new job works out all right for you,” she said. She turned and walked toward her vehicle. She could feel the skin on her back twitching. Then she heard a sound that didn't belong in the situation, that didn't fit with everything the driver had told her.

He had opened a cell phone and was talking into it. She got in her
vehicle and turned the key in the ignition. The engine caught for perhaps two seconds, then coughed and died. She turned the ignition again, pumping the accelerator. The stench of gasoline from a flooded carburetor rose into her face. She turned off the ignition so she would not run down the battery. She placed her hands on the steering wheel and kept them absolutely still, making her face devoid of all expression so he could read nothing in it. He approached her window, dropping the cell phone in his coat pocket, reaching with his other hand for something stuck in the back of his belt.

She unscrewed the plastic drinking cup from the top of her thermos, then unscrewed the cap and rubber plug on the thermal insert and began pouring coffee into the cup, her heart seizing up as his silhouette filled her window.

“People call me Preacher,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Everybody has got to have a name. Preacher is mine. Step out here with me, ma'am. We have to get going pretty quick,” he said.

“In your dreams,” she said.

“I promise I'll do everything for you I can. Arguing about it won't help. Everybody gets to the barn. But for you maybe that won't necessarily have to happen tonight. You're a kind woman. I'm not forgetting that.”

She threw the coffee at him. But he saw it coming and stepped away quickly, raising one arm in front of his face. In his other hand, he held an unblued titanium revolver, one with black rubber grips. It was not much larger than his palm.

“I cain't blame you. But it's time for you to get yourself in the trunk of my automobile. I've never struck a woman. I don't want you to be the first,” he said.

She stared straight ahead, trying to think. What was it she was not seeing or remembering? Something that lay at the tips of her fingers, something that was like a piece of magic, something that God or a higher power or a dead Indian shaman out in the desert had already put at her disposal if only she could just remember what it was.

“I have nothing you want,” she said.

“You dealt the hand, woman. It's your misfortune and none of my
own,” he said, pulling open her door. “Now you slide yourself off that car seat and come along with me. Nothing is ever as bad as you think.”

Amid the litter on the floor, she felt the coldness of a metal cylinder touch her bare ankle. She reached down with her right hand and picked up the can of wasp spray, one that the manufacturer guaranteed could be fired steadily into a nest from twenty feet away. Vikki stuck the spout directly into the Nissan driver's face and pressed down the plastic button on the applicator.

A jet of foaming lead-gray viscous liquid struck his mouth and nose and both of his eyes. He screamed and began wiping at his eyes and face with his coat sleeves, spinning around, off balance, all the while trying to hold on to his pistol and open his eyes wide enough to see where she was. She got out of the car and fired the spray into his face again, backing away from him as she did, spraying the back of his head, hitting him again when he tried to turn with her. He slammed against her vehicle and rolled on the ground, thrashing his feet, dropping the revolver in the grass.

She tried to get back inside her vehicle, but he was on his hands and knees, grabbing at her ankles, his eyes blistered almost shut. She fell backward and felt her forearm come down hard on the revolver. She picked it up, gathering its cool hardness into her palm, and staggered to her feet. But he came at her again, tackling her around one leg, striking at her genitalia with one fist.

She pointed the revolver downward. It was a Smith & Wesson Airweight .38 that held five rounds. She was amazed at how light yet solid and comforting it felt in her hand. She aimed at the back of his calf and pulled the trigger. The frame bucked in her hand, and fire flew from the muzzle. She saw the cloth in his trousers jump and even smoke for a second. Then it seemed as though his entire pants leg was darkening with his blood.

But the man who called himself Preacher wasn't through. He made a grinding sound down in his throat, as though both eating his pain and energizing himself, and threw his weight against her, locking his arms around her knees. She fell in the grass and struck at his head with the revolver, lacerating his scalp, to no avail. Then she screwed the muzzle into his ear. “You want your brains on your shirt?” she said.

He didn't let go. She lowered the revolver and aimed at the top of his shoe but couldn't position her finger adequately to pull against the trigger's tension. She worked her thumb over the hammer, cocked it back, and squeezed the trigger against the guard. The barrel made a second loud pop, and a jet of blood exploded from the bottom of his shoe. He sat up on his haunches and grabbed his foot with both hands, his jaw dropping open, his face the pained red of a boiled crab.

She got into her vehicle and turned the ignition. This time the engine caught, and she dropped the transmission into low and began easing back onto the highway.

“My father was a Medicine Lodge police officer and taught me how to shoot when I was ten years old. Next time you won't get off so easy, bubba,” she said.

She flung the .38 through the passenger window into the darkness and rolled across his cell phone, crushing it into pieces. Then she pushed the accelerator to the floor, a cloud of blue-black oil smoke ballooning behind her.

N
OBODY COULD BE
this unlucky, Nick Dolan told himself. He had taken his wife and daughters and son with him to their vacation house on the Comal River, outside New Braunfels, hoping to buy time so he could figure out a way to get both Hugo Cistranos and Artie Rooney off his back—in particular Hugo, whom Nick had stiffed for the thousands he claimed Nick owed him.

His vacation home was built of white stucco and had a blue-tile roof and a courtyard with a wishing well and lime and orange trees, and terraced gardens and stone steps that descended to the riverbank. The river had a soap-rock bottom that was free of silt and was green and cold and fed by springs even in August, and pooled with shadows from the giant trees that grew along the bank. Maybe he could enjoy a few days away from problems he did not create, that no one could blame him for, and this trouble would just blow over. Why shouldn't it? Nick Dolan had never deliberately hurt anybody.

But when he looked out his window and saw a man with a shaved, waxed head stepping out of a government car, he knew the cosmic plot to make his life miserable was still in full-throttle, turbo-prop overdrive
and the Fates were about to special-deliver another fuck-you message to Nick no matter where he went.

The government man must have been at least six-four, his shoulders like concrete inside his white shirt, his forehead knurled, his eyes luminous pools behind octagon-shaped rimless glasses, eyes that Nick could only associate with space aliens.

The government man was already holding up his ID when Nick opened the door. “Isaac Clawson, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. You Nick Dolan?” he said.

“No, I just look like him and happen to live at this address,” Nick answered.

“I need a few minutes of your time.”

“For what?”

The sun was hot and bright on the St. Augustine grass, the air glistening with humidity. Isaac Clawson touched at the sweat on his forehead with the back of his wrist. In his other hand he clutched a flat, zippered portfolio, the fingers of his huge hand spread on it like banana peels. “You want to do something for your country, sir? Or would you like me to ratchet up the procedure a couple of notches, maybe introduce you to our grand-jury subpoena process?”

“What, I didn't pay into workman's comp for the guy who cuts my lawn?”

Clawson's eyes stayed riveted on Nick's. The man's physicality seemed to exude heat and repressed violence, a whiff of testosterone, an astringent tinge of deodorant. The formality and tie and white shirt and big octagon-shaped glasses seemed to Nick a poor disguise for a man who was probably at heart a bone breaker.

“My kids are playing Ping-Pong in the game room. My wife is making lunch. We talk in my office, right?” Nick said.

There was a beat. “That's fine,” Clawson said.

They walked through a foyer into an attached cottage that served as Nick's office. Down on the river, Nick could see a chain of floaters on inflated inner tubes headed toward a rapids. Nick sat in a deep leather swivel chair behind his desk, gazing abstractedly at the sets of mail-order books he had bought in order to fill the wall shelves. Clawson sat
down in front of him, his elongated torso as straight as a broomstick. Nick could feel the tension in his chest rising into his throat.

“You know Arthur Rooney?” Clawson asked.

“Everybody in New Orleans knew Artie Rooney. He used to run a detective agency. People in the graveyard knew Artie Rooney. That's 'cause he put them there.”

“Does Rooney use Thai whores?”

“How would I know?”

“Because you're in the same business.”

“I own a nightclub. I'm a partner in some escort services. If the government doesn't like that, change the law.”

“I got a short wick with people like you, Mr. Dolan,” Clawson said, unzipping the portfolio. “Take a look at these. They really don't do justice to the subject, though. You can't put the smell of decomposition in a photograph.”

“I don't want to look at them.”

“Yeah, you do,” Clawson said, rising from his chair, placing eight eight-by-ten black-and-white blowups in two rows across Nick's desktop. “The shooter or shooters used forty-five-caliber ammunition. This girl here looks like she's about fifteen. Check out the girl who caught one in the mouth. How old are your daughters?”

“This doesn't have anything to do with me.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it does. But you're a pimp, Mr. Dolan, just like Arthur Rooney. You sell disease, and you promote drug addiction and pornography. You're a parasite that should be scrubbed off the planet with steel wool.”

“You can't talk to me like that.”

“The hell I can't.”

Nick wiped the photos off his desk onto the floor. “Get out. Take your pictures with you.”

“They're yours. We have plenty more. The FBI is interviewing your strippers. I'd better not hear a story that doesn't coincide with what you've told me.”

“They're doing what? You're ICE. What are you doing here? I don't smuggle people into the country. I'm not a terrorist. What's with you?”

Clawson zipped up his empty portfolio and looked around him. “You got you a nice place here. It reminds me of a Mexican restaurant in Santa Fe where I used to eat.”

After Clawson was gone, Nick sat numbly in his swivel chair, his ears booming like kettledrums. Then he went into his wife's bathroom and ate one of her nitroglycerin pills, sure that his heart was about to fail.

 

W
HEN HIS WIFE
called him to lunch, he scooped up the photos the ICE agent had left, stuffed them into a manila envelope, and buried them in a desk drawer. At the table in the sunroom, he picked at his food and tried not to let his worry and fear and gloom show in his face.

His wife's grandparents had been Russian Jews from the southern Siberian plain, and she and their son and the fifteen-year-old twins still had the beautiful black hair and dark skin and hint of Asian features that had defined the grandmother even in her seventies. Nick kept looking at his daughters, seeing not their faces but the faces of the exhumed women and girls in the photos, smeared lipstick on one girl's mouth, grains of dirt still in her hair.

“You don't like the tuna?” Esther, his wife, said.

“The what?” he replied stupidly.

“The food you're chewing like it's wet cardboard,” she said.

“It's good. I got a toothache is all.”

“Who was that guy?” Jesse, his son, asked. He was a skinny, pale boy, his arms flaccid, his ribs as visible as corset stays. His IQ was 160. In the high school yearbook, the only entries under his picture were “Planning Committee, Senior Prom” and “President of the Chess Club.” There had been three other members of the chess club.

“Which guy?” Nick said.

“The one who looks like an upended penis,” Jesse said.

“You're not too old for a smack,” Esther said.

“He's a gentleman from Immigration. He wanted to know about some of my Hispanic employees at the restaurant,” Nick said.

“Did you pick up the inner tubes?” Ruth, one of the twins, asked.

Nick stared blankly into space. “I forgot.”

“You promised you'd go down the rapids with us,” Kate, the other twin, said.

“The water is still high. There's a whirlpool on the far end. I've seen it. It's deep right where there's that big cut under the bank. I think we should wait.”

Both girls looked dourly at their food. His could feel his wife's eyes on the side of his face. But his daughters' disappointment and his wife's implicit disapproval were not what bothered him. He knew his broken promise would result in only one conclusion: The twins would go down the rapids anyway, with high school boys who were too old for them and would gladly provide the inner tubes and the hands-on guidance. In his mind, he already saw the whirlpool waiting for his girls, white froth spinning atop its dark vortex.

“I'll get the tubes,” Nick said. “Eat your food slowly so you don't get cramps.”

He went back to his office and locked the door. What was he going to do? He couldn't even think of a way to safely dispose of the photographs, at least not in the daylight. ICE had his name, Hugo Cistranos was circling him like a shark, and his conscience was pulsing like an infected gland. He couldn't think of one person on earth he could call upon for help.

He sat at his desk, his face in his hands. How long would it be before Hugo Cistranos was at his door, demanding his money, implying Nick was a coward, making remarks about his nicotine habit, his weight, his bad eyesight, his inability to deal with the catastrophe his careless words “Wipe the slate clean” had created?

To sit and wait for misfortune to befall him was insane. He had heard over and over about people “surrendering” control during times of adversity. Screw that. He thumbed through his Rolodex and punched a number into his desk phone.

“How'd you get this number?” a voice with a New Orleans accent said.

“You gave it to me, Artie.”

“Then fuck me.”

“Hugo Cistranos says you offered him your Caddy to clip me.”

“He's lying. I value my Caddy. It's a collectible.”

“Hugo is lots of things, but a liar isn't one of them.”

“You should know. Hugo is your employee, not mine. I don't hire psychopaths.”

“I'm not guilty of what you think.”

“Yeah? What might that be? What might you be guilty of, Nicholas?”

Nick could hear the telephone wires humming in the silence.

“You don't want to say? I don't think there's a tap on my line. If you can't wash your sins with your old podna Artie Rooney, who can you trust, Nicholas?”

“It's Nick. You told Hugo my family name was Dolinski?”

“It's not?”

“Yeah, it is, because my grandfather had to change it so him and his family didn't end up in a soap dish. They had to change it so the anti-Semite Irish cocksuckers in Roosevelt's State Department wouldn't shut them out of the country.”

“That's a heartbreaking story, Nick. Maybe you could sell it as one of those docudramas? Didn't your grandfather used to sell shoestrings door-to-door along Magazine?”

“That's right, with Tennessee Williams. They also ran a soup kitchen together in the Quarter. His name is in a couple of books about Tennessee Williams.”

Nick could hear Artie laughing. “Your grandfather and a world-famous country singer sold soup to winos? Famous, rich guys do that a lot,” Artie said. “When you're in Houston or Big D, drop around. Life is no fun without you. By the way, tell Hugo he owes me. For that matter, so do you.”

The line went dead.

 

N
ICK DETERMINED THAT
his angst and funk would not control the rest of his day. He rented huge fat inner tubes in town, big enough to float a piano on. He stopped by the bakery and bought a carrot cake glazed with white icing and scrolled with chains of pink and green flowers. He packed a half-gallon of peach ice cream in dry ice. He put on a pair of beach sandals and scarlet rayon boxing trunks that hung to his
knees, and walked his children down to the riverside and ran a long nylon cord through all the tubes, lacing them together so they would not become separated as they floated downstream toward the rapids.

Nick was first in the chain, ensconced in his tube, his skin fish-belly white, wraparound black Ray-Bans on his face. The shade trees slid by overhead, the sunlight spangling in their leaves. He laid his neck on the rubber, its warm petrochemical smell somehow comforting, the current tickling his spine, his wrists trailing in the water. Up ahead was a partial dam that channeled the current through a narrow opening. He could hear the sound of the rapids growing in volume and intensity and feel the tug of the river redirecting his course.

Suddenly, he and his children were sliding with the waves through the gap, rocketing through white water and geysers of foam, their own happy screams joining those of the other floaters, the sun overhead as blinding as an arc welder's torch.

The whirlpool by the deep cut under the embankment disappeared behind them, powerless to reach out and draw Nick's family into its maw.

They dragged their tubes out on the shoals and paid a kid with a truck to drive them upstream so they could refloat the river. They stayed in the water until sunset, whipping through the rapids like old pros. At the end of the day, Nick was glowing with sunburn, his hair and oversize boxing trunks gritty with sand, his heart swelling with pride in himself and in his children and the things he owned and the good life he had been able to provide for his family.

They ate the cake and peach ice cream on a blanket next to the river while the sun burned away to a tiny spark inside rain clouds in the west. He could smell the odor of charcoal lighter and meat fires on the breeze, and see Japanese lanterns strung through his neighbor's trees and hear music from a lawn party someone was hosting on the opposite side of the river. The summer light was trapped high in the sky, as though nature had set its own rules into abeyance. Somehow the season had become eternal, and somehow all of Nick's concerns with mortality had been emptied from his life.

He walked his children back up the stone steps to his house, then
went into his office, removed the manila folder of photographs from his desk, and picked up a can of charcoal lighter and a book of matches from beside his barbecue pit. When he returned to the riverbank, the sky was purple, the sky filled with birds that seemed to have no place to land, and he thought he smelled gas in the trees. The surface of the river seemed thicker, its depths colder. The blue-green lawn of the house across the water was now littered with beer cups and paper plates, the band still playing, like a radio someone had forgotten to turn off.

The sunburn on his face and under his armpits ached miserably. He pulled the photos from the envelope, rolled them into a cone, and squirted charcoal lighter along their sides and edges. When he struck a paper match and touched it to the fluid, the fire crawled quickly up the cone to his fingers. He tried to separate the photos and keep them burning without dropping them or injuring his hand. Instead, they spilled into the grass, the faces of all the women and girls staring up at him, the heat blackening the paper in the center, curling the photos' edges, dissolving hair and tissue and eyes and teeth inside a chemical flame.