and each time he relived the scene—saw the black hole of the automatic staring at him, death staring at him—he broke out in a cold sweat and began trembling and felt the fear squeezing painfully at his genitals. He took out his gun two dozen times in those three days and held it in his hands two dozen times, and two dozen times he had to put it away because the sight of it, the feel of it, made him sick to his stomach. And when he slept, he dreamed of a scythe blade descending and fleshless fingers beckoning and Coretti pointing at him, saying his name again and again through the gaping, bleeding hole in what had once been his face ...
Brackeen went back on duty the fourth day—the day Feldman tried to shoot it out with a team of detectives from the Fresno force and died with nine bullets in his head and torso and a .32 Iver-Johnson back-up gun in his pocket, which a later ballistics report proved was the weapon that had killed Coretti. But it was no good. He could not face his fellow workers any more than he had been able to face himself, despite their sympathy or perhaps because of it. He stuck it out for two weeks, and at the end of that time he knew he was finished as an efficient big-city cop, knew that he would never again be able to face a gun—perhaps not even to use one in any kind of tight situation—without the shaking and the sweating and the petrifying fear. He was a coward, deep down where a man lived he was rancid jelly, and Coretti’s death was a crushing weight on him; he could not take the chance of crapping out in some future crisis, and possibly having the blood of another good cop on his hands and on his soul. He loved police work, he had been born to it; but knowing what he now knew about himself, he simply could not continue.
And so he resigned from the force, quietly, and everyone seemed to understand without anything being said. After a few aimless months in the Bay Area, during which he found and lost several jobs—always for the same reason: listlessness and inattentiveness and disinterest—he drifted south. A year in Los Angeles working the produce market, six months in Dago as a hod carrier, and then, finally, the desert and Cuenca Seco and Marge and marriage. He worked in the freight yards in Kehoe City for a while, and when Marge’s uncle offered him a job in his feed store, Brackeen accepted that.
He had no intention of taking on the resident deputy’s position when it came up. Marge had managed to pry loose from him at one time or another the fact that he had once been a cop, but that was all of his past he would reveal to her; she told her uncle about it, and the uncle had some kind of political pull with the county and offered to finagle the job for Brackeen if he wanted it. Brackeen said no, and he meant it at first; but they worked on him, Marge and the uncle, reminding him of how unhappy he was at the feed store, chipping away at his resistance in a dozen little ways. He began to think about it, and the cop in him—a thing that, like the shame and the guilt, had not died over the years—forced him eventually into doing some checking on the resident’s duties. They consisted, he learned, mostly of sitting behind a desk, making routine patrols, and administering traffic tickets—no hassles, no problems, no crises to face, no partners to watch out for. He wondered if he could wear a gun again. He went with the uncle to the substation in Cuenca Seco and strapped one of the Magnums on and took it out and held it in his hands. Something stirred deep within him, but he did not tremble and he did not sweat and he did not feel sick at his stomach. As long as he wasn’t forced to use it, he thought, he might be all right.
He took the job.
And here he was.
Brackeen lay in the early-morning darkness, the warm pressure of Marge’s hip against his thigh, and thought it all through again for the first time in a decade.
He did not want to think about it, and yet his mind dwelled on it just the same. There was no pain now; time had put a thick skin over the wound even though it had failed to heal it. But what there was, was a deep feeling of incompletion, a kind of vague hunger that seemed to have always been there, unfulfilled. The same emptiness he had experienced that afternoon in Sullivan’s Bar. The past was touching him again, as it had not touched him in a long time, and the ghosts of pride and manhood haunted him vaguely, like wraiths half-felt in the darkness, never quite manifesting themselves and yet never quite vanishing either.
It was this goddamn killing that was responsible; he couldn’t get it out of his head, he couldn’t combat the perverse mental involvement in it. It was as if, strangely, it was a personal thing, demanding his intervention, demanding a commitment on his part that he had been unable and unwilling to make since that cold, wet February night when a part of him died along with Bob Coretti. And he didn’t know why; the reason for it was an enigma that he could not solve.
Brackeen turned his head on the pillow and looked at the luminescent dial of the clock on the bedside table. Five A.M. Another hour and a half before the alarm would ring. Another three hours before he was due at the substation to assign Forester some innocuous paperwork. This was one of the days, of which there were two in each week, when county policy dictated a reversal of roles: the bright-face would sit behind a desk and Brackeen would make the routine patrols. The idea was to give the assistant deputies a taste of office duty, while the residents kept abreast of their districts on the outside. Brackeen had always disliked the patrolling—it reminded him, in an ephemeral but uncomfortable sense, of the days and nights he and Coretti had cruised the Potrero in San Francisco—and the prospect of it on this day was even more unappealing. He wanted to know what was happening in Kehoe City and in the capital on the Perrins thing; he wanted to know what the fingerprint and personal background checks had turned up; he wanted to tell Lydell and the State Highway Patrol investigators what he thought and to make some recommendations and to hell with rocking the boat. Damn it, he wanted to be involved in it.
Even though he did not want to be involved in it.
The ambivalence was so strong in him, so frustrating in him, that it was almost like physical pain.
Two
Dawn.
On the desert, the first light is silvery and cold. The moon and the stars fade as darkness recedes, and the quiet is absolute, almost eerie. Then, slowly, magically, the silver becomes gold and the sun peeks almost shyly between distant mountain crests. There is warmth in the air again as the long shadows of towering saguaros stretch across the desert floor, as the grotesquely beautiful rock formations turn the color of flame.
Once again the light changes, becoming a brilliant yellow-white, as the sun reveals more of itself on the eastern horizon. The stillness is broken now by the chattering of quail, by a half-muffled burst of machine-gun fire that is nothing more than the cry of a cactus wren. The desert begins to shimmer with heat and mirage, and as the temperature rises with the sun and the glare increases, human vision once again blurs and there is no more softness, no more beauty, no more serenity to the land. Illusion is consumed by reality, and reality is a middle-aged whore at high noon: coarse, ugly, and uncompromising.
The runners are there, running there, running since that first silvery light, running now through a sea of cactus—barrel, agave, saguaro, prickly pear, cholla, beavertail. Thorns like tiny needles, like slender jade daggers, like gleaming stilettos rip at their skin, at their clothing, inflicting painful but half-noticed scratches and punctures that bleed for a moment and then dry up almost immediately. They are three-quarters of the way across, and their momentary objective—a low butte—looms reddish-brown and barren in the climbing sun.
They are no longer running blind, they have a direction now. North. Cuenca Seco or the county highway or perhaps even the dead-end road. It is the best choice in spite of the fact that it is the obvious one, this is what Delaney—is that really his name? —told Jana in the fort this morning. She does not know if he is right but she has to believe in him because there is no one else to believe in in the suddenly miniaturized confines of her world. She no longer hates him. Like her, he is here as a result of cruel and bitter circumstance; the fault is not his, there is no fault. She does not want to be alone and she does not want to die out here, even though she is very certain that she is going to die out here. But hope is the foundation of sanity, and there is hope even in the most fatalistic of men if that man is sane. Let the fearful be allowed to hope. To the last breath, to the bitter end, to the final revelation. Ovid said it and Aristotle said it and the New Testament said it and now Jana Hennessey is saying it.
I’m keeping the faith, baby; I’ve got hope.
Her mind is touched by these random thoughts, and random others, as she runs. She wonders what Harold Klein will say when he learns of her death. What Don Harper will say. Even what Ross Phalen at Nabob Press will say. She wonders if there will be much pain or if it will be over quickly. She wonders if God is alive and if He is, what Heaven is like; she has sinned, yes, many times in many ways but she does not believe in the existence of an
