things that he no longer possessed. The fact that he had become a slob offended him not at all.
He ate the Poor Boy slowly, in mincing bites washed down with a third stein of draught. The beer was bringing him out of it, as it usually did. He called to Sullivan for a fourth draw, and while he waited for it he decided that he was strong enough to have a cigarette; he couldn’t touch them in the mornings after a night like he’d had in Kehoe City.
He smoked two cigarettes, one each with the fourth and the fifth glasses of beer, and he was feeling straight with himself again, feeling pretty good. The headache had abated, and his gut was not giving him any more trouble. But it was time to get back, because Forester took his lunch at one-thirty and Forester had big eyes and a bigger mouth, being a bright-face. Brackeen didn’t want to antagonize Forester, you had to pamper these young shits with their new-found authority, because if they went sour on you they could make a lot of trouble. And Forester had never made a secret of the fact that he disliked—disapproved of—Brackeen.
He thought briefly about taking a couple of cans of beer back to the substation with him—Forester was going on patrol again, after his lunch—but he shelved that idea immediately. He had almost gotten caught with a half- quart in his hand that afternoon two months ago, when the county sheriff, Lydell, had come in unannounced. He had learned his lesson from that; there was no point in tempting fate, no percentage in raising already poor odds. He would be able to make it through the day now, with these five beers under his belt—and if he did begin hurting a little later on, maybe he could slip out for a couple of minutes and get back here for a bracer or two, as long as things remained quiet.
He eased off the stool and put his hat back on, adjusting the Magnum on his hip. “See you later, Sully,” he said.
“Yeah, sure.”
Brackeen smiled loosely and went out into the sweltering afternoon without touching his wallet—the final segment of the bitter ritual he and Sullivan enacted almost every day.
Six
Slowly, inexorably, the desert sun traversed its ardent path across the smoky blue heavens. When it reached the lip of the western horizon, it hung there for long minutes as if preparing itself for the descent, radiating, setting red-gold fire to the sky around it. Then, abruptly, it plunged, deepening the red haze into burnished brass, adding salmon and pink threads to the intricate color scheme of a desert sunset. The horizon swallowed it hungrily, and the empyrean modulated to blue-gray, to slate, to expanding black as the shining globe vanished completely.
The first papery whispers of the night wind stirred the mesquite, the bright gold flowers of the rabbit bush, and nocturnal animals—badgers, foxes, peccaries, coyotes, hooded skunks— ventured tentatively from their lairs in search of food and water. Bats and horned owls filled the rapidly cooling air with the flutter of wings.
Darkness hooded the land in a black cloak, and the wind grew chill as the sharp and enigmatic reversal of desert temperature manifested itself. A pale gold moon appeared suddenly in the star-pricked velvet of the sky, as if it had been launched from some immense catapult, casting ghostly white shine across the silent landscape.
Night was full-born.
Another day had perished into infinity.
One
I stand on the porch, supporting myself with my left hand on the stucco wall, and with my right I keep slapping the wood paneling of the door. Open up in there, damn you, I know you’re in there, Phyllis. Open this goddamn door!
And the door opens and she looks out at me with that patronizing, superior expression curling her soft mouth—how could I ever have loved her, how could I ever have thought she was beautiful? Her silver- streaked blond hair is freshly coiffed, even though it is past ten o’clock at night; and the floor-length blue peignoir she wears has fur at the throat and on the sleeves. I know it is expensive, I have never seen it before, she bought it with my money—and she keeps looking at me that way, her eyes reducing me to a pile of soft odorous shit and I feel the rage burning down low in my groin, the flames of it already fanned by the liquor I’ve drunk since the court hearing.
I want to hit her. I want to slap that look away. I’ve never hit her before—any woman before— but God! I want to hit her now...
“Oh, it’s you,” she says with clear distaste. “I might have known it. What do you want, Jack?”
“Want to talk to you.”
“There’s nothing more to be said.”
“Goddamn right there is, goddamn right!”
“You’re drunk,” she says, and starts to close the door.
I lean away from the wall and wedge my shoulder against the wood. She frowns, nothing more. A sculpture fashioned of glacial ice. I push the door wide, moving her backward, and stagger inside, near falling, catching myself on the table in the hall, turning. She has gone out of focus. I shake my head and rub splayed fingers over my face, the nails digging harshly into the skin, and she shimmers, three of her into two into one.
“You’re drunk,” she says again.
“Who has a better right to be drunk, you tell me that.”
“Jack, I don’t want you in my house. Now say what you came to say and get out.”
“Your house! You bitch, your house!”
“That’s right. You heard what the judge said, didn’t you?”
So sweet, so contemptuous, and I think of all the nights with her lying beneath me, warm, whispering, and inside nothing, despising me, playing out a not particularly demanding role while I burst in every way with love for her.
“It’s my house!” I shout at her. “I built this goddamn house with my money!”
“Jack, what’s the point of going over it again and again? It’s settled now. We’re divorced, the judge made a fair evaluation—”
“Fair! Oh my God, fair! He gave you everything, he gave you my guts, he made me a goddamn indentured servant!”
“You’re being melodramatic, Jack,” she says with that cold, empty rationality. “You always were childishly ineffective under stress.”
“You frigging slut!”
“Jack, Jack, I’ve heard all the words before and they don’t mean anything to me. Now please, won’t you leave? If you don’t, I’ll have to call the police, and I really don’t want to do that. Go home and go to bed. You shouldn’t drink, either, you know.”
I grow cunning. I take a step forward, with the room tilting slightly, and I point a finger at her as if it is the blade of a dagger, aiming squarely between the heavy white mounds of her breasts. “I’m not going to pay the alimony, Phyllis,” I say softly, and I smile at her with the only side of my mouth which seems to respond.
“Oh, don’t be absurd.”
“I’m not going to pay it.”
“If you don’t, you’ll go to jail.”
“They have to catch me first.”
“And just what is that supposed to imply?”
“What the hell do you think it implies, huh? I’m leaving town, I’m getting out of this state, I’m going as far away from you as I can go.”
