revolver.
It's night in the dream, and L. Q and I are across the river in Mexico, where we have no authority and quarter comes only with dawn. We're dismounted, and our horses keep spooking away from the two dead drug transporters who lie in a muddy slough, their mouths and eyes frozen open with disbelief.
L.Q. pulls a pack of playing cards emblazoned with the badge of the Texas Rangers from the side pocket of his suit coat, unsnaps two cards from under the rubber band, and flicks them at the corpses.
I pull their guns apart and fling the pieces in different directions.
'The tar is still up in one of them houses. You take the left side and don't silhouette on the hill,' L.Q. says.
'Burn the field and the tar will go with it, L.Q.,' I say:
'Wind's out of the south. I'd sure hate to lose a race with a grass fire,' be says.
The houses are spread out along a low ridge, roofless, made of dried mud, their windows like empty eye sockets. My horse is belly deep in a field of yellow grass, and he skitters each time the withered husk of a poppy jitters on the stem.
The rifle fire erupts from the windows simultaneously all across the ridge. My horse rears under my thighs, and I feel myself plummeting backward into darkness, into a crush of yellow grass while tracer rounds float into the sky.
But it's they who set fire to the field, who watch it spread behind a thirty-knot wind that feeds cold air like pure oxygen into the flames. I feel my left foot squish inside my boot, feel my knee collapsing as I try to run uphill and realize that this is the place where all my roads come together, now, in this moment, that the end I never foresaw will be inside an envelope of flame, just as if I had been tied to a medieval stake.
Then I see L.Q. bent low on his mare, pouring it on through the grass, his Stetson low over his eyes, his coat flapping back from his gunbelt, his right hand extended like a rodeo pickup rider's.
I lock my forearm in his, palm against tendon, and swing up on his horse's rump, then feel the surge of muscle and power between my legs as we thunder over the top of a ridge, my arms around L. Q's waist, my boot splaying blood into the darkness, my face buried in his manly smell.
Then, as in a dream, I hear the horse's hooves splash through water and clop on stone and L.Q. holler out, 'Why, goodness gracious, it's Texas already, bud!'
chapter eight
At five-thirty Monday morning I went to Deaf Smith's sole health club, located a block off the town square in what used to be a five-and-dime store, where I worked out three times a week. I lifted in the weight room, then exercised on the benches and Nautilus machines and was headed for the steam room when I saw Mary Beth Sweeney on a StairMaster machine, by herself, at the end of a blind hallway. Her cotton sports bra was peppered with sweat, her face flushed and heated with her movement on the machine. Her curly hair stuck in strands to her cheeks.
'Good morning,' I said.
'How do you do, Mr Holland?' she said.
'Nobody calls me 'Mr Holland'… Never mind… That was impressive last night. That guy in the welding truck owes you one.'
'You stopped, didn't you?'
'Can you go to a picture show tonight?' I asked.
'Why do you keep bothering me?'
'You're a handsome woman.'
'You've got some damn nerve.'
I bounced the tip of my towel on the base of the StairMaster.
'Adios,' I said.
A half hour later I walked outside into the blue coolness of the morning, the mimosa trees planted in the sidewalks ruffling in the shadow of the buildings. Mary Beth Sweeney, dressed in her uniform, was about to get into her car. She heard me behind her, threw her canvas gym bag on the passenger's seat, and turned to face me.
'You strike me as an admirable person. I apologize for my overture, however. I won't bother you again,' I said, and left her standing there.
I walked down the street toward my car. I paused in front of the pawnshop window and looked at the display spread out on a piece of green velvet: brass knuckles, stiletto gut-rippers, barber's razors, slapjacks, handcuffs, derringers, a. 38 Special with notches filed in the grips, a 1911 model US Army. 45, and a blue-black ivory handled revolver that could have been a replica of L.Q. Navarro's.
I felt a presence on my back, like someone brushing a piece of ice between my shoulder blades. I turned around and saw Garland T. Moon watching me from the door of a bar, licking down the seam of a hand-rolled cigarette. He wore a cream-colored suit with no shirt and black prison-issue work shoes, the archless, flat-soled kind with leather thongs and hook eyelets.
I walked back to the door of the bar.
'Early for the slop chute, isn't it?' I said.
'I don't drink. Never have.'
'You following me?'
He lit the cigarette, propped one foot against the wall, inhaled the smoke and burning glue into his lungs. He cast away the paper match in the wind.
'Not even in my darkest thoughts, sir,' he said.
I headed back up the street. The three-hundred-pound black woman who owned the pawnshop was just opening up. She saw my eyes glance at her window display.
'Time to put some boom-boom in yo' bam-bam, baby,' she said. She winked and tapped her ring on the glass. 'I ain't talking about me, honey. But I 'predate the thought anyway.'
At noon I carried a ham sandwich and a glass of milk out on my back porch. Beyond the barn I saw Pete sitting on the levee that surrounded the tank.
He heard me walking toward him, but he never turned around.
'Why aren't you in school, bud?' I asked.
'Stayed home, that's why,' he said, looking out at the water.
Then I saw the discolored lump and skinned place by his eye.
'Who did that to you?' I asked.
'Man my mother brung home last night.' He picked at his fingers and flung a rock into the tank. Then he flung another one.
I sat down next to him.
'Is your mom okay?' I asked.
'She ain't got up yet. She won't be right the rest of the day.'
'Where could I find this fellow?' I said.
We went into the barn and I strapped on L.Q.' s roweled spurs and saddled my Morgan. I pulled a heavy coil of rodeo polyrope off a wood peg and hung it on the pommel. It was five-eights of an inch in diameter and had an elongated eye cinched at the tip with fine wire.
'What are we doing, Billy Bob?' Pete said.
'The man who owned these Mexican spurs, he used to tell me, 'Sometimes you've got to set people's perspective straight'.'
I put my arm down and pulled him up on the Morgan's rump.
'What's 'perspective' mean?' Pete said.
We rode through the back of my farm, crossed the creek and went up the slope through the pines. The ground was moist and netted with sunlight under the Morgan's shoes, and ahead I could see the stucco church where Pete and I went to Mass and the deserted filling station on the corner and up the dirt street an unpainted plank-walled tavern with a shingle-roof porch and boxes of petunias in the windows.
