A World of Thieves

with hers.

All through the day, roadrunners would suddenly appear along the shoulder of the road, scooting with their long bills and tail feathers low to the ground, then veering away into the scrub. In midafternoon we spied a small herd of white-assed antelopes not a quarter-mile from the road and a pair of them butting heads. We pulled off the highway to watch them with the field glasses, and when I cut off the engine you could hear the faint smacking of their tall curved horns. We wished the bucks were distinctly different colors so we could lay bets, but it was impossible to tell them apart at that range.

We were still a couple of hours from Fort Stockton when the engine started to overheat. Luckily we came on a filling station within the next few miles, just beyond the Pecos River. I wheeled into the place with steam billowing from under the hood panels. We’d hoped the problem was nothing more than a ruptured hose but discovered it was a leak in the radiator. The station man said it would have to be soldered but he didn’t have the iron for the job. He did, however, keep a few eggs handy for such emergencies as this and he went inside and got one.

We’d uncapped the radiator to let it steam off and Buck refilled it with water. With the motor idling, the station man broke open the egg and dropped it in the radiator and put the cap back on. As the hot water circulated through the engine it cooked the egg and plugged up the leak. It was an old trick we were all familiar with, one which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. The station man said the makeshift repair should hold us till we got to the Sundowner Motor Camp and Diner about twenty miles down the highway. The place had a garage and a mechanic who lived on the premises.

We bought cold drinks and bags of potato chips. Charlie asked the station man the names of the more common plants around us. He pointed out broad-daggered yucca and skeletal ocotillo and long-stemmed lechugilla, scraggly creosote shrubs, the red tuna of the prickly pear. The tuna had spines so fine you couldn’t see them, and as Russell found out when he touched one, you can’t get those spines out even with tweezers. He’d feel their sting in his finger for days until his body finally absorbed them.

We drove on, everyone wearing dark glasses against the glare of the sun. The heat rose off the road in shimmering waves. Where the highway met the horizon behind us, a constant mirage gleamed like a pool of quicksilver.

The sun was a blinding incandescence at the ridge of the distant mountains when we spotted the Sundowner Motor Camp a mile or so ahead. A little ways beyond it stood a butte shaped exactly like a woman’s breast with an erect nipple.

“You believe that?” Buck said. The likeness was so true we thought it might’ve been sculpted by some half-crazed artist who had devoted years or maybe his whole life to the project.

I parked in front of the camp’s small garage and the mechanic came out and looked things over and said he could easy enough solder the radiator but it would have to wait till first thing in the morning. That was fine with us. Better to rest up tonight and get to Stockton feeling fresh tomorrow. We asked about the butte and he said it was a natural formation locally known as Squaw Tit Peak.

“Only one who can lay claim to that work of art is the Lord Almighty,” he said, “and He didn’t use no tools but wind and sand.”

We took our bags out of the car and went over to the office to check in. The place was run by a married couple, the wife taking care of the desk, the husband doing the cooking in the cafe. The camp had a dozen cabins and ten of them were available. We took three—one for me and Buck, one for Russell and Charlie, one for Belle. We put the bags in the cabins and then went for supper in the cafe.

When the waitress saw Belle’s face she glowered at us like she was trying to figure which one had done it to her—and looked ready to bite whoever it was. Belle read her expression and said, “These fellas are real nice. They fixed the one who…” She gestured at her bruises.

“That so?” the waitress said. “Well, I hope you all fixed the sumbitch good.”

We had big bowls of chili beans that stung our mouths, huge hamburgers with all the trimmings, baskets of thick french fries slathered with ketchup. Tall glasses of lemonade with mint and lots of crushed ice. After nothing but a nibble of breakfast and a couple of bites of a cheese sandwich for lunch, Belle finally showed an appetite. Russell nudged me and nodded at her. She was bent over her plate and wolfing the burger, the juices running out of the bun and down her wrists. Charlie and Buck were watching her too. She stopped chewing and looked up at us.

“Welcome back among the living,” Russell said.

She blushed through her bulging smile, her cheeks full of burger. Charlie reached over with a napkin and wiped a smear of mustard off her lip.

For dessert we had slabs of peach pie thick with fresh peach chunks and rich grainy sugar. Then Buck went to have a chat with the manager. In a little while he came back with the irksome news that there was no hooch to be had at this place. But an oil camp about twelve miles north was said to have its own still, and the crew was said to sometimes be of a mind to sell a little something to a fella in need.

We finished our coffee and went outside and stopped short. The whole world was steeped in a dying daylight so deeply red and darkly yellow it seemed unreal.

The manager stood in the door behind us and said, “Does it every time. I come out here from Ohio near to twenty-five years ago and still can’t believe it. It’s like the light’s made of blood and gold.”

I smiled and said, “You’re a poet, mister.”

“Not me, son,” he said. “I’m just glad to see it with my own eyes and hope to do it again tomorrow.” He flicked away his cigarette and went inside.

Buck drove off in the Model A and the rest of us went to the cabins. After a long shower and a change of clothes I went outside into the gathered darkness. The air smelled of dust and cooling stone. At the foot of a nearby rise I found a low flat boulder that made a good bench. A narrow streak of violet still showed above the western mountains, but the rest of the sky had gone black and glimmered with early stars. The first fireflies were out and flashing softly. The moon was up in the east, nearly full, the color of a new penny.

Highway traffic was sparse. You could see the lights of an approaching vehicle from a long way off before it finally went whirring by. A series of high yowls rose somewhere to the distant south, and it took me a minute to realize they must be coyotes.

“I heard them before.” I started at the sound of her voice in the darkness slightly behind me—then made out her vague silhouette about ten feet away. “Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to spook you.”

“How long you been there?” I said.

“Only a little bit.”

“I didn’t see you come out.”

“Huh?”

“Out of your room,” I said. “I didn’t see you come out.”

“Oh, you mean you didn’t see me from out here. Well, no, you couldn’t’ve seen me come out from out here. I already was.”

“What?”

“I already was out here.”

“You were already out here when I came out?”

“It’s what I just said. Is there something wrong with how I’m talking?”

“I know what you said. I mean, why didn’t you say something?”

“What do you mean? Jeepers, I did say something. I said I’d heard—”

“No, before.”

“Before when?”

“When I first came out here, goddammit. Why didn’t you say something right away instead of lurking in the dark? Jesus Christ, what a conversation.”

“You don’t have to swear at me,” she said. “And I wasn’t lurking. And I could say the same, you know—about this conversation.”

I blew a long breath, surprised at my own agitation. “Yeah,” I said. “I suppose you could.”

“All right, then,” she said.

There was a faraway keening of a train whistle. The highway lay dark in either direction.

“I didn’t say anything before,” she said, “because…well, you don’t talk as much as the others. I thought