river that was as red as the blood of Christ. How many men with his background could say the same? And he had done it all without therapists or psychiatrists or titty-baby twelve-step groups.
But his self-manufactured accolades brought him no solace. He had been bested by Sheriff Holland’s chief deputy and, in a perverse way, had enjoyed it. He had been threatened with bodily harm by the sheriff, as though he were white trash. And while all this was happening, an Oriental woman was openly aiding the wets and getting christened for her efforts as La Magdalena. Anything wrong with this picture?
Maybe it was time to let Miss Chop Suey 1969 know who her neighbors were.
In the fading twilight he drove in his pickup down the long, tire-worn dirt track that traversed the valley from his house to the county road that eventually led to the southern end of the Asian woman’s property. He passed two abandoned oil storage tanks that had turned to rust, a burned-out shack where a deranged tramp sometimes stayed, and a private airstrip blown with tumbleweed, the air sock bleached of color. He turned onto the Asian woman’s property and passed a paint-skinned gas-guzzler driven by two men who were sitting on a hillside, staring north at the Asian woman’s compound. They were smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and wore new straw hats and boots that were curled up at the toes. One of them pulled on a bottle that had no label, and gargled with whatever was inside before he swallowed. The other man, the taller of the two, had a pair of binoculars hanging from his neck. His shirt was open on his chest, and his skin looked as brown and smooth as clay from a riverbank. Cody Daniels nodded at him but didn’t know why. The man either ignored or took no notice of Cody’s gesture.
If you want to live in this country, why don’t you show some manners? Cody thought.
He drove between the gateless walls of the Asian woman’s compound and was surprised by what he saw. Mexicans were eating from paper plates on the gallery and the front steps and at a picnic table under a willow in the middle of the yard. Obviously, no effort was being made to conceal their presence. He got down from his truck and immediately saw the Asian woman staring at him from the gallery. She was the only person among all the people there who looked directly at him. She stepped into the yard and walked toward him, her eyes never losing contact with his. He felt himself clear his throat involuntarily.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Introducing myself. I live up yonder, in the bluffs. I’m Reverend Cody Daniels, pastor of the Cowboy Chapel.”
“I know who you are. You’re a nativist and not here on a good errand.”
“A what?”
“State your business.”
“Who are all these people?”
“Friends of mine.”
“Got their papers, do they?”
“Why don’t you ask them?”
“I don’t speak Spanish.”
“You have a cell phone?”
“Yeah, I do, but the service isn’t real good here. Want to borrow it?” He felt the open door of his truck hit him in the back.
“Either call 911 or leave.”
“I didn’t come here to cause trouble.”
“I think you did.”
“I try to save souls, just like you. I saw y’all from my deck up there, that’s all. I got a telescope. I’m an amateur astronomer.”
She stepped closer to him. “Let me see your hands.”
“Ma’am?”
“I won’t hurt you.”
“I know that,” he said, half laughing.
“Then let me see your hands.”
He held them out, palms up, in front of her. But then she turned them over and moved her thumbs across the scar tissue on the back of his fingers. “You were in prison, weren’t you?” she said.
“I don’t know if I’d call it prison.” He paused. “I was on a county farm in New Mexico when I was a boy.”
“You had your tattoos removed when you came out?”
“I did it myself. Burned them off with acid and took out the leftover flesh with nail clippers.” He started to pull his hands away from her, but she held on to them. He grinned. “I know what you’re gonna say. You’re gonna tell me I had ‘love’ and ‘hate’ on my fingers, aren’t you? Well, I didn’t. I guess that shows how much you know.”
“No, you had the letters B-O-R-N tattooed on your left hand, the letter T on your left thumb, the letter O on your right thumb, and L-O-S-E on your right hand. Who taught you such a terrible concept about yourself?”
“I had no such thing on there.”
“Why do you feel guilty over things that weren’t your fault? You were just a boy. People hurt you and tried to rob you of your innocence. You don’t have to be ashamed of what happened to you. You don’t have to be afraid of people who look different or speak a different language.”
He felt himself swallowing. Through the wetness in his eyes, he saw the people in the yard and on the steps and gallery shimmer and go in and out of focus. “I’m not afraid of anything. If I ever catch up with the sonsofbitches who did what they did, you’ll see how afraid I am.”
She squeezed both of his hands tightly in hers. “You have to forgive them.”
He tried to pull away from her again, but she held on. He said, “I hope those men go to hell. I hope they burn from the top down and the bottom up. I hope Satan himself pours liquid fire down their throats.”
“Would you drink poison in order to get even with others?”
“Sell that Dr. Phil douche rinse to somebody else. They draped me across a sawhorse. I was seventeen. You ever been raped? You wouldn’t be so damn quick to advise if you had.”
“Stay and eat with us.”
“Are you out of your mind, woman? Let go of me.”
But she didn’t. She squeezed his hands tighter, her face staring intently up into his. He freed one of his hands and used it to pull her other hand off his and fling it from him. He got into his truck and started the engine and rammed the transmission into reverse. He steered by glancing over his shoulder, the pedal to the floor, scouring dirt out of the yard, so he would not have to look into the Asian woman’s face again.
How had she gotten into his head? How did she know his history with such accuracy? He had always claimed he could read people’s thoughts. But that wasn’t true. He could read personalities, character traits, and especially secret designs that hid in the eyes of a manipulator. Every survivor could. That was how you became a survivor. But she was the real thing. She had seen into his past in a way no one ever had, and that thought made him grind his molars.
The purple haze he had seen earlier had spread across the valley floor, and he had to turn on his headlights to see his way down the dirt track to the county road. He had forgotten about the two Mexicans who had been smoking on the hillside earlier; he had even temporarily forgotten the rudeness one of them had shown Cody when he tried to say hello. The two men had gotten back into the gas-guzzler, and evidently had decided to stop and urinate at a spot where the dirt track was pinched on either side by big piles of rock.
He slowed his pickup and hit his high beams, drenching the two figures with an electric brilliance, carving their rounded spines, their splayed knees, the cupping of their phalluses, the amber arc of their urination out of the darkened landscape.
The license plate on the gas-guzzler was dented and filmed with a patina of dried mud and attached to the bumper with coat-hanger wire. Cody could see COAHUILA at the bottom of the plate. He mashed on his horn, holding the button down, clicking his high beams on and off, while the two men stuffed their phalluses back in their pants, their eyes glinting like glass.
The shorter of the two men walked toward Cody’s truck, shielding his eyes from the glare with one hand. His jaw was as heavy-looking as a mule’s shoe, his forehead ridged like a washboard, his hair and chin stubble the color of rust. “You got a problem, chico?” he said.
“ Chico?” Cody said.
“That means ‘boy,’” the man with orange hair said. “You got a problem, chico boy?”
