slither their suction cups around. When he returned home from work, he found an envelope stuck in his doorjamb. Inside was a silver-edged sheet of stationery folded crisply through the center. The note on it was written in bright blue ink, in a flowing calligraphy, the curlicues fading into wispy threads. It read: Dear Sheriff Holland, Congratulations on all your political success. My father always spoke fondly of you and I’m sure he would be very proud of you. Forgive me for dropping by without calling first, but your number was unlisted. Call my car phone if you can have drinks or dinner, or I’ll try to drop by later or at your office. With kindest regards,
Temple Dowling
Unconsciously, Hackberry glanced over his shoulder after reading the note, as though an old adversary lay just beyond the perimeter of his vision. Then he went into the house and tore the note and envelope into four pieces, then tore them again and dropped them in the kitchen waste can and washed his hands in the sink.
It was easier to cleanse his skin than rinse his memory of Temple’s father, United States Senator Samuel Dowling. And Hackberry’s thoughts about the senator were uncomfortable not because the senator had been mean-spirited and corrupt to the core, but because Hackberry, when he ran for Congress, had, of his own choosing, fallen under the senator’s control.
The 1960s had been a transitional time in Texas’s political history. Hispanic farmworkers were unionizing, and huge numbers of black people had been empowered by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Hackberry had watched the changes take place from a distance, at least when he wasn’t driving across the river to the brothels in Coahuila or Nuevo Leon, or staining the shaved ice in a tall glass one jigger at a time, with four inches of Jack Daniel’s, adding a sprig of mint and a teaspoon of sugar, just before taking the first drink of the day, one that rushed through his body with the intensity of an orgasm. Both the Democratic ticket and Hackberry’s first wife, Verisa, were delighted at the prospect of a handsome, towering war hero representing their district. Hackberry soon discovered that his addiction to whiskey and the embrace of a Mexican girl’s thighs didn’t hold a candle to the allure of celebrity and political power.
The attraction was not entirely meretricious in nature. Couched inside the vulgarity and the crassness of the new rich who surrounded him, and the attempts at manipulation of the sycophants, were moments that made him feel he was genuinely part of history. For good or bad, he had become a player in the Jeffersonian dream, a decorated former navy corpsman from a small Texas town about to take up residence at the center of the republic. Maybe Jefferson’s dream had been tarnished, but that did not mean it was lost, he had told himself. Even George Orwell, describing a Spanish troop train leaving a station on its way to the front while brass bands were blaring and peasant girls were throwing flowers, had said that maybe there was something glorious about war after all.
Hackberry remembered one balmy summer night of the campaign in particular. He had been standing on a balcony at the Shamrock Hotel in Houston, wearing only a bathrobe, a tumbler of whiskey and ice in one hand. Far below, columns of electric light glowed beneath the surface of a swimming pool built in the shape of a four-leaf clover. Across the boulevard, in a strange blend of the rural South and the New American Empire, oil wells pumped up and down- clink, clank, clink, clank -like the steady and predictable rhythm of lovers copulating, while cattle grazed nearby in belly-deep grass and thunder leaked from banks of black- and plum-colored rain clouds overhead.
The hotel had been built by a notorious wildcatter who sometimes came into the Shamrock Room and got into brawls with his own patrons, wrecking the premises and adding to a mythos that told all of its adherents they, too, could become denizens of the magic kingdom, if only the dice toppled out of the cup in the right fashion. In forty-five minutes Hackberry was to address a banquet hall filled with campaign donors who could buy third-world countries with their credit cards. When he was in their midst, he sometimes had glimpses in his mind of a high school baseball pitcher who resembled him and who took a Mexican girl to a drive-in theater in 1947, knowing that as soon as he went into the restroom, he would be beaten senseless. But Hackberry did not like to remember the person he used to be. Instead, he had made a religion out of self-destruction and surrounded himself with people he secretly loathed.
On that balcony high above the pool, he had not heard the senator walk up behind him. The senator had cupped his palm around the back of Hackberry’s neck, massaging the muscles as a father might do to his son. “Are you nervous?” the senator had said.
“Should I be?”
“Only if you plan to tell them the truth.”
“What is the truth, Senator?”
“That the world we live in is a sweet, sweet sewer. That most of them would drink out of a spittoon rather than give up their access to the wealth and power you see across the boulevard. That they want to own you now so they don’t have to rent you later.”
Hackberry had drunk from the tumbler, the ice cubes clattering against the glass, the palm fronds moving in the breeze down below, the warmth of the whiskey slowing his heart like an old friend reassuring him that the race was not to the swift. “Telling the truth would be my greatest sin? That’s an odd way of looking at public service, don’t you think?”
“There’s a far graver sin.”
“What would that be?”
“You already know the answer to that one, Hack.”
“A worse sin would be disloyalty to someone who has reached out and anointed me with a single touch of his finger on my brow?” Hackberry had said.
“That’s beautifully put. Your wife said you bedded a Mexican whore in Uvalde last night.”
“That’s not true. It was in San Antonio.”
“Oh, that’s good. I have to remember that one. But no more local excursions. There will be time enough for that when you get to Washington. Believe it or not, it will be there in such abundance that you’ll eventually grow bored with it, if you haven’t already. Usually, when a man of your background screws down, he’s not seriously committed to infidelity. It’s usually an act of anger rather than lust. A bit of trouble at home, that sort of thing. It beats getting drunk. Is that the case with the girl in San Antonio?”
Hackberry had not answered.
“Fair enough. There’s no shame in having a vice. It’s what makes us human,” the senator had said. Then he had patted Hackberry gingerly on the back of the head, after first leaning over the rail and spitting, even though people were eating at poolside tables directly below.
Those moments on the balcony and the touch of the senator’s hand on his head had remained with Hackberry like a perverted form of stigmata for over four decades.
An hour after tearing up the message left by Temple Dowling, Hackberry glanced through the front window and saw a man park a BMW at the gate and walk up the flagstones to the gallery. The visitor had thick silver-and- black hair and lips that were too large for his mouth. He was carrying an ice bucket with a dark green bottle inserted in it. Hackberry opened the door before his uninvited guest could ring the bell.
“Hello, Sheriff. Did you find my note?”
“Yes, sir, you’re Mr. Dowling. Leave the bucket and the bottle on the gallery and come in.”
“Excuse me?”
“Guests in my home drink what I have or they don’t drink at all.”
“I was supposed to meet a lady friend, but she stood me up. I hate to see a good bottle of wine go to waste. My father said you used to have quite a taste for it.”
“You want to come in, sir?”
“Thank you. And I’ll leave my bucket behind.” Dowling stepped inside and sat down in a deep maroon leather chair and gazed through the picture window, patting the tops of his thighs, a thick gold University of Texas class ring on his left hand. He wore a gray suit and a tie that was as bright as a halved pomegranate. But it was the composition of his face that caught the eye-the large lips, the pink cheeks and complexion that looked as though they had been dipped out of a cosmetics jar, the heavy eyelids that seemed translucent and were flecked with tiny vessels. “What a lovely view. The hills in front of your house remind me of-”
“Of what?”
“A Tahitian painting. What was his name? Gauguin? He was big on topless native women.”
“I haven’t studied on it.”
Temple Dowling smiled, his fingers knitting together.
“Do I amuse you, sir?” Hackberry said.
