beaded moisture on the sides running onto the porch. “What’s in the sack?”
“Vanilla ice cream.”
“You want to come in?”
“I should have called first.”
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing is going on. I thought you might like a root-beer float. It’s that kind of evening.”
“What kind?”
“When I was a kid, it was a treat to go to the A amp;W root-beer drive-in. We thought that was big stuff. Later-spring and summer evenings are the best moments in the year.”
“Come inside.”
“Another time.”
“Come inside or I’m going to kick you in the small of the back as hard as I can.”
He looked at the street in the gloaming of the day and at the darkness of the lawns in the shade, and he knew what had been bothering him since early that morning. A teenage boy on a bicycle was riding down the sidewalk, sailing a folded newspaper with the accuracy of a marksman onto each porch, whapping it solidly against the front door, the canvas bags slamming hard on his racks each time he banged over a peak in the sidewalk. The boy reminded Hackberry of himself, or maybe he reminded Hackberry of most boys of years ago, winsome in a way that was not calculated, full of expectation, full of innocent pride in their skill at lofting a tightly rolled, string- wrapped newspaper onto a front porch. But why was the boy throwing his route so late? Hackberry wondered. Why was the light so peculiar in tone-sepia-tinted, golden inside the branches of the trees, a smell like chrysanthemums pooling in the flower beds, more like autumn than spring?
“Hack?” Pam said.
“Yeah?”
“I’d really like some ice cream and root beer. It’s very thoughtful of you to bring some by. Come in, won’t you?”
Her mouth was red, her voice infused with a protective emotion that she rarely allowed anyone to see.
“Sure. That’s what I was about to do,” he replied.
She held the screen door open for him while he walked inside. He could feel her eyes slide across the side of his face when she latched the screen behind them. Then he heard her close the inside door and push the dead bolt into place.
“Why’d you do that?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“Lock the door.”
“I didn’t think about it.”
“You think Collins will come around?”
“I hope he does. Except I don’t think he’s interested in me,” she said.
“Then why did you lock the door?”
“Maybe I don’t want to be disturbed by a couple of my busybody neighbors. You’re acting a little strange, Hack.”
“It goes with my persona. The VA gave me a D-minus on normalcy fifty years ago.”
He went into the kitchen and set the root beer on the counter and put the ice cream in the freezer. His lower back felt like a junkyard that had fallen down a flight of stairs. He propped his hands on the edge of the sink and extended his legs behind him and leaned heavily on his arms, the pain slowly draining out of his spine and disappearing down the backs of his thighs into the floor. She placed her palm against the small of his back. “I hate to see you like this,” she said. “I wish it was me instead of you.”
“Like what?”
“In pain, depressed, unhappy. What did Collins say to you when he called your house?”
“It’s not what he said. It’s what he is. He loves death. That’s his edge.”
“So he’ll have a smile on his face when we blow his head off.”
“I met Jim Harrison once. He’s a novelist. He made a remark in passing that I never forgot. He said, ‘We love the earth but we don’t get to stay.’ On an evening like this, an irrefutable truth sometimes has a way of invading your soul. As a nihilist, Collins doesn’t bear that burden. He seeks the dark hole in the ground that the rest of us fear. For that reason, we have no power over him. Even in killing him, we do his will. For that reason alone, I never believed in capital punishment. You said it when we first started dealing with Collins. He wants me to be his executioner.”
She stretched her arm across his back and hooked her hand on his right shoulder and laid her face against his arm. “You were actually mad because my cousin was here?”
“No,” he lied.
“He came to borrow money. His wife left him. He’s a philanderer. No one else in the family will have anything to do with him.” She exhaled and slipped her hand under his arm and squeezed it. “You and I were born by accident in different generations, Hack. But we’re opposite sides of the same coin. Why do you keep thinking of yourself as old? You’re handsome and youthful, and your principles have never changed. Why do you think people around here respect you? It’s because from day to day you’re always the same good man, one who never goes with fashion.”
“There is no worse fate than for a young woman to marry a drunkard or an old man who is about to fall apart on the installment plan.”
“Boy, do you know how to rain on a parade.” She brushed her forehead back and forth on his shoulder. “What are we going to do, Hack?”
“About what?”
“Us.”
“You want a root-beer float?” he asked.
“I feel like running off with my cousin. I probably would if he wasn’t my cousin. I think right now I’d run off with Attila the Hun.”
“You’re the best, Pam.”
“Best what?”
“The best of everything.”
“I can’t tell you how depressed that makes me feel.”
The silence that followed seemed to envelop them, as though the inadequacy of the language they used in speaking to each other had come to define in an unalterable way the impossibility of their relationship. His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. It was R.C. “Maydeen told me to call you direct, Sheriff,” he said. “I’m down in Coahuila in kind of a cantina.”
“What are you doing in Coahuila?”
“I got a girlfriend in El Cibolo. On the way back, I blew out a tire and found out somebody had stolen my spare. I bummed a ride to this beer joint, except it’s not exactly just a beer joint. There’s some cribs in back, and up the street there’s some reg’lar hot-pillow joints that need turnstiles on the doors. There was an hombre malo in here earlier, one I couldn’t get a good look at, but he looked like he had a dent in his face. After these guys left, I asked this mulatto shooting pool who they were, and he said they were guys I shouldn’t be asking about unless I was interested in guns that went south and cocaine that went north. He also said the guy they worked for was getting his ashes hauled up the street, a joint that specializes in girls in their early teens.”
“Could the guy with the dent in his face be the one Anton Ling put a screwdriver in?”
“Maybe. He was back in the shadows, shooting pool on the edge of the light. All I could tell was that one side of his face looked caved in.”
“Are there any Mexican cops around?”
“Not unless you count the two who’re getting blow jobs out back.”
Hackberry took a notepad and a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket. “What’s the name of this place?” he said.
R.C. was having a hard time focusing on the face of the mulatto drinking next to him at the bar, not only because of the mescal he’d knocked back a shot glass at a time and chased with Corona but because the light outside and inside the cantina was unnatural and seemed out of sync with the hour of the day and the geography of
