despair so intense that he could feel himself walking through a door into a place where nothing mattered anymore. “I just remembered what you look like. I couldn’t think of it. But it’s real clear in my head now,” he said, breathing hard through his mouth.
“Why you always got to talk, man? You are like a woman, always talking, filling the air with sounds that grate on the ear.”
“I couldn’t remember what you remind me of. At the cantina I was thinking about it, but I couldn’t get it straight in my head because I drank too much.”
“What I remind you of?”
“An orange Brillo pad. Those steel-wool pads women use to clean grease and fish skins and fried crud out of skillets. After a while, the pads turn orange and blue with soap and rust and all the glop that’s glommed up inside them.”
“That’s what I look like?”
“Yes, sir, I’d call it a match.”
“Be quiet,” Negrito said, rising to his feet.
“Like my mother says, looks is only skin deep.”
“ Silencio, foolish boy who does not hear or listen.”
R.C. realized his tormentor was not interested in deflecting insults and that he had heard something out in the darkness. Negrito walked up the incline, away from the dry wash and the row of graves and the greasewood and the stunted willows along the bank and the tortoise-shaped sandstone boulders that were weathered through with holes the length of a man’s arm. “Is that you out there, Mr. Crazy Man?” he said. “You want to fight Negrito? Come down and fight. I don’t fear you.”
R.C. watched, stupefied.
“The gringos fear you! But I don’t!?Me cago en la puta de tu madre! I take a shit in your mother’s womb. How you like that?” Negrito said.
“Who you talking to?”
Negrito said nothing in answer to R.C. He was standing on a slab of stone that was tilted upward on the slope, one pointy cowboy boot stationed in front of the other, his shoulders humped, his. 45 hanging from his right hand. In profile, his right eye seemed to watch both the hillside and R.C. simultaneously, the way a shark’s eye views everything in its ken, both enemy and prey, revealing no more emotionality than a flat coat button.
“Hey, sacerdote of the garbage dump and eater of your own feces! You think we treated your little Quaker friend bad?” he called out. “What if I bring you down here and make you suck my dick? I can do that to you, man, with great pleasure.”
There was no reply from the hillside, and R.C. could see no movement among the shadows and mesquite and rocks and the dead juniper trees that looked like gnarled and polished bone. Negrito continued to stare into the darkness, his nostrils swelling, his profile as snubbed as a piranha’s. He squeezed his scrotum with his left hand. “Come take it, cabron!” he yelled.
The moon broke from behind a cloud and turned the hillside gray, the scrub brush pooling with shadows. “No? You prefer shooting women and people who ain’t got no guns? You’re a sorry Christian, Mr. Preacher. A Christian without cojones.”
“You know Preacher Collins?” R.C. said.
“The crazy man up there ain’t gonna help you. So give that up,” Negrito replied, backing down the slope, his gaze still concentrated on the hillside. “He’s the hunter, the left hand of God. He don’t have interest in a boy like you.”
“But he’s interested in you?” R.C. said.
“Of course. He knows we’re brothers. Under our skin, we’re no different.”
“Brothers?”
“That’s right, Tejano boy. Preacher and I are both dead. Our souls died many years ago. What do you see in my eyes?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s right. Nothing. And that’s why you’re gonna start to dig. Or maybe I’m gonna start shooting you in various places that will hurt more than you can believe.”
“I done told you, I ain’t gonna do it. So you’d better kill me, ’cause somewhere down the road, I’m gonna catch up with you. You damn betcha I will.”
Negrito’s eyes were rheumy, his face dull with fatigue, his mouth caked. He made a snuffing sound and rubbed his nose with the back of his wrist. “Release the shovel and get in the trunk of the car.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“I got to dig your hole. That makes me very mad. You are lucky I am a merciful man.”
R.C. let the shovel fall to the ground and started toward the gasguzzler, glancing warily over his shoulder, then tripping and stumbling. He heard Negrito pick up the shovel.
“Look up there,” Negrito said.
“At what?”
“The preacher up there in the rocks. See, against the moon. He wants to be your friend. The sacerdote who eats his own mierda has come to your rescue. Or maybe it’s the sheriff you work for. Maybe this is your lucky day.”
R.C. stared at the clumps of brush in the arroyos and at the layers of rock exposed by erosion in the hillside and at the tailings of a mine that spilled like rust down to the wash. He saw a shadow move across the moon. “That’s a coyote,” he said.
He turned around just as Negrito whipped the shovel with both hands through the air and almost flattened the concave steel blade on the back of R.C.’s head.
“I think you was right. It was just a coyote,” Negrito said, staring up the hill.
Jack Collins lay below the crest of the hill, his belly and loins and legs stretched out on a flat rock that had ripples in it like water, his hat beside him, his eyes raised just above a pile of crumbling stone. Behind him, the two Mexican informers, cousins who did murders for hire, were talking quietly to each other, sometimes glancing up in his direction. They were restless men and did not like either indecision or complexity and often found themselves caught between their own self-protective instincts and their hesitancy to challenge the strange ways of the gringo loco whose lethality was a legend in Coahuila and Chihuahua. Finally, the one named Eladio approached the unshaved and unwashed American who dressed in rags and wore a heavy revolver on his hip, squatting down so as not to silhouette against the sky. “Senor Jack?” he said.
“Be patient,” Jack said, peering down the opposite slope.
“Why don’t we just go down there in the streambed and kill Negrito? I’ll do it without no charge.”
Jack looked back over his shoulder and grinned. “You boys were supposed to give me the man named Krill. We didn’t come out here to hunt an orange ape.”
“I thought Krill would be at the farmhouse. He’s a very hard man to catch, boss. This is the place Negrito sometimes uses to bury his victims. It is fortunate that I knew that.”
“So we’re saved from your incompetence by the intervention of the fates, and that should make me feel good?”
“You talk too fast for me to understand sometimes, boss.”
Jack worked his way backward on the rock until he was well under the level of the hillcrest, then got to his feet. He dusted off his knees and the elbows of his suit coat and fitted on his hat, glancing at the strips of black cloud across the moon. He gestured for the other cousin to join him and Eladio. But minutes seemed to pass before he spoke. In the silence, he glanced at one man, then the other, and then into space, as though viewing two different screens in his head. “I pay you boys enough?” he asked.
“Si,” both of them said, nodding.
“Krill has done great injury to a friend of mine. The one down the slope, the ape, isn’t even a cipher.”
“What is this ‘cipher’? These kinds of words don’t mean nozzing to us, boss,” Eladio said.
“The fact you boys were raised up poor and ignorant isn’t your fault. Most of y’all’s mothers would have had you aborted if they’d had the money. But today there’s no excuse for ignorance in an adult. People in mud huts watch CNN. The Internet is available in a street-corner cafe. You boys have access to the same knowledge a university professor does. I suggest y’all start showing a little more initiative regarding your self-
