improvement.”
“We seek to please you, not to upset you, Senor Jack,” Eladio said.
“You did very well following Temple Dowling for me. You did well learning of the machinations of Negrito with the young lawman. But you haven’t given me Krill. Krill is the objective, not his monkey. Are y’all listening?”
“We ain’t perfect, boss,” the cousin said. His name was Jaime, and of the two Mexican killers, he was the less intelligent and the more recalcitrant.
Eladio looked angrily at his cousin, then turned his attention back to Jack, trying to undo any damage his cousin might have caused. “We can take Negrito alive and entertain him in ways he’ll understand,” Eladio said.
“Is he the kind of man who gives up reliable information when he’s in pain?” Jack said. “Or does he lie and tell you what you want to hear?”
“You are very intelligent, Senor Jack,” Eladio said. “Negrito has the strength of a mule and the brain of a snake. Pain means nothing to him. As a boy, he blew flaming kerosene from his mouth in a carnival. His putas say they can still smell it on him.”
Jaime chewed on a weed and took a watch with a broken strap from his shirt pocket and looked at it. “Eladio is right. If Negrito ain’t of no value, maybe it’s time we took care of him and also the American you don’t like at the whorehouse and get some sleep. What is of more importance? The cost of a bullet or the time we waste speaking of these men you say are worthless? Constantly talking of these men makes me resentful of myself.”
Jack’s face registered no emotion. It seemed as serene as a layer of plastic that had melted and cooled and dried in dirty lumps. He watched the lights in the sky and the dust that swirled off the desert floor and buttoned the top of his shirt with one hand as though expecting rain or cold. The Mexicans who worked for him were a mystery, an improbable genetic combination of Indian bloodlust and the cruelty of the Inquisition. The angular severity of their features, the way their skin stretched tautly on their bones, the greasy black shine in their uncut hair, the obsidian glint in their eyes at the mention of violence or pain made him wonder if they were remnants of a lost tribe from biblical times, perhaps an unredeemed race that had floated on the Flood far away from where Noah had landed on Mount Ararat. It would make sense. They were unteachable and killed one another with the dispassion and moral vacuity of someone who idly watches his children wander onto a freeway.
What was Jaime saying now? His lips were still moving, though no sound seemed to come from his mouth. Jack disengaged from his reverie and stared at him. “Repeat that?” he said.
“How come we ain’t at least killed the abusador de ninos? He was at the whorehouse. We could have done it easy. Not even the policia would object to our killing such a man.”
“I don’t go in whorehouses,” Jack said. “Also, don’t speak to me of your policemen’s virtue. They’re jackals and will steal the coins off a dead man’s eyes. What none of you seems to recognize is that your country is ungovernable. Your national heroes are peons who decorated trees with the bodies of their fellow peons. Do not tell me what I should do and not do.”
“Senor Jack is very wise. We need to listen to him, Jaime,” Eladio said.
“But we keep playing games with gringos who should be food for worms,” Jaime said. “This man Holland is the enemy of Senor Jack, but we don’t do nozzing about him. Why not kill Holland? It would give me great pleasure to do this for Senor Jack. What is so special about this man?”
Jack pulled the weed from Jaime’s mouth and tossed it to one side. “Do not refer to Sheriff Holland by his last name only. His name is Mr. Holland or Sheriff Holland. Do you understand that?” he said.
Jaime started to speak, but Eladio squeezed his arm. “You are a man of honor. We will always follow you and do as you tell us,” Eladio said.
“You wouldn’t josh a fellow, would you?” Jack said.
“We are hurt deeply when you talk like that to us, Senor Jack,” Eladio said.
“Really?” Jack said. He gazed out at the desert and the nighttime glow of a distant town in the clouds. “That flatters and humbles me. I declare, you boys are full of surprises.”
The two cousins waited for him to continue, neither of them meeting his eyes, Eladio’s hand still locked on Jaime’s forearm. “You didn’t develop laryngitis on me, did you?” Jack asked.
“We are simple men, boss,” Eladio said.
“That’s why I like you. That’s why I consider you not just friends but family. I wouldn’t offend either of you for the world.”
“Is true what you say?” Eladio asked.
“Cross my heart,” Jack replied, his teeth showing in the moonlight. “But right now I want to see what this hombre malo Negrito is doing. He’s a pistol, isn’t he? A man that keeps his own private burying ground. Y’all surely grow some strange critters down here.”
Jack walked back up the slope, then shook out a handkerchief and placed it on the ground and knelt on one knee so he could look down the far side of the hill without silhouetting. While he studied the scene down below, his right hand played with his revolver, lifting it partially out of the holster, reversing the butt, then reversing it again, dropping it back into the hardened leather with a dry plop.
“Come on up here and check this out,” he said, motioning at the cousins.
The two Mexicans approached him, bent over, gravel rilling from under their cowboy boots, each of them attentive to the motion or lack of motion in Jack’s right hand. Out on the hardpan, the gasguzzler was driving away, its headlights lighting the scrub brush and cactus. “What is it?” Eladio said.
“I was just talking about strange critters,” Jack said. He stood up and pointed down the slope. “Look yonder at that new grave. What’s that sticking out of the dirt?”
Both cousins stared down into the moonlit wash, their foreheads knitted with thought. “An elephant’s trunk?” Eladio said.
“It’s the hose and filter on a World War Two gas mask. What do you boys think we ought to do about that?” Jack said.
R. C. Bevins had been raised in a fundamentalist church where the minister went to great lengths to instruct his congregation in the details of Jesus’ crucifixion. His dedication to the macabre seemed equaled only by his dedication to busing as many congregants as possible to the local theater’s showing of The Passion of the Christ. In his presentation, the minister included descriptions of long square-headed spikes that had pierced the victim’s wrists-not his hands, the minister said, because the hands would have torn loose from the fastenings; not so the spikes through the wrists. The bones and tendons in the wrist were much sturdier and up to the task of supporting the victim’s weight. Also, he pointed out, the spikes were not driven through the tops of the feet, as is often depicted. The knees were folded sideways on the perpendicular shaft, the ankles placed one on top of the other. A single long spike was adequate to pinion the two appendages together.
The minister also explained that death came by asphyxiation as a result of the tendons in the upper torso constricting the lungs and forcing the air back up the victim’s windpipe. But for R.C., the worst detail was the minister’s speculation that the trauma of being nailed to the cross and the cross being dropped heavily into a hole caused the victim to go into shock only to become conscious a few minutes later and discover that he was not waking from a nightmare but instead was anchored hand and foot to a cruciform of pain from which there was no escape.
That was how R.C. had woken under the ground, with the vague sense that something was wrong with his arms and legs, that he had heard a sifting sound of dirt and gravel sliding off a shovel blade, followed by a thump of stones being dropped heavily on top of him. His eyes were unable to see, his throat raw, as though he had not had water in days. When he tried to raise his head, he realized he was not only impaled by the earth but locked solidly inside it, the air that he breathed coming to him through a tube that smelled of rubber and canvas. The level of panic that occurred in him was like a violent electric surge throughout his body, except the electricity had no place to go.
The inside of the mask was soggy and foul with his sweat and his own breath, and no light at all came through the plastic eyepieces. He stretched out his fingers and for just a moment thought he might be able to work his hands through the dirt toward the surface an inch at a time. Then he discovered that by straightening his hands, he had allowed the overburden of the grave to press down on him more firmly, like an octopus tightening its tentacles on its prey.
Who were the fools who constantly taught about man’s harmony with the earth? he asked himself. An uncle who had once worked in a Kentucky coal mine had told R.C. that the earth was not man’s friend, that it was unnatural to enter the ground before one’s time, and that if a man listened carefully, he would hear the earth creak
