“I think you’re not served well by your rhetoric.”
“I’ve got a flash for you, Miss Anton. The only real pacifists are dead Quakers. Ambrose Bierce said that when reflecting on his experience at Shiloh.”
“It’s also cheap stuff. Good-bye.” She broke the connection.
“Look up ahead,” Pam said, steering down into the streambed. “There’re tire tracks in the sand. They go through the backyard of that adobe house. This has to be the hill the bartender was talking about.”
Hackberry turned on the spotlight mounted on the passenger side of the Jeep and shone it through the darkness. A yellow dog with mange on its face and neck, its sides skeletal, its dugs distended, emerged from the shell of the house and stared into the brilliance of the beam before loping away.
“You want to try the switchback up the hill or go around?” Pam asked.
“We take the high ground. Park behind the house. We’ll walk over the hill and come down on top of them.”
“Back there in the cantina, I saw a side of you that bothers me, Hack,” she said.
“I don’t have another side, Pam. You stand behind your people or you don’t stand behind your people. It’s that simple. We get R.C. back from this collection of cretins. When I was at Inchon, I was very frightened. But a line sergeant told me something I never forgot. ‘Don’t think about it before it happens, and don’t think about it when it’s over.’ We bring R.C. home. You with me on that?”
“I’m with you in everything. But my words mean little to you,” she replied. “And that bothers me more than you seem able to understand.”
He didn’t speak again until they had parked the Jeep behind the adobe house, and then it was only to tell her to walk behind him when they went over the crest of the hill.
The man wearing the hat and holstered thumb-buster squatted on his haunches, eye level with R.C. His breath was as dense and tannic as sewer gas. Two Mexicans wearing jeans that looked stitched to their skins stood stiffly on either side of him, like bookends fashioned from wire. “You have a bad moment or two down there?” the man asked.
R.C. nodded, meeting the strange man’s eyes briefly.
“Enough to make you wet your britches?” the man asked.
“No, sir, I didn’t do that.”
The man lifted his chin and pinched the loose flesh under his throat. He was unshaved, and his whiskers looked as stiff as pig bristles. “What’s it like under the ground, with a mask on your face and a lifeline anyone can pinch off with the sole of his boot?”
“Dark.”
“Like the inside of a turnip sack, I bet.”
“That comes right close to it.”
“Your heart start twisting and your breath start coming out of your windpipe like you swallowed a piece of glass?”
“That pert’ near says it,” R.C. replied.
“I can sympathize.”
“You been buried alive?”
“Not in the way you have.”
“You either have or you haven’t.”
“When I was a little boy, my mother would stick me eight or nine hours inside a footlocker. I’d pretend I was on the spine of a boxcar, flying across the countryside under the stars. Did you have fanciful notions like that? Then you opened your eyes and thought somebody had poured an inkwell inside your head.”
“Maybe your soul can go somewhere else. That’s the way I figure it. That’s how come people don’t go crazy sometimes,” R.C. said. Then he added, as though he were in the presence of a confidant, “I got wrapped up in a rubber sheet when I was a little baby and almost suffocated. My mother was in the yard and looked through the window and said I’d already turned blue. She ran inside and saved my life.”
“You saying you had a real mother but mine was cut out of different cloth, maybe burlap?”
“No, sir, I didn’t say that,” R.C. replied, looking away.
“I wouldn’t care if you did. Do you think I care about your opinion of my mother?”
“No, sir.”
“What’s the nature of your relationship with Sheriff Holland?”
“Sir?”
“You deaf?”
“I’m his deputy. My name is R. C. Bevins. I grew up in Ozona and Del Rio and Marathon. My daddy was a tool pusher in the oil field. My mother was a cashier at the IGA till the day she died. She went to work one day and never came home.”
“Why should I care what your parents did or didn’t do?”
“’Cause I know who you are. ’Cause I know what happens to people when you get your hands on them. So if you do the same to me, I want you to know who I am, or who I was.”
“Who do you think I am?”
“A stone killer who don’t take prisoners.”
“For somebody who was just dug up from a grave, maybe you should take your transmission out of overdrive.”
“Maybe you should have practiced a little self-inventory before you murdered all them Asian girls.”
“You’re ahead of the game, boy. Best respect your elders.”
“I ain’t the one trying to get inside somebody else’s thoughts, like some kind of pervert.”
“You were in the whorehouse to play the piano?”
“If that’s what it was, I was there because I blew out my tire. So don’t go belittling me.”
The man in the hat glanced up at the two Mexicans, his eyes amused, the soles of his boots grating on the gravel. “You thirsty?”
R.C. swallowed but didn’t reply.
“You ever kill a man?”
“I never had to,” R.C. said.
“Maybe that’s waiting for you down the pike.”
“If I got choices, it ain’t gonna happen.”
“You want a drink of water or not?”
R.C. sat erect and pulled his knees up before him, the dirt and pea gravel shaling off his clothes. “I wouldn’t mind,” he said.
The man with yellow fingernails that were as thick as horn signaled for one of the Mexicans to pass R.C. a canteen that was attached to a looped GI web belt.
“Does Sheriff Holland treat you all right?”
“We share commonalities. That’s what he calls them, ‘commonalities.’”
“In what way?”
“We both pitched baseball. I pitched all the way through high school. He pitched in high school and three years at Baylor. He got an invitation to the Cardinals’ training camp. I wasn’t as good as him, though.”
“I declare.”
“He has the Navy Cross and a Purple Heart. He treats everybody the same, black or Mexican or Indian or illegal, it don’t matter. That’s the kind of man he is.”
“He sounds like a father figure.”
“If he is, it’s nobody else’s business.”
“The sheriff is a widower and doesn’t have family close by. It must be a comfort for him to have a young fellow like you around. Someone he thinks of as a son.”
“I got to use the restroom.”
The man found a more comfortable position by easing his weight down on one knee. “You might be hard put to find one out here,” he said. He gazed into the distance, his eyes dulled over, seemingly devoid of thought. The collar of his white shirt was yellow with dried soap. “What if I gave you a choice, one that would he’p you define your loyalties in a way you wouldn’t forget? That nobody would forget?”
