R.C. had taken one sip from the canteen and had started to take another. But he stopped and set the canteen down on the edge of the grave and stared at it, his hand still cupped on the canvas snap-button pouch that held it. He waited, his eyes fixed in empty space, the wind flattening the mesquite along the banks of the streambed. He knew what was coming.
“Here’s the situation as I see it,” the strange man said. “The sheriff tried to kill me by firing a whole magazine down a mine shaft. He has also insulted me several times on a personal level without provocation, even though I have always treated him with respect. So principle requires that I do something in kind to him, otherwise I’ll be guilty of what’s called a sin of omission. Are you following me?”
“You’re Preacher Jack Collins. Around here, that translates into ‘crazy.’ I don’t have conversations with crazy people.”
Collins shifted his weight and pulled his revolver from its holster and fitted his thumb over the hammer. “You’d better listen up, boy.” He pulled back the hammer to full cock and touched the muzzle to R.C.’s temple. “With one soft squeeze, I can scatter your buckwheats all over that streambed. There will be a flash of light and a loud roar in your ears, then you’ll be with your dead mother. I’ll make sure the sheriff understands I did this as payback for what he’s done to me. In that way, I’ll rob him of any peace of mind for the rest of his life. But there’s a problem with that choice. Other than not knowing how to stay out of a hot-pillow joint, you’re an innocent boy and shouldn’t have to pay the price for the sheriff’s actions. So I’m going to create a choice for you that most people in your situation don’t have.”
Collins lowered the hammer and released the lock on the cylinder and tipped it sideways from the revolver’s frame. He shucked the six brass cartridges into his palm. “Are you a gambling man?” he said.
“Whatever it is you’re thinking about, I’m not interested.”
“Believe me, you will be.”
“Sheriff Holland is gonna hunt you down in every rat hole in Coahuila. Don’t be talking down to me about no whorehouses, either. You got whores working for you as informants, and I suspect that ain’t all they’re doing for you, provided they’re not choosy.”
Collins stood up. “I’m going to put one in the chamber and spin the cylinder. When I hand you the revolver, I’m going to cover the cylinder so you cain’t see where the load is. If you’ll hold the muzzle to your head and pull the trigger twice without coming down on the wrong chamber, I’ll turn you loose. If you refuse, I’ll pop you here and now.”
“Why you doing this to me?”
“Boy, you just don’t listen, do you?”
“Let me think it over. Okay, I have. Kiss my ass. And when you’re done doing that, kiss my ass again.”
“Why don’t you have another sip of water and rethink that statement?”
“I don’t need no more of y’all’s mouth germs.”
“Get up.”
“What for?”
Jack Collins laughed to himself. “You’re fixing to find out.”
“I’m tired of all this.”
“Tired?”
“Yeah, of being treated like a sack of shit. Just like I told that guy who took me out here, go on and do what you’re gonna do. Fuck you, I couldn’t care less. Hackberry Holland is gonna turn you into the deadest bucket of shit that was ever poured in the ground.”
Jack Collins let the revolver hang loosely at his side, outside the holster. “Stand up and look me in the face.”
R.C. got to his feet, his knees popping. He wiped the sweat and beaded rings of dirt from his neck and looked at his hand. His eyes drifted to the revolver in Preacher Jack’s right hand. He closed his eyes and opened them again, forcing them wide, refusing to blink. On the edge of his vision, he thought he saw his mother watching him, a cone of cotton candy clutched in her hand.
“Just to set the record straight, the breed who buried you wasn’t coming back. He’s in Durango now, drunk out of his senses,” Jack Collins said. “You would have died underground of thirst and starvation. If I had my druthers, I’d take a bullet anytime.”
“I’ll take a bullet just so I don’t have to listen to you no more,” R.C. said.
Jack Collins laughed again and picked up the canteen and looped the web belt over R.C.’s head, easing it down so as not to clip his ear. “Stay on the edge of the hillside and go due north for about three miles, and you’ll hit a dirt road. Follow it eastward, and you’ll intersect an asphalt two-lane that’ll take you to the border.”
R.C. stared at him dumbly, the backs of his legs shaking. He tried to think about what Collins had just said. The words made no sense. He felt as though the horizon were tilting sideways, the mountains going in and out of focus.
“You really thought I was going to cap you?” Collins said.
R.C. didn’t answer. He glanced sideways at the spot where his mother had been standing, but she had disappeared.
“I wouldn’t do that to you, kid. You’ve got sand,” Collins said.
With that, he and his friends walked away like Halloween trick-or-treaters who had lost interest in their own pranks.
A few minutes later, Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs came over the crest of the hill and looked down on the riparian landscape and the empty streambed that resembled a pale scar cutting across it, and the graves where the half-breed named Negrito had buried his victims, some of whom may have been alive when they went into the ground.
There was no one down below. Pam swept the area with her binoculars and then pointed at the north, handing the binoculars to Hackberry. In the moonlight, he saw a solitary figure walking alongside the streambed, a canteen slung from his shoulder, his shirttail hanging out, his shadow as sharp as a fence post on the ground. “R.C.,” he said.
“How’d he get loose from the guy who kidnapped him?” Pam said.
“I don’t know,” Hackberry said. He focused the lenses on the southern horizon and thought he saw headlights dip over a rise and briefly reflect off a sandstone bluff and then disappear. “Let’s find out.”
They climbed back down the opposite side of the hill and drove north in the Jeep until they were out on the flats again and could drive past the hill and intersect the streambed R.C. was following. As they drove toward him, their high beams suddenly defining him among the pale greenery that grew out of the sand, burning the shadows away from the youthful angularity of his face, Hackberry experienced one of those moments doctors at the navy hospital in Houston defined as post-traumatic stress disorder but that Hackberry thought of as the natural entwining of events and people, past and present, that seemed to take place as one reached the end of his life.
The totality of a man’s days eventually became a circle rather than a sum, and one way or another, he always ended up at the place where he had begun. Or at least that was what Hackberry believed.
As he looked through the windshield at R.C., he saw himself in the late summer of 1953, crossing the wooden pedestrian bridge at Panmunjom, the last man in a column of prisoners being returned from the camps south of the Manchurian border. He had been emaciated, barely able to walk and control his dysentery, his marine utilities stiff with salt and faded almost colorless. A photographer from Stars and Stripes took his picture with a big Speed Graphic camera, and later, the photo was picked up by the wire services and published all over the country above a cutline that began, “The last American soldier to cross Freedom Bridge…”
But he had not been the last man across Freedom Bridge. Others would follow and others would be left behind, perhaps four hundred of them who were moved by their captors across the Yalu River into Communist China and forgotten by the rest of the world.
Was it worth it? The great irony was that no one cared enough to even ask the question. The dates, the battles, the strafing of civilian refugees by American F-80s, the misery of the Chosin Reservoir, the red-hot thirty- caliber barrels they unscrewed with their bare hands, leaving their flesh on the steel, the systematic cruelty inside the gulag of prison camps in the north, Hackberry’s time in a place called Pak’s Palace, which had been housed in an abandoned brick factory where the North Koreans refined a method of torture known as Pak’s Swing, all these things were smudged entries in a tragedy that had become little more than an inconvenient memory. But the participants never forgot the details of their experience, and like the Wandering Jew, they were condemned to
