“Oh, Hack,” she said. “Oh, Hack, Hack, Hack.”
From his deck Cody Daniels watched the storm move out of the south and seal the sky, trapping the light between a blue-black layer of clouds and the desert floor and mesas that were pink and talc-colored and that made him think of pictures of ancient Phoenician ships he had seen. When the power outage spread across the county, he saw the reflected glow of the town flatten against the clouds and die, a surge of cool air rising from the valley floor into his face. Hailstones clattered on the hardpan and on the deck, dancing in a white haze, and in the smell of ozone and the drop of temperature, he felt as though the world were fresh and clean, as though every bad memory of his life were being washed away, every failure and personal affliction slipping over the edges of the earth.
If only things were that easy.
Cody started up his gas-powered generator and went back in the house to resume the most difficult task in his life-writing a letter to the FBI. He had attempted a half-dozen versions on his computer and had been unhappy with all of them. His language was either stilted and sounded self-serving, or it became so confused it was almost unintelligible. The last attempt was two double-spaced pages long and gave details about his recruitment into a small group of anti-abortion activists in northern Virginia. It wasn’t a bad statement, except it indiscriminately included the names of his fellow travelers, some of whom may have been unaware of the group’s ultimate goal.
He had gone out on the deck without saving the letter on his hard drive, and the power outage had wiped his screen clean. When he reentered the house, the lights burning dimly on the low wattage produced by his generator, he sat down at his desk and picked up a felt-tip pen and addressed an envelope to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C., no zip code. He put his return address in the upper-left-hand corner of the envelope. Then he wrote the following letter on a yellow legal pad:
Dear Sirs,
I am the pitiful son of a bitch who bought the oven timer for the bomb that blew up the abortion clinic outside Baltimore three years back. I thought the bomb would go off in the middle of the night. But that doesn’t help the woman who got her face blown off. I can’t give you the names of any of the other people involved. This letter is about the evil deed done by one son of a bitch and one son of a bitch only, and as I have stated, that son of a bitch is yours truly,
Sincerely,
Rev. Cody Daniels
From outside, he heard the hiss of air brakes and the sound of a tractor-trailer shifting down. He looked through the window and, in the rain-streaked fading of the twilight, saw an eighteen-wheeler parked by the Cowboy Chapel, its high beams on, the engine still hammering, and what appeared to be a lead car parked in front of it. Cody had seen the lead car before, without the clamped-on brace of yellow lights on the roof; it belonged to a musician, a man who stopped by on occasion at the Cowboy Chapel and drank coffee and ate doughnuts in the hospitality room Cody left open for truckers or travelers on their way to the Big Bend country.
Cody draped a slicker over his head and went down the wood steps to the coffee room in the back of the chapel. “Getting out of the storm?” he said to a small tight-bodied man sitting at the long table in the middle of the room, a chrome-plated guitar across his thighs.
“Hey, Reverend, I didn’t see you, so I just come inside,” the man said. “Hope you don’t mind.”
“That’s what it’s for. The name is Rector, isn’t it?”
“Dennis Rector, that’s me,” the man replied. “I saw your nail gun there. You’ve been doing some carpentering.”
“You play a Dobro?”
“You know your instruments. That’s what it is, resonator and all.” The small man had the dark skin of a field hand and hair that looked like it had been cut with fingernail clippers. He wore lace-up boots and a tie-dyed T-shirt and denim work pants. His upper torso was bent like a question mark. “It’s a Fender, built on the old National model. It feels like a Coca-Cola box packed with ice hanging from your neck.”
Dennis Rector ran a steel bar up and down the neck of the Dobro and began playing a tune with the steel picks on the thumb and index and middle fingers of his right hand. “Recognize that piece? That’s ‘The Great Speckled Bird.’ Same tune as ‘The Wild Side of Life.’ Same tune as ‘It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels.’”
Through the window, Cody could see two men sitting in the cab of the eighteen-wheeler. “What are y’all carrying?” he asked.
“Exotic animals. Want one?”
“You work for a zoo?”
“I guess you could call it that.” Dennis Rector was smiling as though he possessed private knowledge that he might or might not share. “We supply a wild-game ranch up in Pecos County.”
Cody nodded and didn’t reply.
“You’re not keen on them kind of places?”
“Live and let live.”
“That’s the way I figure it. Their misfortune and none of my own. You know you got some beaners parked down yonder on your road?”
“Pardon?”
“Some pepper-bellies in a beat-up old car with a busted headlight.”
“Who are they?”
“Maybe a couple of people fucking. How should I know? I couldn’t see them that good.” The small man was still smiling.
“This is a church house, even if it’s just the coffee room,” Cody said.
“Sorry.”
“Did you catch the tag?”
“I wasn’t paying them much mind. They looked away from our lights when we passed. That’s why I figure they were people making out. Mexicans tend to breed in the spring and domino in the winter.”
Cody studied Dennis Rector from behind his eyelashes. “You from here’bouts?”
“Wherever I hang my hat. Jobs are kind of thin these days. Seems like there’s less and less work for a white man. What’s your feeling about that?”
“I never lost a job ’cause of my skin color.”
“That sounds different from a couple of your sermons.”
“Could I he’p y’all with something?”
“No, I just wanted to show my friends your church and get out of the storm.”
Cody nodded again, looking out the door at the truck and the animals he could see behind the ventilation slots in the sides. “You mind locking up when you leave? I’ve got some work to do in the house.”
The small man filled his mouth with a jelly doughnut, pushing the overflow back into his mouth with his wrist. His chrome-plated instrument swam with an oily blue light. “No problem, Reverend,” he said.
Cody walked back up the stairs and across his deck into the house, forcing himself not to look back over his shoulder. He felt a sense of ill ease that he couldn’t define. Was it the rawness of Dennis Rector’s language? Or the fact that Cody had helped encourage the role of victim in many of his congregants? Or did he see a reflection of his former self in the lewdness of mind that characterized men like Rector? Why was a man like that playing “The Great Speckled Bird,” a spiritual that was as deep-seated in southern religion as “The Old Rugged Cross”? Something wasn’t a right fit.
There was also the business about the Hispanics parked on the road. He should have pumped Rector about them. Could the car have contained Krill and Negrito? It couldn’t be them, could it? They were professional criminals, hunted by the local sheriff and the FBI and probably the Texas Rangers. Why would Krill and Negrito invest their lives in persecuting Cody Daniels, a mail-order minister who was awakened at two each morning by a blind woman with a disfigured face rattling his bedroom windows?
Just as the power went back on, Cody saw the eighteen-wheeler turn in a wide circle, led by Dennis Rector’s car, and head south down the road, the edges of the trailer etched with chains of gold running lights. He folded the confessional letter he had written to the FBI and placed it in the envelope and licked the seal, his stomach churning, his head as light as a helium balloon. Then he sat at his desk, his head in his hands, and wondered how he had made such a catastrophe out of his life.
