“That fellow was standing in the shade and wearing a hat when I took his picture. He could be anybody.”
“That’s why I want you to go back now. I’ve wasted enough of your time.”
“You shouldn’t be out here by yourself.”
“It beats twiddling my thumbs in a motel.”
“Let me treat you to lunch.”
“What’s farther up?”
“Jackrabbits and open space and some more hills. A game ranch or two, maybe one guy running cows. A gun club has a couple of leases where some oil-and-natural-gas guys bust skeet and drink whiskey. I think there might be a cabin that somebody uses during deer season.”
“Who might that be?”
“Not somebody anyone ever paid much mind to. Ethan, you don’t look well. Let’s go back.”
“I got no reason to. You’re the one on his honeymoon.”
“I shouldn’t have ever told you about that fellow we ran into. On the homely scale, he was just this side of a mud fence. About as harmless-looking, too. If this guy is a threat to national security, we’re all in deep doo- doo.”
“You also said he talked like he had a mouthful of molasses. Noie Barnum is from northern Alabama.”
“A Quaker from Alabama?”
“I grant you he’s a strange duck. But compared to Jack Collins, he’s as normal as it gets.”
“My folks have always lived here’bouts, and they haven’t heard any talk about hermits wandering around with Thompson machine guns.”
A single-engine plane passed overhead, its shadow racing across the treetops and boulders on the sunny side of a hill.
“It’s a fine day to be out and about, isn’t it?” Ethan said.
“I cain’t argue that.”
“Help me up, will you?”
Ethan Riser’s friend remained motionless.
“What are you looking at?” Ethan asked.
“I thought I saw a reflection of some kind up there on that hill.” The young man removed a small pair of binoculars from a leather case on his belt and adjusted them to his eyes. “I declare, it’s a book.”
“A what?”
“Yeah, its pages are fluttering on top of a rock. Cain’t anybody say people in Southwest Texas aren’t literary. Stop looking at me like that, Ethan. There’s nobody there. It’s just a book somebody left on a rock.”
Preacher Jack Collins was reading in the Book of Kings, the wind and sun on his face, when he glanced up long enough to see the single-engine plane coming out of the southeast, its wings tilting in the updrafts, its engine sputtering as though it were low on gas. He stepped backward into some pinon trees growing out of the rocks, his body motionless, his face pointed at the ground, his thumb inserted as a bookmark in the pages of his Bible. He heard the plane pass overhead, then the engine caught again, and when he climbed to the crest of the hill and looked between two boulders, he saw the plane disappearing over a long stretch of flatland, its wings level and parallel with the horizon.
Feds? Maybe. Probably a rancher who was burning the valves out of his engine with ethanol. Jack resumed reading in his comfortable spot among the rocks, the pages of the Bible as white as snow in the sunlight, the print on them as clear and sharp and defining as the lettering that Yahweh had seared with a burning finger in the Mosaic tablets. For Jack, there was no such thing as “interpretation” of the Scripture; there was also no such thing as “metaphor.” These were devices that allowed the profligate and the libertine to consecrate behavior that made Jack’s stomach curdle.
Homosexuality? Sodomy? Not exactly. It was a type of behavior that somehow remained nameless. It was more like a memory or the shadow of a person or an event that hid behind a corner on a long street he was forced to walk in his sleep. The street was uniformly gray, as though all the color had been leached out of the concrete and asphalt and stone. There were no people on the sidewalks or in the buildings, and when he crossed an intersection, he hoped to hear a roar of traffic or at least the footsteps of other pedestrians on a side street, but instead, he heard no sound except the pounding of blood in his ears.
In his dream, he would try to wake himself before he reached the last block on the street, but his willpower had no influence on his dream. At the corner of a building on the end of the street, a figure was moving into full view on the sidewalk. The figure wore a hooded workout jacket and a print dress and pink tennis shoes and a sequined belt, as though she had dressed randomly off the rack at a Goodwill store. Everything about her was in some fashion a frightening contradiction. She looked too young and pretty for the damage the world had probably done her. Her mouth was down-hooked at the corners, her brow dimpled with anger, her eyes lit with a quiet scorn that showed she was not only privy to Jack’s most private thoughts but disgusted by them. Her meanness of spirit and the depth of her disdain for him did not seem to fit with the youthfulness of her face. How could he possibly understand the physiological riddle that she presented to him?
She beckoned to him, confident he would come to her, even as she removed her belt and wrapped one end around her palm.
When he would wake from the dream, he would sit on the side of his bed, his hands clenched between his knees, filled with self-loathing that seemed to have no cause.
The degradation that invaded his soul in his sleep never left him during his daylight hours, unless he could transfer its origins onto someone else. It might have seemed a twisted way to think, Jack told himself, but he did not invent the world, nor did he create the people who had bedeviled him without cause for a lifetime or gone out of their way to reject him.
It was the latter category that bothered him most. He did not subscribe to the belief that woman was man’s downfall. Nor did he blame women for their vanity or the fact that guile was sometimes their only defense against man’s exploitation of their bodies. No, it was the strange light in their eyes when they looked upon his person that caused a match to flare on the lining of his stomach. They not only feared him, they were viscerally repelled by him, a man who, in his entire life, had never referred to a woman in a profane or unseemly manner.
So he had found another kind of woman, one he could trust and who was worthy of a man people on both sides of the border referred to as the left hand of God. She lived inside the Scripture and was always waiting on the attention of his eyes when he turned to the thumb-creased pages where her story began but never ended. This woman did not have one name; she had many. She was Esther, who told Xerxes he would have to walk in her blood before she would allow him to harm her people; she was Rebecca, with the water jug on her shoulder, the strong- willed, intelligent wife of Abraham’s son; she was the Samaritan woman with whom Jesus had the longest conversation in the New Testament; and ultimately, she was Mary of Magdala, who subsidized Jesus’ ministry and stayed with him at the cross and became the first apostle of the new religion when she announced on Easter morning, “He is risen.”
The figure who hid behind the wall at the end of the street could lay no claim upon Preacher Jack as long as he had his Testament.
He heard the plane again. This time it was coming out of the northwest, retracing its earlier flight path. He crouched inside the shade of the pinon trees and removed his panama hat and focused his binoculars on the side of the plane as it passed dangerously low over the crest with at least three men inside the cabin. Jack doubted they were feds. Feds didn’t take unnecessary risks; self-important corporate douchebags who paid large sums of money to shoot captured animals on a game farm did. Just for fun, Jack picked up his submachine gun and aimed through the iron sights at the tail of the plane. “Pow,” he whispered as softly as smoke.
Then he realized the distraction of the plane and his idle thoughts about game farms and douchebags had just cost him. Across the flatland to the southwest, two figures had emerged from a rocky basin and were headed in his direction. In fact, if they stayed on course, they would follow the creek up into the buttes to the natural fort where he had built his cabin.
He lay on his stomach, his elbows propped on grit, his binoculars aimed through the pinon branches. Both of the figures were men. One was young and athletic-looking, a canteen slung on his shoulder, wearing a hat that a tourist or rock collector would wear. The other man had meringue hair and a flushed face and was sweating and obviously slowing the younger man. The sun was white in the sky and had robbed the morning of all its redemptive
