qualities. These two men, particularly the older one, were not here to enjoy the Texas landscape.
What to do? Jack asked himself.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ethan Riser got up from the place where he had been resting and followed Caleb, his young friend from Austin, across the stretch of flatland that was streaked with alkali and dotted with green brush and that was now turning into a mirror under the hot sun. Ahead, he could see hills that gave shade and the promise of a cool alcove where the stone still smelled of predawn hours and flowers that opened only at night.
“What the hell?” Caleb said.
A group of at least five dirt-bike riders were headed across the hardpan, their engines whining like dentist drills, their deeply grooved tire treads scissoring the topsoil and weaving trails of dust and smoke in the air. Sometimes a biker roared over a knoll and became airborne, or gunned his engine and deliberately lifted his front wheel off the ground, scouring a long trench with his back tire. The collective cacophony the bikers created was like broken glass inside the eardrum. Worse, at least to Ethan and his friend, the smells of exhaust and burnt rubber were the industrial footprint of modern Visigoths determined to prove that no pristine scrap of an earlier time was safe from their presence.
“This is one bunch that needs to get closed down in a hurry,” Caleb said. He opened his badge holder and held it up in front of him so the sun would reflect off it. But the bikers either ignored his attempt to identify himself or were so committed to recontouring the area that they never saw him at all.
Just as Caleb took out his cell phone, the bikers were gone, as quickly as they had arrived, disappearing over a rise, their bandannas flapping, the roar of their exhausts echoing off a butte where pinon trees grew in the rocks.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” Caleb said.
“What might that be?” Ethan said. The armpits of his long-sleeve blue shirt were looped with sweat, his khaki pants hanging low on his stomach, his eyes squinting in the glare, even though he was wearing a bill cap. In spite of the semiautomatic on his hip, he looked like an old man who would not concede that disease had already taken him into a country from which no amount of pretense would ever allow him to return.
“We’ll go one more mile, up into the shady spot,” Caleb said. “We can sit by a little creek there. The Indians carved turkey tracks on some of the rocks thereabouts. They always point due north and south. That’s how they marked their route, using the stars, never one degree off. You can set a compass on them. It’s just a real fine place to cool our heels.”
“Then what do we do?”
“We go back. It ain’t up for grabs, either,” Caleb said.
“I’ll sit down with you a minute, but then I’m going on.”
“Sometimes we have to accept realities, Ethan.”
“That I’m worn out and can’t make it?”
Caleb looked at the mottled discoloration in his friend’s face. “I don’t think Jack Collins is out here. If he is, we’ll hear about it and come back and nail his hide to a cottonwood. In the meantime, it’s not reasonable to wander around under a white sun.”
“I spent seven months in a bamboo cage. The man next to me had a broken back and was in there longer than I was,” Ethan said.
“In Vietnam?”
“Who cares where it was?” Ethan said.
In the distance, they heard the sound of a solitary dirt bike, the engine screaming as though the back tire had lost traction and the RPMs had revved off the scale. Then there was silence.
“Collins is here,” Ethan said.
“How do you know?”
Ethan looked to the north, where turkey buzzards were turning in a wide circle against a cloudless blue sky. “Know what death smells like?”
“Yeah, like some dead critter up there. Don’t let your imagination start feeding on loco weed.”
“Do you smell anything?”
“No, I don’t.”
“I can. It’s Collins. It’s Collins who smells like death. He’s here. When you’ve got death in you, you can smell it on others.”
Jack did not like what he was watching. Where did this bunch get off, invading a place that was his, one that could have been sawed loose from the edges of Canaan and glued onto the southwestern rim of the United States? Why was the government worried about working-class people crossing the border when a bunch like this were given licenses and machines to destroy public lands? Jack knelt on a sandstone ledge, the butt of his Thompson resting by his knee, the drum magazine packed with fifty. 45 rounds, the clean steel surfaces of his weapon smelling slightly of the oilcloth he had used to wipe down and polish it last night. He longed to raise the stock to his shoulder and lead the bikers with iron sights and squeeze off three or four short bursts and blow them into a tangle of machines and spinning tires and disjointed faces, not unlike the images in the Picasso painting depicting the fascist bombing of Guernica.
One of the bikers, as though he had read Jack’s thoughts, veered away from his companions and roared up the hillside toward Jack’s position, his goggles clamped like a tanker’s on his face, one booted foot coming down hard on the dirt to keep his machine erect, his jeans stiff with body grease, his black leather vest faded brown and yellow under his naked armpits.
The biker throttled back his engine and swerved to a stop just twenty feet below Jack’s position, smoke and dust rising behind him in a dirty halo. His teeth looked feral inside his beard, his chest hair glistening with sweat. Jack laid his Thompson on a clean, flat rock and stood up in full view. “How do, pilgrim?” he said.
“Were you flashing a mirror at me?” the biker asked.
“Not me.”
“I think it was you. You got one of those steel signal mirrors? You being cute or something?”
“You probably saw the reflection off my field glasses.”
“So you want to tell me what the hell you’re doing?”
“Not much. Studying on the general state of mediocrity that seems to characterize the country these days. Did you know the United States has the highest rate of functional illiteracy in the Western world, even though we have the most libraries? What’s your thought on that?”
“My thought is, I’m getting a crick in my neck looking up at you. Who the fuck you think you are?”
“The worst mistake you ever made.”
The biker put a pinch of snuff under his lip. “It’s been good talking to you. Keep your flopper oiled and cocked. The right girl is out there waiting for you somewhere.”
“Maybe you can he’p me with a theory I have. It has to do with atavistic behavior. That means a throwback to the way things were when people hunted each other with rocks and sharp sticks. Did you ever notice that most of the fellows in biker gangs are strange-looking? By that I mean way overweight, with double hernias and beetle brows and pig noses and bulging scrotums and hair growing out of their ears. You’d think it would dawn on them.”
The biker pushed his goggles up on his forehead with his thumb. There were white circles around his eyes. “What would dawn on them?”
“That ugly and stupid people find each other.”
The biker twisted the gas feed with his right hand, revving his engine, making a decision. “I hate to tell you this, pal, but I don’t think your opinion carries a lot of weight. If you haven’t noticed, your suit looks like Sasquatch wiped his ass with it. You’ve got pecker tracks on your fly and enough dirt under your fingernails to grow tomatoes. If the wind turns around, I expect I’ll have to put on a respirator.”
Jack gazed across the flats into the distance. With his naked eye, he could not see the two hikers. The wind was up, out of the south, the pinon trees bending. The sound of a short burst might be mistaken for the backfire of
