He dropped the two cans of soda and the bag of fried chicken into the dirt and ran inside the barn and threw open the tack room door. The chair lay on its side. Above it, Dennis was still swinging from the impact of the drop, his throat wrapped tightly with horse reins, his arms twitching, his neck broken.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Preacher Jack Collins was not in a good mood. Since the long drive from the cabin on the creek, he had said little to Noie Barnum. Also, he had offered no explanation for his and Noie’s sudden departure, scowling whenever Noie asked a question, brooding and moving his lips without sound as though sorting out his thoughts with a hay fork. The decrepit stucco house they had moved into had been a home for bats and field mice and smelled of the damp earth under the floors. The toilet and sink and bathtub were streaked with orange rust and filled with the shells of dead roaches. In the back of the house was a butte that resembled a row of giant clay columns eroding side by side, creating an effect that was both phallic and effete. The front windows gave onto a long sloping plain and a junkyard that was surrounded by a twelve-foot fence with spools of razor wire on top. In the late-afternoon sun, the compacted and polished metal in the junkyard and the razor wire protecting it took on the sharpened brilliance of hundreds of heliographs.
Jack had flung his suitcase on a bunk bed, then brought his guitar case inside and set it on the kitchen table and unsnapped the top.
“What’s that?” Noie asked.
“They were called trench sweepers in the Great War,” Jack replied, setting the Thompson and two ammunition pans and box upon box of cartridges on an oily cloth. “They were manufactured too late to be used in the trenches, though. That’s how guys like John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson ended up with them.”
“What are you doing with one, Jack?”
“Home protection.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“Anything we’re doing.”
“There’re people out there who want to hurt me. It’s not a difficult concept.”
“Hurt you why?”
“I’m hiding you, boy.” Noie’s adenoidal accent was starting to wear on him. Jack threaded a cleaning patch through the tip of a metal pod and dripped three drops of oil on the patch and pushed it down the muzzle of the Thompson. He worked the rod up and down, then inserted a piece of white paper in the chamber and looked down the inside of the barrel at the whorls of reflected light spinning through the rifling. “Did you ever take classes in speech or diction?”
“I was an engineering major.”
“It shows.”
“Pardon?”
Jack’s eyes wrinkled at the corners. “Don’t let my tone bother you. I got to stop fretting myself about our enemies. Some people aren’t made for the world. That’s the likes of us. That’s why we’re hunted.”
“A man deals his own play. The world doesn’t have much to do with it,” Noie replied. “That’s the way I look at it.”
With his fingertips, Jack began loading one of the ammunition pans, lifting each. 45 cartridge from its individual hole in a Styrofoam block and lowering it into a pod inside the circular magazine, as though he took more pleasure in the ritual than its purpose. “All I ever wanted from people was to be let alone. Learn it soon or learn it late, a man doesn’t have peace unless he’s willing to make war.”
“Have you shot somebody with that thing?”
“They shot themselves.”
“How so?” Noie asked, his throat clotting.
“They line up to do it. They cain’t wait.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
How was Jack to explain that he had two optical screens in his head? On one screen were people who caused him trouble or threatened his life. On the other screen was the backdrop against which they had originally appeared, but they were airbrushed from it. Poof, just like that. The alteration of the images had little to do with him. One side of his brain spoke to the other side. One side defined the problem; the other side took care of it. The people who disappeared from the screen designed their own fate and were responsible for their own diminution.
“Look out the front window,” Jack said.
“At the two-lane?”
“I’m talking about the junkyard. You think anything inside it is of any real value?”
“Not unless you’re keen on junk.”
“But the man who owns the junkyard has razor wire on top of all his fences. That wire probably cost a lot more than anything anybody might steal off those rusted-out or compacted cars. The whole place is the automotive equivalent of a warthog. The wire deflates the value of the property around it and makes Nebraska look like the French Riviera. But nine out of ten people in this county would defend the guy’s right to build a huge eyesore on the highway they paid to have poured.”
“What’s that have to do with your machine gun?”
“Not every asylum has walls.”
“They’re out to get us?”
“The government has been trying to put me out of business for twenty years. So has a guy by the name of Josef Sholokoff. His exbusiness partner, Temple Dowling, would like to see you dead, and Sholokoff would like to see you in a cage so he can sell you to Al Qaeda and screw Dowling. In the meantime, the likes of us are considered criminals. Am I getting through to you?”
“There’s gunpowder residue on your cleaning patch.”
“That’s right.”
“You fired your Thompson recently?”
Jack snapped the top back on the metal drum and began twisting the winding key. “The Oriental woman gave up our location to the FBI. At least that’s my belief until I find out different.”
“Miss Anton? She dressed my wounds. She wouldn’t inform on me.”
“How about on me?”
“You didn’t harm her, did you?”
“No, I did not. But a couple of other guys paid her tab.”
“What are you telling me?”
“You want to be back in Krill’s custody? Time to take the scales from your eyes, son. Who do you think Krill used to work for? The United States government is who.”
“What have you done, Jack?”
“Nothing. I told you that at the outset. Moses slew two hundred of his people for erecting the golden calf. He killed, but he didn’t murder. His followers got what they deserved.”
“Tell me if you killed somebody. Just say it.”
Jack exhaled and stared into space, the lumps in his face spiked with unshaved whiskers. “Years ago I did something that still disturbs me, but you can make up your own mind about it. My mother was a prostitute. Most of her clients were gandy walkers or brake-men off a freight line that went past the boxcar we lived in. One guy in particular would come by every two weeks or so. He had a family in Oklahoma City, but that didn’t stop him from topping my mother when he was on a bender. I’d have to wait outside, which I had more or less gotten used to, but on one occasion it was about fifteen above and snowing, and I spent an hour wrapped in a piece of canvas, crouched down out of the wind behind his car, which he kept locked because he didn’t want a smelly little boy sitting on his leather seats.
“The next summer I was working as a dishwasher in town, and this same fellow came in and ordered the
