inside.”
“I’m sorry. You are a handicapped man, and I must treat you as such.”
“I do not like what is happening here. All this makes my head throb, like I have a great sickness inside it. Why do you make me feel like this, jefe?”
“It is not me. You are one of the benighted, Negrito. Your problems are in your confused blood and your tangled thoughts. For that reason I must be kind to you.”
“I will forget you said that to me, ’cause you are a mestizo, just like me. I say we return to Durango. I say we get drunk and bathe in puta and be the friends we used to be.”
“Then you must go and pursue your lower nature.”
“No, I’ll never leave you, man,” Negrito said. “What does ‘benighted’ mean?”
Krill gestured toward the hills in the west, where the sun had become a red melt below the horizon and the darkness was spreading up into the sky. “It means the dying of the light,” he said. “The benighted place is out there where the coyotes and carrion birds and Gila monsters live and the spirits wander without hope of ever seeing the light.”
At ten the next morning Pam Tibbs tapped on the doorjamb of Hackberry’s office. She had a yellow legal pad in her hand. “This is what we’ve found out about Noie Barnum so far,” she said. “There’re a couple of holes in it. You want to hear it now or wait till Maydeen gets off the phone?”
“Who’s she talking to?”
“The state attorney’s office in Alabama.”
“Sit down,” Hackberry said.
“Barnum grew up in a small town on the Tennessee line and was an honor student in high school. His father died when he was three, and his mother worked at a hardware store and raised him and his half sister by herself. He was never an athlete or a class officer or a joiner of any kind. He won a scholarship to MIT and went to work for the government when he graduated. As far as anybody knew, he was always religious. When it came to girls and social activities, he was as plain as white bread and just about as forgettable. The exception came when he was seventeen. A three-year-old boy wandered away from the neighborhood, and the whole town organized search parties and went looking for him. Barnum found him in a well. He crawled in after him and got bitten in the face by a copperhead but carried the kid on his back four miles to a highway. By all odds, he should have died.”
“What happened to the mother and the half sister?”
“The mother passed away while Barnum was at MIT. The half sister moved to New York and went to work for a catering service. Some stories came back about her, but no one is sure of the truth. She wasn’t looked upon favorably in her hometown. She had been arrested in high school for possession of marijuana and was believed to sleep around. This is where it becomes cloudy.”
“What does?”
“She used her father’s last name when she moved to New York. Hang on,” Pam said. She got up from the chair and went to the door. “Maydeen’s off the phone.”
When Maydeen walked into Hackberry’s office, her expression was blank, as though she were looking at an image behind her eyes that she did not want to assimilate.
“What is it?” Hackberry said.
“The Alabama state attorney did some hands-on work for us,” she replied. “He found a guy in a state rehab center who was the half sister’s boyfriend. She died in the Twin Towers. She was called in to work on her day off because somebody else was sick. She was in the restaurant on the top floor. She was one of the people who held hands with a friend and jumped.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
At the bottom of Danny Boy Lorca’s land was a ravine that few people knew about or chose to travel. It led from Mexico into the United States, but the entrance was overgrown with thornbushes that could scrape the skin off a man or the paint from an automobile. The sides of the ravine went straight up into the sky and had been marked in four places by the lances of mounted Spaniards who littered the bottom of the ravine with the bones of Indians whose most sophisticated weapons had been the sharpened sticks they used to plant corn. The few illegals who used the ravine and even the coyotes who guided them swore they had seen Indians standing on ledges in the darkness, their faces as dry and bloodless and withered as deer hide stretched on lodge poles. The specters on the ledges did not speak or show any recognition of the nocturnal wayfarers passing between the walls. Their eyes were empty circles that contained only darkness, their clothes sewn from the burlap given them by their conquerors. No one who saw the specters ever wanted to return to the area, except Danny Boy Lorca.
He woke to the grinding noise of a car in low gear laboring up a grade and a brittle screeching that was like someone scratching a stylus slowly down a blackboard. When he went to his back door, he saw a gas-guzzler bounce loose from the ravine, its lights burning in the fog, strings of smoke rising from the rust in its hood. He saw the silhouettes of perhaps four men inside the vehicle.
He pulled on his boots and lifted his twenty-gauge from the antler rack on the wall and limped out onto the back porch. The fog smelled of dust and herbicide and a pond strung with green feces and someone burning raw garbage. The gas-guzzler was traversing his property, its engine rods knocking, its low beams swimming with dust particles and candle moths.
He walked toward it, a pain flaring in his thigh each time his foot came down on the ground, the shotgun cradled across the crook of his left arm. His twenty-gauge was called a dogleg, a one-barrel one-shot breechloader he had used to hunt quail and doves and rabbits when he was a boy. It was a fine gun that had served him well. There was a problem, though: He had not bought shells for it in years. He was carrying an unloaded weapon.
He limped through the chicken yard and past the three-sided shed where his firewood was stacked and through one end of his barn and out the other until he stood squarely in the headlights of the gasguzzler. The driver touched his brakes and stuck his head out the window. “We got a little lost, amigo. Know where the highway is at?”
Danny Boy moved out of the headlights’ glare so he could see the driver more clearly. “You got dope in that car?” he said.
“We’re workers, hombre, ” the driver said. “We don’t got no dope. We are lost. That canyon was a pile of shit. You got a cast on your leg.”
“Yeah, and you got a bullet hole in your window,” Danny Boy said.
“These are dangerous times,” the driver said. “You have an accident?”
“No, a guy put a shank in me. Did you see the Indians in the ravine?”
“A shank? That ain’t good. You said Indians? What is with you, man?” the driver said. He turned to the others. “The guy is talking about Indians. Anybody here see Indians?”
The other men shook their heads.
“See, ain’t nobody seen no fucking Indians,” the driver said. “We’re going to Alpine. Come on, man, you need to stand aside with that gun and let us pass.”
Danny Boy’s gaze had been fixed on the driver’s orange hair and whiskers and the gorilla-like bone structure of his face, so he had not paid attention to the man sitting in the passenger seat. At first the passenger’s sharp profile and unnaturally wide shoulders and slit of a mouth were like parts of a bad dream returning in daylight. When Danny Boy realized who the passenger was, he felt his breath catch in his throat. He stepped back from the car window, gripping the shotgun tightly. “I seen you before,” he said.
“You talking to me?” the passenger said.
It ain’t too late. Don’t say no more, a voice inside Danny Boy said. They will disappear and it will be like they were never here. “I remember your trousers.”
“What about them?”
“Dark blue, with a red stripe down each leg. Like trousers a soldier might wear, or a marine.”
“These are exercise pants. But why should you care about my clothes? Why are they of such consequence?”
Danny Boy had to wet his lips before he spoke. “I watched you from the arroyo. I heard that man screaming
