while you did those things to him.”
“You’re mixed up, man,” the driver said. “We ain’t from around here. You ain’t never seen us.”
“Let him talk,” said the passenger.
“You tied the man’s scalp on your belt,” Danny Boy said. “You heard a sound up in the rocks and looked up at where I was hiding. I acted like a coward and hid instead of he’ping that guy you killed.”
“Many of our people use this place to enter Texas. We are workers trying to feed our families,” the man said. “Why make an issue with us? It is not in your interest.”
“Listen to him, indio, ” the driver said. “You can get that shotgun kicked up your ass.”
“This is my land. That house is my home,” Danny Boy said.
“So we’re going off your land now,” the driver said. “So get out of our way. So stop being a hardheaded dumb fuck who don’t know not to mess with the wrong guys.”
“You ain’t gonna talk to me like that on my land,” Danny Boy said.
“What I’m gonna do is spit on you, indio. I don’t give a shit if you got a gun or not.”
Danny Boy reversed the twenty-gauge in his hands and drove the stock into the driver’s mouth, snapping back his head, whipping spittle and blood onto the dashboard and steering wheel.
“?Matelo!” a man in the backseat said. “Kill that motherfucker, Negrito.”
“No!” the passenger in the front seat shouted, getting out of the car. “You!” he said, pointing across the top of the roof. “Put your gun away. We are no threat to you.”
The driver was still holding his mouth, trying to talk. “Let me, Krill,” he said. “This one deserves to die.”
“No!” the passenger said. “ You, Indian man, listen to me. You are right. This is your land, and we have violated it. But we mean you no harm. You must let us pass and forget we were here. I saw no Indians in the canyon, but I know they’re there. I’m a believer, like you. We are brothers. Like you, I know our ancestors’ spirits are everywhere. They don’t want us to kill one another.”
The passenger had walked through the headlights and was standing four feet from Danny Boy, his eyes roving over Danny Boy’s face, waiting for him to speak.
“I was in Sugar Land with guys like you. You’re a killer. You ain’t like me, and we ain’t brothers,” Danny Boy said.
“Have it as you wish. But you’re putting us in a bad position, my friend. Your fear is taking away all our alternatives.”
“Fear? Not of you. Not no more.” Danny Boy pushed the release lever on the top of the shotgun’s stock and broke the breech and exposed the empty chamber. “See, I ain’t got a shell in it. I ain’t afraid of you. I ain’t afraid of them guys in the car, either.”
“ Esta loco, Krill,” one of the men inside the car said.
The passenger folded his arms and stared into the darkness as though considering his options. “You got some real cojones, man,” he said. “But I don’t know what we’re going to do with you. Are you going to turn us in?”
“When I can get to a phone.”
“Where’s your cell phone?”
“I ain’t got one.”
“You got a regular phone in your house?”
“No, I ain’t got no phone.”
“You don’t have a telephone? Not of any kind?”
“You see a pole line going to my house?”
Krill stared at the house and at the barn and at the truck parked next to the barn. “The man you saw me kill out there in the desert? He was a corrupt Mexican cop who tortured my brother to death.”
“Then you ain’t no different from the Mexican cop.”
“You are fortunate to have this fine place to live on. I had a farm once, and children and a wife. Now I have nothing. Don’t judge me, hombre.”
Krill pulled a long game-dressing knife from a scabbard on his side and walked to Danny Boy’s truck and sliced the air stems off all four tires. “Buenas noches,” he said as he got back in the automobile. “Maybe one day you will understand men like us. Maybe one day the Indians who live in the canyon will tell you who your real brothers are.”
“They ain’t you!” Danny Boy shouted at the car’s taillights.
In the gloaming of the day, Preacher Jack Collins and Noie Barnum pulled into the drive-in restaurant on the state four-lane and parked under the shed and ordered hamburgers and fries and onion rings and frosted mugs of root beer. The evening was warm, the wind blowing steadily across the rolling countryside, the storm clouds in the south bursting with brilliant patterns of white electricity that made Jack think of barbed wire. He had not spoken since they had left the cottage on the hillside above the junkyard.
“You’re not letting me in on where we’re going?” Noie said.
Jack chewed on his food, his expression thoughtful. “You give much thought to the papists?”
“The Catholics?”
“That’s what I just said.”
“Not particularly.”
“That Chinese woman, the one who dressed your wounds, is a puzzle to me.”
“She’s just a woman with a big heart.”
“Maybe she’s spread her big heart around a little more than she should have.”
“If you read Saint Paul, there’s no such thing as being too charitable.”
“She may have been acting as a friend to the FBI. If that’s true, she’s no friend to us.”
“You saying she’s a turncoat?”
“I’d like to talk to her about it. Here’s a question for you.” From the side, Jack’s eyes looked like glass marbles pushed into dough that had turned moldy and then hardened. The amber reflection in them was as sharp as broken beer glass but without complexity or meaning. In fact, the light in his eyes was neutral, if not benign. “You put a lot of work into whittling out that checker set. Each one of those little buttons was a hand-carved masterpiece. But two pieces were missing from your poke, and you didn’t seem to give that fact any thought.”
“I guess I dropped them somewhere.”
“When you counted the checkers out, you didn’t notice that two were gone?”
“Guess not.”
“Too bad to lose your pieces. You’re an artisan. For a fellow like you, your craft is an extension of your soul. That’s what an artisan is. His thoughts travel through his arm and his hand into the object he creates.”
“That’s an interesting way to look at it.”
“Think they might have fallen out in the trunk when we were moving?”
“I’ll look first chance.”
“You like your hamburger?”
“You’d better believe it.”
“Does it bother you that an animal has to give up its life so we can eat types of food we probably could do without?”
“You know how to hang crepe, Jack.”
“Think we’d be welcomed by the papist woman?”
“You know what I would really like, more than anything else in the world? I mean, if I could have one wish, a wish that would make my whole life complete? That would make me so happy I would never ask for anything else as long as I live?”
“I cain’t figure what that might be, Noie.”
“I’d like to make peace with the men who held me hostage and killed the Mexican man I was handcuffed to. I’d like to make peace with the Al Qaeda guys they were going to sell me to. I’d like to apologize to them for the innocent people I helped kill with the drones I helped develop. Most of all, Jack, I’d like to repay you for everything you’ve done. When they made you, they busted the mold.”
Jack worked a piece of food out of his jaw with his tongue and swallowed, his gaze straight ahead. He sipped from his mug, grains of ice clinging to his bottom lip. An attractive waitress in a rayon uniform roller-skated past the front of the Trans Am on the walkway under the shed, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Who’s ‘they’?” he asked.
