Sholokoff,” he said.
“In making and vending porn?”
“In entertainment. I didn’t ask for details. It’s a two-hundred-billion-dollar industry.”
“What is?”
“Pornography. It’s big business.”
“You just said… Never mind. What about weapons?”
“I’m a defense contractor, but no, I don’t work with Sholokoff. He does things off the computer with agencies that want anonymity. He’s not the only one.”
“Why does Sholokoff have it in for you?”
“He stiffed me on a deal, and I initiated an IRS investigation into his taxes. That’s why he wants to get his hands on Noie Barnum. Josef will turn him over to Al Qaeda.”
“What does he have to gain?”
“I hired Barnum. I thought he was a brilliant young engineer with a great future in weapons design. If Josef can compromise our drone program, I’ll never get a defense contract again.”
“You think Barnum would give military secrets to Islamic terrorists?”
“Of course. He’s a pacifist and a flake or a bleeding heart, I don’t know which. You don’t think his kind want to flush this country down the drain? They want to feel good about themselves at somebody else’s expense. What do you know about Barnum, anyway?”
Hackberry was sitting on the couch, half of his face lit by the reading lamp. He kept his expression blank, his eyes empty. “I don’t know anything about him.”
“No, you’re hiding something,” Dowling said.
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure.” Dowling leaned forward. “You set me up.”
“In what way?”
“At the country club. My father always said your best pitch was a slider. Son of a bitch. You took me good, didn’t you?”
Hackberry shook his head. “You’ve lost me, Mr. Dowling.”
“The grenade under my vehicle, the laser dot on my clothes. I must be the dumbest white person I ever met.” Dowling waited. “You just gonna sit there and not say anything?”
Through the front window, Hackberry could see the hills and the stars and the arid coarseness of the land and the wispy intangibility of the trees in the arroyos and the glow of the town in the clouds. For what purpose had a divine hand or the long evolutionary patterns of ancient seas and volcanic eruption and the gradual wearing away of sedimentary rock created this strange and special place on the earth? Was it meant to be a magical playground for nomadic Indians who camped on its streams and viewed its buttes and mesas as altars on which they stood and stared at the western sun until they were almost blind? Or a blood-soaked expanse where colonials and their descendants had slain one another for four hundred years, where narco-armies waited on the other side of the Rio Grande, armed with weapons shipped from the United States, the same country that provided the market for the weed and coke and skag that went north on a daily basis? As Hackberry stared out the window, he thought he heard the rattle of distant machine-gun fire, a tank with a busted tread trying to dislodge itself from a ditch, the boiling sound napalm made when it danced across a snowfield. What did soldiers call it now? Snake and nape? What was the language of the killing fields today?
“You zoning out on me?” Dowling said.
“No, not at all. I was thinking about you and what you represent.”
“Yes?” Dowling said, lifting his hands inquisitively.
“That’s all, I was just having an idle thought or two. Goodbye, Mr. Dowling. There’s no need for you to drop by again. I think your appointment in Samarra isn’t far down the track. But maybe I’m wrong.”
“My appointment where?”
Noie Barnum had experienced a recurrent dream for years that was more a memory than a dream. He would see himself as a boy again, hunting pheasants on his grandfather’s farm in eastern Colorado. Noie had no memory of his father, who had died when he was three, but he would never forget his grandfather or the love he’d had for him. His grandfather had been a giant of a man, and a jolly one at that, who dressed every day in pressed bib overalls and, even though he was a Quaker, wore a big square beard like many of his Mennonite neighbors. When Noie was eleven, his grandfather had taken him pheasant hunting in a field of wild oats. The plains rolled away as far as Noie could see, golden and gray and white in the sunshine, backdropped by an indigo sky and the misty blue snowcapped outline of the Rocky Mountains. He remembered telling his grandfather he never wanted to leave the farm and never wanted to go back to the little town where his half sister was not allowed to bring her female date to the high school prom.
His grandfather had replied, “It doesn’t matter where we live or go, Noie. The likes of us will always be sojourners.”
“What are sojourners?”
“Folks like me and you and your mother and sister. We’re the descendants of John Brown. We have no home in this world except the one we create inside us.”
Just then two pheasants had burst from the stubble, rising fat and magnificent and thickly feathered and multicolored into the air, their wings whirring, their strength and aerial agility like a denial of their size and the laws of gravity.
“Shoot, little fellow! They’re yours!” his grandfather had said.
When Noie let off the twelve-gauge, the recoil almost knocked him down. Unbelievably, the pattern hit both birds; they seemed to become broken in midair, dysfunctional, their wings crumpling, their necks flopping, their feet trying to hook the air as they tumbled into the stubble.
That night Noie had cried, then the sun rose in the morning as though he had wakened from a bad dream, and for years he did not think about the birds he had killed.
But after 9/11, the dream came back in a mutated form, one in which he no longer saw himself or his grandfather. Instead, he saw curds of yellow smoke angling at forty degrees across an autumnal blue sky and two giant birds on a window ledge entwining their broken wings and then plunging into a concrete canyon where fire trucks swarmed far below.
Noie woke from the dream, raising his head off his chest, unsure where he was, staring down the long dirt road that led to an unpainted gingerbread house.
“Who’s Amelia?” Jack asked.
“My half sister. I must have dozed off. Where are we?” Noie said.
“Right up from the Chinese woman’s place. Does your sister live in Alabama?”
“No, she died nine years ago.”
“Sorry to hear that. I was an only child. It must warp something inside you to see your sibling taken in an untimely way.”
“I don’t like to talk about it.”
“That’s the way I figure it. We all get to the same barn. Why study on it?” When Noie didn’t reply, Jack said, “You scared of it?”
“Of what?”
“Dying.”
“There are worse things.”
“Cite one.”
“Letting evil men harm the innocent. Not doing the right thing when honor is at stake. Why are we parked here?”
“Since we’re wanted all over the state of Texas, I thought it might be a good idea to wait until it was dark before we drove into the yard of somebody who knows us.”
“I don’t think this is smart, Jack.”
“Many a man has tried to put me in jail, but I’ve yet to spend my first day there.”
Jack got out of the car and unlocked the trunk and came back with a suitcase that he set on the hood.
“What are you doing?” Noie asked.
“Changing clothes.”
