“Who?”
“The kind of guys who like to grope young girls in the back of the church bus,” she replied, picking up her purse. “Think I’m kidding? Ask yourself why any middle-aged man wants to make a career out of being a youth minister or a park director or a guy who teaches leather craft to rug rats. Because he likes the way the restroom smells after little kids have pissed all over the bowl? Give me a break.”
“How old are you?”
“Buy me a veggie burger and I’ll tell you. Let’s go, I won’t bite,” she said, squeezing his arm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Krill had parked the car in a grove of dead fruit trees no more than fifty yards behind the house of the woman Negrito kept referring to as la china. After the setting of the sun, the wind had dropped, and the sky had turned as stark as an ink wash. The gingerbread house and trees and windmill and barn and horse tank, even the hills, seemed drained of color and movement of any kind. The horses and chickens were gone from the yard, and there was no birdsong in the trees. The only sound Krill could hear as he and Negrito approached the house was water ticking from a rusted pipe that extended over the surface of the horse tank. A nimbus of dust hung above the house like a great cloud of gnats.
Krill stopped and knelt on one knee behind a car that had no wheels or glass in the windows and whose metal was still hot from baking in the sun all day. He stared at the house and the absence of electric lights or movement inside. Negrito knelt beside him, the leather cord of his hat swinging under his chin, the heavy gray fog of his odor puffing out of his clothes. “Krill, you got to tell me,” he said.
“Tell you what?”
“Why we are here. I don’t see no percentage, man.”
“There isn’t one. Not for you, anyway, my old friend.”
“The others have deserted you, but still you talk down to me like I’m the enemy and not the maricones who ran away.”
Krill placed his hand on Negrito’s shoulder, which felt like a flannel sack filled with rocks. “Like me, you are a killer. But killing is not a problem for you. You sleep without dreaming and rise each morning into a new day. But I relive all the times I watched the light go out of my victims’ eyes. My thoughts have become my enemies.”
“That’s why there are whores and tequila in Durango. A trip there will ease your problems, jefe.”
“I have to talk to La Magdalena.”
“You want to sleep with her? That’s what’s going on? You think there’s something special about a Chinese woman in bed? They ain’t no different from our women. You love them at night, and in the morning they make your life awful.”
“Poor Negrito. Why do you always think with the head of your penis?”
“’Cause it ain’t never let me down, man,” said Negrito, and cupped his hand on Krill’s shoulder. “Come on, tell me the truth. Why you got to talk to this woman if you ain’t looking to poke her?”
“To confess my sins, hombre. To rid myself of the faces I see in my sleep.”
“It ain’t a sin to kill people in a war. We were farmers and cattle workers until the war came. The people we killed had it coming. What is the big loss when a Communist is killed?”
“My children died because of me.”
“That don’t make no sense, Krill.”
“I used to blame the army and the Americans and those from Argentina who first gave us our guns. But I took the pay of corrupt political men and did what they told me. I killed the Jesuit and the leftists. You know these things are true, Negrito, because you were there. The helicopter machine-gunned the clinic, but I was their brother in arms. I helped bring a curse on our land.”
“No, your head is screwed up, Krill. That woman ain’t no priest. Whatever you confess to her, she’s gonna tell the cops. Then they’re gonna hunt us down. They don’t want nobody to know what we done down there.”
“There’s something strange going on in that house,” Krill said.
“What’s strange is your head. It glows in the dark. I think you got too many chemicals in it. Remember those nights in Juarez?”
“The woman’s truck is by the barn, but there is no one moving in the house, and no electric light is turned on. But look through the window of the chapel. The candles are burning in front of the Virgin’s statue.”
“Of course. She burns candles all the time. That’s what people like her do. They burn candles. The rest of us work and sweat and sometimes take bullets, but they burn candles.”
“No, this one has been to war, Negrito. She is not one to go off somewhere or take a nap while an open flame burns in her house.”
“You make a complexity of everything,” Negrito said. “You are a man who cannot bear to have a quiet and simple thought. You constantly construct spiderwebs so you can walk through them.”
“Look on the far side of the fence, beyond the barn, where the grass is tall.”
“It’s grass. So what is the great mystery about grass?”
“There is a channel through it. The wind is not making the channel. Somebody walked through there.”
“Animals did. Deer or horses. They cross the field by walking on it. It took you a long time to figure that out?”
“No horses are in that field. And deer do not make paths on flat land, only on hillsides, where their feet have to find the same spot every day.”
“See what I mean? A simple visit to the home of this pretender sacerdote becomes a torture of the brain.”
“The back door is ajar, Negrito. There is something wrong in that house. You stay here and guard my back. You keep the rifle, but do not use it unless absolutely necessary. If everything is normal, I will come to the door and wave to you with my right hand, not my left.”
“ Claro, man. My head is starting to hurt again with all your cautions. I cannot stand this. We were never afraid before. I told you from the beginning, this woman who wears men’s trousers was bad luck. But your obsession has no bounds.”
“Then leave. Go to Durango. Bathe in the diseased fluids of your whores,” Krill said.
Negrito was breathing heavily, the whiskers around his mouth as thick as a badger’s. His pupils were no bigger than pinheads, the skin around his eyes wrinkled and flecked with scales. “You make me want to do something that’s very bad.”
“You want to be me, Negrito, to leave your own body and live inside mine. And because you are a killer by nature, you believe a bullet can give you my heart and brain.”
“I am a loyal servant and follower and brother, not an assassin. I want you to be you and the leader you used to be, Krill, not a self-hating fool ruminating on his sins.”
“If I wave with my left hand from the door, rather than my right, what message will I be sending you?”
“I see only one message in any of this: that of a man being led with a ring through his nose by the Chinese puta.”
“You are brave in ways that few men are, Negrito. But do not try to think anymore. For some men, thinking is a dangerous vanity. You must accept that about yourself.”
Krill stood and walked toward the back entrance of the house, a holstered. 357 Magnum hanging from the right side of his web belt, his skinning knife in a scabbard on his left. He stepped up on the back porch and listened, then felt a breeze on the back of his neck and heard the windmill come to life and water running into the horse tank. But where were the horses? Or the illegals who came almost every evening for food or benediction at the house of La Magdalena?
He paused at the back door and listened again. The windmill was stenciled against the black and gray patterns in the sky, and tumbleweed was bouncing through the yard, hanging in the fences, skipping by the junked car where Negrito was crouched with the M16. Krill pushed open the door and stepped inside.
Through the hallway, he could see her sitting very still in a straight-back chair, her hands resting on her knees, her hair tied in a bun. In the gloom, he could hardly make out her features. Her face was so still that in
