25
Late that night we stopped in a rest area south of Uvalde and lowered the leather seats back and slept until dawn. In my dream I saw L.Q. and me riding hard down a hill of yellow grass that was lined with flame across the crest. The sky was the texture and color of old bone, and smoke and dust were blowing out of the hills across a sun that gave no heat. Our horses came out of the grass just ahead of the fire, ash and cinders raining upon our heads, then we were on a baked, white flood-plain in which our horses' hooves sculpted holes as big as buckets.
But up ahead were a green river, shadowed with willow trees that had turned gold with the season, and in the distance rain falling on hills where red Angus grazed. L.Q.'s pinstripe suit was strung with horse saliva and sweat, his coat blowing back from the Ranger badge on his belt and the tied-down revolver on his thigh.
'Use your spur, bud. They'll cuff us to mesquite trees and cut off our toes and dance in the smoke while we burn,' he said.
'He's fixing to go lame, L.Q.'
Then I felt my gelding heave sideways under me, slamming me into the soft, baked soil that cracked under my weight like cake icing and powdered my suit with alkali. L.Q. reined his mare and I hit her rump running, vaulting on two hands behind the cantle. I felt her power surge up like a barrel between my thighs, and I locked both arms around L.Q.'s waist and we plunged into the river and down the shelf into deep water.
I saw the alkali and ash and the blackened grass from the fields wash away in the current and felt the water's warmth swell inside my clothes. But something was wrong. The hills on the far side of the river had caught fire, the autumnal gold of the willows now crinkling with flame. Inside the smoke, I could hear cattle stampeding, a roar so loud the surface of the river trembled.
L.Q. had floated out of the saddle and was holding onto the pommel, water rilling off the brim of his hat.
' I think this is the big one, L.Q.,' I said.
' It'll take better than them scumbags to do the likes of us,' he replied.
'We put ourselves in it.'
' In what?' he asked.
'Hell. That's what this is. We've been locating ourselves next to every evil sonofabitch in north Mexico.'
'That's the job description, bud. They commit the crime and we splatter their grits. It beats selling shoes, don't it? Stop tasking your innards. The day you lose your humanity is the day you let Johnny Krause's kind have their way.'
When Temple shook me awake it was raining only two hundred yards away, like a wet curtain of spangled light that partitioned the land, and the live oaks overhead were green and softly focused against the primrose tint of the sunrise in the east. I could smell cattle in a livestock truck that was parked by the rest station, and the sand flats and the rain dimpling on the Nueces River down below.
'You okay, Billy Bob?' she asked.
'Sure.'
'You always have dreams like that?'
A trucker and his wife were eating their breakfast at a stone table under a shed, their faces serene and rested in the cool of the morning, and two little girls were playing on the grass with a big rubber ball. I widened my eyes and opened the car door and felt the flat, dry hardness of the cement under my boot, as though I were touching ground again after having been disconnected from the earth.
'It looks like it's going to be a right nice day,' I said.
Temple hooked her elbow over the back of the passenger seat. Her eyes moved over my face with an undisguised affection in them, then she reached out with her fingertips and brushed a strand of hair out of my eye.
That afternoon Wilbur Pickett put his hands on his hips and stared at Kippy Jo's dresser and decided he had fixed the uneven drawers for the last time. They hung on the runners and jammed sideways and the threading on the knobs had stripped on the screws. Besides, the paneling on the left side that Hugo Roberts and his deputies had ripped loose searching for the stolen bearer bonds was split diagonally along the face like a long white crack in a mahogany tooth.
So he asked permission first, then removed all the clothes from the drawers and folded them on the bed and hauled the dresser to the barn, where he dropped it up-right and began chopping it apart for kindling. On the third blow of the ax the frame cleaved in half and sank in upon itself, and he hooked the ax on the left panel and prised the nails from the warped seam at the top. When he did, the panel cracked apart like a walnut shell, and between the lower portion of the splintered wood and a piece of scrap board that a previous owner had inserted next to the drawer space was the green-and-white-printed edge of a bearer bond.
'They must have planted three of them instead of two,' Wilbur said over the phone.
'Did you touch it?' I asked.
'Not with a manure fork, son,' he replied.
An hour later he was waiting for me on a wood chair in front of the barn when Marvin Pomroy and I and a fingerprint man from San Antonio and Hugo Roberts pulled into his drive in three different cars. Wilbur's hair was wet and combed, and he had put on fresh blue jeans and a beige sports shirt and a pair of dress boots. He stood up from his chair and extended his hand to Marvin.
'How you do, Mr. Pomroy?' he said.
Marvin hesitated just a second, then reached out and took Wilbur's hand. No one spoke and a bucket hanging on a nail inside the barn door tinked against the wood in the wind.
'I don't hold no personal grudge,' Wilbur said.
'I understand you have a piece of evidence that bears looking at,' Marvin said.
'It's what them worthless deputies stuck in there and didn't take back out,' Wilbur said.
Hugo Roberts screwed a cigarette into his mouth and lit it with his lighter, blowing the smoke out in the sunset.
'If this ain't the silliest waste of time I can think of, I don't know what is,' he said.
'If you're going to smoke, do it downwind from me, Hugo,' Marvin said.
The independent fingerprint man from San Antonio picked up the bearer bond gingerly with a pair of tweezers and dropped it into a plastic bag.
'Y'all put me in mind of somebody tweezering corn out of pig shit. What in the hell is this supposed to prove?' Hugo said.
'I imagine all your deputies' fingerprints are on file, as well as your own, Hugo. You'll make those immediately available to us, won't you?' I said.
'I don't have nothing else to do. Did your boy smash up a bunch of cars with his stepdaddy's pickup truck?' he replied. He looked out at a freight train crossing a trestle in the hills and held his cigarette close to his lips with two fingers and puffed it uninterruptedly, the skin of his face the same nicotine shade as his fingers in the late sunlight.
I had just hung up the phone after talking to Marvin Pomroy when Wilbur came through my office door at noon the next day. He continued to stand rather than take a chair, his teeth clamped down on the corner of his lip, his hat held with both hands in front of his belt buckle.
'Hugo Roberts's prints and Kyle Rose's are on the bond. Yours aren't,' I said.
'Kyle Rose, the deputy somebody strung a deer arrow through?' Wilbur said.
'That's the guy. You didn't steal those bonds. They were planted, Wilbur. Marvin Pomroy just said as much.'
'What's it mean?'
'I have some paperwork to do, then you're going to be out of it.'
He sat down in a chair and rubbed the back of his neck, his eyes burrowing into the carpet.
'What about Kippy Jo?' he asked.
'She's still on the hook.'
'One deal's part of the other, ain't it? If I hadn't been set up, Bubba Grimes wouldn't have been sent out there to kill me and Kippy Jo.'
'I thought you'd be happy.'
He got up from the chair, my words never registering in his face.
