The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

James Lee Burke Deportees

from The Strand Magazine

People think the Dust Bowl ended with the 1930s. It didn’t in Yoakum, Texas. I remember how cold and brittle and sharp the air was at eight in the morning six days after Pearl Harbor when my mother and I arrived at Grandfather’s paintless, pitiful home in our old coupe with the hand-crank windshield, but I remember even more the way the dust was piled as smooth as cinnamon against the smokehouse and barn and windmill tank, and how the sun was a dull silver disk and the sky an ink wash and the pecan trees bare and black like they’d been scorched in a fire.

The first thing Mother did when we entered the house was sit down at Grandfather’s piano, which he had bought from a saloon in San Antonio, and play “Clair de Lune.” She was a beautiful woman and had a regal manner, but she was also crazy and had undergone electroshock treatments and had been placed in the asylum in Wichita Falls. The edges of the wood grips on Grandfather’s revolver were cut with nine notches he had tried to sand out of existence with a nail file. It worked about as well as the electroshock treatments did on my mother.

“How you doin’, Buster Brown?” he said.

“That’s not my name, Grandfather,” I said.

“That’s right, stand up for yourself, Aaron,” he said. “But you ought to get you a little dog named Tige.”

You didn’t win with Grandfather. Even in old age he still stood six foot six. When he was a Texas Ranger he knocked John Wesley Hardin out of his saddle and kicked him in the face, and for good measure nailed chains on him in the bed of a wagon and threw him in the county jail and poured a slop bucket on his head.

He was sitting by the fireplace, his face warm and yellow as a candle in the light. “Y’all come to he’p me put up the Christmas tree?”

“Yes, sir.”

He knew better. My father had disappeared again. My mother kept playing “Clair de Lune,” an expression on her face like the shadows rain makes running down a window.

Grandfather got up and went into the kitchen and lifted a tin sheet of biscuits off the woodstove. The biscuits were brown and crusty and oozing with melting butter. The sky was dark, dirty with smoke, and I could see flashes in the clouds and hear the rumble of thunder that gave no rain. I thought I saw people rush past the barn, gripping their belongings against their chests, their clothes streaming in the wind, their faces pinched as though raindrops were stinging their skin, although I knew there was neither rain nor hail inside the wind, only dust.

“There’s Mexicans running across the lot, Grandfather,” I said.

“They’re wets. Don’t pay them no mind.”

He smiled when he said it. But I knew he didn’t mean anything mean or racial. In hard times you don’t share your secrets and you sure don’t borrow trouble.

“A woman was nursing a baby and running at the same time, Grandfather.”

He scraped the biscuits into a galvanized bucket, then slid a sliced-up ham onto the biscuits and draped a checkered napkin over the top and hefted the bucket by the bail. “Let’s go, Buster Brown.”

We didn’t need books to learn about the history of our state. It was always at the ends of our fingertips. It was even in the eyes of my crazy mother, who often seemed to take flight and travel back in time, for good or bad, mostly for bad. How about this? In 1914 an old woman outside Yoakum told my mother this story. When the old woman was a girl, two dozen mounted men with weapons tied to their saddles rode into the yard and asked if they could have breakfast. The girl and her parents started a fire under a Dutch oven and boiled coffee and cooked meat for the riders, all of whom spoke little. Their leader was a lantern-jawed man with soulful brown eyes and oiled, thick hair that hung on his cheeks. After a while he rested his knife and fork over his plate. “Why are you looking at us in such a peculiar way, little girl?” he asked.

“We don’t often see people who wear animal hides instead of clothes,” she replied.

“Back in Tennessee buckskin is considered right smart fashion. You and your folks have been mighty kind. One day you can tell your grandchildren you fixed breakfast for Davy Crockett and his Tennessee volunteers on their way to San Antonio de Bexar to give ole Santa Anna the fight of his life.”

I loved my mother. She stuck up for poor whites and people of color, and was generous to a fault with the little money we had. But I avoided looking into her eyes and the memories from her own life that were buried there. The same with my father. He was an educated and genteel man from South Louisiana who went over the top five times in what he called the Great War. He was an extremely intelligent and perceptive man, and consequently doomed to a life of emotional and intellectual loneliness. Mother’s depression and frigidity did not help, and I thought it no wonder my father’s most loyal companions had become his beer at the icehouse and the whiskey he hid in the garage.

“What are you studying on?” Grandfather said.

“Why do you call the Mexicans wets?”

“Good question. You could walk across the Rio Grande on your hands. We’re going outside. Find you a hat in the hall. That wind has no mercy.”

He was right. It was dry and full of grit and as cold and mean and ugly as a witch’s broom. We ran for the barn. There must have been eight or nine Mexicans sitting in the straw, and maybe more back in the darkness. The chickens were trying to hide in the loft. I don’t think I ever saw people as hungry or lean. The baby I saw sucking at its mother’s breast looked made of sticks and a hank of skin and hair. Grandfather passed out the ham and biscuits and went out to the windmill and unhitched the chain and used a clean syrup can to catch the water under the pipe that fed the stock tank.

When he returned, he passed the syrup can among the Mexicans and told them he would get them more water when the can was done. The wind was puffing under the roof, straining the tin roof against the beams and storm latches. From outside I could hear the sound of a car engine and metal rattling and bouncing. Grandfather put his eye to a crack in the door. He spoke without taking his eye from the crack. “Aaron,” he said.

“Yes, sir?” I replied, aware of the change in his voice and the fact he had used my christened name.

“Keep these people inside. Don’t open the door. Not for any reason.”

“What’s wrong, Grandfather?”

He slipped a shovel loose from a barrel of tools. “I try to avoid confrontations with white trash, but sometimes they don’t give you no selection.”

He pushed open the door and stepped out into the cold. I felt a solitary raindrop strike my eyeball, as bright and hard as a chip of glass. Then Grandfather shut the door. I squinted through the crack and saw him approach a Model T Ford in the middle of a dry streambed that led down to the river. A tall man as thin as a lizard stepped out on the ground, his tie lifting in the wind, his suit flattening against his body. He had a long, unshaved face and tubular nose, shadowed by a John B. Stetson hat. He had to shout to be heard. “Fixing to take a shit in the woods, Mr. Holland?”

“I don’t abide profanity on my property, Mr. Watts.”

“I’m here out of respect. I’m also here to avoid trouble.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mr. Watts. I’m sure the failing is mine.”

The man named Watts looked at Mother’s car and at the dust on the running boards and the swaths of it on the windshield. The wind flapped his coat back, exposing the brass star on his belt and the holster and sidearm on his hip. “Miss Wynona is visiting?”

“What’s the nature of your visit, Mr. Watts?”

“We think there’s infiltrators coming up from the border.”

“Infiltrators?”

“To be specific, Japs.”

“The Japs are fixing to bomb Yoakum, Texas?” Grandfather said. “That’s what you’re saying?”

Mr. Watts’s face made me think of soil erosion. His eyes were as flat and black as watermelon seeds under his hat brim. “I never spoke badly of you, Mr. Holland. I know what whiskey can do. There’s a seat in our church anytime you want it.”

“I know your preacher well. I saw him at a cross-burning once. He was setting fire to the cross. I was writing down license numbers.”

“Jesus didn’t choose to be born a colored man. There wasn’t any on the Ark, either.”

“I got a theory on some of that,” Grandfather said. “Know why God made certain kinds of white people?”

“No, and I’m not interested. I been sent out here by federal authorities.”

“He was sending a message to the nigras about the superiority of white intelligence.”

The wind gusted, rattling the blades on the windmill. Mr. Watts gazed at the barn door. “You calving early this year?”

“My cows were gone in ’31. My grandson and I were gathering up some eggs.”

“You wouldn’t go upside my head with that shovel if I looked inside your barn, would you?”

“No, sir. But I’d file charges against you if you did it without a warrant.”

“I see. Tell your daughter hello for me,” Mr. Watts said. He turned his face so it caught the light. He winked, a grin at the corner of his mouth.

I saw Grandfather’s right hand twitch, as though stung by a bee. “Come back here,” he said.

Mr. Watts drove back down the streambed, the tires of his Model T rolling over fat white rocks that were webbed with algae and that crackled loudly when they were heavily pressed one against the other.

We fed the Mexicans and went back in the house. It had a second story and dormers, but it was a tinderbox and creaked with the wind and had bat and squirrel pellets all over the attic. At one time Grandfather had owned five farms and ranches, one of them on the green waters of the Guadalupe River outside Victoria. But his love of cards and liquor and outlaw women created numerous graves that had no marker and children who had no father.

He never got religion, at least not in the ordinary sense. I also doubted if he dwelled long on the men he shot, since most of them were killers and not worth the dirt it took to bury them. The children he had abandoned were another matter. He could not ignore the despair in my mother’s face when the afternoon sun began to slip below the horizon and evening shadows dropped like wild animals from the trees and crept across the yard in order to devour her heart. In those moments there was no way to shake the terror from her face.

She found a substitute for her father when she was seventeen, but no one was ever sure who. There were many soldiers in town, and also traveling salesmen. Some said her lover died in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Whoever he was, he disappeared from her life and she quit high school and went to Houston. Three months later she returned and picked cotton with the darkies, and later went to night school and learned shorthand. For the rest of her life the one subject she would never discuss was abortion and would leave a room if anyone alluded to it.

After Mr. Watts had gone and Grandfather and I came back into the house, Mother kept staring at the barn and the trail of white rocks in the gulley that used to be a streambed. Her skin was still clear and youthful, her amber hair thick and full of lights, piled on her head like a 1920s woman would wear it. Her dress was paper-thin, printed with tiny red roses, and washed almost colorless. “What’s going to become of the Mexicans?” she said.

“I know a man in Victoria who’s hiring,” Grandfather said. “He can pick them up tonight.”

“There’s an enormous hypocrisy about all this,” she said.

“In what way?” he said.

“In good times we bring them in by the truckload. When there’s drought, the Mexicans are the devil’s creation.”

He watched her eyes and the way they followed the streambed through the trees down to the river. “Was it Watts?”

She turned her glare upon him. “I have no dealings with Mr. Watts. I suggest you don’t either.”

“If it was him, Wynona, I need to know.”

She sat down at the piano and began to play “Malagueña,” by Ernesto Lecuona. She played and played and played, hitting the keys harder and harder, until Grandfather stuffed his fingers in his ears and walked out of the room. Then she stopped and stared at me. “Get your coat,” she said.

“Where we going?”

“To town.”

“To the matinee?” I said.

“We’re going to buy some milk.”

We walked past Grandfather in the kitchen. He was at the window, his back to us, framed in the gray light, his right hand opening and closing at his side, as though he were squeezing a rubber ball, the knuckles ridging.

Mother and I drove down a dirt road into the county seat and parked at a grocery store on a side street, next to an icehouse and a cinder-block building where chickens were butchered. It was Saturday and both the grocery store and the icehouse were crowded. She pressed a nickel into my palm. “Go get you a Grapette, Aaron, but drink it in the car,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. Are we breaking the law?”

“Who told you such a thing?”

I picked at my hands. “It’s the way we’re acting.”

I said we instead of you. She kissed me on the head. “You’re a good boy. Don’t be speaking bad of yourself or me either.”

I went inside the icehouse and pulled a Grapette from the cold box and paid at the counter. Through the side windows I could see the rear lot of the slaughterhouse and a sloping rivulet of feathers and chicken guts that had merged and congealed with the runoff from the ice-maker.

The men around me were bundled up and drinking beer and smoking or chewing tobacco, their clothes sour with the odor that sweat makes when it’s trapped inside wool. They were talking about the American sailors who had been drowned inside the Arizona, a subdued anger as thick as spit in their throats.

“What you doin’ in here, little fellow?” said a voice behind me.

I looked up at the silhouette of Mr. Watts. “Drinking a Grapette,” I said. “But I’m supposed to drink it in the car.”

“Where’s your mama at?”

“The grocery store,” I said. “Across the street,” I added, not knowing why.

“Getting y’all a mess of eats, is she?”

“Not really,” I replied. “Grandfather gets by on the preserves he puts up in the fall.”

“Bet she’s buying milk. Right or wrong?”

I knew somehow he had bested me and caused me to give up a secret, but I wasn’t sure how or what. He smiled down at me and stuck a long, thin cigar in his mouth, then took a kitchen match from his shirt pocket and scratched it on the butt of his revolver. He puffed on the cigar, his eyes hazy, and fitted his hand like a starfish on my head and worked his palm and fingers in my hair. “You don’t like that? If so, just say. Don’t be giving adults mean looks.”

I went back across the street with my Grapette and climbed into my mother’s car. I felt dirty all over. She came out of the store with a big grocery bag clutched against her chest. She set it on the seat between us. Inside it were three sweaty bottles of milk and two cartons of Cream of Wheat.

“What’s wrong, Aaron?”

“Nothing.”

She hadn’t started the car. She twisted around and looked through the rear window. Mr. Watts was crossing the street, his Stetson slanted sideways, his cigar poked back in his jaw. “Did that man say something or do something to you?” she said.

“He put his hand on my head, like he was wiping it on me.”

She looked straight ahead, her face tight. She started to turn the ignition, her hand shaking on the keys. The keys fell to the floor. She reached under the seat and pulled out a leather quirt. “Stay in the car.”

She opened the door and stepped outside, her hair blowing, her profile cut out of tin.

“You haven’t changed,” Mr. Watts said, tipping his hat. “As fresh as the dew, no matter the season.”

“You touched my son?”

“I don’t know rightly what you mean by touched.”

“Don’t you put on airs with me,” she said.

“I thought we were friends.”

She slashed the quirt across his face and laid open his cheek.

“Lord, woman, you flat cut loose, don’t you?” he said. He pressed the back of his wrist against the cut and looked at the smear of blood on his skin. “Warn me next time and I’ll stay out of your way.”

She began to thrash him, raining blows down on his head and shoulders, weeping at her own rage and impotence and shame while two men grabbed her by the arms and dragged her back on the sidewalk, easing the quirt out of her hand.

“It’s all right, everybody,” Mr. Watts said to the onlookers. “Miss Wynona is distraught. She didn’t mean no harm.”

People patted him on the back and shook his hand and told him what a kind and Christian man he was. I ran to my mother and hugged her around the waist, as though we were the only two people on earth.

The man from Victoria who was supposed to pick up the Mexicans never arrived. Mother fed the Mexicans and Grandfather cussed out the man from Victoria on the phone. “You’re going to he’p the war effort by not hiring wets?” he said. “I got a better way for you to serve your country. Shoot yourself.”

The sun went down and so did the glow of lights from town that sometimes reflected on the bottoms of the clouds. In the general store at the crossroads the radio with the tiny yellow dial broadcast stories about the Japanese dropping parachutes loaded with incendiary devices into our forests and grasslands. There were also reports of pamphlets that floated out of the sky and burst into flame when children picked them up. Street mobs were attacking Japanese businesses in Los Angeles.

Grandfather put on his canvas coat and tied on his wide-brimmed hat with a scarf and walked his fences with a lantern, out of fear not of the Japanese but of the evil potential of Mr. Watts, or maybe in bitter recognition that his era had passed and the injury he had done to his family could not be undone and the moral failure that characterized his life had poisoned everything he touched and saw.

That night I helped Mother and Grandfather in the barn with the Mexicans. She gave her greatest care to the woman breastfeeding her infant and held it in her arms while the mother used the outhouse. The Mexicans were a sad lot, their skin as gray as the fields, their faces like mud masks, their clothes and hair sprinkled with bits of hay that had turned yellow.

Back in the kitchen Grandfather told me the Mexicans had crossed the Rio Grande far south of us, then had been betrayed by an illegal contractor who was supposed to drive them to San Antonio.

“He took their money and left them with the clothes on their backs,” he said.

“What’s going to happen to them?” I asked.

“They’ll get caught and sent back. The government calls them ‘deportees.’”

“That little baby is mighty thin,” I said.

“Your mother worries me.”

“Sir?”

“I let her down,” he said. “She blames herself for something that wasn’t her fault.”

“She never speaks bad of you, Grandfather. Not ever.”

“Past is past. Wait here.” He went into the living room and picked up a deep cardboard box from behind the couch and carried it back into the kitchen. I heard scraping sounds inside the cardboard.

“I got this from a lady friend of mine. Take a peek.”

The pup could have walked right off a Buster Brown promotion in a shoe-store window — ​chunky as a fireplug, his brown eyes as round and big as quarters, his stub of a tail swishing against the box.

I picked him up and breathed his clean puppy smell and felt his tongue on my face. “He looks just like Tige.”

“I declare, you and him make quite a pair.”

Two weeks went by, then Wake Island fell and supposedly a Japanese submarine fired artillery shells into a California oil field. Some of the Mexicans went away on their own, single men who hopped a freight or women without children looking for work as cooks and cleaning maids. A half dozen stayed with us, including the woman with the infant. Her name was Maria; her child’s was Jesus. Her husband had died of a snake bite in Coahuila, just before they crossed the river into Texas.

As we entered the new year, Grandfather incrementally gave jobs to the remaining Mexicans so their visibility would grow a little each day, until a passerby might think they had always been with us, patching the barn roof, washing clothes on the porch, burning tumbleweeds in the ditches, harrowing a field for the spring. I don’t know what he paid them. I’m sure it wasn’t much, if anything, for he had very little money. But the Mexicans didn’t seem to mind. My mother bought baby clothes for Jesus and started teaching Maria English. Toward the end of January Mother received a postcard from my father. He said he was returning to Houston and hoped she and I would rejoin him in our little ivy-covered brick bungalow on Hawthorne Street.

“We’re going home, aren’t we, Mother?” I said.

“I suspect,” she said. “Directly, anyway.”

“What’s directly mean?”

“It means directly.”

She twisted her fingers idly in my hair, her gaze just this side of madness.

Two days later we drove to town with Grandfather. He had never learned to drive a car and always looked upon a ride in a car as a treat. We parked at the open market by the train depot and got out. I had forgotten my bad experience with Mr. Watts, as though it were a bad dream that fell apart in the daylight. A locomotive with a caboose and only two passenger cars on it had pulled into the station, the engine hissing steam. Mother was browsing through some open-air clothes racks and Grandfather was buying a piece of cactus candy from a booth when we saw Mr. Watts ten feet away, eating caramel corn from a paper sack while he watched us.

“Good morning,” he said. He was wearing a black suit with a silver shirt and a vest and a string tie. “A friend of yours on the train would like to say hello.”

“Tell him to get off the train and do it,” Grandfather replied.

“Maybe him and some others don’t want to draw attention.”

The shades were drawn on all the passenger windows in the train. “They’re celebrities?” Grandfather said.

“Maybe one of them was there when Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow got it,” Mr. Watts said. “Know who that might be?”

“You’re talking about Frank Hamer?”

“He didn’t give his name. He just said he knowed you.”

“Which car is he in?”

“The second behind the engine.”

Grandfather took me by the hand and we walked past the caboose to the first passenger car. It was the dark green of an olive. “Let’s see what’s going on, Buster Brown.” He swung me up on the steel steps.

The passenger seats had been removed from the car and replaced with benches, a pickle barrel, and a table that had smoked fish and several half-empty bottles of Hires root beer on it. There was a potbelly stove in one corner. Five men in suits and slouch or cowboy hats were sitting on the benches. Two of them wore mustaches. All of them were unshaved and looked like they had slept in their clothes. All of them were armed.

“One of you wanted to see me?” Grandfather said.

A tall man stood up. His mustache was jet-black and drooped to his collar. “I always wanted to meet you. I heard you slept with the girlfriend of the Sundance Kid.” He grinned.

“You must have me mixed up with somebody else,” Grandfather said. “Number two, I got my grandson with me.”

“Excuse me,” the man said.

“Y’all Pinkertons?” Grandfather said.

“Friends of the railroad.”

“One of y’all saw Bonnie and Clyde get it?”

“I did,” said the same man.

Grandfather studied his face. “No, you didn’t,” he said. “I know every man who was there.”

“I got pictures. But I won’t argue.”

“What do you fellows want?”

“We think there’s some Chinamen coming through here with the wetbacks. Except they’re not Chinamen.”

“They’re Japs?” Grandfather said. My hand was still inside his. It felt hard and moist and callused and yet gentle.

“Would that surprise you?” the tall man said.

“Stay clear of me. That includes my family and workers.”

“We don’t call the shots. The railroad is going to be carrying a lot of soldiers through here.”

“I understand that and I don’t need to hear any more,” Grandfather said. “You got my message.”

“You really knew the Sundance Kid?”

“Yes, I did. He was a moron who breathed through his mouth a lot. Are y’all going to make trouble for me?”

“That’s up to you, Mr. Holland.”

“Son, you don’t know what trouble is,” Grandfather said.

One of the other men set his Hires root beer on the table. In the silence the sound made my face jerk.

I was too little to understand adult cruelty. Like most children, I thought adults possessed all the power they needed and hence had no reason to be cruel. So I was not equipped to comprehend the events that happened three days later when Mr. Watts’s Model T drove up the dry streambed, followed by a big khaki-colored truck with a canvas top on the back.

Mr. Watts and the man with the mustache got out by the barn. The truck made a circle into the field behind the windmill and herded three Mexican men toward the house. No, I didn’t say that right. The men hung their heads and walked with the docility of animals going up a slaughter chute. Maria was squeezing out the wash with a hand-crank roller on the back porch, her baby in a bassinet made from an orange crate. Three of the men from the train car jumped off the back of the truck, rifles in their hands. Mother came out the screen door wearing a man’s suit coat, her face disjointed, the way it did before one of her spells came on.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she said.

“The Mexican woman and the child are illegals,” a man with a chin beard said.

“You have no proof of that.”

“We don’t need it, lady.”

“Don’t you dare put your hand on her,” Mother said. “Did you hear me?”

“Ma’am, don’t mix in it or we’ll have to take you too.”

“That’s what you think,” she said.

“Step back, please,” the man said.

“Hold on there, Ed,” Mr. Watts called, walking toward us. “I’ll handle this.”

“You will handle nothing,” Mother said.

“Get your father out here,” Mr. Watts said.

“He’s in town,” she said. “If he was here, you’d be dead.”

“Well, we’ll have to do our job without him, won’t we, Wynona?”

“You will not address me by my first name.”

Mr. Watts turned to the other men. “Load them up, the female and the baby first. Search the barn and the loft. Look in the outhouse as well, and then in the main house.”

“You don’t have the authority to do this,” Mother said.

“I’m head constable,” Mr. Watts said. “These men are contract law officers working for the government. Now you stand aside or I’ll arrest you myself.”

“Like hell you will,” she said.

Mr. Watts looked at the windmill spinning and the dust blowing out of the fields. His eyes were bright and small under the brim of his hat. He bit the corner of his lip. “Cuff her and keep her here till we’re gone,” he said.

And that’s what they did, with her arms pulled behind her, her throat corded with veins. The child began crying in the orange crate, his little chest and fists shaking with the effort. Minutes later Maria looked back at us from under the canvas top on the truck, her body rocking with the movement of the bed, her face small and frightened inside the scarf tied on her head.

Mr. Watts started toward his Model T, then returned to the porch. “Stop yelling,” he said to my mother. “Don’t you tell lies to your father about me, either. Goddamnit, shut up! They’re just deportees.”

That night Mother sat in her room upstairs by herself while in the kitchen I told Grandfather what had happened. He was quiet a long time. The wind was up, the sky black, and through the window I could see sparks twisting from the ventilation pipe on the smokehouse.

“Did she strike Mr. Watts?” he said.

“No, sir.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did they put their hands on Miss Maria?”

“One man held her while another man carried the crate to the truck.”

“The man with the mustache from the train, the one who was talking about the Sundance Kid, what was his part in all this?”

“He told me he was sorry. He said to tell you that. He acted afraid.”

“Ask your mother to come down here, please.”

“What for, Grandfather?” I rarely questioned what Grandfather said. But this time I was truly scared. For all of us.

“I need her to drive me to town. You’ll have to come with us. I don’t want you here by yourself.”

“What are we doing, Grandfather?”

“That’s up to other people.”

I got my mother from upstairs. Grandfather had already put on his canvas coat. His revolver and gun belt and holster were on the table, the belt wrapped around the holster, the leather loops stuffed with brass cartridges.

“Don’t do this, Daddy,” Mother said.

“He’s the man who caused you all that pain, Wynona,” Grandfather said. “Now he’s doing it again.”

“I do not think about him anymore,” she said. “He has nothing to do with my life.”

“Will you drive me to town? I can saddle Blue. But it’s fixing to rain.”

“It might rain in your prayers, but that’s the only place you’re going to see it,” she said.

“Either h’ep me or I’ll get my slicker.”

We climbed into the car and drove to town. I could see flickers of light on the horizon, like a string of firecrackers popping on the rim of the earth.

The saloon was a leftover from the nineteenth century, the ceiling plated with stamped tin, the bar outfitted with a brass foot rail and cuspidors. Not far away some of the pens that marked the exact inception spot of the Chisholm Trail were still standing. Mother parked at an angle to the elevated concrete sidewalk and cut the engine. The window of the saloon was gray with dust, a solitary bulb burning inside. Through the windshield I could see men tipping tin cups in a bucket of beer and playing poker dice at the bar.

“We’ll wait here,” Mother said.

Grandfather got out on the passenger side, his gun belt looped on his shoulder, the revolver hanging under his armpit. “I want Aaron to see this,” he said.

“See what?” my mother asked.

“That our family doesn’t tolerate abuse.”

She half opened the driver’s door and stood partially in the street and looked across the car roof at him. She wasn’t wearing a coat, and her flesh was prickled with cold, her amber hair wild and beautiful. “I made my choices. Now, leave well enough alone, Daddy.”

Grandfather looked down at me. “We do it our way, don’t we, Buster Brown? Come along now and don’t pay your mother no mind. She knows I’m right.”

I put my hand in his and walked with him into the saloon. I thought I smelled rain. I was sure I did. The way it smells in the spring. Like a great gold-green world full of pure oxygen and mist and sunshine and new beginnings. The bell rang above the door. A half-dozen men turned and stared at us. Mr. Watts shook the dice in a leather cup and slung the dice along the bar. “Wrong address, Mr. Holland,” he said.

“What’d y’all do with Maria and her baby and the rest of my Mexicans?” Grandfather said.

“They’re your property, are they?” Mr. Watts said.

Mother came inside and closed the door behind her, the bell tinkling again. The smell of rain went away and the air became close and laced with a masculine odor and a burned stench from the woodstove. A man in a mackinaw bent over and spat a stream of tobacco juice in a cuspidor. Grandfather let go of my hand and approached Mr. Watts. “Say you’re sorry.”

“To who?” Mr. Watts said.

“My daughter.”

“For what?”

“What you did.”

“I have nothing to apologize for.” Mr. Watts reached around for his tin cup and accidentally knocked it over. “Give me a towel over here,” he said to the bartender.

“Forget the towel,” Grandfather said. “Look at me.”

“I will not do anything you say.” Mr. Watts pointed his chin in the air, like a prideful child.

The man with the drooping jet-black mustache was three feet from Mr. Watts. “We ain’t part of this, Captain Holland.”

“Then stand aside,” Grandfather said.

“You’re not really gonna do this, are you?” said the man with the mustache. “You’re a smarter man than that, right?”

Grandfather picked me up and put me in Mother’s arms. “Go sit by the stove, Wynona.”

“Please, Daddy,” she said.

“Do as I ask.”

She walked with me to the rear of the saloon and sat down in a rocking chair. She kept me on her lap, her arms folded across my chest. I could feel her heart beating against my back, her breath on my neck.

Mr. Watts was staring at Grandfather, his hands by his side, as though he didn’t know where to put them. “This needs to stop. We’re all white men here. We’re all on the same side. There’s a war on.”

“Apologize and we’ll be gone.”

Mr. Watts looked sick. The contract lawmen around him moved slowly away from the bar.

“You cain’t walk in here and shoot a constable,” Mr. Watts said.

“Give me your word you’ll bring Maria and her baby back to our house.”

“They’re already on their way to a processing station in Laredo,” Mr. Watts said.

“Then you’d better go get them,” Grandfather said.

Mr. Watts’s bottom lip was trembling, as though he were about to cry. With time I would learn that his desperation was even greater than I thought. He had reached that moment of fear and humiliation when a man is willing to take whatever measure is necessary to avoid the shame and self-loathing that follows a public display of cowardice.

“You were a drunkard back then, Mr. Holland,” he said. “Half the time you were in a blackout. That’s why they took your badge. It wasn’t me caused the problem with your daughter.”

“What?”

“Ask her. I brought her home from the movies. A week later she told me what you did. You were drunk and you put the blocks to her.”

He could hardly get the last sentence out. Grandfather shook his gun belt from his arm and curled his hand around the handle of the revolver as the belt and cartridges struck the floor. He cocked the hammer.

“Tell him, Wynona,” Mr. Watts said.

“He’s lying, Daddy,” she said.

“Bring a Bible out here,” Mr. Watts said. “I’ll put my hand on it.”

“Is he telling the truth, Wynona?” Grandfather said.

“How many times were you so drunk you couldn’t remember what planet you were on?” Mr. Watts said. “Down in Mexico in 1916. You didn’t do that with Pancho Villa’s señoritas?”

“You close your mouth, you vile man,” Mother said.

Grandfather’s eyes were pale blue, lidless, empty of feeling or thought, as though his soul had taken flight. I saw him swallow, then he eased down the hammer on the revolver and picked up his gun belt and replaced the revolver in its holster. “We’re leaving now,” he said. “Come on, Aaron.”

“He’s a liar, Daddy.”

“I don’t know what I did back then. I never will. I killed people in Mexico who have no faces. There’s a whole year I cain’t remember.”

We went out the door and into the night. The wind was howling, the clouds huge and crawling with electricity. I sat in the front seat of the car with my mother. Grandfather was hunched in the back, like a caged animal, his eyes tunnels of sorrow.

Grandfather finalized our defeat that night when he went into the barn with a lantern and returned with a bottle that had a cork in it and no label. He carried the bottle into his bedroom and sat on the side of the bed and pulled the cork and tilted the bottle to his mouth. My mother took me upstairs and told me to put on my pajamas and lie down. Then she put Tige in bed with me and sat down beside me and looked into my face. “Pay no attention to what you saw or heard in the saloon, Aaron,” she said. “Grandfather is a good man and would never intentionally do harm to his family.”

“What was Mr. Watts saying?”

“Never listen to people like Mr. Watts. Their words are like locusts in the wind. I have to run an errand in town now. Don’t worry if Grandfather gets drunk. He’ll be all right in the morning.”

“What kind of errand?”

“I know someone who might be able to help Maria and Jesus,” she said. “He’s a federal judge.”

I looked at her eyes. They were clear. “It’s too late to go to town,” I said.

She stroked my hair, then clicked off the light and went down the stairs and out the front door. Through the window I could see the beams of her headlights bouncing on the fence posts and fields along our road.

I woke to sunlight and the sound of rain ticking on the dormers and people’s voices downstairs. I got up and put on my blue jeans and went to the head of the stairs. I could see Grandfather talking to the sheriff and a deputy and a man in a suit with a stethoscope hanging from his neck. I did not see my mother. I walked down the stairs, still in my pajamas, Tige running in front of me, his nails clicking on the wood, his rump waddling on each step.

“We need to look at it, Hack,” the sheriff said. “Hackberry” was Grandfather’s first name.

“Big waste of time, if you ask me,” Grandfather said.

“You know the position I’m in, Hack,” the sheriff said. He wore a white beard and was almost as big as Grandfather. “Just bring it out here, will you?”

“Whatever you want,” Grandfather said.

He went into the hallway and returned holding his holstered revolver, the belt wrapped around it. The sheriff took it from him and he slipped the revolver from the holster and half cocked the hammer, then opened the loading gate and rotated the cylinder. “Smells and looks like you just cleaned and oiled it.”

“A couple of days ago, I did.”

“When did you start loading with six rounds instead of leaving an empty chamber?”

“Since I stopped toting it,” Grandfather said.

“I’ll keep this for a while, if you don’t mind.”

“You’re going to run ballistics on it?”

“I ain’t got any ballistics to run. The rounds never slowed down and are probably halfway to San Antonio.”

The sheriff shucked the rounds from the cylinder one by one and dropped them in his coat pocket and stuck the pistol back in the holster and handed it to his deputy. The only sound in the room was the creak of the wind.

“So we’re done here?” Grandfather said.

“It was the way he went out that bothers me,” the sheriff said.

“A bullet is a bullet,” Grandfather said.

“Watts got one through the mouth and one that took off most of his penis,” the sheriff said. “What kind of shooter is apt to do that, Hack?”

“I guess somebody who was a bad shot or pretty mad.”

“Let me restate that,” the sheriff said. “Which gender is inclined to do that?”

“It’s a mystery to me,” Grandfather said.

My mother walked from the kitchen into the hallway. “The coffee is ready if you gentlemen care to sit down,” she said.

The sheriff looked at his deputy and the man with the stethoscope and at Grandfather. “I think that would be fine, Miss Wynona,” he said. “Are you feeling okay today?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” she said.

“I know what you mean,” the sheriff said.

In April of 1942 Jimmy Doolittle bombed Tokyo and crash-landed his B-25s on the Chinese mainland. In reprisal for the help given to his crews by Chinese peasants, the Japanese murdered 250,000 civilians. Maria and Jesus were brought back to Grandfather’s place, and Mother and Tige and I rejoined my father in our little brick home on Hawthorne Street in Houston. That summer, after the Battle of the Coral Sea, the war turned around at Midway, and we knew that in all probability the light of civilization had been saved. It was a grand time to be around. Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know what he’s talking about.