Cases

Chapter Four

Pierce Duncan, usually called Dunc, had coal-black hair cropped tight to his head, alive brown eyes, a good chin, and the thick neck of a man who has done a lot of weights or a lot of manual labor, or both. He was being carried west in style on the crushed ivory leather backseat of a white Cadillac convertible as long as a hearse. A pair of curved Texas longhorns graced the Caddy’s grille. Hot wind blew on his face. This was the life! He needed a little of this after Georgia.

The Caddy whispered through the desert afternoon at a hundred miles an hour. The driver was large, soft, reddish, with a red sunburned face and thinning russet hair blown by the wind. Sunglasses hid his eyes. He steered with a single finger crooked around the wheel. There were freckles on the backs of his sunburned hands. Pink hairs curled on his bare forearms.

“Nice car,” called Dunc, trying for casual even though the Caddy, at this speed, skittered as if on glare ice. His words were whipped away by the wind of their passage.

“Eats up the miles,” yelled the big man. In the rearview mirror his face wore a wide grin. His voice was surprisingly thin to come from such a large body. “I need a car can get me there fast. I need lots of fast.”

“I need to pee,” whined the blonde riding beside him. She also wore black glasses and was about thirty, but still with a good figure well displayed by a cotton sunsuit. Her narrow fox face had a sly thin-lipped mouth with half the lipstick eaten off.

“Now, Mae, there’s not much of a place to go around here,” said the driver mildly. He caught Dunc’s eye again in the rearview, winked. “Tracks we’re making, we’ll hit a town soon.”

Maybe literally, thought Dunc. The reddish man went on, as if hearing the unspoken thought.

“Thing is, I gotta go all over the West all the—”

“I’m gonna go all over the seat you don’t stop right now.”

“Just a few more minutes, honeybun.” To Dunc, he said, “So where you heading for?”

“Anywhere.”

“Coming from?”

“Nowhere.” Surely a Georgia chain gang was nowhere.

Mae said in a snide voice, “Must be grand, get to smart off to people nice enough to give you a ride.”

“Wasn’t trying to be smart, ma’am,” said Dunc quickly. He didn’t want to get stranded under a cactus somewhere. “I just graduated from college last month and I’m taking the summer to bum around and see the country.”

“ ‘Ma’am’? How goddamn old does he think I am?”

“I was just being—”

“Arnie, find me one of those cactus things to go behind.”

Arnie sighed and took his foot off the gas. The Cadillac began to lose altitude.

“Where’d you go to school?” he asked Dunc.

“Notre Dame.”

“Arnie!”

“I’m doing it, honeybun, I’m doing it.”

The car stopped on the shoulder. They were maybe fifty miles beyond the intersection where 281 came down from Wichita Falls and Oklahoma City. The blonde opened her door to flounce away through the dry sand with an exaggerated twitching of fanny. She disappeared behind some mesquite bushes. Dunc and Arnie got out to stretch their legs.

“Great football school. But you lost a couple last year.”

“We had a killer schedule,” said Dunc defensively. “We played just about the top ten teams in the country. And we beat USC — that always makes it a good year. Heap and Lattner—”

But Arnie chuckled. “Wait until next year, huh?” It caught Dunc up short: the man was right. Notre Dame was behind him. “Me, I set up syndicates that finance wildcat oil wells. You put in so much money, you get so many shares. We hit a gusher, everybody’s rich. We bring in a dry hole, everybody loses. It’s a real crapshoot.”

Except for you, thought Dunc. Big new Caddy, Mae in her tight sunsuit. He asked, “You score very often?”

“Now, you quit talking about honeybun, hear?” chortled Arnie. He got serious again. “I’ve brought in my share. And it’s a good life. Meet lots of good old boys. Sometimes I’ll outrun a highway patrol car without evening knowing it, they set up roadblocks to stop me. We usually have a good laugh all around when they’re givin’ me the ticket. Meet lots of good little ladies, too” — another wink, a guffaw — “like Mae there.”

His laughter, unlike his voice, fit his body. Anecdotes like that about the highway patrol roadblocks would make prospective investors see Arnie as a real wildcatter.

Mae was coming back across the desert, buttoning up her sunsuit. “Dump him off here, Arnie,” she said.

“Now, Mae.” The big man caught Dunc’s eye and winked yet again. “Man said he wasn’t being a smart aleck—”

“He was watching me while I went.” She had taken off her sunglasses, was holding them in her hand. Dunc expected her to start smiling, but her slightly bulging eyes were bleak and accusing. “Watching me through the bushes.”

“I was right here with Arnie the whole time, honest.”

“Were not,” she said. “You were watching. I saw you. Tryna see my pussy when I stood up.”

Arnie sighed in exasperation.

“Mae, there isn’t any call for you to be that way.”

“You don’t leave this bastard right here, Arnie, I’m gonna get my own motel room tonight on your money.” She added in malicious triumph, “An’ you won’t get nothin’.”

“Aw shit!” said Arnie, and kicked Dunc in the gut, hard, moving real well for a big fleshy man out of shape.

Dunc went down, gagging, managed to roll groggily away from the kick Mae aimed at his face. He kept rolling, trying to wheeze big gulps of air into his lungs, swirled to his feet in as close to a fighting stance as his inexperience allowed, fists cocked to give fucking Arnie something to think about.

Fucking Arnie had already thought of something: he was three yards off with a small flat automatic, maybe a .32, pointed at Dunc’s chest. Dunc went still except for trying to breathe.

“Just so we don’t get into somethin’ stupid out here,” said Arnie. “Nothin’ personal, boy — but you come between me and my lovin’, it’s the same as gettin’ ’twixt a gator and the water. Can’t stand for that. I gotta have my little Mae gal here.”

“Oh, Arnie,” said Mae in a breathless little-girl voice. “You’re so romantic!”

They went back to the Cadillac, Mae wiggling her rounded behind in an exaggerated manner because she knew Dunc would be watching, Arnie covering all her rear-guard action with one big paw and walking a little stiffly from his hard-on. They went to their respective doors, Arnie pausing to toss Dunc’s duffel bag out onto the shoulder of the road in a puff of dust.

Dunc, still a little bent over and breathing funny, watched the big car fishtail back onto the highway. As the big man honked in derisive goodbye, Mae threw a triumphant look over her shoulder before dipping her head down toward Arnie’s lap.

Dunc walked around in tight circles for a few minutes, cursing them both to hell and trying to get his breath back. He was sure going to have a sore gut tomorrow. But he got his spiral notebook out of his duffel bag and sat down on the canvas case to write out his adventure.

“I bet they put on their little vaudeville act for every male hitchhiker they pick up,” he wrote. “What do they mean, Arnie and Mae? Do they ever wonder what relative value they have to anyone else? To the universe?”

He stopped writing to stare out across the desert. Heat waves suggested a cool blue lake shimmering a couple of miles off. He could almost see palm trees at an oasis with water bubbling out of the sand; hunger, heat, and thirst created Bedouin tents and patient camels and belly dancers in swirling silks with shimmy coins tinkling against their rolling, oil-slick hips.

Reality was Joshua trees — the legions of the old General — long arms uplifting, writing his exploits on the sky.

Dunc wrote: “Well, what the hell relative value do I have to anyone else? There’s Arnie with Mae’s head in his lap, here’s me writing about it in my notebook.”

Them what can, does. Them what can’t, teaches. Or writes.

With that, he finally started to laugh at himself.

The sun had westered two more hours, and Dunc was thinking about maybe hiking over to check out that oasis, when a ’49 flathead-eight Merc that had seen better days squealed to a stop after it had already passed him by. He grabbed up his duffel bag to run a little lopsidedly up the road, hoping the guy wouldn’t pull away just as he got there. They did that a lot.

He opened the door and peered in. The driver was a good-looking solidly built man in his early thirties, with clear eyes, wide, even teeth, curly hair, and a small neat mustache.

“Didn’t see you ’til I was almost past. Hop in.”

Dunc did. The car accelerated. It smoked and smelled and sounded as if the pistons were changing holes every other stroke.

“You’re not from around here,” stated the driver.

“Minnesota.”

“Knew you wasn’t from around here.”

Dunc settled back against the stained fabric. All four windows were wide open but it was hot in the car, his throat was parched and his lips were dry.

“There’s a jug of water on the floor of the backseat.”

Dunc found it, drank, waited, drank again. Nothing had ever tasted better than that tepid water. The driver said he’d been in Oklahoma City, waxing cars by hand for fifteen bucks apiece.

“Did two hearses last December, got sixty-seven bucks. Money for Christmas. But too much money isn’t good for a man.” He gestured at a neat travel bag on the backseat. “Two suits and a squirt bottle of suit cleaner, that’s all I need.”

He drove with both hands on the wheel, ten and two o’clock, steering with short quick sawing movements as if he were hitting 150 on an oval track with pursuing race cars tight behind.

“I was drinking beer in a bar on the west side one night and a cop who was usually on the east side came in and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I see you on the east side now and then,’ he says to me. ‘I never see you,’ says to him.”

Dunc capped the water jug. “They’re bad news, all right.”

In Rochester the cops had been benign, only throwing them out of Emerson’s Pool Hall once in a while because they were too young to hear that sort of language. But on the road he’d found cops to be only grief.

“Get you down to the station house and ask you over and over until you tell two stories, just for meanness, then they stick you in jail. I mind my own business. In Oklahoma City, I was there a year and a half, you always see me alone. No one’s got anything on me, I can look anybody right in the eye.”

Dunc shifted in the seat. His gut was starting to stiffen up for sure. The desert flowed by outside the open windows. He found it hard to keep his eyes open — forty-eight hours without sleep...

He came up out of dark nightmare with a start. Jesus! He stole a look over at his companion, afraid he might have screamed aloud as he woke. But it must have been just long enough to have the dream he already couldn’t remember.

“... drove a load of vegetables up to Fairbanks last year on the Alaskan Highway. The boss, he drove with me on the way up, but I had to drive it alone on the way down. Got seventy a week and board, he couldn’t get no experienced drivers to run that highway for less than a hundred a week.”

Dunc had driven the Alcan himself two years before, when he was nineteen. He’d driven and driven and driven, two thousand miles from Minnesota, had thought he’d be in Alaska and was still in Idaho.

“Gotta be careful with women,” said the driver. “I had a sort of steady girl, God what a beautiful body — she was a beauty queen up there in Oklahoma City. She was only about twenty. I had to pull it out each time with her, but I told her it was better than her having a baby. Maybe your wife’s playing around on you, but I’m never going to tell you. Man gets his name known that way. They’ve never had my name down yet and if I can help it they never will.”

Chapter Five

Somehow they’d gotten his name down, and Dunc was alone in a strange city at 6:15 in the morning — St. Louis, Chicago, maybe New York. Then the familiar bells of St. Olaf’s started playing the Stabat Mater, and he realized he was walking down Tenth Street in Minneapolis, with a killer stalking him.

He came up behind a limping man who wore blue denims, an old sport jacket that didn’t fit, a green shirt, a brown cap, and a lumberyard apron. His face was round, red, vacant. His voice was slow, high-pitched, singsongy. For sure not the killer.

“We get a three-day weekend for Decoration Day this year,” the man said. “Three days for the Fourth of July, too, even though it falls on a Saturday — we get the Monday.”

They started across Second Avenue together; dust eddied about them in little swirls.

“A man is trying to kill me,” said Dunc in desperation.

His companion thrust a key into his hand. “Second apartment house, room at the top of the stairs on the left.”

Dunc turned off as the other man limped on down Tenth, looking straight ahead. Neither of them said goodbye. He pounded up the stairs, used the key, ducked into the room.

A girl his own age was sitting on the edge of the bed. She wore a red knit dress that clung beautifully to her curves. Great legs, dimples at the ends of her wide full-lipped mouth, crystal-clear wide-set hazel eyes, and a mass of chestnut hair that framed a round face. Short nose, lovely arched brows.

Dunc looked out between dingy lace curtains. In the ground-floor window across the street was a big Bible, open on a lectern. Bright light shining on it reflected a golden nimbus on the bulky man standing beside the window, so one side of him glowed, the other was in darkness. His felt hat was pulled low over his eyes and his hands were bunched in the pockets of his tan overcoat. Dunc knew each fisted hand held a gun.

The killer started across the street without looking either way. Dunc whirled away from the window, terrified. The chestnut-haired girl on the bed was smiling a Mona Lisa smile.

“Running away won’t do you any good.” She had a musical voice, even though she was speaking gravely. “You’ll have to face this. Here. Now.”

He listened at the door. Heavy footsteps on the stairs. He grabbed a chunky brass lamp from the bureau, stood against the wall beside the door. At least he’d go down swinging.

The door was kicked open to rebound off the wall on the side opposite of Dunc. The killer’s guns came through first, ranging the room. Dunc was already swinging the lamp. The killer made a strangled sound, his round red face was a mask of blood, bone, shattered teeth. He sagged as Dunc jerked him inside. A second blow wasn’t going to be needed.

“Now you can go on,” the girl’s Mona Lisa smile told him.

“You okay? You were sort of yelling out in your sleep.”

Dunc sat up, drenched in sweat, knuckling his eyes. He’d been sprawled over against the door. The Merc was stopped in a narrow rutted one-track dirt road going from the highway into a desert made otherworldly by the rising moon.

“I go north to my folks’ place from here. You’re welcome to come along, but it’s twenty miles off the highway and—”

“No, this’ll be swell.” Dunc’s door creaked in the desert twilight. “I’ll get something here in no time.”

He reached in the back to haul out his duffel bag. His gut, from Arnie’s kick, was stiff and sore.

“Hey, better take the water jug, too. I won’t need it Tore I get home.”

The big jug three-quarters full of brackish water was a real gift. Dunc’s dream was still vivid in his mind. If he saw the girl in real life, would he know her? Though the killer had worn a different face, he had to have been Captain Hent.

Dunc watched the Mercury crunch away up the narrow track, following its twinned headlights bouncing along the uneven road until their glow was gone and the car’s rattling had diminished to silence. Nice guy, but he really covered up in the clinches.

Alone in the moonlight, Dunc spun around in a circle, arms wide, heavy work shoes scuffing the blacktop, then sat down on his duffel bag. It was so bright that he could write up the latest ride in his spiral notebook by moonlight. He was getting it all down, good and bad, the expected and the surprises. From the notebook he would write short stories, maybe someday when he got the guts for it, a novel...

He heard a thin distant whine on the desert air. He stood up, stuffing the notebook into the duffel bag in case it might be a ride, but it was going east. The massive semi truck-trailer festooned with colored lights whooshed by him, the warm wind almost knocking him off his feet.

He’d been east. He wanted to go west.

On the Glee Club’s Easter tour to California three months before, he’d seen his first ocean, his first palm tree, his first desert, and, in San Francisco just across the Embarcadero from the Ferry Building, his first illegal after-hours joint. He and four others from the club had sung all night for beer before running across the street to catch the Southern Pacific train to Los Angeles without even getting back to the St. Francis to pack.

A little buff and gray animal with a bushy black-tipped tail trotted across the road under the paper-cutout moon. Enormous ears, tiny body. Desert fox, kit fox, trotting with that tongue-lolling grin all foxes wear going about their business, it was gone into the mesquite silent as cloud shadow.

Dunc dug out his windbreaker; the full moon gave plenty of light, but no heat. He had just sat back down when he saw a hairy black dinner plate coming across the road at him. He was frozen in place as a tarantula, nearly a foot across with all its hairy legs outstretched and moving, crossed his boot and was gone.

He let out a long silent breath, had a huge drink of water, took a leak in the nearest mesquite bush, lay down on his back with his duffel bag as a pillow to wait for the sound of a ride. The moon was setting, a million stars crowded the blue-black sky. Trying to pick out constellations, he slipped down and down and down and was gone. Just like that.

Dunc woke from dreamless sleep to a cold, hungry dawn, so hungry he actually thought he could smell bacon frying. But what brought him bolt upright was a horrendous screeching noise.

Nieng-haw! Nieng-haw! Nieng-haw!

He was looking into a pair of beautiful, mild brown eyes, with the most sweeping, romantic lashes he had ever seen. The donkey shoved a muzzle like velvet into his cupped hand. It was little and brown, with a darker mane and tail, was cinched and packed with a blanket roll. On one side was a pickax and a flat metal pan gleaming like polished silver, on the other a .30–30 carbine, the old 1897 Winchester with the octagonal barrel.

A grizzled old man appeared wearing a wide-brimmed hat, faded red shirt with long sleeves, and lace-up boots with canvas trousers Housed into them. Equally faded gold suspenders crisscrossed the shirt, a wide leather belt held up the pants. He patted the donkey’s flank with great affection.

“Señorita was afraid you was dead.”

“The donkey’s name is Señorita?”

The old prospector sang in a cracked voice:

He stuck out his hand. “Folks call me Harry.”

“Folks call me Dunc.”

Señorita exclaimed, “Nieng-haw! Nieng-haw!”

“I come by last night, you looked near enough t’dead as damn t’swearing, so I figgered you’d be hungry enough t’eat a dead turtle when Señorita decided to wake you up.”

Dead turtle. Hent and Larkie. A nightmare shudder went through him. But he said, “You figured right, Harry.”

The old man led him fifty yards back into the desert to a smokeless stone-banked mesquite fire with eight thick hand-cut strips of bacon sizzling slowly in a pan set to one side, coffee brewing in a big blue ceramic-ware pot.

Dunc asked casually, “Looking for gold?”

“Mebbe gold. Mebbe silver. I ain’t rightly sayin’.”

Harry got out silverware, halved the bacon onto two tin plates. They sat down. Señorita kept nuzzling Dunc’s right ear as half a dozen eggs popped and blackened in the hot bacon fat.

Dunc gestured at the Winchester cased against the donkey’s side. “You use that for hunting, Harry?”

“Just for meat.” The old prospector got a faraway look in his eye. “Used to trophy hunt. When I was livin’ in Cuba just after the turn of the century, I used that there very rifle to try and get me the biggest damn deer in the whole Sierra Maestra.”

He shook on pepper and salt, flipped the eggs out onto the tin plates. His eyes still had their faraway look.

“Teddy Roosevelt had led them Rough Riders up San Juan Hill five, six years before, and Cuba was wide open. There was big coastal towns like Santiago and Havana, and most of the island was sugarcane, pineapple, banana. But down south in Oriente Province it was wild country, son! Bucks as big as elks back in them mountains. I wanted me one of them big old geezers.”

Dunc ate bacon. Señorita gave his ear a velvety kiss.

“No roads in the high country, so I needed a packhorse. But all I could find was a man with a mule in a little village near Alto Cedro. Fat, dirty fellow with a sash around his middle who loved that mule — once I wanted to buy it! Wouldn’t sell. Rent. Three days at a dollar a day. Dollars, mind, not pesos!”

Dunc shook his head in wonder, busy poking one of his eggs in the eye. They were the best eggs he’d ever eaten.

“That mule had a hunting heart, son; I could have trained him to retrieve game. We pushed up into the mountains, eight thousand feet high and everything steaming from the heat. Then something huge crashed off through the brush...”

Dunc had finished his eggs and bacon.

“I unslung my carbine and that mule was like a thoroughbred at the gate. He knew — he knew! Son, that was a hunting mule! When I tied him to some brush at the edge of the clearing, his eyes pleaded with me to take him along.”

“So why didn’t you?”

Harry poured half a tin of peaches into each plate. They ate the fruit with their forks, slurping the juice.

“Mules can’t make no silent stalk, son. So I went creeping on alone up and down that hillside through that steaming brush. Must of been two hours later I broke out into a clearing. On the far side I could see a pair of unwinking eyes and a patch of sun-dappled hide. Them eyes was so high off the ground, son, I knew he had to be the biggest deer in Cuba! The snick of my hammer going back was thunderous. I shot right between them eyes. There was a fearful thrashing in the brush, and then... silence.”

Harry grunted his way to his feet, started scouring his plate and silverware with desert sand. Dunc, doing the same, finally burst out, “So did you get him? Did you get your deer?”

Harry had hauled out an old tin of Prince Albert and had started to roll a cigarette.

“Son,” he said solemnly, “I shot my mule.”

Chapter Six

The first driver Dunc stuck out a thumb at gave him a ride. He was mid-thirties and six-one, built like a fullback. Wavy blondish hair and startling blue eyes somehow askew in a tawny wise-guy face. A chain-smoker, lighting one cigarette off the butt of the other as they went along. Suntan, bright long-sleeved sport shirt. He said his name was Jack Falkoner and that he was from Palo Alto, where Dunc knew Stanford University was. He drove the red MG with a loose, easy abandon. It had California plates and the top down even though the desert air was still dawn-cold.

“My big brother had a car just like this for a couple of years after the war,” said Dunc. “Even the same color. But then he traded it in for a Jaguar.”

“Must have had a lot of money and liked a lot of speed.”

“He liked the speed, all right, but he got behind in the payments and they came and took the Jag away from him and then he didn’t have anything at all.”

Falkoner feathered smoke through his nostrils, gave a bitter laugh as the slipstream whipped it away.

“I’ve got another TC being overhauled in Palo Alto right now. Just like this one, except it’s black.” He squiggled the steering wheel back and forth, zigzagging them down the empty highway. “Only two and a half turns, lock-to-lock.”

The low red car ate up the road. Falkoner shrugged.

“But I guess a man can’t have sports cars and a wife at the same time. She filed on me two weeks ago. I took off before—”

“She left you over a couple of sports cars?”

“No, she drove the MG real good. I was proud of her.”

He pushed smoke through a nose once broken and healed slightly crooked; that, and an inch-long patch of shiny scar tissue over his right eye, made him not only handsome without being pretty, but possibly tougher than his manner suggested.

“But we were only married a month and she was running around on me. Two different guys.” His voice was suddenly guttural. “I’ll deal with that when I get back.” He turned to study Dunc. “You ever been to Ciudad Juárez, in Old Mexico?”

Dunc hadn’t, but he remembered how exotic Mexico had seemed in that Robert Mitchum movie His Kind of Woman. They picked up Highway 80 at Van Horn, rode it 120 miles to El Paso, which was just across the river from Juárez. They zipped past the vast sprawl of Fort Bliss, the red car turning the heads of the crisp-uniformed MPs manning the gates. Falkoner, driving left-handed, unconsciously massaged his forearm with his right hand.

“Had enough of that crap to last me a lifetime.” He jerked up his left sleeve. The forearm was scarred and disfigured, little of it remaining beneath the shiny scar-tissued skin except the bones. “Little gift from the fucking krauts. Army surgeons wanted to cut my arm off, said I’d never be able to use my hand again.” He worked his fingers and grinned angrily. “A hell of a lot of weight lifting got the remaining muscles to take the place of those that are missing. So I’ve got full control. Fuck ’em.”

He jerked down the sleeve and drove left-handed while snapping the cuff button shut with his other hand.

“Those bastards hurt me plenty,” he added obscurely.

El Paso was a booming oil town with a population squirting ahead almost as fast as the oil was squirting from the ground. The Franklin Mountains sliced the growing city right down the middle, made the east and west sides almost two separate towns.

Late afternoon shadows were reaching out for them when Falkoner parked the distinctive red sports car in a lot a few blocks from the border. He casually tossed Dunc’s duffel bag in the trunk — he called it the boot — with his own luggage.

“A lot of car-theft rings operate out of border towns like Juárez, a car like this draws ’em like flies.”

They walked along South El Paso toward the bridge spanning the thick brown swirling waters of the Rio Grande. On the other side was Mexico. Tall wooden derricks were scattered along the river, some still pumping to fill the air with the rotten-egg smell of crude, others with their rusting machinery quiet.

“Don’t expect anything of the real Mexico in Juárez,” said Falkoner. “Border towns don’t belong to any country.”

Most of the foot traffic on the International Bridge was going against them, from Juárez to El Paso, most of it Americans, many of them soldiers in khaki uniforms with their cunt caps set at jaunty angles on close-cropped heads.

“This morning it would have been Mexican women going into El Paso to shop; in another hour it’ll be Mexican maids going back into Juárez from their jobs in the big gringo houses.”

Dunc tried to see in the Rio Grande the clear sparkling river of a hundred Saturday morning serials, where the white hats splashed their horses across the Rio Bravo in pursuit of the black hats. This was more the muddy Mississippi at flood stage.

“I hear they have bullfights in Juárez.”

“Not today. They get their big crowds on the weekends.”

Leaving his own country for the first time — Canada didn’t really count — had Dunc up, excited, asking stupid questions.

“If the bullring’s closed, what’ll we do over there?”

“Anything we’re big enough to do.” Falkoner gave him an evil white grin with a lot of teeth in it; just beyond midspan he paused to spit down into the moving brown waters. “And in Mexico we can do even more than we’re big enough to do.”

The two beer-bellied, dark-skinned, uniformed guards in caps with exaggerated brims didn’t even look at them as they walked through the Mexican checkpoint.

“I thought we’d need passports or something.”

“White faces bring in them old Yankee dollars.”

On this side of the river, South El Paso had become Avenida Juárez. Dunc could see the sprawling oval of the bullring, plastered with fight posters in Spanish. Dunc was in Mexico — Mexico! He felt an excitement that was like being scared.

Falkoner was different here, swinging his shoulders when he walked, not caring who else was on the street. He’d brought a lot back from the war besides the mutilated left arm. Like the airmen in Fairbanks, linking arms down the main drag of town, knocking man and woman alike off the wooden sidewalks into the muddy street. Until they met bands of loggers doing the same.

Falkoner turned west off Juárez on Tiaxcala, after a time turned left on Degollado, muttering something like “Calle Mujeres” almost to himself. He suddenly stopped in front of a storefront joint on a narrow dirt street. “Yeah, it’s still here. The Red Arrow.” To Dunc, the cantina looked no different from any of the others. But Falkoner’s eyes were feverish, his face tight and shiny. “I started my war ten years ago right here at Fort Bliss. They didn’t have the neon arrow in those days.”

There was indeed a red neon arrow on the wall pointing down at the delights hidden behind the double swinging doors, then folding up into a pointed squiggle, then snapping out straight again. It was enough like Alaska that Dunc stopped short.

“Let’s make sure there’s a back way out first.”

“Of course there is,” said Falkoner. “I know this place.”

But they went to look anyway. The narrow dirt alley’s smell of refuse overrode the pervasive hot oil and spices and frying tortillas of Juárez. Half a shattered small-watt lightbulb hung over the Red Arrow’s warped back door. Dunc noted with approval a thirty-inch two-by-four leaning against the wall.

Inside, the Red Arrow was like the saloon in High Noon, where everybody turned down Caine’s request for help with fighting the outlaws coming to town for revenge. Do not forsake me, oh my darling, on this our wedding day...

Falkoner’s wife had forsaken him a month after the wedding day. Not Dunc’s business. But somehow he wasn’t surprised.

The bar was down the left wall, a wooden stairway led up to the second floor. Serapes and high-crowned Mexican sombreros hung above the backbar as decorations. Half a dozen ten-gallon cowboy hats hung off hooks between booths crowded with foursomes.

Falkoner slid onto a stool and held up two fingers. “Dos cervezas — cold.”

The bartender set out two dripping brown bottles that made instant puddles on the scarred bartop. He reached for the church key hanging from his belt by a leather shoelace, but Falkoner stopped him by flipping off the caps with his Swiss Army knife.

“Never use a glass in Mexico — and open ’em yourself.”

They tapped bottles, drank icy beer. The Red Arrow was crowded with cowboys in high-heeled boots and off-shift roughnecks with permanently crude-blackened fingernails. The rest of the men were of assorted ages but all wore parrot-bright sport shirts hanging outside khaki pants, black shoes, and hair cut so short above their ears that their heads looked white.

Some of the girls were dusky-skinned, others obviously Anglo, some almost ugly, some pretty, two almost beautiful. All of them, whatever their configuration or race, were blond and wore low-cut blouses above tight skirts.

Dunc fired down his beer, he’d been really thirsty, nodded at the bartender to set up two more, unopened, on the bar, then jerked his head at the crew-cut men scattered through the crowd.

“Soldiers from Fort Bliss?”

“Yeah. If they came over in uniform the MPs’d get ’em.”

Falkoner bit the caps off these beers.

On the jukebox, chapel bells were ringing and Little Jimmy Brown was getting married. Falkoner was getting divorced after two months. A couple went upstairs. The chunky Mexican girl’s skirt was so short Dunc could see the curve of her buttocks. He felt a stirring in his groin and looked quickly away.

A buddy who’d joined the navy after high school had written him at Notre Dame, “Jesus, you should of seen the bitch I nailed in a cathouse in Yokohama! Jesus, could she fuck!”

That’s when Dunc, jealous but superior, had sworn he’d never pay for it. Nor had he. In Fairbanks the old-fashioned parlor houses had been the only decent places to drink. Red plush on the walls, a bar, a couple of couches, rooms upstairs, girls coming through not wearing very much — but even there, he hadn’t paid for it. He’d just gone without, as it were.

His second bottle was empty, he was into his third. Hell, who was he kidding? He’d been a virgin until he was a junior in college, had screwed only four girls, once each, none in bed.

The alcohol was hitting his empty stomach. He slid off his stool, leaving the change from his final ten for another round.

“I gotta tap a kidney.”

“Yeah, you don’t buy beer — you just rent it.”

Dunc wove his way into a tin-sided box with a wet concrete floor and a trough along one wall. The reek of urine was sharp as smelling salts. Scrawled above the trough was WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING UP HERE FOR? ARE YOU ASHAMED OF IT? Underneath, a different hand had scrawled, NO, IT SCARES ME.

In the middle of the room was a wooden cubicle without any door; inside was a brown-stained ceramic toilet. As he buttoned up, one of the bar girls went in and hiked up her skirt and stood bent-kneed over the toilet pissing cowily, like the whore in Joyce’s Ulysses.

Back in the bar there was a fresh beer beside his half-finished one, and his change was gone. An Anglo woman with slightly buck teeth but big breasts barely concealed by a loose white blouse had her hand up the inside of Falkoner’s thigh to his crotch. She was making her eyes round as if in amazement.

“Olé, mucho homhre, no?"

“No tengo the lingo, girlie,” said Falkoner. “And I shouldn’t have to with somebody as blond as you.”

“Blond all the way down, sugar.” Her fingers were busy. Falkoner’s pants were beginning to bulge.

“How much?” he demanded.

“Twenty dollars.”

“What?"

“Ten dollars.”

“I’ll give you two.”

“I’ll take it.”

Falkoner slid off his stool, leaving beer, money, cigarettes, and lighter behind. “Keep my place, Dunc.”

Chapter Seven

Dunc tried to spread himself across two stools, keeping his elbows wide to protect Falkoner’s place. Six drunken soldiers wearing their off-duty uniforms of khakis and bright shirts bellied up to the bar. One, with a sweaty red face and master sergeant written all over him, started to slide his fat butt onto Falkoner’s stool despite the beer, cigarettes, money and lighter.

“Hey, sorry, pal,” said Dunc, “that’s my buddy’s place.”

The soldier wore his khaki pants down under his paunch, and a black short-sleeved sport shirt with yellow flowers on it. A pack of Camels was partially rolled up in the left sleeve.

“He can tell me this is his stool when he gets back.”

“I’m telling you now.”

“Well, Jesus, that scares the livin’ shit outta me.”

He poured beer into his face; sweat gleamed on his jowls, he had to be over forty, had to have his twenty in. What was he doing trying to pick a fight in a Mexican whorehouse? What was Dunc doing letting him pick a fight in a Mexican whorehouse?

“I’ve got no fight with you, Sarge,” he said reasonably.

“Gutless fuck, ain’t you?” He turned to his pals. “We got us a PFC here, men.”

“What’s a PFC, Sarge?”

“A poor fucking civilian.”

The sarge finished Falkoner’s beer, shook a cigarette out of Falkoner’s pack, lit it with Falkoner’s lighter, and stuck that in his shirt pocket along with Falkoner’s cigarettes. He then put Falkoner’s folding money into his pants pocket.

“Now your buddy ain’t sitting here no more.”

“Well, shit,” said Dunc.

He slid his wristwatch into his pocket. His heart was pounding wildly. From his years of football he knew he could take a lot of punishment and could dish it out, but knew he was just barely a good enough brawler to still have all his teeth.

They started for the alley to the incongruous “Song from Moulin Rouge” on the jukebox. The squat fat soldier walked with a rolling gait; a beer keg would be easier to knock over.

“Age before beauty,” he said with a sly and nasty grin.

So he could jump Dunc from behind. Dunc said nothing. He went through the back door fast, grabbing the two-by-four he’d seen there, spun around swinging for the fence. Tom Nieblas had saved their butts with that trick one night up in Alaska.

The beer keg sergeant was already rushing him from behind, clasped hands swinging to club the back of Dunc’s neck, so the makeshift bat hit him in the face with a meaty sound, ripping open his forehead and spreading his nose from cheek to cheek.

Kathwuck!

He flew backward, smashed into the door frame, spun around to crash face-first into the garbage pails. They went over, showering him with filth, landing on top of him. A three-quarter eggshell rolled unevenly across the alley floor.

Dunc dropped the two-by-four and fell to his knees beside the downed warrior. Sluggish blood seeped out from under the sarge’s face. Dunc felt suddenly very sober indeed.

Dunc gingerly rolled him over, expecting at the very least to sec an eyeball hanging out on his cheek. No. The flattened nose was pouring blood and he made a long harsh sound. A snore. Knocked down by the two-by-four, passed out from the beer.

Dunc dipped trembling fingers into the soldier’s shirt pocket, found Falkoner’s cigarettes and lighter, then dug his hand into the trouser pocket for the sheaf of folded bills Falkoner had left on the bar.

Feeling sick to his stomach, he went back into the Red Arrow to face the sarge’s buddies. But Falkoner was back on his stool and arguing pro football with them.

“Hell, Joe Perry is the greatest running back ever played the game. Three thousand-yard seasons and he isn’t done yet. And with Hurricane Hugh in the lineup...”

One of the soldiers saw Dunc, blurted out in surprise, “What the fuck?”

“He’s sleeping it off in the alley.”

A black-haired skinny bespectacled soldier laughed as he scooped up the greenbacks strewn across the bar.

“Told you the sarge was gonna get took!” he crowed. “We’d better get him outta that alley before he gets rolled.”

It felt good to slide the cigarettes and lighter onto the bar in front of him, then slap the folded money down beside them.

“He took your stool.”

Falkoner laughed, riffled his money, stuffed some of it into Dunc’s shirt pocket.

“Hey, that’s not—”

“Not mine, either,” said Falkoner. “Let’s blow this joint.”

“I gotta give it back to the sarge.” But all they found in the alley were the overturned garbage pails and a patch of blood-soaked dirt. Dunc got into a laughing jag. “I just rolled a guy for the first time in my life, and I didn’t even know it!”

It got drunk out. The night was a purple-black bruise, hot and sweaty, chilly, loud and raucous, silent, frantic with neon in the middle of a narrow dusty Mexican street, serene in the desert with a billion uncaring stars overhead. A kaleidoscope of images with only fragments of memory clinging to them like flesh to shards of bone on a slaughterhouse floor.

Another bar, an incongruous shuffleboard in back. Soldiers in uniform playing it, shouting and drinking beer. Somebody grabbing Dunc’s arm. “Your buddy over there says he’s too drunk to fight but that you’re lookin’ for trouble.”

Dunc shook his head. “I’ve already had mine, thanks.”

The lanky cowboy sighed sadly. “Shit, can’t get nobody to give me a fight. Lemme buy you a beer.”

In a diner, sloppily eating things he’d never seen before, hadn’t even heard of — tacos and chiles rellenos and huevos rancheros and refritos and burritos, some of them so hot with chili peppers that he was chugging down beer after beer just to keep his ears from smoking as he listened to all the good old boys trying to out-Texas one another.

“Saw your wife the other day, she looked mean as ever.”

“Mean? Last week she hit a guy with her Cadillac and knocked him forty feet down the highway, yesterday she sued him for leaving the scene of an accident.”

Dunc ran every Texas sally and witticism through his mind, savoring it for his notebook.

“Was playin’ golf with Sam the other day, and we hadda wait for two women gassin’ by the eighth hole. So I started over to ask ’em to move on, then I seen who they was and come back and said to Sam, ‘You gotta go talk to ’em, Sam, one of ’em’s my wife and the other one’s my mistress.’ ‘Shit,’ says Sam, ‘I was just gonna say the same thing to you.’ ”

Falkoner said musingly, “You want to find Texas, kid, you just go west far enough to smell it, and south far enough to step in it, and you’ll be in Texas.”

All sound ceased in the eatery. Not a fork rattled against a plate, not a cup scraped on a saucer. The few Mexicans in the place were already edging toward the door.

“Say what, hoss?” demanded the burly, crag-faced cowboy on the stool next to Dunc. There was amazement in his voice.

“I said if you ever wanta give the world an enema, Texas is the place to do it,” said Falkoner, and leaned around Dunc to hit the man in the face with the bottle of ketchup.

Dunc saw a fist coming his way, slipped it, got knocked off his stool by someone else, kicked somebody in the stomach, got stomped on, got slammed into a table leg, scuttled for the door on his hands and knees. Scrambled to his feet, narrowly ducked a chair coming out the diner’s window in a beautiful crystal parabola of shattered glass, was running down the street, careening from side to side, laughing crazily.

Running beside him, Falkoner panted out, “What... do you tell a Texan... on his way... to the electric chair?”

“Wha... what?”

“Don’t... sit... down.”

Somewhere else, a nude girl on a table, humping her way on down to Satchmo’s “Blueberry Hill” from the jukebox, until she was squatting over a silver dollar balanced on edge, then picking it up without using her hands to wild applause from the all-male clientele. She repeated the action.

“Hey, watch this!”

A drunken giggling soldier was heating one of the dollars with his lighter before he balanced it for her. Someone smashed a chair over his head. It might even have been Dunc.

And still later, a broken-down shack on the edge of the desert with no electricity but a cockpit out in back starkly illuminated by the headlights of a dozen parked cars, mostly Cadillacs, dented and unwashed from hard desert miles, all with their motors running to keep the batteries alive.

Gas fumes made people cough. Male and female voices shrieked in Spanish and English as fighting cocks with shaved thighs and metal spurs fastened to their strong, skinny legs leaped and flapped and feinted and gouged. Half obscured by clouds of dust, gahaneros-shirted handlers blew into the beaks of live birds or cradled dead ones in their arms. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke, blood, sweat, the stink of fear and birdshit and testosterone.

Falkoner was leaning farther out across the wooden edge of the ring than Dunc would have thought possible, eyes bulging with excitement, sweat pouring from his face. Veins wriggled down the sides of his neck like snakes, pulsed down the center of his forehead like a forked tree. He was waving bills and shouting to get his bet covered for the next fight.

It was short and quick: within seconds, to mingled olés and curses from the crowd, one of the birds was dead in an explosion of blood and brown and white feathers.

For the second time that night, Dunc was almost sick to his stomach. Not from watching the blood and death. It was just that he wished it was the fucking handlers in there, being forced to leap into the air to rowel each other with steel spurs strapped to their shins while drunks screamed at them.

“Jesus, did you see it?” exclaimed Falkoner. “Did you see that fucking kill?” He turned away, pocketing his winnings. “I gotta fuck me a woman right now. Any woman. Right now.”

Chapter Eight

Dunc’s first coherent morning memory was of throwing up into the Rio Grande from the middle of the bridge. He shambled back into the States wondering: which one did I puke into, Mexico or Texas? He sort of hoped both.

Maybe his thoughts weren’t so coherent, after all.

His knuckles were skinned, his nostrils crusted with dried blood, one eye was puffed up — he’d be lucky if he didn’t get a shiner. His side was sore, his ribs ached, his gut felt as if it had been drop-kicked, and the small of his back was so stiff it might have been stepped on. Hey, it probably had been.

He had huge amounts of great stuff for his notebook — except he’d been too drunk to remember it. Lock himself in a room with a head of lettuce and a bottle of water for a week; he could be like Proust and have remembrances of things past.

Trouble was, his notebook was in the boot of Falkoner’s MG. And he couldn’t remember when he’d last seen Falkoner.

A parking lot, a few blocks from the border. But El Paso’s dawn streets all looked the same. And if Falkoner wasn’t there, how could he get his duffel bag out of the trunk? Buy a cheap screwdriver, jimmy the boot of the MG and...

Yes, definitely not too coherent yet.

And buy a screwdriver with what? His watch was gone and his pants pockets were all turned out. Thank God he’d left his ID in his duffel bag. Then he remembered Sarge’s money. By some miracle his breast pocket hadn’t been torn off his shirt and whoever had rolled him had missed such a stupid place to leave your stash. It was still there: seventeen bucks. Fat city.

But an hour later when he shambled into the lot where they had parked the MG, it was gone. With his duffel bag, his ID...

Later, somehow, some way, sometime, he was going to have to get to Palo Alto and find Falkoner and get his notebook and ID back. But right now all he wanted was out of El Paso, out of Texas. Hung over. He drank about a gallon of water at a public fountain, almost threw up again.

At a five-and-dime near the railroad marshaling yards on the western edge of El Paso he bought a ballpoint and a spiral notebook and a small tin of aspirin, washed down four of them with a cherry Coke. In a gas station men’s room Dunc washed his shirt and put it on wet, brushed his teeth with his finger and soap from the dispenser; he’d forgotten to buy toothbrush and toothpaste. He got to the highway and stuck out a thumb.

Fifteen minutes later he was on his way to Lus Cruces, New Mexico, on Highway 80, in a rattly pickup full of Mexican migrant workers who shared their tortillas with him and dropped him at the bypass where 180 headed west for Tucson. He had no Spanish, but thought they said they were going north to Albuquerque.

All together it took him seven rides and thirteen hours to cover 275-odd miles of scorching, mostly empty desert to Tucson, a land of multicolored rock and sand and buttes and coulees, sparse mesquite and paloverdes and saguaro.

His final ride was with two Negroes in a dirty bashed-up black 1939 Chevy. He sat in the back, the springs poking at him through knife-slashed seat cushions, the erupted stuffing looking like dried custard.

“You comin’ from where?” asked the rider.

“El Paso.”

“I been there,” he said solemnly. He wore a faded maroon sport shirt, had a little stubble of beard on his chin, rolled his eyes a lot, and was big: big of frame, arms, hands. He kept his arm on the back of the seat. “And Tore that?”

Pick a town, Dunc thought. “Shreveport.”

“Been there, too. Where Tore that?”

“Baton Rouge.” This could go on forever.

“Baton Rouge? Been there, too.”

“How far you guys going?”

“Just outside Tucson. Man tole us ’bout some work at a tire-retreader there. Ain’t worked in six months.” Then quickly, as if that might have sounded like an implied threat, “But we let you off anywhere you want. Right, Jeremiah?”

“That sho be right, Zeke,” said Jeremiah solemnly. He was small, thin, stooped, thick-lipped, and receding of chin, and he talked just like the old radio show Amos ’n’ Andy. “That be right, sho nuff. Yas-sah. Lets him off anywheres he wants.”

The car swayed and drifted as if the tires were half-flat or the steering gone or the tie-rods missing, or all three. A puff of black smoke rolled through the firewall.

“You smell somethin’ burnin’?” demanded a panicked Jeremiah.

“I don’t smell nuthin,” said a placid Zeke.

Dunc fought mightily against slipping over the edge of sleep, afraid of one of his nightmares. He was jerked awake by Jeremiah’s low gravelly voice going up the scale dramatically.

“Ah knowed it, Ah jes knowed it!"

A tractor had pulled into the highway in front of them. The Chevy’s tires shrieked as the car tried to go in four different directions at once because each brake shoe grabbed its drum at a different time.

“Lots of luck,” said Dunc conversationally, but Jeremiah got slowed down in time. Dunc let himself relax back against the gouging seat springs. No worries about falling asleep now.

“Ah knowed he’d pull out theah, fo he did it.” Jeremiah carefully passed the tractor. “Jes knowed it fum the way he cum ’cross that field.” Another puff of black smoke. In instant panic, “You smell somethin’ burnin’?”

Soothingly, “I don’t smell nuthin.”

They dropped Dunc at a roadside truck stop outside Tucson. A dozen truck-trailer rigs sprawled on the concrete apron like basking dinosaurs, their running lights twinkling in the dusk like colored fireflies.

Inside, a junk-crowded gift shop offered rubber sidewinder rattlesnakes, rabbit’s-foot key chains lucky for everyone except the rabbits, and sly desert postcards featuring bubble-butted tourists in shorts doing stupid things. Dunc bought a toothbrush and a can of Pepsodent powder, a safety razor, a packet of Gillette Blue Blades, put them all in a cheap yellow gym bag.

In the gas station rest room, two bits got him a shower. A shave, really brush his teeth... Worth it, even though his money was going fast. Probably have to find a job manning the clipper in some hash house kitchen, before he could get to California.

His hangover was gone, he was ravenous. On the diner’s menu he found something called chicken-fried steak: a huge flat slab of pounded beef, breaded and pan-fried in axle grease, sunk in a pint of gooey pale gravy speckled black with pepper. Served with a mountain of mashed potatoes and watery peas and soggy biscuits heavy as rocks.

Dunc had six glasses of milk while he ate everything except the plate and finished off with cherry pie à la mode.

Outside, the night pressed in on this puny oasis of light and warmth. It was clear and totally black, the full moon long gone or not yet up or already set. He walked a quarter mile out into the desert, regretting the windbreaker in his duffel bag. He could see his breath against the lights of the truck stop.

Then he heard the yip, yip, yip, aroooo of his first coyote. The hair stood up on his arms and the nape of his neck. He’d heard wolves howling at night along the Alaskan Highway, but somehow this was an even lonelier sound. At least wolves hunted in packs. Coyotes worked alone.

What was he doing out here in the desert in the middle of the night, alone, anonymous? Hey, this’d be too damned civilized for old Harry and Señorita, too soft and easy and crowded. Old Harry wouldn’t worry about ID.

He wanted to be a writer, didn’t he? Well, how the hell did you do it except like this? You went, you watched, you learned, until you knew, like Hemingway said, that you had something to write about. You had to earn the mighty reckoning in a little room Shakespeare had written about. He’d meant the murder of Marlowe, but somehow it fit. Writing, you faced your own mighty reckoning in your own little room.

Back at the truck stop, nobody wanted him. The truckers said unauthorized riders voided their insurance. And nobody with the wives and kids in the car, at night, would take a beat-up-looking guy without jacket or suitcase. Instead of eating his chicken-fried steak, maybe he should have put it on his puffy eye.

After almost an hour, a long cream-and-red Olds 98 pulled in at the nearest gas pump. A big hard-looking man got out, impeccably groomed and wearing what looked like a silk suit. He told the attendant to fill the Olds with ethyl.

“I used to work at a gas station,” Dunc said to the big man, “pumping ethyl. Regular, too.”

It earned a chuckle. “Looking for a ride, kid?”

“You bet. Going west.”

“Toward El Centro? Dago?”

Dunc didn’t know where El Centro was. Didn’t know Dago was San Diego. “Sure. Or L.A. Whichever is easier.”

The big man handed over a five, pocketed the change. His neck was thick, as wide as his head, his hairline was climbing, his nose was flattened, his ears cauliflowered. He looked like an ex-pug, but most of them were punch-drunk and none of them would have the money for those clothes or a new Olds 98.

“I’m going up through Phoenix, from there you can hitch straight west to San Berdoo and L.A. Got a suitcase? Anything?”

“Just me and the gym bag.”

“Atsa boy. Travel light.” He jerked his head at the car. “Hop in. I’m Lucius Breen.”

“Pierce Duncan. Everybody calls me Dunc.”

The car was almost as luxurious as Arnie’s Cadillac, and there was no honeybun to get him kicked out into the desert. The big man drove fast and well; his hands had distended knuckles but were carefully manicured. He swung the massive head Dunc’s way.

“How long you been on the road?”

“Three, four weeks. Just bumming around.”

“Atsa boy — do it while you’re young.” He kept snuffling and blowing. A thought drew down heavy scar-tissued brows. “Three weeks and just that little bag?”

“I got rolled last night in Juárez.”

Black rage creased his features. “Fucking greasers!”

Dunc didn’t know who had rolled him, but it sure as hell hadn’t been Mexicans who had driven off with his duffel bag.

“Did you used to fight?” he ventured at last.

“Yeah. Twelve years pro. I was my own manager, invested my money in houses and lots.” He gave a great roar of laughter. “Whorehouses and lots of whiskey.”

He got suddenly serious.

“Actually I didn’t booze, I didn’t chase skirts, and I didn’t pay any taxes. Boxers didn’t then. I invested. In land around Dallas. Then I brought in a couple wells on my spread, a couple more...” He shrugged. “I pump oil, pump my wife, raise kids and horses. I hate niggers, spies, farmers, and anybody from Houston or San Anton. Going up to Vegas now to referee a fight. They do two, three a year there, little no-’count things usually, but these boys are ranked heavyweights.”

Last year Dunc had listened on the radio while Rocky Marciano KO’d Jersey Joe Walcott for the title.

“Would either of ’em have a chance against Marciano?”

Breen snuffled through his nose. “Five years ago Nitro Ned Davenport might have given Rock a fight. Still might, on a good night. But Ned’s a fool, stays loyal to...” He paused with a calculating look. “Anyway, lousy judgment, lousy management. Tiger Terlazzo is young, fast — but they say he don’t like to take a punch he don’t have to take. We’ll see.”

Dunc had played a little stud poker, but Vegas would be real gambling. Gambling and professional boxing and all-night excitement. And a good place to earn traveling money.

“How about I ride straight through with you?”

“Atsa boy! Now you’re talking.”

Dunc was running from one side of El Paso’s switching yard to the other, trying to get across before a train got him. But the yard was half a mile wide, and trains were coming on every track with only a half-inch clearance between the sides of the passing cars. Two rushing trains met just where Dunc cowered. He threw crossed arms up in front of his face and screamed...

“Hey! You okay, kid?”

Dunc was bolt upright on the seat, eyes staring, arms still crossed in front of his face. The 98 had come down out of the mountains and was starting across a flat arc of concrete highway laid on the top of a vast curved structure. Yellow lights illuminated the roadway. There was water close up on one side, an endless drop into nothing on the other. Twin ghostly towers flanked the upriver side of the road.

“Just a bad dream,” Dunc finally got out. “Where are we?”

“Boulder Dam. Greatest dam in the world. Lake Mead on your right. Those castle-looking things are silt towers. They work the way they ought to because of a damned good engineer named Will Corfitzen.”

They were across the dam, climbing back into the mountains again. The 98’s lights cut a twin swath from the darkness.

“I worked on this dam back in the twenties,” said Breen. “It was my first job, I was fifteen looking eighteen. Gov’ment farmed the contracts out to engineering firms that knew how to build dams.” He chuckled. “Kaiser and Bechtel got the biggest pieces of the pie. They were bastards to work for, but I learned from them. Learned enough so that after Boulder Dam, I never worked for wages again. And I never will.”

The next time Dunc woke up, they were coming down into the desert. Everything was dark except for the broad thin glow of reddish light flat on the horizon, pulsing in the clear air like the northern lights when he and his dad used to go out poaching rabbits on full-moon nights after a new snow.

“Las Vegas,” said Lucius Breen in a voice laced with conflicting emotions Dunc could only guess at: love and hate for sure, maybe nostalgia and anger and anticipation. Excitement.