Feast Day of Fools

CHAPTER THREE

Hackberry Holland sat behind his desk and listened to Pam Tibbs’s account of the arrest. Outside the window, the American flag was straightening and popping in the wind, the chain rattling on the pole. “What’s our minister friend doing now?” he asked.

“Yelling for his phone call,” she replied. “How do you read that stuff about a hot coal on my tongue?”

“It’s from Isaiah in the Old Testament. Isaiah believed he was a man of unclean lips who dwelled in an unclean land. But an angel placed a burning coal on his tongue and removed his iniquity.”

“I’m iniquitous for not letting him kill himself and others in an auto accident?”

“The sheriff in Jim Hogg told me about this guy a couple of months ago. Cody Daniels was a suspect in the bombing of an abortion clinic on the East Coast. He might not have done it himself, but he was at least one of the cheerleaders. He roams around the country and tends to headquarter in places where there’s not much money for law enforcement. I didn’t know he was here.”

She waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. “You think he could be the guy taking potshots at the illegals coming across the border?” she said.

“Him or a hundred others like him.” Hackberry took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Did he threaten you in a specific way?”

“On the way in, he told me I was going to hell.”

“Did he say he was going to put you there or see you there?”

“No.”

“Did he touch the gun on the seat?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Did he make a threatening gesture of any kind?”

“He refused to get out of the vehicle while telling me he was armed.”

“He told R.C. you hit him in the head after you cuffed him.”

“He fell down against the cruiser. What are you trying to say, Hack?”

“We don’t need a lawsuit.”

“I don’t know if I’m more pissed off by this nutcase or what I’m hearing now.”

“It’s the kind of lawsuit that could cost us fifty thousand dollars in order to be right.”

Hackberry looked up at her in the silence. Pam’s eyes were brown, with a reddish tint, and they became charged with light when she was either angry or hurt. She hooked her thumbs in her gun belt and fixed her attention outside the window, her cheeks spotted with color.

“I’m proud of the way you handled it,” he said. “You did all the right things. Let’s see if our man likes his accommodations.”

Hackberry and Pam Tibbs climbed the steel spiral steps in the rear of the building and walked down a corridor of barred cells, past the old drunk tank, to a barred holding unit that contained nothing but a wood bench and a commode with no seat. The man who had identified himself as Reverend Cody Daniels was standing at the window, silhouetted against a sky that had turned yellow with dust.

“I understand you were potting jackrabbits from your pickup truck,” Hackberry said.

“I did no such thing,” Cody Daniels replied. “It’s not against the law, anyway, is it?”

“So you were cruising down the road surveilling the countryside through your binoculars for no particular reason?” Hackberry said.

“What I was looking for is the illegal immigrants and drug transporters who come through here every night.”

“You’re not trying to steal my job, are you?”

“I go where I’ve a mind to. When I got up this morning, this was still a free country.”

“You bet. But you gave my chief deputy a hard time because she made a simple procedural request of you.”

“Check the video camera in your squad car. Truth will out, Sheriff.”

“It’s broken.”

“Pretty much like everything in this town. Mighty convenient, if you ask me.”

“What are you doing in my county?”

“Your county?”

“You’d better believe it.”

“I’m doing the Lord’s work.”

“I heard about your activities on the East Coast. We don’t have any abortion clinics here, Reverend, but that doesn’t mean we’ll put up with your ilk.”

Cody Daniels approached the bars and rested one hand on the cast-iron plate that formed an apron on the bottom of the food slot. The veins in his wrists were green and as thick as night crawlers, his knuckles pronounced, the back of each finger scarred where a tattoo had been removed. He held Hackberry’s gaze. “I have the ability to see into people’s thoughts,” he said. “Right now you got more problems than your department can handle. That’s why you select the likes of me as the target of your wrath. People like me are easy. We pay our taxes and obey the law and try to do what’s right. How many drug dealers do you have locked up here?”

“There’s a kernel of truth in what you say, Reverend, but I’d like to get this issue out of the way so you can go back to your job and we can go back to ours.”

“I think the real problem is you got a romantic relationship going with this woman here.”

“Deputy Tibbs, would you get the reverend’s possessions envelope out of the locker, please?”

Pam gave Hackberry a look but didn’t move.

“I think Reverend Daniels is a reasonable man and is willing to put this behind him,” Hackberry said. “I think he’ll be more mindful of his driving habits and the next time out not object to the requests of a well-meaning deputy sheriff. Is that a fair statement, Reverend?”

“I’m not given to making promises, particularly when I’m not the source of the problem,” Cody Daniels said.

Hackberry drummed his fingers on the apron of the food slot. “Deputy Tibbs, would you get the paperwork started on Reverend Daniels’s release?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” she replied.

Cody Daniels’s eyes followed her down the corridor, his gaze slipping down her back to her wide-ass jeans and the thickness of her thighs. “I guess it’s each to his own,” he said.

“Pardon?” Hackberry said.

“No offense meant, but I think I’d rather belly up to a spool of barbed wire. That’s kind of coarse, but you get the picture.”

“I hope you’ll accept this in the right spirit, Reverend. If you ever sass one of my deputies or speak disrespectfully of Chief Deputy Tibbs again, I’m going to hunt around in that pile of scrap wood behind the jail until I find a long two-by-four, one with sixteen-penny nails sticking out of it, then I’m going to kick it so far up your ass you’ll be spitting splinters. Get the picture? Have a nice day. And stay the hell out of my sight.”

Anton Ling heard the man in the yard before she saw him. He had released the chain on the windmill and cupped water out of the spout, drinking it from his hand, while the blades spun and clattered above his head. He was gaunt and wore a short-sleeve shirt with no buttons; his hair hung on his shoulders and looked like it had been barbered with a knife.

“?Que quieres?” she said.

“Comida,” the man replied.

He was wearing tennis shoes. In the moonlight she could see his ribs stenciled against his sides, his trousers flattening in the wind against his legs. She stepped out on the back porch. The shadows of the windmill’s blades were spinning on his face. “You didn’t come out of Mexico,” she said.

“How do you know?” he replied in English.

“The patrols are out. They would have stopped you if you came out of the south.”

“I hid in the hills during the day. I have no food.”

“What is your name?”

“Antonio.”

“You are a worker?”

“Only for myself. I am a hunter. Will you feed me?”

She went into her kitchen and put a wedge of cheese and three tortillas on a paper plate, then covered them with chili and beans that she ladled out of a pot that was still warm on the stove. When she went back outside, the visitor was squatted in the middle of the dirt lot, staring at the moon and the lines of cedar posts with no wire. He took the paper plate from her hand and ignored the plastic spoon and instead removed a metal spoon from his back pocket and began eating. A knife in a long thin scabbard protruded at an angle from his belt. “You are very kind, senora.”

“Where did you learn English?”

“My father was a British sailor.”

“What do you hunt, Antonio?”

“In this case, a man.”

“Has this man harmed you?”

“No, he has done nothing to me.”

“Then why do you hunt him?”

“He’s a valuable man, and I am poor.”

“You’ll not find him here.”

He stopped eating and pointed at the side of his head with his spoon. “You’re very intelligent. People say you have supernatural gifts. But maybe they just don’t understand that you are simply much more intelligent than they are.”

“The man you are looking for was here, but he’s gone now. He will not be back. You must leave him alone.”

“Your property is a puzzle. It has fences all over it, but they hold nothing in and nothing out.”

“This was a great cattle ranch at one time.”

“Now it is a place where the wind lives, one that has no beginning and no end. It’s a place like you, china. You come from the other side of the earth to do work no one understands. You don’t have national frontiers.”

“Don’t speak familiarly of people you know nothing about.”

The man who called himself Antonio lifted the paper plate and pushed the beans and chili and cheese and pieces of tortilla into his mouth. He dropped the empty plate in the dirt and wiped his lips and chin on a bandanna and stood up and washed his spoon in the horse tank and slipped it into his back pocket. “They say you can do the same things a priest can, except you have more power.”

“I have none.”

“I had three children. They died without baptism.” He looked toward the west and the heat lightning pulsing in the sky just above the hills. “Sometimes I think their souls are out there, outside their bodies, lost in the darkness, not knowing where they’re supposed to go. You think that’s what happens after we’re dead? We don’t know where to go until someone tells us?”

“How did your children die?”

“They were killed by a helicopter in front of the clinic where they were playing.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“You can baptize them, china.”

“Do not call me that.”

“It wasn’t their fault they weren’t baptized. They call you La Magdalena. You can reach back in time before they were dead and baptize them.”

“You should talk to a priest. He will tell you the same thing I do. Your children committed no offense against God. You mustn’t worry about them.”

“I can’t see a priest.”

“Why not?”

“I killed one. I think he was French, maybe a Jesuit. I’m not sure. We were told he was a Communist. I machine-gunned him.”

Her eyes left his face. She remained motionless inside the pattern of shadow and light created by the moon. “Whom do you work for?” she asked.

“Myself.”

“No, you don’t. You’re paid by others. They use you.”

“ Conejo, you are much woman.”

“You will not speak to me like that.”

“You didn’t let me finish. You are much woman, but you’ve lied to me. You’ve given Communion to the people who come here, just like a priest. But you turn me away.”

“I think you’re a tormented man. But you won’t find peace until you give up your violent ways. You tortured and killed the man down south of us, didn’t you? You’re the one called Krill.”

His eyes held hers. They were pale blue, the pupils like cinders. In silhouette, with his long knife-cut hair and torso shaped like an inverted pyramid, he resembled a creature from an earlier time, a warrior suckled in an outworn creed. “The man I killed in the south did very cruel things to my brother. He had a chance to redeem himself by being brave. But he was a coward to the end.”

“Others are with you, aren’t they? Out there in the hills.”

“Others follow me. They are not with me. They can come and go as they wish. Given the chance, some of them would eat me like dogs.”

“When you were a coyote, you raped the women who paid you to take them across?”

“A man has needs, china. But it wasn’t rape. I was invited to their beds.”

“Because they had no water to drink or food to eat? Do not come here again, even if you’re badly hurt or starving.”

The man watched the heat lightning, his hair lying as black as ink on his shoulders. “I can hear my children talking inside the trees,” he said. “You have to baptize them, senora. It doesn’t matter if you want to or not.”

“Be gone.”

He raised a cautionary finger in the air, the shadow of the windmill blades slicing across his face and body. “Do not treat me with contempt, Magdalena. Think about my request. I’ll be back.”

Three days later, on Saturday, Hackberry rose at dawn and fixed coffee in a tin pot and made a sandwich out of two slices of sourdough bread and a deboned pork chop he took from the icebox. Then he carried the pot and sandwich and tin cup down to the barn and the railed pasture where he kept his two Missouri foxtrotters, a chestnut and a palomino named Missy’s Playboy and Love That Santa Fe. He spread their hay on the concrete pad that ran through the center of the barn, and then he sat down in a wood chair from the tack room and ate his sandwich and drank his coffee while he watched his horses eat. Then he walked out to their tank and filled it to the rim from a frost-proof spigot, using his bare hand to skim bugs and dust and bits of hay from the surface. The water had come from a deep well on his property and was like ice on his fingers and wrist, and he wondered if the coldness hidden under the baked hardpan wasn’t a reminder of the event waiting for him just beyond the edge of his vision-an unexpected softening of the light, an autumnal smell of gas pooled in the trees, a bugle echoing off stone in the hills.

No, I will not think about that today, he told himself. The sunrise was pink in the east, the sky blue. His quarter horses were grazing in his south pasture, the irrigated grass riffling in the breeze, and he could see a doe with three yearlings among a grove of shade trees at the bottom of his property. The world was a grand place, a cathedral in its own right, he thought. How had Robert Frost put it? What place could be better suited for love? Hackberry couldn’t remember the line.

He slipped a halter on each of the foxtrotters and wormed them by holding their head up with the lead while he worked the disposable syringe into the corner of their mouth and squirted the ivermectin over their tongue and down their throat. Both of them were still colts and liked to provoke him by mashing down on the syringe, holding on until he had to drop the lead and use both hands to pry the flattened plastic cylinder loose from their teeth.

Just when he thought he was done, the chestnut, Missy’s Playboy, grabbed his straw hat and threw it on the branch of a tree, then thundered down the pasture, trailing the lead between his legs, kicking at the air with his hind feet. Hackberry did not hear the woman come up behind him. “I let myself in the gate. I hope you don’t mind,” she said.

She was wearing khakis and sandals and a white shirt with flowers on it and a white baseball cap with a purple bill. When he didn’t answer, she looked around her, uncertain. “You have a beautiful place.”

“What can I do for you, Miss Anton?”

“Two nights ago a man came to my house. He said his name was Antonio. But I think he’s the man called Krill.”

“What did this fellow want?”

“He said he was a hunter. He said he was hunting a man for pay. I told him the man he was looking for had been at my house, but he had gone and wouldn’t be there again.”

“Why did you wait to report this?”

There was a beat. “I’m not sure.”

“You thought you would be violating a confidence?”

“This man is deeply troubled. In part, I think he came to me for help. Why are you shaking your head?”

“Don’t be disingenuous about these guys. You know what the conversion rate is on death row? Try a hundred percent. Turn them loose and see what happens.”

“You believe the state has the right to kill people?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Who cares?”

“Sheriff, I came here as an act of conscience. This man probably won’t harm me, but eventually, he’ll kill others. So I had to come here.”

“You don’t think he’ll hurt you? Why should you get an exemption?”

“Three of his children were killed by a helicopter gunship. He believes their spirits will wander until they’re baptized. He thinks somehow I can baptize them retroactively. He says he can’t take his problem to a priest because he murdered a French Jesuit.”

“I think you’re dealing with someone who’s morally insane, Miss Anton. I think it’s both naive and dangerous to pretend otherwise. Who’s he working for?”

“I asked him that. He wouldn’t say.”

“Who’s the guy you gave refuge to?”

“A man of peace. A man who became involved in a military program that kills innocent people.”

“Has the FBI interviewed you?”

“No.”

“When they do, I suggest you give them a better answer than the one you just gave me. You were in the employ of Air America in Indochina, Miss Anton. People who have a lot of guilt have a way of showing up under one flag or another.”

She took a Ziploc bag from her pocket. In it was a dirty paper plate. “Antonio ate from this. I suspect it will be of some help to you.”

“Why are both the FBI and Krill after the same man?”

“Ask them. Before I go, I need to straighten out something. My work has nothing to do with guilt. We live in a country that has created a huge serving class of illegals who work for low pay at jobs Americans won’t do. We get along very well with these people during prosperous times. But as soon as the economy goes down, they’re treated like dirt. You’re obviously an intelligent and educated man. Why don’t you act like it?”

She turned and began walking back toward the gate. Then she stopped and faced him again. For some reason, her baseball cap and her tight-fitting flowered shirt made her look younger and smaller than she was. “One other thing, sir,” she said. “Why do you look at me so strangely? It’s quite rude.”

Because you remind me of my beloved wife, he thought.

The Reverend Cody Daniels had carpentered his house to resemble the forecastle of a ship, up on a bluff that overlooked a wide arid bowl flanked by hills that contained layers of both red and chalk-colored stone, giving them in the sunset the striped appearance of a freshly sliced strawberry cake. A sandstone bluff rose straight into the air behind the house, and on it he had painted a huge American flag, one that was of greater dimension than the roof itself. In the evening, Cody Daniels liked to walk back and forth on his front deck, surveying the valley below, sometimes gazing at the southern horizon through the telescope mounted on the deck rail, sometimes simply taking pleasure in the presence of his possessions-his canary-yellow pickup, his horse trailer, his cistern up on the hill, his silver propane tanks that ensured he would never be cold, the smell of the game he had shot or beef he had butchered dripping into the ash inside his smokehouse, the wood shell of a church that came with the property down on the hardpan, a building he had given a second life by putting pews inside it and a blue-white neon cross above the front door.

Some evenings, after the last wash of gold light on the eastern side of the valley had risen into the sky and disappeared like smoke breaking apart in the wind, he would focus his telescope on a gingerbread house far to the south and watch the events that seemed to unfold there two or three times a week.

When the evening star rose above the hills, Cody Daniels could see small groups of people moving out of the haze that constituted the Mexican border-like lice fleeing a flame, he thought, carrying their possessions in backpacks and knotted blankets, their children stringing behind them, not unlike nits.

He had heard about the woman who lived in the gingerbread house. The wets coming across the border knelt before her altar and believed the glow of votive candles burning at the base of a statue somehow signaled they had reached a safe harbor. Not true, Cody Daniels thought. Not as long as he had the power to send them back where they came from. Not as long as there were still patriots willing to act independently of a government that had been taken over by mud people who were giving away American jobs to the beaners.

Cody could have tapped just three digits into his phone console and brought the authorities down on the Asian woman’s head. The fact that he didn’t made him swell with a sense of power and control that was rare in his life. The Asian woman, without even knowing it, was in his debt. Sometimes she passed him on the sidewalk in town, or pushing a basket in the grocery store, her eyes aimed straight ahead, ignoring his tip of his hat. He wondered what she would say if she knew what he could do to her. He wondered how she would enjoy her first cavity search in a federal facility. He wondered if she would be so regal in a shower room full of bull dykes.

On the deck this evening, with the wind cool on his face, he should have felt at peace. But the memory of his treatment by the deputy sheriff, the one named Tibbs, was like a thumbtack pressed into his scalp. His eyes had the cupped look of an owl’s from the Mace she had squirted into them. The baton stroke she had laid across the back of his calves flared to life each time he took a step. Then, for reasons he didn’t understand, the thought of her slamming him against the truck, of forcing him on his face and kneeing him in the spine and hooking him up, brought about a weakening in his throat, a stiffening in his loins, and fantasies in which he and the woman were in a soundproof room that had no windows.

But Cody did not like to pursue fantasies of this kind, because they contained images and guilty sensations that made no sense to him. It was not unlike watching two or three frames of a film-an image of her hand flying out at his face, a fingernail cutting his cheek-and refusing to see what was on the rest of the spool.

Unconsciously, he rubbed the dime-sized pieces of scar tissue on the back of his fingers. Long ago, when he was hardly more than a boy riding freight trains across the American West, he had learned lessons he would take to the grave: You didn’t sass a railroad bull; you didn’t sass a hack on a county penal farm; and you didn’t put tattoos on your body that told people you were nobody and deserving of whatever they did to you. You rinsed their abuse off your skin and out of your soul; you became somebody else, and once you did, you no longer had to feel shame about the person who somehow had brought degradation upon himself.

Then you did to others what had been done to you, freeing yourself forever of the role of victim. Or at least that was what some people did. But he hadn’t done that, he told himself. He was a minister. He had an associate of arts degree. Truckers talked about him on their CBs. He handed out pocket Bibles to rodeo cowboys behind the bucking chutes. Attractive waitresses warmed up his coffee for free and called him Reverend. He wrote letters of recommendation for parolees. He had baptized drunkards and meth addicts by submersion in a sandy pool by the river that was as red as the blood of Christ. How many men with his background could say the same? And he had done it all without therapists or psychiatrists or titty-baby twelve-step groups.

But his self-manufactured accolades brought him no solace. He had been bested by Sheriff Holland’s chief deputy and, in a perverse way, had enjoyed it. He had been threatened with bodily harm by the sheriff, as though he were white trash. And while all this was happening, an Oriental woman was openly aiding the wets and getting christened for her efforts as La Magdalena. Anything wrong with this picture?

Maybe it was time to let Miss Chop Suey 1969 know who her neighbors were.

In the fading twilight he drove in his pickup down the long, tire-worn dirt track that traversed the valley from his house to the county road that eventually led to the southern end of the Asian woman’s property. He passed two abandoned oil storage tanks that had turned to rust, a burned-out shack where a deranged tramp sometimes stayed, and a private airstrip blown with tumbleweed, the air sock bleached of color. He turned onto the Asian woman’s property and passed a paint-skinned gas-guzzler driven by two men who were sitting on a hillside, staring north at the Asian woman’s compound. They were smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and wore new straw hats and boots that were curled up at the toes. One of them pulled on a bottle that had no label, and gargled with whatever was inside before he swallowed. The other man, the taller of the two, had a pair of binoculars hanging from his neck. His shirt was open on his chest, and his skin looked as brown and smooth as clay from a riverbank. Cody Daniels nodded at him but didn’t know why. The man either ignored or took no notice of Cody’s gesture.

If you want to live in this country, why don’t you show some manners? Cody thought.

He drove between the gateless walls of the Asian woman’s compound and was surprised by what he saw. Mexicans were eating from paper plates on the gallery and the front steps and at a picnic table under a willow in the middle of the yard. Obviously, no effort was being made to conceal their presence. He got down from his truck and immediately saw the Asian woman staring at him from the gallery. She was the only person among all the people there who looked directly at him. She stepped into the yard and walked toward him, her eyes never losing contact with his. He felt himself clear his throat involuntarily.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Introducing myself. I live up yonder, in the bluffs. I’m Reverend Cody Daniels, pastor of the Cowboy Chapel.”

“I know who you are. You’re a nativist and not here on a good errand.”

“A what?”

“State your business.”

“Who are all these people?”

“Friends of mine.”

“Got their papers, do they?”

“Why don’t you ask them?”

“I don’t speak Spanish.”

“You have a cell phone?”

“Yeah, I do, but the service isn’t real good here. Want to borrow it?” He felt the open door of his truck hit him in the back.

“Either call 911 or leave.”

“I didn’t come here to cause trouble.”

“I think you did.”

“I try to save souls, just like you. I saw y’all from my deck up there, that’s all. I got a telescope. I’m an amateur astronomer.”

She stepped closer to him. “Let me see your hands.”

“Ma’am?”

“I won’t hurt you.”

“I know that,” he said, half laughing.

“Then let me see your hands.”

He held them out, palms up, in front of her. But then she turned them over and moved her thumbs across the scar tissue on the back of his fingers. “You were in prison, weren’t you?” she said.

“I don’t know if I’d call it prison.” He paused. “I was on a county farm in New Mexico when I was a boy.”

“You had your tattoos removed when you came out?”

“I did it myself. Burned them off with acid and took out the leftover flesh with nail clippers.” He started to pull his hands away from her, but she held on to them. He grinned. “I know what you’re gonna say. You’re gonna tell me I had ‘love’ and ‘hate’ on my fingers, aren’t you? Well, I didn’t. I guess that shows how much you know.”

“No, you had the letters B-O-R-N tattooed on your left hand, the letter T on your left thumb, the letter O on your right thumb, and L-O-S-E on your right hand. Who taught you such a terrible concept about yourself?”

“I had no such thing on there.”

“Why do you feel guilty over things that weren’t your fault? You were just a boy. People hurt you and tried to rob you of your innocence. You don’t have to be ashamed of what happened to you. You don’t have to be afraid of people who look different or speak a different language.”

He felt himself swallowing. Through the wetness in his eyes, he saw the people in the yard and on the steps and gallery shimmer and go in and out of focus. “I’m not afraid of anything. If I ever catch up with the sonsofbitches who did what they did, you’ll see how afraid I am.”

She squeezed both of his hands tightly in hers. “You have to forgive them.”

He tried to pull away from her again, but she held on. He said, “I hope those men go to hell. I hope they burn from the top down and the bottom up. I hope Satan himself pours liquid fire down their throats.”

“Would you drink poison in order to get even with others?”

“Sell that Dr. Phil douche rinse to somebody else. They draped me across a sawhorse. I was seventeen. You ever been raped? You wouldn’t be so damn quick to advise if you had.”

“Stay and eat with us.”

“Are you out of your mind, woman? Let go of me.”

But she didn’t. She squeezed his hands tighter, her face staring intently up into his. He freed one of his hands and used it to pull her other hand off his and fling it from him. He got into his truck and started the engine and rammed the transmission into reverse. He steered by glancing over his shoulder, the pedal to the floor, scouring dirt out of the yard, so he would not have to look into the Asian woman’s face again.

How had she gotten into his head? How did she know his history with such accuracy? He had always claimed he could read people’s thoughts. But that wasn’t true. He could read personalities, character traits, and especially secret designs that hid in the eyes of a manipulator. Every survivor could. That was how you became a survivor. But she was the real thing. She had seen into his past in a way no one ever had, and that thought made him grind his molars.

The purple haze he had seen earlier had spread across the valley floor, and he had to turn on his headlights to see his way down the dirt track to the county road. He had forgotten about the two Mexicans who had been smoking on the hillside earlier; he had even temporarily forgotten the rudeness one of them had shown Cody when he tried to say hello. The two men had gotten back into the gas-guzzler, and evidently had decided to stop and urinate at a spot where the dirt track was pinched on either side by big piles of rock.

He slowed his pickup and hit his high beams, drenching the two figures with an electric brilliance, carving their rounded spines, their splayed knees, the cupping of their phalluses, the amber arc of their urination out of the darkened landscape.

The license plate on the gas-guzzler was dented and filmed with a patina of dried mud and attached to the bumper with coat-hanger wire. Cody could see COAHUILA at the bottom of the plate. He mashed on his horn, holding the button down, clicking his high beams on and off, while the two men stuffed their phalluses back in their pants, their eyes glinting like glass.

The shorter of the two men walked toward Cody’s truck, shielding his eyes from the glare with one hand. His jaw was as heavy-looking as a mule’s shoe, his forehead ridged like a washboard, his hair and chin stubble the color of rust. “You got a problem, chico?” he said.

“ Chico?” Cody said.

“That means ‘boy,’” the man with orange hair said. “You got a problem, chico boy?”

“Yeah, how about getting your shitbox off the road? Also, find a public restroom and stop polluting the countryside. There’s one at the truck stop up on the four-lane. It’s got a dispenser of toilet-seat covers on the wall. The sign on the dispenser says MEXICAN PLACE MATS . That’s how you’ll know you’re in the restroom.”

“This is a funny guy here,” the man called back to his friend. “Come up here and listen. He is very funny.”

Cody looked in his rearview mirror and could see only a dim glow from the compound of the Asian woman. The stars seemed to arch overhead and stretch beyond the horizon and curve over the earth’s rim. “I need to get about my business. How about it?” He lifted his finger to indicate their vehicle, but his hand felt disconnected from his wrist, lighter than it should.

“What is your business, senor?” said the man with a jaw like a mule’s shoe, leaning in the window, his breath rife with onions and mescal, the whites of his eyes a watery red.

“I’m a preacher.”

“Hey, jefe, the funny gringo is a preacher. That’s why he called my car a shitbox and shone his headlights on us while we were relieving ourselves.”

The second man approached Cody’s window, touching his friend on the shoulder, indicating he should move aside. “That’s right? You’re a preacher?” he said.

“Reverend Cody Daniels. But I got to be getting on my way.”

“You work with La Magdalena?”

“I’m just a neighbor making a neighborly visit. I live up yonder, in the bluffs. I got people waiting on me.”

The tall man’s shoulders seemed unnaturally wide for his thin waist. His profile made Cody think of an ax blade. “Why are you so nervous?” the man asked. “I do something to make you nervous? You have never seen somebody relieve himself on a road in the dark?”

“You got a pistol stuck down in your belt. That’s what some might call carrying a concealed weapon. In this county I wouldn’t mess with the law.”

The tall man fingered his cheek, then pointed at Cody. “I think I know you.”

“No, sir, I don’t think that’s the case.”

The tall man jiggled his finger playfully. “You are like me, a hunter. I’ve seen you down on the border. You hunt coyotes. Except these are coyotes with two feet.”

“Not me. No, sir.”

“No? You’re not the man who likes to look through a telescope?”

“I just want to be on my way.”

“What did you see up there at the house of la china?”

“Of la what?”

“You seem like one stupid gringo, my friend. Do I have to say it again?”

“If you’re talking about the Chinese woman, I saw the same thing you saw through your binoculars-a bunch of people stuffing food in their faces.”

“You were watching us?”

“No, sir, I passed you on the road here, that’s all. I wasn’t paying y’all any mind.”

“You’re one big liar, gringo.”

“That woman up yonder is your problem, not me.”

“You’re a cobarde, too.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“You’re a coward. You stink of fear. I think maybe you’re a cobarde that shot at me once. A man up in the rocks with a rifle. You were far away, safe from somebody shooting back at you.”

“No, sir,” Cody said, shaking his head.

“What we going to do with you, man?”

“I’m gonna turn out on the hardpan and drive around those rocks and let y’all be. You’re right, sir, none of this is my business.”

“That’s not what’s going to happen, man. You see Negrito over there? He drinks too much. He’s a marijuanista, too. When he drinks and smokes all that dope, you know what he likes to do? It’s because he was in jail too long in Jalisco, where he was provided young boys by his fellow criminals. Now when he drinks and smokes marijuana, Negrito thinks he’s back in Jalisco. If you try to drive out of here before I tell you, you will learn a lot more about your feminine side than you want to know.”

“Don’t be talking to me like that. No, sir.”

The shorter man, the one called Negrito, opened the passenger door and sat down heavily in the seat. He smiled and touched the side of Cody’s head and ran one finger behind his ear. “You got gold hair,” he said. He touched Cody’s cheek and tried to insert the tip of his finger in his mouth. “Mexican place mats, huh? That’s really funny, gringo.”

“You get him out of here,” Cody said to the tall man.

“ La china is hiding a friend of ours, a man who has gone insane and is wandering in the desert and needs his family. You need to find out where la china is hiding our friend. Then you need to build a fire and pour motor oil on it so the smoke climbs straight up in the sky. If you call anybody, if you make trouble for us, we’re going to get you, man.”

“I won’t do it,” Cody said.

“Oh, you’re going to do it. Show him, Negrito.”

The man named Negrito fitted his hand over the top of Cody’s head, his fingers splaying like the points of a starfish. When he tightened his fingers, the pressure was instantaneous, as though cracks were forming in Cody’s skull.

“I crushed bricks with my hands in a carnival,” Negrito said. “I ate lightbulbs, too. I could blow fire out of my mouth with kerosene. I snapped a bull’s neck. I can punch my fingers through your stomach and take out your liver, man. Don’t pull on my wrist. I’m just gonna squeeze tighter.”

“Please stop,” Cody said.

When Negrito released his grip, Cody’s eyes were bulging from his head, tears running down his cheeks, his ears thundering.

“When I see the smoke climbing up from the bluffs, I’ll know you’ll have something good to report,” the tall man said. “If I don’t see any smoke, I will be disappointed in you. Negrito is going to stake you out on the ground in the hot sun. Your voice is going to speak to the birds high up in the sky. Maybe for two or three days. You will learn to yodel, man.”

“I was just driving down the road. All I did was blow my horn,” Cody said.

“Yes, I have to say you’re a very unlucky gringo,” the tall man said.

They were both laughing at him, their work done, Cody’s self-respect in tatters, the person he used to think of as the Reverend Daniels gone from inside the truck.

“What you done to have this kind of luck, man?” Negrito asked, caressing Cody’s cheek with the back of his wrist. “Maybe you just act like you’re a funny man. Maybe you’ve done some things you want to tell me and Krill about. Things that make you feel real bad. You’re a nice boy. We’re gonna be good friends.” He leaned close to Cody’s ear and whispered, his breath like a feather on Cody’s skin. Then he withdrew his mouth and smiled. “You gringos call it pulling a train. But in your case, I’m gonna be the train, the big choo-choo in your life, man.”