Rain Gods

20

PETE CAUGHT A ride back to the motel on a poultry truck and slept through the morning, trying to block out the memories of the previous night, which included his fight with Vikki, his failed attempt to boost a car, his admission of fear and inadequacy to his friend Billy Bob in Montana, and his rage and attack upon the driver of the compact car at the traffic light.

How could one guy screw up so often, so bad, and in so short a time? When he woke at noon, a poisonous lethargy seemed to grip both his body and spirit, as though he had been drinking for two days and all his tomorrows had been mortgaged. He was sure that if a high wind blew away the motel and left him behind, he would discover that creation was a vast empty shell as well as a sham, a stage set that hid no mysteries, and he was an insignificant cipher in the middle of it.

Vikki was nowhere in sight. His only companion was a roach the size of a cigar butt climbing up the curtain by the television set. He put on his shirt, not bothering to button it, and sat on the side of the bed and wondered what he should do next.

Billy Bob had said to trust his cousin the sheriff. But what about the feds? Sometimes they hung witnesses out to dry. Pete had heard stories about the Justice Department prosecuting cases that couldn’t be won, turning over the names of confidential informants to defense lawyers who passed the names on to their clients and exposed the informants to violent and perhaps fatal retribution.

His and Vikki’s names would be in the newspapers. Vikki had pumped two rounds into this guy Preacher when he had tried to force her into his car. Pete had never seen the man’s face and knew nothing of his history or background but had little doubt what he would do to Vikki if he got his hands on her.

But what if Pete continued to do nothing? So far he and Vikki had been lucky. If they just had money or passports or a car. Or a weapon. But they had none of these things, and now, to compound his problems, he had fought with Vikki.

The rains had passed when he went outside, but the sky was sealed from horizon to horizon with clouds that were as heavy and gray as lead, like a giant lid pressing the humidity and heat back into the earth. In the convenience store that doubled as a Greyhound bus stop, he bought a box of saltine crackers and a can of Vienna sausages. He also bought a coned-up straw hat from a Mexican who was selling hats and serapes and garish velvet paintings of either the Crucifixion or the Sacred Heart of Jesus off the back of a pickup truck. He bought a bottle of Coca-Cola from the outside machine, and just as the sun was breaking through the overcast, spearing columns of light onto the desert, he squatted down in the shade of the store and began eating the sausages sandwiched between crackers, drinking from the soda, moistening the dried-out saltines to the point where they were almost chewable.

He could not explain adequately to himself why he had bought the hat, which had cost six dollars, except for the fact that squatting down on his haunches, the leather of his colorless cowboy boots spiderwebbing with cracks, eating his lunch in the hot shade of a convenience store on the outer edges of the Great American Desert, his hat slanted down on his brow, was like a conduit back into a time when he had thought of the world in terms of chimerical holograms rather than events-bobber-fishing in a green river, Angus grazing in red clover, sunlit showers breaking on bluebonnets in the spring, harvest moons that were as big and brown and dust-veiled as a planet that had strayed from its orbit.

Pickup trucks and country music and dancing to the “Bandera Waltz” under Japanese lanterns at a beer garden on the banks of the Frio. Barbecues and fish frys and high school kids on hayrides and other kids hanging out on horseback in front of the IGA. Dinner on the ground and devil in the bush and baptism by immersion and outdoor preachers ranting in ecstasy with their eyes rolled back in their heads. If he could just reach back a couple of years and put his hand on all of it and hold on to it and never let anyone talk him into giving it up.

That was the secret: to hold on to the things you loved and never give them up for any reason, no matter how strong the entreaty.

He walked down the street to the town’s one block of business buildings, stepping up on an elevated sidewalk that still had tethering rings inset in the concrete. He passed a shut-down bank that had been constructed in 1891, a barbershop with a revolving striped pole in a plastic tube, a used-appliance store, a café that advertised bison burgers in water-based white paint on the window, a barroom that was as long and narrow and dark as a boxcar. The town’s library was tucked compactly inside a one-story limestone building that once sold recapped automobile tires.

In the reference section, he found a stack of phone books for all the counties in Southwest Texas. It took him only five minutes to find the number he needed. He borrowed a pencil from the reference librarian and wrote the number on a piece of scrap paper. The librarian’s hair was almost blue, her eyes very tiny and bright behind her glasses; her facial skin was wrinkled with deep folds that had the coloration of a pink rose. “You’re not from here, are you?” she said.

“No, ma’am. I’m a visitor.”

“Well, you come back here any time you want.”

“I surely will.”

“You’re a nice young man.”

“Thank you. But how do you know what I am?”

“You removed your hat when you entered the building. You removed it even though you thought no one was watching you. Your manners are those of a naturally considerate and respectful person. That makes you a very nice young man.”

Pete walked back to the motel, left a note for Vikki on her pillow, and hitchhiked thirty miles west of town to a desolate crossroads that reminded him of the place where the Asian women had died and his life had changed forever. He entered a phone booth, took a deep breath, and dialed a number on the phone’s console. In the distance, he could see a mile-long train inching its way along a stretch of alkali hardpan, like a black centipede, heat waves warping the horizon.

“Sheriff’s Department,” a woman said. It was a voice he had heard before.

“Is this the business line?” he asked.

“That’s the number you dialed. Did you want to report an emergency?”

“I need to talk to Sheriff Holland.”

“He’s not in right now. Who’s calling, please?”

“When will he be in?”

“That’s hard to say. Can I he’p you with something?”

“Patch me through. You can do that, cain’t you?”

“You need to give me your name. Is there a reason you don’t want to give me your name?”

He could feel sweat pooling inside his armpits, his own stale odor rising into his face. He folded back the door of the booth and stepped outside, the receiver pressed against his ear.

“Are you there, sir?” the woman said. “We’ve spoken before, haven’t we? You remember me? Your name is Pete, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s what I go by.”

“We want you to come see us, Pete. You need to bring Ms. Gaddis with you.”

“That’s why I want to talk to the sheriff.”

“The sheriff is at the hospital. A man tried to kill him and Deputy Tibbs last night. I think you know the man we’re talking about.”

“This guy Preacher? No, I don’t know him. I know his name. I know he tried to kidnap and maybe kill Vikki. But I don’t know him.”

“We’ve been trying to he’p you, soldier. Sheriff Holland in particular.”

“I didn’t ask him to.” He could hear sweat creaking between his ear and the phone receiver. He held the receiver away from his head and wiped his ear with his shoulder. “Hello?”

“I’m still here.”

“How bad are the sheriff and the deputy hurt?”

“The sheriff is having some X-rays done. You’re not a criminal, Pete. But you’re not acting real bright, either.”

“What’s your name, ma’am?”

“Maydeen Stoltz.”

Pete looked at his watch. How long did it take to trace a call? “Well, Miss Maydeen, why don’t you pull your head out of your hole and give me the sheriff’s cell phone number? That way I won’t have to trouble you anymore.”

He thought he could hear her ticking a ballpoint on a desk blotter.

“I’ll give you his number and tell him to expect your call in the next few minutes. But you listen to me on this one, smartass. Last night we almost lost two of the best people either one of us will ever know. You give that some thought. And if you talk to me like that again and I catch up with you, I’m gonna slap the daylights out of you.”

She gave him the sheriff’s cell number, but he had nothing to write with and had to draw the numerals on the dusty shelf under the phone console with his finger.

He went inside the small grocery store at the intersection, the smell of cheese and lunch meat and insect spray and stale cigarette smoke and overripe fruit enough to make him choke. At the back of the store, he stared through the smoky glass doors of the coolers, his arms folded across his chest as though he were protecting himself from an enemy. Inside one door, the Dr Peppers and root beers and Coca-Colas stood end to end in neat racks. Behind the next door were six-pack upon six-pack of every brand of beer sold in Texas, the amber bottles beaded with coldness, the cardboard containers damp and soft, waiting to be picked up gingerly by caring hands.

One six-pack of sixteen-ouncers, he thought. He could space them out through the afternoon, just enough to flatten the kinks in his nervous system. Sometimes you needed a parachute. Wasn’t it better to ease into sobriety rather than to be jolted into it?

“Find what you want?” the woman behind the counter said. She weighed at least 250 pounds and swelled out like an inverted washtub below the waistline. She was smoking a cigarette and flicking the ash into a bottle cap, her lipstick rimmed crisply on the filter, a V-shaped yellow stain between her fingers.

“Where’s the men’s room?” he asked.

She drew in on her cigarette and exhaled the smoke slowly, taking his measure. “About four feet behind you, the door with the sign over it that says Men’s Room.”

He went in the restroom and came back out wiping the water off his face with a paper towel. He slid open the door to the cold box and lifted out a six-pack of Budweiser, balancing it on his palm, the cans coated with moisture and hard and clinking against one another inside the plastic yoke. The cashier was smoking a fresh one, blowing the smoke through her fingers while she held the cigarette to her mouth. He set the six-pack on the counter and reached for his wallet. But she didn’t ring up the purchase.

“Ma’am?”

“What?”

“You have a reason for acting so damn weird?”

“Weird in like what way?”

“For openers, staring at me like I just climbed out of a spaceship.”

She dropped her cigarette into a bucket of water under the counter. “I don’t have a reason for staring at you.”

“So-”

“He might.”

Her gaze drifted out the front window of the store, past the two gas pumps under the porte cochere. A town constable’s patrol car was parked beside the telephone booth. A man wearing a khaki uniform and shades was sitting behind the wheel, the engine off, the doors open to let in the breeze while he wrote on a clipboard.

“That’s Howard. He asked who was just using the phone,” the woman said.

“I reckon that could have been me.”

“I saw you at the A.A. meeting at the church.”

“That could have been me, too.”

“You still want the beer?”

“What I want is a whole lot of gone between me and your store.”

“I cain’t he’p you do that.”

“Ma’am, I’m in a mess of trouble. But I haven’t harmed anybody, not intentionally, anyway.”

“I expect you haven’t.”

Her eyes were full of pity, the same kind of pity and sorrow he had heard in the voice of his friend Billy Bob. Pete folded his arms across his chest again and watched the town constable get out of his patrol car and walk under the porte cochere and pull open the front door of the store. In those few seconds, a line of stitches seemed to form and burst apart across Pete’s heart.

“Were you using that booth out there?” the constable asked. His skin was sun-browned, his shirt peppered with sweat, his eyes hidden by his shades.

“Yes, sir, just a few minutes ago.”

“You owe the operator ninety-five cents. Would you take care of it? She’s ringing it off the hook.”

“Yes, sir, right away. I didn’t know I went overtime.”

“You want the beer?” the clerk said.

“I surely do.”

Pete hefted the six-pack under his arm, got his change and an extra three dollars in coins, and walked back out to the booth. The sun was hammering down on the hardpan and the two-lane asphalt state highway, glazing the hills, alkali flats, and the distant railroad track where the freight train had stopped and was baking in the heat.

He ripped open the tab on a sixteen-ouncer and set it on the shelf below the phone and punched in Sheriff Holland’s cell phone number. As the phone rang, he gripped the sweaty coldness of the can in his left palm.

“Sheriff Holland,” a voice said.

“Your cousin Billy Bob-”

“He’s already called me. You going to come see us, Pete?”

“Yes, sir, that’s what I want to do.”

“What’s holding you up?”

“I don’t want to go to Huntsville. I don’t want to see this guy Preacher and his friends come after Vikki.”

“What do you think they’re doing now, son?”

I ain’t your son, a voice inside him said. “You know what I mean.”

“How have people been treating you?”

“Sir?”

“Since you came back from Iraq, how do people treat you? Just general run-of-the-mill people? They been treating you all right?”

“I haven’t complained.”

“Answer the question.”

“They’ve treated me good.”

“But you don’t trust them, do you? You think they might be fixing to slicker you.”

“Maybe unlike others, I don’t have the luxury of making mistakes.”

“I have an idea where you might be, Pete. But I’m not going to call the sheriff there. I want you and Ms. Gaddis to come in on your own. I want y’all to help me put away the guys who killed those poor Asian women. You fought for your country, partner. And now you have to fight for it again.”

“I don’t like folks using the flag to get me to do what they want.”

“You drinking?”

“Sir?”

“You were drinking when you called in the original nine-one-one by the church house. If I were you, I’d lay off the hooch till I got this stuff behind me.”

“You would, would you?”

“I had my share of trouble with it. Billy Bob says you’re a good man. I believe him.”

“What do we do, just walk into your office?” Pete said. He looked at the cloud of vapor on top of the aluminum beer can. He looked at the brassy bead of the beer through the tab. His windpipe turned to rust when he tried to swallow.

“If you want, I’ll send a cruiser.”

Pete picked up the beer can and pressed its coldness against his cheek. He could see the train starting to move on the track, the black gondolas clanging against their couplings as though they were fighting against their own momentum.

He sat down on the floor of the booth, pulling the phone and its metal-encased cord with him, the six-pack splaying open on the concrete pad. He felt as though he had descended to the bottom of a well, beyond the sunlight, beyond hope, beyond ever feeling wind on his face again or smelling flowers in the morning or being a part of the great human drama most of the world took for granted, a man with red alligator hide for skin and a bagful of sins that would never be forgiven. He pulled his knees up to his face, his head bent forward, and began to weep silently.

“You still with me, bud?”

“Tell Miss Maydeen I’m sorry for sassing her. I also apologize to you and your deputy for getting y’all hurt. I also owe an apology to some guy I attacked at a traffic light last night. I think I’m plumb losing my mind.”

“You assaulted somebody?”

“I threw rocks at his car. I busted a hole in his rear window with a brick.”

“Where was this?”

Pete told him.

“What kind of car?”

“A tan Honda.”

“You busted a big hole in the window?”

“Just under the size of a softball. It was elongated. It looked like the eye of a Chinaman staring out the window.”

“You don’t remember the license number, do you?”

Pete was still holding the sixteen-ouncer. He set it on the ground outside the booth. He pushed it over with the sole of his boot. “One letter and maybe two numbers. Y’all already got a report on it?”

“You could say we may have had contact with the driver.”

A few moments later, Pete picked up the cans he had dropped and took them back inside the store and set them on the counter. “Can I get a refund?” he said.

“If you hold your mouth right,” the cashier said.

“What?”

“That’s a joke.” She opened the register drawer and counted out his cash. “There’s some showers in back. Hang around if you feel like it, cowboy.”

“I got someone waiting on me.”

She nodded.

“You’re a nice lady,” he said.

“I hear that lots of times,” she said. She stuck another filter-tip in her mouth and lit it with a BIC, blowing the smoke at an upward angle, gazing through the window at the way the two-lane warped in the heat and dissolved into a black lake on the horizon.

“I didn’t mean anything, ma’am.”

“I look like a ‘ma’am’? It’s ‘miss,’” she said.

TWO DAYS AFTER the invasion of his home by Jack Collins, Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs flew in the department’s single engine plane to San Antonio, borrowed an unmarked car from the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, and drove into Nick Dolan’s neighborhood. The enclave atmosphere and the size of the homes, the Spanish daggers and hibiscus and palm and umbrella trees and crepe myrtle and bougainvillea in the yards, and the number of grounds workers made Hackberry think of a foreign country, in the tropics, perhaps, or out on the Pacific Rim.

Except he was not visiting a neighborhood as much as a paradox. The dark-skinned employees-maids retrieving the trash cans from the curb, yardmen with ear protectors clamped on their heads operating mowers and leaf blowers, hod carriers and framers constructing an extension on a house-were all foreigners, not the repressed and indigenous people Somerset Maugham and George Orwell and Graham Greene had described in their accounts of life inside dying European and British empires. Those who owned and lived in the big houses in Nick Dolan’s neighborhood were probably all native-born but had managed to become colonials in their own country.

When Hackberry had called Nick Dolan’s restaurant and asked to interview him, Dolan had sounded wired to the eyes, clearing his throat, claiming to be tied up with business affairs and trips out of state. “I got no idea what this is about. I’m dumbfounded here,” he said.

“Arthur Rooney.”

“Artie Rooney is an Irish putz. I wouldn’t piss in his mouth if he was dying of thirst. Let me rephrase that: I wouldn’t cross the street to see a pit bull rip out his throat.”

“Has the FBI talked with you, Mr. Dolan?”

“No, what’s the FBI got to do with anything?”

“But you talked to Isaac Clawson the ICE agent, didn’t you?”

“Maybe that name is familiar.”

“I appreciate your help. We’ll be out to see you this evening.”

“Hold on there.”

It was late when Hackberry and Pam arrived at Nick’s house, and shadows were spreading across the lawn, fireflies lighting in smoky patterns inside the trees. Nick Dolan ushered them right through the house into his backyard and sat them down on rattan chairs by a glass-topped table already set with a pitcher of limeade and crushed ice and a plate of peeled crawfish and a second plate stacked with pastry. But there was no question in Hackberry’s mind that Nick Dolan was a nervous wreck.

Nick began talking about the grapevine that laced the trellises and the latticework over their heads. “Those vines came from my grandfather’s place in New Orleans,” he said. “My grandfather lived uptown, off St. Charles. He was a friend of Tennessee Williams. He was a great man. Know what a great man is? A guy who takes things that are hard and makes them look easy and doesn’t complain. Where’s your gun?”

“In the vehicle,” Hackberry said.

“I always thought you guys had to have your gun on you. You want some limeade? Try those crawfish. I had them brought live from Louisiana. I boiled and veined them myself. I made the sauce, too. I mash up my own peppers. Go ahead, stick a toothpick in one and slop it in the sauce and tell me what you think. Here, you like chocolate-and-peanut-butter brownies? Those are my wife’s specialty.”

Pam and Hackberry looked at Nick silently, their eyes fastened on his. “You’re making me uncomfortable here. I got high blood pressure. I don’t need this,” Nick said.

“I think you’re the anonymous caller who warned me about Jack Collins, Mr. Dolan. I wish I’d taken your warning more to heart. He put a couple of dents in my head and almost killed Deputy Tibbs.”

“I’m lost.”

“I also think you’re the person who called the FBI and told them Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores were in danger.”

Before Hackberry had finished his last sentence, Nick Dolan began shaking his head. “No, no, no, you got the wrong guy. We’re talking about mistaken identity here or something.”

“You told me Arthur Rooney wants to murder both you and your family.”

Nick Dolan’s small round hands were closing and opening on the glass tabletop. His stomach was rising and sinking, his cheeks blading with color. “I got in some trouble,” he said. “I wanted to get even with Artie for some things he did to me. I got mixed up with bad people, the kind who got no parameters.”

“Is one of them named Hugo Cistranos?”

“Hugo worked for Artie when Artie ran a security service in New Orleans. We all got flooded out by Katrina and ended up in Texas at the same time. I don’t got anything else to say about this.”

“I’m going to find Jack Collins, Mr. Dolan. I’d like to do it with your help. It’ll mean a lot for you down the line.”

“You mean I’ll be a friend of the court, something like that?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“Stick your ‘friend of the court’ stuff up your nose. This crazy fuck Collins, excuse my language, is the only guy keeping us alive.”

“I’m not sympathetic with your situation.”

“You don’t have a family?”

“I looked into Collins’s face. I watched him machine-gun my deputy’s cruiser.”

“My wife beat the shit out of him with a cooking pot. He could have killed both of us, but he didn’t.”

“Your wife beat up Jack Collins?”

“There’s something wrong with the words I use that you can’t understand? I got an echo in my yard?”

“I’d like to speak with her, please.”

“I’m not sure she’s home.”

“You know what obstruction of justice is?” Pam Tibbs said.

“Yeah, stuff they talk about on TV detective shows.”

“Explain this,” Pam said. She picked up a brownie from the plate and set it back down. “It’s still hot. Tell your wife to come out here.”

Nick Dolan stared into space, squeezing his jaw with one hand, his eyes out of sync. “I caused all this.”

“Caused what?” Pam said.

“Everything.”

“Where’s your wife, Mr. Dolan?” Pam asked.

“Drove away. Fed up. With the kids in the car.”

“They’re not coming back?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Vikki Gaddis came to my restaurant and applied for a job as a singer. I wish I’d hired her. I could have made a difference in those young people’s lives. I told all this to Esther. Now she thinks maybe I’m unfaithful.”

“Maybe you can still make a difference,” Hackberry said.

“I’m through talking with y’all. I wish I’d never left New Orleans. I wish I had helped the people rebuild in the Ninth Ward. I wish I’d done something good with my life.”

Pam looked at Hackberry, blowing her breath up into her face.

THAT NIGHT A storm that was more wind and dust and dry lightning than rain moved across Southwest Texas, and Hackberry decided not to fly back home until morning. He and Pam ate in a Mexican restaurant on the Riverwalk, a short distance from the Alamo. Their outdoor table was situated on flagstones and lit by gas lamps. A gondola loaded with mariachi musicians floated past them on the water, all of the musicians stooping as they went under one of the arched pedestrian bridges. The river was lined with banks of flowers and white stucco buildings that had Spanish grillwork on the balconies, and trees that had been planted in terraced fashion, creating the look of a wooded hillside in the middle of a city.

Pam had spoken little during the plane ride to San Antonio and even less since they had left Nick Dolan’s yard.

“You a little tired?” Hackberry said.

“No.”

“So what are you?”

“Hungry. Wanting to get drunk, maybe. Or catch up with Jack Collins and do things to him that’ll make him afraid to sleep.”

“Guys like Collins don’t have nightmares.”

“I think you’ve got him figured wrong.”

“He’s a psychopath, Pam. What’s to figure?”

“Why didn’t Collins shoot you when your revolver snapped empty?”

“Who knows?”

“Because he’s setting you up.”

“For what?”

“To be his executioner.”

Hackberry had just raised his fork to his mouth. He paused under a second, his eyes going flat. He put the forkful in his mouth. He watched a gondola emerge from under a stone bridge, the musicians grinning woodenly, a tree trailing its flowers across their sombreros and brocaded suits. “I wouldn’t invest a lot of time thinking about this guy’s complexities,” he said.

“They all want the same thing. They want to die, and they want their executioner to be worthy of them. They also want to leave behind as much guilt and fear and depression in others as they can. He aims to mess you up, Hack. That’s why he tried to take me out first. He wanted you to watch it. Then he wanted you to pop him.”

“I’ll try to honor his wishes. You don’t want a glass of wine or a beer?”

“No.”

“It doesn’t bother me.”

“I didn’t say it did. I just don’t want any.” She wiped her mouth with her napkin and looked away irritably, then back at him again, her gaze wandering over the stitches in his scalp and the bandage across the bridge of his nose and the half-moons of blue and yellow bruising under his eyes.

“Would you stop that?” he said.

“I’m going to fix that bastard.”

“Don’t give his kind power, Pam.”

“Is there anything else I’m doing wrong?”

“I’ll think about it.”

She set down her knife and fork and kept staring at him until she forced him to look directly at her. “Lose the cavalier attitude, boss. Collins is going to be with us for the long haul.”

“I hope he is.”

“You still don’t get it. The feds are using Nick Dolan as bait. That means they’re probably using us, too. In the meantime, they’re treating us like beggars at the table.”

“That’s the way it is. Sometimes the feds are-”

“Assholes?”

“Nobody is perfect.”

“You ought to get yourself some Optimist Club literature and start passing it out.”

“Could be.”

She pulled at an earlobe. “I think I’ll have a beer.”

He fought against a yawn.

“In fact, a beer and a shot of tequila with a salted lime on the side.”

“Good,” he said, filling his mouth with a tortilla, his attention fixed on the mariachi band blaring out Pancho Villa’s marching song, “La Cucaracha.”

“You think I should go back to school, maybe get a graduate degree and go to work for the U.S. Marshals’ office?”

“I’d hate to lose you.”

“Go on.”

“You have to do what’s right for yourself.”

She balled her hands on her knees and stared at her plate. Then she exhaled and started eating again, her eyes veiled with a special kind of sadness.

“Pam?” he said.

“I’d better eat up and hit the hay. Tomorrow is another day and another dollar, right?”

HACKBERRY WOKE AT one A.M. in his third-story motel room and sat in the dark, his mind cobwebbed with dreams whose details he couldn’t remember, his skin frigid and dead to the touch. Through a crack in the curtains, he could see headlights streaming across an overpass and a two-engine plane approaching the airport, its windows brightly lit. Somehow the plane and cars were a reassuring sight, testifying to the world’s normality, the superimposition of light upon darkness, and humanity’s ability to overcome even the gravitational pull of the earth.

But how long could any man be his own light bearer or successfully resist the hands that gripped one’s ankles more tightly and pulled downward with greater strength each passing day?

Hackberry was not sure what an alcoholic was. He knew he didn’t drink anymore and he was no longer a whoremonger. He didn’t get into legal trouble or associate himself for personal gain with corrupt politicians; nor did he drape his cynicism and bitterness over his shoulder like a tattered flag. But there was one character defect or psychological impairment that for a lifetime he had not been able to rid himself of: He remembered every detail of everything he had ever done, said, heard, read, or seen, particularly events that involved moral bankruptcy on his part.

Most of the latter occurred during his marriage to his first wife, Verisa. She had been profligate with money, imperious toward those less fortunate than herself, and narcissistic in both her manner and her sex life, to the degree that if he ever thought of her at all, it was in terms of loathing and disgust. His visceral feelings, however, were directed at himself rather than his former wife.

His drunkenness and constant remorse had made him dependent on her, and in order not to hate himself worse for his dependence, he had convinced himself that Verisa was someone other than the person he knew her to be. He gave himself over to self-deception and, in doing so, lost any remnant of self-respect he still possessed. Southerners had a term for the syndrome, but it was one he did not use or even like to think about.

He paid Verisa back by driving across the border and renting the bodies of poor peasant girls who twisted their faces away from the fog of testosterone and beer sweat he pressed down upon them.

Why was he, the vilest and most undeserving of men, spared from the fate he had designed for himself?

He had no answer.

He turned on the night-light and tried to read a magazine. Then he slipped on his trousers and walked down to the soda machine and bought an orange drink and drank it in the room. He opened the curtain so he could see the night sky and the car lights on the elevated highway and the palm trees on the lawn swelling in the wind.

Not far away, 188 men and boys had died inside the walls of the Spanish mission known as the Alamo. At sunrise on the thirteenth day of the siege, thousands of Mexican soldiers had charged the mission and gotten over the walls by stepping on their own dead. The bodies of the Americans were stacked and burned, and no part of them, not an inch of charred bone, was ever located. The sole white survivors, Susanna Dickinson and her eighteenth-month-old child, were refused a five-hundred-dollar payment by the government and forced to live in a San Antonio brothel.

Pam Tibbs had taken the room next to his. He saw the light go on under the door that connected their rooms. She tapped lightly on the door. He got up from his chair and stood by the door, not speaking.

“Hack?” she said.

“I’m fine.”

“Look out your window in the parking lot.”

“At what?”

“Look.”

He went to the window and gazed down at the rows of parked cars and the palm trees on the lawn and the tunnels of smoky light under the surface of the swimming pool. He could see nothing of note in the parking lot. But for just a second he thought he saw a shadow cross the clipped grass between two palms that were scrolled with strings of tiny white lights, then disappear through a piked gate on the far side of the pool.

He went back to the door that connected his and Pam’s rooms and slid the bolt. “Open your side,” he said.

“Just a minute,” she said.

A few seconds later, she pulled open the door, wearing jeans, her shirt hanging outside her belt. Her hairbrush lay on top of her bedspread.

“What did you see?” he asked.

“A guy in a tall hat like the Mad Hatter’s. He was standing by our car. He was looking up at the motel.”

“He do anything to the car?”

“Not that I saw.”

“We’ll check it out tomorrow.”

“You couldn’t sleep?” she said.

“About every third night, a committee holds a meeting in my head.”

She sat down on the stuffed chair in front of him. She was wearing moccasins without socks and no makeup, and the side of her face was printed with the pillow. “I need to tell you something, and I need to do so because it involves something you won’t acknowledge yourself. Collins cuffed you to your bed, but you tore it apart trying to stop him from killing me. You went after him when you had only a pistol and he had a Thompson machine gun. He could have cut you in half, but you went after him anyway.”

“You would have done the same.”

“It doesn’t matter. You did it. A woman never forgets something like that.”

He smiled at her in the darkness and didn’t reply.

“Don’t you like me physically? Do you think I’m not pretty? Is it something like that?”

“The problem isn’t you, Pam. It’s me. I misused women when I was young. They were poor and illiterate and lived in hovels across the river. My father was a university professor. I was an attorney and a war hero and a candidate for Congress. But I used these women to hide my own failure.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“I don’t want to use someone.”

“That’s what it would be, then? ‘Use’?”

“How about we kill this conversation?”

She got up and walked past his chair, beyond his line of vision. He felt her fingers touch his collar and the hair on his neck. “Everybody is made different. Gay people. Young women who want father figures. Men who need their mothers. Fat girls who need a thin man to tell them they’re beautiful. But I like you for what you are and not out of a compulsion. I never put strings on a relationship, either.” She rested her palm on his shoulder blade. “I admire you more than any human being I’ve ever met. Make of that what you want.”

“Good night, Pam,” he said.

“Yeah, good night,” she said. She leaned over him, folding her arms on his chest, her chin on his head, pressing her breasts against him. “Fire me for this if you like. You were willing to give your life to save mine. God love you, Hack. But you sure know how to hurt someone.”