That was what her grandmother had taught her. If Esther Dolan had her way, the man they called Preacher was about to learn a lesson from the southern Siberian plain.

When Preacher opened the tent flap, she caught a glimpse of mesas in the distance, an orange sunrise staining a bank of low-lying rain clouds. He closed the flap behind him and started to fasten the ties to the aluminum tent pole, then became frustrated and flung them from his fingers. He was not carrying his weapon. He sat down on the cot opposite her, his knees splayed, the needle tips of his boots pointed outward like a duck’s feet.

“You’ve been around men who didn’t warrant your respect,” he said. “So your disrespect toward males has become a learned habit that isn’t your fault.”

“I grew up not far from the Garden District in New Orleans. I didn’t associate with criminals, so I didn’t develop attitudes about them one way or another.”

“You married one. And you didn’t grow up by the Garden District. You grew up on Tchoupitoulas, not far from the welfare project.”

“Lillian Hellman’s home on Prytania Street was two blocks from us, if it’s any of your business.”

“You don’t think I know who Lillian Hellman was?”

“I’m sure you do. The public library system gives cards to any bum or loafer who wants one.”

“You know how many women would pay money to be sitting where you are right now?”

“I’m sure there’re many desperate creatures in our midst these days.”

She could see the heat building in his face, the whitening along the rims of his nostrils, the stitched, downturned cast of his mouth. She picked up a small piece of brownie with the ends of her fingers and put it in her mouth. She could feel him watching her hungrily. “You haven’t eaten?” she asked.

“Molo burned the food.”

“I made these for my friend Mrs. Bernstein. I don’t guess I’ll ever have the opportunity to give them to her. Would you like one?”

“What’s in them?”

“Sugar, chocolate, flour, butter, sometimes cocoa powder. You’re afraid I put hashish in them? You think I bake narcotic pastries for my friends?”

“I wouldn’t mind one.”

She held out the box indifferently. He reached inside and lifted out a thick square and raised it to his mouth. Then he paused and studied her face carefully. “You’re a beautiful woman. You ever see the painting of Goya’s mistress? You look like her, just a little older, more mature, without the sign of profligacy on your mouth.”

“Without what on my mouth?”

“The sign of a whore.”

He bit into the brownie and chewed, then swallowed and bit again, his eyes hazy with either a secret lust or a sexual memory that she suspected gave birth to itself every time he pulled the trigger on one of his victims.

29

PAM TIBBS PULLED the cruiser onto the shoulder of the dirt road and stopped between two bluffs that gave onto a breathtaking view of a wide sloping plain and hills and mesas that seemed paradoxically molded by aeons and yet untouched by time. Hackberry got out of the vehicle and focused his binoculars on the base of the hills in the distance, moving the lenses across rockslides and flumes bordered by mesquite trees and huge chunks of stone that had toppled from the ridgeline and looked as hard and jagged as yellow chert. Then his binoculars lit on a large pile of bulldozed house debris, much of it stucco and scorched beams, and four powder-blue polyethylene tents and a chemical outhouse and a woodstove and an elevated metal drum probably containing water. A truck and an SUV were parked amid the tents, their windows dark with shadow, hailstones melting on their metal surfaces.

“What do you see?” Pam asked. She was standing on the driver’s side of the cruiser, her arms draped over the open door.

“Tents and vehicles but no people.”

“Maybe the Mexican construction guys are living there.”

“Could be,” he said, lowering the glasses. But he continued to stare at the sloping plain with his naked eyes, at the bareness of the hills, the frost that coated the rocks where the sun hadn’t touched them. He looked to the east and the growing orange stain in the sky and wondered if the day would warm, if the unseasonal cold would go out of the wind, if the ground would become less hard under his feet. For just a second he thought he heard the sound of a bugle echoing down an arroyo.

“Did you hear that?” he said.

“Hear what?”

“The old man back there said hippies were living in tepees and smoking dope out here. Maybe some of them are musicians.”

“Your hearing must be a lot better than mine. I didn’t hear a thing.”

He got back in the vehicle and shut the door. “Let’s boogie.”

“About last night,” she said.

“What about it?”

“You haven’t said much, that’s all.”

He looked straight ahead at the hills, at the mesquite ruffling in the wind, at the immensity of the countryside, beveled and scalloped and worn smooth by wind and drought and streaked with salt by receding oceans, a place where people who may have even preceded the Indians had hunted animals with sharpened sticks and crushed one another’s skulls over a resource as uncomplicated in its composition as a pool of brown water.

“You bothered by last night?” she said.

“No.”

“You think you took advantage of an employee?”

“No.”

“You just think you’re an old man who shouldn’t be messing with a younger woman?”

“The question of my age isn’t arguable. I am old.”

“You could fool me,” she said.

“Keep your eyes on the road.”

“What you are is a damn Puritan.”

“Fundamentalist religion and killing people run in my family,” he said.

For the first time that morning, she laughed.

But Hackberry could not shake the depression he was in, and the cause had little to do with the events of the previous night at the motel. After returning from Korea, he had rarely discussed his experiences there, except on one occasion when he was required to testify at the court-martial of a turncoat who, for a warmer shack and a few extra fish heads and balls of rice in the progressive compound, had sold his friends down the drain. Even then his statements were legalistic, nonemotional, and not autobiographical in nature. The six weeks he had spent under a sewer grate in the dead of winter were of little interest to anyone in the room. Nor were his courtroom listeners interested, at least at the moment, in a historical event that had occurred on a frozen dawn in the third week of November in the year 1950.

At first light Hackberry had awakened in a frozen ditch to the roar of jet planes splitting the sky above him, as a lone American F-80 chased two Russian-made MiGs back across the Yalu into China. The American pilot made a wide turn and then a victory roll, all the time staying south of the river, obeying the proscription against entering Red Chinese airspace. During the night, from across a snow-filled rice paddy spiked with brown weeds, the sound of bugles floated down from the hills, from different crests and gullies, some of them blown into megaphones for amplification. No one slept as a result.

At dawn there were rumors that two Chinese prisoners had been brought back by a patrol. Then someone said the Korean translator didn’t know pig flop from bean dip about local dialects and that the two prisoners were ignorant rice farmers conscripted by the Communists.

One hour later, a marching barrage began that would forever remain for Hackberry as the one experience that was as close to hell as the earth is capable of producing. It was followed throughout the day by a human-wave frontal assault comprised of division after division of Chinese regulars, pushing civilians ahead of them as human shields, the dead strung for miles across the snow, some of them wearing tennis shoes.