The man who sat down next to Pete on the step was wearing an immaculate white T-shirt and freshly pressed strap overalls. He smelled of soap and aftershave lotion, and his dark hair was boxed on the back of his neck. His thick half-moon eyebrows were neatly clipped, the cleft in his chin shiny from a fresh shave. There was a bald spot in the center of his head. When he stared southward at the desert, his mouth was a gray slit without expression or character, his eyes dulled over. He pulled a cigarette out of his pack with his lips, then shook another one loose and offered it to Pete.
“Thanks, I never took it up,” Pete said.
“Good choice,” the man said. He lit his cigarette and blew the smoke from the side of his mouth deferentially. “I’m new at this meet. How is it?”
“Don’t know. This is my first time here, too.”
“You got some sobriety in?”
“A few days, that’s about it. I’ve got a twenty-four-hour chip.”
“Twenty-four hours can be a bitch.”
“You work here’bouts?” Pete asked.
“I was hauling pipe between Presidio and Fort Stockton, up to last month, anyway. I got a service-connected disability, but my boss was a pretty hard-nosed character. According to him, time in the Sandbox was for jerks.”
“You were in Iraq?”
“Two tours.”
“My tank got blown up in Baghdad,” Pete said.
The man’s eyes drifted to the long welted scar that ran like a pink raindrop down the side of Pete’s face. “You start drinking when you came home?”
Pete studied the deepening color in the sky, the hills that seemed humped against a fire burning just beyond the earth’s rim. “It runs in my family. I don’t think the war had much to do with it,” he said.
“That’s a stand-up way to look at it.”
“How much sobriety you have?”
“A couple of years, more or less.”
“You have a two-year chip?” Pete said.
“I’m not big on chips. I do the program my own way.”
Pete folded his hands and didn’t reply.
“You got wheels?” the man said.
“I hitched a ride with a guy who smelled like a beer truck. I asked him to come in with me, but he said Jesus’s first miracle was turning water into wine, and his followers weren’t hypocrites about it. I couldn’t quite fit all that together.”
“Want to get some coffee and a piece of pie after the meet? I’m springing,” the man in overalls said.
During the meeting, Pete forgot about his conversation with the man he’d met on the back steps. A woman was talking about going on a dry drunk and experiencing flashbacks that returned her to the inside of a blackout. Her voice, like that of a benighted soul forced to witness light, became threaded with tension as she told the group she might have killed someone with her automobile. The room was quiet when she finished speaking, the people in the pews and folding chairs staring at their feet or into space, their faces wan, each knowing the speaker’s story could have been his or her own.
After the meeting, the man in overalls helped stack chairs and wash out cups and the coffeemaker. He glanced in the direction of the woman who thought she might have committed vehicular homicide. He lowered his voice. “That one is about to talk herself into Huntsville pen,” he said to Pete.
“What you hear and who you see here stays here. That’s the way it’s supposed to work,” Pete said.
“Anybody who believes that has a lot more trust in people than I do. Let’s get something to eat, and I’ll take you home.”
“You don’t know how far I live.”
“Believe me, I got nothing better to do. My girlfriend boosted my truck and took off with a one-legged Bible salesman,” the man in overalls said. He stared across the row of pews at the woman who had spoken of a dry drunk earlier; his forehead creased with furrows. The woman stood at a window, her attention fixed on the darkness outside, her hands resting on the sill as though they weren’t attached to her arms. “Goes to show you, doesn’t it?” he said.
“Show you what?” Pete said.
“That woman over there, the one confessed to killing somebody who might not exist. She looks like she just figured out she’s created a bigger mess than the one she was already in.”
Pete didn’t answer. Ten minutes later he drove to a restaurant with the man in overalls, who said his name was Bill, and ordered a piece of cake and a glass of iced tea.
“You got a girl?” Bill said.
“I like to think I do,” Pete replied.
“She’s in the program, too?”
“No, she’s normal. I never could figure why she got involved with the likes of me.”
“Where y’all living?”
“A low-rent joint up the road.”
Bill seemed to wait for the next words Pete would speak.
“I’ve been thinking about something,” Pete said. “That woman back yonder at the meet?”
“The wet-brain?”
“I wouldn’t call her that.”
Bill picked up the check and studied it, then looked irritably in the direction of the waitress.
“She was willing to confess to something maybe she didn’t do,” Pete continued. “Or if she did do it, she was willing to confess to it and maybe go to prison. For her, it didn’t make any difference. She just wants to be forgiven for whatever she’s done wrong in her life. That takes guts and humility I don’t reckon I have.”
“That broad can’t add,” Bill said, getting up with the check in hand. “I’ll meet you outside. We need to haul freight. I got to get some shut-eye.”
Pete waited in the parking lot, chewing on a plastic soda straw, looking at the stars, Venus winking above a black mountain in the west. What had Bill said earlier about a two-year sobriety chip? He hadn’t bothered to accept it? That one didn’t quite slide down the pipe. That would be like turning down the Medal of Honor because the ceremony conflicted with an evening of color-matching your socks.
“Ready to roll?” Bill said, exiting the café.
Pete removed the soda straw from his mouth and looked at Bill in the glow of a neon beer sign.
“Problem?” Bill said.
“No, let’s boogie,” Pete said.
“You still haven’t told me where you live.”
“At the red light, turn east and keep going till you run out of pavement.”
“I thought you said you lived up the road, not east,” Bill said, trying to smile.
“I guess I’m not that sharp when it comes to the cardinal points of the compass. Actually, our place is so far back in the sticks, we got to bring the sunshine in on a truck,” Pete replied. “That’s a fact.”
Bill was quiet as they drove eastward through hardpan countryside dotted with mesquite and old tires and scrap metal that sparkled like mica under the moon. He put a mint on his tongue and sucked on it and looked sideways at Pete as the SUV hit chuckholes that jarred the frame. “How much farther?”
“Another five or six miles.”
“What the hell do you do out here?”
“I’m shaving and treating fence posts for a fellow.”
“That’s interesting. I didn’t know there was that much wood around here.”
“It’s what I do.”
“How about your girl?”
“She’s got a little Internet business.”
“Selling what? Lizard turds?”
“She does right well with it.”
Bill drove past another mile marker. Set back between two hills was a lighted house with a gasoline truck parked in the yard and a windmill in back. Horses stood motionlessly in a railed pen where the grass was nubbed down to the dirt.
“Excuse me,” Bill said, reaching across Pete.
“What are you doing?”
“It’s my Beretta. You see that jackrabbit go across the road? Hang on.”
Bill pulled onto the shoulder and got out, staring at a dry wash running from a culvert into a tangle of brush that had leaves like thick green buttons. Out in the moonlight, away from the shadows, were cactuses blooming with yellow and red flowers. A nine-millimeter semiauto hung from Bill’s right hand. “Want to take a shot?” he said.
“What for?”