“Sometimes in hot weather, they get worms. But if you gut and skin them right and hang them from wire overnight, so all the heat drains out, they’re safe to eat. Come on, hop out.”

Pete opened the SUV’s door and stepped down on the gravel, the wind warm on his face, a smell like dried animal dung in his nostrils. The highway was empty in both directions. On the other side of the border, he thought he could see electric lights spread across the bottom of a hill.

“Follow me down here,” Bill said. “You can have the first shot. He’s gonna spook out of the brush in just a minute. Jackrabbits always do. They don’t have the smarts to stay put, like a cottontail does. You never hunted rabbits when you were a kid?”

Pete took his soda straw out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. “Not often. Our farm was so poor the rabbits had to carry their own feed when they hopped across it.”

Bill grinned. “Come on, we’ll flush him out. Afraid of rattlers?”

“Never given them much thought.”

“Think I’m gonna rape you?”

“What?”

“Just a bad joke. But your behavior strikes me as a little bit queer.”

“How are you using the word ‘queer’?”

“That’s what I mean. You’re wrapped too tight, trooper. If you ask me, you need to get your pole polished.”

Bill seemed to lose interest in the conversation. He reached down and picked up a rock. He studied the clump of brush with buttonlike leaves at the bottom of the wash and flung the rock into it hard enough to break a branch and make a clattering sound far down the wash. “See him scoot? Told you he was in there,” he said.

“Yeah, you called it.”

Bill turned and faced Pete. His nine-millimeter was pointed downward, along his thigh, the butterfly safety pushed to the fire position. He formed a pocket of air in one cheek, then the other, like a man rinsing his mouth. “Yes, sir, you’re a mite spooky, Pete. A hard man to read, I’d say. I bet you blew up some hajji ass over there, didn’t you?”

Pete tried to remember giving his name to Bill. Maybe he had, if not at the meet, perhaps at the café. Think, think, think, he told himself. He could feel his scalp tightening. “I’d better be getting on home. I’d like to introduce you to my girlfriend.”

“She’s waiting on you, huh?”

“Yeah, she’s a good one about that.”

“Wish I was you. You bet I do,” Bill said. He looked southward into the darkness, his thoughts hidden. Then he released the magazine on his gun and stuck it in his pocket. He cleared the chamber and inserted the ejected round into the top of the magazine and shoved the magazine back into the frame with the heel of his hand. “Think fast,” he said, throwing the gun to Pete.

“Why’d you do that?”

“See if you were paying attention. Scared you, didn’t I?”

“Pert’ near,” Pete replied. “You’re quite a card, Bill.”

“Not when you come to know me,” Bill said. “No, sir, I wouldn’t say I was a card at all. Just stick my piece back in the glove box, will you?”

Five miles farther down the road, the hills flattened and the moon sat on the horizon like a huge, bruised white balloon. Up ahead, Pete could see a passing lane, then a brightly lit convenience store and gas-pump island. “We’re just about two miles or so from the dirt track that goes to our house,” he said. “I can get off up yonder if you want.”

“In for a penny, in for a pound. I’ll take you all the way.”

“I got to be honest about something, Bill.”

“You kill somebody with your car while you were in a blackout?”

“The reason I don’t have a lot of sobriety is I want to drink.”

“You mean now?”

“Now, yesterday, last week, tomorrow, next month. When I catch the bus, the undertaker will probably have to set a case of Bud on my chest to keep me in the coffin.”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“Like they say, unless you’ve reached your bottom, you’re just jerking on your dork. Pull into the store yonder.”

“Sure that’s what you want to do?”

“Hell, yes, it is. What about you?”

“One or two cold brews wouldn’t hurt. I’m no fanatic. What about your girlfriend?”

“She doesn’t complain. You’ll like her.”

“I bet I will,” Bill said.

He pulled the SUV into the gas island and got out to fill the tank while Pete went inside the convenience store. The air was thick and warm and smelled of burned diesel. Hundreds of moths had clustered on the overhead lights. Pete took two packs of pepperoni sausage from a shelf and two cartons of king-size beers from the cooler. The cans were silver and blue and beaded with moisture and cold inside the cardboard. He set them on the counter and waited while another customer paid for a purchase, clicking his nails on top of one carton, looking around the store as though he had forgotten something. Then he adjusted his belt and made a face and asked the cashier where the men’s room was. The cashier lifted his eyes only long enough to point toward the rear of the store. Pete nodded his thanks and walked between the shelves toward the back exit, out of view from the front window.

Seconds later, he was outside in the dark, running between several eighteen-wheelers parked on a grease-compacted strip of bare earth behind the diesel island. He dropped down into an arroyo and ran deeper into the night, his heart beating, clouds of insects rising into his face, clotting in his mouth and nostrils. The heat lightning flaring in the clouds made him think of the flicker of artillery rounds exploding beyond the horizon, before the reverberations could be felt through the earth.

He crawled through a concrete culvert onto the north side of the two-lane state highway, then got to his feet and began running across a stretch of hill-flanged hardpan traced with serpentine lines of silt and gravel that felt like crustaceans breaking apart under his shoes.

He had created a geographic forty-five-degree angle between his present location and the Fiesta motel, where Vikki waited for him. The distance, by the way the crow flies, was probably around forty-five miles. With luck, if he ran and walked all night, he would be at the motel by sunrise. As he raced across the ground, the lightning threw his shadow ahead of him, like that of a desperate soldier trying to outrun incoming mail.

12

WHEN HACKBERRY HOLLAND was captured by the Chinese south of the Yalu and placed in a boxcar full of marines whose clothes smoked with cold, he tried to convince himself during the long transportation to the POW camp in No Name Valley that he had become part of a great historical epic he would remember one day as one remembers scenes from War and Peace. He would be a chronicler who had witnessed two empires collide on a snowy waste whose name would have the significance of Gallipoli or Austerlitz or Gettysburg. A man could have a worse fate.

But he quickly learned that inside the vortex, you did not see the broad currents of history at work. No grand armies stood in position behind rows of cannons that were given the order to fire in sequence, almost in tribute to their own technological perfection rather than as a means of killing the enemy. Nor did you see the unfolded flags flapping in the wind, the caissons and ambulance wagons being wheeled into position, the brilliant colors of the uniforms and the plumes on the helmets of the officers and the sun shining on the drawn sabers. You saw and remembered only the small piece of ground you had occupied, one that would forever be filled with sounds and images that you could not rinse from your dreams.

You remembered shell casings scattered along the bottom of a trench, field dressings stiff with blood, frozen dirt clods raining down on your steel pot, the chugging sound of a 105 round arching out of its trajectory, coming in short. You remembered the rocking of the boxcar, the unshaved jaws of the men staring back at you out of their hooded parkas; you remembered the face of hunger in a shack where fish heads and a dollop of rice were considered a banquet.