“You guys want anything else?” she asked.

“No, we’re good here,” Bobby Lee said.

“I need some steak sauce,” Liam said.

Bobby Lee smoldered in silence until the waitress brought a bottle of A.1. to the table and went away.

“What are you so heated up about?” Liam asked.

“Take off that hat.”

“What for?”

“It’s stupid. It looks like a woman’s.”

Liam stuffed a complete slice of white bread in his mouth and chewed it with his mouth open.

“We got to have an understanding, Liam. I trusted you when I told you maybe Preacher has got to go off the board. I got to know we’re on the same wavelength here. I can’t have you bitching me out all the time.”

“You don’t like to hear the truth, that’s your problem.”

Outside, the sun was red on the horizon, dust rising off the hills in a brown nimbus. Bobby Lee felt as though someone had stuck a metal key into the base of his neck and wound up his nerve endings as tightly as piano wire. He started to eat, then set down his fork and stared emptily at his plate.

He had played the whole deal wrong. Liam was not to be trusted or confided in; he was a whiner who scapegoated his friends. But if Liam wasn’t a bud, who was? Who was the purist in their midst? Who was the guy who did the work less for the money than for the strange visions that seemed to crawl across the backs of his eyelids?

“Looks like you’re doing some heavy thinking,” Liam said.

“You think I blew it for us at the convenience store, that I should have handled it different, that I should have let the soldier take off on me and not even go inside.”

“I thought you said to drop it.”

“I just want you to put yourself in my place and tell me what you would have done, Liam.”

“When this is over, we’ll both get laid. I got a couple of discount coupons from Screw magazine.” Liam waited, grinning idiotically.

Bobby Lee looked into Liam’s eyes. They were a translucent blue, their moral vacuity creating its own kind of brilliance, the pupils like dead insects trapped under glass. They were the eyes of a man to whom there was no significant reality beyond the tips of his fingers.

“When this is over, I’m going back to college. My sister has a house in Lauderdale. I’m gonna take her kids to Orlando,” Bobby Lee said.

“Everybody says that, but it doesn’t work that way. Can you see yourself selling shoes to old guys in Miami Beach with smelly socks?”

“I’m studying to be an interior decorator.”

But Liam wasn’t listening. His attention had shifted to a man and woman who were sitting at a booth by the entrance to the restaurant.

“Don’t turn around yet, but check out John Wayne over there,” he said. “I’m not kidding. From the side, he looks just like Wayne. He’s even got Calamity Jane with him. She must be his traveling punch. Who said western movies are dead?”

14

THE AIR-CONDITIONING WAS turned up full-blast in the restaurant, fogging the bottoms of the windows. Hackberry and Pam had taken a booth close to the front counter. Family people were eating dinner in the back section, which was separated from the front by a latticework partition decorated along the top with plastic flowers. A church bus pulled up in front, and a throng of preteens came in and piled into the empty booths. Workingmen were drinking beer at the counter and watching a baseball game on a flat-screen television high on the wall. As the sun set on the hills, the interior of the restaurant was lit with a warm red glow that did not subtract from its refrigerated coolness but only added to its atmosphere of goodwill and end-of-the-day familiality.

Hackberry put his hand over his mouth and yawned and stared at the menu, the words on it swimming into a blur.

“How’s your back?” Pam asked.

“Who said anything about my back?”

“Back pain saps a person’s energy. It shows in a person’s face.”

“What shows in my face are too many birthdays.”

“Do you know we covered a hundred square miles of Texas today?”

“We might do twice that tonight.”

“I think they’re in Mexico.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what I would do.”

“Vikki Gaddis might. Pete won’t.”

The waitress returned to the table and took their order and went away. Pam sat stiffly in the booth, her shoulders pushed against the backrest. “Vikki will blow Dodge, but Pete will hang tough? Because that’s what swinging dicks do? Girls aren’t swinging dicks, you’re saying?”

“Pete is one of those unfortunate guys who will never accept the possibility that their country will use them up and then spit them out like yesterday’s bubble gum. Can you stop using that language?”

She scratched at a place between her eyes and looked out the window, her badge glinting on her khaki shirt.

As they waited for their food, Hackberry felt the day catch up to him like a hungry animal released from its leash. He ate three aspirin for the pain in his back and gazed idly at the people in the restaurant. Except for the television set on the wall and the refrigerated air, the scene could have been lifted out of the year 1945. The people were the same, their fundamentalist religious views and abiding sense of patriotism unchanged, their blue-collar egalitarian instincts undefined and vague and sometimes bordering on nativism but immediately recognizable to an outsider as inveterately Jacksonian. It was the America of Whitman and Jack Kerouac, of Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis, an improbable confluence of contradictions that had become Homeric without its participants realizing their importance to the world.

If someone were to ask Hackberry Holland what his childhood had been like, he would answer the question with an image rather than an explanation. He would describe a Saturday-afternoon trip to town to watch a minor-league baseball game with his father the history professor. The courthouse square was bordered by elevated sidewalks inset with tethering rings that bled rust like a ship’s scuppers. A khaki-painted World War I howitzer stood in the shadows of a giant oak on the courthouse lawn. The dime store, a two-story brick building fronted with a wood colonnade, featured a popcorn machine that overflowed onto the concrete like puffed white grain swelling out of a silo. The adjacent residential neighborhood was lined with shade trees and bungalows and nineteenth-century white frame houses whose galleries were sunken in the middle and hung with porch swings, and each afternoon at five P.M. the paperboy whizzed down the sidewalk on a bicycle and smacked the newspaper against each set of steps with the eye of a marksman.

But more important in the memory of that long-ago American moment was the texture of light after a sun shower. It was gold and soft and stained with the contagious deep green of the trees and lawns. The rainbow that seemed to dip out of the sky into the ball diamond somehow confirmed one’s foolish faith that both the season and one’s youth were eternal.

Now Hackberry dipped a taco chip in a bowl of red sauce and put it in his mouth. He picked up his glass of iced tea and drank from it. A bunch of the kids from the church bus brushed by the table on their way to the restroom. Then they were gone, and he found himself looking through the latticework partition at the face of a man who seemed familiar but not to the degree that Hackberry could place him. The man wore a gardener’s hat, the wide brim shadowing his features. The waitress working the back of the restaurant kept moving back and forth behind the latticework, further obstructing Hackberry’s view.

Hackberry pinched the fatigue out of his eyes and straightened his spine.

“You developed back trouble from your time as a POW?” Pam said.