But Pete’s intuitions had been correct. Billy Bob told him his only recourse was to surrender himself to his cousin Hackberry Holland; he even gave Pete Hackberry’s number. He also told Pete the FBI probably had a tap on his phone and that the clock was likely ticking on Pete.
Pete could hear the sorrow and pity in his friend’s voice, and it made his heart sink. In his mind’s eye, he saw the two of them years ago, cane-fishing under a tree on a green river, their cold drinks and bread-and-butter sandwiches lying on a blanket in the shade.
After Pete hung up, sweat was creaking in his ears, and the bodies of insects were thudding against the Plexiglas sides of the booth. He folded back the accordion door hard against the jamb and began walking down the two-lane toward the railroad tracks. Up ahead, he saw a lone compact car stopped at the traffic light, the driver waiting listlessly behind the steering wheel, his features lit by the glow from an AutoZone sign. The traffic light seemed to be stuck on red, but the driver waited patiently for it to change, although there were no other vehicles on the street.
The driver had a long nose and high cheekbones, the hair combed straight back, streaked with gel or grease. His facial structure could have been called skeletal except for the fact that the flesh was lumpy, as though it were covered with bee stings, suggesting carnality and decadence rather than deprivation. His gaze was focused on the traffic signal, like a modern parody of a Byzantine saint experiencing the dark night of the soul.
Pete started across the intersection, in front of the compact’s high beams, just as the traffic signal changed. The driver of the compact had to slam on his brakes. But Pete did not move. He continued to stare into the brilliance of the headlights, red and yellowish-green circles burning into his eye sockets. He spread his arms against the air. “Sorry for being on the planet,” he said.
The driver pulled slowly around him, his window down. “You have a problem of some kind?”
“Yes, sir, I do. See, the light was red when I started across the street. Because it turns from red to green doesn’t mean the driver of a car can run over whatever is in front of him.”
“That’s interesting to know. Now, how about taking your hand off the roof of my car? I don’t particularly enjoy looking into somebody’s armpit.”
“I like your ‘Support the Troops’ ribbons. You must have bought a shitpile of them. What d’you think about bringing back the draft so the rest of y’all can kick some rag-head ass over in the Sandbox?”
“Move away, kid.”
“Yes, sir, I’m very glad to,” Pete said. He began picking up rocks from the asphalt. “Let me he’p you on your way. Is there a late-night pinochle game down at the AMVETS tonight?”
The driver’s eyes roamed over Pete’s face. His expression was one of curiosity rather than fear or apprehension. “Get yourself some help. In the meantime, don’t ever fuck with me again.”
“I thank you for straightening me out, sir. Happy motoring. God bless and Godspeed.”
As the driver pulled away, Pete flung one rock after another at the compact, whanging them off the doors and roof and trunk. Then he picked up a half-brick and chased after the compact and threw the brick as hard as he could, pocking a hole in the rear window. But the driver never accelerated or touched the brake pedal. He simply drove steadily down the road toward the main highway that led out of town, leaving Pete in the middle of the street, wrapped in self-loathing and a level of impotent rage that sat on his brow like a crown of thorns.
AFTER PREACHER GOT back on the four-lane and resumed his journey, he looked in the rearview mirror at his broken window. Lunatic or drunken or drug-induced behavior had never been a source of worry or concern to him. Unhinged people like that kid back there flinging rocks at a stranger’s car were just a reminder that Preacher didn’t have to validate himself, that moral imbeciles had taken over the institution a long time ago. Check out the French General Assembly under Robespierre, he thought. Check out the crowd at a televangelical rally. If they had their way, there would be an electric chair on every street corner in Texas, and half the population would be bars of soap.
He pushed his speed up to sixty-five, staying under the seventy-mile-an-hour limit. The backseat was stacked with the boxed possessions he had salvaged from his destroyed house. His Thompson, for which he had paid eighteen thousand dollars, was concealed between the backseat and the trunk. He would miss his stucco house at the base of the mountain, but eventually, he knew he would return to it. He was sure the cave in the mountainside and the sounds the wind made blowing inside its walls held portent not only for him but for the unwinding scroll of which his story was a part. Was it too big a leap of faith to conclude the whistling of the wind was nothing less than the breathing of Yahweh inside the earth?
Weren’t all our destinies already written on scrolls that we unwound and discovered in incremental fashion? Perhaps the past and the pres ent and the future were already written on the wind, not in transient fashion but whispered to us with unerring accuracy if we would only bother to listen. The three bikers had thought they would kill him in his own house, little knowing of the power that inhabited the environment they had invaded. He wondered what they’d thought when he’d let off on them in the motel room. There had been regret in their eyes, certainly, and desperation and fear, but most of all just regret. If they could have spoken, he was sure they would have renounced everything in their lives in order to live five more seconds so they could make their case and convince either Preacher or whoever governed the universe that they would devote the remainder of their lives to piety and acts of charity if they could just have one more season to run.
Preacher steered around an eighteen-wheeler, the tractor rig’s high beams turning his pocked rear window into a fractured light prism. Had the rock thrower been drunk? The man hadn’t smelled of booze. Obviously, he had been in Iraq or Afghanistan. Maybe the VA was dumping its nutcases on the street. But there was a detail about the kid Preacher couldn’t forget. In his obsession to find Vikki Gaddis, he had thought little about her boyfriend, the kid Hugo and Bobby Lee always referred to as “the soldier boy.” What had Bobby Lee said about him? That the kid had a scar on his face that was as long as an earthworm?
No, it was just coincidence. Yahweh didn’t play jokes.
Or did He?
19
AT TWO A.M. the air-conditioning compressor outside Hackberry’s window gasped once, made a series of clunking sounds like a Coke bottle rolling down a set of stairs, and died. Hackberry opened the windows and the doors, turned on the ceiling fan in his bedroom, and went back to sleep.
A huge bank of thunderclouds had moved out of the south and sealed the sky. The clouds were lit by igneous flashes that rippled across the entirety of the heavens in seconds and died far out over the hills. It was cool in the room under the revolving blades of the fan, and Hackberry dreamed he was in a naval hospital in the Philippines, sedated with morphine, a hospital corpsman no older than he pulling the syringe from his arm. A sun shower was blowing in from the bay, and outside his window, an orchid tree bloomed on the lawn, its lavender petals scattered on the clipped grass. In the distance, where the bay merged with water that was the dark blue of spilled ink, he could see the gray hulking outline of an aircraft carrier, its hard steel edges smudged by the rain.