But how long could any man be his own light bearer or successfully resist the hands that gripped one’s ankles more tightly and pulled downward with greater strength each passing day?

Hackberry was not sure what an alcoholic was. He knew he didn’t drink anymore and he was no longer a whoremonger. He didn’t get into legal trouble or associate himself for personal gain with corrupt politicians; nor did he drape his cynicism and bitterness over his shoulder like a tattered flag. But there was one character defect or psychological impairment that for a lifetime he had not been able to rid himself of: He remembered every detail of everything he had ever done, said, heard, read, or seen, particularly events that involved moral bankruptcy on his part.

Most of the latter occurred during his marriage to his first wife, Verisa. She had been profligate with money, imperious toward those less fortunate than herself, and narcissistic in both her manner and her sex life, to the degree that if he ever thought of her at all, it was in terms of loathing and disgust. His visceral feelings, however, were directed at himself rather than his former wife.

His drunkenness and constant remorse had made him dependent on her, and in order not to hate himself worse for his dependence, he had convinced himself that Verisa was someone other than the person he knew her to be. He gave himself over to self-deception and, in doing so, lost any remnant of self-respect he still possessed. Southerners had a term for the syndrome, but it was one he did not use or even like to think about.

He paid Verisa back by driving across the border and renting the bodies of poor peasant girls who twisted their faces away from the fog of testosterone and beer sweat he pressed down upon them.

Why was he, the vilest and most undeserving of men, spared from the fate he had designed for himself?

He had no answer.

He turned on the night-light and tried to read a magazine. Then he slipped on his trousers and walked down to the soda machine and bought an orange drink and drank it in the room. He opened the curtain so he could see the night sky and the car lights on the elevated highway and the palm trees on the lawn swelling in the wind.

Not far away, 188 men and boys had died inside the walls of the Spanish mission known as the Alamo. At sunrise on the thirteenth day of the siege, thousands of Mexican soldiers had charged the mission and gotten over the walls by stepping on their own dead. The bodies of the Americans were stacked and burned, and no part of them, not an inch of charred bone, was ever located. The sole white survivors, Susanna Dickinson and her eighteenth-month-old child, were refused a five-hundred-dollar payment by the government and forced to live in a San Antonio brothel.

Pam Tibbs had taken the room next to his. He saw the light go on under the door that connected their rooms. She tapped lightly on the door. He got up from his chair and stood by the door, not speaking.

“Hack?” she said.

“I’m fine.”

“Look out your window in the parking lot.”

“At what?”

“Look.”

He went to the window and gazed down at the rows of parked cars and the palm trees on the lawn and the tunnels of smoky light under the surface of the swimming pool. He could see nothing of note in the parking lot. But for just a second he thought he saw a shadow cross the clipped grass between two palms that were scrolled with strings of tiny white lights, then disappear through a piked gate on the far side of the pool.

He went back to the door that connected his and Pam’s rooms and slid the bolt. “Open your side,” he said.

“Just a minute,” she said.

A few seconds later, she pulled open the door, wearing jeans, her shirt hanging outside her belt. Her hairbrush lay on top of her bedspread.

“What did you see?” he asked.

“A guy in a tall hat like the Mad Hatter’s. He was standing by our car. He was looking up at the motel.”

“He do anything to the car?”

“Not that I saw.”

“We’ll check it out tomorrow.”

“You couldn’t sleep?” she said.

“About every third night, a committee holds a meeting in my head.”

She sat down on the stuffed chair in front of him. She was wearing moccasins without socks and no makeup, and the side of her face was printed with the pillow. “I need to tell you something, and I need to do so because it involves something you won’t acknowledge yourself. Collins cuffed you to your bed, but you tore it apart trying to stop him from killing me. You went after him when you had only a pistol and he had a Thompson machine gun. He could have cut you in half, but you went after him anyway.”

“You would have done the same.”

“It doesn’t matter. You did it. A woman never forgets something like that.”

He smiled at her in the darkness and didn’t reply.

“Don’t you like me physically? Do you think I’m not pretty? Is it something like that?”

“The problem isn’t you, Pam. It’s me. I misused women when I was young. They were poor and illiterate and lived in hovels across the river. My father was a university professor. I was an attorney and a war hero and a candidate for Congress. But I used these women to hide my own failure.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“I don’t want to use someone.”

“That’s what it would be, then? ‘Use’?”

“How about we kill this conversation?”

She got up and walked past his chair, beyond his line of vision. He felt her fingers touch his collar and the hair on his neck. “Everybody is made different. Gay people. Young women who want father figures. Men who need their mothers. Fat girls who need a thin man to tell them they’re beautiful. But I like you for what you are and not out of a compulsion. I never put strings on a relationship, either.” She rested her palm on his shoulder blade. “I admire you more than any human being I’ve ever met. Make of that what you want.”

“Good night, Pam,” he said.

“Yeah, good night,” she said. She leaned over him, folding her arms on his chest, her chin on his head, pressing her breasts against him. “Fire me for this if you like. You were willing to give your life to save mine. God love you, Hack. But you sure know how to hurt someone.”

21

BOBBY LEE HAD driven through the darkness and into the morning with the sunrise at his back, the flood of warm air and light spreading before him across the plains, lifting mesas and piles of rock out of the shadows that had pooled on the hardpan, none of it offering any balm to his soul.

He had put his money on Preacher because Preacher was smart and Artie Rooney wasn’t. He was double-crossing Hugo because Hugo was a viper who’d park one behind your ear the first time the wind vane swung in the opposite direction. Where did that leave him? He had teamed up with a guy who was smart and had large amounts of money in offshore accounts and had probably read more books than most college professors. But Preacher was not necessarily smart in the way a survivor was smart. In fact, Bobby Lee was not sure Preacher planned to be a survivor. Bobby Lee wasn’t sure he liked the prospect of becoming the copilot of a guy who had kamikaze ambitions.

He drove across a cattle guard onto Preacher’s property and stared disbelievingly at the stucco house that the bikers had destroyed and Preacher had paid a dozer operator to blade into a two-story pile of scorched debris. Preacher was now living in a polyethylene tent at the foot of the mountain behind the concrete slab the dozer had scraped clean. His woodstove sat outside it, and next to it was a vintage icebox with an oak door and brass hinges and handle and a drawer underneath that could be filled with either crushed or chopped-up block ice. Behind the tent, against the mountain, was a portable blue chemical toilet.