“You can give Josef your restaurant and your vacation house on the river. Then Arthur Rooney and Hugo won’t be doing swirlies on your head anymore. Or you can take the second deal. This one is more interesting, one I like a lot more. Your wife has all the marks of a Siberian woman, a strong face and big tits and a broad ass. But I got to try her out first. Can you fly her out here?”
The men at the card table did not look up from their game but laughed under their breath. The hot wind blowing across the face of the mountain rustled the palm and bottlebrush trees and scattered bits of leaves on the surface of the pool. The women’s bodies looked as hard and sleek as those of seals.
Nick stood up from the chair. His feet were sweaty and felt like mush inside his socks. “I met some of your whores when I was running an escort service in Houston. They talked about you a lot. They kept using words like ‘rodent’ or ‘ferret.’ But they weren’t just talking about your face. They said your dick looked like a thumbtack. They said that was how come you got into porn. You got secret desires to be a human tampon.”
Sholokoff began laughing again, but much more quietly and not nearly as convincingly. One of his eyes seemed frozen in place, as though a separate and ugly thought were hidden in it.
“And here’s my deal to you, you Cossack cocksucker,” Nick continued. “You come around me or my family, I’m gonna mortgage or sell my restaurant, whichever is quicker, and use every dollar of the money to have your bony worthless ass greased off the planet. In the meantime, you might run a VD test on your skanks and Lysol your pool. I think I saw a couple of them lined up at the free herpes clinic in West Phoenix.”
Nick walked back across the lawn toward the carriage house. He could hear chairs scraping behind him and the voice of Josef Sholokoff starting to rise, like that of a man tangled inside his own irritability and his unwillingness to concede its origins.
Be there for me, Mohammed, Nick thought.
Mohammed was having his own troubles. He had moved the cab from near the carriage house to a spot by the corner of the building-probably, Nick suspected, to avoid seeing women dressed only in bikini bathing suits. But two of Sholokoff’s men had come out the front door and were blocking the driveway. Nick headed straight down the drive toward the electronic gates. Behind him, he heard Mohammed stepping on the gas, then the sound of tires whining across a slick surface.
Nick looked over his shoulder and saw Sholokoff’s cardplayers coming around the side of the house. Nick broke into a jog, then a run.
The cab was fishtailing across the lawn, blowing fountains of black soil and water and divots of grass from under the fenders, exploding a birdbath across the grille, destroying a flower bed in order to get on the driveway again. Mohammed swerved past Nick and hit the brakes. “Better get in, sir. I think we’re in deep excrement,” he said.
Nick piled into the backseat, and Mohammed floored the accelerator. The front end of the cab crashed into the gates just before they could lock shut, flinging them backward on their hinges, breaking both of the cab’s headlights. The cab careened into the street, one hubcap bouncing over the opposite curb, rolling like a silver wheel down the mountainside.
Nick sat back in the seat, his lungs screaming for air, his heart swollen the size of a bass drum, sweat leaking out of his eyebrows. “Hey, Mohammed, we did it!” he shouted.
“Did what, sir?”
“I’m not sure!”
“Why are you shouting, sir?”
“I’m not sure about that, either! Can I buy you a drink?”
“I don’t drink alcohol, sir.”
“Can I buy you a late dinner?”
“My ears are hurting, sir.”
“Sorry!” Nick shouted.
“My family is waiting supper for me, sir. I have a wife and four children at home. I have a very nice family.”
“Can I take all of you to a late dinner?”
“That’s very good of you, sir. My family and I would love that,” Mohammed said, pressing his palm to one ear, starting to shout himself. “I could hear you talking to those men. These are very dangerous men. But you spoke up to them like a hero. You are a very nice and brave man. Hang on, sir.”
24
THE PREVIOUS DAY Hackberry Holland had given over the back bedroom and the half-bath of his house to Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores. In the first silvery glow on the horizon the next morning, he could not account to himself for his actions. He owed Flores and Gaddis nothing on a personal basis. He was incurring legal and political risk, and at the least, he was ensuring the permanent enmity of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI. Age was supposed to bring detachment from all the self-evaluative processes that kept people locked inside their heads. As with most of the other aphorisms associated with getting old, he thought this one a lie.
He showered and shaved and dressed and went out to the horse lot to clean off the top of the tank for his foxtrotters and to fill it with fresh water. On the lip of the tank, he had constructed a safety “ladder” out of chicken wire for field mice and squirrels who, during drought or severe heat spells, would otherwise climb up the water pipe onto the tank’s edge in order to drink and fall in and drown. The chicken wire was molded over the aluminum rim, extending into the water, so small animals could climb back out. While Hackberry skimmed bird feathers and bits of hay off the tank’s surface, his two foxtrotters kept nuzzling him, breathing warmly on his neck, nipping at his shirt when he paid them no mind.
“You guys want a slap?” he said.
No reaction.
“Why’d we bring these kids to our house, fellows?”
Still no response.
He went inside the barn and used a push broom to begin cleaning the concrete pad that ran the length of the stalls. The dust from the dried hay and manure floated in the light. Through the barn doors, he could see the wide sweep of the land and hills that were rounded like a woman’s breasts, and the mountains to the south, across the Rio Grande, where John Pershing’s buffalo soldiers had pursued Pancho Villa’s troops fruitlessly in 1916. Then he realized there was a difference in the morning. Dew was shining on the windmill and the fences; there was a softness in the sunrise that had not been there yesterday. The air was actually cool, blessed with a breeze out of the north, as though the summer were letting go, finally surrendering to its own seasonal end and the advent of fall. Why couldn’t he resign himself to the nature of things and stop contending with mortality? What was the passage from Ecclesiastes? “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever”?
Eleven thousand years ago people who may or may not have been Indians lived in these hills and wended their way along the same riverbeds and canyons and left behind arrowheads that looked like Folsom points. Nomadic hunters followed the buffalo here, and primitive farmers grew corn and beans in the alluvial fan of the Rio Grande, and conquistadores carrying the cross and the sword and the cannon that could fire iron balls into Indian villages had left their wagon wheels and armor and bones under cactuses whose bloodred flowers were not coincidental.
Right here he had found the backdrop for the whole human comedy. And what was the lesson in any of it? Hackberry’s father the history professor had always maintained the key to understanding our culture lay in the names of Shiloh and Antietam. It was only in their aftermath that we discovered how many of our own countrymen-who spoke the same language and practiced the same religion and lived on the same carpet like, green, undulating, limestone-ridged farmland-we would willingly kill in support of causes that were not only indefensible but had little to do with our lives.