“I bother you?”

“Yeah.”

“You care to tell me why?”

“’Cause I never saw you scared before. Has ole Jack Collins got you in his sights? ’Cause if you ask me, somebody has got you plumb scared to death.”

25

WHEN HACKBERRY GOT back home from the grocery store in town, the sun had melted into a brassy pool somewhere behind the hills far to the west of his property. The blades on his windmill were unchained and ginning rapidly in the evening breeze, and inside the shadows on his south pasture, he could see well water gushing from a pipe into the horse tank. Once again he thought he smelled an odor of chrysanthemums or leakage from a gas well on the wind, or perhaps it was lichen or toadstools, the kind that grew carpetlike inside perennial shade, often on graves.

For many years Saturday nights had not boded well for him. After sunset he became acutely aware of his wife’s absence, the lack of sound and light she had always created in the kitchen while she prepared a meal they would eat on the backyard picnic table. Their pleasures had always been simple ones: time with their children; the movies they saw every Saturday night in town, no matter what was playing, at a theater where Lash La Rue had once performed onstage with his coach whip; attending Mass at a rural church where the homily was always in Spanish; weeding their flower beds together and, in the spring, planting veg etables from seed packets, staking the empty packets, crisp and stiff, at the end of each seeded row.

When he thought too long on any of these things, he was filled with such an unrelieved sense of loss that he would call out in the silence, sharply and without shame, lest he commit an act that was more than foolish. Or he would telephone his son the boat skipper in Key West or the other twin, the oncologist, in Phoenix, and pretend he was checking up on them. Did they need help buying a new home? What about starting up a college fund for the grandchildren? Were the kingfish running? Would the grandkids like to go look for the Lost Dutchman’s mine in the Superstitions?

They were good sons and invited him to their homes and visited him whenever they could, but Saturday night alone was still Saturday night alone, and the silence in the house could be louder than echoes in a tomb.

Hackberry hefted the grocery sacks and two boxed hot pizzas from his truck and carried them through the back door of the house into the kitchen.

Pete Flores and Vikki Gaddis were waiting for him at the breakfast table, both of them obviously tense, their mouths and cheeks soft, as though they were rehearsing unspoken words on their tongues. In fact, inside the ambience of scrubbed Formica and plastic-topped and porcelain perfection that was Hackberry’s kitchen, they had the manner of people who had wandered in off the highway and had to explain their presence. If they had been smokers, an ashtray full of cigarette butts would have been smoldering close by; their hands would have been busy lighting fresh cigarettes, snapping lighters shut; they would have blown streams of smoke out the sides of their mouths and feigned indifference to the trouble they had gotten themselves into. Instead, their forearms were pressed flat on the yellow table, and there was a glitter in their eyes that made him think of children who were about to be ordered by a cruel parent to cut their own switch.

Whatever was bothering them, Hackberry did not appreciate being treated as a presumption or an authority figure with whom they had to reconcile their behavior. He set the groceries and the pizza boxes on the table. “What did I miss out on?”

“Somebody was trying to take a shot at us,” Pete said.

“Where?”

“Up yonder from your north pasture. On the other side of a hill. There’s a church house by a stream.”

“You said ‘trying.’ You saw the shooter?”

“We saw the laser sight,” Pete said.

“What were y’all doing at the church?”

“Taking a walk,” Vikki said.

“Y’all just strolled on up the road?”

“That about says it,” Pete replied.

“Even though I said stick close by the house?”

“We were watching some people get baptized. We were sitting under a willow tree. Vikki saw the red dot on my face and on her hand, then I saw it on the ground,” Pete said.

“You’re sure?”

“How do you mistake something like that?” Pete said.

“Why wouldn’t the shooter fire?”

“Maybe he was afraid of hitting one of the black people,” Pete said.

“The bunch we’re dealing with doesn’t have those kinds of reservations,” Hackberry said.

“You think we made this up?” Vikki said. “You think we want to be here?”

Hackberry went to the sink and washed his hands, lathering his skin well up on his arms, rinsing them a long time, drying the water with two squares of thick paper towel, his back turned to his guests so they could not see his expression. When he turned around again, his neutral demeanor was back in place. His gaze dropped to Pete’s pants legs. “You ran across the creek?” he said.

“Yes, sir. Then on inside the church house. You could say we were bagging ass.”

“You think it was Jack Collins?”

“No,” Vikki said. “He’s done with us.”

“How do you know what’s in the head of a lunatic?” Hackberry said.

“Collins let us live, so now he feels he’s stronger than we are. He won’t test himself again,” she said. “He tried to give me money. I spit on his money and I spit on him. He’s not a lunatic. Everything he does is about pride. He won’t risk losing it again.”

“So who was the guy with the laser sight?” Hackberry said.

“It’s got to be Hugo Cistranos,” Pete said.

“I think you’re right,” Hackberry said. He opened the top on one of the boxed pizzas. “You spat on Jack Collins?”

“You think that’s funny?” she said.

“No, I did the same. Maybe he’s getting used to it,” he said.

“Where you going, Sheriff?” Pete said.

“To make a phone call.” Hackberry walked through the hallway toward the small room in back that he used as a home office. He heard footsteps behind him.

“I apologize for my rudeness,” Vikki said. “You’ve been very kind to us. My father was a police officer. I’m aware of the professional risk you’re taking on our behalf.”

Better hang on to this one, Pete, Hackberry thought. He sat behind his desk and called Maydeen at the department and told her to put a cruiser on his house. Then he left messages at both of the phone numbers he had for Ethan Riser. Through the side window, he had a fine view of his south pasture. His quarter horses and the windmill and poplar trees were silhouetted against the purple coloring in the west like dimly backlit components in an ink wash. But the fading of the light, the gray aura that seemed to rise from the grass, gave him a sense of terminus that was like a knife blade in his chest. If the two young people had not been staying with him, he would have driven to town and visited his wife’s grave, regardless of the hour.

In some ways, Vikki Gaddis and Pam Tibbs reminded him of Rie. Rie’s detractors had called her a Communist and jailed her and her friends and turned a blind eye to the acts of violence done to them inside and outside of jail, but never once did she allow herself to be afraid.

Hackberry turned off his desk lamp and looked through the window into the darkness that seemed to be spreading across the land. Was it a suggestion of the Great Shade that we all feared? he wondered. Or a visual harbinger of what some called end-times, that morbid apocalyptical obsession of fanatics who seemed to delight in the possibility of the world’s destruction?

But the greater question, the one that sank his heart, was whether or not he would ever see his wife again, on the other side, reaching through the light to take his hand and ease him across.