At the end of the day, Uncle Sidney had told Hackberry to dump the cross in a creek bed. But Hackberry had his own problems. He had been ostracized by his peers for dating a Mexican girl he picked tomatoes with in the fields. He asked his uncle if he could keep the cross on the truck for a few more days. That Saturday night he took his Mexican girlfriend to the same drive-in theater where he had already lost a bloody fistfight after the one occasion when he had tried to pretend the color line for Mexicans was any different than it was for black people.
As the twilight had gone out of the sky and the theater patrons had filtered to the concession stand in advance of the previews, Hackberry’s high school friends had assembled around the pickup, leaning against its surfaces, drinking canned beer, touching the boomer chain on the cross, touching the blackened shell-like wood of the cross itself, talking louder and louder, their numbers swelling as an excoriated symbol of rejection became a source of ennoblement to all those allowed to stand in its presence. That moment and its implications would stay with Hackberry the rest of his life.
Perhaps only fifteen minutes had passed before he opened his eyes and found himself looking squarely into Danny Boy Lorca’s face.
“Why were you waving your arms in the middle of the street?” Hackberry said.
“’Cause all my visions don’t mean anything. ’Cause everything around us is kindling waiting to burn. A drunk man can flip a match into the weeds on the roadside and set the world on fire. Them kind of thoughts always make me go out there flapping my arms in the wind.”
Danny Boy didn’t say where “there” was, and Hackberry didn’t ask. Instead, he said, “But you did your job. It’s on us if we don’t listen to guys like you.”
“Then how come I got this gift? Just to be a wino in a white man’s jail?”
“Think of it this way. Would you rather be sleeping overnight in my jailhouse or be one of those people who have no ears to hear?”
Danny Boy sat up, his thick hair like a helmet on his head, the bleariness in his eyes unrelieved. He looked at the ceiling and out into the corridor and at the clouds of yellow dust moving across the skylight. Then his head turned as he focused on Hackberry’s face. His eyes seemed to possess the frosted blue sightlessness of a man with severe cataracts. “You’re gonna find the man you been looking for.”
“A guy named Preacher?”
“No, it’s a Chinaman, or something like a Chinaman. The guy you always wanted to kill and wouldn’t admit it.”
“WE’VE GOT THE location of the phone number,” Pam said from the top of the steel stairs. “It’s a game farm up by the Glass Mountains.” Her gaze wandered over Hackberry’s face. “Have you been asleep?”
“I dozed off a little bit,” he said.
“You want to contact the sheriff in Pecos or Brewster?”
“See who’ll give us a cruiser at the airport.”
“We’re not sure Cistranos is at the game farm.”
“Somebody is there. Let’s find out who they are.”
“There’s something else. Maydeen got a call from a guy who wouldn’t identify himself. He wouldn’t talk to anyone but you. His number was blocked. She told him to hold on while she got a pad and wrote down his remarks. He hung up on her.”
“Who do you think it was?”
“He said you and he had unfinished business. He said you and he were the opposite sides of the same coin. He said you’d know what he meant.”
“Collins?”
“Know anybody else who makes phone calls like that?”
“Get the plane ready,” he said.
An hour later, they lifted off into bad weather, wind currents that shook the single engine’s wings and fuselage and quivered all the needles on the instrument panel. Later, down below, Hackberry could see the sharp crystalline peaks known as the Glass Mountains, the column-like mesas rising red and raw out of volcanic rubble or alluvial flood plain that had gone soft and pliant and undulating, as tan as farmland along the Nile, dotted with green brush, all of it besieged by a windstorm that could sand the paint off a water tower.
Then they were above a great wide fenced area where both domestic and exotic animals roamed among the mesquite and blackjack and cottonwoods, like a replication of a mideastern savannah created by an ecologically minded philanthropist.
“What’s your opinion on game farms?” Pam said.
“They’re great places for corporation executives, fraternity pissants, and people who like to kill things but can’t pull it off without their checkbooks.”
“You shock me every time,” she said.
26
NICK DOLAN HAD stopped thinking of time in terms of calendar units or even twenty-four-hour or twelve-hour periods. Nor did he think in terms of events or old resentments or jealousies or success in business. He no longer indulged in secret fantasies about revenge on his boyhood tormentors, Irish pricks like Artie Rooney in particular. As he watched his bank accounts and stock-and-bond portfolio seep away, and as the IRS focused its bombsights on his past tax returns, Nick remembered his father talking about life in America during the Great Depression, when the Dolinskis first arrived on a boat they had bribed their way onto in Hamburg.
Nick’s father had spoken with nostalgia of the era rather than of the privation and harshness the family experienced during the years they lived on the Lower East Side of New York and, later, by the Industrial Canal in New Orleans. When Nick complained about going to a school where bullies shoved him down on line or stole his lunch money, his father spoke with fondness of both the settlement houses in New York and the public schools in New Orleans, because they had been steam-heated and warm and had offered succor and education and opportu nity at a time when people were dying in Hitler’s concentration camps. Nick had always been envious of his father’s experience and emotions.
Now, as his possessions and his money seemed to be departing piecemeal in a hurricane, Nick had begun to understand that his father’s fond memories were not a gift but an extension of the personal strength that defined his character. Whether in the Bowery or in a blue-collar school by the Iberville Project, Nick’s father must have run up against the same kind of Jew-baiting bullies who had plagued Nick in the Ninth Ward. But his father had not empowered his enemies by carrying their evil into his adult life.
The new measure of time and its passage in Nick’s life had become one of mental photographs rather than calendar dates: his children floating on inner tubes down the Comal River, the sunlight slipping wetly off their tanned bodies; Esther’s bemused and affectionate glances after his return from Phoenix and his verbal victory over Josef Sholokoff (which he did not tell her of and would never tell anyone else of, lest he lose the newly found sense of pride it had given him); the smiles of his employees, particularly the blacks, who worked in his restaurant; and not least, the unopened carton of cigarettes he soaked in kerosene and set afire in his barbecue pit, saying to the clouds and Whoever lived there, Guess who just had his last smoke.
He had even stopped worrying about Hugo Cistranos. Nick had stood up to Josef Sholokoff in front of his goons on his property, with no parachute except a Pakistani cabdriver who shouldn’t have been licensed to drive in a demolition derby. Who were the real gladiators? Nondescript, bumbling people with no power who had stood up while the Hugo Cistranos brigade bag-assed for the bomb shelter.
Nick had another reason to feel secure. That lunatic called Preacher Collins had thrown his mantle of protection over Nick’s family. True, Esther had bashed him with a cook pot, but one great advantage in having a peckerwood crackbrain on your side was the fact that his motivations had nothing to do with rationality. Collins scared the hell out of the bad guys. What more could you ask for?