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“Because the FBI thinks he or one of his men survived a plane crash he should have gotten fried in. Because the Wellstones were mixed up in casino interests in Reno. Because a guy who worked for Sal is also working for your husband.”
“My husband is a lizard. You don’t know the things he does. Have you been drinking?”
Clete couldn’t put together the disconnect in her thinking. “I’ll call Troyce Nix for you, Jamie Sue. But I’m done with this doodah. You tell Jimmy Dale he and I are square, all sins forgiven, all debts paid. That means I want miles of track between me and y’all’s problems. We clear on this?”
“You’re a sweet man.”
“Anybody who says that doesn’t know anything about me,” Clete replied.
He closed his cell phone and flipped it over his shoulder onto the bed. If ever reincarnated, he vowed, he would live in a stone hut on top of a mountain in Tibet, thousands of miles away from people whose lives were modeled on the lyrics of country-and-western songs.
THAT SAME NIGHT I lay beside Molly in our cabin north of Albert’s barn. The moon was down, and the sky was black and channeled with stars that looked like the tailings of galaxies. Our windows were open, and inside the wind and rumble of heat lightning, I could hear Albert’s horses nickering in the darkness.
We’re the blue marble in the solar system, wrapped by water and vapor but also by stars. The same ones I could see outside the window shone down on all of us — Clete Purcel and Alicia Rosecrans, wherever they were that night, Sonny Click on a slab, the Wellstone brothers and Jamie Sue and Lyle Hobbs in their compound north of Swan Peak, Quince Whitley awaiting the worms to violate his coffin, the improbable couple made up of a Texas gunbull and a young woman with chains of flowers tattooed on her breasts, the pair of them hunting down a hapless creature like Jimmy Dale Greenwood, whose only desire in life was to play his guitar and follow the rodeo circuit with Jamie Sue and his little boy.
All the players were out there, the children of light and the children of darkness, the blessed and the malformed, those who were made different in the womb and those who cursed the day they were born and those to whom every daybreak was filled with expectation. The stars enveloped the entirety of the planet, blanketing a desert where people killed one another in the name of God, while oil fires burned on the horizon and other people sloshed gasoline into their SUVs and believed in their innocence that the earth and its resources were inexhaustible.
What a grand deception and folly it was, I thought, and could not rid my mind of the bitterness in my own words.
I sat on the side of the mattress, my hands cupped on my knees, a chill shuddering through my body, as though my old friend the malarial mosquito had taken on new life inside my blood. I felt Molly’s hand touch my back.
“You have a bad dream?” she said.
“No,” I replied.
“You blame yourself for Sonny Click’s death?”
“No, he was an evil man, and I’m glad he’s dead. But I think something very bad is about to happen. It’s a feeling I can never explain. My nerves are wired, my skin crawls, my stomach starts churning. My spit tastes like battery acid. It’s like the feeling you have when you hear the popping of small-arms fire and you know something a whole lot worse is coming down the pike.”
She sat beside me and took my hand in hers. In the starlight I could see the freckles powdered on her shoulders. Her skin was still warm from sleep. “It’s Clete, isn’t it?” she said.
“He’s going to get himself killed. He won’t listen to me about anything. I wish I hadn’t brought him up here. This whole place is full of ghosts.”
“You’re talking about Sally Dio?”
“Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce came down that ridge right behind us and were wiped out on the Big Hole. The Blackfeet Indians got massacred on the Marias River the same way. The army burned their tents and blankets and left the wounded and the old people and the children to freeze to death. That’s the history that seldom gets written.”
She placed her hand on my forehead, then looked into my eyes. “I think you have a fever.”
“So what? That doesn’t change what I said.”
“Dave, let go of it.”
“Let go of what?”
“Everything. You can’t change the world.”
“Why did you work in El Salvador and Guatemala?” I said.
“So the world wouldn’t change me. There’s a big difference.”
“Your friends were killed down there, and few people cared. There’s no way to put a good hat on it, Molly. You ever see the media interview a GI who comes back on the spike?”
“That’s just the way it is. You give unto Caesar and hope he chokes on it. Like Clete says, good guys forever, and fuck the rest of it.”
“You don’t need to use language like that to make your point.”
“Under it all, you’re a priest, Dave. But that’s all right. I love you just the same.”
