I didn’t go back to the station. I didn’t go home either.
Without a plan or destination in mind, I twisted the wheel and hit the truck’s gas pedal. It responded with a surge of speed that shot me out of the gravel lot and onto asphalt headed out of town. I passed the entrance to the gun club and kept going until I was well into Big Bend National Park.
Main roads were not what I needed. The first unpaved cross road I came to, I took. It reminded me of the dirt track I had traveled that night I escaped my grave. That was a thought I tried hard not to linger on.
The trail took me into a spit of desert that drooped as if melted into a ravine that spread into a tiny valley. In the sheltered walls, water collected when it did rain. Mesquite and junipers grew in clumps. Along the path of drainage was a line of pecan trees.
When the road petered out over the slope, I stopped and let the truck rest. Metal ticked under the settling dust. An idea was already forming in my head that could tie some questions together. But thoughts as hard and black as mine were didn’t give much peace. I was feeling worse, not better. Everything was a nagging grievance: my outlook and attitude, the pain in my spine, and the taste in my mouth. The day was ugly and bad. It needed an ending that didn’t suck quite so hard.
With a last glance, I left the little valley behind me. At a roadside joint that was both restaurant and gas station, I picked up a heaping box of fried chicken. To that I added a tub of black-eyed peas, mashed potatoes with a steaming quart of gravy, cornbread, and a six of Victoria. It wasn’t until I was about to leave that I noticed a galvanized trough full of ice and Big Stripe watermelons. How could I resist? Good food, home food, was one of those things that could raise any spirit.
On the way back to the Desert Drop Inn, I called Officer Sunny. I asked her to make a general radio call putting everyone on notice that the Border Crossing bar was off limits to all officers.
She told me, with remarkable patience, that we didn’t use the radio for such things. Then she said, “I guess you’re learning a thing or two.”
“Yeah, a thing or two,” I answered. “Put it out anyway. And type it up to hang on the bulletin board too.”
“A staff meeting might be a good idea,” she said. I appreciated that she didn’t make me feel like an idiot about it.
“What do you think, once a week?” I asked.
“Monthly has always been enough.”
“I buy that. Thank you, Officer Johnson.”
“Thank you, Chief.”
I hung up feeling a tiny bit better about my job.
The day was slipping into amber when I got to the motel. Another magic hour in south Texas. Who would have ever thought barren could look as beautiful as it did? I laid out my feast on a couple of the pool’s umbrella tables.
While I worked, a car pulled off the road and into the lot to park beside my truck. Hector got out.
Hector stood on the other side. “I got your message about vacation. What’s that about?”
“I’d like you to do something for me.”
Hector leaned over to get a look. “Having a party?”
“You want some chicken?” I asked him.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Paris’s body is at the funeral home.”
Hector stiffened his back and set his gaze on my eyes through the galvanized wire diamonds of the fence.
“I want you to go.”
He dropped his eyes to the ground and started to say something.
Before he could speak, I added, “I want—need you to take care of it for me. I can’t go. The funeral director is expecting you. Paris needs a suit. He needs you to be there.”
“I don’t know,” he said, still evading my gaze.
“Why?”
“I don’t know how he felt.”
“You mean—”
“About me. We didn’t talk about feelings. Maybe…maybe I was projecting my hopes more than reading his.”
“I don’t know what to tell you about that. I can say don’t worry about doing it for him. Or me. Do it for you—for how you feel.”
“Maybe.” He looked up to meet my eyes.
“Tell me something.”
Hector nodded over at the table. “Give me a beer.”
I fetched two bottles and opened them both, tossing the caps away.
“How you met Paris.”
“About two years ago. He said he was in Lansdale on Ranger business checking on something.”
“Did he say what?”
“No. But it had something to do with the other one.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was another Ranger. Old school—you know the kind. He was here a lot around then. Kept meeting with Chief Wilcox.”
“Why do you say Paris was here about him?”
“Timing mostly. The old Ranger would show up. Paris would be here soon after. That and the fact that Paris wouldn’t talk about it. Not at all. But you could tell how bothered he was about it.”
“Wilcox was the old chief, right? Everything started with him.”
Hector shrugged and took a drink of his beer. “We found him shot in the head with his car still idling down by the river. Whatever he started, it finished the heck out of him.”
“Tell me about the replacement chief.”
“What’s to tell? He was here a month, and he turned up dead.”
“By the river again?”
Hector shook his head and used his bottle to point off into the coloring west. “Out in Big Bend. But otherwise the same. Bullet. Head. Parked vehicle.”
“You know about the money?”
“What money?”
“Grants. Homeland security, border protection, economic development—anything like that.”
Hector upended his beer and swallowed the last of it. Then he tossed the empty at a trashcan like shooting a free throw. He made the point. “Over my pay grade,” he said. “I’m going. I need to see him.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” I dug into my pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. “Here. This is for a suit. Anything else that comes up.”
“Are you sure—”
“I am.”
He shoved the money in his pocket without looking.
I thought he was going to say something else. He didn’t. Hector went to his car and left. I remained alone by the pool for a while with too much food and too little beer.
After a bit, a family, a man, his wife, and their little boy came from one of the rooms to the pool. Nothing like a four-year-old determined to have fun to pull the chill out of one’s thoughts. I sliced up the watermelon, and they helped me polish it off. By then the evening had become night.
The family left me. I stayed by the pool watching stars and then turned out, drifting off to sleep.
I woke in the metal chair with a crick in my neck. On the table beside me was a burning candle within a glass cylinder. On it was painted the image of La Virgincita. Sitting beside it was the last beer.
After I’d twisted off the bottle top, I took a quick swallow and continued what seemed to be the natural next step: stripping. There was no thought behind it, like the moment was a continuation of a lost dream, a dream in which being naked in a lonely, dark world was the most normal thing possible. Once bare I dropped into the water.
Just like the beer, still in my hand, the water was blood warm. Sitting in the chlorinated bath reminded me of being back in my grave. I would have climbed right back out, but Lenore stood at the gate watching me. She held a sixer of cans cold enough to be misting.
“This is my favorite time of the day,” she said, kicking off her sandals.
“Night?”
“Hot night.” She pulled a can from the rings and opened it. Lenore tossed her hair and put the cold can against her skin, just below her throat. She kept it there, riding her breaths, as she unbuttoned the shirt with her free hand.
“The heat of the day is not yet spent on the stars,” she said. “Night, desert night, is hot early, cold later. Life and death. There is no fighting it. But we can love the heat while it lasts.”
When she shrugged the garment off, her skin came alive. It was as if she had been painted with magic pigments that showed only under starlight and ice. With the can still pressed to the hard bone of her chest, she made sure my eyes were watching. Then she trailed the dripping can lower, between her breasts, and began rolling it side to side. To her left, it watered the flower tattooed on her skin. To the right, it rode over and then rested on her nipple.
“You want a taste.” It wasn’t a question. Nor was it a statement. It was almost a command. With her left hand, she cupped her right breast. With her right hand, she tilted the can’s mouth over her thick, puckered nipple. She bathed it in frigid beer.
I was ready to climb from the pool to taste it all, the froth of beer, her skin, her mouth. Lenore beat me to the moment.
She came to the edge of the pool and knelt. She dropped the can as she reclined on the rough concrete, extending one arm over her head and offering her breast with the other. When my mouth found her skin, I think we were both somehow swallowed.
I tossed an arm over her bare waist and pressed my face to her. I suckled like I was starving and she was Rose of Sharon. My teeth raked, and my tongue caressed, urging the warmth of her body to melt into me.
Lenore put her arms around my head and pulled. She was forcing herself into my mouth like she could disappear if only I found the right way to swallow her. We were so tightly bonded that for a moment we were one creature, the snake eating its own tail.
Her chest shook, and sounds, indistinct but meaningful, were communicated through our bones.
Sucking her nipple, I worked it into my teeth and bit.
Lenore pulled her embrace tighter and that time moaned at the contact. Then, like a distant echo of the sound, she whispered, “Yes.”
She rolled to me, and I pulled. Wrapped up with me, she tumbled over and carried us both into the depths of the shining water.
We broke apart. The distance was an instant of clarity. And for some reason I could see her better underwater and lit by pool lights than I could when she stood before me under stars and neon. In the water the bats inked onto her right arm appeared to flitter and fly. Her black hair was like a living thing that both reached and ran from me. The jeans she still wore were a blue skin that covered her kicking legs. When she twisted away, I saw the colors and art of her back. Between her shoulder blades was a crucifix bearing a bleeding Christ. It was all in shades of gray but the blood. Where it poured grew flowers and skeletons. Low on her hips was the band of grinning skulls I had seen before. On her ribs, curling from front to back under her left breast, was a series of lines, words, like a verse tattooed so it would always be singing to her.
I was torn between reaching for her again and reaching for breath. She wasn’t. Lenore snuggled her back against my chest and wrapped my arms up, holding my hands to her breasts. I could have drowned happy. I almost did.
Thrusting my hips to her backside, I let her feel my arousal. The denim I pressed against flexed. She ground back at my erection.
That was when something outside the water flashed. It was a comet of light, flaring, streaking, and then dying in the space of inches and instants.
Lenore released me and kicked. I followed upward, gasping in the air for breath. My arms reached for her. But she was already climbing from the pool.
“Lenore?” I called. It was hope without urgency because I could already feel her fading from me, pulled into another orbit.
The air around where the light had flashed was still swirling with blue smoke. I caught the scent of spice and chocolate. Someone had lit a cigar, one characteristic of tobacco grown in the San Andrés Valley.
Twisting my body around, I placed both hands on the deck and pushed myself up into the cold air. I scrambled for my pants but chose to hold them up before me rather than take the time to put them on. I was more concerned about the pistol clipped to the belt than my modesty.
When I turned back, I was alone. Lenore was nowhere to be seen. I think I saw the door to the office moving the last inch to close. I couldn’t be sure. There was no point in trying to follow. If she was alone, she didn’t want me there. If she wasn’t…
Screw the pants, I decided. I looked around for the beer she had brought. It was gone. I sat on the concrete deck and pulled on my boots. Shod but bare assed, I sat under stars as the night cooled and my mind stilled. Thoughts chased me from dark corner to even darker corners. Inside I was all hollows and blackness. That grave I had escaped had somehow dug itself within me. I could feel it there, a shadowed emptiness demanding that I fill it.
The beer Lenore had poured on her breast and dropped was close enough to reach if I stretched. I did. There wasn’t much left in the can, but it was still cold.