CHAPTER THREE

 

“They even robbed the table,” Cipriano said. “I can’t fucking believe it.”

Police and a couple of the sheriff’s posse, wearing flak vests, were cluttering the Copper Country’s back hall with Remington 870 shotguns propped on their hips. If the two robbers were stupid enough to return to the scene of the crime, they’d be dead meat.

“Hey!” Loren yelled. “Everybody but the witnesses get out of here!”

Cipriano Dominguez rightly concluded that this command did not include him. He let the officers and bystanders file out, then led Loren down the back hall with its cheap paneling, then through a door marked with a cardboard sign that said EMPLOYEES ONLY in fading red letters.

A wide poker table sat like a bright green mesa beneath a circular imitation-Tiffany hanging lamp. The last hand still lay where the players— mostly graying cowboys, along with a few miners tossing away their last paychecks— had thrown down their cards. The place smelled like a century’s consumption of cigarette smoke, and there were honest-to-God brass spittoons on the floor for those who dipped snuff.

Loren saw a possible diamond flush and turned over the hole card. Two of clubs, no help.

“Okay,” he said. “How much was on the table?”

“A few hundred.”

“More’n that.”

“Five, six hundred, anyway.”

Loren watched while the cowboys argued about that for a while. Taken all together they were the laziest men Loren knew, boozy, shiftless, and rarely employed. The ranches in the neighborhood knew them all too well and had started to supply themselves with wetback Mexican vaqueros who worked a lot harder and spent a lot less time romancing waitresses in places like the Copper Country. The local cowboys lived chiefly off women–– the women, most of them waitresses here at the Copper Country, provided them with the principal part of their gambling money in the form of tips. There should be a bumper sticker, Loren thought: REAL COWBOYS DON’T WORK, THEY LIVE OFF WAITRESSES.

Still, there seemed no lack of waitresses to support these cowboys, real or not. And Loren could never figure out how men who worked so little and drank so much still had those slim hips that looked so good on a dance floor. Loren considered it unjust that he probably got a lot more regular physical activity than these guys and still carried twenty too many pounds.

“Okay,” he said, after the argument rattled around for a while. “I guess it doesn’t much matter. Who saw the perpetrators first?”

“Bill Forsythe,” Cipriano said, before the cowboys could start arguing about it again.

Forsythe was the man who had owned the Copper Country and its illegal, perpetual poker game for the last twelve years, having taken over both from the previous owner.

“Where’s he?” Loren asked.

“In his office.”

Forsythe’s office was a small room walled in the same cheap paneling he’d used on his back hall. The empty safe stood open behind his desk. He was a gangly man, with wavy iron-colored hair. He wore a western shirt with pearl buttons. He normally augmented this with a silver and turquoise squash-blossom necklace and a big matching bracelet on his left wrist, but the stickup men had taken them. He kept rubbing his wrist as if he missed the bracelet.

He’d spent most of the evening playing poker, occasionally leaving the table to check on the bar, make a phone call, or transfer money from the cash registers to the safe. After last call at one-thirty he’d left the game to go to the bar and collect the excess cash receipts. He’d gone down the back hall to his office to put the receipts in the safe till Monday morning. Two men in ski masks were waiting for him. One of them had a sawed-off shotgun.

“Was the other armed?” Loren asked.

“I only had eyes for that sawed-off,” Forsythe said. “I didn’t notice if the other guy was packing when he came in, but he is now.” He cleared his throat. “I had a .38 Chief’s Special in the safe, just in case this kind of thing happened, but when I saw that shotgun I knew I didn’t want to use it.” He seemed mildly embarrassed by the fact he hadn’t turned Clint Eastwood in the clutch.

“Very smart,” Cipriano said.

“Yeah,” Loren said. “If you’d resisted, we would’ve had to scrape you up with a shovel.”

Forsythe’s eyes got bigger. Any trace of embarrassment vanished.

After taking the night’s receipts and the other contents of the safe, the robbers had marched Forsythe to the back room and stolen the poker bank. “Even took the dimes and quarters,” he said.

“Description? Start with the guy with the weapon.”

“He looked like King Kong with that goddamn gun.”

“Sure it wasn’t Mighty Joe Young?”

Forsythe looked blank. People in shock, Loren thought, never understand when you tried to make a joke.

“Forget it,” he said. “Let’s start with his shirt. Just close your eyes and think for a minute. What kind of shirt did he have on?”

After twenty minutes Loren had a good description. Two young Hispanic men, aged eighteen to twenty-five, an inch or two shorter than average, dressed in work boots, blue jeans, dark blue or black zipped nylon jackets. The man with the shotgun had long black hair that stuck out of the bottom of the ski mask. He was the only one who had talked, and he had a light Spanish accent. The other guy had the tails of a red plaid shirt hanging below the waist of his jacket. Loren told Cipriano to get the descriptions out immediately, and use the LAWSAT antenna to get them out to New Mexico and Arizona state police.

“It’s not much to go on, jefe,” Cipriano said. “That description could fit maybe a couple hundred people living in this county.”

“Put it out, anyway. We might get lucky.” Cipriano turned to leave. “Wait a minute,” Loren said. “I just thought. Call Connie Duvauchelle and see if she’s got these two guys celebrating in her parlor.”

“Good idea.”

Cipriano left the room, and Loren turned to Forsythe. “I got one important question,” he said. “Was the door to the poker room open when you went down the hall?”

Forsythe shook his head. “No. They marched me right to the door and told me to go inside.”

“So they knew it was there.”

Forsythe did not seem to comprehend the significance of this. “Anyone you’ve had to fire recently?” Loren asked. “Any bad blood between you and any of your employees?”

“Hell, Loren. Everyone in the county knows that game is back there anymore. It doesn’t have to be someone who worked for me.”

“Answer the question, Bill.”

Forsythe thought for a moment. “Business is good. I fired one guy for stealing three months ago, but it wasn’t him held me up.”

“Why not?”

“Because Robbie Cisneros is almost as tall as you are.”

Loren scratched his jaw. “Yeah, I know him. I arrested him a couple times for drunk and disorderly. How much did he steal?”

“A lot of tip money, I think. He was a bus boy so he could just grab the money from the tables when no one was looking. But I only caught him with about twenty bucks. It seemed easier just to kick his ass out of here.”

“Always prosecute,” Loren said. “Even if it’s for pocket money. Never let them get away with anything. Because for every theft you catch them at, they’ve committed a hundred more.”

“Robbie didn’t hold me up.” Insistently. “He was taller.”

“Have you had a fight with anyone lately? Anyone complain the poker game is rigged?”

“Rigged!” Forsythe was indignant. “We don’t even have a dealer!”

“Yeah, okay. I was just asking.”

“And the players are too damn dumb to cheat one another.” Now that he was safe and his shock wearing off, all Forsythe’s fear and adrenaline was beginning to come out as belligerence. In a minute, Loren figured, he’d start yelling at the police for not protecting him properly. “Nobody’s complained!” Forsythe said. “Nobody! Those good ole boys have been losing all their girlfriends’ tips to me for years, and nobody’s ever said a word about it.”

“Fine. Any of the regulars not around tonight?”

Forsythe gave a few names. Loren knew them all and knew they didn’t fit the description of the robbers.

Cipriano came back and reported that he’d sent the LAWSAT alert and that Connie Duvauchelle had reported no suspects in her vicinity. So much for that.

Loren decided to leave before Forsythe’s growing anger got annoying. He thanked the man and went down the hall to the table. Maybe the ole boys had remembered something.

The ole boys contradicted one another at every turn and it took over an hour to get their stories straight. No details of any significance were added except that they heard a car pull out of the back parking lot just after the robbery.

“Did anyone hear it start?” Loren asked.

A few said yes, a few no. That left the possibility of a third robber sitting in the back with the engine running. Loren grew unhappier by the minute at the implications of all this. He and Cipriano left the poker room and closed the door behind them. The EMPLOYEES ONLY sign came loose at one corner and flopped down at an angle.

“It’s folks from around here, jefe,” Cipriano said. “There’s too much local knowledge for it to be anything else.”

“Yeah.” Loren found himself getting unhappier still.

“Maybe it’s that Cisneros kid, after all. Maybe he was the driver.”

“Could be.”

“I’ll go down to Las Animas and cruise by his folks’ place on the way home. See if his van is there.”

“Okay. Do that.”

“I can talk to his parents tomorrow. But I don’t think they’ll give me nothing. They’re harder cases than he is.”

All the bars were closed. If anyone was getting drunk and belligerent now, Loren figured he didn’t have to be awake for it. He thanked everybody for their cooperation, told Sanchez on the desk to send himself and everyone but the regular shift home, and drove home himself.

The house smelled of popcorn. There was a half-eaten bowl sitting on the coffee table in front of the TV, and Loren ate a couple handfuls quietly, in the dark, before walking into the kitchen for a glass of water. The water cooler was empty and he had to use the stuff from the tap. Wincing at the mineral taste, he finished his water, then took off his shoes and gun belt and padded into the bedroom.

Debra’s breathing pattern changed as he entered the room— without quite waking up, she was reassuring herself of his continued health and well-being— and then her breathing normalized. He undressed and slid into the bed beside her and thought about what had just happened out on the City Line.

Some citizen or citizens of Atocha, it was fairly clear, had used his knowledge of the town to conspire to rob one of the town’s most venerable, if illegal, institutions. Growing resentment bubbled in Loren’s mind. The town— his town— and its way of life were threatened, not just from acts of God like the pit closing and the advent of ATL, but by treachery on the part of its own inhabitants. They were disloyal, Loren thought, betraying the town. Undermining its foundation. Threatening its way of life.

He had to find the assholes, whoever they were. Make an example of them.

He thought about the twenty-first century and what it was bringing. Chevy pickups full of designer drugs and automatic weapons. Imported gunmen holding up bars. People not standing up for their neighbors or institutions or what was right. Incomprehensible and threatening technologies like all the Star Wars weaponry erupting through the sky over the ATL compound.

Once, he thought, the future had been a special place. Full of wonder gadgets and streamlined design, like the deco façades on the buildings downtown. The World of Tomorrow. The future had been a place, like Oz, where all sorts of delightful things seemed possible.

Then somehow, he thought, the bad guys had occupied the future. They were sitting up there, like Apaches in a western film, occupying the high ground. And the good guys had no choice but to ride into the next century under their guns.

“What’s wrong?” Debra was sitting up in bed, her eyes fixed on him. He looked at her in surprise.

“What do you mean?”

“You were grinding your teeth loud enough to wake the dead. What happened?”

Loren had to think for a moment about what had started his train of thought. “Copper Country got held up. Including that poker game that Bill Forsythe runs in the back.”

“And that means someone from around here did it.”

“Yeah.” Loren wasn’t surprised at her acuity; Debra had always been quick to pick up on these things. She propped her head up on one hand and regarded him.

“Any idea who?”

“Not really, no. A couple Spanish kids did the holdup. They maybe had a third man as a driver.”

“And nobody’s seen the two guys.”

“Right. They probably got out of town before the description ever went out.”

“Or they’re hiding out with their friend.”

“Maybe.”

There was silence for a moment, filled only by the ticking of the Little Ben alarm clock on the night table. Loren sighed. “Nothing I can do about it now.”

“I can make you some hot milk.”

“No. Thank you. I can get to sleep.”

“Watch that grinding.”

“Okay. I’ll try to remember.”

She kissed his cheek and buried herself in the covers. Loren closed his eyes, tried to deepen his breathing. Bits of the day floated across his vision, superimposed in meaningless juxtaposition: Gileno looming over the crowd at Holliday’s, the deco griffins at the City-County Building staring with blind white eyes, Len Bonniwell’s sprawled body limned in the halogen light of the ATL jeep, Bill Forsythe rubbing the wrist that had worn his stolen turquoise bracelet . . .

Out of this, somehow, he put it all together. He knew who had done the holdup, and when he realized that he knew, he wasn’t surprised.

He looked at the fluorescent hands of the Little Ben. It was five-thirty.

Time to get up, anyway.

Loren had finished his shower and was starting his shave when Debra appeared puffy-eyed in the doorway. Energy hummed happily in his mind. He gave her a cheery smile. “Go to sleep for another hour,” he said. “I might as well get Jerry, since I’m up, anyway.”

Debra blinked at him sleepily, then without a word turned and headed back to bed.

Loren finished shaving, then dressed in a blue wool blazer, white shirt, red linen tie, and gray slacks. He unlocked the gun rack and took out the short-barreled .38 Chief’s Special, clipped the holster to his belt on the left side, under the jacket, then went out to the driveway and got in the police cruiser.

He headed north along Estes, through the town center and across the maglev tracks, and down the steep hillside, lined with willows, that marked where the Rio Seco cut through town. Estes Street cut right through the bottom of the dry river, with a steel pole stuck in the riverbed nearby. The pole was painted with depth markers so people would know whether they could safely get across in case of flood. On the opposite bank was the ramshackle neighborhood called Picketwire, all cinder block and rusty tin roofs and old cars sitting on blocks in sandy front yards.

True to every small-town stereotype, in Atocha there was a right side of the tracks on which to be born. Picketwire was on the wrong side.

Loren turned right and drove past the residence of A.J. Dunlop’s father— no fewer than four cars sat on blocks in the front yard— then west along the barren ridge that overlooked the south side of the Rio Seco. He went down another slope, then up another rise, into another neighborhood. This one was called Las Animas on the town plots, but Taco Town by snotty Anglo kids like Loren’s daughter Kelly.

Las Animas was still on the wrong side of the AT&SF tracks, and looked more or less like Picketwire, the same rusty tin roofs rising up the side of a treeless ridge, the same junked autos gathering graffiti as they sat in the sun. Maybe there was a higher percentage of adobe used in construction, but the main difference was not architectural, but racial.

No one had ever drawn any lines, and there had never been any formal segregation, no racial laws, no Jim Crow. There had always been exceptions, intermarriages— many of the town’s founding aristocracy, in fact, had created Spanish/Anglo marriages, Anglo businessmen marrying Spanish women to have access to the Hispanic market, after which the children chose their ethnic identification for themselves. Informal segregation was simply a fact— Las Animas was for the poor Spanish, Picketwire for the poor Anglos, both being named after the same evocatively named Colorado river, El Rio de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio, the River of Lost Souls in Purgatory–– Picketwire being an Anglo corruption of Purgatoire, which was itself a French version of Purgatorio. Loren had never been clear concerning how neighborhoods in a southwestern New Mexico town had been named after a Colorado river, but then the other districts were oddly named, too. Loren’s neighborhood, Rose Hill— few roses, not much of a hill— was for the better class of Anglo; and it was mirrored by Port Royal— no port, no royalty— where Cipriano and the better-off Hispanics lived. The city’s tiny handful of black people clustered around the African Baptist Church in an informal no-man’s-land north of Picketwire. Nothing concerning this arrangement had ever been said; nothing ever needed saying.

Power in the town had been divided up in the same quiet way. The police chief was always Anglo; the assistant Hispanic. The president of the city council was always Spanish, and the chairman of the county’s Democratic Party organization had been a member of the Figueracion family for over a hundred years. The mayor had always been Anglo, at least till Edward Trujillo created a minor political earthquake first by running, then by getting himself elected, not simply the first Hispanic mayor ever, but the first Republican since the 1890s.

Unseen boundaries were coming down. It made Loren nervous.

Loren drove into Las Animas, then slowly down the cracked surface of Cedar Street. He passed a little adobe chapel, its windows and doors painted blue to symbolize devotion to the Virgin. A miniature house of worship built on someone’s front lawn, marking the meeting place of a few families who had come from northern Mexico to work in the mines during the Depression. Ostensibly Catholics— Bob Sandoval would have called them heretics— they belonged to some small divergent sect that had gotten thrown out of Spain in the 1600s. Another of Atocha’s forty-one Welcoming Churches.

Parked right where he thought it would be was a little dusty car with Texas plates. Loren took down the plate number, used the Computer-Aided Dispatch Keyboard to check the license number, then drove home. He walked through the living room to the kitchen phone and speed-dialed Cipriano.

Debra was loading the coffeemaker with water from the water cooler that she’d loaded with a fresh bottle. She brushed straight blond hair out of her face and looked at Loren with narrowed eyes, squinting without her glasses.

“Where’s Jerry?” she said.

Loren gave a laugh. “I got distracted by police work. I’ll get him in a minute.”

She nodded. “Got it figured out?” she said.

“I think so.”

The line went four rings before it answered with a single word.

“Dominguez.” Cipriano’s voice was full of sleep.

Loren grinned into the phone. “Y andale, bubba,” he said.

There was a long moment of silence. “I hope this is good, jefe. It’s six in the fucking morning.”

“I figured out who popped the Copper Country. But I’ve got to go to church at seven o’clock and I can’t keep on top of it.”

“Let me get a pencil.” There was another moment of silence. “Okay, jefe. Shoot.” Each word sounded like a groan.

“Remember your cousin Félix?”

Another moment of silence. “My cousin by marriage. You’re saying he robbed the Copper Country?”

“Naw. But remember when we had to bust his daughter’s wedding reception because some asshole called Rose’s mother a fat old bruja, then got punched in the nose by the old lady’s bad-ass nephew Anthony from Laredo?”

“He’s from Harlingen. But okay.”

“So who did we have to drag off to the jail because they kept trying to slug it out even though they were too drunk to stand up?”

“Anthony. And his two boys. And Rose’s mother, because she tried to kick Eloy Esposito when he was hauling Anthony away.”

“She really is an evil old bruja, you know? But who else?”

“Ahhh.” Cipriano was beginning to sound as if he was awake. “Robbie Cisneros.”

“Yeah. So if you go drive by Félix’s place you’ll see a car with Texas plates out front. Because my working hypothesis is that Robbie and Anthony’s two boys got to be good buddies in our drunk tank, and that yesterday the two boys from Harlingen drove up here to stick up the Copper Country with Robbie as their driver.”

“God damn. I’m impressed, jefe.” Cipriano sounded as if he had finally come awake.

“The car is there. I’ve run the number on the C. A. D. and it has a Harlingen address. I need somebody to watch the car, okay?”

“I’ll check it out.”

Loren put the phone back in its cradle. The smell of coffee began to rise in the room. Debra peered at him nearsightedly. “When did you work all that out?” she said.

“When I was grinding my teeth.” He grinned and backed out of the room, heading for his brother’s place.

Loren’s brother, Jerry, had been living for the last ten years or so in an automobile graveyard east of town, where the owner allowed him to live in an old trailer in exchange for looking after the place and doing some free-lance auto repair. A ruddy tinge crept across the horizon as Loren drove the Fury out of town on Route 82, the red horizon calibrated by a marching succession of silhouetted black power poles. The automated maglev train, off to Loren’s right, winked redly as it soared airborne over its pathway of rusting steel.

A bulky adobe structure appeared on the left: the Earth Church, Atocha’s forty-second, a religion for those who found spirituality in environmental activism. The doctrine itself was, to Loren, an offensive, not-quite-settled mixture of revived paganism, political radicalism, and bits borrowed from Christianity and Daoism— the “Earth gospel was evolving,” to quote the official literature. Evolving, Loren figured, to the point where it could extract the maximum contributions from the gullible.

Churches, Loren thought, were about eternal things, not about contemporary politics. Loren knew all he needed to know about politics, and he knew he wanted to keep them as far away from his own faith as possible.

In the church parking lot Loren saw a pair of elderly Apaches, in traditional garb, climbing out of an old jeep. This morning’s guest shamans, Loren figured. White people who, strangely, had no use for Native Americans as people nevertheless seemed to need them as spiritual entities— yuppies who would look with a certain well-bred trepidation upon an Apache and his large family moving into the neighborhood would nevertheless happily participate in a ceremony in which the same Apache, in a shamanistic capacity, blessed them with pollen and urged them to respect Mother Earth. Indians, in this respect, were treated as both inferior and superior— superior in terms of spiritual resonance, inferior in every other way. You didn’t want them next door, you wanted them safely up on a mountain somewhere, talking to spirits on your behalf.

Indians, according to Anglo myth, were more spiritual, “closer to the Earth.” It never occurred to the whites that the reason the Indians were so close to the Earth was that they were poor, and that they had been kept in poverty and on reservations by vicious and stupid policies set up and tolerated by the same white folks who had become so respectful of their spiritual condition.

Loren remembered that, some years before, running water and flush toilets had been introduced into the Taos Pueblo. There had actually been opposition to the move on the part of Anglos who were horrified by the desecration of a historical and sacred site. That was the problem with the whole view of Indians as our spiritual superiors, Loren thought: people forgot that these superior, spiritual beings were actually people who needed to take a crap now and again.

Almost directly across the highway was a contrasting point of view in the form of a rugged monument of stones with a bronze-green plaque. ON THIS SPOT ON JULY 21, 1884, SIX MEN OF H TROOP, 9TH U.S. CAVALRY, WERE KILLED BY RED SAVAGES.

The history didn’t let you forget.

The junkyard was on a hill, visible for miles in all directions. It was surrounded by a ten-foot-high fence, chain link in back, painted wood in front. The wooden fence had been painted with a Hamm’s beer ad, a bright pastoral view of evergreens and lakes, rioting green grass, stately white-tailed deer, a glowing sylvan Minnesota scene as far removed from the reality of dry, alkaline New Mexico as from the moon.

Loren pulled onto a dirt side road that led to the yard’s side entrance. German shepherds paralleled him, barking cheerfully. He parked in front of the gate, let the dogs lick his hand for a while— they were so starved for company that they were utterly useless in their role as guard dogs— and then Loren let himself in. The dogs jumped around him in chaotic joy.

Jerry’s trailer was an old Airstream sitting on rotting tires flat for twenty years. Strings of rust drooled from its rivet heads. It was surrounded by the decayed rubble of twentieth-century transportation systems: cars, trucks, buses, even a sagging row of electric streetcars that had been pulled out of Atocha in the 1940s. Loren banged on the door, then opened it and stepped into the darkness. He couldn’t see anything at all. A male voice speaking Russian gobbled at him from the back of the trailer. His foot hit something solid. He groped for the light switch and flipped it.

The trailer was full of stuff that Jerry had collected over the years, most of it malfunctioning apparatus. In the dim light of the sixty-watt overhead bulb Loren could see several typewriters, a pair of old Osborne computers, an ancient stainless-steel Waring blender, a couple toasters, a McIntosh keyboard with several keys missing, and some mismatched tire hubs, gears from a manual transmission, all interleaved with piles of paperback books, magazines, old newspapers, a huge backlist of National Geographic . . .

The stuff rose to the rounded ceiling on all sides, giving off a faint odor of dust, decaying pulp, and machine oil. Loren tried not to let any of it touch his clothing. The voice in Russian continued.

“That you, Loren? I’m getting dressed!”

Jerry’s voice came from the back of the trailer, over piles of stuff. Though the trailer was less than twenty feet long, there was no obvious way from one end to the next. Loren knew there was a tunnel, however, created when Jerry had laid some planks between the built-in dinette and the sink, then piled more of his kibble on top.

There was a scurrying sound. Preceded by a strong scent of Mennen’s Skin Bracer, Jerry appeared in the tunnel entrance. Loren stepped back to give him room. Jerry stood up. He was carrying a small pink cardboard box and wore a yellowed white shirt, a pair of pleated brown slacks, and old brown cowboy boots. Jerry rose and brushed off his knees, then opened the box and offered it to Loren.

“Chocolate-covered doughnut?”

Loren eyed the box and wondered how old the doughnuts were. “No, thanks,” he said. “Debra’s cooking.”

“Right. I’ll have just one, then.”

The Russian voice babbled on. Jerry stuck a doughnut in his mouth, then jammed the box carefully between an old upright office typewriter and a bunch of crumbling science-fiction magazines tied up with twine. Loren wondered how long the box would stay there. Years, maybe. He left the trailer and Jerry followed. Delighted dogs swirled around them as they walked to the gate. Jerry reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a string tie, then put the tie around his collar.

”Learning to speak Russian?“ Loren asked.

Jerry removed the doughnut from his mouth. “Streaming audio,” he said. “I just like to listen to the sounds. And Radio Moscow has the most amazing music. Like from another planet.“

You’re the one from another planet, Loren wanted to say, but he never actually managed to say it. It would have been pointless, anyway.

“I can listen to Russian Top Forty,” Jerry added, “because my sound system is based on transistors, and they’re based on the holes between things.”

Loren looked at his brother. “Holes?” he said. He knew what was coming.

Jerry, the Useless Fact Machine.

“Yeah. Holes. See, there are atoms, right? And atoms are protons and electrons. Electrons move, and that’s electricity. But when electrons move, they leave big holes behind. And that’s what transistors are based on.”

Loren peered at his brother across the roof of his car. “Based on holes?” he said.

“Yeah. See, when the electrons move off, new electrons appear out of nowhere to fill the holes. I can’t remember what they do when they get there, I just remember reading about it.”

Loren opened the car door. “The holes are in your head, Jerry.”

Jerry resembled his younger brother, the same strong build, the same broad cheekbones and curly dark hair, but there was something undefined about him. Unfocused, Loren thought. As if you were looking at him through a pane of glass smeared by fingerprints.

He hadn’t always been that way— growing up he was a healthy Atocha kid, popular, outgoing, a member of the high school basketball and football teams. And then for some reason he joined the military, and when he came back from overseas something had changed him.

Whatever happened, Loren knew, it wasn’t war. Jerry’s duties consisted of guarding NATO installations in Thessalonika.And by the time Jerry came back, something had gone out of him— he’d become vague, lost focus— and he bounced around Atocha aimlessly until one of the deacons at Loren’s church, as a favor to Loren, gave him the Airstream to live in.

Loren got in the car and started the engine. Jerry sat in the passenger seat, then reached to touch the walnut stock of the Remington shotgun propped in the rack between the two front seats.

“Duck season opens next Friday,” Loren said. “I’m planning on taking the day off. You wanna go?”

“Sure.”

“Right after church.”

Jerry gave a sigh. “We’ll miss half the morning.”

“Jerry,” Loren said. “The church got you a place to live. And a whole bunch of jobs that you tossed away.”

“Did I ever ask the church for anything?”

“I did.”

“Did I ever ask you to ask?”

There was silence. Loren backed the Fury onto the dirt road, then turned back to town.

“You’ve got to hang on to the things that are important,” Loren said. “You’ve got family, you’ve got a faith that wants you. A whole town you grew up with. You can’t just let it all slip away.”

Jerry brushed doughnut crumbs off his shirtfront. Beneath the strong after-shave he had an odd smell, part auto grease, part dust, as if he were a bit of disused machinery sitting on the shelf for a long time, another item in his pile of kibble.

“I don’t know why you’re always complaining,” Jerry said. “I’m still here, aren’t I?”

“Yeah. You’re still here.”

“I’m going to church like you want me, and I’m going hunting with you on Friday.”

“Yeah.”

“So what’s your problem, Loren?”

Loren didn’t answer, using the necessity of stopping at the end of the dirt road and turning onto Route 82 as an excuse.

The Fury raced on in silence, a good ten miles above the limit. Ahead of them were lines of sandy ridges painted blood red by sunrise, the valleys between them all deep purple shadow. The terrain, Loren thought suddenly, looked like the weathered, wrinkled skin of an old Apache woman. Dry and aged and filled with reality. He found himself struck by the insight as the car coasted over a ridge.

“Holy fuck!”

Loren slammed on the brakes. The Fury lunged for the narrow shoulder, into the entrance to the Earth Church parking lot. A pair of old pickups, both heavily laden with what seemed to be a ton of old furniture crowned by mattresses and box springs, one trying to pass the other on a rise, did a slow-motion dance of inept avoidance and managed to miss the cruiser by inches. As Loren weaved past he glanced directly into the dark, unsurprised eyes of a small boy, the child riding in the bed of one of the pickups surrounded by stacks of household goods.

Loren brought his car to a stop, heart flailing in his chest. He reached for the siren button, then hesitated.

Breakfast was waiting. Church was waiting.

The hell with it. New Mexico had long been the worst state in the U.S. for auto accident statistics— by a considerable margin— and it was time to make at least a little change.

Both drivers were, in fact, clearly drunk. Loren cited them and called for a patrolman to come up from town and haul them to jail. The little kid jumped out of the truck and followed Loren around, yelling curses in Spanish that he probably assumed Loren didn’t understand. His favorite word was “chota,” which any southwestern cop understood as being an uncomplimentary reference to the law enforcement profession. Loren looked down at the boy. “Cállate la boca, chivito!” he said, and the kid shut up in a hurry.

Jerry gave a laugh as Loren got back in the car. “New Mexico drivers,” he said. “Nothing like ’em.”

“Worst in the world,” Loren said. “And these were drunk, too.”

“You know,” Jerry said, “I wonder if there’s some kind of bacteria in New Mexico, in the soil and in the air. A little bug that transmits incompetence. And everyone who lives here gets it sooner or later.”

Loren grinned. “You may have something there.”

“It’s the Third World here. Drivers who can’t drive, teachers who can’t teach, administrators who can’t sign their names, politicians who only get elected because the voters are as stupid and bigoted and inept as they are. An aboriginal population that gets shat on by everybody. Nothing sensible ever prospers, everything ambitious turns to farce. Pathetic. It’s the land of mañana. And it’s been that way forever, and nothing’s gonna change it.”

Loren gave his brother a surprised look. Jerry’s bizarre speculations were hardly ever serious; this last seemed heartfelt.

“Maybe not, Jer,” he said. “But maybe it’s just the way we do things.”

“The way we don’t do things, you mean.”

There was a wink of red on Loren’s left. He turned to see the red sun gleaming on the silver body of the maglev train returning from the ATL facility to town, a sign of the latest attempt to transform the country, to inject, as with a hypodermic, a new century into the land where the germ of incompetence had for so long thrived.