NEAL BARRETT, JR.

Diner

Here’s another story by Neal Barrett, Jr., as different in mood from “Perpetuity Blues” as night is from day, but still strong, surprising, and original.

 

DINER

Neal Barrett, Jr.

He woke sometime before dawn and brought the dream back with him out of sleep. The four little girls attended Catholic junior high in Corpus Christi. Their hand-painted guitars depicted tropical Cuban nights. They played the same chord again and again, a dull repetition like small wads of paper hitting a drum. The light was still smoky, the furniture unrevealed. He made his way carefully across the room. The screened-in porch enclosed the front side of the house facing the Gulf, allowing the breeze to flow in three directions. He could hear rolling surf, smell the sharp tang of iodine in the air. Yet something was clearly wrong. The water, the sand, the sky had disappeared, lost behind dark coagulation. With sudden understanding he saw the screen was clotted with bugs. Grasshoppers blotted out the morning. They were bouncing off the screen, swarming in drunken legions. He ran outside and down the stairs, knowing what he’d find. The garden was gone. A month before, he’d covered the small plot of ground with old window screens and bricks. The hoppers had collapsed the whole device. His pitiful stands of lettuce were cropped clean, razored on the ground as if he’d clipped them with a mower. Radishes, carrots, the whole bit. Eaten to the stalk. Then it occurred to him he was naked and under attack. Grasshopper socks knitted their way up to his knees. Something considered his crotch. He yelled and struck out blindly, intent on knocking hoppers silly. The fight was next to useless, and he retreated up the stairs.

*   *   *

Jenny woke while he was dressing.

“Something wrong? Did you yell just a minute ago?”

“Hoppers. They’re all over the place.”

“Oh, Mack.”

“Little fuckers ate my salad bar.”

“I’m sorry. It was doing so good.”

“It isn’t doing good now.” He started looking for his hat.

“You want something to eat?”

“I’ll grab something at Henry’s.”

She came to him, still unsteady from sleep, awkward and fetching at once. Minnie Mouse T-shirt ragged as a kite. A certain yielding coming against him.

“I got to go to work.”

“Your loss, man.”

“I dreamed of little Mexican girls.”

“Good for you.” She stepped back to gather her hair, her eyes somewhere else.

“Nothing happened. They played real bad guitar.”

“So you say.”

*   *   *

He made his way past the dunes and the ragged stands of sea grass, following the path over soft, dry sand to solid beach, the dark rows of houses on stilts off to his right, the Gulf rolling in, brown as mud, giving schools of mullet a ride. The hoppers had moved on, leaving dead and wounded behind. The sun came up behind dull, anemic clouds. Two skinny boys searched the ocean’s morning debris. He found a pack of Agricultural Hero cigarettes in his pocket and cupped his hands against the wind. George Panagopoulos said there wasn’t any tobacco in them at all. Said they made them out of half-dried shit and half kelp and that the shit wasn’t bad, but he couldn’t abide the kelp. Where the sandy road angled into the beach, he cut back and crossed Highway 87, the asphalt cracked and covered with sand, the tough coastal grass crowding in. The highway trailed southwest for two miles, dropping off abruptly where the red-white-and-blue Galveston ferries used to run, the other end stretching northeast up the narrow strip of Bolivar Peninsula past Crystal Beach and Gilchrist, then off the peninsula to High Island and Sabine Pass.

Mack began to find Henry’s posters north of the road. They were tacked on telephone poles and fences, on the door of the derelict Texaco station, wherever Henry had wandered in this merchandising adventure. He gathered them in as he walked, snapping them off like paper towels. The sun began to bake, hot wind stinging up sand in tiny storms. The posters said: FOURTH OF JULY PICNIC AT HENRY ORTEGAS DINER. ALL THE BARBECUE PORK YOU CAN EAT. EL DIOS BLESS AMERICA

Henry had drawn the posters on the backs of green accounting forms salvaged from the Sand Palace Motor Home Inn. Even if he’d gotten Rose to help, it was a formidable undertaking.

No easy task to do individually rendered, slightly crazed, and plainly cokeyed fathers of our country. Every George Washington wore a natty clip-on Second Inaugural tie and, for some reason, a sporty little Matamoros pimp mustache. Now and then along the borders, an extra reader bonus, snappy American flags or red cherry bombs going kapow.

Mack walked on picking posters. Squinting back east he saw water flat as slate, vanishing farther out with tricks of the eye. Something jumped out there or something didn’t.

*   *   *

Jase and Morgan were in the diner, and George Panagopoulos and Fleece. They wore a collection of gimmie caps and patched-up tennis shoes, jeans stiff and sequined with the residue of fish. Mack took the third stool down. Fleece said it might get hotter. Mack agreed it could. Jase leaned down the counter.

“Hoppers get your garden, too?”

“Right down to bedrock is all,” Mack said.

“I had this tomato,” Panagopoulos said, “this one little asshole tomato ‘bout half as big as a plum; I’m taking a piss and hear these hoppers coming and I’m down and out of the house like that. I’m down there in what, maybe ten, twenty seconds flat, and this tomato’s a little bugger and a seed. You know? A little bugger hanging down, and that’s all.” He made a swipe at his nose, held up a finger, and looked startled and goggle-eyed.

Mack pretended to study the menu and ordered KC steak and fries and coffee and three eggs over easy; and all this time Henry’s standing over the charcoal stove behind the counter, poking something flat across the grill, concentrating intently on this because he’s already seen the posters rolled up and stuffed in Mack’s pocket and he knows he’ll have to look right at Mack sooner or later.

“Galveston’s got trouble,” Jase said. “Dutch rowed back from seeing that woman in Clute looks like a frog. Said nobody’s seen Mendez for ‘bout a week.”

“Eddie’s a good man for a Mex,” Morgan said from down the counter. “He’ll stand up for you, he thinks you’re in the right.”

Mack felt the others waiting. He wondered if he really wanted to get into this or let it go.

Fleece jumped in. “Saw Doc this morning, sneaking up the dunes ‘bout daylight. Gotta know if those hoppers eat his dope.”

Everyone laughed except Morgan. Mack was silently grateful.

“I seen that dope,” Jase said. “What it is there’s maybe three tomato plants ‘bout high as a baby’s dick.”

“I don’t want to hear nothin’ about tomatoes,” said Panagopoulos.

“Don’t make any difference what it is,” Fleece said. “Man determined to get high, he going to do it.”

Panagopoulos told Mack that Dutch’s woman up in Clute heard someone had seen a flock of chickens. Right near Umbrella Point. Rhode Island Reds running loose out on the beach.

Mack said fine. There was always a good chicken rumor going around somewhere. That or someone saw a horse or a pack of dogs. Miss Aubrey Gain of Alvin swore on Jesus there was a pride of Siamese cats in Liberty County.

Mack wolfed down his food. He didn’t look at his plate. If you didn’t look close, you maybe couldn’t figure what the hot peppers were covering up.

When he got up to go he said, “Real tasty, Henry,” and then, as if the thought had suddenly occurred, “All right if you and me talk for a minute?”

Henry followed him out. Mack saw the misery in his face. He tried on roles like hats. Humble peon. An extra in Viva Zapata! Wily tourist guide with gold teeth and connections. Nothing fit. He looked like Cesar Romero, and this was his cross. Nothing could rob him of dignity. No one would pity a man with such bearing.

Mack took out the roll of posters and gave them back. “You know better than that, Henry. It wasn’t a real good idea.”

“There is no harm in this, Mack. You cannot say that there is.”

“Not me I can’t, no.”

“Well, then.”

“Come on. I got Huang Hua coming first thing tomorrow.”

“Ah. Of course.”

“Jesus, Henry.”

“I am afraid that I forgot.”

“Fine. Sure. Look, I appreciate the thought, and so does everyone else. This Chink, now, he hasn’t got a real great sense of humor.”

“I was thinking about a flag.”

“What?”

“A flag. You could ask, you know? See what he says. It would not hurt to ask. A very small and insignificant flag in the window of the diner. Just for the one day, you understand?”

Mack looked down the road. “You didn’t even listen. You didn’t hear anything I said.”

“Just for the one day. The Fourth and nothing more.”

“Get all the posters down, Henry. Do it before tonight.”

“How did you like the George Washington?” Henry asked. “I did all of those myself. Rose did the lettering, but I am totally responsible for the pictures.”

“The Washington was great.”

“You think so?”

“The eyes kinda follow you around.”

“Yes.” Henry showed his delight. “I tried for inner vision of the eyes.”

“Well, you flat out got it.”

Jase and Morgan came out, Jase picking up the rubber fishing boots he’d left at the door. Morgan looked moody and deranged. Mack considered knocking him senseless.

“Look,” Mack told him, “I don’t want you on my boat. Go with Panagopoulos. Tell him Fleece’ll be going with me and Jase.”

“Just fine with me,” Morgan said.

“Good. It’s fine with me, too.”

Morgan wasn’t through. “You take a nigger fishing on a day with a r in it, you goin’ to draw sharks certain. I seen it happen.”

“You tell that to Fleece,” Mack said. “I’ll stand out here and watch.”

Morgan went in and talked to Panagopoulos. Jase waited for Fleece, leaning against the diner, asleep or maybe not. Mack lit an Agricultural Hero and considered the after-taste of breakfast. Thought of likely antics with Jenny’s parts. Wondered how a univalve mollusk with the mental reserve of grass could dream up a wentletrap shell and then wear it. This and other things.

Life has compensations, but there’s no way of knowing what they are.

*   *   *

Coming in was the time he liked the best. The water was dark and flat, getting ready for the night. The bow cut green, and no sound at all but a jazzy little counterbeat, the crosswind snapping two fingers in the sails. The sun was down an hour, the sky settling into a shade inducing temporary wisdom. He missed beer and music. Resented the effort of sinking into a shitty evening mood without help.

Swinging in through the channel, Pelican Island off to port, he saw the clutter of Port Bolivar, the rusted-out buildings and the stumps of rotted docks, the shrimpers he used to run heeling drunkenly in the flats. South of that was the chain-link fence and the two-story corrugated building. The bright red letters on its side read SHINING WEALTH OF THE SEA JOYOUS COOPERATIVE 37 WELCOME HOME INDUSTRIOUS CATCHERS OF THE FISH.

This Chinese loony-tune message was clear a good nautical mile away; a catcher of the fish with a double cataract couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there.

Panagopoulos’s big Irwin ketch was in, the other boats as well, the nets up and drying. Fleece brought the sloop in neatly, dropping the sails at precisely the right moment, a skill Mack appreciated all the more because Morgan was scarcely ever able to do it, either rushing in to shore full sail like a Viking bent on pillage or dropping off early and leaving them bobbing in the bay.

The Chinks greatly enjoyed this spectacle, the round-eyes paddling the forty-three-foot Hinckley in to shore.

Mack and Jase secured the lines, and then Jase went forward to help Fleece while the Chinks came aboard to look at the catch. The guards stayed on the dock looking sullen and important, rifles slung carelessly over their shoulders. Fishing Supervisor Lu Ping peered into the big metal hold, clearly disappointed.

“Not much fish,” he told Mack.

“Not much,” Mack said.

“It’s June,” Fleece explained. “You got the bad easterlies in June. Yucatan Current kinda edges up north, hits the Amarillo Clap flat on. That goin’ to fuck up your fishing real good.”

“Oh, yes.” Lu Ping made a note. Jase nodded solemn agreement.

Mack told Jase and Fleece to come to the house for supper. He walked past the chain-link fence and the big generator that kept the fish in the corrugated building cooler than anyone in Texas.

The routine was, the boats would come in and tack close to the long rock dike stretching out from the southeast side of the peninsula, out of sight of the Chinks, and the women and kids would wave and make a fuss and the men would toss them fish in canvas bags, flounder or pompano or redfish if they were running or maybe a rare sack of shrimp, keeping enough good fish onboard to keep the Chinese happy but mostly leaving catfish and shark and plenty of mullet in the hold, that and whatever other odd species came up in the nets. It didn’t matter at all, since everything they caught was ground up, steamed, pressed, processed, and frozen into brick-size bundles before they shipped it.

Mack thought about cutting through the old part of the port, then remembered about Henry and went back. There were still plenty of posters on fence posts and abandoned bait stands and old houses, and he pulled down all he could find before dark.

*   *   *

They ate in front of the house near the dunes, a good breeze coming in from the Gulf strong enough to keep mosquitoes and gnats at bay, the wind drawing the driftwood fire nearly white. Henry brought a large pot of something dark and heady, announcing it was Acadia Parish shrimp creole Chihuahua style, and nobody said it wasn’t. Mack broiled flounder over a grill. Jase attacked guitar. Arnie Mace, Mack’s uncle from Sandy Point, brought illegal rice wine. Not enough to count but potent. Fleece drank half a mason jar and started to cry. He said he was thinking about birds. He began to call them off. Herons and plovers and egrets. Gulls squawking cloud-white thick behind the shrimpers. Jase said he remembered pink flamingos in the tidal flats down by the dike.

“There was an old bastard in Sweeny, you know him, Mack,” George Panagopoulos said. “Swears he had the last cardinal bird in Texas. Kept it in a hamster cage long as he could stand it. Started dreaming about it and couldn’t sleep, got up in the middle of the night and stir-fried it in a wok. Had a frazzle of red feathers on this hat for some time, but I can’t say that’s how he got ’em.”

“That was Emmett Dodge,” Mack said. “I always heard it was a jay.”

“Now, I’m near certain it was a cardinal.” Panagopoulos looked thoughtfully into his wine. “A jay, now, if Emmett had had a jay, I doubt he could’ve kept the thing quiet. They make a awful lot of noise.”

Mack helped Fleece throw up.

“Georgia won’t talk to me,” Fleece said miserably. “You the only friend I got.”

“I expect you’re right.”

“You watch out for Morgan. He bad-talkin’ you ever chance he get.”

“He wants to be pissant mayor, he can run. I sure don’t care for the honor.”

“He says your eyes beginnin’ to slant.”

“He said that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, fuck him.” Fleece was unsteady but intact. Mack looked around for Henry and found him with Rose and Jenny. He liked to stand off somewhere and watch her. A good-looking woman was fine as gold, you caught her sitting by a fire.

He took Henry aside.

“I know what you are going to say,” Henry said. “You are angry with me. I can sense these things.”

“I’m not angry at all. Just get that stuff taken down before morning.”

“I only do what I think is right, mi compadre. What is just. What is true.” Henry tried for balance. “What I deeply feel in my heart. A voice cries out. It has to speak. This is the tragedy of my race. I feel a great sorrow for my people.”

“Okay.”

“I shall bow to your wishes, of course.”

“Good. Just bow before Huang gets here in the morning.”

“I will take them down. I will go and do it now.”

“You don’t have to do it now.”

“I feel I am an intrusion.”

“I feel like you’ve had enough to drink.”

“Do you know what I am thinking? What I am thinking at this moment?”

“No, what?”

“I am thinking that I cannot remember tequila.”

“Fleece has already done this,” Mack said. “I don’t want you doing it, too. One crying drunk is enough.”

“Forgive me. I cannot help myself. Mack, I don’t remember how it tastes. I remember the lime and the salt. I recall a certain warmth. Nada. Nothing more.”

Tears touched the Cesar Romero eyes, trailed down the Gilbert Roland cheeks. If Jase plays “La Paloma,” I’ll flat kill him, thought Mack. He left to look for Rose.

*   *   *

Jenny told him to come out on the porch and look at the beach. Crickets crawled out of the dunes and made for the water. The sand was black, a bug tide going out to sea. The crickets marched into the water and floated back. In the dark they looked like the ropy strands of a spill.

“The ocean scares me at night,” Jenny said.

“Not always. You like it sometimes.” He wanted to stop this but didn’t know how to do it. She was working up to it a notch at a time.

“It’s not you,” she said.

“Fine, I’ll write that down.” He worked his hand up the T-shirt and touched the small of her back. She leaned in comfortably against him.

“Things are still bad, you get too far away from the coast. I don’t want you just wandering around somewhere.”

“I haven’t really decided, Mack. I mean, it’s not tomorrow or anything.”

“I don’t think you’re going to find anyone, Jenny.” He said it as gently as he could. “Folks are scattered all about.”

She didn’t answer. They stood a long time on the porch. The house already felt empty.

*   *   *

The chopper came in low out of the south, tilted slightly into the offshore breeze, rotors churning flat, snappy farts as it settled to 87 stirring sand. Soldiers hit the ground. They looked efficient. Counterrevolutionary acts would be dealt with swiftly. Fleece and Panagopoulos leaned against the diner trading butts. Henry came out for a look and ducked inside. The morning was oyster gray with a feeble ribbing of clouds. Major Huang waved at Mack. Then Chen came out of the chopper and started barking at the troops. Mack wasn’t pleased. Huang was purely political—fat and happy and not looking for any trouble. Chen was maybe nineteen tops, a cocky little shit with new bars. Mack was glad he didn’t speak English, which meant Jase wouldn’t try to sell him a shark dick pickled in a jar or something worse.

The Chinese uniforms were gallbladder green to match the chopper. Chen and three troopers stayed behind. The troopers started tossing crates and boxes to the ground. One followed discreetly behind the major.

“Personal hellos,” Huang Hua greeted Mack. “It is a precious day we are seeing.”

Mack looked at the chopper. “Not many supplies this time.”

“Not many fishes,” Huang said.

It’s going to be like this, is it? Mack followed him past the diner down the road to Shining Wealth Cooperative 37. He noticed little things. A real haircut. Starched khakis with creases. He wondered what Huang had eaten for breakfast.

Sergeant Fishing Supervisor Lu Ping greeted the major effusively. He had reports. Huang stuffed them in a folder. The air-conditioning was staggering. Mack forgot what it was like between visits.

“I have reportage of events,” Huang began. He sat behind the plain wooden table and folded his hands. “It is a happening of unpleasant nature. Eddie Mendez will not mayor himself in Galveston after today.”

“And why’s that?”

“Offending abuse. Blameful performance. Defecation of authority.” Huang looked meaningfully at Mack. “Retaining back of fishes.”

“What’ll happen to Eddie?”

“The work you do here is of gravity, Mayor Mack. A task of large importance. Your people in noncoastal places are greatly reliant of fish.”

“We’re doing the best we can.”

“I am hopeful this is true.”

Mack looked right at him.

“Major, we’re taking all the fish we can net. We got sails and no gas and nothing with an engine to put it into if we did. You’re not going to help any shorting us on supplies. I’ve got forty-one families on this peninsula eating nothing but fish and rice. There’s kids here never saw a carrot. We try to grow something, the bugs eat it first ‘cause there’s no birds left to eat the bugs. The food chain’s fucked.”

“You are better off than most.”

“I’m sure glad to hear it.”

“Please to climb down from my back. The Russians did the germing, not us.”

“I know who did it.”

Huang tried Oriental restraint. “We are engaging to help. You have no grateful at all. The Chinese people have come to fill this empty air.”

“Vacuum.”

“Yes. Vacuum.” Huang considered. “In three, maybe four years, wheat and corn will be achieved in the ground again. Animal and fowl will be brought. This is very restricted stuff. I tell you, Mayor Mack, because I wish your nonopposing. I have ever shown you friendness. You cannot say I haven’t.”

“I appreciate the effort.”

“You will find sweets in this shipment. For the children. Also decorative candles. Toothpaste. Simple magic tricks.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I knew this would bring you pleasure.”

Huang looked up. Lieutenant Chen entered politely. He handed Huang papers. Gave Mack a sour look. Mack recognized Henry’s posters, the menu from the diner. Chen turned and left.

“What is this?” Huang appeared disturbed. “Flags? Counterproductive celebration? Barbecue pork?”

“Doesn’t mean a thing,” Mack explained. “It’s just Henry.”

Huang looked quizzically at George Washington, turning the poster in several directions. He glanced at the cardboard menu, at the KC Sirloin Scrambled Eggs Chicken-Fried Steak French Fries Omelet with Cheddar Cheese or Swiss Coffee Refills Free. He looked gravely at Mack.

“I did not think this was a good thing. You said there would be no trouble. One thing leads to a something other. Now it is picnics and flags.”

“The poster business, all right,” Mack said. “He shouldn’t of done that. I figure it’s my fault. The diner, now, there’s nothing wrong with the diner.”

Huang shook his head. “It is fanciment. The path to discontent.” He appeared deeply hurt. The poster was an affront. The betrayal of a friend. He walked to the window, hands behind his back. “There is much to have renouncement here, Mayor Mack. Many fences to bend. I have been lenient and foolish. No more Henry Ortega Diner. No picnic. And better fishes, I think.”

Mack didn’t answer. Whatever he said would be wrong.

Huang recalled something of importance. He looked at Mack again.

“You have a black person living here?”

“Two. A man and a woman.”

“There is no racing discrimination? They are treated fairly?”

“Long as they keep picking that cotton.”

“No textiles. Only fishes.”

“I’ll see to it.”

*   *   *

Mack walked back north, past a rusted Chevy van waiting patiently for tires, past a pickup with windows still intact. Rose hadn’t seen Henry. She didn’t know where he was. “He didn’t mean to cause trouble,” she told Mack.

“I know that, Rose.”

“He walks. He wanders off. He needs the time to himself. He is a very sensitive man.”

“He’s all of that,” Mack said. He heard children. Smelled rice and fish, strongly seasoned with peppers.

“He respects you greatly. He says you are muy simpático. A man of heart. A leader of understanding.”

A woman with fine bones and sorrowful eyes. Katy Jurado, One-Eyed Jacks. He couldn’t remember the year.

“I just want to talk to him, Rose. I have to see him.”

“I will tell him. He will come to you. Here, take some chilies to Jenny. It is the only thing I can grow the bugs won’t eat. Try it on the fish. Just this much, no more.”

“Jenny’ll appreciate that.” A hesitation in her eyes. As if she might say something more. Mack wouldn’t ask. He wasn’t mad at Henry. His anger had abated, diluted after a day with Major Hua. He left and walked to the beach. Jase and Fleece were there. Jase had a mason jar of wine he’d maybe conned from Arnie Mace.

“Tell Panagopoulos and some of the others if you see ’em,” Mack said, “I want to talk to Henry. He’s off roaming around somewhere; I don’t want him doing that.”

“Your minorities’ll do this,” Jase reflected. “I’m glad I ain’t a ethnic.”

“It’s a burden,” Fleece said. “There going to be any trouble with the Chinks?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Fleece thought of two more birds,” Jase said. “A cormorant and a what?”

“Tern.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Good,” Mack said. “Keep your eyes peeled for Henry. He gets into that moon-over-Monterey shit, it’ll take Rose a month to get him straight.”

*   *   *

“I think I’m going to go,” Jenny told him. “I think I got to do that, Mack. It just keeps eatin’ away. Papa’s likely gone, but Luanne and Mama could be okay.”

He put out his cigarette and watched her across the room, watched her as she sat at the kitchen table bringing long wings of hair atop her head, going about this simple task with a quick, unconscious grace. The mirror stood against a white piece of driftwood she’d collected. She collected everything. Sand dollars and angel wings, twisted tritons and bright coquinas that faded in a day. Candle by the mirror in a sand-frosted Dr Pepper bottle, light from this touching the bony hillbilly points of her hips. When she left she would take too much of him with her, and maybe he should figure some way to tell her that.

“I might not be able to get you a pass. I don’t know. They don’t much like us moving around without a reason.”

“Oh, Mack. People do it all the time.” Peering at him now past the candle. “Hey, now, I’m going to come on back. I just got to get this done.”

He thought about the trip. Saw her walking old highways in his head. Maybe sixty-five miles up to Beaumont, cutting off north before that into the Thicket. He didn’t tell her everything he heard. The way people were, things that happened. He knew it wouldn’t make a difference if he did.

Jenny settled in beside him. “I said I’m coming back.”

“Yeah, well, you’d better.”

He decided, maybe at that moment, he wouldn’t let her go. He’d figure out a way to stop her. She’d leave him in a minute. Maybe come back and maybe not. He had to know she was all right, and so he’d do it. He listened to the surf. On the porch, luna moths big as English sparrows flung themselves crazily against the screen.

*   *   *

The noise of the chopper brought him out of bed fast, on the floor and poking into jeans before Jase and Panagopoulos made the stairs.

“It’s okay,” he told Jenny, “just stay inside and I’ll see.”

She nodded and looked scared, and he opened the screen door and went out. Dawn washed the sky the color of moss. Jase and Panagopoulos started talking both at once.

Then Mack saw the fire, the reflection past the house. “Oh, Jesus H. Christ!”

“Mack, he’s got pigs,” Panagopoulos said. “I seen ’em. Henry’s got pigs.”

“He’s got what?”

“This is bad shit,” Jase moaned, “this is really bad shit.”

Mack was down the stairs and past the house. He could see other people. He started running, Jase and Panagopoulos at his heels. The chopper was on the ground, and then Fleece came out of the crowd across the road.

“Henry ain’t hurt bad, I don’t think,” he told Mack.

“Henry’s hurt?” Mack was unnerved. “Who hurt him, Fleece? Is someone going to tell me something soon?”

“I figure that Chen likely done a house-to-house,” Fleece said, “some asshole trick like that. Come in north and worked down rousting people out for kicks. Stumbled on Henry; shit, I don’t know. Just get him out of there, Mack.”

Mack wanted to cry or throw up. He pushed through the crowd and saw Chen, maybe half a dozen soldiers, then Henry. Henry looked foolish, contrite, and slightly cockeyed. His hands were tied behind. Someone had hit him in the face. The rotors stirred waves of hot air. The diner went up like a box. Mack tried to look friendly. Chen lurched about yelling and waving his pistol, looking wild-eyed as a dog.

“Let’s work this out,” Mack said. “We ought to get this settled and go home.”

Chen shook his pistol at Mack, danced this way and that in an unfamiliar step. Mack decided he was high on the situation. He’d gotten hold of this and didn’t know where to take it, didn’t have the sense to know how to stop.

“We can call this off and you don’t have to worry about a thing,” Mack said, knowing Chen didn’t have the slightest notion what he was saying. “That okay with you? We just call it a night right now?”

Chen looked at him or somewhere else entirely. Mack wished he had shoes and a shirt. Dress seemed proper if you were talking to some clown with a gun. He was close enough to see the pigs. The crate was by the chopper. Two pigs, pink and fat, mottled like an old man’s hand. They were squealing and going crazy with the rotors and the fire and not helping Chen’s nerves or Mack’s either. Mack could just see Henry thinking this out, how he’d do it, fattening up the porkers somehow and thinking what everybody’d say when they saw it wasn’t a joke, not soyburger KC steak or chicken-fried fish-liver rice and chili peppers. Not seaweed coffee or maybe grasshopper creole crunch. None of that play-food shit they all pretended was something else, not this time, amigos, this time honest-to-God pig. Maybe the only pigs this side of Hunan, and only Henry Ortega and Jesus knew where he found them. Mack turned to Chen and gave his best mayoral smile.

“Why don’t we just forget the whole thing? Just pack up the pigs there and let Henry be. I’ll talk to Major Huang. I’ll square all this with the major. That’d be fine with you, now, wouldn’t it?”

Chen stopped waving the gun. He looked at Mack. Mack could see wires in his eyes. Chen spoke quickly over his shoulder. Two of the troopers lifted the pigs into the chopper.

“Now, that’s good,” Mack said. “That’s the thing you want to do.”

Chen walked off past Henry, his face hot as wax from the fire, moving toward the chopper in this jerky little two-step hop, eyes darting every way at once, granting Mack a lopsided half-wit grin that missed him by a good quarter mile. Mack let out a breath. He’d catch hell from Huang, but it was over. Over and done. He turned away, saw Rose in the crowd and then Fleece. Mack waved. Someone gave a quick and sudden cheer. Chen jerked up straight, just reacting to the sound, not thinking any at all, simply bringing the pistol up like the doctor hit a nerve, the gun making hardly any noise, the whole thing over in a blink and no time to stop it or bring it back. Henry blew over like a leaf, taking his time, collapsing with no skill or imagination, nothing like Anthony Quinn would play the scene.

“Oh, shit, now don’t do that.” Mack said, knowing this was clearly all a mistake. “Christ, you don’t want to do that!”

Someone threw a rock, maybe Jase. Troopers raised their rifles and backed off. A soldier near Chen pushed him roughly toward the chopper. Chen looked deflated. The rotors whined up and blew sand. Mack shut it out, turned it back. It was catching up faster than he liked. He wished Chen had forgotten to take the pigs. The thought seemed less than noble. He considered some gesture of defiance. Burn rice in Galveston harbor. They could all wear Washington masks. He knew what they’d do was nothing at all, and that was fine because Henry would get up in just a minute and they’d all go in the diner and have a laugh. Maybe Jase had another jar of wine. Mack was certain he could put this back together and make it right. He could do it. If he didn’t turn around and look at Henry, he could do it.…