THEY GRAB HER—Tanya, my fourteen year-old daughter—early in the afternoon from the sidewalk outside the north entrance to J. C. Penney’s at the Mimbres Valley Mall.
At that moment, I, her father, Lonnie Nees, am in my office in the county administration building, putting together the agenda items for the road department, in particular the details for abandoning a bladed road in southeast Luna County adjacent to Panky Scott’s O Bar O Ranch, so, of course, I don’t know that Tanya isn’t, as she told me before she left for school in the morning, at her friend’s house. “You can pick me up at Segen’s,” she said. Her mother, my ex-wife Ginny, thinks Tanya is at basketball practice, the JV team. In any event, neither of us knows that while I’m putting the polish on the wherefore’s and whereunto’s and Ginny is taking a nap to the sounds of One Life to Live, Tanya is being dragged into a late-model pickup in front of what Sheriff Milton will say are nearly fifty witnesses.
The call comes at four-thirty. From Milty himself. Here in Deming, New Mexico, no one is a stranger. You want to talk to the editor of the Headlight, you call up Dwight Eddy and say your say. Ditto with the fire chief, B. J. “Butch” Puntch. Our state representative, Monte Zamora, a Democrat, lives down the block from my office on Fir Street. Sylvia Chavez owns the El Corral Bar, Earl Spencer the Ford-Mercury dealership on Iron. Dr. Friedman will come to your house, night or day. Eight Thousand Smiling Faces, so says the billboard on I-10.
“You know anybody drives a dually—maybe a Chevy—red over white?” Milty asks. “Texas plates?”
Hereabouts, pickups are common as horseflies. I even have one, an F-150 I use to haul trash and the like out at my mother’s spread toward Hatchita.
“What’s up?” I ask.
Milty takes a second, too long for this call to be about an auction or the benefit rodeo. He’s polite, our sheriff, especially if your collar is white and you make a living, as I do, talking about writs of mumbo-jumbo and using your large legal genius to keep on the sunny side of Uncle Sam.
“We think it’s Tanya,” he says. “That’s what a couple of girls are telling us.”
Okay, I think. An accident.
“Is she all right?”
Milty clears his throat, another habit he has when hard words are to come next.
“She was kidnapped,” he says.
I have my pen out—a birthday present from Carly Barnes, my girlfriend—and, Christ, I have the k written down before my brain gets too big for my head.
“Lonnie, you there?”
I am here: rooted, it seems, stuck between standing and sitting, the air in my office suddenly too thick, me like a dog listening for thunder.
“How long ago?” I ask.
An hour, he says. Maybe longer. His people and the Deming PD are out the mall right now, interviewing witnesses.
“Give me five minutes,” I tell him.
Outside my office, my secretary, Margie, is telling her son-in-law over her phone that her plumber, Delton Shirley, still hasn’t covered the trench for her new septic system, a complaint she’s refined for a week.
“Meet me at your place in an hour,” Milty says. “You can’t do any good out here.”
That makes sense. I’m a practical man, few of my ideas ever half-baked. I brush my teeth three times a day, gargle with mouthwash, change my drawers in the morning—as ordinary a citizen as you can find in the funny pages. I, as my mother insisted, mind my p’s and q’s. “If X knows Y, and Z doesn’t,” my father used to say before his heart went “blooey” two years ago, “let X do his damn job.” Milton’s the sheriff: X. Lonnie Nees is a county manager, as at home with statue and regulation and such as is a tailor with needle and thread: Z.
“You tell Ginny yet?” I ask him.
Here’s that necessary second again, Milty—like too many of us men, I suspect—far more comfortable with what cusses and spits than with what only shakes its head and clucks its tongue.
“I thought I’d leave that to you,” he tells me.
He’s right, but for the next few minutes—time enough, anyway, to find my seat again and put my breathing in order—I don’t call. Instead, trying to put English to the thoughts I have, I listen to Margie chattering on about what a miserable, low-down skunk Delton Shirley is for not putting the cap on the clean-out and tearing up the chain-link fence so she has to keep Sugar, her spaniel, in the house all the durn time. And then, nothing new to learn about leach lines and the ethic of today’s workingman, I punch in Ginny’s number and tell myself that here isn’t Albuquerque or El Paso, or even Las Cruces. Here we just beat the stuffings out of each other and drive into a utility pole or take the ugly times out on a stop sign with a .22. This is Nowhere, New Mexico, folks, home of the duck races and five-acre “ranchettes” and a handful of families, mine among them, that pretty much own everything you can see from Devil Bill’s Texaco station all the way to Lordsburg in the west. But Ginny has come on the line, her new baby in the background fussing, and I find myself, as per usual with her, hoping for the roundabout way to get at what needs getting to.
“I knew you’d call,” she says.
She’s said something, but I can’t make heads or tails of it.
“I told you,” she’s saying, “Tanya can’t stay this weekend. Billy’s taking us to the dog races in Juarez.”
Billy—William Teaford—is her husband, the cowboy she left me for three years ago, and as good a guy as you could wish for your ex-wife. Good stepfather, too, to hear Tanya tell it. Generous. Always ready with a laugh.
“This is not about the weekend,” I tell her.
“What is it, then?” she says. “Little Billy has the colic or something, so I’m kind of pressed for time.”
We have an arrangement, Ginny and I. Though she has custody, Tanya stays with me Monday night through Friday morning because the Teafords—Billy’s a son in one of the five families—live forty miles south of town, too far for Tanya to participate in any extracurricular activities; Friday afternoon, Ginny picks her up after shopping and getting groceries, and that’s that until Monday when Tanya climbs in the front seat of my Suburban outside the ninth-grade wing of Deming High School. We’re civilized, we tell ourselves. Making the best out of times that once upon a time seemed only bad.
“It’s Tanya,” I say, a little louder than I’d planned.
“She sick?” Ginny asks. “She get hurt?”
I’m getting ready to tell her, but before I do, I have a moment with myself—just me and the sharp parts inside that have gone loose.
“She’s missing,” I say.
Ginny named her Tanya, said it was exotic, suggestive of times better and elsewhere—Shangri-la and the like, a picture-book paradise with soft breezes and homes with five bathrooms; not this hardscrabble desert and everything sad as dirt—said it gave her a place in the world that was already full of Ashleys and Mallorys and Kaylas. Me, I’d wanted a name with some history to it—Sally, say, or Virginia, aunts of mine I’m partial to.
“Outside the mall,” I tell her. “Milton called.”
The forty miles between our ears are hissing and crackling, time grinding like a flywheel, and I imagine Ginny putting my words in a pile, one atop another, until she’s got her breath back, her tongue ready to come out with it.
“You son of a bitch,” she says.
...
Tanya’s not really missing. I won’t learn this for a month. I won’t learn that she’s only run away, vanished herself, headed elsewhere in a cloud of dust. No, this news is coming, thirty days hence, me in the meantime jumpy and scared, the America outside my windows as remote and cruel as Mars. Instead, see me that afternoon, pulling into my driveway, Sheriff Milton already there, his car the biggest eyesore in the zip code.
“This hers?” he says, holding a Baggie with a flip-flop inside.
Who knows? I want to say. It’s a flip-flop, for crying out loud.
“What’s going on?” I ask, the simplest question on the planet.
He’s not sure, he says. Could’ve been wetbacks, cholos, anybody. Could’ve been the dually. Could’ve been a four-door Dodge, maybe a Ram. Hell, everybody’s got a different story. Some joker set off fireworks about the same time. Helen Harrison, from the Mode O’Day, thinks it was a flatbed with winch and a light bar. Two guys. Maybe a third driving. Older. Grown-ups. Went east on Country Club.
Milty’s put the Baggie back in his car, and we’re standing outside the gate to my yard, the sun beating down hard and nothing between us and the next thing to do but time and footsteps.
“I got to ask,” he says.
“What?”
Milty looks a lot like a Ben Franklin without all the bad habits, eyeglasses on the tip of his nose, his the rosy cheeks of the fat man he’s sure to become.
“Can I look at her room?”
Another bit of good sense, so a minute later we’re standing at the door to Tanya’s bedroom, little so far to say that life has now completely wobbled out of groove.
“Well kept,” he says, nodding.
He’s right: Bed’s made, drawers are closed, no clothes on the floor, her dresser organized. Daddy’s good girl.
“Mind if I look around?”
Hanging from one corner of the ceiling is a hammock filled with stuffed animals—a buffalo, a jackalope, a moose, a lizard, a bear the size of a steamer trunk that I got her on a trip to Yellowstone. “Consult the bear,” she used to say when a choice had to be made—green beans, say, or peas—her voice swami-like, her eyes rolling dreamily. Beneath her boombox are her CDs—Eight States Away, Savage Garden, Shudder to Think, Thrasher, groups that look angry and starved. Her TV has a tape in it—Moulin Rouge, I think, a longtime favorite—and hanging like bunting from one mirror are her ribbons for swimming, even a mini-marathon at Elephant Butte. Sure, I tell Milton. Look around.
“I’ll help,” I tell him.
Milton holds up a hand, a new being entirely.
“It’s official, Lonnie,” he says. “I’ve got to do this by the book.”
A book, I think. The book. The one with the whyfore’s and such. The book that says the loved one—the father, in this case—should wait in the living room, or the den, while the peace officer conducts his search. That book.
“You want something to drink?” I say. “Coke. Iced tea.”
“Just give me a few minutes, Lonnie,” he says.
In the kitchen, I help myself to a glass of water, attend to the scrapes and creaks that say Milton is opening drawers. Held on the fridge by a magnet is the roster for Tanya’s basketball squad, so I think, what the hell, and pick up the phone. A mistake’s been made, I’m telling myself. Not Tanya. Someone else.
I get Ruth Peterson, Sissy’s mother, on the second ring.
“I’m wondering if Tanya’s there,” I say. “Could you put her on, please?”
“Lonnie?”
Only this morning, the refrigerator was semi-interesting to read. Pictures of Carly and me in the swine barn at the county fair last autumn. A wallet-size of Tanya in her away uniform. Number 25. Her hair in a ponytail. A to-do list. Fix the water softener. Treat the brick in the sunroom. The toll-free number of the Pegasus satellite people.
“She’s not here, Lonnie.”
“Do you know—”
“Lonnie,” Ruth says, some steel in her voice. “She’s not welcome anymore. She was supposed to tell you.”
“Ruth, I—”
“You need to watch her, Lonnie. That’s all I’m going to say.”
Sissy, I’m thinking. A homely creature. A dinosaur’s wicked teeth. Hair like a tumbleweed. Tall, elbows like doorknobs—just the specimen of girlhood you need in the paint to clear a little landing area.
Nobody answers at the Sanders’ house, so, while Milty is banging around in Tanya’s room, I try Cassie Moore’s number, people I don’t know. Moved from California a year or so earlier. The father’s in real estate.
“Mrs. Moore?” I say to the woman who answers.
Her “hello” was cautious, wary, sixty percent We don’t want any.
“This is Lonnie Nees,” I say, “Tanya’s father.”
An ocean of silence, and for instant I wonder if there’s anyone at all her end of the line.
“I’m looking for Tanya,” I say. “We’ve got kind of an emergency.”
The Moore family’s big, I hear. Five kids, Cassie the oldest. A looker, so the gossip goes. Too full in the bosom for fourteen. Hell, too full in the bosom for forty.
“I haven’t seen her,” Mrs. Moore says, her tone ice and darkness.
“Maybe I could talk to Cassie,” I say. “Is she there?”
More silence, this downright toothy. And I find myself staring at the phone, half convinced I haven’t been speaking English, but a foreign tongue much burdened by x’s and m’s, the language of fits or permanent panic, what you see in the cartoons when life in 2-D gets runny at the edges, when faith gives way to gravity.
“Tanya’s off-limits,” Mrs. Moore is saying. “We don’t condone that kind of behavior, Mr. Nees. We’re Baptist people.”
Behavior—yet more vocabulary from the animal kingdom.
“Mrs. Moore,” I begin, “I—”
“Please don’t call again, Mr. Nees. Our Cassie has nothing to do with your Tanya.”
I’ll remember this exchange forever, as I will remember all that arises out of these events, me still unable to sort sense from silliness. I’ve got the phone in hand when I catch a glimpse of myself in the den mirror, a massive thing with an honest-to-goodness lariat as its frame next to my gun case. There’s Lonnie, I think. Square-shouldered, nose a little bent courtesy of Wildcat football (junior year). He’s going to seed in the gut, not the worst fate that can befall a man in middle age. He has an impressive loaf of hair, none of it gone gray, and eyes that say he’s stepped through a seam into a world cockeyed and tumbledown, this day the wrong day for folks with money in the bank and diplomas on the wall at work.
Which is when Milton appears in the doorway, a metal box in hand.
“Does Tanya do drugs?” he asks. “Marijuana, pills—that sort of thing?”
Tylenol, I’m thinking. She wouldn’t swallow Tylenol until the fourth grade.
“Found this in the closet, hidden behind some shoe boxes.”
He’s holding the thing as if it were a bomb, which I suppose it more or less is, big as a cash box you’d buy at Staples.
“She hates smoking,” I tell him. “Made me quit before we went to Yellowstone that summer.”
“Look inside,” he says, the top now back on its hinge.
Here’s something else to remember: the father approaching, the news clearly bad, time seizing up, the outside turning black as coal, the links and straps of him letting go, his heartbeat the only sound for miles.
“I believe that’s crank, Lonnie. Crystal meth.”
She’s in a street gang. Vatos Locos. She’s a Pee Wee, well down the ladder from the O.G. There’s an affiliation with the Insane Pope Nation. She hangs with Queen Lefty, Mopi, Molla, Cuzz 211—Shorty Folks with a desire to go Lil AK. They squawb and tag and pretend to front for the Anglo Queens. She speaks punk and Aramaic and voodoo and all else foreign to the round world of God-fearing Christians. There’s no JV basketball. No “gee” and “golly” and “tee-hee-hee.” Instead, it’s piercing and doo-rags and low-riders, children with nothing between their ears but fear and woe.
I learn these facts over the next few days, Sheriff Milton appearing in my office doorway or on my porch. The third morning, he puts his Stetson on the corner of my desk and says, “I’ve got something to show you.”
I drop the paperwork I really haven’t been reading and give Milty the once-over.
“How long have I known you?” I ask.
He gets which-away in the eyes and looks briefly over his shoulder—maybe for the bogeyman.
“Hell, Lonnie, we go back to grade school. I don’t remember ever not knowing you.”
True. We go back to the Alameda Falcons, back to freeze-tag with Kay Stevenson and Michelle Parker and the Newell brothers, back to swimming the flooms and racing ATVs over Jimmy Bullard’s lettuce field, back to the time when days were only and always twenty-four hours long and the sun—always yellow, always hot—rose routinely in the east.
“You like this, don’t you?”
“Lonnie, what’re you talking about?”
“The action,” I say, meaning to include in my tone all of America that can hear me. “Getting on the radio, talking the cop talk, turning on the siren, ten-four and Roger that.”
He’s got his hat in hand again, giving it a thorough look-see.
“Hear me out,” I tell him. “This is my daughter we’re talking about. This is not a case, a fucking investigation. We’re people you know. You’ve eaten barbecue in my backyard. We fucking play golf together. Jesus H. Christ.”
He doesn’t know what I’m hollering about and, truth to tell, neither do I. I sit in the office and try to appear busy, my inside absolutely unrelated to my out. I read the paper but have no idea what those marks on the pages mean. I drive my car, uncertain about I how I get from hither to yon. I eat what’s set before me. I doze in front of the TV and wake to find myself still stupid, still fond of us at our best.
“Sorry,” I tell him. “I’m not thinking straight.”
You can see him get his corners tight, the hat back on my desk.
“I have some pictures,” he says. “We opened her locker at school.”
For the first time, I notice an envelope next to the hat.
“They’re pretty rough,” he says. “Just wanted to warn you.”
While he closes the door—no more complaints today from Margie about Delton Shirley or his common kind—I consider the envelope, standard issue interoffice.
“Put these on,” he says, handing me a pair of latex gloves.
He’s shaking a bit when he takes out the pictures, Polaroids, more than a handful in an evidence bag. Sheriff Barry Milton, I think. Milty. Just the sort of stick-’em-in-the-eye, clean-shaven meat-eater you want around when there’s a warning to heed.
“Take your time,” he says.
The first is of five girls—early teens, I’m guessing—all in ordinary school clothes, shirts too tight, pants their mothers couldn’t wear. In the middle stands Tanya, scowling like the others, all throwing the finger. One has the bored expression of a viper. They look sore-minded, defiant, girls bidding adios to high heaven.
“You recognize any of them?”
Not a one, I tell him. They’re aliens, witches.
“Keep looking,” he says.
In the next, they’ve taken off their shirts. They’re wearing brassieres, fancy colors for modern times, their bodies still ten percent baby fat, five girls in thrall to the same simple idea.
“I didn’t realize she was so big,” I say. “Tanya. Her breasts.”
Milty shrugs, clearly embarrassed as much for himself as for me.
In the third, they’ve dropped their pants, the five of them in their underclothes, panties from the hard-breathing pages of the catalogue.
“Who’s this?” I say, pointing to an arm—the photographer’s, I assume—in the lower left corner of the photo. On the back of the hand is a tattoo, what looks like a stylized unicorn with bat wings, a Technicolor nightmare from a comic book evil genius.
“We think it’s a guy calls himself Trey Dog. Real name Douglas Posey. He’s a punk, runs with a gang called the 8th Street Bombers. Dropped out after the ninth grade. In and out of the juvenile system pretty regularly. Mainly first- and second-degree misdemeanors, but we think he boosts cars for the Rolling 60s out of Tucson.”
“You interview him?”
He nods. “Claims he was at his mother’s, babysitting some nephews.”
Oddly, I think of Ginny, the way she can whistle loud enough to get the attention of most of West Texas.
“Why am I looking at these, Milty?”
Maybe something will ring a bell, he says. You never know.
And maybe it’s all a mistake, a practical joke gone haywire, every roof beam of the planet now snapping free. Or maybe it’s the right time to see the creatures we are, to reckon with the sorrowful and crooked kind you’ve raised, to throw back the lid and consider, moiling before you, the motes and mites my old man said we are.
“You’re strong,” Carly told me last night.
She’s a sizable piece of work, a former Miss New Mexico Rodeo in the late seventies, but at that moment—her at the stove, me at the breakfast table—she seemed tiny, less of what more had once been.
“Say it,” she told me. “Say, ‘I’m strong.’”
I beheld her, Carly Louise Barnes, orthodontist: hair from a fairy tale, teeth out of Hollywood, a laugh that can move furniture.
“I’m strong,” I said, yet more chatter from Mars.
Now I’m holding the fifth photograph. The girls, Tanya in the center, have turned their backs to the camera, their rear ends thrust out. Cheesecake, is all. A harmless two-page spread from my old man’s Swank or Playboy magazines—another instance of what the tribe is thought to pant for.
“Nothing,” I tell Milty.
In the next, they’ve unclasped their bras, their backs still to the camera. Muscles, I notice, skin the many hues we white ones come in. They’re coquettes, vamps, so grown-up they’re strangers. One looks like she’s sucking on a jawbreaker.
“It gets worse,” Milty says, taking no pleasure at all in the fact.
The panties vanish next, five asses from dreamland. They’ll turn, I am thinking, and in the next one they have, their bellies flat, Tanya clearly proud of how much she’s left behind, none of them with pubic hair, all bald as their first birthday.
“It’s an initiation,” Milty tells me. “A ritual, we’re guessing.”
Like church, I think. Like varsity football. Like pledging Greek. Take off your clothes, show the outsiders your goodies. Amen.
At last, then, we’ve come to the picture Lonnie Nees has not lived enough life to see: Tanya alone, evidently on her knees, her head back, her frizzy hair pulled away from her face, eyes wide open, mouth set straight as a ruler.
“What’s that on her face?” I ask.
Later, I will tell Carly, her own face turning stony, her eyes glassy and flat, the air between us dry as ash.
“Ejaculate,” Milty says, a catch in his throat. “It’s semen.”
“She’s lazy,” I tell Carly that evening.
We’re on the porch, cocktails in hand, most of New Mexico to the east a cheap shade of purple. In Carly’s lap are the Yellow Pages, another night of takeout.
“Ginny cuts her goddamn food for her,” I say. “Peels her banana. Jesus.”
“Don’t,” says Carly.
“Watches TV all the damn time. Takes a half-hour shower. Christ, I’ve never seen her read anything that wasn’t a school assignment.”
Carly closes the phone book, stage business meant to dramatize her impatience with me.
“What’s your point, Lonnie?”
I don’t have a point. I have facts. The height and weight of us. Our odd and low needs. Tanya Virginia Nees. Libra. Southpaw. Brown eyes. Braces once upon a time. Can’t sing worth a hoot.
“Chinese or pizza?” Carly asks.
I swallow a drink, high-dollar bourbon that’s not nearly potent enough.
“You wouldn’t think she’d have the imagination to be a punk,” I tell Carly. “How can you be a bad ass if your mother still cuts your meat for you?”
A minute passes, arctic and miserable. To the south a coyote barks—not with enthusiasm, I think—and more night descends upon us, another terrible morning only hours away.
“I’m going home,” Carly says. “You’re not fit company.” An hour later, I’m in the kitchen when the phone rings, a huge sound in an otherwise diminished world.
“Carly?” I say, me ready with an apology, but in return only come the hiss and ticks of an open line, your county manager connected to outer space.
On the counter sits the bids for the elevator retrofit at the courthouse, numbers and words I haven’t the sobriety to comprehend.
“Hello?” I say again.
The silence has heft and hue and heat.
“Tanya?” I say, now on the tottery side of fear.
I hear it then: breathing, deep and steady, what the perky heroine puzzles over before the front door busts open and the psychopath charges in with the miner’s pick.
“Lonnie Nees?” a man says.
“Who is this?”
Shortly, when I am shooting my .22 at the hay bales stacked between T-posts next to the pump house, I will congratulate myself for my calm, my cool—for not losing my temper with the owner of a voice that is as much sand as sound.
“She’s gone,” the man is saying.
“Who are you?”
Laughter now—faint and fading—the chuckle of the hombre who holds the deed to dreamland.
“Posey?”
But the call has ended, me with a million more questions to ask. I hit 69, the callback function, but all I get is a handful of rings, and a handful more. I punch it again, and again, until, the inside of me filled with ice and echoes, I find myself at the gun cabinet, replica six-shooter in hand. And then I’ve scrambled outside, bourbon for company, and I’m plugging away at hay bales I have no other use for—just me, Jim Beam, and the Man in the Moon.
Not a minute later, Ginny Teaford, ex-wife, appears on the ditch road you take to my house, her Explorer raising considerable dust in the starlight, and I spend some quality time with my hands and feet until she brakes to a stop a couple of giant steps away.
“Billy the Kid,” she says through the open window.
I doff an imaginary ten-gallon. “At your service, little lady.”
She eyes me hard, as if I’m a stain that won’t wash out.
“You’re drunk,” she declares.
I look around, take in the far and near. “I’m trying,” I say.
Here she gets out of the car, shakes her head—a real production.
“What’re you doing in town?” I ask.
Her face tightens, and for a second I think she might smack me.
“How about a drink?” she asks.
I hold out the bottle, neighborly and generous.
“On ice,” she says. “In a glass. Civilized, Lonnie. Let’s go in the house.”
Is it here where I tell you that, not three civilized drinks from now, we’ll be having sex? Yes: Wrong as God on horseback, we, Billy the Kid and the little lady, will be mostly naked on a bed big enough for a stage show and that not a word will be spoken, nothing but rutting sounds forthcoming, us but friction and flesh, the two of us having gone mean and wicked against each other.
“You haven’t decorated much,” she says when we sit in the living room.
“Not much to decorate with,” I say.
We’re going to fight, I think. A storybook shouting match, the sort we had so surprisingly little of when the end was finally upon us.
“How’s Carly?” she says.
I make a wave that indicates Dr. Barnes is fine.
“Where’s the baby?” I ask.
Her mother’s, she says. “I’m in town for a few days, maybe a week.”
“And Billy?”
We’ve arrived at a fork in the road. One way leads to a cave where the monsters roar, the other to a version of this room, in easy chairs an old couple with one last complaint to register. In any event, this is the end of what the weepy call high tide and green grass.
“Billy thinks I’m fat,” she announces.
Even with all the hooch, I’m smart enough to keep my trap shut.
“I nag, he says. Fuss at him.”
In the half-light she looks tired, as if she’s run all the way here, and a part of me remembers why I fell in love with her back in the Dark Ages.
“You should go home, Ginny.”
She gives me that high-handed look again: I’m an interesting smudge she’s found on the tip of her boot.
“And you should pour me another drink, Lonnie Nees.”
The wind is up now, acres of Arizona blowing our way, time getting gooey at the edges.
“One more,” I tell her. “Then you go home.”
But, of course, she won’t, a certainty I don’t grasp until, standing at the bar, my thoughts going whichaway in a whirl, she tells me to close my eyes, turn around.
“Ginny,” I begin, helpless to know what to say next.
“Just do it,” she says. “Just do this one thing.”
So I, eyes closed, turn, me the most obedient being in the desert.
“We had it good, didn’t we, Lonnie? We had the best, you and me. You made me laugh. You made me feel smart.”
Hers is the voice from yesteryear, all the age out of it, all the bite gone.
“Open your eyes,” she says.
She’s got her shirt off, an honest-to-goodness western affair with yoke and mother-of-pearl snaps. Her jeans are on the back of the easy chair by the fireplace. Except for her underclothes, she is white as light itself.
“Say ‘yes,’ Lonnie.”
It’s not a word I know, and then, because this is Oz and Wonderland and Atlantis and that parallel universe the eggheads yack about, it is the only word I know, and I am following her toward the bedroom where, as driven by grief and fear and helplessness as I, she will, grabbing me by the belt, ask, “Why didn’t we know, Lonnie? About Tanya.”
To which question I will have no answer. Except rage.
Midmorning the next day, Milty calls, tells me to come out to the county dump.
“You found something,” I say.
Just come, he tells me. He doesn’t want to talk about it over the phone.
At her desk, Margie my secretary is on the phone herself. “Delton Shirley,” she mouths. “The bum.”
I take the phone from her, wind myself up.
“Mr. Shirley,” I begin, mine the voice you hear from the Republican Party when there’s a war to fight.
I ask him if he likes working for the county on occasion, to which question he says, sure, why not, the checks don’t bounce, so I tell him about the “exceptions and exclusions” clause in the county charter, which information gives him pause, and I can picture him scratching his noggin, eyes crinkled with suspicion, trying to figure out which field I’m coming from.
“It’s a great day,” I tell him. “No clouds, no wind. Couldn’t be any better.”
“Where’s this going, Mr. Nees?”
To Margie’s house, I tell him. A fence needs mending, the clean-out needs a cap.
“This ain’t right,” he grumbles, which sentiment I agree with, but, hey, what can a body do, county has good work for good workers, not fellows who can’t seem to get themselves motivated, certainly not for folks who say one thing and do another.
“You understand me, Mr. Shirley?”
This is prejudice, he informs me. Outright discrimination.
“Have a nice day, Delton.”
I hand Margie the phone, me the newest version of the Big Bad Wolf.
“Call the courthouse,” I tell her. “I want the property records for people named Posey—addresses, taxes, the whole thing.”
On the way out to the dump, I catch a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror: Mine is the smile of a man who’s not smiling, me your dandy hero with the heart of coal. Still, I’m right about the day: The wind coming out of the south is cool, something in Mexico gone to ice. Scattered clouds: September as imagined by a Mr. Rogers on a toot.
At the gate, Milty has posted a deputy, who flags me down, gets in the car.
“Take a right beyond the appliances.” He’s pointing to rank after rank of dryers and stoves and refrigerators, durable goods that will take centuries to rust. Maybe a quarter mile on, Milty’s leaning against his car, the light bar flashing, more than a dozen of his deputies walking in line away from him toward the bypass. Not too far away a front-end loader idles, the driver one of my guys from the road department, while yonder a couple of bulldozers are burying what Deming threw away yesterday.
“We got a backpack and some clothing,” he says, leading me toward a pit the size of the municipal swimming pool on Birch Street.
“You hurt me,” Ginny said last night, only a minute or two before she left.
She was standing by the end of the bed, mostly dressed, showing me the bruises on her forearms.
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what happened.”
She was still for a second, little in her face to suggest she knew me at all.
“Get him, Lonnie,” she said. “Get the bastard who took our Tanya.”
Yes, I was thinking. That terrible word again.
Then she was at the dresser, my six-shooter in hand.
“Whoever he is, you find him,” she said, “and you shoot him a hundred times.”
Now I’m side by side with Milty, police tape between us and what might be the place Tanya turns up.
“The state patrol is bringing a cadaver dog,” Milty is explaining. “Meanwhile, my people are poking around. We have no idea when the dozers were in this area.”
I have nothing to say, nor anything to say it with. I’m just the parts God left behind, more mud than mind, a mummy but for the coat and tie and cell phone.
“You recognize this?”
He has a paper bag—Safeway, of all things—and he’s spilled its contents on the hood of his cruiser, spreads the stuff out as if it’s closing time at the flea market and he’s got some slightly worn items he can make me a really good deal on. A backpack. A T-shirt that says TUFF GRRRL. A pair of denim shorts frayed at the legs. A hair scrunchy. A textbook, Patterns for a Purpose, that looks like it’s been abused by every freshman in the Western Hemisphere. A pair of Adidas sneakers sizable enough for the Hulk.
“Doesn’t look familiar,” I tell Milty.
Milty seems to chew this over, his the expression of an accountant finally coming to the end of a foolishly long number.
“We talked to some kids at school,” Milty says. “They remember the T-shirt, but hell, nobody knows for sure.”
“We’re at a dead end, right?”
He nods, obviously offended by how this corner of the republic has turned out.
“I thought we might catch a break from the security cameras at the mall,” he says. “But the one outside Penney’s was on the fritz.”
“The feds?”
He shrugs, tilts his Stetson back a mite. “I called Fred Beeker, the special agent in Cruces, but he says his hands are tied. No actual evidence of a snatch. No evidence that she’s crossed state lines. Just a lot of what-if’s and maybe’s.”
I’m thinking of Ginny, her bucking beneath me last night, the pair of us dropped from the sky, and how later, composed as a nun, she walked from the dresser to the bed, gave me a granny’s kiss on the forehead, and put the six-shooter on the sheet across my lap, the thing heavy as a clothes iron. “Shoot him dead,” she whispered. “Shoot him, shoot him, shoot him.”
“Tanya’s a runaway,” I tell Milty, now certain of it myself.
Our sheriff gives me the look he probably reserves for UFOs.
“I got a call,” I tell him, the particulars of which need only a single deep breath.
“Caller ID?”
Nothing, I say. Just yours truly and Mr. Sandman.
“Could be a prank,” he suggests, the hopeful half of me eager to agree with him.
“Could be,” I say.
And that’s the way we leave it—two yahoos from the Elks Club leaning against the fender of a Ford Crown Victoria, a line of lawmen meandering its way across a moonscape of disposable diapers and bed frames and buckets and tin cans, at our feet a crater at the bottom of which might lie anything you had fear enough to imagine.
“Stopping power,” the kid says, the phrase clearly as suspicious as poetry.
“It’s from law enforcement,” I tell him, and thereafter we exchange the looks you see on people who’ve come a long way and realize they have a long way yet to go.
I’ve been thinking about this moment—the pace and texture of it, its shape and shine—since I left the dump and while I was briefly home. I’ve been wondering what’s going to happen. And if whatever’s going to happen will happen enough. I am two, it seems: a man watching a father about to deliver a boy to Kingdom Come.
“It’s having the power,” I tell him, “to kill or maim a man—stop him—before he kills or maims you or hurts someone you love.”
He nods, this a concept he’s evidently familiar with.
“You bring a slingshot,” I tell him, “I bring a crossbow. You bring a hammer, I bring a howitzer.”
“This going somewhere?” he asks, not a squeak in his voice—a kid named Trey Dog being tough for the chump in the Suburban.
“This is what I’m bringing,” I say, and hold up my replica single-action revolver, a Ruger .45 Vaquero with a hog-wallow sight and rosewood grips, a weapon as wicked as it is heavy, what muscle can make given an understanding of our kind’s lower needs.
He nods again, still another fact of life he knows the up and down of.
“My ex-wife gave this to me years ago,” I tell him, me keeping the squeak out of my voice now. “You know the Wild West Shootout and Barbecue at the Fairgrounds every July?”
He does.
“I’m in the posse that chases down the outlaws.”
As I talk, I am not seeing anything but him—not the no-account house with the chain-link fencing that, according to Margie and the tax assessor of Luna County, belongs to one Elena Gomez Posey, probably his mother; not the kid, a toddler in diapers wrestling a Big Wheels across the lawn behind him, maybe one of the nephews Milty told me about; not the car on blocks, an ancient Dodge, in the driveway; not the windows covered in tinfoil, not the beat-up lawn furniture, not flower pots on the front steps—just him: Douglas, skin and bones in baggy shorts and a wife-beater T-shirt, a slump-shouldered ectomorph even Gandhi might want to kick around for an hour. And I’m seeing Tanya on her knees in front of him, the world a place thereafter in which you are obligated to find the time to make time stop.
“We’re just a bunch of college kids and businessmen and cowboys having fun,” I tell him. “Three times an evening for four days, we’re riding horses and dying like you see in the movies—lots of grunting and moaning and staggering and whooping and falling down. You ever go?”
He takes a second to say no, him looking hard at me, too.
“We use blanks for the playacting,” I say, “but today I’m using CCI Blazer Brass 230-grain TMJ. It’s good for snakes. Coyotes. Assholes who want to break in your house and hurt you.”
I’ve come to end of my speech, and he seems ready to begin his.
“Bito,” he says, “go inside.”
The toddler, dark-eyed and already tending toward fatso, gives Posey the “huh” look, me another, shrugs dramatically enough to suggest he, too, might have had a speech to make, and starts toward the front door, Big Wheels dragging behind. Everything is happening in slow motion—the weather, the words, the turn of the planet.
“It’s short for Alberto,” Posey says to me, one guy chatting with another on a street corner. “On my mother’s side, we’re Mex.”
It almost happens here, that part of the drama Ginny wanted. In fact, for a moment I think it has—the boom, impossibly big, and the bad guy flying backward onto a plastic patio table, the good guy with nothing else to do but chew gum and put his heart away. But nothing’s happened, and we are who we used to be before there were devils and dragons loose in the land.
“Where is she?” I ask.
He considers his hands, the marvels they appear to be. “Who?”
“Tanya,” I say.
He’s smiling. Evidently, I’ve said something that’s amused him.
“T-girl,” he says. “Nice piece, that one.”
Here’s the second time it almost happens—the noise God makes when He smites, the big become small and the wrong made everlastingly right—but I am not the person I was only a moment ago. I am not this flesh. Not this tongue. Not this finger on the trigger.
“I ain’t seen her in a couple of months,” Posey is saying. “She a friend to you, too?”
I can’t wait to tell Carly about this instant. It’s like discovering you have a tail or that you can bend flatware with your mind.
“I’m her father,” I tell him.
He shrugs, body language he’s obviously learned from Bito. “Sorry, mister, I don’t see no resemblance.”
An hour ago, I was sitting on Tanya’s bed, her huge teddy bear in my hands. I was telling myself the hopeful things you tell yourself when hope is the last thing you have. And then I had opened the back of the bear, the modern world soon to be another fact hard to argue with. Inside were bank receipts, dozens of them, for an account in the name of Tanya Nees. Deposits. Then a withdrawal—over six thousand dollars—six weeks earlier. T-girl before she vanished.
“You know where she went?” I ask Posey.
“Last I heard, L.A.,” he says. “Maybe San Diego. Can’t say, really.”
And here, at last, is the last time it can happen. I consider my revolver, its weight and the magic it can be made to make. I can do this, I tell myself. I have the skill, the steady hand. I take the breath I need. I have made peace with the clouds that bear witness. The trees are telling me to do this. The grass is telling me. And then Sheriff Milton, having made his way from the cruiser parked behind me, is telling me not to.
“Margie,” I say, two and two making four.
“She was worried,” Milty says, as much friend as lawman. “Said you sounded weird.”
The trees aren’t talking to me anymore.
“It’s over, Lonnie.”
And it is: Nothing is new or different between my ears except the whole world.
“Posey,” Milton says to the kid, “go inside.”
The kid gives me the bored, flat look of a snake—the trees aren’t talking to him, either—before he turns toward his door.
“Give me the gun, Lonnie.”
At his door, Posey gives me a wave and a grin, another monster to share the twenty-first century with.
“I could’ve done it, Milty.”
“And then what?” he says.
It’s a good question, one I ask myself after I’ve given him the revolver, one I ask when I pull away from the curb, one I’ll ask Ginny someday, one I might ask Tanya if she ever comes back from whatever L.A. is, a question I hope Carly has the answer to.