“I know where there’s a jenny barn.”
“A what?” I said.
“In Kentucky that’s what we call a whorehouse. In this particular one, the señoritas sing in your ear if you tip them.”
I nodded and turned on the radio. Someone had broken off the aerial. I clicked off the radio, my gaze straight ahead. The slopes of the mountains were deep in shadow now, the smell of the sage as dense as perfume.
“Silence is rude, Aaron,” Spud said. “Actually, an act of aggression.”
“In what way?”
“It’s like telling people they’ve done something wrong. Or they’re stupid and not worth talking to.”
“You’re a good fellow, Spud.”
He squeezed his package as though he were in pain. “I guess I’ll have to get married again. My last wife hit me upside the head with a skillet and threw me down a fire escape. She was the only one who loved me. My other two were meaner than a bucket of goat piss on a radiator.”
Cotton had unrolled his sleeping bag between two stacks of tomato crates and was reading a Classics Illustrated comic book, his head propped up on a pillow that had no cover on it. His hair was silver and grew to his shoulders, his left eye as white and slick as the skin on a hard-boiled egg. He said during the liberation of Rome, he chased Waffen-SS miles through the catacombs to a chamber under the Vatican Obelisk. There were three levels in the catacombs, and the third level, where the SS had fled, was full of water that had been dripping there for almost two thousand years. He said he had a grease gun and killed every SS in the chamber, the same one where the bones and dust of Saint Paul and Saint Peter lay inside two stone coffins.
Spud saw me looking at Cotton in the rearview mirror. “You believe that war story of his?”
“About the Nazis in the catacombs?”
“Wherever.”
“Yeah, I believe him,” I said.
“How come you’re so certain?”
“Because Cotton doesn’t care what people think of him one way or another.”
“Did you really study journalism at the University of Missouri?”
“Yep.”
“Why are you doing this shit?”
“It’s a good life.”
He looked at the countryside flying by the window. “I know what you mean. I love slopping pigs and milking cows before breakfast, and chopping cotton from cain’t-see to cain’t-see. You’re a laugh riot, Aaron.”
Chapter Two
WE UNLOADED AT a packing house by the tracks outside Trinidad, then blew a tire and decided to stay over, with Mr. Lowry’s permission. Not many growers were farming tomatoes anymore, but Mr. Lowry took pride in his produce and yearly rotated his acreage and plowed it with compost and cow manure, and every five years brought in a refrigerated load of waste from a fish cannery on the Texas coast. Afterward, the birds picked his fields like seagulls, and sometimes bears came down from the mountains and tore up the rows, but Mr. Lowry’s sliced tomatoes were the fattest in the area and bled like beefsteak.
When we pulled in at the motel, the sun was a spark in the crevice of two mountains, the shadows as long and purple as a bruise. “I’d like to go on a field trip tonight,” Spud said.
“This truck is not going to a hot-pillow joint,” I said.
“What about you, Cotton?” he said.
“What about me?” Cotton said.
“What’s your vote?” Spud asked. “You can just sit in the living room if you like. Or—”
“You’re always borrowing trouble, Spud,” Cotton replied.
The motel we used in Trinidad was clean and cheap and attached to a restaurant with neon cactuses and sombreros and Mexican beer signs scrolled in the windows. The mountains around Trinidad were the deep metallic blue of a razor blade, and seemed to rise straight and flat-sided into the clouds. The wind was balmy from the layer of warm air that lifted at sunset from the plateau at the bottom of Ratón Pass. Trinidad was a magical city in those days, full of brick streets that climbed into the hills and nineteenth-century saloons where Doc Holliday and the Earps probably drank and slept during the 1880s when they were wiping out the remnants of the Clanton gang.