Another Kind of Eden (Holland Family Saga 3)

I looked across the street at the pawn store. “What have you got in the way of sidearms?”

He wiped at his eyes. “You’re serious?”

“I can go thirty-five dollars for a quality piece.”

His eyes held mine. The humor had gone out of his face. “You want a gun for personal protection?”

“Maybe.”

“Follow me. Watch the traffic. People tend to run the light.”

Five minutes later, he placed four pistols on the glass top of his display counter. I picked up a .38 snub-nose Police Special and released the cylinder and rotated it and looked through the barrel, then snipped the cylinder back into the frame. The bluing was worn, the wood grips grainy and dark with oil, but there was no pitting inside the barrel, and the cylinder locked solidly in place when I cocked the hammer.

“How much?” I said.

“I need to get fifty on it.”

“Thirty-five is all I can afford.”

He fed a stick of gum into his mouth and shook his head. “Cain’t do it.”

“Forty for the gun and a box of shells.”

He smacked his gum, his eyes on mine. “You look like you walked into a window fan.”

“So?”

“You scare me. You fixing to do some payback?”

“I got a rodent problem.”

He started to drag the revolver off the counter.

“There are people out there who’d like to put me in a box,” I said.

“Son, I don’t know who you are, but you sure know how to put a blister on a man’s conscience.”

* * *

I DROVE TO JO Anne’s house, but she wasn’t home. I put one hundred dollars and a note in an envelope and slid it under the door. The note read: I hope this will tide you over. I bought clothes and a toothbrush and toothpaste and a razor and checked in to a motel at the top of Ratón Pass. I peeled back the covers on the bed and lay facedown without undressing and fell instantly asleep, one arm touching the floor, one hand clutching the .38 Special under a pillow, each chamber loaded with a hollow-point.

I never liked sleep. It took me to too many bad places. Late at night, my parents fought when my father came home from the icehouse, feeling his way along the wall to their bedroom door, which my mother kept closed when he was drinking. Their words were muffled, like shards of anger rising and falling inside a pool of dark water. After I grew older and lost my best friend, Saber Bledsoe, at Pork Chop Hill and my father in a car accident, I knew that sleep would always be my enemy, forcing me to look at images that may have been dreams or, chillingly, replications of real events that took place during one of my blackouts.

I mentioned earlier that they were not chemically induced. Sometimes during a blackout, I got my hands on alcohol and went genuinely insane, shouting at people in the street, once getting into it with Green Berets in a Lake Charles roadhouse, once fighting with cops. In the aftermath, I would be terrified at the fate I could have suffered. My darkest hours came when I was in a deep sleep and a motion picture projector clicked on and lit up a screen inside my head I couldn’t flee.

The worst images on that screen showed Saber on a godforsaken hillside in July ’53 writhing inside a burst from a Chinese flamethrower, his mouth wide, as though he were calling out to me, his arms extended, begging me to take him home.

* * *

I SHOWERED AND SHAVED and called Jo Anne in the morning. “Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” she replied.

“Can you have breakfast with me?”

“I have to look for a job. I won’t be able to get compo.”

“Compo?” I repeated.