“Which guys?”
“The ones in the Studie.”
He stabbed at his milkshake with his straws.
“Did they boost it?” I asked.
“Who’s going to boost a Studie?”
“Somebody who knows they’re already collectibles.”
He glanced at the parking lot, then back at me. I thought he might say something indicating the old Saber was still with me. Come on, Sabe. Two or three words. Or just one.
But the only sound I heard was the comic book pages rippling. I looked through the window at the two Mexicans. They were relaxing, the seats pushed back, their eyes closed. They had unbuttoned their shirts, exposing the hair and ink on their chests. For just a moment I hated them, or at least I hated what they represented.
“Why do you have that look on your face?” Saber asked.
“They’re drug pushers,” I said. “They’re worse than pimps. They betray their own people.”
“Who’s worse? Guys born in a bean field who get called pepper-bellies and spics all their lives, or a ball of shit like that detective who tried to frame us?”
“Why did Krauser want to believe you and I broke into his house?”
“When we have some free time, we can dig him up and ask.”
I got up from the booth. “I’ll see you, Sabe.”
“Aaron?” he said.
He took a long, dry drag off the dregs of his milkshake. I was smiling at him. Say it, Sabe. Be the innocent kid you are. Be my old-time bud.
“I lost my virginity in Reynosa,” he said. “Outlawry has got its upside. The downside is I probably picked up a nail. Krauser was a prick. I hope the devil throws him a beer once in a while.”
He grinned as though he had neutralized the enormous gulf that lay between us.
On the way out of the drugstore, I bought a Captain Marvel comic book so I could pretend to read it and not acknowledge the Mexicans who had been our cellmates. I heard one of them sink an opener into a beer can, then smelled the beer spraying in the air and splattering on the asphalt. When I looked back, both of them were laughing and wiping beer out of their hair, indifferent to the family people wheeling grocery baskets through the parking lot.
I started my engine and headed for Loren Nichols’s house.
AS SABER WOULD have said, I was back in Indian country, more specifically in Loren’s two-track dirt driveway, next to his termite-eaten, two-story nineteenth-century house sitting on cinder blocks. The old woman with the maniacal glare was sitting in her rocking chair, her hair tangled like wire. I got out of the car. “Is Loren home, ma’am?”
She made no reply. Her body was withered, her dugs exposed, her hands little more than bird claws.
“I’m back here, if you want to talk to me,” a voice said.
Loren was standing in the doorway of a paintless garage, bare-chested, a screwdriver in his hand. The woman took no notice of him. I didn’t know if her face was twisted in fear or silent rage. But I didn’t want to be rude and walk away from her. “Thank you, ma’am,” I said. “There’s Loren now. It was nice meeting you.”
Why did she bother me so? Because I had seen the same look in my mother’s eyes, no different in portent than a cave filled with startled bats. I walked to the garage. “Is that your grandmother?” I asked Loren.
“That’s my mother.”
“Sorry. Is your dad here?”
“What’s it to you?”
“I don’t know. I just asked. I wasn’t thinking.”
“He’s in Huntsville.”