“I don’t have much time, Saber. Are you in or out?”
“I just need something cold to drink. How you like the old man’s truck? He got a job delivering pipe in the oil field. I’ll be right back.”
Saber walked into the house, his ribs and spine printed like sticks against his skin. Through the front window, I saw him talking with his father, gesturing. He came back out with two sweating bottles of RC Cola. He sat down against the truck tire, one leg stretched out. “So run that by me again.”
“You always said you were backing my action.”
“I meant it, too,” he said, looking straight ahead. “I just don’t know what the action is.”
“I’m going to make them hurt me or leave me and my parents alone.”
“Back off and take a second look at what you just said.”
I sat down next to him. I didn’t drink from the bottle. “I need your help, Saber.”
“The old man hasn’t touched the sauce in four days. I’ve been racking pipe for him and riding shotgun and such. We might have to go to Beaumont tonight.”
He waited for me to speak, to tell him that I didn’t need him, that I was wrongheaded, that it was okay for him to cut me loose and let me down.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Could I have those two Molotov cocktails that were rolling around in your backseat?”
“Come on, what do you want those for?”
“I’ll find a reason.”
“Come on,” he repeated.
“Will you give them to me or not?”
He looked away. “They’re not real.”
“What?”
“They’re full of water. They were just for show.”
I could hear the chimes of the Popsicle truck at the end of the street. Children were running from their houses with the nickel or dime their parents had given them.
“Forget it,” I said, resting my cola on the grass. “I figured out something the last day or so, Saber. I never could understand why Grady hung with a guy like Vick Atlas. Then I thought about why you and I always hung together. Both of our fathers have problems with alcohol, but we’ve always stuck with them. That’s when I realized where the bond between Grady and Vick came from. Both of them grew up hating their fathers. It’s funny, isn’t it? We don’t think we’re anything like those guys, but in some ways we are.” I got up and took off my hat and wiped my brow. My legs felt weak.
“Where you going?” he asked.
“I haven’t thought it through, Sabe.” I said. “Check with you down the track.”
I walked to my heap, accidentally knocking over my drink, the cola seeping into the swale.
Chapter
34
I DROVE TO THE north side of the city and stopped in a dusty park. Mexican children were having a birthday party and hitting a piñata hanging from the crossbar of a swing set. I parked behind the concrete restrooms and took Loren’s .32 revolver from under the seat and walked into a cluster of pines behind the backstop of a softball diamond and dumped the shells from the cylinder into my palm and sprinkled them into a trash can. I slipped the revolver back into my pocket and clicked open my stiletto and inserted it under the base of a water fountain and snapped off the blade. Then I closed the stub and put it in my pocket with the revolver. I sat down in the bleachers and watched the children split the piñata into shreds, showering paper-wrapped taffy in the dust.
I do not know how long I sat there. I was sweating inside my hat. I set it crown-down on the bleacher seat and propped my hands on my knees and lowered my head and shut my eyes. There was a red glow inside my eyelids, a warm finger of sunlight on the back of my neck. I could smell a drowsy odor on the wind, like flowers left too long in a vase. My mother’s father, Hackberry Holland, used to say death was like a field of poppies. He said every third night he rode deep into them, the husks smearing the legs of his horse, the red petals gluing to its skin. He said that death was a long field that had no fences but led to a precipice the other side of which was a blue sky. Grandfather had left us the previous year and, I believe, joined the drovers and lawmen and saloon girls and Indians whose companionship had defined his life. I wondered if he waited there to show me the way across.
“Are you okay, mister?” a tiny voice said.
I opened my eyes and looked down at a little Mexican girl. Her shiny black hair resembled a cap. She was wearing a pinafore and had a pink ribbon in her hair. “You looked like you was asleep and about to fall over,” she said.
“I’d better not do that, then,” I said.