“They were alive a long time after the car sank. They breathed the air that was trapped against the roof. Touch my hands and you’ll see them. They’re unfastening the safety belts that hold them in the seats of the car.”
Jeff grinned stupidly, his mouth opening and closing without sound. He stepped back from her, as though he could pull an envelope of invisibility around himself, his face unable to find an acceptable expression, like a naked man on a public sidewalk.
It made good theater. But I suspected somebody would pay a price for it. I drove out to Wilbur’s that night and tried to convince him of that in his front yard.
“Jeff Deitrich doesn’t believe in your wife’s psychic powers. He probably believes somebody informed on him,” I said.
“You’re telling me he done it, he drowned a couple of black guys?”
“I’m telling you he’s a dangerous kid. He takes out his grief on others. Usually innocent people.”
The windows in Wilbur’s house were lighted behind him, his horses blowing and nickering out beyond the windmill.
“I ain’t got no doubts about Earl Deitrich’s family. You want to come in for a piece of pie?” he asked.
“I must speak a different language. You just don’t hear me, do you?”
“I’m cutting you in for ten percent of my oil company.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Son, anybody can be a lawyer or a rodeo bum. You ever see well pipe sweat moisture big as silver dollars? That’s what happens when you punch into an oil sand. The air turns sour with gas and everything you put your hand on is dripping with money.”
“Leave me out of your oil dealings, Wilbur.”
“What you got is ten percent of nothing. That’s probably the only fee you’re ever gonna get.” He grinned broadly, his bladed face silhouetted in the light from his house, and sailed a rock out into the darkness. “Don’t worry about that Deitrich kid coming around here, either. His kind was put outside before the glue was dry.”
Hopeless.
I stopped at the IGA the other side of the intersection and called Wesley Rhodes at his house.
“Get out of town. Visit your relatives in Texline,” I said.
“They’re in prison. Why you want me out of town?”
“Jeff Deitrich thinks somebody dimed him on the deal with the Jamaicans at the rock quarry.”
“Oh man,” he said, like someone who had not believed his luck could get any worse.
On the way back home I tried to sort out my thoughts and the reasons I felt anger at Wilbur and his wife, and even at my son, Lucas.
The truth was I had no legal solutions for the problems they brought to me. Wilbur had admitted to stealing the historical watch from Earl Deitrich’s home office, and hence by implication the bearer bonds, and Kippy Jo had methodically drilled a pistol round in each of Bubba Grimes’s eyes. Unless I could bring down Earl Deitrich, there was a good chance both Kippy Jo and Wilbur would go into the system.
Lucas had been stand-up when it counted and had succeeded in putti
ng himself right between the gangbangers and the East Enders. How do you tell a kid that honor has its price and that his father had rather it not be paid?
I felt my palms tighten on the steering wheel. I wanted to hold L.Q. Navarro’s heavy .45 revolver in my hand. I wanted to feel the coolness of its surfaces against my skin and open the loading gate and rotate the cylinder inside the frame and watch the thick, round base of the brass cartridges tick by one at a time. I wanted to feel the knurled spur on the hammer under my thumb and hear the cylinder lock hard and stiffly into place.
L.Q. and I raided deep into Coahuila and killed drug transporters and set their huts ablaze and watched their tar, reefer, and coke flame like white gas against the sky. In that moment all the moral complexities disappeared. There was no paperwork to be done, no rage over our inability to reconcile feelings with legality. Sometimes we would find the dead several nights later, still unburied and exposed in the moonlight, their skin glowing like tallow that has melted and cooled again. I had no more feeling about them than I would have about bags of fertilizer.
The trade-off came later, when I fired blindly up an arroyo and watched sparks fly into the darkness and L.Q. Navarro fling his hands at the sky and tumble toward me.
Brave people kept the fire in their belly out of their heads. Reckless and self-indulgent ones let someone else pay their dues.
The inside of the car seemed filled with a fragrance of roses. My thoughts bunched and writhed like snakes inside a black basket.
Lucas was sitting on the collapsed tailgate of his pickup in my driveway when I got home. He took off his straw hat and slapped the dust off the spot next to him. Every light in the downstairs of my house was on.