“No, with you and your friends, señor.”
“I think you have become delusional, my Hispanic friend.”
“You didn’t see what Negrito just did. Negrito was living inside my skin, but he just left my body and went up on the ceiling. Now he’s standing right behind you. You are in deep shit, señor.”
“Who’s Negrito?” Sholokoff asked Frank.
“The guy who’s gonna fuck you with a garden rake,” Krill said. Then he began laughing on the floor, his long hair hanging in a sweaty web over his face.
Sholokoff seemed more bemused than offended and went upstairs to use the bathroom. Two men picked Krill up by his arms and carried him to his cell and threw him inside. “Hey, Frank,” one of them said. “There’re scratches around the keyhole.”
“What?” Frank said.
“His food bowl is here, but there’s no utensil. The guy must have been using a fork on the lock.”
“Somebody gave the greaser a fork?”
“Frank, I gave him a spoon,” said the man who had brought Krill his food.
“Then where is it?”
“I don’t know, man.”
“We should tell Mr. Sholokoff,” said the man who had discovered the scratches.
“Shut up. Both you guys shut up,” Frank said. He stepped inside the cell and kicked Krill in the base of the spine. “Where’s the spoon, greaseball?”
“That hurts, boss. It makes my mind go blank,” Krill said. “Somebody gave me a spoon? I must have lost it. I am very sorry.”
“Frank,” one of the other men whispered.
“What?”
“Mr. Sholokoff just flushed the toilet.”
JACK COLLINS HAD led the way in a Ford Explorer through a winding series of low-topped white hills on which no grass or trees or even scrub brush grew. The road through the hills was narrow and rock-strewn and dusty, the wind as hot as a blowtorch, smelling of creosote and alkali and dry stone under the layer of blue-black clouds that gave no rain.
He had seen white hills like these only one other time in his life, when he was marching with a column of marines in the same kind of dust and heat through terrain that was more like Central Africa than the Korean peninsula. The marines wore utilities that were stiff with salt, the armpits dark with sweat, the backs of their necks tanned and oily and glistening under the rims of their steel pots, their boots gray with dust. In the midst of it all, the ambulances and six-bys and tanks and towed field pieces kept grinding endlessly up the road, the dust from their wheels blowing back into the faces of the men. Ahead, Hackberry could see the white hills that made him think of giant wind-scrubbed, calcified slugs on which no vegetation grew and whose sides were sometimes pocked with caves in which the Japanese prior to World War II had installed railroad tracks and mobile howitzers.
That was the day Hackberry had an epiphany about death that had always remained with him and that he called upon whenever he was afraid. He had reached a point of exhaustion and dehydration that had taken him past the edges of endurance into personal surrender, a calm letting go of his fatigue and the blisters inside his boots and the sweat crawling down his sides and the fear that at any moment he would hear the popping of small-arms fire in the hills. When the column fell out, he looked at the red haze of dust floating across the sun and on the hills and on a long flat plateau dotted with freshly turned earth that resembled anthills, and he wondered why any of it should be of any concern to him or his comrades or even to the nations that warred over it. In a short span of time, nothing that happened here would be of any significance to anyone. Ultimately, every cloak rolled in blood would be used as fuel for flames, and the sun would continue to shine and the rain to fall upon both the just and the unjust, and this piece of worthless land would remain exactly what it was, a worthless piece of land of no importance to anyone except those who lost their lives because of it.
Just as he had experienced these thoughts, someone had shouted, “Incoming!” and Hackberry had heard first one, then two, then three artillery rounds arching out of the sky, like a train engine screeching down a track and then exploding, striking the earth in such rapid succession that he’d had no time to react. From where he was sitting on top of a ditch, he saw the barrage intensify and march across the plateau, blowing geysers of dirt and buried pots of kimchi into the air.
The North Koreans were laying waste to a field filled with buried earthen jars of pickled cabbage. Hackberry continued to stare at the rain of destruction on the most ignoble of targets, bemused as much by the madness of his fellow man’s obsession as by the bizarre nature of the event. When clouds of pulverized dirt blew into his face, he never blinked. Nor did he blink when a piece of artillery shell spun toward him like a heliograph, its twisted steel surfaces flashing with light, whipping past his ear with a whirring sound like that of a tiny propeller. He felt neither fear nor self-recrimination at his recklessness, and he did not know why, since he did not consider himself either brave or exceptional.
His lack of fear and his whimsical attitude toward his own death stayed with him all the way to the Chosin Reservoir and his imprisonment in No Name Valley, and up until the present, he was not sure why his fear had temporarily disappeared or why it had returned. With time and age, he had come to think of mortality as the price of admission to the ballpark; but why had this road in Mexico taken him back to Korea? Was he finally about to step through the door into the place we all fear? Would his legs and his mettle be up to that dry-throated, heart-pounding, blood-draining moment that no words can adequately describe? Or would his courage fail him, as it had when he dropped a litter with a wounded marine on it and ran from a Chinese enlisted man who stood on a pile of frozen sandbags and sprayed Hackberry’s ditch with a burp gun and shot him three times through the calves and left him with years of guilt and self-abasement that he came to accept as a natural way of life?
The flatbed truck followed the Explorer between the hills, then emerged into a green valley where a paved road lined with eucalyptus trees led due south through meadowland and cornfields and farmhouses that were built of stone or stucco or both. Finally, the Explorer turned off the road and crossed a cattle guard and passed a burne
d-out house and pulled into a two-story barn that was filled with wind and the sounds of rattling tin in the roof.
Jack Collins cut his engine and got out of the Explorer and pulled his guitar case after him, then shut the driver’s door. “The sun will dip behind that mountain yonder in about four hours. If you want, you can rest up,” he said.
“What is this place?” Hackberry asked.
“It used to belong to a friend of mine. At least it did until the army burned him out.”
“You’ve spent time around here before?”