?No.?
?Why not??
?Why should I??
He didn?t have an answer. A few minutes later, he picked up the card from the table and walked outside and over a bare knoll dotted with clusters of prickly-pear cactus. From the top of the knoll, he could see a half-dozen oil wells methodically pumping up and down on a rolling plain that seemed to bleed into the sunset. The air smelled of natural gas and creosote and a stack of old tires someone had burned. Behind him, the ever-present dust gusted off the road and floated in a gray cloud over the clapboard house he and Vikki rented. He opened his cell phone and dialed the number on the business card.
Six weeks later, Vikki Gaddis cut her first record at Martina and John McBride?s Blackbird Studio in Nashville.
For Hackberry Holland, the end of the story lay not in the fate of Jack Collins or Hugo Cistranos and Arthur Rooney or any of their minions. By the same token, it did not lie in the fact that justice was done for Pete Flores and that the talent of his wife, Vikki Gaddis, was recognized by her fellow artists, or even in the fact that Vikki and Pete later bought a ranch at the foot of the blue Canadian Rockies. Instead, the conclusion of Hackberry?s odyssey from Camp Five in No Name Valley to an alluvial floodplain north of the Chisos Mountains was represented by a bizarre event that remained, at least for him, as an emblematic moment larger than the narrative about it.
It involved the unexpected arrival of Nick Dolan, the former operator of a skin joint, on Collins?s property, driving an SUV that had the lacquered brilliance of a maroon lollipop, a stolen American flag with a broomstick for a staff mounted on the rear bumper, his passengers a blue-collar community-college student who thought it perfectly natural to sing Carter Family spirituals in a beer joint and a former American soldier who was so brave he had forgotten to be afraid.
The three of them made for an improbable cast of heroes. Perhaps like an ancient Roman watching a Vesuvian mountain grow red and translucent until it exploded and rained its sparks on a dark sea, they did not recognize the importance of the events taking place around them or the fact that they were players in a great historical drama. They would be the last to claim they had planned the charge across the hardpan into Jack Collins?s camp. But that was the key to understanding them: Their humility, the disparity in their backgrounds, the courage they didn?t ac knowledge in themselves, the choices they made out of instinct rather than intellect, these characteristics constituted the glue that held them together as individuals and as a people. Empires came and went. The indomitable nature of the human spirit did not.
Or at least these were the lessons that Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs tried to take from their own story.