The Convict and Other Stories

“Well, okay, Mr. Holland, you let me know when you’re ready.”

Hack raised the mug to his mouth with both hands, his frosted eyes staring into the brassy bead of the beer, and drank it all the way to the bottom. He felt the foam dripping off his chin and a wetness st

art to run down his trousers into his half-topped boots. He pushed the mug up on the dashboard and waved at the dark opening of the poolroom. The people inside moved around like shadows in the noise of the billiard balls and the jukebox. The leather seats burned his hands and the odor from his trousers sickened him. He knocked with his knuckles against the front windshield, his collapsed mouth opening and closing like a fish’s.

Then, suddenly, there was a tall man who looked cut out of burned iron by the side of the car. His silhouette seemed to break the murderous sun in half.

“Why, hello, Hack. How have you been?” the man said.

Hack thought he heard a branch of the pin-oak tree at home snap in the hot wind like a rifle shot.

“I didn’t expect to see you here, Captain McAlester,” he said. He shook the captain’s extended hand, squeezing it, the board roughness biting into his palm, and felt a resilience and strength swell into his arm.

“We haven’t had any fun together since we killed all them Mexicans and spent the night in that hot-pillow house in Juarez,” the captain said. “You remember when you turned the key on Wes Hardin? He said he was going to gun you soon as he come out of Huntsville.”

“He didn’t get a chance, though,” Hack said. “Old John Selman put a ball through his eye first.”

“It’s too hot out here, Hack. Let’s take a walk and have a cigar.”

Hack opened the door and stepped up on the sidewalk in the shade of the awning, his shoulders erect inside his open coat, an unlit Havana cigar in his mouth. He popped a kitchen match on his thumbnail, cupped his hands in the warm breeze, and drew in on the smoke. He felt a physical power and confidence in his body that he hadn’t known since he was in his prime as a middle-aged man.

He and the captain walked the full length of Main Street, tipping their hats to the women and politely refusing invitations for a drink from men who wanted to be seen at the bar with two of the best law officers in south-central Texas.

At the edge of town he leaned against the wood colonnade in front of the feed-and-tack store and looked out into a deep field that was burned sear by drought. In the distance was a low, brown mountain covered with summer haze. He could smell the drowsy odor of the poppies blowing across the field.

“This is where we go, ain’t it?” he said.

“Let’s just walk on into the field, Hack.”

He heard the dried husks of the poppies rattle around him and the whistle of a locomotive somewhere beyond the curve of the mountain as he went deeper into the field with the captain, this time without resistance or heat or fear of a machine gunner’s twisted, monkey-paw face.

On the far edge of the field he saw an old adobe jail set back in a grove of juniper trees, and he could hear a man railing in his chains. Was that John Wesley Hardin screaming in there, or was it himself or his grandson? he thought.

“No sir, that’s Satan you chained in that cell,” the captain said.

Then he saw the train come around the curve of the mountain, the smoke blowing back over the line of cars and the men sitting on the spine, and for just a moment he thought he could hear the laughter of Mexican girls in a roar of hooves.

WE BUILD CHURCHES, INC.

Across the frozen rice fields the brown North Korean hills were streaked with ice and pocked with craters from our 105s. It was cold and bright, and the concertina wire we had strung around our perimeter was half buried in the snow, looping in and out of the surface like an ugly snake that had been lopped into segments by a lawn mower. But we really weren’t worried about a frontal attack in that third week of November in 1950. We had killed communists by the thousands all the way across North Korea, bulldozing their bodies into trenches and packing the fill down with tanks, until they fled into the hills under a gray sky and hid like bandits. Then the winter swept down out of China across the Yalu, and the hills cracked clear and sharp, and our F-80s and B-25s bombed them twelve hours a day with napalm and phosphorus and incendiaries that generated so much heat in the soil that the barren slopes were still smoking the next morning.

Jason Bradford was seated with his back against the ditch, looking at a picture on the front page of Stars and Stripes. He had a blanket pulled up to his chin, and his mittened hands stuck out from under the blanket. The mitten on his right hand was cut away around the trigger finger. During the night his patrol had run into a North Korean listening post and had lost one marine to a potato masher that the Koreans had got away before the sergeant stitched them all over the hole. Jace’s eyes were red around the rims, and he kept fingering his cheek as though he had a toothache.

“Give me another hit of gin, Doc,” he said. “I’m going to get warm if I have to let the stuff eat down to my toenails.”

I took a bottle of codeine out of my pack and handed it to him.

“Cheers,” he said, and drank from the bottle’s lip, washing the codeine over his teeth and swallowing it with the pleasure a martini would give him. “Now, look at that picture. A picture like that is not an accident.”

A reporter from Stars and Stripes had been photographing an airborne squadron of B-25s, but when the picture was developed, the planes appeared only in the right-hand corner and the frame was filled with the head and shoulders of Jesus Christ.

“You see, I took a course in meteorology at Amherst, and those kinds of clouds don’t make a formation like that,” Jace said.

“That’s what they call an optical delusion,” the corporal sitting across from us said. He was a tall hillbilly boy from north Alabama named Willard Posey. He hated the Marine Corps for a different reason than the rest of us: the corps had sent him to Korea to fight for gooks, whom he considered inferior even to blacks.

“There’s a preacher on a radio station in Memphis that sells them things,” he said.

“Willard, my friend, the whole world is not like the hill country of north Alabama. You have to understand that one of these days,” Jace said.