Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set (74 page)

“Who do you think it was?”

“He said you and he had unfinished business. He said you and he were the opposite sides of the same coin. He said you'd know what he meant.”

“Collins?”

“Know anybody else who makes phone calls like that?”

“Get the plane ready,” he said.

An hour later, they lifted off into bad weather, wind currents that shook the single engine's wings and fuselage and quivered all the needles on the instrument panel. Later, down below, Hackberry could see the sharp crystalline peaks known as the Glass Mountains, the column-like mesas rising red and raw out of volcanic rubble or alluvial flood
plain that had gone soft and pliant and undulating, as tan as farmland along the Nile, dotted with green brush, all of it besieged by a windstorm that could sand the paint off a water tower.

Then they were above a great wide fenced area where both domestic and exotic animals roamed among the mesquite and blackjack and cottonwoods, like a replication of a mideastern savannah created by an ecologically minded philanthropist.

“What's your opinion on game farms?” Pam said.

“They're great places for corporation executives, fraternity pissants, and people who like to kill things but can't pull it off without their checkbooks.”

“You shock me every time,” she said.

N
ICK
D
OLAN HAD
stopped thinking of time in terms of calendar units or even twenty-four-hour or twelve-hour periods. Nor did he think in terms of events or old resentments or jealousies or success in business. He no longer indulged in secret fantasies about revenge on his boyhood tormentors, Irish pricks like Artie Rooney in particular. As he watched his bank accounts and stock-and-bond portfolio seep away, and as the IRS focused its bombsights on his past tax returns, Nick remembered his father talking about life in America during the Great Depression, when the Dolinskis first arrived on a boat they had bribed their way onto in Hamburg.

Nick's father had spoken with nostalgia of the era rather than of the privation and harshness the family experienced during the years they lived on the Lower East Side of New York and, later, by the Industrial Canal in New Orleans. When Nick complained about going to a school where bullies shoved him down on line or stole his lunch money, his father spoke with fondness of both the settlement houses in New York and the public schools in New Orleans, because they had been steam-heated and warm and had offered succor and education and opportu
nity at a time when people were dying in Hitler's concentration camps. Nick had always been envious of his father's experience and emotions.

Now, as his possessions and his money seemed to be departing piecemeal in a hurricane, Nick had begun to understand that his father's fond memories were not a gift but an extension of the personal strength that defined his character. Whether in the Bowery or in a blue-collar school by the Iberville Project, Nick's father must have run up against the same kind of Jew-baiting bullies who had plagued Nick in the Ninth Ward. But his father had not empowered his enemies by carrying their evil into his adult life.

The new measure of time and its passage in Nick's life had become one of mental photographs rather than calendar dates: his children floating on inner tubes down the Comal River, the sunlight slipping wetly off their tanned bodies; Esther's bemused and affectionate glances after his return from Phoenix and his verbal victory over Josef Sholokoff (which he did not tell her of and would never tell anyone else of, lest he lose the newly found sense of pride it had given him); the smiles of his employees, particularly the blacks, who worked in his restaurant; and not least, the unopened carton of cigarettes he soaked in kerosene and set afire in his barbecue pit, saying to the clouds and Whoever lived there,
Guess who just had his last smoke.

He had even stopped worrying about Hugo Cistranos. Nick had stood up to Josef Sholokoff in front of his goons on his property, with no parachute except a Pakistani cabdriver who shouldn't have been licensed to drive in a demolition derby. Who were the real gladiators? Nondescript, bumbling people with no power who had stood up while the Hugo Cistranos brigade bag-assed for the bomb shelter.

Nick had another reason to feel secure. That lunatic called Preacher Collins had thrown his mantle of protection over Nick's family. True, Esther had bashed him with a cook pot, but one great advantage in having a peckerwood crackbrain on your side was the fact that his motivations had nothing to do with rationality. Collins scared the hell out of the bad guys. What more could you ask for?

As Esther always said, a good deed done by a Cossack was still a good deed.

Nick had begun lifting weights at a gym. After the initial soreness, he
was amazed at the resilience his body still possessed. In under two weeks, he could see a difference in the mirror. Or at least he thought he could. His clothes looked good on him. His shoulders were squared, his eyes clear, the fleshy quality starting to disappear from his cheeks. Could it be that easy? Why not? He came from working people. His grandfather had been undaunted by physical labor of any kind and had been ingenious and marvelous with his hands when he'd built his own house and created a thriving vegetable garden amid urban decay. Nick's father had been a short, wiry shoe repairman, but he could slip on a pair of Everlast gloves and turn a speed bag into a leathery blur. Even Nick's rotund compulsive mother, who overfed and protected him and sometimes treated him like a human poodle, scrubbed her floors on her hands and knees twice a week, from the gallery to the back stoop. The Dolan family, as they were called in America, stayed in motion.

As Nick looked at his full-length profile in the mirror, sucking in his stomach, his chin up, his arms pleasantly stiff and tinged with pain from curling a sixty-pound bar, he thought,
Not bad for Mighty Mouse
.

Even though he didn't like to see blood leaking from every orifice in his portfolio, his finances had a formidable degree of solidity at their core. He still owned the restaurant, a wholesome place that served good food and offered mariachi music, and nobody was going to take it away from him, at least not Josef Sholokoff or Hugo Cistranos. He still had a mortgage on his house in San Antonio, but his weekend home on the Comal in New Braunfels was free and clear, and he was determined for the children's sake to hold on to it. He and Esther had started out with virtually nothing. For the first five years of their marriage, she'd had to give up attending classes at UNO and work full-time as a cashier at the Pearl while Nick ran Didoni Giacano's cardroom until five in the morning, fixing drinks and coffee and making sandwiches for Texas oilmen who told Negro and whorehouse and anti-Semitic jokes in his presence as though he were deaf. Then he would swamp out their piss and puke in the bathroom while the sun rose and a greasy exhaust fan roared above his head.

But those days were all behind him. Esther was his Esther again, and his kids were his kids. They were not just a family. They were friends, and more important, they loved one another and loved being with one
another. What he owned he had worked for. Screw the world. Screw the IRS. Nick Dolinski, badass at large, had arrived.

It was Saturday evening, and Nick was relaxing on the terrace of his weekend home on the Comal, reading the newspaper, drinking a gin and tonic. Fireflies were lighting in the trees, and the air was fragrant with the smell of flowers, charcoal lighter flaring on a grill, meat smoke pooling among the heavy green shadows on the river.

Esther had taken the kids to deliver a box of her peanut-butter-and-chocolate brownies to a sick friend in a San Antonio suburb; she had said she would be back no later than six-thirty
P.M
. with a delicatessen cold supper they would eat on the sunporch. He glanced at his watch. It was after seven. But sometimes she decided on impulse to take the children to an afternoon movie. He flipped open his cell phone to check for missed calls, although he was sure it had not rung that afternoon. He put aside his paper and called her cell number. His call was transferred to her voice mail.

“Esther, where are you?” he said. “I'm starting to think alien abduction here.”

He went inside the house and checked the kitchen phone. There were no new calls. He walked in a circle. He went into the living room and walked in another circle. Then he called Esther's cell phone again. “This isn't funny. Where are you? This is Nick, the guy who lives with you.”

He tried Jesse's number and was sent to voice mail. But Jesse was one of those rare teenagers who had little interest in computers, cell phones, or technology in general; he sometimes left his cell phone turned off for days. Regarding his son, the more essential question for Nick was: Did Jesse have an interest in anything? It surely wasn't girls or sports. The kid had an IQ of 160 and spent his time listening to old Dave Brubeck records or playing lawn darts by himself in the backyard or hanging out with his four-man chess club.

Nick realized he was inventing other forms of worry to keep his mind off Esther's failure to check in. He went back outside in the twilight and retrieved his gin and tonic from the arm of the redwood chair. He drank it standing up, one hand propped on his hip, crunching the ice on his molars, chewing and swallowing the lime slice, his eyes fixed on the
boiling rapids and the whirlpool farther down the river. When he touched his brow, it felt as tight and hard as a washboard.

The phone rang inside. He almost broke a toe on the back step getting to it before the message machine clicked on. “Hello!” he gasped, out of breath.

“Dad?”

“Who'd you expect?” he said, wondering why, of all the times in his life, he chose now to sound impatient and harsh with his son.

“Did Mom call?”

“No. You don't know where she is?”

“She left us at Barnes and Noble. She was going back for something at the deli. That was an hour ago.”

“Kate and Ruth are with you? Y'all are still in San Antonio?”

“Yeah, but the deli is only three blocks from here. Where would she go?”

“Did she go back to Mrs. Bernstein's?”

“No, Mrs. Bernstein went to Houston with her daughter. We went all this way to deliver the brownies, and she wasn't there.”

“Did you see any strange guys around y'all? Like somebody watching or following y'all?”

“No. What strange guys? I thought all that stuff you were worried about was over. Where's Mom?”

 

P
AM
T
IBBS AND
Hackberry Holland drove in their borrowed cruiser on a winding two-lane road that followed a dry creek bed bordered by cottonwoods that were bending hard in the wind, the torn leaves flying high in the air. To the east they could see irrigated ranchland and a long horizontal limestone formation that resembled a Roman wall traversing the bottom of a hill. The cruiser was shaking in the wind, grit and the needlelike leaves of juniper trees ticking against the windshield. They entered what appeared to be another domain, one that was dry and cluttered with brush and spiked plants and thick tangles of undergrowth, one that seemed abandoned to Darwinian forces, all of it surrounded by huge wire-mesh game fences of the kind one sees along highways in the Canadian Rockies.

“Shit, what was that?” Pam said, her head jerking sideways at something they had just passed.

Hackberry looked through the back window while Pam drove. “I think that's called an oryx or something like that. I've always had a fantasy about these places. What if the patrons were allowed to hunt one another? The fences could be electrified, and the boys could go inside the fences with three-day licenses to blow one another all over the brush. I think there's a lot of merit to that idea.” He heard her laughing under her breath. “
What?
” he said.

“God, you're a case,” she said.

“I'm supposed to be your administrative superior, Pam. Why is it I can't adequately convey that simple concept to you?”

“Search me, boss.”

He gave up and remained silent as they continued down the road, the cottonwoods and pebble-strewn creek bed gone, the terrain one of twisting arroyos, brush-covered hills, and flat expanses of hardpan where trophy animals as diverse as bison, elk, gazelles, and eland grazed. It was a surreal place sealed off by hills that seemed to suck light into shade, lidded by clouds that were as yellow and coarse as sulfur.

“I've got to tell you something,” Pam said.

He continued to look out the window and didn't answer.

“I think sometimes you go to a place inside yourself that isn't good. I think that's where you are now. I think that's where you've been all day.”

“What place might that be?”

“How can anyone know? You never share it with anyone, least of all me.”

He stared at her profile for a long time, somehow thinking he could force her to look him squarely in the eye, to make her admit the nature of her assault on his sensibilities. But she was unrelenting in her concentration on the road, her hands set in the ten-two position on the wheel.

“When this is over—” he said.

“You'll what?”

“Take you out for dinner. Or give you a few days off. Something like that.”

She closed her eyes for a second, then opened them as though com
ing out of a trance. “All I can say is I have never in my life met anyone like you,” she said. “Absolutely no one. Never.”

They went around a curve and saw an archway over a cattle guard and, at the end of an asphalt driveway, a two-story log building with a peaked green metal roof. The logs in the building had not been debarked and, over the years, had been darkened by rainwater and smoke from wildfires and gave the rustic impression characteristic of roadside casinos and bars along western highways. The American and the Texas state flags flew on separate metal poles at the same height in front of the building. A pile of deer antlers and what looked like cattle bones was stacked like a cairn by the arch, an incongruous strip of red ribbon blowing from the eye socket of a cow's skull. An SUV and two new pickup trucks with extended cabs and oversize tires were parked by the building's front porch, the paint jobs freshly waxed and powdered with dust from the storm. Every detail in the picture seemed to tell a story of some kind. But there were no people in sight, and once again Hackberry was reminded of the paintings of Adolf Hitler, who could draw every detail in an urban setting except human beings.

“Slow down,” Hackberry said.

“What is it?”

“Stop.”

Pam pressed softly on the brake, her eyes sweeping the front of the building and the terrace on one side and the outdoor tables that had been inset with umbrellas. Hackberry rolled down his window. There was no sound anywhere except the wind. No lights burned in the building except one deep inside the entrance. None of the umbrellas inset in the outdoor tables had been collapsed in advance of the windstorm, and three of them had been blown inside out, the fabric feathering around the aluminum supports. A saddled horse grazed on the back lawn, dragging its reins, its droppings fresh and glistening on the grass. One stirrup was hooked on the pommel as though someone had pulled it out of the way to tighten the cinch and been interrupted in his work.