He stopped, his mind seizing up as though he had experienced a brain freeze. He shouldn’t have used the word “children.” He was never attracted to children. He was not a pedophile. He just wanted to be with teenage girls while they were blooming into women. What finer creation was there than a young girl? What greater tragedy was there than seeing them left to the mercies of America’s street culture? Or seeing them turned over to degenerates like Sholokoff, who made addicts of them and used them in porn films? Why was Temple Dowling the scapegoat? He had never treated a woman or girl badly in his life.
He drank his glass empty. The sky had darkened over the mountains, as though a lavender rain were starting to fall where the sun had just set. Where were his men?
“Would you like another, sir?” the bartender asked. He wore a white jacket and a red bow tie and black pants. His face had no color, not even the shadow of a beard, but his hair was as black and liquid in appearance as melted plastic.
“Yeah, hit me again,” Temple replied. “What’s all that noise next door?”
“It’s a young people’s organization of some kind.” The bartender’s cheeks were sunken, his mouth like a button.
“Listen to it. That’s a lot of kids.”
“Can I order you something from the grill?”
“They seem to be having fun,” Temple said, still distracted by the celebratory mood next door.
“The hotel gives them the space for their meetings one night a week.”
“That’s pretty nice.” Temple gazed out the door at the teenagers going in and out of the lobby, the shadows of the potted palms sliding off their skin and hair and the flowers some of the girls were wearing.
“It’s called Alla-something,” the bartender said.
“Can you order me a steak?”
“Yes, sir. Right away.”
“I like it pink in the middle,” Temple said.
He worked on his vodka and waited for his food and listened to the pianist play “Claire de Lune.” The pianist was dressed in a summer tux with a red boutonniere, his long fingers floating above the keys in a cone of blue light. Santa Fe was a grand place to be. The Spanish ambience, the wooden colonnades and earthen jars on the terrazzo entrances to the shops along the street, the stars twinkling above the vastness of the mountains—why should a man be afraid in a country as wonderful as this? Or why should a man be ashamed of what he was? He agreed with the liberals and libertines on this one. A man didn’t choose his sexual inclinations. They chose him. Didn’t Jesus say there are those who are made different in the womb?
The girl who came into the lounge from the lobby and sat down next to him at the bar had the face of a pixie, with a pug nose and an uplifted chin and thick dark red hair that was tied in back. She wore a sequined cowboy shirt and tight stonewashed jeans tucked into boots that came almost to her knee. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” Temple said.
“Can you help me out?”
“You kill anybody?”
“I’d like to. At least if I have to go back in there.”
“Where?” he asked.
“To the Alateen meeting.”
“What’s Alateen?”
“A meeting that’s a guaranteed cure for insomnia. I got sentenced to it by the court.”
“Why’d the judge send you there?”
“My boyfriend totaled his car and left me unconscious inside it. My boyfriend is not only a needle-dick but a lying shit. I told the judge if he believed my boyfriend, he was a shitbird, too, but I wasn’t sure whether he qualified as a needle-dick. What’s that music?”
“Debussy, I think. You know, Claude Debussy?”
“Who’s that?”
“He was a great composer.”
She was chewing gum, her eyes rolling, her mouth indolent and somehow vulnerable. The sound of her gum wet and smacking in her cheek made him swallow. She smiled lazily, one eye crinkling at the corner. “Will you buy me a drink?”
“Are you legal age?”
“Why do you think I asked you to buy me one?”
“What are you having?”
“I don’t care. Something with candied cherries in it. Something that’s cold and warm at the same time.”
When the bartender served the steak, Temple ordered another Collins for himself and an old-fashioned for the girl. The bartender lowered his eyes with his hands folded, not unlike an undertaker who doesn’t want to broach a difficult subject.
“She’s my niece,” Temple said. “Nobody would believe she’s twenty-two.”
“Very well, sir,” the bartender said, and went to the end of the bar and took a tumbler from a rack on the back counter.
“That was impressive,” the girl said. “I had an uncle like that. He could get people to do things for him and make them feel like they were doing themselves a favor. You know how he’d do that?”
“Tell me.”
“He already knew what they wanted to do. They only needed permission from someone. It was usually about money. Or maybe sex. But one way or another, they were coming across for him. He used to say, ‘Put a smile on their faces, and they’ll follow you over a cliff.’”
“What happened to him?”
“Nothing. He owns a bunch of massage parlors in Los Angeles. Is that a Rolex?”
Temple looked at his watch, then realized how long he had been in the lounge. Where were his men? They had been acting strangely ever since two of them had been dumb enough to get themselves popped by Preacher Jack. “I never noticed. I have about a dozen watches I wear. Do you ride horses?”
“Sometimes. I barrel-raced when I was in Four-H. I was a hot-walker at Ruidoso Downs. Talk about a horny bunch. You ought to be in the bar after the seventh race.”
“Yeah, but that’s not your crowd. I bet you go to college.”
“If that’s what you call working at the McDonald’s inside Wal-mart. How about that for being a two-time loser? Your steak is getting cold.”
“You want one?”
“I’m a vegan. My whole life changed after I gave up meat and milk products. I thought my needle-dick boyfriend was the problem, but I think it was my diet.”
“What problem?”
“My organisms were messed up.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“Meat and cheese and barnyard shit like that are toxic to your erogenous development.” The waiter placed a coaster in front of her and set down her old-fashioned. She wrapped her gum in her napkin. “Anyway, thanks for the drink. I can’t take that group next door. You know their problem?”
“No,” he replied.
She took a drink from her glass and her eyes brightened and her cheeks filled with color, in the same way a thirsty plant might respond immediately to water. He could feel the coldness of her breath when she exhaled. “They feel unloved,” she said.
“You have a lot of insight for such a young woman.”
“Yeah, that’s why I’m in charge of the french-fry basket.”
“You smell like orange blossoms.”
“Maybe that’s because I’m chewing an orange rind.” She turned on the stool toward him, her knee hitting his. She let her eyes hold on his. “I bummed a ride here with a friend, but he’s gonna stay at the meeting for another hour. I live six miles away, and I don’t have money for a cab. I’d like a ride, but when I get home, I go in by myself.”
“You’re the captain of your soul?”
“No, I’m just not somebody’s backseat fuck.”
He picked up a small cooked tomato on the tines of his fork and placed it in his mouth and chewed slowly. “I wouldn’t ever say or even think something like that about you,” he said.
“So you’re gonna give me a ride?”
“If you’ll do one thing for me.”
Her eyes shifted sideways with a level of dependence that made his heart drop. “What’s that?” she said.
“Walk through the open-air jewelry market with me. I’m a sucker for Indian junk. I need an
expert hand to guide me.”
“You have a daughter?”
“No.”
“I thought that’s what you were gonna tell me.”
“Why?”
“Most of the time they say I remind them of their daughter. They can’t do enough for you.”
“Who?”
“The kind of guys who like to grope young girls in the back of the church bus,” she replied, picking up her purse. “Think I’m kidding? Ask yourself why any middle-aged man wants to make a career out of being a youth minister or a park director or a guy who teaches leather craft to rug rats. Because he likes the way the restroom smells after little kids have pissed all over the bowl? Give me a break.”
“How old are you?”
“Buy me a veggie burger and I’ll tell you. Let’s go, I won’t bite,” she said, squeezing his arm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
KRILL HAD PARKED the car in a grove of dead fruit trees no more than fifty yards behind the house of the woman Negrito kept referring to as la china. After the setting of the sun, the wind had dropped, and the sky had turned as stark as an ink wash. The gingerbread house and trees and windmill and barn and horse tank, even the hills, seemed drained of color and movement of any kind. The horses and chickens were gone from the yard, and there was no birdsong in the trees. The only sound Krill could hear as he and Negrito approached the house was water ticking from a rusted pipe that extended over the surface of the horse tank. A nimbus of dust hung above the house like a great cloud of gnats.
Krill stopped and knelt on one knee behind a car that had no wheels or glass in the windows and whose metal was still hot from baking in the sun all day. He stared at the house and the absence of electric lights or movement inside. Negrito knelt beside him, the leather cord of his hat swinging under his chin, the heavy gray fog of his odor puffing out of his clothes. “Krill, you got to tell me,” he said.
“Tell you what?”
“Why we are here. I don’t see no percentage, man.”
“There isn’t one. Not for you, anyway, my old friend.”
“The others have deserted you, but still you talk down to me like I’m the enemy and not the maricones who ran away.”
Krill placed his hand on Negrito’s shoulder, which felt like a flannel sack filled with rocks. “Like me, you are a killer. But killing is not a problem for you. You sleep without dreaming and rise each morning into a new day. But I relive all the times I watched the light go out of my victims’ eyes. My thoughts have become my enemies.”
“That’s why there are whores and tequila in Durango. A trip there will ease your problems, jefe.”
“I have to talk to La Magdalena.”
“You want to sleep with her? That’s what’s going on? You think there’s something special about a Chinese woman in bed? They ain’t no different from our women. You love them at night, and in the morning they make your life awful.”
“Poor Negrito. Why do you always think with the head of your penis?”
“’Cause it ain’t never let me down, man,” said Negrito, and cupped his hand on Krill’s shoulder. “Come on, tell me the truth. Why you got to talk to this woman if you ain’t looking to poke her?”
“To confess my sins, hombre. To rid myself of the faces I see in my sleep.”
“It ain’t a sin to kill people in a war. We were farmers and cattle workers until the war came. The people we killed had it coming. What is the big loss when a Communist is killed?”
“My children died because of me.”
“That don’t make no sense, Krill.”
“I used to blame the army and the Americans and those from Argentina who first gave us our guns. But I took the pay of corrupt political men and did what they told me. I killed the Jesuit and the leftists. You know these things are true, Negrito, because you were there. The helicopter machine-gunned the clinic, but I was their brother in arms. I helped bring a curse on our land.”
“No, your head is screwed up, Krill. That woman ain’t no priest. Whatever you confess to her, she’s gonna tell the cops. Then they’re gonna hunt us down. They don’t want nobody to know what we done down there.”
“There’s something strange going on in that house,” Krill said.
“What’s strange is your head. It glows in the dark. I think you got too many chemicals in it. Remember those nights in Juárez?”
“The woman’s truck is by the barn, but there is no one moving in the house, and no electric light is turned on. But look through the window of the chapel. The candles are burning in front of the Virgin’s statue.”
“Of course. She burns candles all the time. That’s what people like her do. They burn candles. The rest of us work and sweat and sometimes take bullets, but they burn candles.”
“No, this one has been to war, Negrito. She is not one to go off somewhere or take a nap while an open flame burns in her house.”
“You make a complexity of everything,” Negrito said. “You are a man who cannot bear to have a quiet and simple thought. You constantly construct spiderwebs so you can walk through them.”
“Look on the far side of the fence, beyond the barn, where the grass is tall.”
“It’s grass. So what is the great mystery about grass?”
“There is a channel through it. The wind is not making the channel. Somebody walked through there.”
“Animals did. Deer or horses. They cross the field by walking on it. It took you a long time to figure that out?”
“No horses are in that field. And deer do not make paths on flat land, only on hillsides, where their feet have to find the same spot every day.”
“See what I mean? A simple visit to the home of this pretender sacerdote becomes a torture of the brain.”
“The back door is ajar, Negrito. There is something wrong in that house. You stay here and guard my back. You keep the rifle, but do not use it unless absolutely necessary. If everything is normal, I will come to the door and wave to you with my right hand, not my left.”
“Claro, man. My head is starting to hurt again with all your cautions. I cannot stand this. We were never afraid before. I told you from the beginning, this woman who wears men’s trousers was bad luck. But your obsession has no bounds.”
“Then leave. Go to Durango. Bathe in the diseased fluids of your whores,” Krill said.
Negrito was breathing heavily, the whiskers around his mouth as thick as a badger’s. His pupils were no bigger than pinheads, the skin around his eyes wrinkled and flecked with scales. “You make me want to do something that’s very bad.”
“You want to be me, Negrito, to leave your own body and live inside mine. And because you are a killer by nature, you believe a bullet can give you my heart and brain.”
“I am a loyal servant and follower and brother, not an assassin. I want you to be you and the leader you used to be, Krill, not a self-hating fool ruminating on his sins.”
“If I wave with my left hand from the door, rather than my right, what message will I be sending you?”
“I see only one message in any of this: that of a man being led with a ring through his nose by the Chinese puta.”
“You are brave in ways that few men are, Negrito. But do not try to think anymore. For some men, thinking is a dangerous vanity. You must accept that about yourself.”
Krill stood and walked toward the back entrance of the house, a holstered .357 Magnum hanging from the right side of his web belt, his skinning knife in a scabbard on his left. He stepped up on the back porch and listened, then felt a breeze on the back of his neck and heard the windmill come to life and water running into the horse tank. But where were the horses? Or the illegals who came almost every evening for food or benediction at the house of La Magdalena?
He paused at the back door and listened again. The windmill was stenciled against the black and gray patterns in the sky, and tumbleweed was bouncing through the yard, hanging in the fences, skipping by the junked car where Negrito was crouched with t
he M16. Krill pushed open the door and stepped inside.
Through the hallway, he could see her sitting very still in a straight-back chair, her hands resting on her knees, her hair tied in a bun. In the gloom, he could hardly make out her features. Her face was so still that in profile, it looked like it had been painted on the air. He eased his .357 from its holster and waited, his left foot in front of his right, breathing slowly through his mouth, the checkered grips of his revolver hard inside his palm.
He stepped backward, never taking his eyes off the Chinese woman, his left arm extended out the door. He opened and closed his hand so the fading light would reflect off it, then moved his arm up and down so Negrito could plainly see that he was signaling with his left hand and not his right. Please remember what I told you, he thought. This is the moment I have to count on you, Negrito. This is when your skills will be of the greatest necessity.
Krill went down the hallway and could see the woman watching him from the corner of her eye.
“Magdalena?” he said, his voice hardly audible.
She continued to stare straight ahead, her hands absolutely still.
“¿Qué pasa?” he said. He glanced over his shoulder. Where was Negrito? “Señora, look at me,” he said. “It’s Krill. I want to make confession. I murdered a Jesuit priest. I must have absolution. You can give it to me.”
He stepped into the room and felt the barrel of a gun touch the back of his head. “Bad timing, greaseball,” a voice said.
There were four men inside the room, all of them wearing beige-colored gauzy masks with slits for the nose and mouth and eyes. One man stood against the far wall, his left hand on the shoulder of a girl not over ten years old. With the other hand, he held the stainless-steel four-inch blade of a clasp knife under the girl’s throat. The girl’s eyes were wide with terror and confusion, and her bottom lip was trembling.
The man holding the gun to the back of Krill’s head removed the .357 from his grip. “Who’s with you?” he said.