He stood out there next to his dad’s grave. He just stood there. Every now and then he’d shift his feet. Cross his arms. Put his hands in his pockets. I don’t know what he was doing. Then, kind of suddenly, he fell, hit his knees, and lay there like he was kissing the ground. At first I thought maybe he was hurt, and I should get help, but then I thought it wasn’t that kind of hurt. I heard a sound come out of him that I never heard come out of a man before. It was deep and lasted a long time. Then he made it again. And again.
Dear God,
The sun is almost up now. Cowboy’s walking back to the house. I don’t think he ever went to sleep last night. His face looks pained. He’s got big, broad shoulders but this morning they look like they’re hanging off the sides. Like something pulling down on them.
I can see the mound out in the pasture that’s covering up Mr. B. I guess he’s laying out there in that dark, cold dirt. I guess he’s gone now so he don’t really know where he’s laying, which is probably good. He might be scared if he woke up and found it all dark and black.
God… I need to ask you something. Something I been thinking about. Why did Mr. B have to step in that hole? Why didn’t you stop him? Why didn’t you nudge him off to one side? You could have, you know.
There’s a part of me way down deep inside that wants to be good. Wants to see good. Wants to live good. But, every time I turn around, all I see is bad. It’s like evil bubbles up out of the ground and all we can do is step around it and try not to get any on our feet.
My insides are hurting real bad. And, I’m tired.
Dear God,
We’re back home now. Momma told me that she thought maybe we were imposing and that maybe we should give them some space, so we left real early, even before breakfast. I told her they didn’t need no space and that we should go check on them but she said, “No baby,” and patted me on the head. She’s been pacing the floor and shaking her head ever since we got back. She didn’t even notice that I hadn’t gotten ready to go to school, which told me things were real bad ’cause she don’t like me missing school. Now she’s just staring out the window, toward town, arms crossed, talking to herself. I’ve tried talking to her but she’s mainly just talking to herself. But, like I told you before, I think Momma feels other people’s hurts. Like I think she’s feeling Brodie’s hurt right now. And Cowboy’s, too. And I think Cowboy’s feeling Brodie’s hurt. ’Cause I know I’m feeling Brodie’s hurt. And all that means that we’re just a bunch of hurting people. And I can tell Momma wants to do something, wants to help, but she don’t know her place. Or, maybe she does and maybe that place is that it ain’t her place to do nothing. Maybe that’s why she ain’t said much and she’s drunk like two pots of coffee and she’s bit her nails down to the quick.
Sometimes, like now, when I write, I feel it’s just words on a page. They don’t mean nothing and they don’t go nowhere. I guess what I’m saying is… Are you up there? Are you paying attention? What are you doing? Why can’t you do anything? Maybe I shouldn’t ask that. Maybe I shouldn’t be so disrespectful but I want to know. I drank three sodas this morning to help me stay awake so I’m a little jumpy and my hand is shaking but I look around and I see bad stuff happening to good people and bad people getting away with doing bad. That don’t make any sense. No sense at all. And I’m tired of it. I know I’m only ten but I seen a lot and what I seen ain’t good. Ain’t right. Shouldn’t you be making it right? Shouldn’t you be doing something? Isn’t that your job?
I’m not writing any more today. I think my mouth is ’bout to get me in trouble. I’m going to bed now, but I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep. I can still hear Cowboy screaming and crying. Every time I try and close my eyes, it’s still there. Echoing around my head. I see him holding Brodie in the rain. Rocking back and forth. I thought maybe if I wrote you a letter, that the sound and pictures’d go away but they ain’t. I wish you’d get Brodie a new horse. He really loved Mr. B. He was a good horse.
Dear God,
It’s only been five minutes since the last time when I said I wasn’t going to write no more today but I just wanted to say that I was sorry. I went back and read over what I wrote, and… it was disrespecting you. I looked that word up. I would erase it, or tear it out, but I promised you when we started this thing that I wouldn’t never erase nothing I wrote here. So, I’m sorry. Maybe you won’t hold that against me and then let more bad stuff happen to us. Or to Cowboy. Or Brodie. If you let that stuff happen to Cowboy and his horses ’cause I said something wrong in some way I shouldn’t, well… I’m real sorry. I’m going to try to think of something good now.
This new dictionary that Cowboy gave me is real nice and it’s easy to find the words and it’s got more words in it, not that I know them all. Momma says I’m filling up my vocabulary. That I know more words than her. I think she may be right ’cause sometimes I say stuff and she looks at me like I’ve plumb lost my mind. Then I explain it to her and she nods or shakes her head.
Oh, I almost forgot. Cowboy said his wife had a baby before Brodie. One that died before it got here. He said it was a girl but that they didn’t know for sure. Whatever it was, would you tell her “Hi” and let her know that he thinks about her sometimes.
I like it when Cowboy talks to me. His voice is real kind. Like he means what he says. And his voice changes when he talks about his wife. Her name is Andie. She was his wife. But she’s not dead. Momma says they’re divorced but he don’t sound like he’s divorced. I’ve heard other people talk about the people they’re divorced from and he don’t sound like them. He ain’t angry. Ain’t calling her bad names or nothing.
I been trying to figure a way to describe Cowboy to you. So you’ll know he’s good people and you should stop the bad people. Cowboy is like, well, when I think of what you’re like, Cowboy comes to mind. I hope you don’t mind. I’m just telling you so’s you’ll know. I think you done good with him.
Dear God,
Momma took a nap, even though she was twitching a little. I know. I watched her. I even heard her cry a little in her sleep. She didn’t know I heard her, but when she did, I just put my hand on her back and she quieted down and quit crying. I don’t think she ever woke up.
Now Momma’s pacing around the apartment again. She’s had like eight more cups of coffee. She keeps walking to the window and staring out, tapping her teeth, and talking to herself. She don’t know it but she’s spitting little pieces of skin against the window. One or two of them stuck to the window but she can’t see it ’cause she’s looking way down the road. I think she’s worried about Cowboy.
I hope you’re not upset about what I said about him being what I think of when I think of you. Is that confusing? Oh, and one more thing. I told a lie. I told Momma that my stomach hurt so I could skip school again today. She let me. But, it don’t hurt like normal. It was a different kind of hurt. The kind of hurt you have when other people you know are hurting and you hurt ’cause they’re hurting. So, I’m sorry about that.
I just called Brodie to ask him how he was feeling but the phone just rang and rang and rang and right when I was about to hang up, he answered. His voice was real quiet. He sounded like he’d been crying. I told him I hoped he felt better and I was real sorry about Mr. B. He couldn’t talk no more so he just hung up.
Momma just ran in here and dressed real quick, told me she was running down to the store and for me to stay here but I think Momma told a lie, too, ’cause she ran down the street but she didn’t turn toward the store. She went straight down the street and turned in to the bell tower.
Sometimes I think this world is a mess and it ain’t nothing but a whole lot of hurt.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I didn’t wake Brodie for school. Figured he needed the rest. I drank coffee until ten. Dumps just nodded at me as I stepped out the door. “I’ll watch him,” he said. I was walking out the door as he shook his head, mumbling, “I shoulda seen that hole. Shoulda filled it in.”
r /> I turned, kissed Dumps on top of the head, and drove to town.
I parked at the courthouse and walked down the street to the bell tower. Andie’s—or Sam’s—apartment sat two blocks away. I could see it when I parked but I wasn’t in the mood for conversation. I walked behind the tower, used my key to get through the gate, used my other key to get in the door, and climbed the eighty-seven stairs to the top where the seven bells hung. I walked the platform around the bells and then shimmied up the vertical ladder to the small ledge above, about the size of a sheet of plywood. I used another key to unlock the padlock, flipped up the trap door, and crawled up. I slid across on my belly, coughing in the dust, shooing the pigeons, and stared out the small hole.
Eight hundred and twenty-seven yards to the south sat the first fence of the high security federal prison. Another ten yards sat the second. Both topped in razor wire. German shepherds patrolled the no-man’s-land between. I got comfortable, slid into position, and eyed my watch.
At 10:57, José Juan Chuarez, walked out of cell block B and into the yard. A minute later, he walked to “his” section of the fence from where he ran most of the activities inside the prison, and many out. I pressed my face against the cheek weld of the rifle, turned the scope to 14X, dialed 32 MOA into the gun, gauged the wind as one-two left to right, and held half of one mil-dot left on the center of his neck. Eight hundred thirty-eight to target. I lay there, measuring my breathing, watching José direct the prisoners. I pressed off the safety, took a deep breath, let out half, and began depressing the trigger. At two and a quarter pounds of pull, it didn’t take much. Halfway through my trigger pull, I heard the muted words, “Is that a real gun?”
Finger straight, I pulled the safety on, but I didn’t take my eye off the target. “Yes.”
“What are you shooting?” Sam asked.
My tone of voice told her I was not in the mood for conversation. “Better question is ‘who?’ ”
I glanced back as more of her climbed through the trap door. “Who?”
“José Juan Chuarez. Forty-seven-year-old male, convicted murderer, and dope dealer. Not to mention Mexican gang leader. I put him in prison a few years back.”
“Oh, you mean”—she ran her fingers along her neck and then gestured at mine—“him.”
I nodded and checked my watch again.
“You’re going to shoot a man in prison?”
“Thinking about it.”
“Why?”
“Because a federal judge just reduced his sentence to time served based on a technicality.”
She gently pulled my hand away from the trigger. “You want to talk about it?”
Oddly, I did.
I sat up. Leaned against the wall. Wiped the sweat off my forehead. “About nine years ago, we started getting intel about a new kingpin running drugs through Rock Basin. We tracked him south, started monitoring his movements, and charted his organization. Pretty sophisticated, too. He even bought his own local cell network. We took our time. Did our homework. Took us four years to figure out he’d systematically planted GPS tracking devices on all our vehicles so his people knew where we were at all times. After we found them, we sent all our cars one way while we drove in rented vans to his clubhouse. A late night thing. We caught him with enough evidence to put him away for several lifetimes.”
“Like?”
“Drugs, dead bodies, and his fingerprints on both.” I stared across the distance between José Juan and me. “I arrested him. Walked him to jail myself. The pictures made all the papers. Lot of people around here were real proud. Proud of all of us. Even stopped me on the street. The next morning, I took Brodie to get some ice cream. What we didn’t know was how deep José Juan’s tentacles stretched. Even in prison, he’s still powerful. So, he told his boys to light up my life. They did.”
I swallowed and closed my eyes. “I look back on my life and that’s the day. The moment.” I shook my head. “In the four years leading up to that, I spent so many nights away. So… committed. I gave all of me to getting”—I nodded through the window toward where I knew José still stood alone—“him. Nothing but a piece of garbage.” Sam was staring at me. “So many times I swore to Andie, ‘Just as soon as I catch him, we’ll take a vacation, be a family.’ I didn’t know it but all the nights I wasn’t there, all the days I missed with Brodie, all the times… it took its toll. She hid her pain pretty good. I didn’t know she was taking prescription drugs for a long time. By the time I did know, it was too late.”
The rifle drew her attention. “Can I see?”
I shifted. She lay down and squinted through the scope. “He looks so little. How could you hit him from here?”
“A little practice is all.”
“Anyone ever told you that you might have an unhealthy attraction to weapons?”
I chewed on that. “In 1867, nineteen soldiers northwest of here were guarding six civilian hay cutters near Fort C. F. Smith up along the Bozeman Trail near the Bighorn River in Montana. About mid-morning, somewhere close to 800 Cheyenne and Sioux warriors showed up. The fight lasted all day. The soldiers were armed with breech-loading Sharps but Al Colvin, a civilian and Civil War veteran, owned a sixteen-shot Henry Rifle—something seldom seen on the frontier and probably never seen by those Indians. The Indians had been fighting muskets so long that they’d been trained to wait for a volley of fire, then charge while some redcoat reloaded. That changed that day. Several accounts record that by nightfall, the pile of empty brass casings at Colvin’s feet numbered over three hundered—as did the number of dead Indians lying in the field out in front of him. That night, those civilians and all but a few of the soldiers went home to their families.”
“So, what are you saying?”
“A man with the right weapon can change the course of history for the better.”
“So, you’re really lying up here about to shoot him?”
I slid open the bolt to reveal the chamber and magazine. She said, “Where are the bullets?”
“None in there.”
“So, you’re up here trying to shoot a man with a gun that has no bullets?”
“Sometimes, things get cloudy. Looking through this changes that. Lets me see clearly. Like putting blinders on a horse.”
“Are you afraid of him?”
“I don’t know that I’ve ever been afraid of any man, but I am concerned with what I know he’ll do when he gets out.”
“Like what?”
“I put a lot of people in that prison. All of them deserved it but not all of them are bad people. Some just made bad choices. They’re paying for that. A few of them tell me things from time to time. They tell me that he talks about me, and my family, a good bit.”
She wiped dust off the top of the rifle. “How long has this been up here?”
“Couple of years.”
“You been coming up here and doing this for a couple of years?”
“Yes.”
I pulled a .308 Winchester cartridge from my pocket and turned it in my hand. She said, “Does that fit that?”
“Black Hills Sierra match; 175-gram boat tail hollow point; 2620 feet per second. Flight time from here to there is about one-point-three seconds. And yes, it fits it perfectly.”
We sat a long time. An hour or better. Pigeons fluttered around us. She didn’t press me with a bunch of conversation. Just sat with me when that’s what I needed. Somewhere in there, I spoke.
“People been killing people since Cain slit his brother’s throat, or bashed his head in. I don’t know how he did it, just that he did. I always found it strange… the idea of one family member pressing the delete button on a member of its own. People have accused me of being over the top. Say I own too many guns. Take this star too seriously.” I spat. “I don’t give a flying flip what they think. Evil is as real as this bell tower. And like it or not, we’re all in this. We’re all in a fight for our lives. Evil wants to rip off our heads, post it on a stake outside our front door, then s
tack the bodies like cordwood and sit on the pile. People who don’t think so weren’t born Jewish in Germany in the 1930s. Have never seen the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Never walked through the halls at Columbine or Virginia Tech. I have. Flew to all those places because I wanted to know what history felt like. Smelled like. Looked like. And the thing I’ve learned is that evil is a chameleon.” I stared at her. “You want to know what evil looks like? Want to see its face? Take a look. Doesn’t get any clearer than José Juan.” I paused. “His nickname is ‘The Machete.’ ” I leaned back. Shook my head. “Some say the world’s changed. That these bad people have changed. I’ve actually heard that one before. Mostly from defense attorneys speaking before juries. They say their client is not the man the prosecution details. I’ve heard José Juan himself tell that to his jury during his trial. They called me back on the stand and I looked at him square, “ ‘José Juan, that bs might fly with your jury but it won’t fly with those four dead women. Especially the one that got her baby cut out of her stomach by your knife.’ ” I paused. “They struck that from the record, but that don’t make it not true. It’s true as the day is long. He wanted his drugs and his drugs were in little bags in her stomach.”
I was talking as much to myself as her. “You ever seen those videos of the wildebeest migration? Ever noticed who’s hanging out near the back, trailing the weak? Lions aren’t stupid. That’s you, me, all of us—the naïve, unsuspecting folks minding our own business, trying to get through the day, at the back of the pack.” I nodded. “Dad was right: a prowling lion, looking for someone to devour.”
I offered the rifle cartridge. “Killing people ain’t all that tough. Put the bullet in the right place and it does all the work. He’s 838 yards away. I grew up shooting whistle pigs at six hundered yards. His head is four times bigger than one of them. ‘Well,’ you say, ‘if you shoot him then you’re no better than him. That badge doesn’t make you right.’ And I’d agree, but it would make us all feel better and it would rid the earth of him. Others say, ‘Well… he’s just misunderstood. Too many drugs. Bad upbringing. Too much time in prison where he learned to think like a bad man.’ All that may be true, but does it excuse him?” I sucked through my teeth. The anger growing. “I love being a lawman. It’s all I ever wanted to be. But, the only problem with being one is that we are constantly responding to evil that has either already happened or is in the process of happening. Rarely, if ever, do we get to intervene before it happens. I don’t care what your religion is, or where you land on the mercy meter, but that man right there needs to be shot. Because he will commit evil as soon as he walks out. ‘Well,’ you say, ‘that’s coldhearted.’ Maybe. I admit the job can jade you after twenty years, but, whatever happened to fighting back? Fighting for your life. Fighting back doesn’t make you evil. You can both fight and be good. They are not mutually exclusive.”