Then Bunny began to wonder if there were not other men involved with Roseanne besides himself. She knew too much, controlled him too easily, discerned his moods and sexual weaknesses too easily, sitting on top of his thighs, pressing his face into her breasts, kissing his damp hair while he came inside her.

One night he forced the subject. 'You making it with somebody else, Roseanne?' he said.

'You're such a silly fucko sometimes… Oh, I'm sorry, baby. Come here.'

That same night they went to San Antonio and had small red hearts tattooed above their left nipples.

After graduation Bunny worked as a floorman on a drilling rig in Odessa. Then he reported for summer football camp at A amp;M and a strange phenomenon occurred in his life: he was no longer a West Ender.

He was invited to sorority mixers, into the homes of the wealthy, taken to dinner at the country club by businessmen, treated as though a collective family of magically anointed people had decided to adopt him as their son.

He didn't return to Deaf Smith until Thanksgiving. He didn't call Roseanne Hazlitt, either.

He expected anger, recrimination, maybe even a trip on her part to College Station and a public scene that would be ruinous for him. But she surprised him again.

It was the last game of the season, a blue-gold late fall afternoon like the one the previous year when he had crunched across the track on his cleats and flipped the football into her palms. He got up from the bench and walked back to the Gatorade cooler and saw her standing by the rail in the box seats, next to a marine in his dress uniform. Bunny stared at her stupidly. She took a mum from the corsage on her coat, blew him a kiss, and bounced the mum off his face.

'Hey, you too stuck-up to say hello, you ole fucko?' she said.

His bare head felt cold and small in the wind, somehow shrunken inside the weight of his shoulder pads.

'Why'd she slap you in front of Shorty's, Bunny?' I asked.

He stuck the flats of his hands in his back pockets. He kicked at the dirt and didn't reply.

I looked beyond his shoulder at his customized maroon Chevy, with oversize whitewalls and white leather interior.

'That's a great-looking car,' I said.

The next day, after work, I lit a candle in front of the statue of Christ's mother at the stucco church. The church was empty, except for Pete, who waited for me in a pew at the back. I walked back down the aisle, dipped my fingers in the holy water font and made the sign of the cross, then winked at Pete and waited for him to join me out on the steps.

The western sky was ribbed with scarlet clouds, and the air smelled of pines and irrigation water in a field.

'You come here just to light a candle?' Pete asked.

'A friend of mine died on this date eleven years ago. Down in Mexico,' I said.

'How old was he?'

'Just a mite older than me.'

'That's young to die, ain't it?'

'I guess it is.'

He nodded. Then his expression grew thoughtful, as though he were remembering a moment, a question, he had refused to face earlier. 'Them men who was in the cars out there, the ones made you mad, that one man said something about you sticking a playing card in the mouth of a dead wetback? You ain't done anything like that, huh?'

'They weren't wetbacks, Pete. They were bad guys. They got what they asked for.'

'That don't sound like you.'

'I lost my friend down there.'

'I didn't mean nothing.'

'I know that. You're the best, Pete.'

We walked Beau down the hard-packed dirt street, along the edge of the rain ditch, to the café and ate supper.

But I didn't tell Pete the rest of the story, nor have I ever told anyone all of it, at least not until now-the weeks of treatment in Uvalde and Houston for the wound in my right arm, the bone surgery, the morphine dreams that at first leave you with a vague sense of unremembered sexual pleasure, followed by a quickening of the heart, flashes of light on the edges of your vision, like gunfire in darkness, a feeling in the middle of the night that you are about to be violated by someone in the room whom you cannot see.

After the hospitals, I went back across the river, without a badge, into the arroyo where we were ambushed and the town south of it where three of our adversaries-psychotic meth addicts who would later be killed by federates-had celebrated L.Q.' s death in a whorehouse, then down into the interior, across dry lake beds and miles of twisted moonscape that looked like heaps of cinders and slag raked out of an ironworks, into mountains strung with clouds and finally a green valley that was glazed with rain and whose reddish brown soil was lined with rows of avocado trees.

I thought I had found the leader, the man L.Q. had taken the rifle from.

The owner of the only bar in the village thought for a moment about my offer, then picked up the fifty-dollar bill from the counter and folded it into his shirt pocket. He was a big man with a black beard, and part of his face was covered with leathery serrations like dried alligator hide.

'See, I was a migrant labor contractor in Arizona. That's where I first seen this guy. I think he was moving brown heroin on the bracero buses. Pretty slick, huh? Yeah, I don't owe that guy nothing. Come on back here, I'll show you something,' he said.

The bar was a cool, dark building that smelled of beer and stone, and through the front door you could see horses tied to a tethering rail and the late sun through the long-leaf Australian pines that were planted along the road.

We went out the back door to a small cottage that was built of stacked fieldstones and covered with a roof of cedar logs and a blackened canvas tarp. The bartender pushed open the door, scraping it back on the stone floor.

'That was his bunk. Them stains on the floor, that's his blood. The guy don't got no name, but he got plenty of money. Puta too. A couple of them,' the bartender said. 'They told me they didn't like him, he talked about cruel things, made them do weird stuff, know what I mean?'

'No.'

'He must have been in the army, maybe down in Guatemala, he done some things to the Indians… Here.'

The bar owner picked up a bucket by the bail, walked outside with it, and shook it upside down. A broken knife blade and a spiral of bloody bandages tumbled out. He flipped the knife blade over with the point of his boot.

'That's what the doctor took out of him. Got to be a macho motherfucker to carry that and still have puta on the brain,' he said.

'Where'd he go?' I could feel my heart beating with the question.

'A plane picked him up. Right out there in them fields… This guy killed somebody who was your friend?'

'Not exactly.'

'Then I'd let it go, man. He told them two girls, his puta, he wired up people to electrical machines… You want your money back?'

'No.'

'You don't look too good. I'll fix you a rum and something to eat.'

'Why not?' I said, looking at the mist on the avocado orchards and a torn purple and yellow hole in the clouds through which the man without a face or name had perhaps disappeared forever.