“Nick, your face is white. You get some bad news?” the bartender said.

“Everything is great,” Nick replied.

When he sat on the bar stool, his head reeling, his duck feet were so swollen with hypertension that he thought his shoes would burst their laces.

BEFORE HE FINALLY went to bed, Hackberry Holland had gone into the shower stall as his only salutary refuge from his experience behind the church, washing his hair, scrubbing his skin until it was red, holding his face in the hot water as long as he could stand it. But the odor of disinterred bodies had followed him into his sleep, trailing with him through the next day into the following twilight, into the onset of darkness, the hills flickering with electricity, the horn of an eighteen-wheeler blowing far down the highway like a bugle from a forgotten war.

Federal agents had done most of the work at the murder scene, setting up a field mortuary and flood lamps and satellite communications that probably involved Mexican authorities as well as their own departmental supervisors in D.C. They were polite to him, respectful in their perfunctory fashion, but it was obvious they thought of him as a curiosity if not simply a bystander or witness. At dawn, when all the exhumed bodies had been bagged and removed and the agents were wrapping up the site, a man in a suit, with white hair and threadlike blue and red capillaries in his cheeks, approached Hackberry and shook hands in farewell, his smile forced, as though he was preparing to ask a question that was not intended to offend.

“I understand you were an attorney for the ACLU,” he said.

“At one time, many years ago.”

“Quite a change in career choices.”

“Not really.”

“I didn’t tell you something. One of our agents found some bones that have been in the ground a long time.”

“Maybe they’re Indian,” Hack said.

“They’re not that old.”

“Maybe the shooter has used this site before. The dozer was brought in on a truck. It went out the same way. Maybe this is a very organized guy.”

But the FBI agent in charge of the exhumation, whose name was Ethan Riser, was not listening. “Why did you stay out here digging up all these bodies by yourself? Why didn’t you call in sooner?” he said.

“I was a POW during the Korean War. I was at Pak’s Palace, plus a couple of other places.”

The agent nodded, then said, “Forgive me if I don’t make the connection.”

“There were miles of refugees on the roadways, almost all of them headed south. The columns were infiltrated by North Korean soldiers in civilian clothes. Sometimes our F-80s were ordered to kill everybody on the road. We had to dig their graves. I don’t think that story ever got reported.”

“You’re saying you don’t trust us?” the agent said, still smiling.

“No, sir, I wouldn’t dream of saying that.”

The agent stared at the long roll of the countryside, the mesquite leaves lifting like green lace in the breeze. “It must be like living on moonscape out here,” he said.

Hackberry did not reply and walked back to his truck, pain from an old back injury spreading into the lower regions of his spine.

IN THE LATE 1960s, he had tried to help a Hispanic friend from the service who had been beaten into a pile of bloody rags on a United Farm Workers picket line and charged with assaulting a law officer. At the time Hackberry was four fingers into a bottle of Jack Daniel’s by midafternoon every day of the week. He was also a candidate for Congress and deep in the throes of political ambition and his own cynicism, both of which poorly masked the guilt and depression and self-loathing he had brought back with him from a POW camp located in a place the North Koreans called No Name Valley.

At the jail where his friend would eventually be murdered, Hackberry met Rie Velásquez, who was also a United Farm Workers organizer, and he was never the same again. He had thought he could walk away from his friend’s death and from his meeting with the girl named Rie. But he was wrong on both counts. His first encounter with her was immediately antagonistic, and not because of her ideals or her in-your-face attitude. It was her lack of fear that bothered him, and her indifference to the opinions of others, even to her own fate. Worse, she conveyed the impression that she was willing to accept him if he didn’t ask her to take him or his politics seriously.

She was intelligent and university-educated and stunning in appearance. He manufactured every reason possible to see her, dropping by her union headquarters, offering her a ride, all the while trying to marginalize her radicalism and dismiss and hold at bay her leftist frame of reference, as though accepting any part of it would be like pulling a thread on a sweater, in this instance unraveling his own belief system. But he never confronted the issue at hand, namely that the working poor she represented had a legitimate cause and that they were being terrorized by both growers and police officers because they wanted to form a union.

Hackberry Holland’s political conversion did not take place at a union meeting or at Mass inside a sympathetic Catholic church, or involve seeing a blinding light on the road to Damascus. An irritable lawman accomplished the radicalization of Hackberry Holland by swinging a blackjack across his head and then trying to kick him to death. When Hackberry awoke on the concrete floor of a county lockup, his head inches from a perforated drain cover streaked with urine, he no longer doubted the efficacy of revolutionaries standing at the jailhouse door to sign up new members for their cause.

Rie had died of uterine cancer ten years ago, and their twin sons had left Texas, one for a position as an oncologist at the Mayo in Phoenix, the other as a boat skipper in the Florida Keys. Hackberry sold the ranch on the Guadalupe River where they had raised the children, and moved down by the border. If he’d been asked why he had given up the green place he loved for an existence in a dust-blown wasteland and a low-paying electoral office in a county seat whose streets and sidewalks and buildings were spiderwebbed with heat cracks, Hackberry would have had no explanation, or at least not one he would discuss with others.

The truth was, he could not rise in the morning from his bed surrounded by the things she had touched, the wind blowing the curtains, pressurizing the emptiness of the house, stressing the joists and studs and crossbeams and plaster walls against one another, filling the house with a level of silence that was like someone clapping cupped palms violently on his eardrums. He could not wake to these things and Rie’s absence and the absence of his children, whom he still saw in his mind’s eye as little boys, without concluding that a terrible theft had been perpetrated upon him and that it had left a lesion in his heart that would never heal.

A Baptist preacher had asked Hackberry if he was angry at God for his loss.

“God didn’t invent death,” Hackberry answered.

“Then who did?”

“Cancer is a disease produced by the Industrial Age.”

“I think you’re an angry man, Hack. I think you need to let go of it. I think you need to celebrate your wife’s life and not mourn over what you cain’t change.”

I think you ought to keep your own counsel, Hackberry thought. But he did not say the words aloud.

Now, in the blue glow of early dawn and the fading of the stars in the sky, he tried to eat breakfast on his gallery and not think about the dreams he’d had just before waking. No, “dreams” wasn’t the right word. Dreams had sequence and movement and voices inside them. All Hackberry could remember before opening his eyes into the starkness of his bedroom was the severity of the wounds in the bodies of the nine women and girls he had found buried by a bulldozer behind the church. How many people were aware of what a.45-caliber round could do to human tissue and bone? How many had ever seen what a.45 machine-gun burst could do to a person’s face or brain cavity or breasts or rib cage?