He spent many evenings sitting on a metal chair in front of the cave, wondering if the wind echoing inside it spoke to him and if indeed the desert was not an ancient vineyard made sterile by man’s infidelity to Yahweh. Paradoxically, that thought comforted him. The sinfulness of the world somehow gave him a greater connection to it, made him more acceptable in his own eyes and simultaneously reduced the level of his own iniquity. Except Preacher had one problem he could not rid himself of: He had filled the ground with the bodies of Oriental women and watched while Hugo’s bulldozer had scalloped up the earth and pushed the backfill over them. He told himself he had been acting as an agent of God, purging the world of an abomination, perhaps even preempting the moral decay and diseases that had awaited them as prostitutes on the streets of a corrupt nation.
But Preacher was having little success with his rationalization for the mass execution of the helpless and terrified women who waited for him nightly in his sleep. When Bobby Lee Motree arrived at Preacher’s house in the desert, Jack was delighted by the distraction.
He set up two metal chairs in front of the cave and opened cold bottles of Coca-Cola for the two of them and watched while Bobby Lee drank his empty, his throat pumping, one eye fastened curiously on Preacher. Bobby Lee was wearing a muscle shirt and his top hat and his brown jeans that had yellow canvas squares stitched on the knees. He was full of confidence and cheer at being back in Preacher’s good graces; he unloaded his burden, telling Preacher how Liam got popped by the female deputy sheriff in the restaurant and how that rat bastard Artie Rooney had told Hugo to smoke everybody-the soldier and his girl, the Jewish guy and his wife and maybe even the Jewish guy’s kids, and finally, Preacher himself.
“If you cain’t trust Artie Rooney, who can you trust? The standards of our profession have seriously declined,” Preacher said.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Bobby Lee replied.
“That was a joke.”
“Yeah, I knew that. I can always tell when you’re joking.”
Preacher let the subject slide. “Tell me again how this Holland fellow spotted Liam. I didn’t quite get all that.”
“I guess he recognized him, that’s all.”
“Even though Liam had shaved off his beard and was sitting in a crowded restaurant and the sheriff had never seen him and had no reason to be looking for Liam there?”
“Search me. Weird stuff happens.”
“But the sheriff didn’t make you?”
“I was in the can, taking a dump.”
“How’d you get out during all that shooting if you were in the can?”
“It was a Chinese fire drill. I ran outside with the crowd.”
“And just strolled on off, a fellow with no car, a fellow everybody saw sitting with Liam just a few minutes earlier?”
“Most of them were pouring the wee-wee out of their shoes. Why should they worry about me?”
“Maybe you were just lucky.”
“I told you the way it was.”
“Young people believe they’re never going to die. So they’ve got confidence that old men like me don’t have. That’s where your luck comes from, Bobby Lee. Your luck is an illusion produced by an illusion.”
Bobby Lee’s obvious sense of discomfort was growing. He shifted in his chair and glanced at the stars and the sparkle of the desert and the greenish cast at the bottom of the sky. “Is that hole behind us one of those pioneer storage places where they kept preserves and shit?”
“Maybe it goes down to the center of the earth. I’m going to find out one day.”
“Sometimes I just can’t track what you’re saying, Jack.”
“My uncle was in the South Pacific. He said he dynamited a whole mountain on top of the Japs who wouldn’t surrender and were hiding in caves. He said you could hear them at night, like hundreds of bees buzzing under the ground. I bet if you put your ear to the ground, you might still hear them.”
“Why do you talk about stuff like that?”
“Because I’m doubting your truthfulness, and you’re starting to piss me off.”
“I wouldn’t try to put the glide on you. Give me some credit,” Bobby Lee said, his eyes round, unblinking, the pupils dilated like drops of ink in the dark.
“Bobby Lee, you either gave up Liam or this fellow Holland is a special kind of lawman, the kind who doesn’t quit till he staples your hide on the barn door. Which is it?”
“I didn’t give up Liam. He was my friend,” Bobby Lee replied, propping his hands on his knees, tilting his face up at the sky. His unshaved jaw looked as though grains of black pepper and salt had been rubbed into the pores. Preacher looked at him for a long time, until Bobby Lee’s face began to twitch and his eyes glistened. “You want to keep hurting and insulting me, go ahead and do it. I came out here to see you because you’re my friend. But all you do is run me down,” Bobby Lee said.
“I believe you, boy,” Preacher said.
Bobby Lee cleared his throat and spat. “Why do you do it?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“Our kind of work. We’re button men. We push people’s off button and shut down their motors. A pro does it for money. It’s not supposed to be personal. You’re a pro, Preacher, but with you, it’s not the money. It’s something nobody ever asks you about. Why do you do it?”
“Why are you asking me?”
“’Cause you’re the only man I could ever relate to.”
“You see the glow in the land? It’s the bone in the soil that does that. Inside all that alluvial soil and lava flow and sedimentary rock, there’s millions of dead things letting off energy, lighting the way for the rest of us.”
“Go on.”
Preacher picked a mosquito off his neck and squeezed it between his thumb and finger. He wiped the blood on a piece of Kleenex. “That’s all. You asked a question and I answered it.”
“I don’t get it. Lighting the way, what?”
“Don’t fret yourself, boy. I need to know everything about this fellow Holland. I want to know why he was down by Big Bend. I want to know how he recognized Liam.”
“I’m one guy. You got us into all this, Jack. How am I supposed to fix everything?”
Preacher didn’t respond. In the wind, his face looked as serene and transfixed as though it had been bathed in warm water, his lips parted slightly, his teeth showing. In his eyes was a black reflection that made even Bobby Lee swallow, as though Preacher saw a presence on the horizon that no one else did. “You’re not mad at me, are you?” Bobby Lee said, trying to smile.
“You? You’re like a son to me, Bobby Lee,” Preacher answered.
BOBBY LEE DROVE away from the stucco house before first light, and Preacher prepared breakfast for himself on a propane stove and ate from a tin plate on his back steps. As a red glow fingered its way across the plain from the east, Preacher mounted his crutches and worked his way down the incline toward a mesa that was still locked in shadow. He crossed the opening to an arroyo and stumped through a depression of soft baked clay that cracked and sank beneath his weight with each step he took. He thought he could see petroglyphs cut in the layered rock above his head, and he was convinced he was traversing an alluvial flume that probably had irrigated verdant fields when an agrarian society had lived in harmony with the animals and a knife blade hammered out of primitive iron drew no blood from them or the people who had been sent to dwell east of Eden.
But Preacher Jack’s thoughts about a riparian paradise brought him no peace. When he looked behind him, the funnel-shaped indentations of his crutches in the dried-out riverbed reminded him of coyote tracks. Even the drag of his footprints was serpentine and indistinct, as though his very essence were that of a transient and weightless creature not worthy of full creation.
He wished to think of himself as a figure emblazoned retroactively on biblical legend, but the truth was otherwise. He had been a burden to his mother the day he was born, as well as a voyeur to her trysts. Now he lusted for the woman who had bested him both physically and intellectually and, in addition, had managed to pump one.38 round into his calf and one through the top of his foot. The memory of her scent, the heat in her skin and hair, the smear of her saliva and lipstick on his skin caused a swelling in his loins that made him ashamed.