He had spent a lot of mornings in old aircraft of the Allied and enemy persuasion, waiting for the instant, waiting for the magic moment she'd appear.
He had left his mark in mad dog Messerschmitts, Zeros and P-38s.
Fat-bellied Wildcats, Mustangs and Spits.
Mac sacks, Pepsi cans and chicken buckets littered the cockpits of ancient airplanes.
Twice-—and he wasn't proud of this–he'd left peculiar stains.
It was always the same.
No matter when she got in, two o'clock or four, she'd open the door behind the rusty, corrugated wing, open the door and just stand there awhile before she turned in.
Stand there, dry her hair and yawn, watching the sun come yellow through the trees.
And the fine thing was, the thing that made Jack's heart swell, was she didn't wear anything dirty, something short and black like you see in a girlie magazine.
She wore a long nightgown that came below her knees, a nightie with Mickeys and Minnies all over, like a little kid'd do.
And even if Jack was freezing cold, or broiling in sweat like he was doing now, he never thought about leaving, not till he saw her up there.
Not till the warm and loving thoughts had time to settle down inside his head.
This time, though, there wasn't any love up there, there was sorrow and murder in his head.
Sorrow for himself, and murder for Cecil R. Dupree, who was up there with her where he, Jack, had never been.
Sorrow and shame, because he knew what he ought to do was climb up and kill him, kill the sorry bastard any way he could.
Climb up and do it, not even think about what might happen after that.
What he did wasn't anything at all, because Huntsville had sucked all the killer part out, drained him and left him with a hole in his belly and a fright in his soul.
The mean was still in him, he could feel it in there, mean left over from the Choctaw-Irish Oklahoma kid, from the man he became after that.
It was there, but he just couldn't reach it anymore.
A
big crow landed on the plane's right wing.
Then another, and another after that.
They squawked and they strutted, and poked each other with their bills.
Jack knew crows were real smart.
Grandpa Rait had told him so, when they sat on the bank at Shallow Creek, fishing for crappie and cat.
Grandpa Rait was mostly full of shit, but he knew about crows, there wasn't any bull in that.
The door opened up and the crows scattered quick.
It wasn't Gloria, it was Cecil R. Dupree.
Jack's heart skipped a beat.
The ugly flush across Cecil's face was darker than Jack had ever seen.
His eyes were little cuts, his mouth was thin and mean.
Muttering, talking to himself, Cecil made his way down the tree. Missed a few slats, nearly fell twice, stomped through the woods and headed toward the road.
Jack watched until Cecil was out sight.
Looked up at the plane, looked a second too late.
The door slammed shut and she was gone.
What he could do, he could go up there, he could climb up and talk.
She was all distraught, she'd welcome some comfort right now.
And, sorrow and anger and pissed off aside, what he knew, what he knew was surely true, was she'd brought Cecil there against her will.
Nothing had happened up there, Cecil's face told him that.
That mark was as good as those mood rings the stores used to sell.
If Cecil'd done her, he'd be kind of coral, light strawberry, he wouldn't be black.
Jack had seen him black once or twice, and he knew what that was like.
Go up and see her then, lay it all out, like he should have done before.
Tell her they had to start dating or they'd never get close.
She simply had to understand that.
How love was a two-way street, he couldn't do it all alone.
Another thing he'd tell her, which would show her how he felt, was he'd stay there at Piggs.
Even if Cat half killed him, he wouldn't run off, he wouldn't go away.
If she'd have him, if they'd go out now and then for pie, if she'd let love try and have its way, he'd put up with anything else.
He thought that'd do it.
If that didn't work, then nothing else would.
Out of the Yak, then, onto the ground.
Stretched for a minute to get the kinks out.
Started for the ladder—stopped, hesitated.
Made himself try again.
Halfway there, and he heard a branch snap, heard it real close, froze in his tracks behind a tree.
The sound came again.
A cough, then another.
Someone else was in the woods, someone close by.
Someone–
Cecil!
Oh Jesus, Cecil hasn't left, he's coming back now!
Jack drew a breath, caught a blur of motion to his right.
Five, six yards off in the trees.
Past the red fighter without a tail.
He turned his head slowly, an inch at a time.
The figure moved again.
Out in the open, away from the trees.
Jack stared.
It wasn't Cecil, it was somebody else.
It was that big Mex, fucking Ricky Chavez, with the solid gold buckle on his belt.
Standing there with a dozen wilted roses, looking up sadly at Gloria's tree.
"Godamn it," Jack said to himself, "these people got to stop, I cannot keep putting up with this..."
I
t was way past seven when he drove Ortega's car back and parked beneath the live oak tree.
Cecil's car was back in Cecil's spot, in the alley next to Piggs.
They were all asleep, then.
Cecil up there in his room, Cat on his cot behind the stairs.
Jack knew for sure that he slept with his eyes wide open, a sight fairly frightening to see.
Conscious, or in a deep coma–either state was fine with him.
Jack settled down in the back room at Wan's, back behind cartons of toilet paper, soy sauce, chilés, and great tins of MSG.
It was too late to try and go to bed.
He could lie down and rest, though, make sure he didn't go to sleep.
For some peculiar reason, he felt unusually calm, almost at ease, and wondered just how that could be.
In a couple of hours, someone would hurt him real bad.
Cecil wouldn't let Cat kill him.
Help was too hard to get in Mexican Wells.
Almost anyone could do a lot better than Piggs.
Cat wouldn't kill him, then–but whatever he did, it wouldn't feel good.
"Jhack, what the fock you doin' here, mahn?
I t'ink you are gone, I never be seein' you again."
"Well I'm here," Jack said, "if that's all right with you."
"Hey, is aw'right wi' me, hah?
I am t'inking, though, you pretty crazy in the head, Jhack.
I t'ink you smarter than dat."
"Well I'm not, so just shut up about it, okay?"
"Hokay, Jhack."
"Hokay your fuckin' self.
Just leave me alone, I gotta get some rest."
Ahmed was in the far corner somewhere, behind the sacks of rice.
Rice felt a lot like sand, he'd told Jack, it even felt better sometimes.
"Why you be comin' back, mahn?
These not a good idea, I know dat..."
"I love it here, okay?
How could you ask for a better place than this?
Good bed, good pay.
Some asshole from overseas talking all the time.
All the Chink food you can eat.
What else could a guy want besides that?"
"Hokay, Jhack."
"Shut up, you said that.
Don't go saying it again."
"Hey, Jhack."
"What?"
"I know thees guy one time, he has got a place sout' of Baghdad?
Wat these guy is doin, he is tired of t'inkin' all da time.
All the time he gotta t'ink of ever t'ing hisself.
So wat he do, he say, 'Allah, you do the t'inkin' I am no t'inkin' anymore.'
So he don', hokay?
He start off walkin', run into a wall.
Get up, start walkin' somewhere else.
Maybe a fruit or somet'in fall outa tree, he gonna eat dat.
Maybe it rain sometime, he gonna get a drink.
He walk into a shop, right through da glass, knock ever' t'ing down.
Someone hit thees guy, knock him in da head.
He don' care, he get up and go again..."
"Jesus, is there a point to this or what?"
"I don' t'ink so, Jhack."
"Now how did I know that?
Shut up, don't you tell me nothing, you hear?"
Jack waited, waited for Ahmed to mouth off again because Ahmed always did.
He hated to sleep in the storeroom.
Not just because of Ahmed, because of the smell.
The smell was the same as the storeroom in Huntsville prison–cardboard, potatoes, lettuce and tomatoes.
Flour, sugar, things in boxes and cans.
People didn't know cans smelled.
You get enough cans stacked up, they've got a certain smell.
They don't smell like anything but cans.
Color was the other thing that stuck in his head.
White shirt and pants if you were good.
Pea-green if a man was truly bad.
Bad guys took great pride in their greens.
Big black dudes with rheumy eyes.
Little guys with killer eyes from "K" Wing, where the Mexican Mafia was king.
Skinhead whites from the Aryan Brotherhood.
The whites, he recalled, were either pole-thin or hog fat, nothing in between.
Everything around you was painted in pale dirty colors that didn't have a name.
No purples, no yellows, no reds.
The first thing he did when they let him out was buy a bright red shirt and yellow pants.
You could always spot a con who'd just come out.
He looked like a fucking rainbow for a while.
He didn't mean to sleep but he did.
He was thinking about the day "C" Wing had gotten out of hand, and the guards had tossed in a gas grenade.
He took that thought into a dream, heard the quick explosion, saw the baby-shit yellow cloud of smoke come at him, felt his eyes and his skin and the inside of his nose begin to burn...
...That dream flipped into another, this one featuring Billy Joe Weal, a lifer Jack had met in the yard at one time.
Billy, who was just twenty-two, had robbed a convenience store, shot the clerk dead, and run off with eighteen dollars and thirty-nine cents.
An Oklahoma boy of the skinhead persuasion, Billy had tattoos up and down his arms of swastikas, eagles, daggers and the like.
And, across his chest, the words
HI, HITLER!
in bold Gothic script.
No one, not even his Aryan brothers, had the nerve to tell him it wasn't quite right.
Billy was not only dumb, he was also a mean little shit...
...And, as the tar on the roof began to boil, and the room down below was hot enough to bake a brick, Ahmed cried out in his sleep, a long Iraqi curse that hopped into Jack's dream.
The words began to spill out of Billy Joe Weal, and somehow seemed to make sense...
H
utt Kenny drove his rental Buick through Martindale, Fentris, Prairie View and Luling, turned off 80 onto Interstate 10.
Ten went straight through Houston, Beaumont, Baton Rouge, and finally down to New Orleans.
Something close to five-hundred miles and nothing in between that Kenny cared to see.
What he wanted to see was the Louisiana line.
That, and a girl on Chartres Street named Jill.
Jill looked a lot like Gloria whatsit, that knockout dancer at Piggs.
Okay, she didn't, but she looked pretty good, you didn't see her in the light.
Just thinking about Texas, Piggs, and fucking Zorro the Hick, made Kenny start to boil.
The guy was a loony, a nut.
Smart, you got to say that, but crazy as shit.
As crazy as Ambrose Junior, only Junior wasn't smart.
The old man, now, there's a guy that's smart.
Only Junior was running the show now, and he's the guy Kenny had to call.
Call up and tell him what Cecil said, how he wouldn't go along.
Even if you left out all the bad parts, Junior would blow his stack.