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  In memory of Murphy Dowouis

  Prologue

  THE EVENTS I’M about to describe may challenge credulity. I do not blame the reader. Young Goodman Brown wanders these pages. The macabre images, the Gothic characters, the perfume from a poisonous garden could have been created with the ink from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s pen.

  But the operative word is “could.” Edwin Arlington Robinson once wrote that God slays Himself with every leaf that flies. I think the same is true of us. I think we cannot understand ourselves until we understand that living is a form of dying. My generation was born during the Great Depression and, for good or bad, will probably be the last generation to remember traditional America. Our deaths may be inconsequential; the fling we had was not.

  Cursed or blessed with the two faces of Janus, we saw the past and the future simultaneously but were sojourners in both, and most of us had gone into the night even before we knew the sun had set. In our ephemerality, we were both vain and innocent, as children can be vain and innocent. In our confidence that the evil of German fascism and Japanese imperialism lay smoldering in the ashes of Berlin and Hiroshima, we believed the republic of Jefferson and Adams had become the model for the rest of humankind, without acknowledging the internecine nature of triumphalism.

  Music was everywhere. Dixieland, Brubeck, R&B, swing, C&W, rock and roll, Bird. The amusement piers along the Gulf Coast rang with it. In the hurricane season, when the nights were as black as silk, the waves seemed to swallow the stars and turn the waves to burgundy. They were five feet high, hissing with foam, swollen with seaweed and shellfish, with the thudding density of lead, smelling of birth and organic turmoil and destruction; then, suddenly, they would lift you into the air, pinioning your arms behind you like Jesus on his cross, and release you on the sand as a mother would a child.

  It was a grand time to be around. War was an aberration. Bergen-Belsen and Changi Prison were devised by foreign lunatics who wore the uniforms of clowns. A GI with a cigarette lighter that had a sketch on the side of Mount Fuji was a celebrity. But the fondest memories were the drive-in theaters, the formal dances under a silver ball, the summer tuxes and hooped crinoline dresses, the dollar-fifty corsages and small boxes of chocolate-covered cherries we gave to our dates at their front door, the flush in a girl’s face when you kissed her cheek, the shared conviction that spring was forever and none of us would ever die.

  But illusion is illusion, and the millions of bison and passenger pigeons slaughtered on the plains and the whalebones that still wash ashore on the New England coast are testimony to our anthropogenic relationship with the earth. And for that reason I have written this account of the events to which I was witness in the year 1962, in the days just before the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  These events fill me with sorrow and give me no peace. They also make me question my sanity. But they occurred, and others can reckon with them or not. I said Goodman Brown found his way into this story. That’s not quite accurate. I believe the human story is collective, that we write it together, but only a few are willing to recognize their participation in it. T. E. Lawrence described the aftermath of the Turks at work in an Arabian village. I have never forgotten the images, and I have never forgiven him for implanting them in my memory. At the conclusion of this story, I hope I have not done that to you.

  Chapter One

  MANY YEARS AGO, knocking around the American West was quite a gig. Think of running alongside a boxcar, your heart bursting in your chest, slinging your duffel and your guitar inside and jumping in after them, and then two hours later descending the Grand Divide, your head dizzy from the thin air, grizzly bears loping alongside the grain cars. The side-door Pullman didn’t cost a cent, and what a show it was: an orange moon above a Kansas wheat field; the iridescent spray of wheel lines; the roar of a stream at the bottom of a canyon; the squeak of an irrigation valve at sunset; the cold smell of water seeping through a walnut orchard at evening tide.

  Colorado had strange laws back then. Hitchhiking or hopping a freight could cost you six months in the can or on the hard road. The consequence was that bums and migrants riding a hotshot into Denver could get into the state but not out, so Larimer Street was overflowing with panhandlers and derelicts pissing and sleeping in alleyways and under the bridges on the Platte. In the spring of ’62, I swung off a flat-wheeler at the Denver city limits and slept two nights in the Sally, then took a Greyhound bus down to Trinidad and hired on with a big dairy and produce farm that provided cabins and community showers and a dining hall for the workers. The owner was Mr. Jude Lowry.

  Know why migrants are migrants? There’s no yesterday and no tomorrow. Anonymity is a given; migrants come with the dust and go with the wind. Mortality disappears with a cold bottle of beer in a juke joint. I had nonalcoholic blackouts back then, and because of the life I had chosen, I didn’t mind. In fact, the migrant way of life seemed created especially for people like me.

  Late in August, Mr. Lowry put me in charge of the flatbed and the trailer it towed, and told me to round up Spud Caudill and Cotton Williams and start hauling our last crop of tomatoes down to the packing house in Trinidad, which would take us three trips. The air was heavy with the odor of insecticide and the harrows busting up the soil and the scattered chunks of ruined melons that looked like red emeralds in the sunlight. But there was another phenomenon at work also, a purple haze in the lee of the mountains, one that smelled of the desert and the end of the season, as though the land wanted to reclaim itself and drive us from its midst.

  * * *

  I FIRED UP THE flatbed and, with Spud in the passenger seat and Cotton behind the cab, headed down the dirt road for the highway, the knob on the floor shift jiggling in my palm.

  Spud’s face was as coarse as a lampshade and pocked with ringworm scars, his head shaped like an Idaho potato. He always wore a wilted fedora low on his brow, and cut his own hair to save money for brothels. He had been on his own since he was eleven years old. One mile down the road, he unscrewed the cap on a canteen and filled a jelly jar half-full with dago red. “Want a slug?”

  I gave him a look.

  “Mind if I do?” he said.

  “Mr. Lowry entrusted us with his truck.”

  “A passenger drinking in the truck don’t hurt the truck, Aaron.”

  “Do whatever you want, Spud.”

  He poured the wine carefully back into the canteen, shaking out the last drop. “Why are you so weird, Aaron? I mean deeply, brain-impaired weird?”

  I drove with one hand, the breeze warm on my face, the sky piled with plum-colored clouds above the mountains, backdropped by a molten sun.

  “You not gonna say anything?” he asked.

  “Nope.”

  “I know where there’s a jenny barn.”

  “A what?” I said.

  “In Kentucky that’s what we call a whorehouse. In this particular one, the señoritas sing in your ear if you tip them.”

  I nodded and turned on the radio. Someone had broken off the aerial. I clicked off the radio, my gaze straight ahead. The slopes of the mountains were deep in shadow now, the smell of the sage as dense as perfume.

  “Silence is rude, Aaron,” Spud said. “Actually, an act of aggression.”

 
“In what way?”

  “It’s like telling people they’ve done something wrong. Or they’re stupid and not worth talking to.”

  “You’re a good fellow, Spud.”

  He squeezed his package as though he were in pain. “I guess I’ll have to get married again. My last wife hit me upside the head with a skillet and threw me down a fire escape. She was the only one who loved me. My other two were meaner than a bucket of goat piss on a radiator.”

  Cotton had unrolled his sleeping bag between two stacks of tomato crates and was reading a Classics Illustrated comic book, his head propped up on a pillow that had no cover on it. His hair was silver and grew to his shoulders, his left eye as white and slick as the skin on a hard-boiled egg. He said during the liberation of Rome, he chased Waffen-SS miles through the catacombs to a chamber under the Vatican Obelisk. There were three levels in the catacombs, and the third level, where the SS had fled, was full of water that had been dripping there for almost two thousand years. He said he had a grease gun and killed every SS in the chamber, the same one where the bones and dust of Saint Paul and Saint Peter lay inside two stone coffins.

  Spud saw me looking at Cotton in the rearview mirror. “You believe that war story of his?”

  “About the Nazis in the catacombs?”

  “Wherever.”

  “Yeah, I believe him,” I said.

  “How come you’re so certain?”

  “Because Cotton doesn’t care what people think of him one way or another.”

  “Did you really study journalism at the University of Missouri?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why are you doing this shit?”

  “It’s a good life.”

  He looked at the countryside flying by the window. “I know what you mean. I love slopping pigs and milking cows before breakfast, and chopping cotton from cain’t-see to cain’t-see. You’re a laugh riot, Aaron.”

  Chapter Two

  WE UNLOADED AT a packing house by the tracks outside Trinidad, then blew a tire and decided to stay over, with Mr. Lowry’s permission. Not many growers were farming tomatoes anymore, but Mr. Lowry took pride in his produce and yearly rotated his acreage and plowed it with compost and cow manure, and every five years brought in a refrigerated load of waste from a fish cannery on the Texas coast. Afterward, the birds picked his fields like seagulls, and sometimes bears came down from the mountains and tore up the rows, but Mr. Lowry’s sliced tomatoes were the fattest in the area and bled like beefsteak.

  When we pulled in at the motel, the sun was a spark in the crevice of two mountains, the shadows as long and purple as a bruise. “I’d like to go on a field trip tonight,” Spud said.

  “This truck is not going to a hot-pillow joint,” I said.

  “What about you, Cotton?” he said.

  “What about me?” Cotton said.

  “What’s your vote?” Spud asked. “You can just sit in the living room if you like. Or—”

  “You’re always borrowing trouble, Spud,” Cotton replied.

  The motel we used in Trinidad was clean and cheap and attached to a restaurant with neon cactuses and sombreros and Mexican beer signs scrolled in the windows. The mountains around Trinidad were the deep metallic blue of a razor blade, and seemed to rise straight and flat-sided into the clouds. The wind was balmy from the layer of warm air that lifted at sunset from the plateau at the bottom of Ratón Pass. Trinidad was a magical city in those days, full of brick streets that climbed into the hills and nineteenth-century saloons where Doc Holliday and the Earps probably drank and slept during the 1880s when they were wiping out the remnants of the Clanton gang.

  We showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes, then went into the restaurant and ordered plates of tamales and beans and enchiladas and guacamole salad. Four men were standing at the bar, not sitting but standing, the way men do when they have more on their mind than just drinking. I thought maybe they didn’t like Cotton’s long hair or felt challenged by his jagged profile and one-eyed stare and hunched posture and the slink in his walk and the muscles in his shoulders and upper arms that you associate with a former paratrooper.

  Much earlier in my life, I had learned not to make eye contact with the predators who hang in late-night bars, particularly the ones with jailhouse tats who are closet sadists and can’t wait to rip a college boy apart. I kept my eyes on my food, then glanced at the bar. The four men were sitting on stools now and watching Have Gun—Will Travel on a black-and-white TV.

  Spud couldn’t keep his eyes off our waitress. Neither could I. Her hair was thick and clean and as bright as a new penny, her skin without a blemish, like the inside of a rose, her legs long and tapered, her pink uniform tight across her rump.

  “Y’all want anything else?” she said.

  “You from Texas?” I asked.

  “I used to be. You gonna have dessert?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I will if he won’t,” Spud said, his eyes lighting. “I’ll eat anything that’s sweet. With both hands. Any way I can get it. Whatcha got, girl?”

  She handed him a menu. “Try reading the list under ‘Desserts.’ ”

  She was standing inches from me. Her hip brushed against my shoulder.

  “Could I have another Dr Pepper?” I said.

  “You bet,” she said. “Ice cold.”

  * * *

  IT WAS DARK when we walked out to the parking lot. Our truck was in the shadows, close by the motel. Spud was picking his teeth. Cotton was licking down the seam on a hand-rolled cigarette. The stars were white and cold and so numerous they looked like refrigerated smoke arching over the mountains and down Ratón Pass into New Mexico. I looked through the front window of the café. Our waitress was writing down the order for a Mexican family in a booth. A little boy was crying in a high chair. She patted his head, then put a coloring book and a crayon in front of him.

  “You’re not gonna let me borrow the truck?” Spud said.

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Drop me off and I’ll find my own ride back.”

  “Can’t do it, partner,” I said.

  “Like you don’t have it on your mind, too?” he said.

  “I didn’t catch that.”

  “Ice cold,” he said. “How old is she? Fifteen?”

  She was probably nineteen or twenty, but I didn’t want to argue. “I didn’t mean to judge you, Spud. I told Mr. Lowry I’d be responsible for his truck, that’s all.”

  “So I’ll call a cab.”

  “Here’s a dime,” I said.

  It was a cheap thing to say. Spud was a good soul, as homely as mud, as socially sophisticated as a dirty sock floating in a punch bowl. But secretly, I knew he was a better man than I. He pulled on his dong. “Well, the heck with it. In the next life, I’m coming back as a dildo.”

  An eighteen-wheeler went by, the driver shifting down, the air brakes blowing for the long descent down the Pass. The stench from the exhaust stacks seemed to violate the perfection of the ink-black sky and the vaporous coldness of the stars and the symmetry of the lighted houses strung through the hills. Then I knew that something was wrong, and it was not the semi or Spud’s lust or my inability to stop thinking about the young waitress.

  I saw a sticker on the rear bumper of Mr. Lowry’s truck that I hadn’t paid attention to before. I saw Cotton’s hand move to the side pocket of his jeans, his thumb working at the Buck folding knife he carried. A tall, booted man about my age in a coned-up cowboy straw hat, with girlish hips, was standing five feet from us. Three more men stood behind him, silhouetted against a neon cactus on the café window. They were the same ones we had seen standing at the bar. Each of them held an ax handle. One had a blanket draped over his arm.

  “What the hell you guys want?” Spud said.

  Then they were on us, our arms hardly in the air before the first blows rained down upon us. I saw Cotton’s half-opened knife fall from his hand. I felt a string of saliva and blood whip against the side o
f my face. I saw Spud’s jaw drop and his knees collapse, his arms flop at his sides as if his motors had been cut. I saw a blanket swirl above us, undulating like the wings of a giant stingray. Under the blanket, Cotton’s face was pressed against mine, his blind eye luminous, his body trembling with shock, his breath rife with the smell of beer and Mexican food.

  When the blows stopped, I heard the four men walking away, one of them talking about Richard Boone, the star of Have Gun—Will Travel. I got the blanket off my head and stumbled onto the highway as they drove off. I couldn’t make out their license number. A beer can flew from the back window and bounced end over end on the asphalt, all the way down the hill.

  Chapter Three

  TWO SHERIFF’S DEPUTIES put us in the back of a patrol car, and one gave Spud a towel to cup to his mouth. I thought we were going to a hospital. When I saw the lights of the jail, I rattled the grille. “My friend needs stitches,” I said.

  “The ER is full-up,” the driver said, his eyes in the rearview mirror. He was smiling. “Wreck on the highway.”

  We were put in different cells in a row separated by bars rather than walls. In the morning we were questioned one by one in a room that had a D ring sunk in the floor, although we were not cuffed to it. The detective who questioned us was tall and impersonal and wore a drooping mustache and cowboy boots and a short-brim Stetson tilted over his eyebrows.

  “My name is Wade Benbow,” he said to me. “Which one are you?”

  “Aaron Holland Broussard.”

  “You never saw those guys before?” he said.

  “No, sir.”

  “They just came out of the dark and laid into you? No warning?”

  “No, sir. No warning.”

  “No explanation?”

  “None.”

  “You think they mistook you for somebody else?”

  This time I didn’t reply.