PROLOGUE
Texas, 1980
He sat for a while in the close, quiet dark of the bedroom, black straw Bullhide in his lap. The woman lay on the bed in a slant of blue nightlight. She was naked, small-boned, pallid and pretty. Her eyes were wide and red with burst capillaries and fixed on the ceiling where a brown water stain had long since faded, the flesh beneath her jaw purpled over. Outside, a scrim of light lay over the world and the wind scraped blades of yucca along the trailer’s metal shell. Directly, he stood from the chair and picked up the stuffed bear he had set aside, its one eye black and shining. Somewhere, in the deep silence of the Elcona, a clock was ticking. He put the bear back in the chair and pulled his hat low on his head and went out of the woman’s trailer, which was set back in a sweet-smelling juniper grove.
From Fredericksburg, he drove the pickup and cabover three hundred miles without stopping. The sun rose over rolling hills and tight, gnarled groves of live oaks wrapped in mist. He took a thin strip of blacktop toward Rocksprings, then on south until he came to a great green body of water, beyond which lay Mexico. From here he hooked back north, sinking the pickup and camper into the land like a barb. He drove with no destination in mind: Del Rio, Comstock, Langtry—the true desert west of the Pecos where the highway emptied out onto a vast scrub plain. Dry washes snaking beneath bridges where the bones of animals lay bleaching in the sun. He drove just under the limit and rode the narrow shoulder when bigger rigs passed. Ernest Tubb warbled on the radio.
At twilight, he pulled off for gas in a wasted town where the wind never ceased banging metal against metal. He stood away from the pumps and smoked a cigarette while a boy in overalls filled the pickup’s tank. The sun bled out in colors of orange and pink, and he wiped away the tears the wind brought. The boy was a half-breed, rangy with muscle. He walked with a limp and glowered and spoke no words of peace or friendship.
“Propano?” he asked the boy. “Para mi caravana.”
The boy shook his head and spat away from the wind. “Próxima ciudad. Maybe.”
He gave the boy three dollars, ground his cigarette beneath the flat of his boot, and drove on into the mounting dark.
It was night when he stopped again at a roadside bar west of a town called Cielo Rojo. CALHOUN’S was spelled out in red neon above the porch, the cantina’s only extravagance, the rest of the place all cinder blocks and tin, white paint peeling from the blocks and showing faded blue beneath. It was a sad, sturdy place at the edge of a low dry forest of mesquite. Across the highway, a set of railroad tracks ran from one end of the night to the other. He parked the pickup and cabover in a pool of orange arc-sodium light. A train was passing, and he stood in the lot and watched it, enjoying the steady, percussive rhythm of its going. Like a knife punching holes in the lonely night. He went inside the bar for a beer and found, plugged into the back wall near the toilets, a Wurlitzer Stereo with a handwritten note taped below the selector switches: Works. New in 1963—Mgmt. The chrome was flecking and the cabinet was cracked.
He looked around.
The only other patron sat alone in a corner, an old abuela with a face like a canyon. She wore a thin silk blouse with a bow at the throat. Her hand shook when she reached for the glass of whiskey in front of her. The bartender was a white man, big and silver-haired and bored behind his register, working a crossword with a chewed pencil.
The place was cool and dim and pleasant.
He bought a can of Pearl with the last two dollars he had, then dropped a quarter in the Wurlitzer. He punched a number and settled down at a table and tipped his chair back against the wall and put his boots up. He set his hat over his eyes and drifted in the peaceful dark of not being on the road.
The man in the box began to sing.
The music rose and fell.
Out of the darkness came her scent of lemon and vanilla, the curve of a white calf beneath the hem of a pale blue cotton dress, her shape an hourglass, like time itself slipping away. She, before the picture window that looked out on the mimosa dropping its pink petals on the grass. Her slow smile spreading beneath a pair of eyes blue as cobalt glass. Water sheeting on the window and casting its shadow like a spell of memory on the wall behind. Her little red suitcase turntable scratching out a song beneath the window and he, a boy, with his bare feet on hers as she held his hands and the record turned
and they danced.
Their private, sad melody unspooling in his heart forever.
The song played out at three minutes.
In the silence that followed, a voice spoke inside his head.
A woman’s voice, soft and clear and sweet, and the word she spoke was his name.
Travis.
He heard the clatter of a quarter dropping and opened his eyes and tilted his hat back on his head and saw a woman who was not the woman he had been dreaming of. No woman ever was, but all women were measured against the dream, the memory, and so far, all had come up wanting. This woman stood alone at the Wurlitzer in a white summer dress with red flower print. Her skin was light as bone, her hair as red as a fortunate sky. She punched her selection and turned and looked at him and her eyes were large and round and green and she was not, he saw, so much a woman as a girl—seventeen, maybe eighteen. But the way she stood, alone before the box and somehow apart from the world, made her seem so much older.
“I like this song,” she said, and her voice was the voice that had spoken inside his head.
The man in the box began to sing again, the same sad warble.
Travis dropped his boots and set his chair on all fours.
She held the hem of her dress between her fingers and began to sway. She closed her eyes and tipped her head back to bare a long white throat. The old song working through her, Travis thought, like a slow, hot wire. He saw, where neck joined shoulder, an old white scar, blade-thin. She wore a gold locket, an oval-shaped clasp, the kind to hold pictures inside. It glinted in the scant bar light. The flowers of her dress were deep crimson, and they spilled down from her waist like—
red on the old man’s shirt like red on the seat like
—blood.
Her lips, the lightest shade of pink, moved around the words of the song, but no song came out of her.
Her skin so pale.
His heart beating faster now.
She moved toward him, swaying. Her red leather cowgirls scuffed concrete.
He slid his right hand to the buckle of his brown leather belt, ran his thumb over the eagle there, its outstretched wings, its talons curved and sharp.
Travis.
She opened her arms like a flower unfolding and slipped sideways onto his knee. She was in his lap and the tips of her fingers had found his cheeks before he knew it was happening, and when they touched his skin he started because her fingers were cold.
His own hand moved to the knife he wore on his hip, a Ka-Bar in a leather scabbard, its handle cut crudely from ironwood into the shape of an eagle’s head, cut to match his buckle.
She smiled, pushed his
black Bullhide far back on the crown of his head. Traced her fingers down from his hairline and along his crooked nose, lingered over his lips. Her touch like a snake’s tongue finding its way.
His grip around the knife eased.
She took his hand in her palm and pressed her fingers against the pulse of his wrist and spun them lightly, as if unlocking a combination.
A jolt shot through him like he’d touched his hand to an electric fence. He twitched and his beer tipped and spilled and ran over the table and pattered on the floor. Red spots fired behind his eyes like he’d stared full-on into the sun. The world went white. A curtain dropped, a gauzy membrane through which the world looked faint, like after-rain rising from a hot road or his own breath fogging his windshield, but then he was back, as sudden as he had left. Only he felt slow and stupid now, and he knew, somehow, that he was no longer himself.
She put her lips to his ear and whispered, “I know your name, boy.”
Her breath was terrible, like something gone off, spoiled deep inside.
A thing was happening to him, a momentous—
monstrous
—thing.
Still holding his hand, still smiling, she pulled him up and out of his chair and now he was leaving the table, stumbling along behind her, helpless not to follow as she drew him across the floor and out of the bar and into the dark, and the old woman never looked up from her whiskey and the bartender never looked up from his puzzle.
The man in the box sang on.
Outside, they drifted hand in hand like teenagers in a movie. Beyond the gravel parking lot the lonely highway and the darkened plains stretched endless. For him, the world was now a picture knocked crooked. He could barely judge the ground beneath his boots and the stars in the sky shimmered and blurred and became long straight lines of light, as if time itself were stretching to the breaking. She laughed and squeezed his hand. His slow gaze went to his Ford parked in a pool of orange light near the scrub at the edge of the lot. The truck bed saddled with the Roadrunner. His miserable little—
home
—camper.
She laced her arm through his. “Will you show me?”
Each of her words curled like an edge of burning paper and flew away into the night, became a star in the sky.
“Show me what the others never see.”
“Others,” he said. The word sounded as if it had been spoken from a deep and empty well.
Her grip on his arm tightened, and he felt the unexpected strength of her.
Not a girl, he thought. Something else.
“Show me, killer,” she said, close in his ear again, and now he recognized her smell, a red metal reek he had known as a boy when his father had leaned
over his bed to kiss him goodnight after a shift at the stockyards.
She sat on the metal stoop of the cabover and spread her legs and drew her fingers lightly along her thighs, tugging the hem of her dress up with them. He saw the fine blue web-work of veins in the soft, pale flesh.
Felt the throb inside them.
“I want to see,” she said. “Where you sleep. Where you eat.”
She smoothed the fabric of her dress back down—he wondered how her hands didn’t come away bloody, touching all those flowers—and rose. She made a slow, lazy circle around him, and he turned with her but could not keep up. He staggered. Laughed at himself. She moved faster, made another circle. Another. He, trying to keep her in his field of vision, she at the edge, skipping away. Gravel popping beneath her boots like bones, tiny bones. His legs growing weaker. Head swimming. Another circle. Another. Until finally she was nothing more than a flicker, like an old-fashioned machine he had seen at a fair as a child, a light shining through the shape of a horse galloping. He staggered again and went down on one knee and fell over on his ass. The world went away, and when it came back her face filled his vision where she leaned over him, hands on her knees, breathing fast and shallow in the manner of a child who has just played a great fun game. The stars behind her still turning.
Now she looked over her shoulder at his camper. “Take out your key and open the door,” she said between breaths, brushing her hair back from her face.
He put his hand in his pocket where he lay on his back and felt the rabbit’s foot keychain and two keys. A black tuft of fuzz and metal, the keychain made him remember he was part of a world that was real. She put her hand out. He took it and suddenly was standing, as if some great gust of wind had swept him to his feet. He took a step sideways, felt his balance tipping. “Shit,” he said. Then he felt her fingers twine with his, and now he could stand without fear of falling, their two hands become one, the snake’s head whole.
To better find our way, she said.
But she hadn’t spoken, had she?
He took out his keys and together they crossed the small distance to the camper, and the key sought the lock and went smoothly in.
The door opened outward.
He stepped back, and now his hand was empty of hers.
Travis looked around.
He stood alone on the stoop.
She was nowhere.
The air, for the briefest moment, took on a chill, and for the space of a single breath he saw the cold in front of his face.
He caught the doorjamb to steady himself.
He heard laughter, like glass chimes on a summer day.
Off to the right he saw a shape.
She stood a dozen feet away at the edge of the lamplight, her hands clasped primly behind her, as if she had always been there, her mouth turned up in a cold little smile, her white dress covered in—
blood
—flowers.
Out in the dark, a coyote
yelped, a young, strangled sound.
Another answered.
“Who are you?” he said to her.
She came in close, crossing the distance between them in a single step. He knew this had happened and it made no sense, but it was like a lost snatch of song on a record that had skipped a groove: it did not matter, the song went on. She reached behind him. Traced her index finger over the stamp of the letters on the back of his belt. She whispered each letter—T-R-A-V-I-S—but her lips did not move save to widen into a grin. Then she turned her sharp chin up to the night sky, to the moon, a sliver of shaved silver, and he thought, for a second, she was going to howl. But she only said, “My name is Rue.”
“Rue,” he said thickly. “Where’d you get all them teeth, Rue? You got about a thousand, a thousand—”
She kissed him, her lips meeting his, and the sensation was at once like setting his tongue to a battery, or an ice cube, or a moist clutch of fetid earth.
She backed lightly up the metal stoop and into the narrow camper, smiling all the while, and his last glimpse of her from where he stood, beneath starlight and sky, as she turned and disappeared into the camper dark, was a flash of white calf, curved and sharp as a scythe buried in her red stump of a boot.
He looked up at the stars.
“Travis,” she called down, softly, unseen in the gaping black maw of the camper. “Come in here with me. Please.”
This time, he thought. This time. Maybe it will all be. Different. She is not the one, but I know it. I know it and that makes this. Different.
He went up the steps and closed the door.
Again, he was alone.
Orange lamplight came bleeding through the tiny windows. Shadows spilled out of the pine-laminate cabinets and corners. The air was stale. He heard the clink of an empty glass in the sink as the camper groaned and settled. He stood very still. He listened. The room was silent, as silent as a forest of bamboo, he thought, tall and thick and blotting out the sun, heavy artillery sending distant tremors through the earth, the sounds of battle fading, the only sounds the call of a bird and his own thudding heart. The instinct to run had brought him to such a place once, and the same instinct was spreading through him now like spilled ink, a black and permanent stain.
In a splash of red neon across the aluminum dinette, two pale hands emerged from the shadows and steepled themselves atop the table, and now he saw the rest of her sitting in the corner, in shadow. He suddenly remembered a trip to the Fort Worth Zoo when he was a boy, the white tiger exhibit, how the big cat had watched him and his father from where it lay in the daylight gloom beneath a frond, its huge snow-mitten paws draped one over the other. I can eat you whenever I want, that gaze said. Whenever.
When Rue spoke from the dark, her voice was somehow changed.
It was deeper, crueler.
Hungry.
“I know you, Travis. I’ve been watching you. You and all the pretty girls, and all the pretty girls watching you. You show them what they want to see, and they want you. They take you into their beds. But not their hearts.”
He felt light-headed, as if fingers were fluttering through his skull, searching out his secrets.
“It isn’t you they really want,” she said. “It’s him. The stranger who steals your face.”
His legs went weak. He sagged against the cabinet and slid to the floor, one arm stretched up and grasping the handle of a cabinet drawer. He saw her pale hands withdraw into shadow, and in the silence that followed he thought—he swore—he heard the wet smack of the tiger’s jaws. Like a drum in his head, his own heartbeat, slowing. Then, tiny and distant, a snatch of song from the Wurlitzer in the bar: a man-woman duet, the bright patter of a xylophone.
“This sad little shell. You carry your home on your back.”
And now she was bending over him, her arms encircling him, lifting him from the floor as if he were a child. The locket she wore brushed his cheek.
He felt a cry rising in his throat, a cry that had been years building, building all his life, ever since he was a boy and he had seen a spot of blood on his father’s undershirt, the morning after his mother left forever—all her music burned, a heap of melted plastic—but what came out of him when he opened his mouth, thinking his vocal cords might just burst with the force of it, was barely a moan, low and pitiful.
“I know,” she whispered. “I know. But you don’t have to be afraid now. You’re so special. So precious.”
She held him close and somehow lifted him up into his narrow sleeping berth, placing him in his own bed, where she removed his hat and lay beside him and cradled him, and the soft press of her breast through her cotton dress against his cheek reminded him of all the old songs, the ones she played, the ones she loved, his bare feet atop hers as they had danced.
“No other woman ever saw so much of the man, child, or stranger called Travis Stillwell,” Rue said, smoothing his hair with her hand. “We are kindred spirits.”
He was trembling and he had not trembled like this for a very long time.
“We are kin.”
Her hand slipped down to the handle of his knife, closing around the eagle’s head, and as she slid the blade from its scabbard, he saw its glint in the orange light leaking through the cracked sleeper window.
“Oh Travis,” she said. “Everything we’ve ever lost will be found.”
He closed his eyes and let this, her final promise, take him.
I
THE SUNDOWNER INN
SUNDAY
October 5
The boy sat in church clothes on the steps of the farmhouse, a white rabbit in his lap. He tumbled the rabbit in his arms, cradled it, all the while looking out from the wide morning shade of the porch to a spot far down the grassy hill, where his mother now stood, her back to him, the wind pulling at the hem and sleeves of her Sunday dress, the one with the yellow birds over blue and the high lace collar. She stood like a steel bolt set on end, balanced and still.
Earlier, the woman and the boy had looked out together from inside the house, from behind a shut screen door. Staring out. A pickup was parked in the gravel lot behind the motel. A cabover camper sat on its back. The camper was filmed in orange road dust, a single long crack in the sleeper window. The crack was sealed with duct tape. There were six other hookups behind the Sundowner, and all of them, like the motel itself, were empty.
The woman had put her arm around the boy’s shoulders. “Stay,” she’d told him. “And don’t come down less I call.” She had looked at him, and the boy had nodded, a red clip-on tie in one hand, his shirt collar buttoned tight. After that, his mother had kissed him atop his head and pushed through the door, fly-screen slapping behind her. She went down the hill in bold, long strides.
The boy ran through the house and out the back and past the clothesline, past the old windmill and tank, and into the small, tin-roofed shed, where in the dark the two white Netherland dwarf rabbits sat in wire cages atop a makeshift work table the boy’s father had built. Both nibbling fresh cabbage stems. The boy scooped the female from her cage—a warm, white handful—and went round the corner of the house, and when he saw his mother at the foot of the hill, he sat down on the porch steps to wait and watch, holding the rabbit close.
Today of all days, the boy thought. He ran his hands through the rabbit’s fur. She better not take anything for granted. It could be any mean son of a bitch in that thing.
His mother turned in the scant brown grass and when she saw the boy on the steps with his rabbit she waved.
The boy waved back.
Annabelle Gaskin stood in the sage at the edge of the motel, one hand shielding her eyes from the morning sun, the other clenching and unclenching a fold of dress at her side. The wind pushed tumbleweeds across the fields and highway and gathered them like wayward chicks beneath the brick portico of the old filling station that was the motel’s office and cafe. The farmhouse cat, an orange tabby with a bobbed tail and a leaky eye, sat on the concrete pump island, licking its paw. Atop the station’s roof, what was left of a great winged horse—a white Pegasus of molded concrete—reared, the right hind leg little more than a bone of rebar below the fetlock. In the horse’s long morning shadow: the RV lot, the camper and pickup.
Annabelle turned her gaze from the pickup to the west, where a cloud the color of a bruise was spreading over the low, dry hills. Rain had passed the valley by for ages now, great dark thunderheads to the west and south always breaking up, moving on. What had the old minister said, three weeks past, Annabelle’s hand trembling in his?
“Do not be afraid, pobrecita. All will be made new. All will be washed clean.”
Annabelle looked back to the pickup. She clenched the dress at her side and chewed her lip and thought, resentfully, that her entire life had been a series of things to take care of. Most of them owing to the foolishness of men. Men who promised comfort like it was a thing that could come from the sky and not the workings of their own hands, their own hearts. She let go her dress and smoothed the fabric beneath her palms. Looked over her shoulder to her son. Annabelle saw the boy holding his rabbit and knew that he was anxious, and though she waved and smiled and he waved back, she felt her son’s unease creep around her like a chill. No warm creature to hold against her own breast, she set out across the field to knock on the camper’s door.
Travis Stillwell woke from a dream of empty rooms in a decrepit house where open doors led to nothing but darkness and the hallways were thick with the smells of fresh earth and kerosene. He sat up on one elbow in his narrow berth and drew his boot-socked feet along the edge of the mattress, the crown of his head just touching the metal ceiling. The world was dim, unfocused. His head throbbed, as if with drink. He coughed on a bad taste in his mouth, like pennies, and spat a quarter-sized dollop of red phlegm at the linoleum
below. He stared at this for a while, then fished for the pack of cigarettes he kept in the right breast pocket of his flannel shirt. Except for the shirt and socks, he was naked. His jeans had been tossed over an open cabinet door. He shook out a cigarette and drew it from the pack with his lips and reached for the jeans, where he kept a plastic lighter in the front hip pocket.
Travis saw a long red smear from the third knuckle of his hand to the crook of his thumb and index finger.
He dropped the pack of smokes, turned his hand over.
The whole of his palm and the underside of every finger were sticky red. Rust-colored crescents beneath every nail.
Blood.
He turned his hand before his face in the dim light like a guilty man’s nightmare. Not a dream, he thought. The textures were too harsh, too gritty. His throat felt like fine-grained sandpaper.
The air in the camper was thin, had a stale stink. He could smell himself, a days-old funk of night-sweats and booze and tar and smoke and—
death
—blood.
Christ, he thought.
A flutter of panic in his chest: what had happened last night?
Last night, last night.
He thought the words over and over, closing his fingers, opening them.
He couldn’t remember. Last night was a black hole punched through his head.
Cigarette unlit between his lips, lighter forgotten, he rolled out of the bunk and dropped to the floor.
A fierce, bright pain shot through his leg.
Travis cried out and staggered and the camper and pickup rocked.
A metal pot fell from where it hung above the stove.
He shot a hand out to steady himself, made a red handprint on the white vinyl of the dinette seat at his back. Here, by the hutch window, the light was brighter—through the thin drapes he could see a cinder-block building painted a fading pink—so he put his leg up on the padded seat and examined it, cigarette still clamped in his mouth. Sweat popped all over him when he saw it. His inner left thigh down to his knee was the color of rust where it looked as if a bucket of his own blood had dried. The flesh near the juncture of leg and groin was swollen and red, the skin broken by a ragged half-moon ring of six punctures, each shallow and crusted over. Below this: a single raw, angry slit, about two inches long.
A smiling pink mouth.
Travis pressed his fingers around the wound. The flesh was hot and throbbing.
He looked around the camper. He was alone. Whatever had done this, whatever had brought him here—wherever here is—it was gone, like the morning’s dreams, ...
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