High White Sun Read online

  He stands, lights up, and looks back toward his father walking toward us.

  “Guess we don’t want anyone to get snake-bit out here, do we?”

  * * *

  • • •

  WE’RE STANDING TOGETHER, silent, as Earl comes up. I can tell by the way his neck is corded he’s pissed, grinding his teeth together in his skull, chewing on whatever’s angered him. He’s wearing a button-down shirt that’s come all undone, untucked, and it flaps open like wings, revealing the ink all over his chest and stomach. So much of it, you can’t even tell there’s skin underneath. That stomach that’s always been strong enough for killing is starting to sag, and the once powerful prison muscles slabbed over his chest are falling in, too, giving him a small set of tits. Beneath the harsh lamp of the sun, his face is deeply lined, and his slick-backed pompadour is showing all of its flat gray. More than any other moment since I’ve been with him, Earl looks old. Killing is making him older. Every damn one of his miserable years is there for both me and his son to see.

  Jesse’s smiling at him, fake-curious. “What’s got you all spun up, JW?” It’s the question of someone who already knows the answer.

  Earl stands clenching and unclenching his fists. “I just talked to Jenna and she says you got a call today from that sheriff in Murfee? Is that right?” He looks at me as if I knew it and hadn’t said anything, but Jesse hasn’t breathed the word Murfee since I drove him and T-Bob back from town.

  I never even told Earl how Jesse had me circle the place, just staring at it.

  “Yeah, when we was up there a few days back, they wanted a way to contact us. You said to be cooperative, right? You said don’t give ’em no reason to come back down here, so I gave ’em Jenna’s number and forgot all about it. But I’ll be damned if one of ’em didn’t call today. I think it was the sheriff himself, leaving a message that he had that warrant for me an’ T-Bob . . . for our damn blood or something. They’d threatened that when we first talked to them and I thought it was all bullshit, but I guess it wasn’t so empty a threat after all. He was polite, though, the way he asked us to come up again to take care of it.”

  Earl goes very still, but his neck is tense, his teeth clenched. “So, were you gonna tell me this?”

  Jesse takes a long draw on his cigarette before answering, enjoying Earl’s anger. “Well, I was, but I guess I don’t have to now. Goddamn bitch can’t hold her tongue.” He points at his daddy with the cigarette. “You were the one told us to go up there in the first place. You told us to talk to ’em, make nice, and be all helpful. Now look what it got me, more fucking shit. So there’s no cause to be all pissy about it.”

  Earl pops his neck, then his knuckles. “Dammit, boy, it’s what it got us. You know why I said that. The guns and the other shit we got down here, not to mention a houseful of felons and peckerwood ex-cons? It’s not gonna take much to throw me back in, or stir up a shit storm for you and everyone else. You want all that, with your friend Flowers on his way?”

  I’m still here, but neither are talking or looking at me anymore. It’s like Earl’s arguing with a younger ghost, the man he used to be. Arguing with himself in a dark mirror.

  “Well, first off, you ain’t in no position to call me boy, and haven’t been in a while, Daddy.” Jesse spits the last word and flips his cigarette end over end. “Second, if you are all so worried about it, you don’t have to stay. No one invited you, remember? You just fuckin’ showed up one day, and ain’t none of us was waiting for you. You been dead and gone for twenty years in that hole. You’re only here ’cause I let you be, and ’cause I’m fine with it. But you keep telling me what to do and not do, and I’m not gonna be fine with it much longer.”

  Earl smiles, all shark teeth. “That’s right, I forgot, you’re all grown now.”

  Jesse smiles back twice as hard. “Have been for a while.”

  Earl laughs in his son’s face. “Okay, okay, here’s what’s gonna happen. I’m gonna think on this for a day or so, but I’m guessing you and T-Bob are gonna have to go and do this thing. You’re gonna do it, and then you’re gonna pray when it’s done they don’t find your goddamn blood or whatever it is all over that spic lover you got sideways with—”

  Jesse yells, his voice echoing in the emptiness. “We already did it your way. You said it would go away and it hasn’t, so now we’re gonna do it how I want to.”

  Earl goes on, not missing a beat or drawing a breath. “You even know who that sheriff is? Sheriff Chris Cherry? He’s some kinda hero, was in the paper for gunnin’ down a bunch of beaners and damn near died in the process. Make no mistake, he is the goddamn law around these parts, so you’re gonna honor his warrant and we’re all gonna hope they don’t find anything, because if they do, the last thing you’ll have to fuckin’ worry about is the law.” Earl’s calm again, his eyes flat, featureless, like most of the desert around us. It feels like a storm blew in and then blew out again, just as fast, leaving electricity in its wake. “I’ll burn this whole place to the ground, Jesse. By the Devil I swear I will. I ain’t goin’ back in for your stupidity. I ain’t havin’ it. Not now. I gotta take my share of the blame for how you turned out, but I ain’t takin’ the blame for this.”

  Jesse breathes through his nose, mouth open. “That’s fuckin’ rich. Goddamn rich, coming from you. That supposed to be a threat?”

  “No, boy, that’s just the way it is. The way it’s gotta be. You listen to me now and things will be okay. I promise. But if you don’t . . .” Earl shrugs, leaving the rest unsaid.

  Jesse spits on the ground. “Fuck you, old man. Fuck you to hell. You keep talking and talking. Something happened to you down in that hole. It was too damn long. The world’s done passed you by. You shoulda stayed there, where you was still somebody. Out here, you don’t mean shit, not anymore.” And then, just like that, if there’s any more fight in Jesse, it’s gone now, too, like Earl’s passing storm. He takes one last look at me, then back to his daddy, and turns his back on us both.

  Earl watches him go and shakes his head. We’re alone again, like the other morning after the deputies first came to Killing. He reaches in his own pocket and pulls out his matches and cigarettes from a crumpled soft-pack. He offers me one and I take it, and he lights it for me off of his own.

  He holds up his cigarette, breathes on it, daring the end to brighten and burn. “There was a time inside when these were worth something, everything. A damn fortune. Trade ’em for just about anything.” He puts it to his lips, draws hard, and the end turns to ash before it flares again. “Even a man’s life.”

  I don’t say anything, as we both watch Jesse make his way down the bluff. What is there to say? I’m standing beside the man who killed my own father, sharing one of his cigarettes. I can return the favor right now and walk off this hill like Jesse, but in the other direction, out toward that switchback road and the mountains.

  Out into the desert, far away, and never look back.

  I’ve had more than a few moments like this—where it’s just me and him and no one else. No one close enough to stop me or make a difference. I can do it.

  My muscles clench.

  He’s looking away from me, toward his real son.

  The gun I was hiding is only an arm’s length away . . .

  I can make it . . . I can make it . . .

  Breathe . . . relax . . . aim . . .

  He speaks up, sudden. “I may need more of your help, Danny. No, I’m definitely gonna need your help, ’cause there’s no one else around here I trust.” He looks me right in the eye then, searching for something . . . for what, I don’t know.

  That stops me, shakes me.

  “It’s not just about me, you gotta see that. And you will see it. It’s about all the rest of ’em. The girls, that boy Kasper. You’re always talkin’ to him, I know he looks up to you.”

  I reach for some words, so
mething to say, so he won’t keep looking me in the eye. “What do you need, JW? You want me to drive Jesse and T-Bob into town again for those warrants? Keep a watch on them?”

  “Well, yeah, that’s likely part of it,” he answers, but that’s not really what’s on his mind, not at the moment, and whatever it is, he doesn’t share. He turns back to where his son’s disappeared, lost in the shade of the house, staring there, as if he’s still looking for him.

  When he does speak again, it’s odd, unsettling. Like the stuff about the sheriff and Murfee and the maps he has me draw; a hint of things only he knows. And even in the heat, I go cold.

  “If we don’t do something, that boy is gonna be the death of you all . . .”

  20

  Jesse Earl often thought about his mama.

  Not that he had any real memories or pictures of her, or anything at all to remind him of what she’d truly been like. His daddy had always called her that whore and left it at that, even if the words never quite matched the softer way he’d said them. But that left Jesse free to imagine her any damn way he pleased, so he did. Sometimes the life he dreamed up for her was good and clean and bright and a thousand miles away, just like a commercial or one of them reality TV shows Jenna liked so much, and that hurt like hell. But other times it wasn’t much different from his shitty day-to-day, and that hurt, too, just in a different way. In that life, she was holed up in some rusted trailer in Beaumont or Waco, way too fat or way too thin, strung out or deep in the bottle like T-Bob, with someone else’s shitty kids and a whole shitload of that someone else’s problems to boot. But no matter what he dreamed, there was always a moment when he got to stand right up close to her and look her right in those eyes he didn’t remember, and ask her what he, but more important, his daddy, had done so wrong to make her up and leave them in the first place.

  * * *

  • • •

  HE WOULD NEVER SAY that Sunny and T-Bob hadn’t tried to do right by him; they’d done what little they could. And Flowers had always been there, too, a presence like a hand on his shoulder, eager and ready to listen. He’d had more talks with Thurman in the last fifteen years than he’d ever had with his daddy. But if he’d thought that was going to change with his daddy’s surprise release from Walls, well, JW had quickly set him straight on that score. His daddy had no more interest in him or even Little B now than during all those years down that goddamn prison hole, when they’d never received so much as a letter or a phone call. It was like they didn’t exist, like they’d been the ones who’d done something wrong and been sent off to serve the time, when Jesse knew they had done nothing more than have the bad fuckin’ luck to be born to a man like JW. Their biggest mistake was being a couple of his mistakes—too much booze one night or fuckin’ the wrong woman, that whore—which is why he wasn’t gonna stand around now while his daddy and Danny talked it up like old friends on the bluff. Like father and son, and probably about him, too. Fuckin’ Danny was about the only person in Killing his daddy didn’t seem to mind so much, ’cause he was the only one who didn’t remind JW of all the mistakes he’d made in his miserable-ass life, and that only pissed Jesse off all the more. It made no sense, or worse, it made all the sense in the world, but either way, there it was . . . all the fuckin’ same.

  Just like it made no sense that JW was the broke-ass nigger he pretended to be. Jesse knew he had money hidden around somewhere, and Flowers knew it, too, and their plans here for Killing were built on that belief. His daddy had been someone inside for a long time. He’d called shots, made shit happen, held other men’s lives in his hands. It was like this shit with the Murfee sheriff and his deputies, that old man and that little wetback bitch. Not telling JW the sheriff had called for him had been partly spite, a way to give his daddy a little of his own medicine. But it had also been about fear, real fear that he’d fucked up royally this time. As long as those deputies weren’t gonna let Terlingua go, JW wasn’t going to let it go, either. There was a time when his daddy would never have let fuckers like these push him around. He never would have jumped just ’cause they called . . . he would have made them regret just raising their voice to him . . . but that man was either dead or had been left behind in the hole. His daddy, the man he was here and now, was scared of his own shadow, acting like a big pussy. And although JW liked to make it out that Jesse was the one who was stone-cold yellow, a big fuckin’ coward (mostly, but not only, because of that damn fight in Lubbock), Jesse thought it was his daddy who was finally showing his true colors.

  He wasn’t sure if he actually hated the man or was just disappointed at what he’d become and all the things he wasn’t, but some days that hate was strong as poison and today was one of ’em. Soon, though, Thurman was gonna show up and help set things straight; he felt just as strongly that it was JW who owed Jesse, and that it was finally time for JW to do some paying up.

  And if JW couldn’t afford to give Jesse the time of day, and there was no way to pay back all those years he’d been gone down that hole and the years Jesse had lost right along with him, then old JW could settle up in the cash he had hidden around. It wouldn’t perfectly pay off Jesse’s shitty life up to this point, but Jesse liked to think of it as a down payment on his future.

  He’d heard that on one of Jenna’s TV shows and had written it down.

  There was another part of it, too; something Jesse would never admit to anyone, least of all Flowers, who wouldn’t understand it. Jesse figured his daddy’s debt started adding up the minute he ran off Jesse’s mama, and the meter had been running ever since.

  His daddy owed him for that most of all.

  * * *

  • • •

  JESSE PAUSED AT THE BACK DOOR of the ranch house, taking one look back at his daddy and Danny still up there on the bluff. It didn’t seem like they were talking at all, just staring out into the desert, standing almost shoulder to shoulder. From way back here, it looked like Jesse himself standing up there, but it wasn’t. Danny had showed up weeks ago talking a big game and promising guns and shit, but all that had fallen to the wayside once JW had come into the picture. It was like Danny had just been looking for his own damn daddy all along.

  Jesse knew that goddamn feeling.

  He shut the door on ’em both.

  Then he went to go look for Kasper and Little B. Shit was getting serious, and it was maybe time to find out exactly what that little wetback girl from the Wikiup knew . . .

  21

  Harp was sitting in his own car, not his department truck, watching Main Street and sipping a Coke with just a touch of Firestone & Robertson.

  It was still Jackie’s car, that’s how he saw it. That’s how it still felt. There were all her old grocery lists still in the center console, and in the glove compartment there was a lost earring—a hoop with a gold shamrock—that had never found its companion. The car still smelled like her. He couldn’t help thinking of all the times she’d sat right here in this seat, taking another damn call from him; how something had come up at work, how he was going to be late . . . again. He imagined her talking to him on the phone but looking at herself in the rearview mirror, her hazel eyes getting older, wondering where all the years they were supposed to spend together were going. All those days, all those hours, forever lost behind her and disappearing in that mirror like whatever road she was driving on.

  They’d never even owned a second car. There had never been a need, as long as he’d had a department patrol car or unmarked to drive.

  He’d promised again and again that when he retired things were going to be different for them.

  He’d promised her that.

  He took another long sip.

  Things definitely were.

  * * *

  • • •

  BRIGHT AND EARLY the morning after they got back from Lubbock, Harp had caught Chris in his office reading up on the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas and Thurman
Flowers and his Church of Purity. There was nothing church-like about it; it was just another dime-a-dozen white-power hate group. The sheriff had found videos somewhere online of Flowers’s speeches or sermons, all sorts of things he’d written, and had gone through them all. Despite everything Nichols and Dyer had told them, Chris had checked and double-checked it all himself, trying to understand exactly who they were dealing with in Killing, and what Danny Ford had gotten himself into.

  After Chris had finished with it, he’d left it piled up for Harp on the middle of his desk. But he hadn’t looked through any of it. He didn’t need to read that shit to know what sort of men Flowers and Earl were.

  Harp had just about decided everything with the Earls and Danny was going to end right there, with a bunch of papers on his desk, until yesterday, when Chris had walked in while Harp was drinking a coffee and bullshitting with Till Greer and added two final pages to the top. Chris had tapped them, hard, and told Harp without smiling he might actually want to read these.

  Harp had pulled them off the stack to find they were signed and sealed DNA warrants for T-Bob and Jesse Earl.

  * * *

  • • •

  CHRIS HAD LATER EXPLAINED his reasoning like this: assuming someone in the Big Bend County Sheriff’s Department decided it was worth meeting with Danny Ford, the only realistic chance was to get him away from Killing. They had no cell phone number for him, no easy way to contact him directly, and he might not even take their calls if they did. But maybe, just maybe, they could get him to come to them again, and not even realize it. That’s what had gotten Chris thinking about those DNA warrants Harp had asked about before they went to Lubbock. If Jesse and T-Bob were forced to come back to Murfee, Danny might be the one to drive them a second time, like he had the first. And while the other two were inside the department getting their DNA swabs, there might be a few minutes to get him alone. If he wouldn’t listen, so be it. But at least they could say they tried.