America coming of age in a hardscrabble wart of a town in West Texas in the 1960s; deciding what was right and wrong in life, and in a war nobody seemed to want half a world away.

The more things change, the more they stay the same . . .  --Sly

East Jesus

A Novel

Chapter 1

"The bastard's dead," Momma swore. "And dead is dead, so just leave him lay."

Crammed in the front seat between deaf old Art, who hunkered over the wheel, and my mother, who stared out the side window, Pop cocked his head and worked his jaws. "Dead and buried, but damn well still my brother," he muttered, mostly to himself. He'd hardly find sympathy for Uncle Ray in that old wreck.

From the rear seat, I studied the back of my father's neck, the way the thick, sun-cured skin formed a wrinkled "X" crease above his burly shoulders. Try as I might, and God knows I did, in all my seventeen years, I couldn't conjure up an "X," or a "V," or even a halfway "dash" on the back of my neck, no matter how I scrunched and strained. In fact, it seemed I hadn't inherited any of his brawniness or even a touch of his sullen features, although our eyes were the same color. I never could figure that out.

"He's still dead," my mother had to repeat, had to get those words in. Pop's thick silence clotted the stuffy air in the overloaded Chevy, windows rolled up tight against the persistent needle points of rain and sealed closed in deference to Aunt Shirl's hairdo. I could hardly breathe.

We headed east slowly, away from the sinking sun that slunk back toward Dix, away from the weather ahead which raced off to rake the plains with strokes of lightning and a bow wave of red dust. That confounded weather was killing me too, inch by inch. I felt wind-whipped and faded, just like the last Fall's tattered Humphrey-Muskie posters flapping against the row of telephone poles.

And because of the thick, tumbling blue thunder clouds rolling across the plains, ready at any second to blow the sky apart with jagged lightning, the windows would stay shut. They held me prisoner--suffocating--squashed between Shirl and Gram, noosed by one of late Uncle Ray's cast-off string ties. Taking shallow breaths, I picked at my hand-me-down sport coat and worked a finger between the raspy-collared white shirt and my chafed neck.

I sighed. Could have done better; could have inherited his snakeskin boots, or his hat or his vest, maybe looking more like him than I already did, which is what folks who saw us together always said. But then there'd have been nothing much else to bury him in.

While Art dragged us home at a snail's pace, I tried not to fidget. I tried to disappear, actually, to melt into the ripped upholstery, not ready to take a side in the standing feud, a strangling hostage to the lightning and the hail to come. And to Shirl's hair.

Tighter than the windows, I slammed my mouth shut, knowing for the life of me better than to get caught on either side of the battle lines being drawn. Bean sat on my lap in silence, wise enough at age five to do the same.

We'd made it all the way to--and now mostly back--from Dix without a word, much less a cross word, from either Momma or Pop. A careful stalemate, a dangerous stand-off ready to explode, just like the seething sky, and I knew the strained peace was only temporary.

Graveside an hour ago, wind-whipped grit and trash from the Dix Drive-in across the road had swirled and tumbled around our grim cluster, all hunched over Uncle Ray's pine box. A west Texas rain pestered us, splatting one-inch raindrops in dust craters two inches apart, but only now and then, holding the big stuff over your head for all at once, just when you didn't need it.
While Reverend Ruley mumbled flimsy words that fled against a howling west wind, I'd prayed to God for the sky to rip itself apart and dump those lightning shredded clouds full of hail right there on that pink dirt spot.

Because I hate those black moments, the heartbeat before the storm when you know what's coming, know it's going to hurt but there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Like the deep breath before a flood of tears, or the shallow gasp before your gut clenches and heaves itself out onto the floor, all you can do is wait until it's darn good and ready. And then hang on for the ride.

But the swollen freight train of inky clouds just teased and rode the gusty wind across the flat red horizon from here to the end of the world, threatening with ragged flashes of blue-green, hollering thunder but moving on just the same while Uncle Ray, the lucky one, lay dead in a box back in Dix.

Pop stared straight ahead, melting the tint clean off of Art's windshield with his dark glare. "He knew how to clean a shotgun," Pop said. "He damn well knew."

True enough. Uncle Ray had shown me how, last year, just after he'd finished his time at Huntsville. "Come here, son," he'd said, unshaven face split by that gap-toothed grin. "You're sixteen. Time you learned how to take care of a shotgun." We'd broke it down to a pile of oily rods and barrel and stock. Ray loved guns, especially handguns. He'd used a bunch.
My mother glared out the side window, jaw set, that little muscle near her ear beginning to flinch. "Lester said it was an accident. Lester's the law."

My father snorted. "Lester's a horse's ass."

Maybe so. But a horse's ass with a badge, a gun, and unlike Uncle Ray, the okay to use it on people. But more than just the law, Lester Ruley was the judge, the preacher and the junk man too. Because if you were a Ruley in Conroy, somebody with your last name owned just about everything. Rusty-haired Lester wore the badge, his right Reverend Daddy wore the collar and doubled as the Justice of the Peace, and his brother Rooster ran the gas station and scrap yard. Besides the farms, there wasn't much else of Conroy worth mentioning.

"Rusthead," Ray used to call Lester back in high school and after. They'd fight some, back then, but Ray'd always whipped Lester's ass good. So it was natural that Lester, especially being in law enforcement, would get a good laugh about Ray "getting a full scholarship to Huntsville." In fact, he'd laughed real big, until Ray got back in town about ten years earlier than anyone'd figured on. Everyone except me.

Off in her own world, Bean shook her head, letting her pigtails whip my nose. Thunder clouds never scared her. Nor did storms. Bean was an angel, an island of calm, insulated from the furious weather by some power from above.

Art motored on, also unconcerned about the storm gathering in or outside of his hail-damaged sedan. Right behind him, next to me, Gram sat with her lips pursed in pregnant silence, ready to speak but as always, holding back until she finally burst.

Ahead, the sun-bleached standpipe rose into view at the exact moment the smell sliced the air. No one looked, no one remarked on the first turkey farm and the dusty, waddling feather balls strutting uselessly around the hardscrabble yard, heads thrown back, beaks agape, blinking dumbly at the boiling clouds, daring them to open up and drown them outright. And the acrid stink, a rising wave of cutting, shit-smell that floated against the wind, defiant, permanently stationed on that damn spot in the tired blacktop road marking that one scorched patch of packed red dust.

Good-bye, Dix. Hello, Conroy.

"Bygones is bygones," Shirl huffed in her tired singsong, mournful even on a good day, much less the day of Uncle Ray's send-off to the hereafter. She'd done her mud-colored hair up in a towering B-52, but Pop had ordered it down out of respect for the dead. Wise direction, because Shirl was a tall girl, much taller than her older sister, and the beehive would have rubbed the droopy head liner in Art's old car.

Shirl and Momma shared the same tired eyes, puffy cheeks and loose under-chin threatening to go double any day. More than ten years younger, Shirl's hips and waist had held back, barely, where Momma's had given up and let go when she'd come into her thirties. Shirl sat on my mother's side of the car. She had to be careful to stay on Momma's side, her good side, because Shirl needed a roof, our roof, Momma's roof over her head.

"He's in a better place now," Gram promised with uncommon tact. "And you all best pray to sweet baby Jesus nobody in this life finds out how he got there."

Bean brushed my nose again, back and forth, with her red straw pigtails. Like me, she hadn't inherited Pop's "X," nor his pointy nose, drawn face, dark complexion or any other nametag he could have put on her. I never could figure that out either, but Momma's hair might have been a kind of red under the base coat or bleach of the season.

Bean's hair was cut straight, shoulder length, when it wasn't gathered into pigtails, with bangs draped down over her eyebrows like a dark red stage curtain. "Doll" lay on the floor hump, her hair done exactly like Bean's, cut that way by Shirl a couple years back. Bean lived with that toy, never letting it too far from her sight. We'd hoped Bean would name it something; anything, but since she didn't, it became just Doll, which seemed fine with Bean. She'd take no replacement either; I tried two Christmases in a row. Doll's rubber limbs had lost their pink and faded to a pasty grey, and her head fell off all the time, but that never flustered Bea Anne.

In fact now, when things got hectic or dangerous, Bean popped Doll's head from her colorless shoulders before it could fall off, stashing it in the wash-faded pocket of her jumper for safekeeping. For me, that was an omen of doom. Through some sixth sense or guardian angel, Bean saw trouble way ahead of time and set herself and Doll to survive it. So when the head popped off, I took warning.

Still, doom or no, Bean was unflappable. No matter what, she just went quietly about her way, a wall-flower since before she could walk, easygoing as a wagon horse. She didn't even mind sharing her tiny room with Shirl, though Gram said our trailer was "'bout like to explode," even before Shirl came back to Conroy to stay "temporarily" with her big sister. That was three years ago, yet Bean never complained. But then, Bean never spoke.

"Hold still, Bean," I whispered.
Pop's "X" pulled tight and squashed flat as the big head whipped around, showing me the widow's peak. Pop wore his jet black hair in a pompadour and grew his sideburns long. In his meaner, drunker moments, he fancied himself as someone else, so he had to look the part.

His lips pulled back against jagged front teeth. "Not one goddam word outta you, boy. I ain't through with you yet, so don't you go giving me more cause than I got."
I met his black pinpoint eyes with my own matching set. Come hell, come a beating, come whatever, I didn't care anymore. I'd decided what to do. I'd signed and sealed it on the rain pocked red dirt near a six foot hole in the ground in Dix, adding a few drops of my own to those of the teasing rain. Pop could kill me if he wanted, in fact he'd have to, just to stop me.

Tired of the neck strain, the head turned back toward the windshield, slowly.

"My two sons, good one dead, bad one snapping like a snarling cur," Gram's lip finally busted loose in a whisper.
Pa snorted again. "Your good son did hard time in prison. Bad son does hard time out and might as well be dead. And that boy next to you will be, soon as I whale his ass for running off."

"Leave Travis be, Jesse. He just run off to see his dying uncle. Nothing you ain't done ten times worse. You just leave him be."
"What are you gonna do, old woman? Call that red haired, fatass preacher's son?" Ignoring Gram, he studied my mother's face as he spat the words but she'd turned to stone, staring out the window.

Not that Pop cared about me running off. Hitchhiking the fifty miles to Lubbock was no big deal. I'd done that before plenty. My unforgivable sin was bumping into him in the Medical Center parking lot, tumbling out of the cab of his rig with The Tramp.

The woman none of us ever spoke of. The one who only appeared in Conroy, holed up at the Alamo Cafe, when Pop was in town. When he disappeared, on the road dragging his tractor trailer full of god knows what to who knows where, she vanished too. She was one of the dark things, the many dark things you best leave laying in the closet. Everybody knows they're there, but you just don't talk about them, much less burst right in on them. But I had.

And the whole way east, sitting next to the zombied-out diesel truck long-hauler who'd picked me up mostly to keep himself awake, I'd thought of Pop and the woman, knew they'd be there eventually, but I didn't care. Staring at the sunrise burning through the bug splattered windshield, I'd practiced my question. "Who, Ray? Just tell me who."

And he'd told me a lot of things. Bandaged, tied down, tubes coming and going but still, he'd told me things.
Art put on his turn signal and began to slow, at least a half mile shy of the only stop light in town. It could have gone through three cycles by the time he got us there, if it worked. Instead, a temporary stop sign, anchored by sandbags, leaned into the wind and managed the intersection until the county could get by to work on the dead light. And we crept along.

Left again, onto Slide Road bordered by rows of scraggly, rotting Dutch Elms, spindly sentinels dying slowly from no other cause I could figure besides the basic poison of life in Conroy. North another mile, past dry pasture land drawn into hopeless plots by rusty barbed wire strung on rough hewn posts.
Wide-sky country, Uncle Ray would say, because to anyone with open eyes, there was more sky than anything else in the Panhandle. He said if a man fell on his back and looked around, the earth would disappear completely, because there wasn't a hill or valley this side of Palo Duro to get in the way. Lester had no business taking that sky away from Ray.

A mile from the center of Conroy, we trundled by Center Park and its sagging aluminum picnic awning, the hard-packed ball field and the fifteen foot sweet gum, "The Tree," the only one in the park to survive a lifetime of lightning, tornadoes and hail.
A crop of oil wells, bobbing and ducking, squatted like blackened steel grasshoppers, siphoning murky liquid gold from the Llano Estacado into some faraway stranger's pocket. In the center of the well field, a plyboard pump shack with a make-shift TV antenna on the corrugated tin roof sat quietly behind Otis' chopped Harley squatting out front. The trailer park, an aluminum oasis without a shade tree in sight, drew us closer like the tide.

Art slowed again but the worn tires still shot gravel missiles that clunked against the floorboard as we rocked up the potted road to Rattlesnake Gulch. Scamper, the Masons' scroungy mutt, yapped up the drive with us, dodging the flying gravel, legs scrambling. Shirl sighed, hope expiring as much as breath, and Bean started squirming again but it didn't matter. Pop could whale my ass, Momma could scream, the trailer could rock and swell and echo like I knew it would but it wouldn't matter.

Because as soon as everyone else had their say, I'd go about my own business. Like the sunset, the moonrise and the wheeling canopy of pinpoints that dotted the night sky, no matter how ugly the day, everyone had to do what they had to. And I had to kill Lester Ruley.

Chapter 2
Art switched off the ignition but the engine fired on, twice, three times; coughing, shaking the old car and then finally wheezing itself into silence. In the gathering dusk, doors flew open, all except Art's. Mom grunted herself out, followed by Pop who sprang to the crushed gravel, nimble as a tiger, eyes wild. Parked before the house trailer, his huge Kenilworth cab sat quietly, splattered with dirt and mud, looking forlorn with no load hitched to it. Jet-black with a lacquered finish, Pop had paid Rooster twenty dollars to airbrush the nickname Heart 'O Darkness across both doors in bold, red letters. It sat there quiet now, waiting for Pop to ride it into the night like a witch's broom.

Shirl swung her legs out then heaved herself upright. Bean slipped off my lap and skittered away in Shirl's shadow. I, too, tried to hide behind Shirl, hoping the big cat wouldn't notice me and instead, prowl his way to the liquor cabinet and crawl inside for the night. Not so fast.

"We got business, boy." Pop glared at me with the squint-eyed look that usually only comes out of a thick bottle and not until. Lightning slashed the horizon behind him as his right hand, the club hand, opened and closed idly. The left, his chop and slap hand, straightened itself and rose to his waistline. I set my jaw, trying not to show the shiver that rose in me sure as sap in springtime. Slivers of wind-driven rain stung my cheeks as I crunched around the back of the car to Gram's door. I bought time, figuring Pop probably wouldn't smack me while I helped his own mother out. Shirl grabbed Bean by the hand and trotted her off behind Momma with a worried look over her shoulder. Momma flinched every time Pop snarled but kept walking, just the same. She knew she was next.

Art rolled down his window and fumbled with the outside door handle while he popped the hood open on the tired old heap. A curl of steam hissed from under the cracked, paintless metal as Art swung his door open between Pop and me. Grateful for the fleeting instant of safety, I planted my feet, ready for the cat's charge when a mangy furball, yapping like crazy, dashed between my legs and flung itself at the poised tiger.

Pop spun around on one leg, the other swung the growling mutt clamped onto his pant leg through the air in a tight arc. He hop-stepped toward the front end of the car, his eyes wilder than the snarling animal's, and slammed the dog against the fender. The dog yelped, scrambling to its feet, and Pop whirled once then aimed a deft kick that grazed Scamper's hind quarters.

Mason's screen door banged open and he stomped onto the plywood door stoop clutching a newspaper. Barefoot in bib overalls that bulged over an enormous gut, he glared silently at Pop over the top of his bifocals.

Still yowling, the dog scrambled up the wooden steps and into the trailer. Droopy-eyed Mason scowled, smart enough not to say anything that might provoke the tiger further.

Art waddled to the steaming hood. "Last week it's your drunk brother shooting at the dog. Now it's you launching him against my car. Dog ain't gonna live too long next door to you folks." Art swatted at the hissing vapor cloud with a handkerchief. He coughed at the dank smell, then pulled a crumpled pouch of chew from his coat pocket and offered it to Pop. "Now come here and help me with this dang motor, son." He pried the warped metal open with Pop's help.

"Good thing Ray was drunk, Art, or that dog would have a big hole in him right now," I said carefully.

Mason winced and Pop whipped him with an ugly, jagged-tooth smile, probably savoring the memory of wild-eyed Ray on one of his gin-soaked shooting sprees, target shooting the dog with a 44-Magnum.

Then as quickly as it had appeared, Pop's smile vanished. "Damn right, Mason. Now go on back inside."

Mason flicked his gaze to me and though I could read the pain, the scare in them, I didn't say one word. He turned away, hurt, but I'd make it up to him sometime when the big cat wasn't breathing down my throat.

Pop leaned over the popping, crackling engine block. "Artimus, we gotta patch this damn radiator once and for all."
Pop paused to spit a brown stream onto the dirt, then loosened the radiator cap. The sizzling cloud swallowed him and Art in a sour smelling whitewash of vapor and I eased toward the trailer, forgotten in the steaming white haze. I hoped.

Gram turned towards the front steps as I slunk toward the back. "I'll just wait inside while you two--"
"Naw, you won't neither," Pop barked. "I'll have you and your husband outta here in just a minute." He uncoiled the garden hose as I slipped around the corner of the trailer.

I trotted up the back steps and pulled the door shut. In the small bedroom, Momma leaned over her vanity, shoulders bunched, squinting through hard eyes at the small spot in the cloudy mirror that wasn't plastered with magazine cutouts and clippings of The King. She'd powder her face then a trickle of tears would roll a wet trail down her cheek.

I yanked off the string tie and stuffed it in my jeans pocket as I unbuttoned the cardboard shirt. "Momma, don't. Just don't."
"Now don't you start on me, Travis Carlisle, because I don't have the time." She rolled up a red tip from a tube of lipstick, then threw it down and fumbled in her make-up pile. Outside, Art's car rumbled, choked, then died. "You don't have time either, boy. So you best high tail it. Shirl! Where's my 'drank'?"
Her sister brushed past me and handed her a glass of amber liquid. "You do this for The Kang, hon. Remember, you just think of Evis all the while. You can do it."

Evis. In west Texas, you didn't say the 'L.' And Evis was The Kang. Momma slurped the drink as Shirl patted her back.
I studied the water-stained ceiling. "He ain't no Evis, Momma. Why do you have to--"

"It's the easiest way." She gulped her drink and lit a cigarette.
"It's the only way," Shirl promised. "You got to make your mind elsewhere."

The starter cranked and whined, then stopped.

Momma sighed and fingered a clipping with a photo and a schedule on it. "Shirl, tell me again how we're gonna go to Vegas . . ."

Bean slipped into the cramped bedroom, headless Doll in one hand, and hopped up on the cluttered vanity. She picked a picture of The Kang out of the mirror frame and studied it quietly. Her lips drew into a straight line and she shook her head slowly.

"We're going, honey bun, we just are." Shirl helped steady her big sister's hand. "You think about him all night tonight. Just him."

Momma's eyes mirrored her sister's shock and fear, with an added edge of pain in Momma's that at once made her seem old beyond her thirty-five years.

Shirl turned to me as I dug in the hamper for a T-shirt. "We'd best clear out for the night, Travis. Where you going?"

I shrugged. "Janey and Carl's. I reckon."

"Go over to Buster's. Find out when Bo's coming around for me."
I sniffed a T-shirt, then quickly pulled it on. "I can't take Bean to Buster Ketterly's house, Shirl."

Art's car cranked again, caught, then revved to a roar. Car doors slammed. Shirl huffed a sigh. "I'll take Bea Anne with me. You go on over to Buster's. Tell Bo I'm waiting on him. Better hurry."

Gravel crunched as the car pulled away. No time, just no time left. I moved towards the back door, behind Shirl and Bean, rolling my sleeves up to my shoulders as I went. "You take care of Bean, Shirl. And you'd better haul ass."

Shirl thumped down the back steps, Bean leading her, following headless Doll. "Come on, Travis. I got the truck." She waggled a key ring with one hand, the other struggling to hang onto Bean's hand. "We'll carry you on over to Buster's."

I stood on the back stoop, just as the front door slammed. "Shirl, you just take Bean and git. Go on."

Bean dragged Shirl toward the truck. "Tell Bo. Travis, you tell him I'm waiting."

I turned and pulled the back door open and waved a hand, but didn't look back.

Inside, Momma still sat at the mirror, drink in one hand, a smoke snake drifting lazily out of her nose as she hummed "Love Me Tender," tears streaming down her cheek. She seemed not to notice as I rushed past her and stepped quietly down the narrow hallway, toward the rustling sounds coming from the kitchen.

Pop had his back turned, pouring a jelly glass full of tequila. He held it up to the window, turning it back and forth with his fingers, looking through it to the street lamp cutting the darkness outside Mason's.

He growled deep in his throat. "Get ready, Baby-Doll. Put on your pretty face. The Kang's coming after you."

Slowly, he put the glass to his lips. I breathed through my mouth, carefully, praying to God that Pop couldn't hear the thudding of my heart that sent the blood roaring through my ears.

With noisy gulping swallows, Pop drained the glass, gasped and spat in the sink, then wiped his mouth with the back of the slap hand. The fingers on the club hand trembled ever so slightly, then groped for the bottle again as Pop stared out the window.

He flinched, his shoulders hunched slightly and the hand froze. I knew the black eyes had locked onto something, either outside or reflected from inside, in the filthy glass pane.

The hand moved toward the bottle again, steadily, and found it. Thick, grease-stained fingers closed around the bottle, lifted it, and poured the last few ounces of clear liquid into the drinking glass. He froze, eyes still locked on the window, bottle tipped toward the glass, thick shoulders tensed, a motionless freeze-frame save the tiny, colorless drops that plinked one by one into the clear pool in the glass.

My heart thundered. I fought a shiver that drew every nerve in my body tight.

The dark statue before the window gripped the bottle, frozen save the measured drip that slowed, and slowed, and finally came to one clear drop that stretched, but hung on just the same.

Faint strains of my mother's ragged humming mixed with my own shallow breathing as I watched the cords on the back of the chop hand bulge and the finger pads whiten against the empty bottle.

I blinked. In that fraction of a second, the tiger leapt and spun and I heard the air whistle over the mouth of the empty bottle just before the starburst of light and the dagger of pain exploded from my left cheekbone.

I flexed my knees and braced myself forward to resist the charge as Pop leapt over a laundry basket and grabbed my throat. He slammed me against the wall by the stove.

"Boy, you ain't got the common sense to git while you could of." His eyes bulged and he panted short breaths sweetened with the afterscent of tequila and lingering traces of Red Man. "You jest got no sense at all."

A thumb dug under my jawbone probing, then found it's mark. My cheek throbbed, my ears hummed and the room began to swim. A reedy voice fluttered up from somewhere deep and my heaving chest. "You . . . ain't no father . . . to Bean. And you . . . ain't no husband to--"

My feet left the floor and I sailed across the room, weightless, catching a glimpse of my pale momma, jaw slack and eyes wide, frozen in the hallway. I dropped against the front door frame. Pop vaulted over the cluttered table and landed on his haunches square in front of me, his face in mine.

"You're goddam right I ain't," he hissed, dotting my throbbing cheek with tiny flecks of tequila spit. "Ray-Bob talked, didn't he?"

My mind flashed the image of those same hard eyes, only in his brother's wounded head, on his deathbed, whispering to me.

The slap hand whipped out of nowhere. Impact sparked another burst of light that made my ear ring and my nose burn somewhere down deep. A warm trickle flowed down my chin but I ignored it, boring a hole in his eyes with my own.
His lips pulled back against brown teeth. "So you know what Lester don't want nobody to know. Did Ray-Bob tell you the rest?"

Starbursts again, on the other side. My skin burned and that ear rang. Still, I lanced him with my eyes but clenched my jaws tight.
"Who do you think I am a Pa to?"

Course hands lifted me and pinned me roughly against the door. Again, I said nothing.

Pop drew ragged breaths. "You best listen to me, boy." He banged my head off the door. "Pa or no, I'd sooner burn in hell than rot here in East Jesus with the likes of you."

He grabbed a handful of my T-shirt with one hand, the other twisted the door knob. He kicked it open. "You're damn near eighteen, boy. Get the hell outta this house."

Weightless again, I sailed through still air never touching a step, and landed flat on my back in the dirt where I writhed like a headless snake, my wind gone.

Pop pointed a thick finger at me. "If I ever come back and find you here, I'll kick your ass all the way to Fort Worth."

The door banged shut and the deadbolt clicked. Voices rose, one of them my mother's. After a loud crashing, the hollering receded, as I lay on my back, forcing shallow gasps, watching scud clouds riding the wind between me and the stars.

Mason's door creaked open and footsteps shuffled across gravel. Then a thick hand pulled on my jeans and belt buckle, holding them up.

"Lie still, Travis. Let it come back on its own."

Flat on my back, I watched the stars wheel between cloud gaps behind Mason's head, fighting panic until my breath returned. Finally, I sat up.

"Sorry," I gasped. "Sorry about Scamper."

Mason helped me up. "You got someplace to go for the night?"
I slipped past him, my chest heaving. "Ketterly's." I took a shaky step, then another.

Mason brushed the dirt from my back but said nothing. I walked with careful steps to the gravel drive, spit a coppery tasting dark glob on Pop's silent, hulking Heart 'O Darkness and moved on without looking back, concentrating on my dimming shadow.

Trudging down the gravel road from Rattlesnake Gulch, I cleared my throbbing head and wrapped myself in the darkness. Ahead and to the north, the prairie storm flared the horizon with sparks and flashes that backlit a ghostly outline of a towering thunderhead jumble. The wind carried the dank smell of earth touched by some rain, but not by enough. Moments later, muffled booms rumbled across the flatlands as the storm rolled on, punishing Oklahoma just for being itself, I reckoned.

To the south, angry orange flames dotted the night sky, flickering in the heat waves that still shimmered across the miles between me and the uncapped gas wells in the Harlow fields. I forced a determined stride, matching the cadence of my bootheels in the gravel to the measured rasp of my own breathing. Staring straight ahead in the black night, you couldn't tell where the sky ended or the ground began and my legs disappeared. So I floated, a weightless feather riding the wind, down the hill from Rattlesnake Gulch toward the lights of Ketterly's ranch.

That thick lump rose in my throat again but I fought it off with careful, strong breaths. I'd sooner burn in hell than rot here in East Jesus with the likes of you. I rubbed my eyes, wiping them clear and though some drops still fell, it would be okay because the black sky and sailing wind still spit a fat drop or two that also would dot my shirt.

Crossing Slide Road I spun on my heels and stopped, fists clenched, and faced back toward Dix. Was this how it was for Ray now? No arms, no legs, floating in the solid black, heart trying to cry a hole right through his very soul? A shotgun blast and then Lester's lopsided grin played in my mind, over and over, that and Ray's strangled words from his death bed. I dug in my pocket for the string tie, looped it over my head, then pressed my eyes shut.

Damn the night, damn that hole in the ground and the one in my heart too. And damn the raging tiger, the false Kang, still strutting, stomping and making life hell in the red dirt shithole, Conroy. I ordered my invisible legs into motion again and floated towards Ketterly's.

(Next installment in this series: July '07. Want an advance copy? Email: Chris@SlyReader.com )