“Whatever it was, we never put it all together. A miss is as good as a mile with that shit.”
“We used to have a little song,” Dieter said to Marge. “Allow me to recite it for you.
“We had a few laughs,” Hicks said. He was not laughing. He reached into the bowl, took out one of the mushrooms and nibbled at its blue surfaces.
Dieter spread his palms face up and shook them in the gesture of not comprehending.
“Why is it too late?” he demanded. “Maybe it’s not. Look, you don’t want that filth you’re carrying. It takes you nowhere.”
He walked up to Hicks and raised his elbows as though he were about to put his hands on Hicks’ shoulders, but he kept his hands away in the end.
“Stay,” he said commandingly. “Stay, both of you. We’ll give it another shot.”
Hicks looked away from him, and took another bite of the mushroom.
“Look,” Dieter said, “here we are, yes? The last crumbling fortress of the spirit. The world is breaking down into degeneracy and murder. We have to make islands for ourselves like the ninth-century monks. We’re in the dark ages.”
He looked over his shoulder and saw Kjell watching him from beside the fireplace. In a moment the boy went outside again.
“We have to get it down before it goes forever. It may never come together again.”
“Forget it, man,” Hicks said.
“Forget?” Dieter asked in amazement. “You’re joking.
Who can forget?”
“I’d like to help you get it down, Dieter, but I got some shit to move.”
Dieter seized Marge by the arm.
“Tell him.”
She shook her head.
“Nobody bought me no mountain, Dieter. I got to live, damnit.”
“Nonsense! Bullshit! You don’t have to make your living that way.”
“Sorry, man,” Hicks said.
In the hills outside, a rifle shot echoed over and over, diminishing from rim to rim.
They looked at each other.
“That part of the fiesta?”
“No,” Dieter said.
Kjell came in carrying a single log and stood just out of the sunlight that streamed in behind him, with his head cocked toward the open door.
“Sounded like a great big deer rifle,” he said.
Hicks went to the other side of the door and looked out at the stone plaza.
“Hunters?”
Dieter shrugged.
“We’ve never had any before.”
“Wouldn’t be somebody shooting at us, would it?”
“Maybe somebody’s sending us a message,” Dieter said.
There was a brick chamber behind Dieter’s altar where a ladder was pitched against the platform of the bell tower above them. Hicks climbed it, with Kjell following him up.
A whitewashed wooden rail ran around the tower plat form’s protecting wall, and between the rail and the brick surface of the wall was an indented space through which a man could look out from concealment.
Hicks walked the rail’s length peering through the space; Kjell handed him a pair of glasses. He went round again with the glasses pressed against the rail, studying what he could see of the surrounding hills.
“I think you can still smell the cordite,” Kjell said. “Unless it’s my imagination.” He stood still for a moment with his arm out before him. “Wind’s south, I think.”
Hicks went to the south side of the tower and searched out the opposite hill. Of all the nearby hills, its pinnacle was closest to their mountain, and it was the most thickly wooded.
He scanned its high points over and over, but the only movement he could make out was the slow stirring of Dieter’s bright ornaments on the lazy wind.
“They ought to be over there,” he said, “if it’s blowing down on us.”
He made another round of the tower, standing on tiptoe to tilt the angle of the glasses downward toward the valley.
Among the trees on the road far below, he made out a yellow pickup truck. He handed the glasses to Kjell.
“Who’s that?”
“Don’t know them,” Kjell said, when he had looked through the glasses. “Could be… well, I don’t know who it could be. People camping maybe.”
“They’d have to be pretty fucking dedicated to camp around here.” He called down the ladder to Dieter and brought him up, blinking and unsteady in the sunlight.
“Whose pickup is that?”
Dieter took the glasses and Hicks guided their angle to the road. “Never saw it before. He’s blocking the road out to the flats, though. And he can see the house from there.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Hicks said. “Look,” he told Kjell, “hang up here. Let us know if that thing moves or something happens.”
They went below to the main room; Hicks gathered up the wet shirts he had been preparing to hang and pitched them on the stone floor.
“How about walking?” he asked Dieter. “How far was it across the flats?”
“Twenty miles to the highway,” Dieter said. “But whoever is in that car will see you start out.”
“What are the flats like?” Marge asked.
“Well, they’re flat,” Hicks said. “And they’re dry and windy and hot. On the other side of them is a highway that runs a couple of miles from the Mexican border.”
“Surely you’re not going to carry it over there?” Dieter said. “That would be madness. You’d just have to get it back in again.”
“I wouldn’t take it over the line. But I might have a shot at the highway if I thought I could walk twenty miles.”
“The wetbacks do it,” Dieter said. “They follow the ore tracks right into this valley.”
“What about the border patrol?”
“They fly over it a couple of times a week. Not every day.”
“Maybe that’s the border patrol in that pickup, Dieter. Maybe they’re cruising your fiesta.”
“Those people are American citizens,” Dieter said. “The border patrol knows that.”
“They’re setting us up, damnit. They’re setting us up for a bust. That shot was some nark tripping over his cock.”
“One thing I assure you,” Dieter said, “we cannot be surprised up here. Besieged, surrounded, but never surprised. And if they were going to bust us they’d have helicopters and dogs — it’s a carnival the way they do it.”
“Maybe they’re waiting for dark.” Hicks walked to the open door that led to the plaza and slammed it shut. “We’ve been turned, Marge. We’re gonna have to sprint.”
“Hey,” Kjell called from the tower. “Galindez is coming up.”
Dieter opened the door and looked out into the slanting afternoon sun. After a minute or so, a man in a bleached white shirt came up the steps, walking cautiously, and came inside. He looked at the people in the room and at the empty wine jar in Dieter’s hand. When he had recovered his breath, he spoke quietly in Spanish with Dieter.
“There are three men on the hill across from us,” Dieter said when Galindez was done. “They have guns, and one of them has a rifle. There are two more down by the pic up. Galindez says one is a Mexican cop.”
Marge sat down at the altar steps and tucked her knees under her chin.
“What were they shooting at?” Hicks asked.
“At me,” Galindez said.
“Would you get the boy off the roof?” Marge said. “Before somebody shoots him?”
“You were followed,” Dieter said to Hicks.
“We weren’t followed. We were turned.”
“By whom?” Marge asked. “June?”
Hicks shrugged.
“Maybe they made a lucky guess. I’m sorry,” he told Dieter. “We brought you trouble.”