All that’s required of me is to keep my mouth shut. For once, I do. Whether Bea is a snake or not, I can’t tell, but if so, she’s the snake that saved me.
The real story goes something like this. When they found me, I was short of breath and coughing up a fine mist of blood. The bullet had entered my chest and collapsed a lung, which made my blood pressure drop rapidly. Keller put pressure on the wound to try and stop the flow of blood, but by the time the paramedics reached me, I had slipped into shock.
Bea says I was rambling incoherently, that I mistook her for a boy at one point, and for my deceased daughter at another. It pains me to hear this.
After they stabilized me, I was rushed into surgery, spent the night on a ventilator, and woke up with a blank space where my memory of the night before should have been. I was flown back to Houston and discharged after a week free of complications. The doctor who signed off on my papers told me I was lucky.
He had no idea.
While I was in the hospital, Charlotte posted herself beside me, scrutinizing everyone who came in. Officials in search of photo ops she sent packing unless I insisted, not realizing that after my string of misdeeds, nothing but a dam of publicity was holding back the tide of consequences. Cavallo came, paving the way for a state visit by Wanda Mosser, who poured on a treacly layer of kindness for the cameras before giving an interview out in the hallway, stressing her commitment to interagency cooperation. Before she left, Wanda conveyed her thanks to Charlotte and whispered in my ear that from now on I should direct any inquiries from reporters to her desk. I agreed wholeheartedly. Cavallo stuck around awhile after she was gone, angry with me for what she called my “rampage,” but grateful and teary-eyed that I was still alive.
One evening after visiting hours, Charlotte managed the thing I wanted most.
After disappearing for half an hour, she returned with Gina Robb holding a swaddled baby in the crook of her arm. Carter came in behind them, looking askance at my chest tube, almost afraid to come close. I beckoned them forward. Their baby girl was pink and translucent and beautiful in every way, with a downy cap of dark hair on her crown and a pinched little face. Gina bent low and offered to let me hold her, but I was afraid. It didn’t feel right somehow, touching such innocence with these hands. I stared at that little girl, and when I looked up, all three of them were gaping at me, triggering a memory of Keller’s exclamation of shock when he saw the ragged hole in my chest.
But it was my eyes that set them off, my eyes goggled with tears.
A secret world had opened up to me, sucking me down through its many layers, and instead of swallowing me at the last moment, it coughed me up.
The official record had been not only tidied but heavily redacted, leaving behind a series of notable omissions. Jeff’s body must have been recovered from the barn out on the highway-I’d seen the column of police heading in that direction with my own eyes, and it was common knowledge that the van full of M4 carbines was recovered-but in the official version, he never existed.
All that’s left of the killer I brought to Mexico with me is a tattered copy of The Foxhole Atheist.
The murder of Chad Macneil remains unsolved, as it was in the beginning, and the headless victim he left in the park with its ominous finger pointing to the place Nesbitt died is still identified for the record as Brandon Ford. The man I knew as Ford was buried with honors under the name of Robert Johnson-the idea being, I suppose, that false identities are interchangeable.
The last time I saw Reg Keller was in his apartment in Matamoros. He is no longer a part of the story, either. As obliging as Bea proved in the aftermath of my shooting, whenever I brought up Keller’s name, she cocked her head in incomprehension. There will be no more confidences, she told me, never saying a word.
The week after my release from the hospital I eat a burger at Five Guys before driving out to the cemetery where Jerry Lorenz is buried. A riding lawn mover whirs in the distance, and I have to hold my breath to walk through a cloud of gnats. All the trees have been planted on the perimeter, leaving the cemetery grounds to bake and boil in the Texas sun, and me along with them. I press my hand to the back of my neck and it comes away damp. I’m cold-blooded by nature, and even in high humidity it takes more than a stroll across a gently rolling graveyard to raise a bead of sweat on my skin.
Either the heat is astronomical or what’s changed is me. I’m not the man I was, not so resilient. The ice water in my veins is starting to melt, and maybe I should take that as a sign.
The tombstone lies flat on the ground, a gleaming black slab incised with an ancient tablet and the inscription BELOVED HUSBAND, FATHER, FRIEND. I kneel down at the edge of the still-fresh grave, feeling a slice of pain through the back of the thigh. My old companion making an unwelcome return.
What do you say to a fallen partner? What do you say to a man you started off despising and came to grudgingly respect, whose death is on your conscience and whose absence you’re only beginning to feel? I’m not a good mourner, despite all the practice.
I press my hand flat on the granite, leaving a fleeting impression behind on the stone.
His last thought was for his kid, as mine would have been, as mine was in the confusion of shock when I mistook Bea for Jess. It was Lorenz who first thought that the finger must be pointing, Lorenz who later worked out what it was pointing at. And I’ve come without even a conclusion to offer him, no killer behind bars, no clearance on record. Just death. At the end of the day, Lorenz and the man he was hunting are both equals in the grave, their differing moral weight apparently balanced in a zero-sum game of nonexistence.
If there’s anything in religion I want to believe, kneeling beside this beacon in a sea of markers, serving no ostensible purpose but as a focal point of memory and remorse, as a blaze cut into the bark to let us know something’s rotting underneath, it’s that the dead and disembodied will rise again before the cosmic judge, that the zero-sum game will give way to the balance scales of an unblindfolded justice. That a cool psychopath like Jeff will be weighed and measured and found wanting, and someone will tell Jerry Lorenz that he didn’t die for nothing after all. Which is more than I can do, hovering without words over the silent grave.
At first I fear the ripping sound signals some new injury of the flesh, that I’ve popped some stitches in my chest or my taut sciatic nerve has finally snapped asunder. But the gashed seam isn’t inside me; it’s between my legs. The seat of my pants has snagged on the fence around Jeff’s vacant garage, the threads giving way. On the ground I make a quick inspection. An inch or so of frayed fabric gaping wide, nothing more.
The desiccated hulks of the once-treasured muscle cars haven’t moved at all since the last time I was here. Everything’s the same. There are no migrants congregating in the parking lot across the street, but otherwise the clock could have reset to the moment before my ill-judged southward journey. When we left, we were both in a hurry, and I distinctly remember Jeff pausing at the door only long enough to lock one of the dead bolts. With that lock in mind, I’ve brought along a crowbar. In thirty seconds I’m inside the garage.
I turn on the window unit A/C and the upright fan. The stifling heat doesn’t abate one bit. If anything, the thin sliver of refreshing air makes the rest of the space burn hotter. My shirt sticks to me, my imperviousness gone.