It had been a long morning, and Brackeen was badly hungover and very thirsty. He had gotten into a pointless argument with his wife, Marge, the night before and had driven over to Kehoe City in a huff; there had been a poker game in the back room of Indian Charley’s, and he had lost heavily and drunk too damned much gin in the bargain. He still could not remember driving home, and that was very bad; he was hanging onto his job by a thread now, and the last stroke of the scissors would be a tag by one of the Highway Patrol units or cruising county cars for drunk driving in a county vehicle. He was a goddamned fool for getting into the gin like that; he couldn’t handle gin, he had never been able to handle gin. It did things to his mind, blacked him out so that he could not recall what he had done after a certain point in the evening. But if he stayed with the beer, he was all right. He could drink beer with the best of them, and he was always in full control of his faculties; things were just fine if he stayed with the beer.
Brackeen had no illusions about himself. He knew what he was and why he was what he was. There had been a time when that knowledge had been heavy and consumptive within him, but that had been sixteen years ago, in another world named San Francisco — that had been before the desert and the beer, before Marge. Now the perception was only a dimly glowing ember resting on the edge of his soul.
He was a big man, thick-chested, and he had in his youth fought amateur bouts in the heavyweight class, almost but not quite qualifying for the Golden Gloves; but the once-powerful musculature of his body was now overlaid with a soft cushion of fat, and his belly swayed liquidly beneath his dark khaki uniform shirt, partially concealing the buckle of his Sam Browne belt, brushing across the checked grip of the .357 Colt Python Magnum on his right hip. Each of his forty-one years was grooved for all to see on the sun-blackened surface of his face, as the elements had carved the centuries on the desert landscape he had made his home more than fourteen years before. Perpetually damp black hair, speckled with gray and pure white, was thickly visible beneath a deep-crowned white Stetson; gray eyes, red-rimmed and flatly expressionless, seemed as fixed as bright marbles solidified in lucite.
He was not particularly well-liked in the town of Cuenca Seco, but neither was he hated nor feared; he was, for the most part, simply tolerated and ignored. As he moved now along the heat-waved sidewalk toward Sullivan’s Bar, walking slowly because of the throbbing ache in his temples and because of the hot sun, he passed townspeople whom he knew — but there were no exchanges of greeting, no nods of recognition. He walked alone on the busy street, and it was the way Brackeen had come to want it; he could live with himself only as long as he was able to lock the secret of his disintegration as a man deep within, and he knew that friendships, liaisons, often brought probings which, if well-meaning, could still be ultimately destructive. He could never talk about it. He had never told anyone about it, not even Marge, even though she might have understood.
Sullivan’s Bar was crowded with lunch trade, and Brackeen’s eyes narrowed into thin slits at the sudden change in light as he entered. There was an air-conditioning unit behind the simulated kegs-and-plank bar, and the cool air was a salve on his pulsing temples, the feverish skin of his face. He moved across the wooden floor, up to the bar, and the men there made room for him without ceasing conversation, without looking at him, without acknowledging his presence in any way.
Sullivan came down immediately, no smile on his freckled Irish countenance. Brackeen said, “Mighty hot,” the way he did every day when he came in, and took off his hat and put it on the bar face. He passed one of his big, knotted hands through his damp hair.
Sullivan said, “Yeah,” ritualistically.
“Draw a pint, will you, Sully?”
“Sure.”
“And put a Poor Boy in, I guess.”
Sullivan went away and drew the beer and placed one of the foil-wrapped, ready-made sandwiches into the miniature electric oven on the back bar. He was an old-fashioned publican, and he scraped the foaming head off the glass of beer with a wooden spatula before serving it.
Brackeen wrapped both hands around the cold-beaded stein, lifted it, his eyes closing in anticipation. He drank in long, convulsive swallows, filling his mouth with the chill effervescence before letting it flow tingling through the burning passage of his throat and into the unsettled emptiness of his stomach.
The glass was empty. He put it down on the bar and rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. Jesus, but he had needed that! And the next one, too. He didn’t really want the Poor Boy at all, but he knew that when he had a hangover as bad as this one, he had to have something solid on his stomach; if not, he would conclude his tour at five o’clock by puking up stale beer, that was what had happened the last time he hadn’t eaten with hell going.
Brackeen looked for Sullivan and caught his eye, lifting the empty stein. When it had been refilled, he drank more slowly, looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. What he saw did not disturb him much. If he had been able, as a kid fresh out of the Police Academy, to look twenty years into the future and see himself as he was today, he would have been appalled at the vision; but as a kid, he had had ideals, dreams, he had had a lot of things that he no longer possessed. The fact that he had become a slob offended him not at all.
He ate the Poor Boy slowly, in mincing bites washed down with a third stein of draught. The beer was bringing him out of it, as it usually did. He called to Sullivan for a fourth draw, and while he waited for it he decided that he was strong enough to have a cigarette; he couldn’t touch them in the mornings after a night like he’d had in Kehoe City.
He smoked two cigarettes, one each with the fourth and the fifth glasses of beer, and he was feeling straight with himself again, feeling pretty good. The headache had abated, and his gut was not giving him any more trouble. But it was time to get back, because Forester took his lunch at one-thirty and Forester had big eyes and a bigger mouth, being a bright-face. Brackeen didn’t want to antagonize Forester, you had to pamper these young shits with their new-found authority, because if they went sour on you they could make a lot of trouble. And Forester had never made a secret of the fact that he disliked — disapproved of — Brackeen.
He thought briefly about taking a couple of cans of beer back to the substation with him — Forester was going on patrol again, after his lunch — but he shelved that idea immediately. He had almost gotten caught with a half-quart in his hand that afternoon two months ago, when the county sheriff, Lydell, had come in unannounced. He had learned his lesson from that; there was no point in tempting fate, no percentage in raising already poor odds. He would be able to make it through the day now, with these five beers under his belt — and if he did begin hurting a little later on, maybe he could slip out for a couple of minutes and get back here for a bracer or two, as long as things remained quiet.
He eased off the stool and put his hat back on, adjusting the Magnum on his hip. “See you later, Sully,” he said.
“Yeah, sure.”
Brackeen smiled loosely and went out into the sweltering afternoon without touching his wallet — the final segment of the bitter ritual he and Sullivan enacted almost every day.
Six
Slowly, inexorably, the desert sun traversed its ardent path across the smoky blue heavens. When it reached the lip of the western horizon, it hung there for long minutes as if preparing itself for the descent, radiating, setting red-gold fire to the sky around it. Then, abruptly, it plunged, deepening the red haze into burnished brass, adding salmon and pink threads to the intricate color scheme of a desert sunset. The horizon swallowed it hungrily, and the empyrean modulated to blue-gray, to slate, to expanding black as the shining globe vanished completely.