We showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes, then went into the restaurant and ordered plates of tamales and beans and enchiladas and guacamole salad. Four men were standing at the bar, not sitting but standing, the way men do when they have more on their mind than just drinking. I thought maybe they didn’t like Cotton’s long hair or felt challenged by his jagged profile and one-eyed stare and hunched posture and the slink in his walk and the muscles in his shoulders and upper arms that you associate with a former paratrooper.
Much earlier in my life, I had learned not to make eye contact with the predators who hang in late-night bars, particularly the ones with jailhouse tats who are closet sadists and can’t wait to rip a college boy apart. I kept my eyes on my food, then glanced at the bar. The four men were sitting on stools now and watching Have Gun—Will Travel on a black-and-white TV.
Spud couldn’t keep his eyes off our waitress. Neither could I. Her hair was thick and clean and as bright as a new penny, her skin without a blemish, like the inside of a rose, her legs long and tapered, her pink uniform tight across her rump.
“Y’all want anything else?” she said.
“You from Texas?” I asked.
“I used to be. You gonna have dessert?”
“No, ma’am.”
“I will if he won’t,” Spud said, his eyes lighting. “I’ll eat anything that’s sweet. With both hands. Any way I can get it. Whatcha got, girl?”
She handed him a menu. “Try reading the list under ‘Desserts.’?”
She was standing inches from me. Her hip brushed against my shoulder.
“Could I have another Dr Pepper?” I said.
“You bet,” she said. “Ice cold.”
* * *
IT WAS DARK when we walked out to the parking lot. Our truck was in the shadows, close by the motel. Spud was picking his teeth. Cotton was licking down the seam on a hand-rolled cigarette. The stars were white and cold and so numerous they looked like refrigerated smoke arching over the mountains and down Ratón Pass into New Mexico. I looked through the front window of the café. Our waitress was writing down the order for a Mexican family in a booth. A little boy was crying in a high chair. She patted his head, then put a coloring book and a crayon in front of him.
“You’re not gonna let me borrow the truck?” Spud said.
“Nope,” I said.
“Drop me off and I’ll find my own ride back.”
“Can’t do it, partner,” I said.
“Like you don’t have it on your mind, too?” he said.
“I didn’t catch that.”
“Ice cold,” he said. “How old is she? Fifteen?”
She was probably nineteen or twenty, but I didn’t want to argue. “I didn’t mean to judge you, Spud. I told Mr. Lowry I’d be responsible for his truck, that’s all.”
“So I’ll call a cab.”
“Here’s a dime,” I said.
It was a cheap thing to say. Spud was a good soul, as homely as mud, as socially sophisticated as a dirty sock floating in a punch bowl. But secretly, I knew he was a better man than I. He pulled on his dong. “Well, the heck with it. In the next life, I’m coming back as a dildo.”
An eighteen-wheeler went by, the driver shifting down, the air brakes blowing for the long descent down the Pass. The stench from the exhaust stacks seemed to violate the perfection of the ink-black sky and the vaporous coldness of the stars and the symmetry of the lighted houses strung through the hills. Then I knew that something was wrong, and it was not the semi or Spud’s lust or my inability to stop thinking about the young waitress.
I saw a sticker on the rear bumper of Mr. Lowry’s truck that I hadn’t paid attention to before. I saw Cotton’s hand move to the side pocket of his jeans, his thumb working at the Buck folding knife he carried. A tall, booted man about my age in a coned-up cowboy straw hat, with girlish hips, was standing five feet from us. Three more men stood behind him, silhouetted against a neon cactus on the café window. They were the same ones we had seen standing at the bar. Each of them held an ax handle. One had a blanket draped over his arm.
“What the hell you guys want?” Spud said.
Then they were on us, our arms hardly in the air before the first blows rained down upon us. I saw Cotton’s half-opened knife fall from his hand. I felt a string of saliva and blood whip against the side o
f my face. I saw Spud’s jaw drop and his knees collapse, his arms flop at his sides as if his motors had been cut. I saw a blanket swirl above us, undulating like the wings of a giant stingray. Under the blanket, Cotton’s face was pressed against mine, his blind eye luminous, his body trembling with shock, his breath rife with the smell of beer and Mexican food.