This is one thing you?re really good at. I?m proud of you.?

T-Bone wrapped the rifle sling around his left forearm and clicked off the safety. He moved into a more comfortable position, his left elbow anchored in a sandy spot free of sharp rocks, the steel toes of his hobnailed work shoes dug into the hillside, his scrotum tingling against the ground.

?There they go. Take the shot,? Hugo said.

?The minister is walking a little girl into the creek.?

?Take the shot.?

?Flores and the girl are holding hands. I cain?t see for a clear shot.?

?What are you talking about??

?The minister and a little girl are right behind them.?

?Take the shot.?

?Stop yelling.?

?You want me to do it? Take the shot.?

?There?s colored people everywhere. You whack them and it?s a hate crime.?

?They can afford to lose a few. Take the shot.?

?I?m trying.?

?Give me the rifle.?

?I?ll do it. Let them get clear.? T-Bone raised the barrel slightly, leading his target, his unshaved jaw pressed into the stock, his left eye squinted shut. ?Ah, beautiful. Yes, yes, yes. So long, alligator boy.?

But he didn?t pull the trigger.

?What happened?? Hugo said.

T-Bone pulled back from the crest, his face glistening and empty, like that of a starving man who had just been denied access to the table. ?They went up the steps into the back of the church. I lost them in the gloom. I didn?t have anything but a slop shot.?

Hugo hit the flat of his fist on the ground, his teeth gritted.

?It?s not my fault,? T-Bone said.

?Whose is it??

T-Bone worked the bolt on his rifle and opened the breech, ejecting the unfired round. It was a soft-nosed .30-06, its brass case a dull gold in the twilight. He fitted it back into the magazine with his thumb and eased the bolt back into place and locked it down so the chamber was empty. He rolled on his back and squinted up at Hugo, his eyelashes damp with perspiration. ?You bother me.?

?I bother you??

?Yeah.?

?You care to tell me why??

??Cause I never saw you scared before. Has ole Jack Collins got you in his sights? ?Cause if you ask me, somebody has got you plumb scared to death.?

25

WHEN HACKBERRY GOT back home from the grocery store in town, the sun had melted into a brassy pool somewhere behind the hills far to the west of his property. The blades on his windmill were unchained and ginning rapidly in the evening breeze, and inside the shadows on his south pasture, he could see well water gushing from a pipe into the horse tank. Once again he thought he smelled an odor of chrysanthemums or leakage from a gas well on the wind, or perhaps it was lichen or toadstools, the kind that grew carpetlike inside perennial shade, often on graves.

For many years Saturday nights had not boded well for him. After sunset he became acutely aware of his wife?s absence, the lack of sound and light she had always created in the kitchen while she prepared a meal they would eat on the backyard picnic table. Their pleasures had always been simple ones: time with their children; the movies they saw every Saturday night in town, no matter what was playing, at a theater where Lash La Rue had once performed onstage with his coach whip; attending Mass at a rural church where the homily was always in Spanish; weeding their flower beds together and, in the spring, planting veg etables from seed packets, staking the empty packets, crisp and stiff, at the end of each seeded row.

When he thought too long on any of these things, he was filled with such an unrelieved sense of loss that he would call out in the silence, sharply and without shame, lest he commit an act that was more than foolish. Or he would telephone his son the boat skipper in Key West or the other twin, the oncologist, in Phoenix, and pretend he was checking up on them. Did they need help buying a new home? What about starting up a college fund for the grandchildren? Were the kingfish running? Would the grandkids like to go look for the Lost Dutchman?s mine in the Superstitions?

They were good sons and invited him to their homes and visited him whenever they could, but Saturday night alone was still Saturday night alone, and the silence in the house could be louder than echoes in a tomb.

Hackberry hefted the grocery sacks and two boxed hot pizzas from his truck and carried them through the