soldiers in civilian clothes. Sometimes our F-80s were ordered to kill everybody on the road. We had to dig their graves. I don’t think that story ever got reported.”

“You’re saying you don’t trust us?” the agent said, still smiling.

“No, sir, I wouldn’t dream of saying that.”

The agent stared at the long roll of the countryside, the mesquite leaves lifting like green lace in the breeze. “It must be like living on moonscape out here,” he said.

Hackberry did not reply and walked back to his truck, pain from an old back injury spreading into the lower regions of his spine.

IN THE LATE 1960s, he had tried to help a Hispanic friend from the service who had been beaten into a pile of bloody rags on a United Farm Workers picket line and charged with assaulting a law officer. At the time Hackberry was four fingers into a bottle of Jack Daniel’s by midafternoon every day of the week. He was also a candidate for Congress and deep in the throes of political ambition and his own cynicism, both of which poorly masked the guilt and depression and self-loathing he had brought back with him from a POW camp located in a place the North Koreans called No Name Valley.

At the jail where his friend would eventually be murdered, Hackberry met Rie Velásquez, who was also a United Farm Workers organizer, and he was never the same again. He had thought he could walk away from his friend’s death and from his meeting with the girl named Rie. But he was wrong on both counts. His first encounter with her was immediately antagonistic, and not because of her ideals or her in-your-face attitude. It was her lack of fear that bothered him, and her indifference to the opinions of others, even to her own fate. Worse, she conveyed the impression that she was willing to accept him if he didn’t ask her to take him or his politics seriously.

She was intelligent and university-educated and stunning in appearance. He manufactured every reason possible to see her, dropping by her union headquarters, offering her a ride, all the while trying to marginalize her radicalism and dismiss and hold at bay her leftist frame of reference, as though accepting any part of it would be like pulling a thread on a sweater, in this instance unraveling his own belief system. But he never confronted the issue at hand, namely that the working poor she represented had a legitimate cause and that they were being terrorized by both growers and police officers because they wanted to form a union.

Hackberry Holland’s political conversion did not take place at a union meeting or at Mass inside a sympathetic Catholic church, or involve seeing a blinding light on the road to Damascus. An irritable lawman accomplished the radicalization of Hackberry Holland by swinging a blackjack across his head and then trying to kick him to death. When Hackberry awoke on the concrete floor of a county lockup, his head inches from a perforated drain cover streaked with urine, he no longer doubted the efficacy of revolutionaries standing at the jailhouse door to sign up new members for their cause.

Rie had died of uterine cancer ten years ago, and their twin sons had left Texas, one for a position as an oncologist at the Mayo in Phoenix, the other as a boat skipper in the Florida Keys. Hackberry sold the ranch on the Guadalupe River where they had raised the children, and moved down by the border. If he’d been asked why he had given up the green place he loved for an existence in a dust-blown wasteland and a low-paying electoral office in a county seat whose streets and sidewalks and buildings were spiderwebbed with heat cracks, Hackberry would have had no explanation, or at least not one he would discuss with others.

The truth was, he could not rise in the morning from his bed surrounded by the things she had touched, the wind blowing the curtains, pressurizing the emptiness of the house, stressing the joists and studs and crossbeams and plaster walls against one another, filling the house with a level of silence that was like someone clapping cupped palms violently on his eardrums. He could not wake to these things and Rie’s absence and the absence of his children, whom he still saw in his mind’s eye as little boys, without concluding that a terrible theft had been perpetrated upon him and that it had left a