Low put the truck in gear and they headed out to I-10 on the way to Midland, Texas, four and a half hours away.
Sawyer said, “You didn’t really have to come.”
Hawkes: “Yes, I did. I made the call, so I go.”
She’d made the call to murder a man and a woman she’d never met, or even seen.
The U.S. Armyhadn’t been what Hawkes thought it would be. When she signed up, she was thinking Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria; armored-up combat patrols on dusty mountain roads or desert tracks where you could see forever. She was thinking adventure, she was thinking movies:13 Hours,Jarhead,The Hurt Locker,Zero Dark Thirty.
Instead, she got Fort Polk, Louisiana, bureaucracy, and bugs, working in a job that, in civilian life, would have been called a “gopher.” She was supposed to be a 46Q, a public affairs specialist, but she was a gopher. She did take some Army courses that taught her how to use Microsoft programs like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. She studied hard, because those programs, she thought, would be useful in civilian life. She was wrong about that. You could earn all the Microsoft certifications in the world and still wind up making nine dollars an hour.
Out on I-10,Low put the cruise control at ninety miles an hour and Hawkes told him to back it off to eighty-five. “You get a DPS trooper with an itch and he stops us, we’ll be on record as heading out toward Midland.”
“You’re the worst goddamn backseat driver in the world,” Low said, but he backed off to eighty-five.
Hawkes’s father had been a white-trash loafer, hard drinker, andsometime over-the-road truck driver out of Houston. Her mother worked occasionally as a housecleaner and a window-washer for rich people as she tried to take care of her seven children. She took them to church some Sundays and read to them from the Bible some nights, which Hawkes found stultifying and often incomprehensible. The Army, Hawkes thought, was one way out of that life, if you couldn’t afford community college. She was wrong about that; some things that you were born with you can never escape. She was white trash.
Duran, from the backseat, said, “Let’s get some tunes going. What do you got on Sirius?”
They settled on Outlaw Country and got on down the highway, talking off and on about country music. “You know what Sirius needs?” Duran asked. “A Texas music station.”
As he spoke, James McMurtry came up on the radio with “We Can’t Make It Here.” They all shut up to listen, and when McMurtry finished, Hawkes said, “Our theme song. That’s our fuckin’ theme song, guys.”
Hawkes used her quiet time in the Army to read American history, trying to find out why her life was like it was. Some of her reading was reality-based, some of it more peculiar. She was honorably discharged from the Army as a Specialist E-4 and took advantage of the Forever GI Bill to enroll at the University of Texas–El Paso, working part-time in a Fleet & Ranch store, once again lifting batteries. She quit university after two years, when a grad student explained to her that the job market for a woman with a B.A. in history was nonexistent.
Nobody had told her that.
After dropping out, she went full-time at Fleet & Ranch, started by pushing carts of cut lumber around the concrete floor until her back was on fire, but over four years she worked her way up to assistant manager. She should have been the manager, but gotsideswiped by a well-spoken bilingual weasel with a necktie, four years younger than she was, and male, with a degree in business.
She’d had no chance.
She continued reading history of the peculiar sort, threading her way through the online world of social media. As somebody stuck to the bottom of the employment ranks, she couldn’t help noticing that while climbing through those ranks was difficult enough, holding your spot at the bottom was getting harder all the time, because more “bottom” kept arriving. Plenty of bottom to do the work at nine dollars an hour, if you decided to quit. Didn’t take a genius to push a cart of two-by-fours. She was a robot, one that happened to be living and breathing. Sooner, rather than later, a real robot would be doing her job.
Headed southeast out of El Paso, I-10 tracked the agricultural land a mile or so to the south, the ribbon of green fed by the Rio Grande. Fifty miles out of town, the highway jogged to the east, away from the river, and into harder, drier country, running between heavily eroded low red mountains, past isolated small towns until they got to I-20 and turned north, toward the oil patch.
In the backseat, Sawyer was running an off-and-on monologue about guns: “Anyway, I was in this place up in Wichita Falls, Henry’s, and I seen this interesting piece, gray synthetic stock, detachable magazine, so I go over to take a closer look, and holy shit! It was one of the original Steyr Scouts designed by Jeff Cooper, you know, the guy who wrote forGuns & Ammo. Bolt-action, .308, and it’s still mounted with the long eye-relief scope that came with the rifle, and they got the original case with all the case candy...”
Duran said, “I don’t shoot me no bolt-actions...”
Hawkes said, “I read this article said that the more guns a man’s got, the shorter his dick is gonna be.”
Duran: “So you’re saying Max here is a half-incher?”
Sawyer, a short man with thick blond hair, and eyes so pale they were almost white, smiled: “Okay, boys, let’s get ’em out... You, too, Janie.”
“Fuck you, Max.”
“Anytime, anyplace.”
Then there was Rand Low, who was driving, another piece of white trash.
Sawyer said, “Hey, Rand, what do you call four Mexicans in quicksand?”
“I dunno, what?”
“Quatro sinko.”
“That sucks,” Low said, but he laughed anyway.
