“Some of those boys and girls are gonna be right surprised tomorrow morning, when we tell them the truth,” Low said.
“If they want to bail, they can bail. We’ll tell them the truth then,” Hawkes said. “If there’s FBI among them, it’ll be too late for them to do anything.”
“Down there!” Low said. “Two more trucks. Goddamn, they’re coming in now.”
“Read your talk some more,” Hawkes said. Low had a speech written by Hawkes, meant to be delivered as the high point of the evening, something to get people churned. “You’re not gonna be able to read it when you get down there.”
“I know, I know, I know. I’m gonna shout it out there, gonna preach,” Low crowed. He looked down at the papers in his hand, curled into a tube. He’d already read it twenty times. Then, suddenly subdued, he asked, “How many you think will buy it?”
“All of them, until tomorrow morning,” Hawkes said, looking at the people walking among the trucks. “Some might drop out then and they’ll live to regret it. This will be the day when people will ask, ‘Were you there?’ This is where we draw the line.”
“Ah, God.” Low scrubbed at his hairline with open hands. “I ain’t felt like this since high school football.”
Duran was climbing the slope toward them, and when he cameup, out of breath, he said, “I talked to Borrego. It’s definitely happening.”
“Of course it is,” Hawkes said. “I’ve known for two months.”
“Look at this,” Low said. More trucks climbing the mountain, five, six more, long rolling cigars of dust trailing behind them. Down below, a dozen men and women had clustered around a guy who was demonstrating a long, dark, heavy rifle. “That’s a Barrett fifty.”
“And that’s probably a guy we don’t need, a show-off,” Hawkes said.
“C’mon, give the guy a break,” Low said. “I wouldn’t mind trying it myself.”
“Bet ol’ Max would have loved to try it,” Low said.
“But ol’ Max is deader’n a doornail,” Hawkes said. She started thumbing her cell phone. “I heard some more about that from R.J. He wasn’t killed by that big DHS guy, he was shot by the girl. R.J. says she put three rounds in him, two in his legs and one in his forehead. The story is, her name is Letty Davenport and she’s a killer. R.J. says she’s killed before and she took Max down like he was the village ding-a-ling.”
She pushed a button on her phone and held it so Low could see the screen. “This is her, Letty Davenport. Picture’s six or seven years old. I’m going to pull it and send it around to our main guys.”
“If I see her, she’s dead,” Low said. He reached behind his back and pulled his Beretta, popped the mag, slapped it back in place, just because he liked to do it.
“Says you,” Hawkes said. “How many people you killed in an actual stand-up gunfight?”
Low glanced sideways at her: “What’s got on your tits?”
“I’m... anxious,” Hawkes said. She put the phone away. “Also tired. I spent five hours buying potato chips and weenies andketchup and charcoal and lighter and KFC and bread and salami. I had to go to three KFCs to get all that chicken. And marshmallows and buns and pickles and Pepsi and water and beer and milk and cereal...”
“We get the picture,” Duran said. “Hey: there’s more coming up.”
Down below, more long trails of dust, more pickups rolling in.
Hawkes reached back to her days in American history: “It’s like... It’s like fuckin’ Shiloh. Good ol’ boys and girls going to war.”
Full dark came quickly, not much twilight on the desert, and pinewood fires popped up around the meeting place. A woman named July Null had set up a cafeteria off the back of three El Paso pickups, and people were lining up with paper plates for the food. A truck or two came in after dark, but Low had been right: there were eighty-two trucks altogether and maybe a hundred and ten people—seventy percent men, but a larger number of women than they’d expected.
A Honda gas generator ran smoothly off to one side and provided power for a dozen lights and a speaker and microphone, which had been set up on top of Low’s pickup bed. Several people were wearing cowboy-style bandanna masks and pulled-down hats, not wanting to show their faces. Hawkes hadn’t bothered: the Feds would know who she was if she pulled this off. She wandered among the crowd, shaking hands and taking hugs from old acquaintances, compliments from people who knew her by name but had never met her.
The place smelled like a small-town carnival, she thought; it was the odor of mustard and ketchup and chopped onions on roasting wieners that did it. And maybe a little whiff of poop—ladies in that ravine, gentlemen in the other, and watch your step, there’s a deep holeback there, and be sure to use the garden trowel to drop some dirt on top of your business.
Hawkes took the microphonefor one minute and said, “We’re going to have a pep talk by one of our own El Paso boys, but right now I want to encourage you to eat—we still got plenty of KFC—and to introduce yourself around. If you’re a little shy, don’t worry about it, go meet people. We want to be a unified force when we get to town tomorrow. Now: we’ve got members of our El Paso group who will be directing traffic tomorrow. They don’t outrank you—nobody outranks anyone here—but we’ve been talking to them about directing traffic. We want everyone to sign up with these groups, so you know where you’ll be tomorrow. Something else—we’ll be getting up early in the morning, so try to get some sleep, even if it’s hard. I hope everybody has a sleeping bag, like we asked you to bring, but if you don’t, we’ve got some extras on this truck over here...”
She pointed to the next truck over, and Crain held up two sleeping bags.
Hawkes went on. “Try to stay up until we tamp down the fires and kill the lights. For those of you who come from places that are wetter than us, you’ll be amazed by the stars you’ll see tonight. So. Fifteen more minutes for dinner, you can put your trash, paper plates and all that, in the bags below this truck. Then we’ll have the pep talk. Tomorrow morning, we’ll talk about specific assignments.”
One of her El Paso women shouted, “The Hawk is out,” and Hawkes smiled and climbed down from the truck.
As she came down, Low climbed up and took the microphone. A big man with shoulder-length black hair, he was dressed in a black T-shirt under a black sport coat, black jeans, and black combatboots. He was carrying a black AR-15 with a thirty-round mag banged onto the bottom of it. As the crowd tightened around the truck, he peeled off the jacket to reveal a tan leather shoulder holster with his Beretta. Hawkes had calculated the effect, and she’d been correct: a ripple ofooorolled through the crowd. Low flashed his smile and picked up the microphone.
