Page 94 of The Bright Lands

A few minutes later, he saw that it was a little shack tucked into a thicket of red, white and green signs. Even from yards away he knew what those signs would say. He’d seen them around town all week.

There were signs in the grass and signs in the windows, signs on the doors and pasted over the roof. MY HERD MY GLORY declared the green ones. The red ones were predictable, political, frightfully mundane. Who these signs were hoping to persuade Joel couldn’t imagine. The shack looked to be the only building for miles.

Joel parked well away, idled for a long time. Nothing moved. He dug a finger beneath the sheath of the knife on his ankle, scraping at a nasty itch that had spread since last night. Clark had offered him a gun earlier and he’d declined it, certain he would be more likely to shoot himself than someone else. Now that he’d arrived here he wished he’d taken his chances.

A breeze rustled the signs in the yard. He felt a faint, silent tremor rise from the dirt road and shake the wheel of the convertible.

Enough screen had fallen from the door’s outer frame Joel needed only to reach through and knock. A Bison sign was hung there, and in the Bison’s eye a small circle had been cut to keep the door’s peephole uncovered. Joel knocked again.

The Bison’s eye darkened to study him.

A moment later, Ranger Mason was standing a few inches and a lifetime away from Joel.

“You.”

“Me,” Joel agreed.

Ranger had withered. A stained green jersey hung from his bony frame. The snake tattoo on his neck now ended abruptly at his Adam’s apple. Nobody had told Joel that the bomb Ranger had fallen on in Iraq had peeled off most of his face in addition to taking off half his hand. A hollow socket stared back at Joel from deep inside the old scars.

“If I’d known you was coming I’d have put my eye in,” Ranger said.

“You’re a hard guy to find.”

“That’s intentional.” A pause. “Well, shit. We’re air-conditioning the outdoors.”

Joel followed him into the shack. Inside it reeked of chili and stale cigarettes and some sweet pallid primal stink. The shack was nothing but a single room: a grimy kitchenette to one end, a rumpled daybed on the other, a wide TV on the wall catching a choppy satellite signal. There was a door in the back that looked to lead outside and another to the side that Joel assumed concealed a bathroom. He thought of his own apartment with its marble counters, its Italian furniture. He’d never felt so cultivated, which was saying something.

Ranger muted the television as he walked by. On it, Joel spotted the Bison field, saw people already claiming seats five hours before the game. The man opened a rusted refrigerator and removed two beers.

“You can push that shit to the floor,” Ranger said, indicating a sunken easy chair, its seat covered in a heap of green jerseys identical to the one that dangled over his gaunt shoulders.

“Cheers.” Ranger passed Joel a tepid beer. “The hell happened to your face?”

“Wesley Mores.”

Ranger threw his head back and laughed. He reached out his gnarled half hand to pat Joel on the shoulder—Joel couldn’t help but flinch at the touch—and said, “Thank you, Whitley. I needed that.”

The man dragged over the solid oak daybed with his good arm and sat. He held his bottle between his legs and wrenched off the cap with the claw of his ruined hand. He drank most of the bottle in a single pull.

Joel sat. He sipped his beer and readied himself. He wondered how exactly you were supposed to ask a man what he had come here to ask.

Before Joel could say a word, Ranger burped and told him, “Jason Ovelle is dead. I’m sure he’s involved in this somehow.”

Joel blinked.

“They found him on Tuesday, in a motel up outside that town Mexia. You know the place?”

“A couple of hours north. What was he doing up there?”

“Precisely. His mother knew how to find me. She asked me to go identify him. As a friend of the family.”

“An overdose?”

“That’s what they told her. Oxy. Oxycodone. You know what it is?”

Oh, did Joel ever. A breeze stirred an army blanket that had been nailed over a busted window. Joel thought of the bottle of pills he’d discovered in his brother’s nightstand, wondered if he and Clark had been too hasty to assume Dylan hadn’t been involved in drugs after all. “It’s a painkiller.”

“Makes you loopier than morphine, yeah. But downers like Oxy was never Jason’s style,” Ranger said. “He might have got a little wired on ice every now and then but lately he hadn’t even been using that. He said he was clean the last time I saw him.”