Days of Atonement Read online

  Not anymore, Loren thought.

  His anger simmered on.

  He remembered the first time he realized how Atocha County really worked. He’d heard about it, of course, all his life, the supposed payoffs from Connie Duvauchelle and what the newspapers called “the liquor interests,” the network of complicated obligations, the graft . . . The police department and sheriff’s office were a steady job with good health and retirement plans, but (perhaps as a consequence) they were also some of the last political patronage jobs in the county— no civil service tests, no background checks, and only Democrats need apply.

  Loren was a Democrat. His father was an official of the miners’ union, which counted, and his parents always showed up at precinct meetings, which counted even more.

  Within a week of his arrival, the shine not yet off his seven-pointed APD star, the chief sent him to Luis Figueracion’s office for a package.

  The Figueracion Ranch was the largest in the county, and half of it was later sold to ATL at about three times its real value— the price, everyone knew, of doing business in Atocha County. The head of the Figueracion clan had been chief patrón of the county for as long as there had been a county, the dispenser of favors and political office—if business needed doing, it was often as not a Figueracion who saw it was done.

  Figueracion’s office was a musty old storefront next to a fruit and vegetable stand, its flaking tin walls decorated with yellowing election posters for every Democratic presidential candidate from FDR on. There were also pictures of the teenage Luis shaking hands with Harry Truman himself. Loren didn’t see Figueracion himself that first trip— it was one of his clerks, another cousin of Cipriano Dominguez, who handed him the unsealed manila envelope.

  Loren looked into the envelope on his way back to the station and found it full of crisp new money.

  He remembered the wave of surprise that went through him, that this was how it was done. He wasn’t surprised that there was money wandering from hand to hand in this way— a lifetime of rumor had prepared him for that— but what astonished him was that he had actually been made the chief’s bagman with less than a week on the job.

  But that had been Chief Odell’s way, to get a young officer in on the corruption as soon as possible and thereby assure his own safety. With the entire department on the take, all of them had a stake in keeping things as they were. And that was— qué no?— the job of the police department in the first place.

  Later that day, Loren found an unmarked white envelope in his locker. In it was a ten-dollar bill, his share.

  The take, he discovered, had been settled at some point in the 1930s and never revised. It ran from ten dollars each week for the patrolmen all the way to twenty-five dollars for the chief. Probably in the thirties it had been a lot of money, but by the time Loren joined, all it amounted to was pocket change. There were other benefits available, money that could arrive from Figueracion’s office in the event of a medical catastrophe, or interest-free loans to be paid back out of the weekly take; when Loren, with a sergeant’s weekly supplement of fifteen dollars, got married and bought a house, he had been able to afford a substantial down payment courtesy of the Democratic chairman, and was left out of the graft tree till he paid it off.

  Still, the chief purpose of the money was symbolic. Those who broke the law had to pay, pay one way or another. The weekly cash transaction demonstrated that the lawbreakers knew they had done wrong and were willing to atone.

  Atonement was something Loren believed in.

  Loren told himself that the graft also built morale and comradeship among the police. They had a secret they shared among themselves— a bond, even if it was a bond that consisted of a shared sin.

  Sometimes, however, the lawbreakers forgot what the money meant, thought it actually bought the law instead of simply permitting a grudging toleration of their activities. One of the reasons Loren admired Connie Duvauchelle was that she had done business in the county for over fifty years and had never once stepped out of bounds, never had to be reminded who was really in charge. Maddy had made a tactless remark, and it had been Loren’s job to make her regret it.

  He hadn’t really been angry, he thought. He’d just been pretending. Just to show her who was boss.

  Still, it was usually the boss that paid the employees. An uncomfortable thought.

  One Loren was determined to ignore.

  There was a five-ton truck outside the Sunshine filled with sawn-off elk antlers. The antlers were in their velvet stage, covered with soft-furred flesh and spots of blood.

  It was not a sight to improve Loren’s temper.

  Loren opened the avocado-green deco door and walked to the counter along linoleum worn in spots to the wood floor underneath. Two Korean vampires in suits and ties sat at a back booth talking to Sam Torrey, the man who ran the elk ranch south of town. Loren looked for blood spots and saw flecks on one white collar. Sitting at the counter was Len Armistead, a barrel-chested, bearded man who ran a service station on the west side, and two garrulous old codgers, Bob Sandoval and Mark Byrne, retired miners living on their Riga Brothers pensions. Both wore checked shirts, gimme caps perched back on thinning white hair, and had probably been boozing since noon.

  Loren sat next to Armistead. Coover, the Sunshine’s owner, poured Loren a cup of coffee without being asked. Loren looked at the coffee and saw it had oily scum riding on top.

  The local groundwater was awful, filtered as it was through a couple centuries’ worth of mine tailings. Most people had water filters or bought bottled water.

  Coover felt free to serve it to his customers.

  Loren looked at Armistead’s plate and saw the last of chicken fried steak with cream gravy. It had been Friday’s special for as long as he could remember.

  “How is it?” he asked.

  Armistead frowned at his plate. “ ’Bout what I expected,” he said.

  Loren looked at Coover. “I’ll have the special.” He looked over his shoulder at the Koreans. “And some blood for the vampires.”

  Coover smiled thinly and wrote the order down on his pad.

  Sam Torrey’s elk ranch was one of the county’s few successful new businesses. Torrey had discovered that traditional Chinese and Korean medicine prescribed powdered elk horn to return potency to aging males. Newly grown autumn velvet antlers were particularly useful, supposedly because they were loaded with hormones. Some Chinese and Koreans went so far as to fly to New Mexico to drink the blood that gouted from the elks’ spongy skulls after the horns were sawn off— supposedly the hormone-enriched blood was better than the powdered horns themselves.

  The local chapter of the Eco-Alliance was up in arms about the country selling off its natural resources in order to cater to some bizarre Asian obsession with virility. Hunters like Loren weren’t wild about it, either, and also didn’t think much of the game ranch’s other purpose, which was to provide hunting trophies— at eleven thousand dollars for the larger racks of antlers— to any sorry, incompetent, well-heeled hunter who could stomach the notion of walking into a pen and shooting a helpless tame animal.

  Loren looked at the Koreans again. Maybe they’d be testing their newfound potency at Connie Duvauchelle’s tonight.

  “You gonna get an elk this year?” he asked Armistead.

  “Got my permit.” Armistead dabbed cream gravy from his mustache. “Gonna go out with Pooley and get him a bear tomorrow.”

  He pronounced it b’ar. Of course.

  “Everybody in this town’s got a bear but him,” Armistead went on. “He’s feelin’ left out.” Pooley was his nephew.

  “Good luck,” Loren said.

  “He figures to make a rug out of it.”

  “It’ll cost him a couple thousand, if he wants the head and all.”

  “I think he’ll settle for the hide.” Armistead looked at his coffee, screwed up his face, then put the coffee down. “How ’bout you?”

  “I’ve got my permit, too.”
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  “Still gonna use that fancy Russian gun?”

  “The Dragunov? Yeah. I like it. The Russians do good with small arms.”

  The Dragunov had been Loren’s extravagance of the previous year. The Dragunov SVD was supposed to be the world’s best sniper rifle. He’d replaced the Russian PSO-1 4x military scope with better optics by Fujinon, and last autumn had shot an elk dead at six hundred yards.

  “It’s a good gun,” he said.

  Armistead rose from his stool and pulled his gimme cap down over his eyes. “Reckon I’d better push on.”

  “See you later.”

  “See you.”

  Loren looked out through the spotted plate-glass window. His stomach rumbled. The Sunshine had the world’s worst food, but it was on Central across from the town plaza, and from the counter Loren could keep an eye on what was happening at police headquarters. And Coover was a honcho in the Democratic Party— there was that to consider, too.

  “It’s because that part of the country was too poor to afford regular churches,” said Byrne, one of the old-timers farther down the counter. He held a hand-rolled cigarette between two yellowed fingers. “That’s why the Apostles and the Mormons both sprang up there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They had all kinds of stuff going on up there. Joseph Smith’s granduncle started a religion, you know that?”

  “Nope.”

  Loren, listening to this, asked the Lord for patience. Byrne, who had a colossal shrew for a wife, spent a lot of his time in the town library, and had absorbed tons of facts that he was happy to show off to anyone close enough to be victimized, and do so with an aggression he plainly borrowed from his wife.

  “Religion was sort of the family business, I guess. And Samuel Catton, who started the Apostles, nobody even knew who his father was. But they both made good. They both figured out that the way to start a new religion was to preach to all the poor people that none of the other religions wanted.”

  “Jesus did that.”

  “Exactly my point!” Byrne was gleeful. “Poor people want religion as much as anybody. And if you get enough of them putting their pennies in the collection plate, you can live pretty damn well. That’s why there are all these American churches trying so hard for converts in South America, and so on.”

  “And that Joseph Smith had a lotta wives, too.”

  “You get poor people hoping, you can do anything you want with them. Look at Jim Jones, who killed all those people in Surinam.”

  “Guinea.”

  “Guyana. That’s the place.”

  “Guinea.”

  Loren decided he’d had enough. He put down his cup and looked at Byrne. “What about God?” he said.

  Byrne seemed surprised. “What about him?”

  “What if God decides to start a new religion? Suppose God decides that all the other religions are on the wrong path, and that they’re neglecting the people, and he tells someone to start a new ministry?”

  Byrne grinned with tobacco-stained teeth. He was having a good time. “Well, Chief.” He began rolling a new cigarette. “I figure if God tells someone to start a new religion, why don’t he tell a bunch of other people to believe in it?”

  “What if he does?” Loren argued. “Samuel Catton was the leader of the Apostles, but he didn’t go it alone. He had twelve deacons who received the revelation right along with him.”

  “A revelation that included support for the Anti-Masons and opposition to the Bank of the United States, right?”

  Coover appeared with Loren’s steak. He gave an irritated glance at Byrne and Sandoval. “Don’t you have anything better to do than argue about people’s religion?” he demanded.

  “I’m not arguing about nothing, Coov. I’m talking about historical fact. You can go down to the library and read it yourself.”

  “The Masons were committing murders and smashing printing presses, and the bank was oppressing the people,” Loren said.

  Byrne lit his cigarette and puffed. “Well, there ain’t no Bank of the United States no more, not since the Apostles helped elect Andy Jackson. And the Masons aren’t doing much of anything these days but putting on silly hats and getting drunk down at the Shrine Temple. I’m a 32nd -degree Scottish Rite myself, and if we were conspiring to oppress people anymore, I’d know about it. So why don’t you disband your religion and let people get drunk in the city limits instead of having to go west, hey?”

  “Go west” was Atocha dialect for going past the city limits for a bottle.

  “The ministry is ongoing,” Loren said, “supported by the force of continuing revelation.”

  “What I wanna know,” said Bob Sandoval, “is which of these revelations we’re supposed to believe in.” He wasn’t wearing his upper plate and his words were slurred by more than alcohol. “God told one thing to Joseph Smith and something else to Sam Catton, so which one do we believe in?”

  “They both agreed on the subject of the Masons,” Byrne said.

  Loren looked over one shoulder to make sure that no Mormons had come in while they were talking. None were in sight. “I don’t say anything about the LDS,” said Loren, “but my working hypothesis is that I wouldn’t choose a religion whose founder went and got himself lynched.”

  “Like Jesus Christ?” Byrne asked.

  Loren was speechless. Sandoval laughed at his expression.

  “I don’t wanna say anything about you guys or the Mormons,” he said, “but I’m a Catholic, and we say you’re both cults.”

  Loren glared at him. “You don’t want me to tell you what my religion says about the Pope.”

  “Loren,” said Coover, “that nice steak of yours is getting cold.”

  “One of the great minds of the sixteenth century,” Loren said.

  Sandoval looked offended. Byrne turned to him. “I’m a Lutheran,” he said. “Am I a cultist, too?”

  “You’re okay, ése,” Sandoval said. “You’re just a heretic.”

  He and Byrne cackled. Byrne took a flask out of his pocket and added whiskey to their coffee cups.

  “Eat your steak, Loren,” said Coover. He turned to the two old men. “Can’t you talk about politics like everyone else?”

  “Sure,” Byrne said. His eyes were bright. “When are Luis Figueracion and the rest of you Democrats gonna do something right for a change and get somebody elected?”

  “Now, Mark,” said Coover.

  Loren looked at the congealing gravy that concealed the overdone breaded meat and reconstituted potatoes. Watery pale green peas from out of a can floated randomly on the surface. He jabbed a fork into the steak with a vicious gesture, then picked up his knife and started to saw. His appetite was long gone.

  “Nobody even knows what the Democrats stand for,” Sandoval said. “Letting those fucking Japanese and wetback Chilote assholes steal our work, maybe.”

  “You know we tried to keep foreign copper out,” Coover said.

  “I don’t hear nothing but words, ése.”

  Loren’s jaws worked at tough, overdone meat and scorched breading. He’d listened to these kinds of conversation all his life and could gratefully spend his remaining years without hearing another one. A couple drunken old geezers, he thought, telling God and everybody else what to do. American copper production was dying because it couldn’t compete with the combination of South American peon labor and efficient German industrial smelters, and there wasn’t much a local Democratic Party chairman could do about it.

  Sandoval and Byrne jabbered on. Taxpayers, Loren thought. Voters.

  He took a forkful of thick, dry reconstituted potatoes and looked at them and tried to smile, the way a public official should.

  It was lucky, he figured, that his job was an appointed one.

  *

  For most of Loren’s life the western horizon had stayed bright long after sunset. The lights of the Atocha pit burned through the night hours as the miners worked their late shifts, and the neon signs of the City Line
burned right along with them. When the wind was easterly you could hear a continual moaning, like ten thousand distant flute players all holding the same low note, the sound of all the giant trucks rolling out of the pit on tires twelve feet high. Now the pit was dark and silent and the Line was on fire.

  The first call came at six-thirty, when two female ten-eighteens, meaning drunks, went after each other in the parking lot of the Geronimo, a classic 1950s roadhouse featuring a neon Indian in a Plains warbonnet that the real Geronimo wouldn’t have been caught dead in. The two women battled it out while their husbands staggered around beerily and then got into a fight themselves over the best way of putting a stop to it.

  The Line was no stranger to violence. Loren remembered midnight smokers after he’d joined the force: a bar— since burned down— called the Ringside, with a small boxing ring in the back room, where Loren and some other cops would each be paid $150 for squaring off against some hard-timer furloughed from the state penitentiary for the one event.

  The ring was only fifteen feet across, too small to give the fighters much maneuvering room, and Loren hated it— he was a boxer, not a brawler, and the close confines gave the advantage to the latter. In the Army his style had been distance-oriented, snapping out with his long left arm to keep his opponents at a distance, then going in with the right when they got impatient or tired and tried to charge him. He’d developed a way of twisting his punches at the moment of impact, ripping open his enemies’ faces with the gloves, spraying blood into the delighted front row of the audience . . . he had liked that, found a brutal, joyous satisfaction in the way he could cut up an opponent and keep himself safe. The satisfaction lasted until his second title defense, when he ran into the hammerhand right of a nineteen-year-old private from Detroit, and went down for the count in the forty-first second of round one.

  There was no satisfaction to be had in the small ring in the old Atocha bar. He hated the advantage it gave to the tattooed, muscular cons with the wispy prison mustaches who came into the ring smiling around their mouthpieces because they’d finally got a chance to hurt a cop and get away with it. His first fight was a one-and-a-half-round slugfest, a hateful, vicious fight, the two windmilling each other at close range until Loren got lucky and flattened his opponent with an instinctive right cross that only God could have foreseen. Because he hated it, hated the little ring and the smell of beer, hated every second of sweating, bruising, merciless combat, Loren spent hours at the Ringside working on footwork, on sidestepping and feinting and bobbing, anything to duck those heavyweight bruisers with their head-down charges and short, sharp flurries to the body that were often as not followed by an elbow to the teeth or a head butt to the face. He didn’t want to quit— the Ringside faithful were usually members of the Atocha establishment and Democratic Party faithful from outside the county, and Loren wanted to use the smokers to gain himself a name among people who could help him later. Loren’s footwork got far better than it had been in his prime. And hate fueled his punches, hate for the big shots at ringside and the con-boss fighters with their gold teeth and scarred faces.