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.
Duran said, “I don’t get it.”
* * *
Low had turned his head toward the backseat as he laughed, and Hawkes slapped her hand on the dashboard and barked, “Watch it!”
Low snapped his head back around and hit the brakes, hard. They all rocked forward as he came to a stop at the end of a traffic pileup. They spent fifteen minutes edging up to three DPS cruisers and two wreckers, all with their lightbars flashing blue and red light out into the afternoon. At the front of the line, they found a crowd of cops and relevant civilians standing in the ditch, where a tractor-trailer lay on its side. The left side of a manufactured house, still strapped to the trailer, was crumbled like an aluminum can.
A thin, frightened-looking man in a white T-shirt, jeans, and a bush hat was waving his arms around as he talked to a cop; the driver, Hawkes thought.
Low said, “There’s a good ’ol boy gonna need a new job.”
* * *
As a young man, Rand Low had looked . . . Texan. Large, rawboned, he was permanently angry. He’d been born in Odessa, Texas, where his father worked as a short-order cook and his mother was a waitress. His parents wanted him to learn a trade. They thought the Army might train him in heavy equipment operation, because heavy equipment operators made good money in the oil patch. But the Army recruiter had conned him and he landed in the infantry, carrying a rifle. He saw distant combat—he could hear it, but not see it—and got away uninjured, angered by the restraint imposed on the troops by their officers.
Afghanistan? They could knock it down in a month, he told anyone who’d listen—and enlisted people listened, nodding—if only the Army would turn them loose. The officers said that was crazy talk. You should see the chaplain, they told him. He worried them and they suggested that he find another line of work and finally insisted that he do that. They’d be happy to give him an honorable discharge at the end of his enlistment, but if he stayed on . . . well, then maybe not.
His anger grew in the Army and he carried it out to civilian life in the West Texas oil fields.
If a shopper should back out of a parking space while Rand Low was coming down the supermarket lane, block him for a half-second, you’d hear from him, a bearded, red-faced man in a rage at the audacity of some unlucky woman who occupied the lane ahead of him. Rand Low was coming through and he didn’t have that half-second to waste.
“Get the fuck out of the way, bitch, you fuckin’ . . .”
Pounding on the steering wheel of his pickup, leaning on the horn. Hitting on the bottle of Lone Star, or Pearl, in the cupholder.
Low was somewhat tough. Not crazy tough, but maybe eighty-five percent on the male tough-o-meter, what you’d get after two tours in Afghanistan.
One Monday night, at a drive-in burger place in Odessa, Texas, he did his screaming-and-horn act with a woman who rolled down her window to give him the finger. He slammed his Chevy pickup into park and jumped out and went running after her and smacked the trunk of her car with an open hand, hard.
She’d stopped, and as he was about to go around to the driver’s-side window to explain the error of her ways, the woman’s boyfriend—or possibly her pet gorilla, could have been either—got out of the passenger side of the car, grabbed Low by the neck, dragged him to his pickup, and beat his head against the truck’s fender hard enough to dent it and put Low in the hospital for eight days with a concussion and a shattered nose, which was never quite right after that.