The Influence Read online

  He shook his head, smiling. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

  Lita sighed. “I wish I didn’t have to go either.”

  “You could stay.” He gestured around the room. “I have an exciting evening planned. I intend to eat your pie, watch the Curb Your Enthusiasm marathon and be in bed by ten.”

  “That’s so sad!” She laughed. “You’re not even going to stay up until midnight?”

  “Nah. New Year’s has never been a real holiday to me anyway. There’s no gifts, no feast, just…bad TV.”

  “Well, I’ll be thinking about you.”

  “With envy?”

  “Actually, yes,” she admitted. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Have fun.”

  By the time Lita walked back up to the house, Dave was ready to leave. The party this year was at Cameron Holt’s—yet another reason she didn’t want to go—but a lot of friends would be there, some of whom she hadn’t seen in awhile, and as they drove down one dirt road and then another on their way to Cameron’s ranch, she gradually grew more enthusiastic about the evening. The desert was dark, and long before they arrived, a line of white headlights and red taillights could be seen winding like a snake toward their destination, which shone like a beacon in the blackness.

  The parking area in front of the house was full, so people had started pulling off the edge of the drive and parking in the weeds on the side. Dave pulled behind a dented white pickup that Lita recognized as Vern Hastings’ truck, and Vern and his wife Rose got out. Vern gave a short wave, and the two of them headed up the drive without waiting.

  “Typical,” Lita said disgustedly as she handed Dave the pie and held tightly to the doorframe before stepping out onto the uneven ground.

  The music was audible even from here, but she didn’t recognize the song and couldn’t tell if it was live or recorded until the tune changed to “American Farmer,” and it was clear that it was not Charlie Daniels singing. She turned to Dave. “Cameron hired a band?”

  “I think Jim Haack’s boys started a band with a couple of their friends. It’s probably them.”

  “They’re not bad,” Lita said.

  Holt’s foreman, Jorge, was standing on the front porch, directing guests around back, and Dave waved a greeting. “He’s making you work on New Year’s Eve?”

  Jorge shrugged and smiled, but Lita could see the resentment in his eyes. She felt sorry for Jorge. And for all of Cameron’s workers. The man was clueless, heartless and pretty much an all-around bastard. She was surprised he kept any workers at all. If she were Jorge, she would have defected to another employer a long time ago.

  They turned the corner. The Haack boys did indeed have a band—Tumbleweed Connection, according to the name written on the front of the bass drum—and they were set up in a corner of the back patio where a line of small speakers put out surprisingly loud and surprisingly clear sound. Quite a few couples, including several senior citizens, were dancing to their version of “Act Naturally.”

  Cameron and some of the other big ranchers were clustered around a keg that had been set up on the opposite side of the patio, laughing loudly at some private joke that was no doubt offensive to three-fourths of the other people there, and Dave immediately started toward them.

  Lita grabbed his hand. “No,” she said. “Uh-uh.”

  “We’ll just stop by and say hi. We’ll put in an appearance, then move on. It is his party.”

  “David…”

  “We have to. These are our customers.” He nodded toward Vern Hastings, backslapping people by the open pit barbecue. “And our competition.”

  “All right,” she reluctantly agreed. “We’ll put in an appearance.”

  But Cameron and his buddies, Jack Judd in particular, were already half-drunk and in a garrulous mood, and instead of the quick hello she’d expected, they got drawn into a discussion about the prospects of turning the valley into wine country, making Magdalena Arizona’s version of Napa. It was an endlessly looping debate, made even more interminable by the fact that the ranchers were downing beer like it was water.

  Lita escaped as quickly as she could, leaving Dave with Cameron’s crew (although he’d definitely hear from her about it later. What happened to the ‘moving on’ he’d promised?) and heading toward friendlier territory. Darla and JoAnn were hanging out with Lurlene from the laundromat, and Lita joined them next to a picnic table filled with various pretzels, crackers, chips, dips and salsas. Everyone asked where her cousin was—they’d all heard that Ross was staying with them—and Lita explained that he hadn’t wanted to come.

  “Is he cute?” JoAnn asked. “I heard he was cute.”

  “He is, actually. But why are you asking?”

  “Yeah.” Lurlene nodded toward JoAnn’s husband. “Ain’t your man keepin’ you satisfied?”

  “As a matter of fact, no, he isn’t.” They all laughed. “But I was asking for my sister.”

  “Becky’s back?” Lita asked, surprised.

  “She will be. Back and single. I’m just trying to keep her options open.”

  Lurlene put a hand on Lita’s arm. “Honey, don’t let your cousin anywhere near Becky.”

  “That’s not funny!” JoAnn objected, but the rest of them thought it was, and the wild Becky stories started flying.

  Lita paused to get a drink—the nonalcoholic punch, for now—and by the time she returned, Lurlene had wandered off. Since Darla had been sick in the weeks leading up to Christmas and they hadn’t seen each other in awhile, there was some catching up to do, and the three of them did so, staking out a corner where they could talk privately.

  Dave eventually extricated himself from Cameron’s circle and began to mingle, gradually working his way over to Lita. He gave her a quick kiss, and she was surprised to taste nothing stronger than beer on his lips. “Having fun?” he asked her.

  “Actually,” she said, “I am.”

  “See?”

  “What about you?”

  “Not so much,” he admitted.

  They both laughed.

  Father Ramos was there at the party, parked at the dessert table, but his presence wasn’t the deterrence to bacchanalia that Lita wished it had been. He was in his most jovial, convivial mood, gladhanding everyone, and while conversation in his immediate vicinity was cleaned up considerably and those nearby, the Mexican workers who formed the backbone of his congregation in particular, were on their best behavior, alcohol was still being consumed in copious amounts. She could tell that, instead of toning things down as the evening wore on, the faithful were going to end up reveling as hard as the heathens, although perhaps making up for it by being more contrite in their confessions the next day.

  As in previous years, things started to get rowdy by about ten.

  Somewhere by the barbecue, two men got into a shouting match loud and serious enough that others had to speed over and separate them before the argument escalated. Lita saw a woman bent over a corral fence, loudly vomiting. Behind her, one young man she didn’t recognize was thrusting his hips in her direction, pantomiming having sex with her, while a group of friends, including Lee, the stockboy from the grocery store, and Boo, the mechanic, laughed uproariously.

  It was all downhill from here. She knew what was going to happen. As midnight approached, the firearms would come out. To herald the arrival of the new year, redneck ranchers and Mexican cowhands, united for that one magical moment, all of their differences pushed aside, would shoot their guns into the air, whooping and hollering. It was pure luck that no one had been injured or killed yet by one of their bullets plummeting back to earth, but as far as she was concerned, it was only a matter of time, and she wanted to make sure that she and Dave were gone by the time this year’s idiotic ritual was enacted.

  Dave had gone off with a couple of other organic farmers who wanted to check out Cameron’s barn and see how the other half lived. She found the three of them chatting with Jorge in front of a narrow pen housing a milky-eye
d and shockingly overweight veal calf. In broken English, the foreman was trying to defend Cameron’s indefensible cattle raising practices, but she could tell that he didn’t believe what he was saying. Neither did his audience, who kept asking him how livestock could be treated so inhumanely.

  “Tell to Senor Holt,” Jorge kept saying. “Tell to Senor Holt.”

  Lita grabbed the sleeve of Dave’s shirt, tugging on it. “I want to go home,” she told him.

  He looked at his watch. “It isn’t even eleven yet.”

  They’d talked about this before, and she looked straight in his eyes to make sure he understood. “I’m tired, I’m cold, I want to go.”

  He did understand. He nodded. “Okay.”

  It was getting cold, and Lita wasn’t sure why she hadn’t brought a jacket. Stupid. Dave bid his friends a happy new year, and the two of them walked out of the barn into the night air. A sharp breeze had sprung up in the last few minutes, and Dave put an arm around her shoulders to stave off some of the chill. A few other people—families with kids, mostly—were also starting to leave, getting out before the shooting started and things got out of control.

  By the corral, Cameron and one of his buddies had already cornered Doris Stiever, the part-time gas station cashier whose husband was deployed in Afghanistan. She let out a shriek that would have been a cry for help if she hadn’t been drunk, but was playful and flirty because she was.

  “Let’s go,” Lita said primly.

  Dave nodded, and they said goodbye to the people on their way as they headed back toward the front of the house. On the drive, a Jeep and a pickup were both attempting to turn around without hitting each other. Farther up the lane, green palo verde trees glowed red with the taillights of departing partiers.

  Vern Hastings’ truck was still parked in front of theirs, but whoever had pulled in behind them had left, so it was easy to back up and pivot about. Although everyone else who was leaving early had turned left, toward town, they turned right, into the desert, toward home. The land was dark but the sky was bright, filled with both a full moon and, incongruously, a visible field of stars.

  Something swooped low over the top of the pickup.

  Dave slammed on the brakes, nearly driving them into a ditch. “What the hell was that?”

  Lita didn’t know, but she had seen it too, a shadow that passed over the windshield, briefly blotting out the moon and stars, and she’d felt an instinctive terror, an inner recoiling that raised goose bumps on her arms and left her shivering. Like Dave, she twisted her neck sideways and ducked her head down in order to look up through the windshield, but it was gone, whatever it was, and there were no dark shapes moving across any portion of the sky.

  She straightened up, glancing over at Dave, who looked back at her with a confused expression. “That was weird,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “What do you think it was?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “A vulture?”

  Lita shook her head. She might not know what it was, but she knew what it wasn’t, and it was neither a bird nor a plane nor anything she had seen before. It was strange, and she didn’t like it, and though she’d been granted even less than a glimpse, just a suggestion of darkness more sensed than seen, she hoped she never saw it again.

  She shivered as Dave put the truck into gear and continued on toward home.

  They made it back without incident. Later, after showering together, they made love to see in the new year, and in the middle of it, from far away, she heard faint popping sounds.

  At the party, the guns were going off.

  SEVEN

  It had been over three hours, and his knees hurt so much that he doubted he would be able to stand without rolling onto his side first and then pushing himself up with his hands, but Father Ramos remained kneeling, hands folded in supplication as he continued to pray. It was good that his knees hurt. They should be bloody. His legs should be broken. He should be in constant torturing pain for the rest of his life.

  He had been there.

  He had seen it.

  He was a part of what had happened.

  He closed his eyes even more tightly, squeezing out a tear and letting it roll slowly, unobstructed, down his cheek. He asked for God’s guidance, but heard nothing back, felt nothing. No ideas implanted themselves in his brain, no helpful advice was presented to him. Either God was deliberately ignoring his entreaties or—

  There was a voice.

  Father Ramos stopped praying, silencing the words in his head and listening for sounds in the stillness of the church.

  It came again, a word.

  “Hector.”

  His heart pounded so hard he thought it was going to burst. The ecstasy he’d always assumed he would feel should the Lord actually speak to him directly did not materialize. Instead, he was overcome with terror, a paralyzing fear that rooted him in place, even as he heard his name called again.

  “Hector.”

  He should have run from the party as soon as it happened. He should have fled this town and never looked back. But that was animal instinct, gut not head. That was a human reaction. For while, as a man he might want to flee, as a priest, he knew that he could not. God was everywhere and He would know where he went and what he did. The right thing to do, the only thing to do, was exactly what he had done: remain and pray on it. If he was to be punished, so be it. If Magdalena was to be wiped off the map, its memory erased from the world, then that was what would be. It was the Lord’s decision to make, and whatever He chose would be right.

  Father Ramos thought of Sodom and Gomorrah and how, when the angels visited Lot, the people of the town demanded that Lot surrender the angels to them. The people were struck blind, and the next day their cities were destroyed.

  Was that what would happen here?

  “Hector.”

  He was sobbing, and was dimly aware that he’d wet his pants.

  There was another sound in the empty church. A shuffling noise behind him, as though something large and barely mobile was shambling slowly across the concrete floor toward the front of the church. The priest closed his eyes even more tightly, so tightly they hurt, his lips mouthing a fervent prayer.

  The shuffling grew closer.

  He turned quickly, letting out a cry so sharp and frightened that he startled himself. But there was nothing behind him. There was only the voice, coming from nowhere, coming from everywhere, saying his name. “Hector.”

  “What do you want?” he cried.

  Laughter was the response. Not the loud, eardrum-bursting laughter he would have expected, but a low sibilant snickering that seemed to emanate from the building itself, swirling and echoing around him until it graduated from stereo to surroundsound. He was enveloped in cold, an icy dampness settling over him and chilling him to the bone. He expected an accompanying revelation, assumed he would now be told what was in store for him, but—

  It was over.

  The church was empty save for himself, and the abandonment left him as devastated as the revealing of punishment would have. He fell forward onto the floor, filled with anguish and despair, sobbing in remorse for what had happened and in fear for what it could bring.

  ****

  Jorge ran breathlessly into the kitchen from the side porch while a still-hungover Cameron was eating breakfast. “Senor Holt! Senor Holt!”

  Cameron shot him a withering look. “How many times have I told you to knock first, pendejo? This is my home! You can’t just run in here whenever you feel like it.”

  “But Senor Holt! The cows! They are dead!”

  “What?”

  “The cows are dead!”

  His head was pounding, and he wanted to be angry, but there was a triphammer of fear in his chest as he stood up and followed his foreman out the door. All of his cows couldn’t be dead, he knew. Although he realized with dismay that he would not be surprised if they were. None of this surprised him, in fact, and the most frightening
thing about what was happening was that he’d somehow suspected it.

  He thought about the party last night and shivered.

  All of the cattle weren’t dead. But six of them were, and they lay in the yard next to the house in an almost perfect circle, touching head to tail, their legs pointing in toward the center of the circle like the spokes of a wheel, their spines curved to form the outer ring. It was an eerie, otherworldly sight, but he expected nothing less. He glanced around at the gathered crowd and realized that they were looking to him for reassurance. Their faces held nearly identical expressions of confusion and fear. A couple of workers were missing, and though he wanted to believe they were busy elsewhere on the ranch, he had the feeling they had fled.

  More men would run away if he didn’t nip this in the bud, so Cameron pushed aside his own fear, put on his toughest face and ordered everyone back to work, telling them in his pidgin Spanish that he was going to call the vet and have him do an examination to find out what had killed the animals. If the meat wasn’t contaminated, they were going to butcher the cows this afternoon.

  A few of the men crossed themselves—not a good sign—and though Cameron wanted to yell at them, berate them for being ignorant superstitious peasants, he did not. Partly because he did not want to drive them away.

  Partly because he understood their fear.

  He glanced involuntarily at the smokehouse, then looked quickly away. He couldn’t tell from here whether the door was still locked, but he wasn’t about to go over and check, not with his workers hanging around. He didn’t want to remind them. The last thing he needed was for the rest of them to run off.

  He ordered Jorge to make sure the men stopped lounging around and started doing what he paid them to do. Then he walked back into the house to call the vet.

  ****

  Was this the beginning of an epidemic?

  Jose Gonzalez had barely hung up the phone when it rang again. The fourth call this morning. It was another rancher, Cameron Holt this time, with an almost identical story. Holt, too, claimed to have lost six cows, which put the total right now at twenty-four.