With the letter in hand to show the Chevrolet dealer, Tommy’s dad drove to Amarillo and ordered the truck. Then with the money his son had sent home all year, to help out with the bills at the ranch, his dad paid for the vehicle in advance. That way the boy could not argue with his father, and had to either take the pickup or park it.

McKay’s parents, his cousin Bill, his aunt and uncle, and his ninety-one-year-old grandmother all drove from Dumas, down U.S. Highway 287, through Amarillo, Childress, Wichita Falls, and Fort Worth to the international airport in Dallas the day before Tommy’s plane landed. The crowd gathered around Granny McKay, who sat in a wheelchair, and greeted their Marine as he walked down the ramp from the plane in the fancy, new Dallas-Fort Worth air terminal.

When all of them got their hugs in on the boy, and wiped their eyes, Tommy’s dad handed him the keys hanging on a ball chain with a clear plastic tag encasing a small, new-vehicle identification card, and on the owner’s line of the yellow slip of stiff paper inside the plastic carrier it read Thomas Gaylord McKay.

Dressed in his green serge uniform with his rows of ribbons pinned above his glistening silver rifle and pistol shooting badges, silver bars shining on his collar and blouse’s epaulettes, his football player’s physique bulging against the fabric, the look of her son took his mother’s breath away.

“Stand right there!” she ordered her young man. “Daddy, get that Kodak out and take a picture of this boy! I swear if he ain’t the prettiest thing I ever did see. My Lord! He looks awfully smart in that uniform. Tommy, won’t you wear that to church for us Sunday?”

“Mama, I got out of the Marine Corps so I didn’t have to put this uniform on anymore, and now you want me to wear it to church?” McKay said, frowning at his mother. She always did love to show off her good-looking son, especially at the First Baptist Church of Dumas, Texas, a place where even in July of 1968 people appreciated a man in a Marine Corps uniform.

He finally agreed to her begging, and he dressed for the last time in his green serge uniform, for his mother, so she could show him off at church. People at the First Baptist Church of Dumas took pictures of the young man. Old veterans there slapped him on the back and talked about landing at Normandy and Iwo Jima. High school girls who knew of Tommy McKay as the star Demon of Dumas’s football team, and now a Marine lieutenant with medals, all swooned and giggled when he caught them staring at him.

The preacher had the young veteran stand up in the congregation, and he openly thanked the lad for serving his country. Vietnam War protesters were never welcome in Dumas, Texas. However, at the Dallas airport, while getting his baggage on the newfangled carousel where suitcases came falling down a metal slide and landed on the big metal turntable, some people did shout rude remarks at him. Big-city people with no sense, his dad called them, and told Tommy to never mind the idiots. They all smoked dope and were probably Communists, too.

That’s how homecoming went for T. D. McKay. Flashcubes popping and family hugging him, his mama in love with how her son looked, and his father, who had gone to war himself twenty-five years earlier, just glad to have his boy home alive.

Mid-August temperatures in West Texas boiled the tops out of most thermometers. One place outside Big Spring, where he stopped to buy gas, the big dial in the shade of the filling station awning read 114 degrees. T. D. drank a Coke and bought two more that he set in a little Styrofoam ice chest he kept on the front seat in which his mother had put a plastic bowl full of fried chicken and several dill pickles sliced in quarters, so the boy would not die of hunger on the eight-hour trip from Dumas down to the Lyle Langtree Ranch near Fort Stockton, Texas, where Jimmy Sanchez’s mother, two sisters, and three brothers still lived.

He turned off the pavement a few minutes past four o’clock, and finally at ten minutes before five, he saw the sprawling brown stucco and stone ranch headquarters and below it the white stucco house with the wide, stone-faced front porch and white shingled roof where Jimmy’s family lived.

The rutted road needed a good bulldozing at the bottom of the draw he had to cross to get to the houses. He slowed his new truck to a crawl, but still the rocks jumped underneath, and banged against the frame and the oil pan. Once up the other side, he pulled to the side and got out of the truck and crawled on his knees and looked for oil or transmission fluid leaks. Nothing wet. Just dust. He worried too much, fearful of a scratch on the paint.

Near the house he saw the old windmill that he and Jimmy had fixed before they shipped out to Vietnam, Tommy going just a week ahead of Jimmy. It spun in the stiff, hot breeze and kept a trickle of water overflowing from the holding tank where a dozen white-face heifers had flopped after taking their fill. The small herd of young cows looked at the blue-and-white pickup as it eased past them and drove on up the hill to the white stucco house where a gang of people, all smiling, stood inside a wire-mesh fence tied to steel oil well pipe that emerged out of a low concrete and stone wall.

Beyond the house, on the low hills covered in soapweed and sage, Tommy saw a whirlwind towering in the distance, sweeping across the dry country, churning up the white dust into a column that must have gone a thousand feet in the air. He and Jimmy had ridden horses across those hills, chasing Lyle Langtree’s cattle to a set of pens where the three younger Sanchez brothers and two more ranch hands waited to cut and brand the strays that the Diamond-L crew had missed working in the spring roundup.

Everyplace he looked, Tommy saw reminders of what he and Jimmy had done here. Too few summers and not nearly enough Christmases. McKay could have used a lot more time with his best friend, riding and romping on this place he loved.

As he rumbled over the cattle guard and passed under the archway that connected the front gate to the exterior welded-pipe fence line that surrounded the Sanchez home and ranch headquarters compound, Tommy noticed a new brand painted on the metal arch by the Diamond-L. A J-barS brand. Something new since he went to Vietnam.

McKay had not even shut down his rumbling engine before the three Sanchez boys and one of their two sisters had pulled open both doors and clambered inside, taking a look at the next-year’s model Chevy.

“Aw, she’s a beaut, Tommy!” Henry Sanchez, the brother next to Jimmy in age, said as he jumped in the truck. He would graduate from the University of Texas next spring, just ahead of Marguerite, the younger of the two girls, named for her mother. She stood by the driver’s side and smiled, lowering her eyes, showing her shyness. Hector, the next younger brother, had finished his freshman year at Texas and now felt himself a man as a sophomore. José would finish high school this year, at Fort Stockton, where he played football. Maria Sanchez-Ochoa, the elder daughter, was the only sibling of Jimmy’s not home to greet his best friend. She taught elementary school in Dexter, New Mexico, where her husband, Robert Ochoa, worked as the New Mexico State University extension agent, helping Pecos Valley farmers develop more efficient ways of cultivating and growing alfalfa and feedlot cattle.

She had sent her love and kisses to Tommy McKay, though, and Marguerite Sanchez told him over and over how badly Maria wanted to be there to see him.

“Maybe she and Roberto will drive down here this weekend,” the mother said, walking Tommy to the house while the boys carried his suitcase. “You will stay through the weekend. You must, you know. Señor Lyle told the boys to butcher one of the steer calves and make a big barbecue in your honor. Many of our neighbors will come, and most of the people from church, too. I’m not supposed to tell you, but I know you will stay if you know all the trouble they have gone to, and what they have planned.”

“Oh, I can do that, for you, Mama,” Tommy said, and then gave the Mexican woman a long and tearful hug.

Tears now streamed from her face, too. They stood on the porch both looking at each other, and not able to speak, because they knew it would mean talking about Jimmy, and that hurt too much right now. So they hugged some more and wept.

“It makes me feel so good that you call me Mama, too, like my Jimmy,” she finally said, still holding her arms around Tommy’s neck. “I hope your own mother will not mind it.”

Tommy said nothing, because he did not tell his mother that years ago he had begun calling Mrs. Sanchez Mama, too. Everyone there at the Diamond-L Ranch called her Mama, and he felt uncomfortable calling her anything else. Only Señor Lyle called her Marguerite, and sometimes he even called her Mama Sanchez.

“You split the room with Henry, just like before, when you came here with Jimmy, only it’s Henry in there now,” Mama Sanchez said, leading Tommy through the house to one of the three big bedrooms. “With everyone here all at once, we have to sleep two people in a room. Before, when the boys were much younger, they could all sleep together. Now you’re men, so men need more space than boys.”

“Hola, Marguerite,” Tommy said, turning around and seeing the younger sister walking quietly behind him, still smiling. Her creamy, tan skin glowed in contrast to her jet black hair and dark brown eyes. She had high cheekbones like her mother, and a beautiful, slightly upturned nose that gave her almost a pixie look. The girl stood only five feet tall, if that, and wore pumps with a good lift in the heels so she didn’t appear so short. However, Tommy liked her smallness because it became her quiet and gentle personality.

Maria, on the other hand, stood a full two inches taller than her mother, and had the anger of a lioness that exploded easily. Like Jimmy, she sought to achieve greatness by addressing the best of her talents to the people with the least. It made perfect sense to Tommy that she would marry an extension agent after graduating at the top of her class at Texas, and going to teach school in a rural classroom with mostly Hispanic children whose parents came to America one night when they waded across the Rio Grande.

“Hola, Thomas, Marguerite answered, and smiled her perfect teeth at him. All of the Sanchez children had perfect teeth. They hardly saw a dentist, yet even the mother had perfect teeth, strong enough to chew through screen wire.

Most of Tommy’s molars held large fillings, caused from too many sweets as a lad and not enough time over the sink with a toothbrush in his mouth. Jimmy, on the other hand, always liked having a toothpick or matchstick in his mouth. Once in a while he chewed a stick of Spearmint chewing gum, but he seemed to always prefer a small piece of wood.

“We must go see Señor Lyle pronto,” Mama Sanchez said, and looked at her daughter, frowning and shaking her head, as though the girl were bothering their guest. Tommy noticed the gesture, and then smiled and took Marguerite’s hand.

“I sure would like you to come, too, if Mama doesn’t mind,” McKay said, and caused the young woman’s face to flush deep red.

“If Mama does not mind, I would like that, too,” Marguerite said, still holding Tommy’s hand.

“Oh, I suppose,” Mama Sanchez said, and then smiled at the attraction that both of the two young people seemed to have sparked toward each other. “Marguerite, you know how bad Señor Lyle can talk, so do not be offended if he says too much. You know he is old, and men of his time think different than men today.”

“Yes, Mama, I know Mister Langtree can say awful things,” Marguerite said, and then walked alongside Tommy McKay and her mother as they crossed the broad patio behind the ranch headquarters and entered the big house through the sliding glass doors.

The old man sat inside, feeling the cool breezes off the air conditioner as he reclined in a wooden rocking chair draped with a red-and-blue Navajo blanket. He had his hats hanging on a set of deer antlers just inside the door. Just like Tommy’s father, his favorite one hung on the outside of the rack, nearest the door, handy to grab. The tattered gray Stetson had a sweat stain that reached halfway up the crown and halfway out the brim, with its nose rolled almost to a point and polished slick from years of handling.

His bald head was pink and pale, surrounded by snow-white hair. From the tops of his ears downward, the skin on his neck and face shone a dark tan color, weathered tough from a lifetime of outdoor work. Tommy thought how his father looked the same way but had twenty-five years less time on his watch.

Old Lyle Langtree took his first breath of life on this ranch eighty-two years ago, when his mother gave birth to him in a dugout cabin with a sagebrush and dirt roof that his parents had hacked into the ground the winter before his birth in 1886. They carried water in wooden barrels, hauled twice a week in a wagon they drove fourteen miles each way, until Lyle’s father managed to hand-dig a well deep enough to finally strike a trickle of ground water outside their dugout. Although rank with gypsum, leaving white chalk in their clothes, they survived on it until a driller came along with a cable-tool rig and put down a decent, deep well that sprang fresh water even in the driest summers.

He never forgot his hard beginnings, and reminded anyone who admired his fine home today that it all began in a single-room hut with a roof that dropped dirt, scorpions, and big, black centipedes with yellow legs into a person’s bed or the stew pot, if someone forgot to put the lid back on it.

“I hope you’ll stay a spell,” the old man said, smiling and chewing on a cigar that he would never light. “Maybe we’ll kill the fatted calf for the prodigal son, if you’re a mind to visit a day or two.”

“Sir, I am honored to stand in your home and in your presence, and thank you for your kind hospitality,” McKay said, and bowed slightly for the old gentleman. “I am glad to stay a day or two, but insist that you allow me to pitch in with the chores so I am not such a burden.”

“Hell, son, we got a tribe of wetbacks that take care of the chores,” the old man said with a laugh, and coughed a wad out of his throat that he held in his mouth until he could amble to the back door and launch it into the flower bed by the patio.

Tommy rolled his eyes at the thoughtless remark, and looked at Mama and Marguerite Sanchez, who smiled back at him and shook their heads as the three of them watched the old cowboy totter his way back to his rocking chair and sit down.

“Now, for supper, I want you girls to fix us a mess of those flat enchiladas with the chili meat, hot sauce, and salad between the tortillas that you stack up like pancakes,” Lyle said, rocking the chair and his knobby knees bobbing back and forth as he pushed with his long, skinny legs. “This boy ain’t ate good over in that Vietnam, so I expect a plate of decent food would set right with him. Ain’t that right, boy?”

“A plate of Mama’s enchiladas sets right with me anytime,” McKay said with a smile, and looked at the two Sanchez women. “I think I could eat them for breakfast, dinner, and supper seven days a week and never get tired of them.”

“Spoke like a true Texas gentleman, Mister McKay,” the old man said and laughed, and cleared his throat again and took another trip to the patio door for a spit.

“You all be over here by six o’clock sharp,” Lyle Langtree said, rocking in his chair. “I don’t want to have to wait supper on them wild kids of yours, either. Mama Langtree, my boy, Sonny, and his wife, Vanessa, with their tribe of younguns, they’ll all be back shortly. I expect Mama and Vanessa and her two girls will help in the kitchen, too. So I guess I’ll see you back here in a little bit, unless the good Lord takes me first.”

Then the old man returned his stare out the patio doors, gazing across the hills where the whirlwinds twisted up dust in the afternoon heat, and once in a while, if a person had extra-good eyes, he could spot a mule deer that might have strayed up from the mountains in the Big Bend country.

“Not much time,” Tommy McKay said, walking back across the patio with the two Sanchez women and glancing at his wristwatch.

“We already have most of the meal cooked,” Mama said, and put her arm inside the crook of Tommy’s. Marguerite walked close at his other side.

“Mama, I need to talk about Jimmy. I need all of you to hear me. Not just you, but Henry and Hector and José and Marguerite,” Tommy said, stopping on the white stucco house’s long front porch where a glider and several other metal chairs sat.

“I know what you want to tell me,” Mama Sanchez said, putting up her hands, and then taking both of Tommy’s in hers. Tears immediately filled her eyes. “My boys and my girls, they all read the letters. Your letters, and the letters from the colonel, Jimmy’s commanding officer, and from his sergeant, that good man named Rhodes. Why must you torture yourself so much, my good boy? It breaks my heart to see you grieve so deeply for my son.”

Then the woman walked to the metal glider and sat and patted her hand on a spot next to her.

“Sentarse, por favor,” she said in Spanish, asking the young man to please sit with her.

Tommy settled on the swinging chair next to the woman and swallowed against a hard lump that grew big as a baseball in his throat.

“Marguerite, you tell the boys to come out here and listen, too,” she said to her daughter, and then took Tommy’s hand. “They may want to say something as well.”

“I have to explain myself, and ask for you to forgive me,” Tommy said, and tears flowed from his eyes when he spoke.

“You did nothing but risk your life to save my son!” Mama Sanchez said as her three boys and daughter returned to the porch and sat down. “Why must you need forgiveness? I read the letters, and what you did saved all those men, too. Jimmy is proud of you! Can’t you understand?”

“If I had not gone on patrol with him, he would have been more careful,” Tommy said, swallowing against the lump and choking out his words.

“If you had not gone on patrol my son would have died without his best friend, the boy he called his brother, by his side,” Mama Sanchez said, crying as she spoke. “He would have died whether you had gone or not. God put you with him, so he could die with someone who loved him close to him. Tommy, we love you like our own. We love you more because you were with our Jimmy, and you cared for him so much that you risked your own life for him.”

Tommy McKay put his face in his hands and he cried. Mama Sanchez held him close to her, tucking his head under her chin, and she cried, too. Henry knelt by them both, with Hector and José standing behind him, tears flowing down their cheeks as well. Marguerite sat quietly by her mother, her hands folded in her lap, sobbing, too, in short, silent breaths.

As the family held each other close, Tommy remembered what Buck Taylor had told him: “Don’t go trying to kill all those demons at once, and share the grief with the people you love.”

In the dim light cast from the projector, the Ax Man glared at Brian Pitts, feeling pangs of jealousy as he watched the commander of the Freedom Hill chapter of the Black Stone Rangers confiding secrets with a new man. A white man!

“We high-risk, so the guards they keep us up front where the light shine good on us,” Harris said with a chuckle, and glanced over his shoulder where he saw Iron Balls and Bad John leaning against a hooch wall, absorbed in a cartoon featuring Yosemite Sam trying to blow Bugs Bunny to smithereens.

“Look here,” Pitts whispered, taking advantage of his first real opportunity to talk to his old partner about their very secret matter of two million dollars in cash and the stash of dope that the other million dollars had bought. “You did good, getting this gang started and putting this notion of a prison riot in the heads of these dudes.”

“We gonna make national headlines back in the world, you wait and see,” Harris said with a smile, still focused on the idea of standing in the limelight and bringing attention to the black cause.

“I know, and that’s cool, but Mau Mau, we got our money and our dope to think about,” Pitts whispered, looking to see that no one eavesdropped. “I took a million dollars and bought enough heroin and Buddha that we can roll it into fifty million bucks, man!”

“What about that other two million we gonna split?” Harris said, whispering in a panicked voice.

“You didn’t hear me?” Pitts strained, clenching his teeth. “Listen closely to me. Fifty million dollars, man! It’s just sitting in a tunnel out west of Saigon. Our two million in cash, too, right there with it.”

“You bury our money out west of Saigon?” Harris said, his voice rising loud enough that Celestine Anderson turned his head when he heard the word “money.”

“Shhhh!” Pitts hissed, putting his hand over Harris’s mouth. “Not so fucking loud!”

“Huong and Bao they got away, and I know that they went straight to the stash and have it under their control,” Pitts said, and looked at Harris’s eyes. “You remember what I said about loyalty, and why it was important? This is why. I know Huong will stick with us. Our stuff will be there when we can break out of this hole.”

“So you wants to get this riot going so we can bust loose and go south, right?” Harris said, smiling.

“Fuck an A, man,” Pitts said, smiling back. “I mean civil rights is cool and all, but fifty million dollars is a whole lot more cool.”

“You got that right, Jack,” Harris said, and looked over his shoulder and nodded to Celestine Anderson to wait just one more minute. “So we bring down this house, and you and me, we splits out the back door.”

“You and me, and Bobby Matthews,” Pitts said, giving the Ax Man a friendly wink and getting a snarl in return.

“Who that?” Harris said, twisting his neck as though he might see him in the crowd of dark faces watching the cartoon. “Oh, yeah, that dude we let in the rangers. Why he so special?”

“Like I said, his partner, Tommy Joyner, got popped when the army took us down,” Pitts said, and pointed to his shoulder. “Same asshole that nailed me, killed Tommy and Chung. I ever see that motherfucker again, I’ll park a .45-caliber hardball straight up his tailpipe. I want to put the muzzle of my pistol up his asshole and empty the magazine.”

“So this kid Matthews, he thrown in with you down there at Saigon,” Harris whispered.

“Yeah,” Pitts answered, and smiled at Anderson, now taunting the angry man. “What I said about loyalty goes deep. I ain’t never cut you out, and I won’t cut this man out either. Fifty million goes a long way among friends.”

“So, what we need to do?” Harris said, looking at Anderson and three other rangers all staring at him and Pitts.

“Go ahead and bring in the boys, and we’ll lay out our plan for them, but when we head south, Mau Mau, it’s just you, me, and Matthews,” Pitts said, and waved at Anderson to bring the others close.

Harris looked at Ax Man, too, and motioned for him to come near.

“Snowman, he got a plan on how we bring this motherfucker down,” Harris smiled at the four rangers who slid close to him on the bench. “Once they get this piece-of-shit movie rolling, we talk about what we gonna do.”

All hands, including the guards’ day shift and the brig’s two officers, came for the evening’s showing of Stanley Kubrick’s blockbuster science-fiction hit 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even on the white-painted concrete block wall, the picture didn’t look all that bad. However, halfway through the feature, most of the audience dozed off with boredom.

Chief Warrant Officer Frank Holden and First Lieutenant Michael Schuller surveyed the disappointed crowd and decided that they would stick to action films, Westerns, and comedies in the future. They had Eight on the Lam, starring Bob Hope, Phyllis Diller, and Jonathan Winters slated for the next movie night, August 16, 1968, and decided that shows like it would suit the prisoners best.

“I figure there be two times of the day when we can bust things open here, when everybody in the brig gets put in one place, all together,” Harris told his cohorts. “One time is when we eat and go out in the rec yard, and the other time is like tonight, at the movies.”

“We want to launch this happening on August 16, when everyone’s out here in the rec yard, at the movies,” Pitts said, looking to his right and left as he talked, and glancing at Iron Balls and Bad John, who had begun looking at the suspicious group talking. Then they looked around at other prisoners and saw that many of them now idly chatted instead of watching the picture, so they shrugged off the confab and focused back on the man in the space suit growing really old and then becoming a baby at the same time. “The advantage that movie night has is that it’s dark.”

“See, when it dark, the guards they might not want to drop gas on our ass,” Harris added. “We got the advantage at night. None of these dudes want to put on a gas mask in the daylight. They can’t see shit. At night, they sure as hell can’t see shit out those goggle eyes, so they ain’t going to want to pop the CS.”

“So when the movie ends, and the projector gets shut off, when we have that window of darkness, before they turn on the yard lights, we kick off the riot,” Pitts said, and nodded at Harris.

“See,” Harris added without consulting Brian Pitts, but thinking on his own to cover their escape, “when everybody in the yard gets busy burning this motherfucker down, we gonna take our Black Stone Rangers and go out the fence.”

“We gonna escape?” Anderson said and smiled.

“Fuck an A, bro,” Harris said and put out his fist for Anderson to dap. “We going out and join up with the Viet Cong. Then we come back and kill these motherfuckers.”

“Fuck yeah,” Anderson said, and looked at Bad John and Iron Balls watching him. “I gonna come back and commit special duty on those two motherfuckers for sure.”

Brian Pitts leaned over and whispered to Anderson, “Be cool, man. When the time comes, we gonna let you go straight at those two dudes. You gonna start the fight we need to set this whole thing off.”

“I like that,” Anderson said, still looking at Iron Balls and Bad John.

“Mau Mau, he’s going to get into a pushing match with me while the film is still rolling,” Pitts said, looking at Harris. “The guards will take him up to control, to see the duty warden. Once they get him inside, then Ax Man, you can do what you like to Bad John. I want you to take him down hard. The rest of us will deal with Iron Balls.”

“What I do up in control?” Harris said, puzzled at how he could help up there.

“Everybody’s gonna be running down here, because of the fight, and that’s when you just hang back and pull down all the switches, opening the gates,” Pitts said with a wide grin. “You just stay quiet and keep out of the way when the shit goes down, and our little hoorah will give you all the time you’re gonna need. Just a second or two to grab those gate handles and pull them down.”

“Cool, man,” Harris said and smiled. “Then, with everybody raising hell, I can take command of my rangers and we hit the gates and go free, right?”

“Yeah,” Pitts said and frowned.