Echo Burning

them was light blue, so hot it looked white. The sun was a diffuse glare, like it was located everywhere. There was no cloud at all. He was squinting so much the muscles in his face were hurting.
    “It’s new to me,” she said. “That’s for sure. I figured it would be hot here, but this is completely unbelievable.”
    Then she asked him when he’d been in the Middle East and the Pacific islands, and he responded with the expanded ten-minute version of his autobiography because he found he was enjoying her company. The first thirty-six years were easy enough, as always. They made a nicely linear tale of childhood and adulthood, accomplishment and progress, punctuated and underlined in the military fashion with promotions and medals. The last few years were harder, as usual. The aimlessness, the drifting. He saw them as a triumph of disengagement, but he knew other people didn’t. So as always he just told the story and answered the awkward questions and let her think whatever she wanted.
    Then she responded in turn with an autobiography of her own. It was more or less the same as his, in an oblique way. He was the son of a soldier, she was the daughter of a lawyer. She had never really considered straying away from thefamily trade, just like he hadn’t. All her life she had seen people talk the talk and walk the walk and then she had set about following after them, just like he had. She spent seven years at Harvard where he spent four at West Point. Now she was twenty-five and the rough equivalent of an ambitious lieutenant in the law business. He had been an ambitious lieutenant at twenty-five, too, and he could remember exactly how it felt.
    “So what’s next?” he asked.
    “After this?” she said. “Back to New York, I guess. Maybe Washington, D.C. I’m getting interested in policy.”
    “You won’t miss this down-and-dirty stuff?”
    “I will, probably. And I won’t give it up completely. Maybe I’ll volunteer a few weeks a year. Certainly I’ll try to fund it. That’s where all our money comes from, you know. Big firms in the big cities, with a conscience.”
    “I’m glad to hear it. Somebody needs to do something.”
    “That’s for sure.”
    “What about Hack Walker?” he asked. “Will he make a difference?”
    She shrugged at the wheel. “I don’t know him very well. But his reputation is good. And he can’t make things any worse, can he? It’s a really screwed-up system. I mean, I’m a democrat, big D and little d, so theoretically to elect your judges is perfectly fine with me. Theoretically. But in practice, it’s totally out of hand. I mean, what does it cost to run a campaign down here?”
    “No idea.”
    “Well, figure it out. We’re talking about Pecos County, basically, because that’s where the bulk of the electorate is. A bunch of posters, some newspaper ads, half a dozen homemade commercials on the local TV channels. A market like this, you’d have to work really hard to spend more than five figures. But these guys are all picking up contributions running to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Millions, maybe. And the law says if you don’t get around to spending it, you don’t have to give it back. You just keep it, for miscellaneous future expenses. So what it amounts to is they’re all picking up their bribes in advance.The law firms and the oil people and the special interests are paying now for future help. You can get seriously rich, running for judge in Texas. And if you get elected and do the right things all your years on the bench, you retire straight into some big law partnership and you get asked onto the boards of a half-dozen big companies. So it’s not really about trying to get elected a judge . It’s about trying to get elected a prince . Like turning into royalty overnight.”
    “So will Walker make a difference?” he asked again.
    “He will if he wants to. Simple as that. And right now, he’ll make a difference to Carmen Greer. That’s what we need to focus on.”
    He nodded. She slowed the car, hunting a turn. They were back up in ranch country. Somewhere near the Brewer place, he guessed, although he didn’t recognize any specific features of the landscape. It was laid out in front of him, so dry and so hot it seemed the parched vegetation could burst into flames at any moment.
    “Does it bother you she told all those lies?” Alice asked.
    He shrugged. “Yes and no. Nobody likes to be lied to, I guess.