Privileged to Kill

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I saw Wesley Crocker for the first time on a cold Thursday afternoon in October, three weeks before Election Day. He was pushing his bicycle eastward along the shoulder of State Road 17, an asphalt-patched remnant of highway that the interstate had made obsolete.

When I saw Crocker, I was sitting warm and comfortable in the Posadas County patrol car, cruising west, looking for no one or no thing in particular. Lenticular clouds formed, spread, and shredded over the San Cristobal mountains that separated Posadas County from Mexico, and rain had been predicted by morning.

The wind was driving out of the northeast, gusting strong enough to rock the car. Moisture might have been in the offing, but at that moment the only thing in the air was the New Mexico prairie. Fine, stinging sand scudded across the macadam like tawny snow, the larger pieces rattling against the white paint of the Ford. Occasionally a kochia, its brittle stem snapped off at the ground, would perform a clumsy imitation of a tumbleweed, jouncing across the road to pack against the barbed-wire fencing.

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