The Power of the Dog (Power of the Dog, #1)

by Don Winslow

Deliver my soul from the sword; my love from the power of the dog. Psalms 22:20

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Arthur Keller hears his own heart break.

“Gone also is the life we led. Gone in poison and flame. Our old lives are like the fragile dreams we dream in the waking hours, floating away from us like a wisp of smoke in the wind. We might like to call the dream back, to go on sweetly sleeping, but that is not life, that is a dream.

Where e'er we go, we celebrate The land that makes us refugees, From fear of priests with empty plates From guilt and weeping effigies. —Shane MacGowan, “Thousands Are Sailing”

fat lot of good it's done us but we love the goddamn old country anyway

Seventy-five thousand deaths, Art thinks as his plane lands in a country that has become its own mass grave.

Bitter men handle weapons differently than the rest of us, he thinks. The guns seem connected to them in a visceral way, as if a wire runs from the trigger through their dicks and to their hearts. And Núñez has that look in his eye—he’s in love with the weapon.

Rivera gets this clever look on his face, then asks, “And in the bedroom? May I ask? How are the connubial—” Adán makes a successful effort to suppress a smirk. It always amuses him when priests, these self-castrated eunuchs, want to give advice on sexual matters. Rather like a vegetarian offering to barbecue your steak for you.

Must everything, he wonders, be sacrificed on the altar of capitalism?

if they have their way with it, definitely.

“Jesus walked on water,” Parada says. “I don’t know that it’s been done since.”

He looks at the front page of the paper and notes without much interest that NAFTA goes into effect today. Well, congratulations, everybody, he thinks. Free trade shall bloom. Factories shall spring up like mushrooms just across the border, and underpaid Mexican labor shall make our tennis shoes, our designer clothes, our refrigerators and handy household appliances at prices we can afford.

All the federales say They could have had him any day. They only let him go so long Out of kindness, I suppose. —Townes Van Zandt, “Pancho and Lefty”

sort out the bits and pieces of nightmares from the emerging, waking reality.

The weak sun hits his eyelids and they open. Another day in paradise. Fuck.

his dreams are incarnadine; blood flows through them like a river, connecting one nightmare to another.

I forgive you. God forgives you.