The screen turned to snow.
'How about the look on those boys watching her?' Temple said.
'You recognize any of them?' I asked.
'Three or four. Jocks with yesterday's ice cream for brains. How do kids get that screwed up?'
I looked at my watch. It had started to rain outside and the hills were aura-ed with a cold green light like the tarnish on brass.
'I'll buy you a barbecue dinner at Shorty's,' I said, and dropped the Polaroid photo of Darl Vanzandt in front of her.
We sat on the screen porch and ate plates of cole slaw and refried beans and chicken that had been cooked on a mesquite fire. The river that flowed under the pilings of the club was dented with raindrops, the trees along the bank smoky with mist. Downstream, some boys were swinging out over the water on a rubber tire tied to a rope, cannonballing into the current.
I heard beer cans clattering outside the screen.
'He's an old-timer, Temple. Let's try to keep him in a better mood this time,' I said.
'I'll just watch. Maybe I can learn how it's done,' she said.
We went out the side door to a woodshed with a tarp that was extended out from the roof on slanted poles. The elderly black man we had interviewed earlier in the week was heaving two vinyl sacks of cans into the shed. When he saw us, he took his stub of a pipe out of his shirt pocket and pared the charcoal out of the bowl with a penknife.
'My memory ain't no better than it was the other day. Must be age. Or maybe I don't take to rudeness,' he said. He pointed the stem of his pipe at Temple.
'I get the notion you don't like working here,' I said.
'The job's fine. What a lot of people do here ain't.'
I held the Polaroid of Darl Vanzandt in front of him. He dipped his pipe in a leather tobacco pouch and pressed the tobacco down into the bowl with the ball of his thumb.
'Is that the boy Roseanne Hazlitt slapped?' I said.
He struck a wood match and cupped it over his pipe, puffing smoke out into the rain. He tossed the match into a puddle and watched it go out.
'You a church man?' I said.
'My wife and me belong to a church in town. If that's what you're axing.'
'That girl didn't deserve to die the way she did,' I said.
He tapped his fingernail on the Polaroid.
'That ain't the one she slapped,' he said. His eyes lingered for a moment on mine, then looked out into the rain.
'But he was in the crowd?' I asked.
'A boy like that don't have no use for anybody else 'cause he don't have no use for himself. What other kind of place he gonna go to? Come back tonight, he'll be here, insulting people, yelling on the dance flo', getting sick out in the weeds. He ain't hard to find.'
'Was he here the night she was attacked?' I said.
'Why you giving me this truck? You know the one question y'all ain't axed me? Who'd that po' girl leave with? It was Lucas Smothers. That's what I seen.' He pointed to the corner of his eye. 'Y'all always think you find the right nigger, you gonna get the answer you want.'
In the car, I felt Temple's eyes on the side of my face. She rubbed me on the arm with the back of her finger.
'Lucas didn't do it, Billy Bob,' she said.
On the way home, by chance and accident, Temple and I witnessed a peculiar event, one that would only add to the questions for which I had no answer.
It had stopped raining, but the sky was sealed with clouds that were as black as gun cotton and mist floated off the river and clung to the sides of the low hills along the two-lane road. A quarter mile ahead of us, a flatbed truck with a welding machine mounted behind the cab veered back and forth across the yellow stripe. A sheriff's cruiser that had been parked under an overpass, the trunk up to hide the emergency flasher on the roof, pulled the truck to the side of the road and two uniformed deputies got out, slipping their batons into the rings on their belts.
It should have been an easy roadside DWI arrest. It wasn't. The driver of the truck, his khakis and white T-shirt streaked with grease, his face dilated and red with alcohol, fell from the cab into the road, his hard hat rolling away like a tiddledywink. He got to his feet, his ankles spread wide for balance, and started swinging, his first blow snapping a deputy's jaw back against his shoulder.
The other deputy whipped his baton across the tendon behind the truck driver's knee and crumpled him to the asphalt.
It should have been over. It wasn't. We had passed the truck now, and the two deputies were into their own program.
'Uh-oh,' Temple said.
They lifted the drunk man by each arm and dragged him on his knees to the far side of the truck. Then we saw the humped silhouettes by the back tire and the balled fists and the batons rising and falling, like men trading off hammer strokes on a tent post.
I touched the brake, pulled to the shoulder, and began backing up in the weeds.
From under the overpass a second cruiser came hard down the road, its blue, white, and red emergency flasher on, water blowing in a vortex behind it. The driver cut to the shoulder, hit the high beams, and the airplane lights burned into the faces of the two deputies and the bloodied man huddled at their knees.
The driver of the second cruiser got out and stood just behind the glare that blinded the two deputies, a portable radio in her left hand, the other on the butt of her holstered nine-millimeter.
'Y'all got a problem here?' Mary Beth Sweeney said.
That night I fell asleep as an electrical storm moved across the drenched hills and disappeared in the west, filling the clouds with flickers of light like burning candles in a Mexican church that smelled of incense and stone and water.
Or like cartridges exploding in the chambers of L.Q. Navarro's blue-black, ivory-handled, custom-made .45 revolver.
It's night in the dream, and L.Q and I are across the river in Mexico, where we have no authority and quarter comes only with dawn. We're dismounted, and our horses keep spooking away from the two dead drug transporters who lie in a muddy slough, their mouths and eyes frozen open with disbelief.
L.Q. pulls a pack of playing cards emblazoned with the badge of the Texas Rangers from the side pocket of his suit coat, unsnaps two cards from under the rubber band, and flicks them at the corpses.
I pull their guns apart and fling the pieces in different directions.
'The tar is still up in one of them houses. You take the left side and don't silhouette on the hill,' L.Q. says.
'Burn the field and the tar will go with it, L.Q.,' I say:
'Wind's out of the south. I'd sure hate to lose a race with a grass fire,' be says.
The houses are spread out along a low ridge, roofless, made of dried mud, their windows like empty eye sockets. My horse is belly deep in a field of yellow grass, and he skitters each time the withered husk of a poppy jitters on the stem.
The rifle fire erupts from the windows simultaneously all across the ridge. My horse rears under my thighs, and I feel myself plummeting backward into darkness, into a crush of yellow grass while tracer rounds float into the sky.
But it's they who set fire to the field, who watch it spread behind a thirty-knot wind that feeds cold air like pure oxygen into the flames. I feel my left foot squish inside my boot, feel my knee collapsing as I try to run uphill and realize that this is the place where all my roads come together, now, in this moment, that the end I never foresaw will be inside an envelope of flame, just as if I had been tied to a medieval stake.
Then I see L.Q. bent low on his mare, pouring it on through the grass, his Stetson low over his eyes, his coat flapping back from his gunbelt, his right hand extended like a rodeo pickup rider's.
I lock my forearm in his, palm against tendon, and swing up on his horse's rump, then feel the surge of muscle and power between my legs as we thunder over the top of a ridge, my arms around L.Q's waist, my boot splaying blood into the darkness, my face buried in his manly smell.
Then, as in a dream, I hear the horse's hooves splash th
rough water and clop on stone and L.Q. holler out, 'Why, goodness gracious, it's Texas already, bud!'
* * *
chapter eight
At five-thirty Monday morning I went to Deaf Smith's sole health club, located a block off the town square in what used to be a five-and-dime store, where I worked out three times a week. I lifted in the weight room, then exercised on the benches and Nautilus machines and was headed for the steam room when I saw Mary Beth Sweeney on a StairMaster machine, by herself, at the end of a blind hallway. Her cotton sports bra was peppered with sweat, her face flushed and heated with her movement on the machine. Her curly hair stuck in strands to her cheeks.
'Good morning,' I said.
'How do you do, Mr Holland?' she said.
'Nobody calls me "Mr Holland"… Never mind… That was impressive last night. That guy in the welding truck owes you one.'
'You stopped, didn't you?'
'Can you go to a picture show tonight?' I asked.
'Why do you keep bothering me?'
'You're a handsome woman.'
'You've got some damn nerve.'
I bounced the tip of my towel on the base of the StairMaster.
'Adios,' I said.
A half hour later I walked outside into the blue coolness of the morning, the mimosa trees planted in the sidewalks ruffling in the shadow of the buildings. Mary Beth Sweeney, dressed in her uniform, was about to get into her car. She heard me behind her, threw her canvas gym bag on the passenger's seat, and turned to face me.
'You strike me as an admirable person. I apologize for my overture, however. I won't bother you again,' I said, and left her standing there.
I walked down the street toward my car. I paused in front of the pawnshop window and looked at the display spread out on a piece of green velvet: brass knuckles, stiletto gut-rippers, barber's razors, slapjacks, handcuffs, derringers, a .38 Special with notches filed in the grips, a 1911 model US Army .45, and a blue-black ivory handled revolver that could have been a replica of L.Q. Navarro's.
I felt a presence on my back, like someone brushing a piece of ice between my shoulder blades. I turned around and saw Garland T. Moon watching me from the door of a bar, licking down the seam of a hand-rolled cigarette. He wore a cream-colored suit with no shirt and black prison-issue work shoes, the archless, flat-soled kind with leather thongs and hook eyelets.
I walked back to the door of the bar.
'Early for the slop chute, isn't it?' I said.
'I don't drink. Never have.'
'You following me?'
He lit the cigarette, propped one foot against the wall, inhaled the smoke and burning glue into his lungs. He cast away the paper match in the wind.
'Not even in my darkest thoughts, sir,' he said.
I headed back up the street. The three-hundred-pound black woman who owned the pawnshop was just opening up. She saw my eyes glance at her window display.
'Time to put some boom-boom in yo' bam-bam, baby,' she said. She winked and tapped her ring on the glass. 'I ain't talking about me, honey. But I 'predate the thought anyway.'
At noon I carried a ham sandwich and a glass of milk out on my back porch. Beyond the barn I saw Pete sitting on the levee that surrounded the tank.
He heard me walking toward him, but he never turned around.
'Why aren't you in school, bud?' I asked.
'Stayed home, that's why,' he said, looking out at the water.
Then I saw the discolored lump and skinned place by his eye.
'Who did that to you?' I asked.
'Man my mother brung home last night.' He picked at his fingers and flung a rock into the tank. Then he flung another one.
I sat down next to him.
'Is your mom okay?' I asked.
'She ain't got up yet. She won't be right the rest of the day.'
'Where could I find this fellow?' I said.
We went into the barn and I strapped on L.Q.' s roweled spurs and saddled my Morgan. I pulled a heavy coil of rodeo polyrope off a wood peg and hung it on the pommel. It was five-eights of an inch in diameter and had an elongated eye cinched at the tip with fine wire.
'What are we doing, Billy Bob?' Pete said.
'The man who owned these Mexican spurs, he used to tell me, "Sometimes you've got to set people's perspective straight".'
I put my arm down and pulled him up on the Morgan's rump.
'What's "perspective" mean?' Pete said.
We rode through the back of my farm, crossed the creek and went up the slope through the pines. The ground was moist and netted with sunlight under the Morgan's shoes, and ahead I could see the stucco church where Pete and I went to Mass and the deserted filling station on the corner and up the dirt street an unpainted plank-walled tavern with a shingle-roof porch and boxes of petunias in the windows.
I stopped the Morgan by the side window.
'You see him?' I asked.
That's him yonder, by the pool table. The one eating chili beans out of a paper plate.'
'I want you to go on back to the café and wait for me.'
'Maybe you oughtn't to do this, Billy Bob. My eye don't hurt now.'
'Did you eat lunch yet?'
'He's got a frog sticker in his right-hand pocket. I seen it when he…'
'When he what?'
'Hung up his britches on my mother's bedpost.'
I put five dollars in Pete's hand, 'Better get you a hamburger steak and one of those peach ice cream sundaes. I'll be along in a minute.'
Pete slid off the Morgan's rump and walked down the street toward the café, looking back over his shoulder at me, the lump by his eye as red as a boil.
I took the polyrope off the pommel, unfastened the pig string that held the coil in place, worked the length of the rope through my palms and ran the bottom end through the eye at the tip. Then I double-folded the rope along half the loop, picked up the slack off the ground, and rode my Morgan up on the porch and through the doorway, ducking down on his withers to get under the jamb.
The inside of the tavern was well lighted and paneled with lacquered yellow pine, and neon Lone Star and Pearl beer signs and an enormous Texas flag were hung over the bar.
'I hope you brung your own dustpan and whisk broom,' the bartender said.
I rode the Morgan between a cluster of tables and chairs and across a small dance floor toward the pool table. The man eating from a paper plate looked at me, smiling, a spoonful of chili halfway to his mouth. He wore a neatly barbered blond beard and a shark tooth necklace and a blue leather vest and black jeans and silver boots sheathed with metal plates.
I whipped the loop three times over my head and flung it at the man with the blond beard. It slapped down on him hard and caught him under one arm and across the top of the torso. He tried to rise from the chair and free himself, but I wound the rope tightly around the pommel, brought my left spur into the Morgan's side, and catapulted the blond man off his feet and dragged him caroming through tables and bar stools and splintering chairs, into an oak post and the legs of a pinball machine and the side of the jukebox, tearing a huge plastic divot out of the casing. Then I ducked my head under the doorjamb, and the Morgan clopped across the porch and into the road, and I gave him the spurs again.
I dragged the blond man skittering through the parking lot, across layers of flattened beer cans and bottle caps embedded in the dirt. His clothes were gray with dust now, his face barked and bleeding, both of his hands gripped on the rope as he tried to pull himself free of the pressure that bound his chest.
I reined in the Morgan and turned him in a slow circle while the blond man rose to his feet.
'Tell me why this is happening to you,' I said.
'Wha—' he began.
'You turn around and you tell all these people how you hurt a child,' I said.
He wiped the blood off his nose with the flat of his hand.
'His mama told me there was a fellow liked to put his head up her dress,' he said.
&
nbsp; I got down from the saddle and hooked him in the nose, then grabbed his neck and the back of his shirt and drove his head into the corner of the porch post.
The skin split in a scarlet star at the crown of his skull. When he went down, I couldn't stop. I saw my boot and spur rake across his face, then I tried to kick him again and felt myself topple backward off balance.
Pete was hanging on my arm, the five-dollar bill crushed in his palm, his eyes hollow with fear as though he were looking at a stranger.
'Stop, Billy Bob! Please don't do it no more!' he said, his voice sobbing in the peel of sirens that came from two directions.
* * *
chapter nine
I sat in the enclosed gloom of the sheriff's office, across from his desk and the leviathan silhouette of his body against the back window. The deputy who had arrested me leaned against the log wall, his face covered in shadow. The sheriff took his cigar out of his mouth and leaned over the spittoon by the corner of his desk and spit.
'You turned that fellow into a human pinball. What's the matter with you?' he said.
'It's time to charge me or cut me loose, sheriff,' I said.
'Just keep your britches on. You don't think I got enough drunk nigras and white trash in my jail without having to worry about the goddamn lawyers?… Ah, there's the man right now. Cain't you beat up somebody without starting an international incident?' he said.
The door opened, and a dark-skinned man in a tropical hat with a green plastic window built into the brim and a tan suit that had no creases entered the room. He removed his hat and shook the sheriff's hand, then the uniformed deputy's and mine. He was a little older than I, in his midforties, perhaps, his jawline fleshy, his thin mustache like the romantic affectation of a 1930s leading man.