“Who are these men, Pete?”
“People my daddy knew once.” His face was empty, his gaze still focused outside the window. “My mother made up that story about him getting killed in the army. He just gone off one day and never come home.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t study on it.”
“It don’t bother me. If people don’t want you, they ain’t worth fretting on. That’s the way I see it.”
Then he grinned again, as though the world’s capacity to injure had no power over him.
JACK VANZANDT LIVED in a large white-columned home built of old brick and Spanish ironwork salvaged from a plantation in Louisiana. The lawn comprised eight acres and sloped upward from the street through shade trees to the wide, breezy front porch of the house, the four-car garage with servants’ quarters on top, two clay tennis courts, a screened-in pool stippled with sunlight, a stucco guest cottage, a satellite television dish that was the size of a barn door.
His first wife had died in a traffic accident on a bridge over the Pecos River gorge. The second wife, Emma, came from Shreveport, where her mother and father had run a fundamentalist church, then had become moderately wealthy by starting up a mail-order wedding cake business. Emma’s approach to civic and charitable work seemed to be governed by the same entrepreneurial spirit. She ran on high-octane energy that made her eyes flash and her hands move abruptly when she became impatient with the way someone else did his work, until she simply took over it. Like her husband, Jack, she was always polite, and her high cheekbones and long Indian-black hair were lovely to look at. But you always felt you wanted her as a friend, never as an adversary.
“How are you, Billy Bob?” she said, rising from her work in a rose bed, pulling off a cotton glove and extending her hand.
“Sorry to bother y’all on a Sunday, Emma,” I said.
“We always love to see you. Did you bring your tennis racquet?”
“No, I’m afraid I have to chop cotton today. Is Jack around?”
“You’re going to take his picture?” she said, her eyes dropping to the Polaroid camera in my hand.
“Not really,” I said, and smiled.
Jack came out on the front porch, a frosted high-ball glass wrapped with a napkin and a rubber band in his hand.
“Can you handle a gin and tonic?” he said.
“I just need a minute or two, then I’ll be gone,” I said.
He watched my face, then said, “Walk out here with me and I’ll show you part of an Indian work mound Emma dug up.”
We strolled through the trees toward a white gazebo. Pine needles and rose petals had been scattered on the grass by a windstorm during the night.
“My PI had to do some checking on Darl’s record,” I said. I kept my eyes straight ahead on the piled dirt and sacks of pasteurized fertilizer and potted hydrangeas by the edge of a freshly spaded flower bed.
Jack cleared his throat slightly. “Why’s that?” he said.
“You don’t want to find out later the other side is waiting for you with a baseball bat. Darl has four arrests involving violence of some kind . . . Am I correct, he beat up a waitress in a bar?”
Jack squatted by the mound of black dirt and picked up some pottery shards and rubbed them clean between his fingers. There was a thin, round place in the center of his gold hair.
“He shouldn’t have been there. But she wasn’t a waitress. She was a prostitute, and she and her pimp tried to roll him when they thought he was passed out,” he said.
“I’d like to take a Polaroid of Darl.”
“I’m a little unclear as to where this is going.”
“The kid who might take you for seven figures should at least be able to identify your son in a photo lineup.”
“Wait here. I’ll get him.”
Five minutes later the two of them came out of the back of the house together. Even though it was almost noon, Darl’s face looked thick with sleep. He raked his hair downward with a comb, then gazed at the lint that floated out in the sunlight.
“What’s that spick say?” he asked.
“Darl . . . ,” his father began.
“That you blindsided him and kicked him on the ground,” I said.
“How about my car? I was supposed to enter it in the fifties show in Dallas. What right’s he got to ruin my paint job?”
“That’s a mean cut on your ring finger,” I said.
“It collided with a flying object. That guy’s mouth.”
“Two weeks ago?”
“Yeah, his tooth broke off in my hand. I’m lucky I didn’t have to get rabies shots.”
“Look up a little bit,” I said, and popped the flash on the Polaroid.
Darl’s eyes stared back at me with the angry vacuity of an animal who believes it has been trapped in a box.
“I’m going back to the house,” he said.
“Thank Mr. Holland for the help he’s giving us, son,” Jack said.
“He’s doing this for free? Get a life,” Darl said. Thick-bodied, sullen, his face unwashed, he walked through the shade, his hand caressing the peach fuzz along his jawbone.
Jack turned away, his fists knotted on his hips, his forearms corded with veins.
THAT AFTERNOON TEMPLE Carrol found me back by the windmill, hoeing out my vegetable garden. The sky behind her was purple and yellow with rain clouds, the air already heavy with the smell of ozone.
“My sister-in-law works at the video store. This tape was in the night drop box this morning,” she said.
I stopped work and leaned on my hoe. The blades of the windmill were ginning rapidly overhead.
“Somebody must have dropped it in by mistake. You’d better take a look,” she said.
We went through the back of the house to the library and plugged the cassette into the VCR.
At first the handheld camera swung wildly through trees illuminated by headlights, rock music blaring on the audio, then the camera steadied, as though it were aimed across a car hood, and we saw kids climbing out of convertibles, throwing ropes of beer on each other, passing joints, kissing each other hard on the mouth for the camera’s benefit, their features as white as milk.
Then we saw her in an alcove of trees, in Clorox-faded jeans and a maroon T-shirt with a luminous horse head on it, a long-neck beer in one hand, a joint in the other, dancing to the music as though there were no one else present on earth.
“Roseanne Hazlitt,” I said.
“Wait till you see what a small-town girl can do with the right audience,” Temple said.
Her auburn hair was partially pinned up in swirls on her head, but one long strand curled around her neck like a snake. She let the beer bottle, then the joint, drop from her fingers into the weeds, and began to sway her hips, her eyes closed, her profile turned to the camera. She pulled her T-shirt over her head, her hair collapsing on her shoulders, arched her shoulders back so that the tops of her breasts almost burst out of her bra, unsnapped her jeans and stepped out of them, then twined her hands in the air and rotated her hips, ran her fingers over her panties and thighs, grasped the back of her neck and widened her legs and opened her mouth in feigned orgasm and pushed her hair over her head so that it cascaded down her face while her tongue made a red circle inside her lips.
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 auraed 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 plate
s of coleslaw 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,” he 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 through 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 Stair-Master 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 U.S. 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.
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