On the wall behind the counter were scores of guns and musical instruments. I pointed at one.
'Can you give me a good deal, Ella Mae?' I said.
'Honey, if we was back in the old days, I'd pay to pick your cotton. That's the truth. Wouldn't put you on,' she said.
But after she had rung up my purchase, her mood changed, as though she were stepping across a line she had drawn between herself and white people.
'The other day when you was here? You gone on to your car, but a man with red hair was watching you. He had a coat on without no shirt,' she said.
'What about him?'
'The look in his face, honey. He started to come in here and I locked the door.' She shook her head, as though she feared her words could make the image a reality.
That evening I drove to Lucas Smothers's house. Vernon was sitting on the steps, a bottle of strawberry soda beside him. His clothes were dirty from his work, his face lined with streaks of dried sweat. A wheelbarrow filled with compost and crisscrossed with rakes and a shovel stood in the front yard. Under Lucas's screen was a bright patch of white paint.
'Is Lucas home?' I asked.
'He took the truck to town.'
'Did the sheriff do anything about those kids who tore up your lawn?'
'That tub of guts is doing good to get himself on and off the toilet seat.'
'Is Lucas at the poolroom?'
'No, they're handing out free beer at the Baptist church tonight.'
'It's always a pleasure, Vernon.'
But Vernon had another side, one that wouldn't allow me the freedom to simply condemn and dismiss him. When I was almost out the drive, he rose from the steps and called my name and walked out to the road. He pulled a cloth cap from his back pocket and popped it open and flicked it against his thigh, as though he could not bring himself to admit the nature of his fear and love and his dependence upon others.
'What kind of chance has he got? Don't lie to me, either,' he said.
'It doesn't look real good right now.'
'It ain't right… I swear, if they send that boy to prison…' He breathed hard through his nose. 'I killed people in Vietnam didn't do nothing to me.'
'I'd get a lot of distance between me and those kinds of thoughts, Vernon.'
'Damn, if you don't always have to get up on the high ground. Excuse me for asking, but who died and made you God?' he said, and went inside the house. You didn't win with Vernon Smothers.
I drove downtown and parked in front of the poolroom, a gaunt, two-story building that was over a hundred years old. It had a wood colonnade and elevated sidewalk inset with iron hitching poles, a stamped tin ceiling, oak floors as thick as railroad ties, a railed bar with spittoons, card and domino tables, a woodburning stove, and a toilet down a back hallway with the water tank high up on the wall.
Down the row of pool tables, I saw Lucas chalking a cue, sipping off of a long-neck beer. He wore a pair of gray slacks and loafers and a starched lavender shirt and he had put gel in his hair.
'Come on outside,' I said.
'Now?' he asked.
'Half the people in here are my clients… I'd like to stay off the clock.'
His face pinched with confusion. 'What?' he asked.
It was cool outside, and down the street the live oaks on the courthouse lawn were gold and purple and freckled with birds in the sun's afterglow.
'You got a date?' I said.
'I'm supposed to talk with this guy about a job,' he said.
'Have a seat in my car. I want to show you something.'
As soon as he opened the passenger door he saw the twelve-string guitar propped up on the seat.
'Man, where'd you get that at?' he said.
'A client. I never could play one for diddly-squat, though. You want it?'
'Do I?'
'It's yours. I hate to use it for a fly swatter.'
He corded the neck and ran his thumbnail across the strings.
'Wow, what a sound. Mr Holland, I'll make this right with you.'
'Don't worry about it. Look, those kids who tore up y'all's lawn?'
'My father and me fixed it. I don't care about kids like that.'
'Listen to me. I don't know why anyone would…' I shook my head and started over. 'Maybe they have too much money, maybe they're just mean, but it's important you understand what and who you are… Sometimes we look at the reflection in other people's eyes and that's who we think we are and the truth is we're a whole lot better than that.'
'You're a good guy, Mr Holland. But I don't want to talk about this.'
'Suit yourself. But you're an artist, the honest-to-God real article, Lucas. Some people will always envy and hate you for the talent you have.'
He turned the guitar over in his hands and felt the polished mahogany and walnut belly and the spruce soundboard.
'It's funny, I seen one just like this in Ella Mae's pawnshop. She wanted three hundred dollars for it,' he said.
'No kidding?'
His gaze wandered over my face, then he looked out the window at a man in cream-colored slacks and a tropical hat walking toward the poolroom.
'There's the guy I'm meeting,' Lucas said.
'Felix Ringo? He's the guy talking to you about a job?'
'Yeah, I told you about him. He's got a furniture factory down in Piedras Negras.'
'He's a Mexican drug agent.'
'Yeah. He's got a furniture business, too.'
'Wait here.'
I got out of the Avalon and approached the man named Felix Ringo. His expression was flat, his eyes registering me with the valuative pause of a predator waking from sleep.
'I don't know why, but you're running a game on the kid in my car. It stops here,' I said.
'You got some bad manners, man.'
'I'll say it once. Stay away from him.'
'I was at Fort Benning. The School of the Americas. I'm here with the permission of your government. I don't like to provoke nobody, but I don't got to take your shit.'
'Don't bet on it.'
'Hey, man, I got a good memory. I'm gonna remember where I seen your face. When I do, maybe you ain't gonna have a very good day.'
I stepped off the sidewalk and got back in my car. He remained under the colonnade, staring at Lucas. Then he jerked his head at him, motioning him inside.
'He's dirty, Lucas. It's something you can smell on a bad cop. He'll take you down with him,' I said.
'I cain't get on at any clubs. What am I gonna do, keep working for my dad the rest of my life?'
'It might beat chopping cotton with a gunbull standing over you,' I said and started the car and drove down the street before he could get out.
'Why don't you treat me like I'm three years old?' he said, his face red with anger and embarrassment.
'I want the names of all Darl Vanzandt's friends,' I said.
That night I sat at my library desk and read from Great-grandpa Sam's faded, water-stained journal that he had carried in a saddlebag through Oklahoma Territory.
L.Q. Navarro sat in a burgundy-colored stuffed chair in the corner, fiddling with his revolver, an armadillo-shell lamp lighted behind his head. He spun the revolver on his finger and let the ivory handles snick back flatly in his palm. The blue-black of the steel was so deep in hue it looked almost liquid. He opened the loading gate with his thumb, pulled back the hammer on halfcock, and rotated the cylinder so that one loaded chamber at a time clicked past his examining eye.
' That Garland T. Moon? You can take it to him with fire tongs. That boy's not a listener, ' he said.
' I'm trying to read, L.Q.,' I said.
' You going to find your answers in there? I don't hardly think so .'
I rested my brow on my fingers so I wouldn't have to look at him.
I read from Great-grandpa Sam's journal:
In the Indian Nation, July 4, 1891
I always heard women in the Cherokee Strip was precious few in number and homely as a mud fence, but it wa
s not held against them none. The Rose of Cimarron surely gives the lie to that old cowboy wisdom. She is probably part colored and part savage and perhaps even related to the Comanche halfbreed Quanah Parker. She is also the most fetching creature I have ever set eyes on. I would marry her in a minute and take her back to Texas, but I am sure I would not only be run out of the Baptist church but the state as well, provided she did not cut my throat first.
If the Lord made me for the cloth, why has my lust and this woman come together at such an inopportune time?
L.Q. stuffed his revolver in his holster and walked to the ceiling-high window and looked out at the hills. I could see the thick, brass cartridges in the leather loops on his gunbelt, and the Ranger badge clipped just in front of his holster.
' Your great-grandpa got rid of whiskey and guns in his life, but his propensities come out in a different way,' he said.
' What's that mean?'
'Garland Moon, Jimmy Cole, that Mexican drug agent with the grease pencil mustache? You don't run them kind off with a legal writ, Billy Bob.'
He took his revolver back out of his holster and hefted it from one palm to the other, the barrel and cylinder and moon-white grips slapping against his skin.
A pair of headlights turned into my drive, and through the library window I saw Mary Beth Sweeney pull her cruiser to the back of my house.
I stepped out on the back porch and opened the screen door. Her portable radio was clipped to her belt.
'You on duty?' I said.
'For another hour. I need to talk with you,' she said. She stepped inside the porch and took off her campaign hat and shook out her hair. 'You can't just unload a bomb like that and walk off from someone.'
'Last night?'
'Yeah, last night. I don't want somebody hanging his guilt on me like I'm some kind of dartboard.'
'That wasn't my intention.'
'Oh no? Like, "Hey, I killed my best friend, and you remind me of it, so see you around and thanks for the great evening."'
'Where do you get the in-your-face attitude?' I said.
'I knew it would be a mistake coming here.'
'No, it wasn't,' I said. I held my eyes on hers and realized what it was that drew me to her. The spray of pale freckles, the dark brown curls that had a silklike sheen in them, the obvious decency and courage in her behavior, these were all the characteristics that had probably defined her as a girl and had stayed with her into her maturity. But her eyes, which were bold and unrelenting, masked a level of past injury that she didn't easily share.
Her stare broke.
'Come in. I just baked a pecan pie,' I said.
'I'd better not.'
I put my hand under her forearm.
'You have to,' I said.
She bit down on her bottom lip.
'I need help with this Mexican drug agent,' I said.
'For just a minute.' She walked ahead of me and sat at the kitchen table, with her hat crown-down in front of her.
'Felix Ringo told me he was at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning. Punch him up on the computer for me,' I said.
'The federal computer, you're saying?'
'You got it.'
'What's this School of the Americas?'
'It's supposed to be counterinsurgency training. But their graduates have a way of murdering liberation theologians and union organizers or anybody they don't approve of.'
I placed a piece of pie and cup of coffee in front of her. She turned a tiny silver spoon in her cup, then put the spoon down and gazed out the window.
'I'm not saying I have access. But I'll do what I can,' she said. Static, then a dispatcher's voice squawked on her portable. 'I'll have to take a rain check on the pie.'
She walked out onto the porch, both hands on the brim of her campaign hat.
I picked up one of her hands and traced my fingers down the inside of her arm and brushed her palm and touched her nails and the back of her wrist and folded her fingers across mine.
'You're really a nice lady,' I said.
The wind filled the trees outside and blew through the screens, and a loose strand of her hair caught wetly in the side of her mouth. I removed it with my fingertips, then looked in her eyes and saw the consent that I knew she rarely gave, and I put my hands on her arms and kissed her on the mouth, then did it again, then slipped my arms around her and touched her hair and the hard muscles in her back.
I felt a warm exhalation of her breath against my cheek, like that of a swimmer taking a self-disciplinary pause, then her palms pressing on my chest, and I was looking into her face again, the light brown freckles, the brightness of her eyes. She pursed her lips, then winked and was gone into the yard and the shadows and the moonlight and her cruiser, all that fast.
I stood in the drive and watched her back out into the road and pull away behind the row of poplar trees and myrtle bushes that bordered my front yard.
Down the road, I heard a second car engine start up, then a pair of headlights flared in the road and a sheriff's cruiser passed my driveway, with two men in it, headed in the same direction as Mary Beth. The man in the passenger's seat seemed to have his arm propped up on the sill so anyone watching from my house could not identify him.
I called 911 and told the dispatcher a drunk man with a gun was shooting at automobiles in front of my home.
chapter eleven
A half hour later I stood in the front yard and watched the last of five cruisers from the sheriff's department, including Mary Beth Sweeney's, drive away. Temple Carrol had seen the emergency lights from her house down the road and had arrived only a few minutes ago. 'Somebody shooting at cars? I didn't hear any gunfire,' she said.
'I saw two guys in a cruiser follow that new deputy from my house, so I muddied up the water,' I replied.
'Mary Beth Sweeney? What's she doing at your house?'
'I wanted her to run this Mexican drug agent for me.'
'She had to come by your house to do it?' She looked across the road at my neighbor's cattle bunched in the field.
'She was in the neighborhood,' I said.
'This broad always has a way of being in the neighborhood.'
'You want a cup of coffee?'
She pulled a bandanna out of her jeans pocket and tied up her hair. 'I can't sleep when I drink coffee. Or when I think your house is burning down,' she said.
She walked toward her car.
'Temple?' I said.
She didn't answer.
I was rinsing the dishes after breakfast the next morning when Vernon Smothers tapped on my back door. He wore a broken straw hat and had a matchstick in the corner of his mouth.
'What is it?' I said, opening the door part way, without inviting him in.
He rolled his wedding ring on his index finger and looked at the palm of his hand.
'I made a mistake about something. I need your advice,' he said. He blew air out of his nose, as though he had a cold, and looked away at the windmill behind the barn.
I widened the door for him. He sat down at the plank table on the porch. The heels of his cowboy boots were worn almost flat.
'Yesterday I hauled my car in to have the oil pan welded. To that shop next to the Green Parrot Motel?' he said.
He saw the recognition in my face.
'Yeah, that's right,' he said. 'The place where Garland Moon is working. Except I didn't know that and I didn't know what he looked like, either.'
'Oh man,' I said.
'He gets my car up on a jack and drains the oil and takes the pan off and welds it and sticks it back on, and I ask how much I owe him.
'"Hunnerd-twenty-five," he says.
'I go, "My ass. That job ain't worth one nickel more than seventy-five dollars."
'He says, "Then it looks like I got me a fishing car."
'I give him eighty dollars cash and take out my MasterCard for the rest of it. He looks at the name and says, "Vernon Smothers… Vernon Smothers… Is that little jailhouse bitch your son?
Why, you're bird-dogging me, ain't you?"
'I told him I'd never laid eyes on him and didn't want to and didn't have no plan on seeing him again… He never said a word. He just smiled and wrote out my charge slip and handed it to me… I seen eyes like that on one other man in my life. He was a door gunner. If he caught them in a rice field or a hooch or coming out of a wedding party, it didn't make no difference.'
'Forget it,' I said.
'I think he's going to hurt my boy.'
'We won't let that happen, Vernon.' He cupped his fingers over his mouth. His skin made a dry, rasping sound against his fingers.
The social circle of Darl Vanzandt wasn't a difficult one to track. They were rich and lived in the East End; they had flunked out of the University of Texas or they commuted to a community college or they held token jobs in the businesses they would inherit. But it was a strange solipsistic attitude toward others that truly defined them. They were animated and loud and unseeing in public, indifferent to the injury their words might cause anyone outside their perimeter. They drove too fast, running stop signs and caution lights, never making a connection between their recklessness and the jeopardy they arbitrarily brought into the lives of others.
Their accents were regional, but they had skied in Colorado and surfed in California, and they played golf and tennis at a country club where blacks and Mexicans picked up their litter from the greens and their sweaty towels from the court, as though that was the natural function of the poor. Their insensitivity was almost a form of innocence. Had they ever been brought to task for their behavior, they probably would not have understood the complaint against them.
But one member of this group was an exception. Bunny Vogel came from a family of shiftless mill workers whose front yard was always decorated with rusted washing machines and automobile parts. But Bunny'd had a talent. As a high school running back he had crashed holes through the enemy line like a tank through a hedge row. Then he had played two years on a no-cut athletic scholarship at Texas A amp;M, with every expectation of graduating and going to the pros. That was before he got caught paying off a grader and fellow athlete to change an exam score for a freshman named Darl Vanzandt.
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