'Yeah, okay, we done that.' He breathed hard through his nose.
'And set up Lucas Smothers?'
'Yeah, that, too.'
'All that grief, just to protect Jack Vanzandt.'
'There was a lot at stake, things you don't know about, man. Ask the guapa, the DEA woman, it's like a war, man, there's casualties. Hey, man, I work for your fucking government. That's what you ain't hearing.'
He stared at me for a long time, waiting, his eyes lustrous with hate and apprehension.
'What you gonna do, man?' he said, his voice climbing into a higher register.
'I guess you're just up shit's creek, bud,' I replied.
His face was gray from loss of blood, beaded with sweat. He closed his eyes, his mouth trembling.
'No, you got it all wrong, Felix,' I said. 'L.Q. Navarro used to own this card. I wouldn't soil it by putting it on your body. But you parked one in my chest. So the medics won't be coming for either one of us tonight.'
I winked at him and grinned.
Or thought I did. The passageway was slatted with moonlight, redolent with dust and the musky smell of field mice and moldy hay and fresh deer droppings in the barnyard and wind and flowers in the glade and wet fern and creek water coursing over stone. I felt myself slip in and out of time, then the darkness bled out of the sky and a pink light glowed through the holes in the barn's walls and out in the fields I saw a group of federal agents in blue hats and vests walking through the mist, their weapons at port arms, like the emissaries of Empire, a statuesque woman with brown freckles' in the lead whose fingers would be as cool and bloodless as alabaster when they touched my brow.
* * *
epilogue
Felix Ringo was DOA at the county hospital. I had the feeling the DEA considered his passing his greatest public service. To my knowledge, no investigation into his background was ever made. I tried to tell newspapers in Dallas and Houston about Felix Ringo, then the wire services, and finally anyone who would listen. But the time came when I accepted the fact that societal hearing and sight are a matter of collective consent, and I desisted from trying to undo the cynicism and cruelty of governments and learned to walk away when people spoke of the world as a serious place.
Jack Vanzandt plea-bargained down to three years in a federal facility. It seemed like a light sentence, at least for a man who had trafficked in crystal meth and counterfeit credit cards and indirectly caused the death of a young woman, until the morning I read in the paper that Jack had taken poison in the psychiatric unit of a federal hospital and had suffered a brain seizure that cost him his eyesight.
Emma divorced him after their home and their assets were confiscated by the government. I heard her stepson's ashes were left behind in an urn on the mantelpiece and she never tried to recover them. Today she runs her parents' mail-order wedding cake business in Shreveport and sometimes appears on a televangelical cable program and denounces drug use among teenagers.
I never saw Mary Beth again, at least not when I was fully conscious. After the surgery that removed the .25-caliber round from my chest, I floated for days through a warm pool of morphine and was sure I saw her in the room with L.Q. Navarro. But one morning I woke to sunlight and the realities of physical recovery and spoke both their names repeatedly, my hands as useless as blocks of wood, my face tingling with thousands of needles, until a black male nurse pushed me back on the bed and held me there, his eyes lighted with pity.
On a Friday evening in late summer Temple Carrol and I went to watch Pete play in a ball game at the Catholic elementary school. I had let him ride Beau to the game by himself, and later we walked from the diamond to the café down the street and ate buffalo burgers and blackberry milkshakes. Outside the window, Beau pulled his tether loose and walked into the grove of pines by the stucco church and began grazing in the grass. The attic fan in the café drew the air through the open door and windows, and I could smell the evening coming to its own completion, the dusk gathering in the streets, the water that ebbed out of the irrigation ditch into the grass, the pine boughs etched against the late sun, the hot sap cooling on the bark of the trees.
'That's good about Lucas going to A&M this fall, ain't it?' Pete said.
'It's a fine school,' I said.
'Can I ride Beau back by myself tonight?'
'You're the best, Pete,' I said.
'He's a mighty good little boy, that's what he is,' Temple said, and hugged him against her.
'I'm gonna ride Beau out on the hardpan, where that Chisholm Trail is at,' Pete said, and grinned as though he had already begun an extravagant adventure.
Temple's eyes settled on mine, and I looked at the redness of her mouth and wanted to touch her hands.
Outside, I heard Beau's hooves thumping on the earth and I dipped a strip of buffalo steak in catsup that was as thick as blood and for just a moment, in my mind's eye, I saw dust clouds filled with hail swirling across the high plains, and I thought of Comanche Indians and saddle preachers and trail drovers and outlaws and was sure that somewhere beyond the rim of the world Great-grandpa Sam and the Rose of Cimarron turned briefly in their saddles and held up their hands in farewell.
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