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 ’preciate 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.
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 peal 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.
“Felix Ringo, a Mexican drug agent?” I repeated.
“Yeah, you know that name, man? Is gringo. My ancestor, he was a famous American outlaw,” he said.
“Johnny Ringo?” I said.
“Yeah, that
was his name. He got into it with guys like, the guy there in Arizona, was always wearing a black suit in the movies, yeah, that guy Wyatt Earp.”
“Felix is jalapeño and shit on toast south of the Rio Grande. You fucked up his bust, Billy Bob,” the sheriff said.
“Oh?” I said.
“The guy you drug up and down, man, I been following him six months. He’s gonna be gone now,” the Mexican said.
“Maybe you should have taken him down six months ago. He hurt a little boy this morning.”
“Yeah, man, but maybe you don’t see the big picture. We take one guy down, we roll him over, then we take another guy down. See, patience is, how you call it, the virtue here.”
“The guy I pulled out of that bar isn’t the Medellín Cartel North. What is this stuff, sheriff?” I said.
The sheriff rolled his cigar in the center of his mouth and looked at the Mexican drug agent.
“Billy Bob used to be a Texas Ranger, so he looks down on the ordinary pissant work most of us have to do,” he said.
“That’s a bad fucking attitude, man,” Felix Ringo said.
“Get out your fingerprint pad or I’m gone, sheriff,” I said.
He dropped his cigar hissing into the spittoon.
“There’s the door. Don’t mistake my gesture. Stay the hell out of what don’t concern you,” he said.
Felix Ringo followed me outside. The light was hard and bright on the stone buildings in the square, the trees a violent green against the sky. I could see Mary Beth Sweeney outside her cruiser, writing on a clipboard in the shade. She stopped and stared across the lawn at me and the man named Felix Ringo.
“You want something?” I asked him.
“I seen you somewhere before. You was a Ranger?” he said.
“What about it?”
“You guys did stuff at night, maybe killed some people that was fruit pickers crossing the river, that didn’t have nothing to do with dope.”
“You’re full of shit, too, bud,” I said, and walked toward the cab stand across the street.
I stepped off the curb and waited for a car to pass.
Then I heard her voice behind me.
“Hey, Billy Bob,” she said.
“Yeah?”
She gave me the thumbs-up sign and smiled.
THE NEXT MORNING I drove along the fence line of my property to a section by the river where Lucas and Vernon Smothers were hoeing out the rows in a melon patch. I walked out into the field, into the heat bouncing off the ground, into Vernon’s beaded stare under the brim of his straw hat.
“I want to borrow Lucas for a couple of hours,” I said.
“What for?” he asked.
“Take a guess,” I said.
He propped his forearm on his hoe handle and smelled himself. He looked out over the bluff and the milky green flatness of the river and the willows on the far side.
“I don’t want to lose my melons to coons this year. I aim to put steel traps along that ditch yonder. That’s where they’re coming out of,” he said.
“I need Lucas to help me with the case, Vernon. You’re not putting any steel traps on my property, and you can forget about poisons, too.”
“You ever see how a coon eats a melon? He punches a little hole, no bigger than a quarter. Then he sticks his paw in and cleans the whole insides out. All he needs to do is get his paw in the hole and he don’t leave nothing but an empty shell for anybody else.”
His mouth was small and angry, down-turned on the corners, his stare jaundiced with second meaning.
“Let’s go to the movies, Lucas,” I said.
LUCAS SAT ON the back steps and pulled off his boots.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“I’ll track your house.”
We went into the library and I switched on the VCR that contained the videotape of Roseanne Hazlitt dancing. Lucas’s face went gray when he realized what he was being shown.
“Mr. Holland, I ain’t up to this,” he said.
“Who are the other kids in that woods?”
“East End kids messin’ around. I don’t know them too good.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Why you talk to me like that?”
“Because none of this will go away of its own accord. You played in the band at Shorty’s. You knew the same people Roseanne knew. But you don’t give me any help.”
He swallowed. His palms were cupped on his knees.
“I grew up in the West End. I don’t like those kind of guys.”
“Good. So give me the names of the other boys she went out with.”
He fingered the denim on top of his thigh, his knees jiggling up and down, his eyes fixed on the floor.
“Anybody. When she was loaded. It didn’t matter to her. Three or four guys at once. Same guys who’d write her name on the washroom wall,” he said. He blinked and rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand.
WE DROVE INTO Deaf Smith and parked on the square and walked down a side street toward a brick church with a white steeple and a green lawn and a glassed-in sign announcing Sunday and Wednesday night services.
“Why we going to the Baptist church?” Lucas asked.
“We’re not,” I replied.
Next door to the church was the church’s secondhand store. An alley ran along one wall of the store, and at the end of the alley was an overflowing donation bin. The pavement around it was littered with pieces of mattresses and mildewed clothing that had been run over by automobile tires. As soon as the store closed at night, street people sorted through the bin and the overflow like a collection of rag pickers.
Lucas’s eyes fixed on a waxed, cherry-red chopped-down 1932 Ford with a white rolled leather interior and an exposed chromed engine parked in front of the store.
“You know the owner of that car?” I asked.
“It’s Darl Vanzandt’s.”
“That’s right,” I said, and pointed through the glass.
Darl was sorting a box of donated books by pitching them one at a time onto a display table. When the box was empty, he opened the back door and flung it end over end into the alley.
“We need to have a talk with him,” I said.
“What for? I ain’t got no interest in Darl.” The rims of his nostrils whitened as though the temperature had dropped seventy degrees.
“It’ll just take a minute.”
“Not me. No, sir.”
He backed away from me, then turned and walked back to the car.
I got in beside him.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“I don’t fool with East Enders, that’s all.”
He twisted at a callus on his palm.
“All of them, or just Darl?”
“You don’t know how it is.”
“I grew up here.”
“They look down on you. Darl knows how to make people feel bad about themselves.”
“Like how?”
“In metal shop, senior year, he was making Chinese stars in the foundry, these martial arts things you can sail at people and put out an eye with. Darl was hogging the sand molds, and this kid says, ‘I got to pour my mailbox hangers or I won’t get my grade,’ and Darl goes, ‘You got an S for snarf. Get out of the way.’
“The kid says, ‘What’s a snarf?’
“Darl says, ‘You don’t got a mirror at home?’
“After school Darl catches the kid out in front of everybody and says, ‘Hey, a snarf is a guy who gets off sniffing girls’ bicycle seats. But I had you made wrong. You don’t get an S. You get an F for frump. That’s a guy cuts farts in the bathtub and bites the bubbles.’”
Lucas’s cheeks were blotched with color.
“Would Darl beat a girl with his fists, Lucas?”
>
“My father needs me back in the field,” he answered.
THAT EVENING I opened up all the windows in the third floor of my house and let the breeze fill the rooms with the smells of alfalfa and distant rain and ozone and dust blowing out of the fields.
The house seemed to resonate with its own emptiness. I stood by the side of the hand-carved tester bed that had been my parents’, my fingers resting on the phone, and looked out over the barn roof and windmill and the fields that led down to the clay bluffs over the river. Lightning with no sound quivered on a green hill in the west.
I punched in Mary Beth Sweeney’s number.
“You mind my calling you?” I asked.
“I’m happy you did.”
The line hummed in the silence.
“I know a Mexican restaurant that serves food you only expect in the Elysian Fields,” I said.
“Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be like this . . . That Mexican narc you were talking with? He’s a bucket of shit. You watch your butt, cowboy.”
Watch your own. You’re working for the G, Mary Beth, I said to myself as I put down the receiver.
THAT NIGHT I heard the doors on the near end of the barn slamming in the wind. I rolled over and went back to sleep, then remembered I had closed the doors on the near end and had slipped the cross planks into place to hold them secure. I put on a pair of khakis and took a flashlight from the back porch and walked through the yard, the electric beam angling ahead of me.
One door fluttered and squealed on its hinges, then sucked loudly against the jamb. I started to push the other door into place, then I looked down the length of stalls, out in the railed lot on the far side, and saw my Morgan trotting in a circle, walleyed with fear, spooking at bits of paper blowing in the moonlight.
“What’s wrong, Beau? Weather usually doesn’t bother you,” I said.
I got him into the barn and stroked his face, closed the door behind him, and unscrewed the cap on a jar of oats-and-molasses balls and poured a dozen into the trough at the head of his stall.
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