The groundskeepers adjusted the amounts of water and liquid nitrogen fed into the grass to ensure the fairways were emerald green year-round, no matter how dry or cold the season. The swimming pool was constructed in the shape of a shamrock, and those who stepped down into its turquoise sun-bladed surface seem to glow with a health and radiance that perhaps validated the old literary saw that the very rich are very different from you and me.
The main building was an immaculate, blinding white, with a circular drive and a columned porch and a glassed-in restaurant with a terrace shaded by potted palm and banana trees that were moved into a solarium during the cold months. A hedge as impenetrable as a limestone wall protected the club on one side, the bluffs and the lazy green expanse of the river on the other. Recessions and wars might come and go, but Deaf Smith’s country club would always be here, a refuge, its standards as unchanging as the European menu in its restaurant.
I had dressed for it, in my striped beige suit, polished cordovan boots, a soft blue shirt and candy-striped necktie. But dress alone did not always afford you a welcome at Post Oaks Country Club.
I stood by Jack and Emma Vanzandt’s table, the maître d’ standing nervously behind me, a menu in his hand. Jack and Emma were eating from big shrimp cocktail glasses that were deep-set in silver bowls of crushed ice.
“You want to go outside and talk?” I said to Jack.
He wiped his mouth with a napkin and looked through the French doors at several men putting on a practice green. “It’s all right, André,” he said to the maître d’.
Then he glanced at an empty chair across from him, which was the only invitation I received to sit down.
“Thanks, Jack,” I said.
In the gold and silver light that seemed to anoint the room, Emma’s Indian-black hair looked lustrous and thick on her bare shoulders, her ruby necklace like drops of blood on the delicate bones of her throat.
“Your boy was out at my place today. He’s a sick kid. Do something about him,” I said.
“You come to our dinner table to tell me something like this?” Jack said.
“Here’s the street menu in Deaf Smith, Jack: purple hearts, black beauties, rainbows, screamers, yellow jackets, and China white if you want to get off crack. I hear Darl does it all. If you don’t want to take a wake-up call, at least keep him away from my house.”
He set his cocktail fork on the side of his plate and started to speak. But Emma placed her hand on his forearm.
“We’re sorry he bothered you. Call either Jack or me if it happens again. Would you like to order something?” she said.
“Blow it off. I can’t blame you. The sheriff did, too. But now he’s dead,” I said.
They stared at each other.
“You didn’t know?” I said.
“We just got back from Acapulco,” Jack said.
“Somebody came up behind him with an ax,” I said.
“That’s terrible,” Emma said.
“He had a lot of enemies. A lot,” Jack said. But his eyes were fastened on thoughts that only he saw.
“I told the sheriff I think Darl killed Jimmy Cole. I don’t know if there’s a connection or not,” I said.
Emma’s eyes were shut. Her lashes were black and the lids were like paper, traced with tiny green veins, and they seemed to be shuddering, as though a harsh light were burning inside her.
“Leave our table, Billy Bob. Please, please, please leave our table,” she said.
BUT LATER I was bothered by my own remarks to the Vanzandts. Darl connected with the sheriff’s murder? It was unlikely. Darl and his friends didn’t prey on people who had power. They sought out the halt and lame and socially ostracized, ultimately the people who were most like themselves.
The sheriff’s widow was the daughter of a blacksmith, a square, muscular woman with recessed brooding eyes who wore her dark hair wrapped around her head like a turban. Whether she bore her husband’s infidelities and vulgarity out of religious resignation or desire for his money was a mystery to the community, since she had virtually no friends or life of her own except for her weekly attendance at the Pentecostal church downtown, and the community had stopped thinking of her other than as a silent backdrop to her husband’s career.
“The person done this was probably a lunatic got loose from some mental hospital,” she said in her kitchen.
“Why’s that?”
“’Cause it’s what Davis Love always told me it’d be if it happened,” she said. (Davis Love was her husband’s first and last name and the only one she ever called him by.) “He said the man who killed him would probably be some crazy person, ’cause nobody he sent up to prison would ever want to see him again.”
She let the undisguised heat in her eyes linger on my face so I would make no mistake about her meaning.
“He left his mark on them?” I said.
“They tended to move to other places.”
I looked out the kitchen window at the rolling pasture behind her house, the neat red and white barn, an eight-acre tank stocked with big-mouth bass, the sheriff’s prize Arabians that had the smooth gray contours of carved soap rock.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.
“They might bad-mouth him, but he worked hisself up from road guard to high sheriff, without no hep from nobody.”
I nodded as her words turned over a vague recollection in my mind about the sheriff’s background.
“He was an extraordinary person,” I said.
Her smile was attenuated, wan, a victorious recognition of the assent she had extracted from me. Then I saw it in her eyes. She had already revised him and placed him in the past, assigning him qualities he never had, as the roles of widow and proprietress melded together in her new life.
I HAD FORGOTTEN that the sheriff had started out his law enforcement career not as a cop but as a gunbull on a road gang, back in the days when the inmates from the old county prison were used to trench water and sewer lines and to spread tar on county roads. I remember seeing them as a boy, their backs arched with vertebrae, their skin sunbrowned the color of chewing tobacco, thudding their picks into a ditch while the road hacks stood over them with walking canes that were sheathed on the tips with cast-iron tubes.
Moon had been one of those inmates.
At age fifteen raped on a regular basis by two gunbulls in the county prison.
What were his words? Tore my insides out and laughed while they done it . . . Y’all gonna get rid of me the day you learn how to scrub the stink out of your own shit.
Was the splattered, red trail from the kitchen to the gun case in the sheriff’s log house just the beginning of our odyssey with Garland T. Moon?
THAT NIGHT I called Mary Beth Sweeney and got her answering machine.
“It’s Billy Bob. I’ll buy you a late dinner—” I said, before she picked up the receiver.
“Hi,” she said.
“Are you Secret Service?”
“No!”
“I had a run-in with this character Brian Wilcox this morning. Why are Treasury people interested in the sheriff’s murder?”
“Ask Brian Wilcox.”
“Come on, Mary Beth.”
“I don’t want to talk about him.”
Through my library window I could see the moon rising over the hills.
“How about dinner?” I said.
“It’s a possibility.”
“I’ll be by in a few minutes.”
“No, I’ll come there.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Brian watches my place sometimes. He’s weird . . .” Then, before I could speak again, she said, “I’ll take care of it. Don’t get involved with this man . . . See you soon.”
THE BREEZE WAS cool that night, the clouds hammered with silver. It had been an unseasonably wet sprin
g, and small raindrops had started to click on the roof and the elephant ears under my library windows. I walked out into the barn and the railed lot behind it and fed Beau molasses balls out of my hand. When he had finished one, he would bob his head and nose me in the shirt pocket and face until I gave him another, crunching it like a dry carrot between his teeth. I stroked his ears and mane and touched the dried edges of the wound someone had inflicted on his withers, and tried to think through all the complexities that had attached themselves to the defense of Lucas Smothers and had brought someone onto my property who would take his rage out on a horse.
I could hear the windmill’s blades ginning in the dark and the bullfrogs starting up in the tank. My back was to the open barn doors and the wind blew across me and Beau as though we were standing in a tunnel. For no apparent reason his head pitched away from the molasses ball in my palm, one walleye staring at me, and then he backed toward the far side of the lot, his nostrils flaring.
I turned and just had time to raise one arm before a booted man in shapeless clothes swung a sawed-off pool cue at the side of my head. I heard the wood knock into bone, then the earth came up in my face, the breath burst from my chest, and I heard a snapping, disconnected sound in the inner ear, like things coming apart, like the sound of seawater at an intolerable depth.
I was on my elbows and knees when he kicked me, hard, the round steel-toe of the boot biting upward into the stomach.
“You like roping people in bars? How’s it feel, motherfucker?” he said.
Then a second man kicked me from the other side, stomped me once in the neck, lost his balance, and kicked me again.
My Stetson lay in the dirt by my head, the crown pushed sideways like a broken nose. I could hear Beau spooking against the rails, his hooves thudding on the mat of desiccated manure.
But a third man was in the lot, too. He wore khakis and snakeskin boots, and hanging loosely from the fingers of his right hand was a curved knife, hooked at the end, the kind used to slice banana stalks. He dropped it in the dirt by the booted man’s foot.
The booted man gathered it into his right hand and laced the fingers of his left into my hair and jerked my head erect.
“Just so you’ll know what’s going on, we’re cutting off your ears,” he said.
For just a second, through the water and blood and dirt in my eyes, I saw a flash of gold in the mouth of the man who had dropped the knife to the ground.
I brought my fist straight up between the thighs of the man who held me by the hair, sinking it into his scrotum. I saw his body buckle, the knees come together, the shoulders pitch forward as though his lower bowels had been touched with a hot iron.
Then headlights shone in my driveway, bounced across the chicken run, and filled the barn and horse lot with shadows.
The three men were motionless, like stick figures caught under a pistol flare. I rolled sideways, stumbled and ran into the barn, my arms cupped over my head as one of them aimed and fired a pistol, a .22 perhaps, pop, pop, pop, in the darkness and I heard the rounds snap into wood like fat nails.
I thought I saw L.Q. Navarro, his tall silhouette and cocked ash-gray Stetson and gunbelt and holstered .45 double-action revolver superimposed against an eye-watering white brilliance.
Moments later Mary Beth Sweeney squatted next to me in Beau’s stall, her nine-millimeter pushed down in the back of her blue jeans. My nose was filled with blood and I had to breathe through my mouth. She ran her hand through my hair and wiped the straw and dirt out of my eyes. My face jerked when she touched me.
“Oh Billy Bob,” she said.
“Where are they?”
“They took off in a four-wheel-drive through the back of your property . . . Let’s go inside. I’ll call the dispatcher.”
“No, call Marvin Pomroy.”
I got to my feet, my hands inserted between the slats of the stall. The high beams of her car were still on, and the inside of the barn was sliced with electric light. She put her arm around my waist, and we walked together toward my back door as the wind twisted and bent the branches of the chinaberry tree over our heads.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
I STOOD SHIRTLESS in my bedroom on the third floor, the cordless phone held to one side of my head, a towel filled with ice held against the other. My shirt was on the floor, the collar flecked with blood. I could feel a burning in my lower back that I couldn’t relieve, no matter which way I moved.
“You never saw them before?” Marvin said through the phone.
“No . . . I don’t think.”
“You’re unsure?”
“The guy who watched, the one who dropped the knife on the ground . . . Maybe I’m imagining things.”
“Where’d you see him?”
“It’s like you remember people from dreams. I’m not feeling too well now, Marvin. Let me get back to you.”
“I’ll put a deputy on your house.”
“No, you won’t.”
“No faith,” he said.
“You’re a good guy, Marvin. I don’t care what people say.”
I heard him laugh before he hung up.
I clicked off the phone and set it down on the table by the window where Mary Beth sat, her violet eyes close set with thought.
“You think you saw one of those guys before?” she said.
“L.Q. Navarro and I went up against this same mule down in Coahuila three or four times. I always saw him in the dark. Sometimes I see people at night who remind me of him, like you see people inside dreams. A therapist told me—”
“What?”
“That it was unexpiated guilt. It’s the kind of thing therapists like to talk about.”
“I worry about you.”
“I’d better take a shower,” I said.
“You should go to the hospital.”
“I’ve wasted enough of the night on these guys. Why don’t you get yourself something to eat in the kitchen?”
“Eat?”
“Yeah.”
“Too much,” she said.
After she went downstairs, I got into the shower stall and turned the hot water into my face and hair and propped my palms against the tile and let the blood and dirt and dried sweat boil out of my skin and sluice into the drain.
But when I closed my eyes I felt the bottom of the stall tilt under my feet and I saw streamers of colored light, like tracers in a night sky, behind my eyelids. I dried off and dressed in my underwear, one hand gripped on the bathroom door for balance. I saw the horizon dip outside the window and I heard a voice say Just so you’ll know what’s going on, we’re cutting off your ears, and I toppled sideways across a chair onto the floor.
Then Mary Beth was beside me, her hands gripped under my arms, pulling me erect, helping me to the bed. I fell back on the pillow and dragged the sheet across my loins. She sat on the edge of the mattress, her eyes staring down into mine. Outside the window the sky was sealed with a flat layer of black clouds that pulsed with lightning.
“I’m all right,” I said.
“You want me to go?”
I started to speak, but she saw the answer in my eyes and she leaned over me and brushed my forehead with her fingers and kissed me lightly on the mouth. The tips of her curls touched my cheeks, and I could smell her shampoo and the heat in her skin. I held her and kissed her again. She slipped off her shoes and lay beside me, her face inches from mine.
“I’ve seen your jacket. Your kind always gets hurt, Billy Bob,” she said.
“You are a fed.”
She didn’t reply. Instead, she gathered her arms around me and pulled me against her, releasing her breath against my cheek, molding me against her, her ankle tucked inside mine.
I waited to sit up, to change my position, but I felt two bright tentacles of pain slip along my spine and wrap around the
front of my thighs.
“Wait,” she said. She stood up, unbuttoned her shirt and let it drop to the floor, then unsnapped her blue jeans and worked them off her hips and stepped out of them. Behind her, I could see clouds racing across the land, blooming with quicksilver, splintering the hills with electricity.
She turned away from me briefly, unhooked her bra and slipped off her panties, then sat on the edge of the mattress, pulled the sheet away from my body, and lay against me. I tried to turn on my shoulder so that I faced her, but again I felt a muscular spasm seize my lower back and send a pain through my thighs that made my mouth drop open.
“Don’t move,” she said, and spread her thighs and sat on top of me, her arms propped on each side of me. She smiled down into my face. The freckles on her shoulders and the tops of her breasts looked like tiny brown flowers. I traced my fingers around her nipples and took them in my mouth, then felt an unrelieved hardness and desire in my loins that I couldn’t contain, that was like an envelope of heat glowing off of iron, that ached to enter her softness and the beauty and charity of her body, which gave satisfaction and sanctuary long before orgasm.
“I’ll be here for you,” she whispered, her lips against my cheek, her passion so genuine and pure that I knew secretly, as all men do, I was undeserving of it.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
EARLY THE NEXT morning, I put ice on the tubular swelling along the side of my head and went to a doctor for the muscle spasms in my lower back. He showed me a set of exercises that involved lying on the floor and raising the knees to the chest and sitting in a chair and touching the floor while I sucked in my stomach. I was amazed to find that a level of pain that had been so intense could drain out of my body like water, at least temporarily.
“Whenever you feel the pain, do the exercise. You’ll be fine. Just avoid any sudden movement in your back,” the doctor said. He took a ballpoint pen out of his shirt pocket. “You want a prescription?”
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