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 peel 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 Medellin 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 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.