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.'