'Thanks, Marvin. The ME thinks Jimmy Cole was suffocated in a hog lot?'
'Moon wouldn't do that to an old friend. He put an ice pick inside his head.'
After work that day I took the rake and garden shears and a gunny sack out of the barn and walked to our family cemetery on the far side of the tank. It was bordered by sandstone fence posts drilled through the center to hold the cedar rails that my father had shaved and beveled and notched thirty-two years ago, the year before he had climbed down into a hellhole on a natural gas pipeline to mend a leak in a faulty weld.
Each year he faked his physicals or got someone else to take them for him, because, like many pipeline arc welders, his eyes were filled with tiny pinholes from weaving a circle of fire that was as white as the sun around a pipe joint. My mother said his vision had become so bad that clarity of sight came to him only when he struck the stringer-bead rod against the pipe's metal and saw again the flame that was as pure to him as the cathedral's bells were to the deaf bellringer Quasimodo.
My father never saw the apprentice with him pull a Zippo from his khakis and light a cigarette. The explosion blew the glass out of the welding truck like brittle candy.
My mother, who had been a librarian and an elementary school teacher, was buried next to him. After my father's death, she had purchased a common headstone for them both, inscribed with her name as well as his, with her birth date and a chiseled dash that left the date of death to another hand.
I raked their graves and Great-grandpa Sam's clean, and those of all the other Hollands buried there, trimmed the grass around the headstones, and weeded out the rose beds I had dug under the cedar fence rails. Then I picked wild-flowers from the field and set them on my parents' graves, and cut a solitary yellow rose and laid it against Great-grandpa Sam's headstone.
The wind was warm blowing across the field, rippling the grass like new wheat, and I could smell the river and the water in the irrigation ditches and the day's heat baked into the scarred hardpan that had once been part of the Chisholm Trail. I didn't hear the footsteps behind me.
'I saw you from the back of the house,' Mary Beth said. She wore tan slacks, with high pockets, and sandals and a magenta shirt, and she carried a picnic basket by the straw bail in her right hand.
'How you doin', slim?' I said.
'Slim? If you aren't a peach.'
'You figure out who those guys in the cruiser were?'
'Take your choice.'
'Maybe it's time your people pulled you out.'
'Subject closed. You like fried chicken?'
'You bet.'
We walked across the field to a grove of oaks on the bluff above the river. She spread a checkered cloth on the grass and set it with silverware, tiny salt and pepper shakers, turkey-and-cheese sandwiches, guacamole, taco chips, potato salad, and a thermos of lemonade. Her hair hung over her cheeks while she placed each item carefully on the paper plates.
'You're making me self-conscious,' she said.
'You're a great-looking lady, Mary Beth.'
Her eyes crinkled in the corners. I was standing by the edge of the checkered cloth now. When she rose to her feet her face was only inches away from mine. I touched her hair, then I put my mouth on hers. Her eyes were open, then they closed and she put her arms around my back and I felt her breasts against my chest and a moment later the heat of her cheek press against mine.
I was suddenly involved with the old male impossibility of making love with any degree of dignity while standing up. We sat on the grass, then I lay her back with her head on the edge of the checkered cloth and kissed her again. The wind was blowing from across the river, eddying through the grass above the bluff, and the clouds piled on the western horizon were purple and edged with fire. I looked down into her eyes.
Behind me I heard a horse's hooves moving through the dead oak leaves. I turned and saw Beau, my Morgan, coming through the shade, and a little boy with a haircut like a soft brush riding bareback atop him.
'Hi! What ch'all doin'?' he said, pushing a branch out of his face with his arm.
'Hey, Pete, what's goin' on?' I said, my voice coming back to me like a man bursting to the surface of a deep pool.
'We still going fishing?'
'Wouldn't miss it, bud. You want some chicken? This is Mary Beth.'
He grinned at her. He was barefoot and in overalls and looked like a small clothespin on Beau's spine.
'I already eat,' he said.
'We have some lemonade,' she said. She was sitting up now, one arm propped behind her.
'That's all right. I'm butting in.'
'I'd tell you, wouldn't I?' I said.
He grinned at nothing, flicking the reins across the back of his hand.
'I'm gonna take Beau back,' he said.
'Billy Bob told me a lot about you, Pete. I'd like it if you'd join us,' Mary Beth said.
His eyes shifted off her, his grin never fading, then he slipped off Beau's back onto the ground.
'This is the smartest little guy in Deaf Smith,' I said.
'I knew you was gonna say that,' he said.
That night I drove down the road to the convenience store to buy a carton of milk. The store was on the top of a rise, next to a cornfield, its bright white-and-red exterior and neon-scrolled windows and lighted gas pumps and wide cement parking area surrounded by rural darkness. It was also a hangout for East Enders dragging the main road through town.
Their cars were parked by the phone booth, their doors open to catch the breeze, the cement pad around their feet already littered with beer cans, dirty napkins, and the cigarette butts they had emptied from their ashtrays.
On the way back to my car Darl Vanzandt got up from the passenger seat of his cherry-red chopped-down 1932 Ford and came toward me, the pupils of his wide-set eyes like burnt cinders. He drank the foam out of a quart bottle of Pearl and flung it whistling into the darkness. When I tried to walk around him, he stepped into my path, his courage inflating now with the audience that had formed at his back.
'Whoa, there, bud,' I said.
'You bothered all my friends. Now you're bothering my step-mother,' he said.
'Wrong.'
'You're setting me up to go to jail. All because of that little fart Lucas Smothers,' he said.
'Good night,' I said.
But he stepped in front of me again. He pushed me in the breastbone with his fingers, then he did it again, grinding his teeth slightly, thumping hard against the bone.
'Don't do this, Darl,' I said.
The skin around his mouth was taut and gray, his nose tilted slightly upward, the fear and loathing in his eyes like a candle flame that didn't know which way to blow. I dropped my eyes, and a smile exposed his teeth.
He slapped the carton of milk from my hand. It exploded in a white star on the pavement.
I stepped backward, then walked in a wide circle toward my car.
I heard his feet running behind me. By the time I could turn he was almost upon me. I brought up my elbow and drove it into his nose.
He doubled over, his cupped hands smeared with blood as soon as they touched his face. Then Bunny Vogel was next to him, his arm around Darl's shoulders, holding a wadded T-shirt against Darl's nose.
'I'll get some ice, then we'll go home. It ain't broken. The blood's darker when it's broken,' Bunny said.
'You tell his dad what happened, Bunny,' I said.
'It ain't my job to tell on people.'
'You're sure loyal to a kid who cost you a career in the pros. I wonder why that is,' I said.
He led Darl back toward the parked cars of the East Enders. Then he glanced back at me, his eyes like those of a man who just realized his future will be no different from his past.
chapter twelve
The next morning I ate breakfast on the kitchen table and read from Great-grandpa Sam's journal.