I am fifty-six years old and fear I do not know who I am.
Pete walked hot and dusty and happy into the shade, his fielder's glove hooked on its strap through his belt.
'We still gonna get peach ice cream?' he said.
'I wouldn't go a day without it,' I replied.
'You know them men out yonder, Billy Bob? They been around the block twice, like they was lost or something.'
I looked over my shoulder, out on the hard-packed dirt street. Both the cars were dark and waxed, with tinted windows and radio antennas. I stood up and put on my Stetson and walked over to Beau and stroked his head and fed him a sugar cube with the flat of my hand. The cars pulled up along the edge of the rain ditch, and the passenger window in the front of the lead car rolled down on its electric motor.
The man from Mary Beth's apartment looked at me from behind aviator's sunglasses.
'You already stomped the shit out of Roy Devins. Maybe it's time to leave his welfare to others,' he said.
'You know how it is, a guy gets bored and starts to wonder why feds are running around in his county, making veiled threats, acting like heavy-handed pricks, that sort of thing,' I said.
He laughed to himself.
'How about staying out of Dodge?' he said.
'I expect we're on the same side, aren't we?'
'You're a defense lawyer, pal. You get paid to keep the asswipes out of the gray-bar hotel chain.' His gaze drifted to Pete, then back on me. 'You really stick playing cards in the mouths of dead wets down in Coahuila?'
I stroked Beau once along his mane, then stepped across the rain ditch and leaned down into the open window of the lead car.
'I worked with a Ranger named L.Q. Navarro. We took down the mules and burned out the stash houses y'all didn't know how to find. You couldn't shine his boots, bud.'
He took off his sunglasses and looked indolently into my face.
'You like the lady, don't make trouble for her. You're an intelligent man. You can work with this, I'm convinced of it,' he said, and motioned to his driver.
Pete and I watched the two cars move slowly away, the windows sealed against the dust, the whitewall tires crunching delicately on the gravel as though the two drivers did not want to chip the gleaming finish on the cars' exteriors.
'You pretty mad, Billy Bob?' Pete said.
'No, not really.'
'For a person that's been river baptized and converted to Catholic, too, you sure know how to tell a fib.'
I rubbed the top of his soft, brushlike hair as the two cars turned down a dirt alley and their dust rolled across the wash hanging behind a row of clapboard shacks.
chapter fourteen
The typical isolation unit in a prison is a surreal place of silence, bare stone, solid iron doors, and loss of all distinction between night and day. Its intention is to lock up the prisoner with the worst company possible, namely, his own thoughts.
But fear and guilt have corrosive effects in the free people's world as well.
Bunny Vogel passed my house twice, driving a customized maroon '55 Chevy, before he mustered the courage to turn in the driveway and walk out to the chicken run in back, where I was picking up eggs in an apple basket.
He wore an unbuttoned silk shirt and jeans and Roman sandals without socks, and his tangled bronze-colored hair seemed to glow on the tips against the late sun. With his classical profile and his abdominal muscles that were like oiled leather, he could have been a male model for the covers of romance novels, except for the sunken scar that curled like an inset pink worm along his jawbone.
'Pretty nice automobile,' I said.
'What you said the night you busted Darl in the nose? About me being loyal to a guy who cost me a pro career?'
'I didn't mean to offend you, Bunny.'
He let out a breath. 'I think you're gonna pin the tail on any donkey you can. I ain't gonna be it, Mr Holland,' he said.
'You want to come inside?'
'No… The old black guy out at Shorty's told you Roseanne Hazlitt slapped somebody in the parking lot the night she was killed.'
'How do you know that?'
'Darl heard the old guy'd been talking to you. So he kind of got in his face about it.'
'He's quite a kid. I don't think I've ever known one exactly like him.'
'It was me she slapped. I ain't gonna hide it no more.'
I picked up a brown egg from behind a tractor tire and dropped it in the basket. I didn't look at him. I could hear him breathing in the silence.
'But that's when I left. I didn't see Roseanne or Darl or none of the others after that. I ain't part of nothing that happened later that night,' he said.
'Who was?'
'God's truth, Mr Holland, I don't know.'
'You told me you weren't mixed up with Roseanne, Bunny.'
He kneaded his fists at his sides and the veins in his forearms swelled with blood. Then his face colored and his eyes glazed with shame.
'Damn, I knew this was gonna be a sonofabitch,' he said.
This is the story he told me.
He was a high school senior, on the varsity, with the kind of bone-breaking running power that left tacklers dazed and sometimes bloody in his wake, when he first noticed her watching him at practice from the empty stands.
He remembered the balmy gold afternoon that he walked over to her, his cleats crunching on the cinder-and-pea-gravel track, and tossed the football into her hands. He thought it was a clever thing to do, the kind of gesture that disarmed most girls, that made them feel vulnerable and a little foolish and gave them a chance to be coy and defenseless in his presence.
She flipped it back at him with both hands, so fast he had to duck to avoid being hit in the face. Then she opened her compact and put on lipstick as though he were not there.
'How old are you, anyway?' he asked.
'Fifteen. You got something against being fifteen?' She squeezed her knees together and wagged them back and forth.
He looked back over his shoulder at the practice field, at the second-string, whose attention was absorbed with thudding their pads against one another and running plays they would never be allowed to run in a game that counted.
'You want to go to a movie tonight?' he asked.
'The drive-in?'
'It don't have to be the drive-in.'
'I'll think about it.'
'You'll think about it?'
'I work at the Dairy Queen. I get off at six. I'll let you know then.'
He watched her walk down the empty concrete aisle, then across the worn grass to the bus stop in front of the school, her hips swaying under her plaid skirt. He kept glancing back at the practice field, as though someone were watching him, and his own thoughts confused and angered him.
He was at the Dairy Queen at five-thirty.
They did it a week later, amid a drone of cicadas, in the back of his uncle's old Plymouth, on cushions that smelled of dust and nicotine, and he realized immediately she had lied and that she was a virgin and he was hurting her even more deeply than the gasp, the clutch of pain in her throat, indicated. But he couldn't stop, nor did he know how to be gentle, nor could he admit that most of his sexual experience had been with Mexican prostitutes in San Antonio and the mill women his father brought home when he was drunk.
He was frightened when he saw how much she bled and he offered to drive her to a hospital in another county.
'You afraid to take me to one here?' she said.
'I don't want you in trouble with your folks, that's all,' he lied.
'I don't need a doctor, anyhow. Did you like me?' she said.
'Yeah, sure.'
'No, you didn't. But you will next time,' she said, and kissed him on the cheek.
Her hand found his. The trees that had gone dark outside the car made him think of stone pillars wrapped with the tracings of fireflies, but he did not know why.