His pool cue had clattered to the floor. He looked at it rolling away from him, his mouth draining blood on the apron of the table, and I hit him again, in the ribs, and again in the head, the neck, across the ear; then Moon was stumbling out the back screen door, through the trees, along the edge of the bluff. Down below, the river was covered with rain rings.
I swung the mattock handle with both hands across his spine. I seemed to slip out of time and place, as though I had been absorbed into a red-black square of film that was like the color of fire inside oil smoke. Then, like a man awakening from a dream, I realized the mattock handle was no longer in my grasp, that I was on one knee beside him, his head lolling against a tree trunk, my fist driving into his face.
'That's enough, motherfucker,' a voice said behind me.
I turned and looked up into the disjointed, heated eyes of a booted man in a leather vest whose body glowed with odor.
'Private conversation,' I said. But my words sounded outside my skin, as though they had been spoken by someone else and I heard them through the rain. The back of my right fist was flecked with Moon's blood.
A biker next to him studied my face and extended his arm across his friend's chest.
'His name's Holland. Sonofabitch is crazy. Leave him alone. Snooker done already called the Man,' he said.
They and those who had followed them walked away, their boots splashing in puddles, as though water had no effect on their clothes and bodies, their hair blowing in the wind like dirty string.
I looked again at Moon, his face, the tree he lay against, the grass stains on his elbows, the skinned lesions around his eyes, the rain dripping out of the overhead branches, all of it coming into focus now, my breath quieting in my throat, as though a bird with blood in its beak had flown out of my chest.
'You think you're conwise, but somebody's laughing at you, Moon, just like those gunbulls did when they draped you over a barrel and made a girl out of you,' I said.
He pushed his back up against the tree, wincing slightly, grinning at me. He started to speak, then cleared his mouth and spit in the grass and started over.
'This don't mean nothing. I done something to you won't ever change,' he said.
'The people who hired you are the same people who tried to run you out of town earlier.'
He grinned again and wiped his nose on his sleeve, but I saw my words catch in the corner of his eye.
'You and Jimmy Cole wandered into something you shouldn't out at the Hart Ranch. Then some guys tried to take you down with a baseball bat at your motel. The same guys jumped me behind my barn. One of them was a dude named Felix Ringo.'
He looked out into the rain, his brow knurled, his recessed eye bright, brimming with water.
'A Mexican narc works out of San Antone?' he asked.
'Guy's got a nasty record, Moon. He likes to hurt people. But unlike you, he's got juice with the government.'
'That don't change nothing between me and you.'
'The Big C has its own clock.'
'You still ain't caught on, have you? How come that pipe joint blowed out on your old man? 'Cause some kid lit a cigarette down in the hellhole?'
I stood up and straightened my back. I felt two long ribbons of pain slip down my spine and wrap around my thighs.
'Come on, boy. Ask me,' he said. His legs forked out straight in front of him, like sticks inserted inside his trousers. His flat-soled prison work shoes glistened with mud.
I picked up my hat and slapped the dirt off it on my coat. 'You come near Pete or his mother again, I'll shoot you through the lungs. It's a promise, Moon,' I said, and started to walk away.
'I went back into the pump station and turned on the gas. That pipe was loaded when his arc bit into it. You ever watch a cat chewing on an electric cord? You ought to seen his face when it went,' Moon said.
He began to laugh, holding his ribs because they hurt him, his face convulsing like a pixie's. He pushed the mattock handle at me with one shoe, trying to say something, shaking his head impotently at the level of mirth bursting from his chest.
Moon had to reach into the past to injure me, but across town, at that moment, Darl Vanzandt was buying a length of steel cable and a set of U-bolts, perhaps to prove that no matter what happened to Garland T. Moon, his legacy would be passed on to another generation in Deaf Smith.
chapter thirty-two
'You followed Darl from the courthouse?' I said to Temple.
We sat on my back screen porch. Pete was in the house, watching television, and the yard was full of pools with islands of leaves floating in them.
'You rubbed his face in it, in front of his friends. A kid like that doesn't pray for his enemies,' she said.
'I'm sorry for the stupid remark I made to you yesterday.'
'I already forgot about it.' She picked up her coffee spoon from her napkin and set it in her saucer.
I waited, but her eyes were deliberately empty, the balls of her fingers motionless on the table, and I said, 'What's he want with a pair of U-bolts and twenty feet of steel cable?'
She shook her head, then said, 'For some reason, those words and the name of Darl Vanzandt make my stomach crawl… You really gonna strike a match on Bunny's soul?'
'It's going to get even worse later.'
She looked at me and then looked through the screen. Her face was quiet, full of the thoughts and connections that she seldom shared. Her shirt had pulled out of her jeans and her baby fat creased on her hips. 'You want to have dinner with me and Pete?' she asked.
Pete's mother had consented to let him return to Temple's house for the next few days. That night we ate at a cafeteria, then I dropped them off and parked my car in back, turned on the flood lamps in the yard, poured some oats in Beau's stall, and walked all the way around the outside of the house with L.Q.' s.45 revolver under my raincoat.
Then I fell asleep on the third floor, with Great-grandpa Sam's journal open in my lap, an illogical image of torn steel cable and roaring car engines threading in and out of my dreams.
Bunny Vogel was dressed in a brown suit and sandals and a wash-faded pink golf shirt when he took the stand. He kept scratching his face with four fingers, as though an insect had burrowed into his cheek, and staring out into the courtroom, as though looking for someone who should have been there but wasn't.
I walked toward the jury box so Bunny would either have to face them when he answered my questions, or avert his eyes or drop his head. It wasn't a kind thing to do.
'Did you sleep with Roseanne Hazlitt, Bunny?' I asked.
'We went out in high school.'
'Did you sleep with her?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Would you say you loved her?'
'Yeah, I reckon. I mean, the way kids do.'
'You were a senior and she was only fifteen when y'all met, is that right?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Was she a virgin?'
'She told me she wasn't.'
'You found out different, though, didn't you?'
He knitted his fingers together, glanced out at the courtroom, at the Vanzandts, the boys he had played football with, the Mexican girl he dated now, at the few empty seats in back where maybe his father would come in late and sit down.
'Bunny?'
'Yes, sir, I found out I was the first,' he said.
'You hurt her, didn't you? You thought you should take her to a hospital?'
'Yes, sir.'
'But not in the county where people might know you?'
He turned his head away from the jury and cleared his throat. 'That's right,' he said.
'The witness will speak up,' the judge said.
'I was afraid. She was underage,' Bunny said. He pushed himself up in the chair and rubbed his hand on the back of his neck.
'Then you went to A amp;M and dumped her?' I said.