I looked at the backs of my fingers on top of the desk blotter. I could hear the minute hand on my wall clock click into the noon position. Outside the window, the oak trees were a deep green against the yellow sandstone of the courthouse.
'Don't misjudge your opponent, sir,'
'I said.
'I know all about you. But you don't know the first thing about me. Me and my twin brother was in a place where they switched your legs raw just because you spilled your food on the floor. You ain't gonna find that on a rap sheet. When he was nine years old they pushed epilepsy pills down his throat till he choked to death. You doubt my word, you go look in the Waco Baptist Cemetery.'
'You're a sick man.'
'There's some that has said that. It never put no rocks in my shoe, though.'
I got up from my chair and walked to the door and turned the key in the lock.
'Get out,' I said.
He remained motionless in the chair, his face looking away from me, the back of his neck flaming with color. He mumbled something.
'What?' I said.
He didn't repeat it. When he walked past me, his eyes were fixed straight ahead, a single line of sweat glistening on the side of his face like an empty blood vein.
chapter seven
At sunrise Sunday morning I put on my pinstriped beige suit and a short-sleeve white shirt and a pair of oxblood Tony Lamas, walked down to the barn and lifted my saddle off a sawhorse in the tack room and threw it on the back of my Morgan. The breeze blew through the doors on each end of the barn and the air was cool and smelled of wildflowers, fish spawning, oats and molasses balls, green horse dung, hay that had turned yellow in the corners, and well water spilling over the lip of the corrugated windmill tank.
L.Q. Navarro sat on top of a stall, the heels of his boots hooked onto a plank, his body slatted with sunlight.
'You should have taken that.38-40 that gal tried to give you,' he said.
'It's Sunday, L.Q. Take a day off.'
'It's them kind of days the shitbags crawl out of the storm sewers. Tell me it wasn't fun busting caps on them dope mules down in Coahuila.'
'Adios, bud,' I said, and flicked my heels into the Morgan's ribs and thudded across the soft carpet of desiccated horse manure in the lot.
I crossed the creek at the back of my property and rode through a stand of pines, then up an incline that was humped with blackberry bushes into Pete's backyard. He waited for me on the porch, dressed in a pair of pressed jeans and a starched print shirt and freshly shined brown shoes. I reached my arm down and pulled him up behind the cantle.
The Morgan's hooves clattered on the flattened beer cans in the yard.
'Was you really baptized in the river?' he said.
'Sure.'
'I never heard of a river-baptized person converting to a Catholic'
'Somebody's got to keep y'all honest.'
He was quiet a long time, rocking against me with the horse's steps.
'Does it bother you when people say you're crazy, Billy Bob?'
'Most of the human race is, Pete.'
'I knew you was gonna say that.'
We came out of the pines into the backside of a rural Mexican neighborhood with fenceless dirt yards and abandoned privies and alleys blown with litter and bloodred hibiscus growing out of rusted car shells.
This area was part of what was known as the West End, a place where cedar cutters and field-workers and 'bohunks', people who were of mixed German and Mexican blood, had always lived. It was exactly twenty miles down the same road that led into the East End, where Deaf Smith's country club set, and there were many of them, had bought and refurbished Victorian homes that were as big as steamboats when spot market oil was forty dollars a barrel.
It was cool inside the small stucco church, and electric fans oscillated on the walls by the Stations of the Cross, and the votive lights in front of a statue of Christ's mother rang with color each time the breeze from the fan passed over the burning wax. The people in the pews were almost all elderly, their hands sheathed in callus, the skin around their eyes wrinkled, as though they had been staring into the sun for a lifetime.
After Mass Pete and I rode my Morgan up the street, then cut through a grove of cedars and an empty filling station that had been built in 1945 and went inside a clapboard chafé and ate breakfasts of pork chops, biscuits, milk gravy, scrambled eggs, grits, sliced tomatoes, and coffee.
'What's a crystal meth lab?' Pete asked.
'A place where people make narcotics. Why?'
'My mother said to stay away from some men that's in the neighborhood.'
'Oh?'
He looked out the window at a dog tied on a rope in the bed of a pickup. He chewed on the corner of his thumbnail. The light had gone out of his eyes.
'You shouldn't tie a dog in the back of a truck. If he falls out, he'll get drug to death. He won't have no chance at all,' he said.
'Who are these men, Pete?'
'People my daddy knew once.' His face was empty, his gaze still focused outside the window. 'My mother made up that story about him getting killed in the army. He just gone off one day and never come home.'
'Maybe you shouldn't study on it.'
'It don't bother me. If people don't want you, they ain't worth fretting on. That's the way I see it.'
Then he grinned again, as though the world's capacity to injure had no power over him.
Jack Vanzandt lived in a large white-columned home built of old brick and Spanish ironwork salvaged from a plantation in Louisiana. The lawn comprised eight acres and sloped upward from the street through shade trees to the wide, breezy front porch of the house, the four-car garage with servants quarters on top, two clay tennis courts, a screened-in pool stippled with sunlight, a stucco guest cottage, a satellite television dish that was the size of a barn door.
His first wife had died in a traffic accident on a bridge over the Pecos River gorge. The second wife, Emma, came from Shreveport, where her mother and father had run a fundamentalist church, then had become moderately wealthy by starting up a mail-order wedding cake business. Emma's approach to civic and charitable work seemed to be governed by the same entrepreneurial spirit. She ran on high-octane energies that made her eyes flash and her hands move abruptly when she became impatient with the way someone else did his work, until she simply took over it. Like her husband, Jack, she was always polite, and her high cheekbones and long Indian-black hair were lovely to look at. But you always felt you wanted her as a friend, never as an adversary.
'How are you, Billy Bob?' she said, rising from her work in a rose bed, pulling off a cotton glove and extending her hand.
'Sorry to bother y'all on a Sunday, Emma,' I said.
'We always love to see you. Did you bring your tennis racquet?'
'No, I'm afraid I have to chop cotton today. Is Jack around?'
'You're going to take his picture?' she said, her eyes dropping to the Polaroid camera in my hand.
'Not really,' I said, and smiled.
Jack came out on the front porch, a frosted highball glass wrapped with a napkin and a rubber band in his hand.
'Can you handle a gin and tonic?' he said.
'I just need a minute or two, then I'll be gone,' I said.
He watched my face, then said, 'Walk out here with me and I'll show you part of an Indian work mound Emma dug up.'
We strolled through the trees toward a white gazebo. Pine needles and rose petals had been scattered on the grass by a windstorm during the night.