Romancing that woman is like chasing cows in dry lightning. It's a whole lot easier getting into the saddle than out of it. Such is the nature of pagan ways.
When I walked out to my car Lucas Smothers pulled into the driveway in his skinned-up truck.
'My father says I got to tell you something. Even though it's just stuff I heard,' he said.
'Go ahead.'
He got out of the truck and leaned against the fender. The shadow of a poplar tree seemed to cut his face in half. He bit a hangnail.
'About the firemen finding Jimmy Cole's body at the old Hart Ranch? Like, maybe Garland Moon killed him and tried to burn him up with some old tires? I mean, that's what the sheriff's thinking, ain't it?' he said.
'It's Moon's style.'
'Darl Vanzandt and some others used to get fried on acid and angel dust out there. Roseanne went there with them once. She said Darl got crazy when he was on dust.'
'What's Darl have to do with Jimmy Cole?'
'Six or seven months back, a hobo died in a fire by the railway tracks. The paper said he was heating a tar paper shack with a little tin stove and a can of kerosene. I heard maybe Darl and some others done it.'
He looked at the expression on my face, then looked away.
'Why would he kill a hobo?' I asked.
'There's kids that's cruel here. They don't need no reason. Roseanne said maybe Darl's a Satanist.'
'We're talking about murdering people.'
'I seen stuff maybe older folks don't want to know about. That's the way this town's always been.'
'Jimmy Cole wasn't killed on the Hart Ranch. His body was moved there.'
'It wasn't Darl?'
'I doubt it.'
He wiped his palms on his jeans. 'I got to get to work… Mr Holland?'
'Yes?'
He scraped at a piece of rust on the truck door with his thumbnail.
'You doing all this 'cause you figure you owe me?' he said.
'No.'
He was silent while the question he couldn't ask burned in his face.
'Your mother and I were real close. If it had gone different, we might have gotten married. For that reason I've always felt mighty close to you. She was a fine person,' I said.
His throat was prickled and red, as though he had been in a cold wind. He got in the truck, looking through the back window while he started the engine so I would not see the wet glimmering in his eyes.
But the lie that shamed, that I could not set straight, was mine, not his.
I parked my car around the corner from the bank and walked back toward the entrance to my office. Emma Vanzandt sat in a white Porsche convertible by the curb, two of her tires in the yellow zone. She wore dark glasses and her black hair was tied up with a white silk scarf. When I said hello, she looked at the tops of her nails. I stepped off the sidewalk and approached her car anyway.
'Is Jack inside?' I asked.
'Why don't you go see?'
'Your son attacked me, Emma.'
The backs of her hands were wrinkled, like the surface of bad milk, networked with thick blue veins. She spread her fingers on the steering wheel and studied them.
'If you think you can solve your problems at our expense, you don't know Jack or me,' she said.
I went up the stairs and opened the frosted glass door into my outer office. My secretary was trying to busy herself with the mail, but the strain on her composure showed on her face like a fine crack across a china plate. Jack was staring at a picture on the wall, without seeing it, his hands on his hips. When he turned to face me, his vascular arms seemed pumped and swollen with energy, as though he had been curling a barbell.
'Come inside, Jack,' I said.
'That's very thoughtful of you,' he replied.
He closed the inner door behind him. He bit his bottom lip; his hands closed and opened at his sides.
'I can't describe what I'm feeling right now,' he said.
'Your son's problem is dope and booze. Address the situation, Jack. Don't blame it on other people.'
'I feel like taking off your head.'
'Oh?'
'You put me in mind of a blind leper climbing into a public swimming pool.'
'I get it. I'm the source of everyone's discontent but don't know it.'
'You got this guy Moon stoked up, then you broke my boy's nose.'
'Moon?'
'He wouldn't be around here if it wasn't for you.'
'What do you care?'
'He hauled a dead man out to my property, what's his name, that character Jimmy Cole.'
'Cole was found on the old Hart place.'
'I have an eighth interest in it…' He seemed distracted and tried to regain his train of thought. 'I want you to leave us alone. It's a simple request. You've fucked up your life and your career. But I'll be damned if you'll make my family your scapegoat.'
I stepped closer to him. I could feel the blood rise in my head. In the corner of my eye I thought I saw L.Q. Navarro watching me, wagging a cautionary finger.
'You want to explain that, Jack?' I asked.
'I gave orders in Vietnam that cost other men their lives. It comes with the territory. That's what maturity is about. I'm embarrassed to be in your presence,' he replied.
He went out the door, nodding to the secretary as he passed.
I sat alone in the steam room at the health club, the sting of his words like needles in my face. I pushed a towel into a bucket of water and squeezed it over my head and shoulders. L.Q. Navarro leaned against the tile wall, his dark suit bathed in steam, his face as cool and dry as if he stood on an ice flow.
'Don't let them kind get to you,' he said.
'Which kind is that?'
'The kind with money. I don't know what that boy did in Vietnam, but down in Coahuila we went up against automatic weapons with handguns. We shot the shit out of those guys, too.'
'I grant, they knew we'd been in town.'
He took off his Stetson and spun it on his finger. His teeth shone when he smiled.
'That woman deputy, the tall one, Mary Beth's her name? She was good to the little boy. That's how you tell when it's the right woman,' he said.
'You saved me from burning to death, L.Q. It was the bravest thing I ever saw anyone do.'
He grinned again, then his face became somber and his eyes avoided mine.
'I got to leave you one day, bud,' he said.
A fat man with a towel wrapped around his loins opened the steam room door and came inside. L.Q. fitted his hat on his head and walked toward the far wall, where the tiles melted into a horizontal vortex spinning with wet sand.
I showered and walked back to my locker in the dressing room, then caught myself glancing sideways at my reflection in the wall mirror, at the same reddish blond hair that Lucas had, the same six-foot-one frame, the puckered white scar on my upper right arm where a bullet had snapped the bone the night L.Q. died, the long stitched welt on top of my foot from the night he pulled me out of the grass fire and we thundered down the hills with tracers streaking over our heads in the darkness.
At age forty-one I had gained only ten pounds since I was a beat cop in Houston, and I could still bench two hundred pounds and do thirty push-ups with my feet elevated on a chair.
But I knew my self-congratulatory attitudes were all vanity. I was trying to reconstruct my pride like a schoolboy searching for a missing virtue in his reflection after he has been publicly humiliated.
I stuffed my soiled workout clothes in my gym bag and drove out to the old Hart Ranch.
It lay between two large hills, and the only access was down a rutted dirt road that wound through a woods with a thick canopy and layers of pine needles and dead leaves on the ground. The gate at the cattleguard was chain-locked and strung with yellow crime scene tape. I climbed through a barbed wire fence and walked a quarter of a mile into a wide glade that was green with new grass and dotted with wildflowers.