'What are you doing?' I said.
'My dad uses it in the compost heap.'
'He's not one to waste.'
'You don't like him much, do you?' he said. His face and denim shirt were spotted with mud, his arms knotted with muscle as he lifted a rake-load of dripping weeds to the edge of the ditch.
'Garland Moon's out. I want you to be careful,' I said.
'Last night a Mexican in the poolroom offered me five-hundred dollars to drive a load of lumber down to Piedras Negras.'
'What are you doing in the poolroom?'
'Just messin' around.'
'Yeah, they only sell soda pop in there, too. Why's this Mexican so generous to you?'
'He's got a furniture factory down there. He cain't drive long distances 'cause he's got kidney trouble or something. He said I might get on reg'lar.'
'You leave this county, Lucas, you go back to jail and you stay there.'
'You ain't got to get mad about it. I was just telling you what the guy said.'
'You thought anymore about college for next fall?'
'I was just never any good at schoolwork, Mr Holland.'
'Will you call me Billy Bob?'
'My dad don't allow it.'
I walked back to my car. The sun was yellow and pale with mist behind Vernon Smothers's house. He stood on his porch in work boots and cut-off GI fatigues and a sleeveless denim shirt that was washed as thin as Kleenex.
'You out here about Moon?' he asked.
'He's been known to nurse a grievance,' I answered.
'He puts a foot on my land, I'll blow it off.'
'You'll end up doing his time, then.'
'I busted my oil pan on your back road yesterday. You'll owe me about seventy-five dollars for the weld job,' he said, and went back inside his house and let the screen slam behind him.
Just before lunchtime, my secretary buzzed the intercom.
'There's a man here who won't give his name, Billy Bob,' she said.
'Does he have on a blue serge suit?'
'Yes.'
'I'll be right out.'
I opened my door. Garland T. Moon sat in a chair, a hunting magazine folded back to ads that showed mail- order guns and knives for sale. He wore shiny tan boots that were made from plastic, and a canary yellow shirt printed with redbirds, with the collar flattened outside his suit coat.
'Come in,' I said.
My secretary looked at me, trying to read my face.
'I'm going to take my lunch hour a little late today,' she said.
'Why don't you go now, Kate? Bring me an order of enchiladas and a root beer. You want something, Garland?'
His lips were as red as a clown's when he smiled, his head slightly tilted, as though the question were full of tangled wire.
He walked past me without answering. I could smell an odor like lye soap and sweat on his body. I closed the door, turned the key in the lock, and put the key in my watch pocket.
'What are you doin?' he said.
I sat behind my desk, smiled up at him, my eyes not quite focusing on him. I scratched the back of my hand.
'I asked you what you're doing,' he said.
'I think you're a lucky man. I think you ought to get out of town.'
'Why'd you lock the door?'
'I don't like to be disturbed.'
One side of his face seemed to wrinkle, his small blue eye watering, as though irritated by smoke. He was seated now, his thighs and hard buttocks flexed against the plastic bottom of the chair.
'I want to hire you. To file a suit. They took a cattle prod to me. They put it all over my private parts,' he said.
'My client's deposition has no meaning for you now. You're home free on murder beefs in two states. I wouldn't complicate my life at this point.'
'That little bitch they planted in the cell, what's his name, Lucas Smothers, he told y'all a mess of lies. I never had no such conversation with Jimmy Cole. I been jailing too long to do something like that.'
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
