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 chafe 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.
'My PI had to do some checking on Darl's record,' I said. I kept my eyes straight ahead on the piled dirt and sacks of pasteurized fertilizer and potted hydrangeas by the edge of a freshly spaded flower bed.
Jack cleared his throat slightly. 'Why's that?' he said.
'You don't want to find out later the other side is waiting for you with a baseball bat. Darl has four arrests involving violence of some kind… Am I correct, he beat up a waitress in a bar?'
Jack squatted by the mound of black dirt and picked up some pottery shards and rubbed them clean between his fingers. There was a thin, round place in the center of his gold hair.
'He shouldn't have been there. But she wasn't a waitress. She was a prostitute, and she and her pimp tried to roll him when they thought he was passed out,' he said.
'I'd like to take a Polaroid of Darl.'
'I'm a little unclear as to where this is going.'
'The kid who might take you for seven figures should at least be able to identify your son in a photo lineup.'
'Wait here. I'll get him.'
Five minutes later the two of them came out of the back of the house together. Even though it was almost noon, Darl's face looked thick with sleep. He raked his hair downward with a comb, then gazed at the lint that floated out in the sunlight.
'What's that spick say?' he asked.
'Darl…' his father began.
'That you blindsided him and kicked him on the ground,' I said.
'How about my car? I was supposed to enter it in the fifties show in Dallas. What right's he got to ruin my paint job?'
'That's a mean cut on your ring finger,' I said.
'It collided with a flying object. That guy's mouth.'
'Two weeks ago?'
'Yeah, his tooth broke off in my hand. I'm lucky I didn't have to get rabies shots.'
'Look up a little bit,' I said, and popped the flash on the Polaroid.
Darl's eyes stared back at me with the angry vacuity of an animal who believes it has been trapped in a box.
'I'm going back to the house,' he said.
'Thank Mr Holland for the help he's giving us, son,' Jack said.
'He's doing this for free? Get a life,' Darl said. Thick-bodied, sullen, his face unwashed, he walked through the shade, his hand caressing the peach fuzz along his jawbone.
Jack turned away, his fists knotted on his hips, his forearms corded with veins.
