That afternoon Temple Carrol found me back by the windmill, hoeing out my vegetable garden. The sky behind her was purple and yellow with rain clouds, the air already heavy with the smell of ozone.
'My sister-in-law works at the video store. This tape was in the night drop box this morning,' she said.
I stopped work and leaned on my hoe. The blades of the windmill were ginning rapidly overhead.
'Somebody must have dropped it in by mistake. You'd better take a look,' she said.
We went through the back of the house to the library and plugged the cassette into the VCR.
At first the handheld camera swung wildly through trees illuminated by headlights, rock music blaring on the audio, then the camera steadied, as though it were aimed across a car hood, and we saw kids climbing out of convertibles, throwing ropes of beer on each other, passing joints, kissing each other hard on the mouth for the camera's benefit, their features as white as milk.
Then we saw her in an alcove of trees, in Clorox-faded jeans and a maroon T-shirt with a luminous horse head on it, a longneck beer in one hand, a joint in the other, dancing to the music as though there were no one else present on earth.
'Roseanne Hazlitt,' I said.
'Wait till you see what a small-town girl can do with the right audience,' Temple said.
Her auburn hair was partially pinned up in swirls on her head, but one long strand curled around her neck like a snake. She let the beer bottle, then the joint, drop from her fingers into the weeds, and began to sway her hips, her eyes closed, her profile turned to the camera. She pulled her T-shirt over her head, her hair collapsing on her shoulders, arched her shoulders back so that the tops of her breasts almost burst out of her bra, unsnapped her jeans and stepped out of them, then twined her hands in the air and rotated her hips, ran her fingers over her panties and thighs, grasped the back of her neck and widened her legs and opened her mouth in feigned orgasm and pushed her hair over her head so that it cascaded down her face while her tongue made a red circle inside her lips.
The screen turned to snow.
'How about the look on those boys watching her?' Temple said.
'You recognize any of them?' I asked.
'Three or four. Jocks with yesterday's ice cream for brains. How do kids get that screwed up?'
I looked at my watch. It had started to rain outside and the hills were aura-ed with a cold green light like the tarnish on brass.
'I'll buy you a barbecue dinner at Shorty's,' I said, and dropped the Polaroid photo of Darl Vanzandt in front of her.
We sat on the screen porch and ate plates of cole slaw and refried beans and chicken that had been cooked on a mesquite fire. The river that flowed under the pilings of the club was dented with raindrops, the trees along the bank smoky with mist. Downstream, some boys were swinging out over the water on a rubber tire tied to a rope, cannonballing into the current.
I heard beer cans clattering outside the screen.
'He's an old-timer, Temple. Let's try to keep him in a better mood this time,' I said.
'I'll just watch. Maybe I can learn how it's done,' she said.
We went out the side door to a woodshed with a tarp that was extended out from the roof on slanted poles. The elderly black man we had interviewed earlier in the week was heaving two vinyl sacks of cans into the shed. When he saw us, he took his stub of a pipe out of his shirt pocket and pared the charcoal out of the bowl with a penknife.
'My memory ain't no better than it was the other day. Must be age. Or maybe I don't take to rudeness,' he said. He pointed the stem of his pipe at Temple.
'I get the notion you don't like working here,' I said.
'The job's fine. What a lot of people do here ain't.'
I held the Polaroid of Darl Vanzandt in front of him. He dipped his pipe in a leather tobacco pouch and pressed the tobacco down into the bowl with the ball of his thumb.
'Is that the boy Roseanne Hazlitt slapped?' I said.
He struck a wood match and cupped it over his pipe, puffing smoke out into the rain. He tossed the match into a puddle and watched it go out.
'You a church man?' I said.
'My wife and me belong to a church in town. If that's what you're axing.'
'That girl didn't deserve to die the way she did,' I said.
He tapped his fingernail on the Polaroid.
'That ain't the one she slapped,' he said. His eyes lingered for a moment on mine, then looked out into the rain.
'But he was in the crowd?' I asked.
'A boy like that don't have no use for anybody else 'cause he don't have no use for himself. What other kind of place he gonna go to? Come back tonight, he'll be here, insulting people, yelling on the dance flo', getting sick out in the weeds. He ain't hard to find.'
'Was he here the night she was attacked?' I said.
'Why you giving me this truck? You know the one question y'all ain't axed me? Who'd that po' girl leave with? It was Lucas Smothers. That's what I seen.' He pointed to the corner of his eye. 'Y'all always think you find the right nigger, you gonna get the answer you want.'
In the car, I felt Temple's eyes on the side of my face. She rubbed me on the arm with the back of her finger.
'Lucas didn't do it, Billy Bob,' she said.
On the way home, by chance and accident, Temple and I witnessed a peculiar event, one that would only add to the questions for which I had no answer.
It had stopped raining, but the sky was sealed with clouds that were as black as gun cotton and mist floated off the river and clung to the sides of the low hills along the two-lane road. A quarter mile ahead of us, a flatbed truck with a welding machine mounted behind the cab veered back and forth across the yellow stripe. A sheriff's cruiser that had been parked under an overpass, the trunk up to hide the emergency flasher on the roof, pulled the truck to the side of the road and two uniformed deputies got out, slipping their batons into the rings on their belts.
It should have been an easy roadside DWI arrest. It wasn't. The driver of the truck, his khakis and white T- shirt streaked with grease, his face dilated and red with alcohol, fell from the cab into the road, his hard hat rolling away like a tiddledywink. He got to his feet, his ankles spread wide for balance, and started swinging, his first blow snapping a deputy's jaw back against his shoulder.
The other deputy whipped his baton across the tendon behind the truck driver's knee and crumpled him to the asphalt.
It should have been over. It wasn't. We had passed the truck now, and the two deputies were into their own program.
'Uh-oh,' Temple said.
They lifted the drunk man by each arm and dragged him on his knees to the far side of the truck. Then we saw the humped silhouettes by the back tire and the balled fists and the batons rising and falling, like men trading off hammer strokes on a tent post.
I touched the brake, pulled to the shoulder, and began backing up in the weeds.
From under the overpass a second cruiser came hard down the road, its blue, white, and red emergency flasher on, water blowing in a vortex behind it. The driver cut to the shoulder, hit the high beams, and the airplane lights burned into the faces of the two deputies and the bloodied man huddled at their knees.
The driver of the second cruiser got out and stood just behind the glare that blinded the two deputies, a portable radio in her left hand, the other on the butt of her holstered nine-millimeter.
'Y'all got a problem here?' Mary Beth Sweeney said.
That night I fell asleep as an electrical storm moved across the drenched hills and disappeared in the west, filling the clouds with flickers of light like burning candles in a Mexican church that smelled of incense and stone and water.
Or like cartridges exploding in the chambers of L.Q. Navarro's blue-black, ivory-handled, custom-made. 45
