I stopped the Morgan by the side window.
'You see him?' I asked.
That's him yonder, by the pool table. The one eating chili beans out of a paper plate.'
'I want you to go on back to the cafe and wait for me.'
'Maybe you oughtn't to do this, Billy Bob. My eye don't hurt now.'
'Did you eat lunch yet?'
'He's got a frog sticker in his right-hand pocket. I seen it when he…'
'When he what?'
'Hung up his britches on my mother's bedpost.'
I put five dollars in Pete's hand, 'Better get you a hamburger steak and one of those peach ice cream sundaes. I'll be along in a minute.'
Pete slid off the Morgan's rump and walked down the street toward the cafe, looking back over his shoulder at me, the lump by his eye as red as a boil.
I took the polyrope off the pommel, unfastened the pig string that held the coil in place, worked the length of the rope through my palms and ran the bottom end through the eye at the tip. Then I double-folded the rope along half the loop, picked up the slack off the ground, and rode my Morgan up on the porch and through the doorway, ducking down on his withers to get under the jamb.
The inside of the tavern was well lighted and paneled with lacquered yellow pine, and neon Lone Star and Pearl beer signs and an enormous Texas flag were hung over the bar.
'I hope you brung your own dustpan and whisk broom,' the bartender said.
I rode the Morgan between a cluster of tables and chairs and across a small dance floor toward the pool table. The man eating from a paper plate looked at me, smiling, a spoonful of chili halfway to his mouth. He wore a neatly barbered blond beard and a shark tooth necklace and a blue leather vest and black jeans and silver boots sheathed with metal plates.
I whipped the loop three times over my head and flung it at the man with the blond beard. It slapped down on him hard and caught him under one arm and across the top of the torso. He tried to rise from the chair and free himself, but I wound the rope tightly around the pommel, brought my left spur into the Morgan's side, and catapulted the blond man off his feet and dragged him caroming through tables and bar stools and splintering chairs, into an oak post and the legs of a pinball machine and the side of the jukebox, tearing a huge plastic divot out of the casing. Then I ducked my head under the doorjamb, and the Morgan clopped across the porch and into the road, and I gave him the spurs again.
I dragged the blond man skittering through the parking lot, across layers of flattened beer cans and bottle caps embedded in the dirt. His clothes were gray with dust now, his face barked and bleeding, both of his hands gripped on the rope as he tried to pull himself free of the pressure that bound his chest.
I reined in the Morgan and turned him in a slow circle while the blond man rose to his feet.
'Tell me why this is happening to you,' I said.
'Wha-' he began.
'You turn around and you tell all these people how you hurt a child,' I said.
He wiped the blood off his nose with the flat of his hand.
'His mama told me there was a fellow liked to put his head up her dress,' he said.
I got down from the saddle and hooked him in the nose, then grabbed his neck and the back of his shirt and drove his head into the corner of the porch post.
The skin split in a scarlet star at the crown of his skull. When he went down, I couldn't stop. I saw my boot and spur rake across his face, then I tried to kick him again and felt myself topple backward off balance.
Pete was hanging on my arm, the five-dollar bill crushed in his palm, his eyes hollow with fear as though he were looking at a stranger.
'Stop, Billy Bob! Please don't do it no more!' he said, his voice sobbing in the peel of sirens that came from two directions.
chapter nine
I sat in the enclosed gloom of the sheriff's office, across from his desk and the leviathan silhouette of his body against the back window. The deputy who had arrested me leaned against the log wall, his face covered in shadow. The sheriff took his cigar out of his mouth and leaned over the spittoon by the corner of his desk and spit.
'You turned that fellow into a human pinball. What's the matter with you?' he said.
'It's time to charge me or cut me loose, sheriff,' I said.
'Just keep your britches on. You don't think I got enough drunk nigras and white trash in my jail without having to worry about the goddamn lawyers?… Ah, there's the man right now. Cain't you beat up somebody without starting an international incident?' he said.
The door opened, and a dark-skinned man in a tropical hat with a green plastic window built into the brim and a tan suit that had no creases entered the room. He removed his hat and shook the sheriff's hand, then the uniformed deputy's and mine. He was a little older than I, in his midforties, perhaps, his jawline fleshy, his thin mustache like the romantic affectation of a 1930s leading man.
'Felix Ringo, a Mexican drug agent?' I repeated.
'Yeah, you know that name, man? Is gringo. My ancestor, he was a famous American outlaw,' he said.
'Johnny Ringo?' I said.
'Yeah, that was his name. He got into it with guys like, the guy there in Arizona, was always wearing a black suit in the movies, yeah, that guy Wyatt Earp.'
'Felix is jalapeno and shit on toast south of the Rio Grande. You fucked up his bust, Billy Bob,' the sheriff said.
'Oh?' I said.
'The guy you drug up and down, man, I been following him six months. He's gonna be gone now,' the Mexican said.
'Maybe you should have taken him down six months ago. He hurt a little boy this morning.'
'Yeah, man, but maybe you don't see the big picture. We take one guy down, we roll him over, then we take another guy down. See, patience is, how you call it, the virtue here.'
'The guy I pulled out of that bar isn't the Medellin Cartel North. What is this stuff, sheriff?' I said.
The sheriff rolled his cigar in the center of his mouth and looked at the Mexican drug agent.
'Billy Bob used to be a Texas Ranger, so he looks down on the ordinary pissant work most of us have to do,' he said.
'That's a bad fucking attitude, man,' Felix Ringo said.
'Get out your fingerprint pad or I'm gone, sheriff,' I said.
He dropped his cigar hissing into the spittoon.
'There's the door. Don't mistake my gesture. Stay the hell out of what don't concern you,' he said.
Felix Ringo followed me outside. The light was hard and bright on the stone buildings in the square, the trees a violent green against the sky. I could see Mary Beth Sweeney outside her cruiser, writing on a clipboard in the shade. She stopped and stared across the lawn at me and the man named Felix Ringo.
'You want something?' I asked him.
'I seen you somewhere before. You was a Ranger?' he said.
'What about it?'
'You guys did stuff at night, maybe killed some people that was fruit pickers crossing the river, that didn't have nothing to do with dope.'
'You're full of shit, too, bud,' I said, and walked toward the cab stand across the street.
I stepped off the curb and waited for a car to pass.
Then I heard her voice behind me.
'Hey, Billy Bob,' she said.
