don't know it.'
He started laughing, hard, his flat chest shaking, sweat rolling through the dirt rings on his neck, the wisps of red hair on his scalp flecked with bits of black ash.
I picked up Mary Beth Sweeney at her apartment that evening and we drove down the old two-lane toward the county line. She wore a pale organdy dress and white pumps and earrings with blue stones in them, and I could smell the baby powder she used to cover the freckles on her shoulders and neck.
Twice she glanced at the road behind us.
'You having regrets?' I asked.
Her eyes moved over my face.
'I don't think your situation is compromised. The sheriff's corrupt, but he's not Phi Beta Kappa material,' I said.
'What are you talking about?'
'I think you work for the G,' I said.
'The G? Like the government?'
'That's the way I'd read it.'
'I'm starting to feel a little uncomfortable about this, Billy Bob.'
She gazed out the side window so I couldn't see her expression. We crossed the river and the planks on the bridge rattled under my tires.
'My great-grandfather's ranch ran for six miles right along that bank,' I said. 'He used to trail two thousand head at a time to the railhead in Kansas, then he gave up guns and whiskey and became a saddle preacher. His only temptation in life after that was the Rose of Cimarron.'
'I'm sorry. I wasn't listening,' she said.
'My great-grandpa… He was a gunfighter turned preacher, but he had a love affair with an outlaw woman called the Rose of Cimarron. She was a member of the Dalton-Doolin gang. He wrote in his journal that his head got turned by the sweetest and most dangerous woman in Oklahoma Territory.'
'I'm afraid you've lost me,' she said.
I tried to laugh. 'You're a fed. This county's got a long history of political corruption, Mary Beth. There're some violent people here.'
'How about the prosecutor, Marvin Pomroy?'
'He's an honest man. As far as I know, anyway. Are you FBI?'
'Can we forget this conversation?' she said.
I didn't answer. We pulled into a Mexican restaurant built of logs and scrolled with neon. I walked around to the passenger side to open the door for her, but she was already standing outside.
The hills to the west were rimmed with a purple glow when I drove her back home. During the evening I had managed to say almost nothing that was not inept and awkward. I turned into her apartment building and parked by the brick wall that bordered the swimming pool.
'Maybe I should say good night here,' I said.
'No, come in for a drink.'
'I've made you uneasy. I don't want to compound it.'
'You're patronizing me… I don't understand you, Billy Bob. You quit a career as a law officer and then as an assistant US attorney to be a defense lawyer. You like putting dope mules back on the street?'
'I won't handle traffickers.'
'Because you're a cop. You think like one.'
I heard cars behind me on the road, the same two-lane that I could follow, if I were willing, into Val Verde County and beyond, across the river, into an arroyo where horses reared in the gunfire and a man in a pinstriped suit and ash gray Stetson and Mexican spurs grabbed at his breast and called out to the sky.
We were outside the car now. My ears were popping, as though I were on an airplane that suddenly had lost altitude.
I heard myself say something.
'I beg your pardon?' Mary Beth said, her mouth partly open.
My face felt cold, impervious to the wind, the skin pulled back against the bone. Like the penitent who refuses to accept the priest's absolution through the grilled window inside the confessional, I felt the words rise once more in my throat, as in a dream that knows no end.
'I killed my best friend. His name was L.Q. Navarro. He was a Texas Ranger,' I said.
Her lips moved soundlessly, her eyes disjointed as though she were looking at a fractured image inside a child's kaleidoscope.
At noon the next day I walked from my office to the pawnshop down the street from the health club. The three-hundred-pound black woman who owned it, whose name was Ella Mae, wore glass beads in her hair and a white T-shirt that read: I Don't Give a Fuck-Don't Leave Home Without American Express.
On the wall behind the counter were scores of guns and musical instruments. I pointed at one.
'Can you give me a good deal, Ella Mae?' I said.
'Honey, if we was back in the old days, I'd pay to pick your cotton. That's the truth. Wouldn't put you on,' she said.
But after she had rung up my purchase, her mood changed, as though she were stepping across a line she had drawn between herself and white people.
'The other day when you was here? You gone on to your car, but a man with red hair was watching you. He had a coat on without no shirt,' she said.
'What about him?'
'The look in his face, honey. He started to come in here and I locked the door.' She shook her head, as though she feared her words could make the image a reality.
That evening I drove to Lucas Smothers's house. Vernon was sitting on the steps, a bottle of strawberry soda beside him. His clothes were dirty from his work, his face lined with streaks of dried sweat. A wheelbarrow filled with compost and crisscrossed with rakes and a shovel stood in the front yard. Under Lucas's screen was a bright patch of white paint.
'Is Lucas home?' I asked.
'He took the truck to town.'
'Did the sheriff do anything about those kids who tore up your lawn?'
'That tub of guts is doing good to get himself on and off the toilet seat.'
'Is Lucas at the poolroom?'
'No, they're handing out free beer at the Baptist church tonight.'
'It's always a pleasure, Vernon.'
But Vernon had another side, one that wouldn't allow me the freedom to simply condemn and dismiss him. When I was almost out the drive, he rose from the steps and called my name and walked out to the road. He pulled a cloth cap from his back pocket and popped it open and flicked it against his thigh, as though he could not bring himself to admit the nature of his fear and love and his dependence upon others.
'What kind of chance has he got? Don't lie to me, either,' he said.
'It doesn't look real good right now.'
'It ain't right… I swear, if they send that boy to prison…' He breathed hard through his nose. 'I killed people in Vietnam didn't do nothing to me.'
'I'd get a lot of distance between me and those kinds of thoughts, Vernon.'
'Damn, if you don't always have to get up on the high ground. Excuse me for asking, but who died and made you God?' he said, and went inside the house. You didn't win with Vernon Smothers.
I drove downtown and parked in front of the poolroom, a gaunt, two-story building that was over a hundred years old. It had a wood colonnade and elevated sidewalk inset with iron hitching poles, a stamped tin ceiling, oak floors as thick as railroad ties, a railed bar with spittoons, card and domino tables, a woodburning stove, and a toilet down a back hallway with the water tank high up on the wall.
Down the row of pool tables, I saw Lucas chalking a cue, sipping off of a long-neck beer. He wore a pair of gray slacks and loafers and a starched lavender shirt and he had put gel in his hair.
'Come on outside,' I said.
