I had thought I had put my violent ways behind me. But just as my loins yearn for the nocturnal caress of the Rose of Cimarron, my palm wishes to curve around the hardness of my Navy. 36. I purely hate these men, God forgive me for my words, but they make me ashamed to be a member of the white race and give me dreams about the old life and the men whose faces I lighted with gunfire while people watched from the balconies of saloons and brothels.
Jennie and I have moved into a cabin up on the hillock overlooking the river. We have peach and apple trees in the yard and curtains in the windows she sewn from her old dresses. But I cannot pretend those outlaws are not down below in their mud caves, their squaws rolling opium in little balls for their pipes, the stolen dollars they almost lost in a river drying on clotheslines.
Maybe I hate them because the nature of their abode and of their fornication is the only difference between us. This question has troubled me sorely and I raised it to Jennie. She did not reply and went out to the woodstove in back and began frying meat for our breakfast. She was not hardly dressed and in the early light her young body looked like that of a savage. The sight of her filled me with a passion that I could not contain, that even in the cool air of our bedroom made her palms damp with my sweat.
I am fifty-six years old and fear I do not know who I am.
Pete walked hot and dusty and happy into the shade, his fielder's glove hooked on its strap through his belt.
'We still gonna get peach ice cream?' he said.
'I wouldn't go a day without it,' I replied.
'You know them men out yonder, Billy Bob? They been around the block twice, like they was lost or something.'
I looked over my shoulder, out on the hard-packed dirt street. Both the cars were dark and waxed, with tinted windows and radio antennas. I stood up and put on my Stetson and walked over to Beau and stroked his head and fed him a sugar cube with the flat of my hand. The cars pulled up along the edge of the rain ditch, and the passenger window in the front of the lead car rolled down on its electric motor.
The man from Mary Beth's apartment looked at me from behind aviator's sunglasses.
'You already stomped the shit out of Roy Devins. Maybe it's time to leave his welfare to others,' he said.
'You know how it is, a guy gets bored and starts to wonder why feds are running around in his county, making veiled threats, acting like heavy-handed pricks, that sort of thing,' I said.
He laughed to himself.
'How about staying out of Dodge?' he said.
'I expect we're on the same side, aren't we?'
'You're a defense lawyer, pal. You get paid to keep the asswipes out of the gray-bar hotel chain.' His gaze drifted to Pete, then back on me. 'You really stick playing cards in the mouths of dead wets down in Coahuila?'
I stroked Beau once along his mane, then stepped across the rain ditch and leaned down into the open window of the lead car.
'I worked with a Ranger named L.Q. Navarro. We took down the mules and burned out the stash houses y'all didn't know how to find. You couldn't shine his boots, bud.'
He took off his sunglasses and looked indolently into my face.
'You like the lady, don't make trouble for her. You're an intelligent man. You can work with this, I'm convinced of it,' he said, and motioned to his driver.
Pete and I watched the two cars move slowly away, the windows sealed against the dust, the whitewall tires crunching delicately on the gravel as though the two drivers did not want to chip the gleaming finish on the cars' exteriors.
'You pretty mad, Billy Bob?' Pete said.
'No, not really.'
'For a person that's been river baptized and converted to Catholic, too, you sure know how to tell a fib.'
I rubbed the top of his soft, brushlike hair as the two cars turned down a dirt alley and their dust rolled across the wash hanging behind a row of clapboard shacks. chapter fourteen
The typical isolation unit in a prison is a surreal place of silence, bare stone, solid iron doors, and loss of all distinction between night and day. Its intention is to lock up the prisoner with the worst company possible, namely, his own thoughts.
But fear and guilt have corrosive effects in the free people's world as well.
Bunny Vogel passed my house twice, driving a customized maroon '55 Chevy, before he mustered the courage to turn in the driveway and walk out to the chicken run in back, where I was picking up eggs in an apple basket.
He wore an unbuttoned silk shirt and jeans and Roman sandals without socks, and his tangled bronze-colored hair seemed to glow on the tips against the late sun. With his classical profile and his abdominal muscles that were like oiled leather, he could have been a male model for the covers of romance novels, except for the sunken scar that curled like an inset pink worm along his jawbone.
'Pretty nice automobile,' I said.
'What you said the night you busted Darl in the nose? About me being loyal to a guy who cost me a pro career?'
'I didn't mean to offend you, Bunny.'
He let out a breath. 'I think you're gonna pin the tail on any donkey you can. I ain't gonna be it, Mr Holland,' he said.
'You want to come inside?'
'No… The old black guy out at Shorty's told you Roseanne Hazlitt slapped somebody in the parking lot the night she was killed.'
'How do you know that?'
'Darl heard the old guy'd been talking to you. So he kind of got in his face about it.'
'He's quite a kid. I don't think I've ever known one exactly like him.'
'It was me she slapped. I ain't gonna hide it no more.'
I picked up a brown egg from behind a tractor tire and dropped it in the basket. I didn't look at him. I could hear him breathing in the silence.
'But that's when I left. I didn't see Roseanne or Darl or none of the others after that. I ain't part of nothing that happened later that night,' he said.
'Who was?'
'God's truth, Mr Holland, I don't know.'
'You told me you weren't mixed up with Roseanne, Bunny.'
He kneaded his fists at his sides and the veins in his forearms swelled with blood. Then his face colored and his eyes glazed with shame.
'Damn, I knew this was gonna be a sonofabitch,' he said.
This is the story he told me.
He was a high school senior, on the varsity, with the kind of bone-breaking running power that left tacklers dazed and sometimes bloody in his wake, when he first noticed her watching him at practice from the empty stands.
He remembered the balmy gold afternoon that he walked over to her, his cleats crunching on the cinder- and-pea-gravel track, and tossed the football into her hands. He thought it was a clever thing to do, the kind of gesture that disarmed most girls, that made them feel vulnerable and a little foolish and gave them a chance to be coy and defenseless in his presence.
She flipped it back at him with both hands, so fast he had to duck to avoid being hit in the face. Then she opened her compact and put on lipstick as though he were not there.
'How old are you, anyway?' he asked.
'Fifteen. You got something against being fifteen?' She squeezed her knees together and wagged them back and forth.
He looked back over his shoulder at the practice field, at the second-string, whose attention was absorbed with thudding their pads against one another and running plays they would never be allowed to run in a game that counted.
