'You want to go to a movie tonight?' he asked.
'The drive-in?'
'It don't have to be the drive-in.'
'I'll think about it.'
'You'll think about it?'
'I work at the Dairy Queen. I get off at six. I'll let you know then.'
He watched her walk down the empty concrete aisle, then across the worn grass to the bus stop in front of the school, her hips swaying under her plaid skirt. He kept glancing back at the practice field, as though someone were watching him, and his own thoughts confused and angered him.
He was at the Dairy Queen at five-thirty.
They did it a week later, amid a drone of cicadas, in the back of his uncle's old Plymouth, on cushions that smelled of dust and nicotine, and he realized immediately she had lied and that she was a virgin and he was hurting her even more deeply than the gasp, the clutch of pain in her throat, indicated. But he couldn't stop, nor did he know how to be gentle, nor could he admit that most of his sexual experience had been with Mexican prostitutes in San Antonio and the mill women his father brought home when he was drunk.
He was frightened when he saw how much she bled and he offered to drive her to a hospital in another county.
'You afraid to take me to one here?' she said.
'I don't want you in trouble with your folks, that's all,' he lied.
'I don't need a doctor, anyhow. Did you like me?' she said.
'Yeah, sure.'
'No, you didn't. But you will next time,' she said, and kissed him on the cheek.
Her hand found his. The trees that had gone dark outside the car made him think of stone pillars wrapped with the tracings of fireflies, but he did not know why.
He saw her two days later in front of the shoe store downtown and bought her a lemon Coke at the small soda fountain in back of the Mexican grocery. He told her he would call her that evening but he didn't.
Two weeks passed before he realized it was not he who had avoided her; she had made no phone call to him, had not come out to the practice field as he had expected, had not told anything of their first date to anyone he knew.
He found himself watching her at her job at the Dairy Queen from his parked car across the street. Then one night at closing time he saw her go in back, in her uniform, and emerge moments later from a side door in suede boots and tight jeans and hoop earrings and vinyl black jacket, her mouth bright with fresh lipstick, and mount the back of a motorcycle a Mexican kid who looked carved out of an oak stump sat splayed upon, his genitalia sculpted against his jeans.
A half hour later he found them both at the drive-in restaurant north of town.
'Get in my car, Roseanne,' he said. Then to the Mexican boy, 'Here the drift, greaseball. You can ride your hog home and fuck your fist tonight. Or walk out of here on broken sticks.'
'Oh yeah, she told me about you… Vogel, the running bo-hunk, right?' the Mexican replied. 'I got news for you, sperm-brain. She's jailbait. I hope you end up in the Walls and somebody jams a chainsaw up your cheeks.'
An hour later Bunny and Roseanne made love on a bare mattress in the darkened back of the filling station where he worked on weekends.
Through the rest of his senior year she was available whenever he wanted her. She rarely made demands or threw temper tantrums, and the fact that he didn't take her to the parties or places where his friends went seemed of no concern to her. But he would realize, again, belatedly, as had always been the case, he did not really understand the nature of the game. Just as he had worried that her age would diminish him in the eyes of his classmates (until he discovered that, as a West Ender, he was not expected to date anyone of significance, anyway), he also learned that Roseanne didn't care about his world or friends because she had brought him into hers.
Sophomore girls giggled when he walked by, and one time three of them hung a condom filled with milk on a string inside his hall locker. When they had slumber parties his father would be wakened by phone calls that made him wonder if his son had become a child molester.
Then Bunny began to wonder if there were not other men involved with Roseanne besides himself. She knew too much, controlled him too easily, discerned his moods and sexual weaknesses too easily, sitting on top of his thighs, pressing his face into her breasts, kissing his damp hair while he came inside her.
One night he forced the subject. 'You making it with somebody else, Roseanne?' he said.
'You're such a silly fucko sometimes… Oh, I'm sorry, baby. Come here.'
That same night they went to San Antonio and had small red hearts tattooed above their left nipples.
After graduation Bunny worked as a floorman on a drilling rig in Odessa. Then he reported for summer football camp at A amp;M and a strange phenomenon occurred in his life: he was no longer a West Ender.
He was invited to sorority mixers, into the homes of the wealthy, taken to dinner at the country club by businessmen, treated as though a collective family of magically anointed people had decided to adopt him as their son.
He didn't return to Deaf Smith until Thanksgiving. He didn't call Roseanne Hazlitt, either.
He expected anger, recrimination, maybe even a trip on her part to College Station and a public scene that would be ruinous for him. But she surprised him again.
It was the last game of the season, a blue-gold late fall afternoon like the one the previous year when he had crunched across the track on his cleats and flipped the football into her palms. He got up from the bench and walked back to the Gatorade cooler and saw her standing by the rail in the box seats, next to a marine in his dress uniform. Bunny stared at her stupidly. She took a mum from the corsage on her coat, blew him a kiss, and bounced the mum off his face.
'Hey, you too stuck-up to say hello, you ole fucko?' she said.
His bare head felt cold and small in the wind, somehow shrunken inside the weight of his shoulder pads.
'Why'd she slap you in front of Shorty's, Bunny?' I asked.
He stuck the flats of his hands in his back pockets. He kicked at the dirt and didn't reply.
I looked beyond his shoulder at his customized maroon Chevy, with oversize whitewalls and white leather interior.
'That's a great-looking car,' I said.
The next day, after work, I lit a candle in front of the statue of Christ's mother at the stucco church. The church was empty, except for Pete, who waited for me in a pew at the back. I walked back down the aisle, dipped my fingers in the holy water font and made the sign of the cross, then winked at Pete and waited for him to join me out on the steps.
The western sky was ribbed with scarlet clouds, and the air smelled of pines and irrigation water in a field.
'You come here just to light a candle?' Pete asked.
'A friend of mine died on this date eleven years ago. Down in Mexico,' I said.
'How old was he?'
'Just a mite older than me.'
'That's young to die, ain't it?'
'I guess it is.'
He nodded. Then his expression grew thoughtful, as though he were remembering a moment, a question, he had refused to face earlier. 'Them men who was in the cars out there, the ones made you mad, that one man said something about you sticking a playing card in the mouth of a dead wetback? You ain't done anything like that, huh?'
'They weren't wetbacks, Pete. They were bad guys. They got what they asked for.'
'That don't sound like you.'
'I lost my friend down there.'
'I didn't mean nothing.'
'I know that. You're the best, Pete.'
