'A lot of TDC graduates hated his guts,' I said.
Marvin looked back at the log house. His face was dry and cool in the wind, but the skin jumped in one cheek, as though a string were pulling on it.
'Two Secret Service agents were in here earlier. What's their stake in a guy who spit Red Man on restaurant floors?' he said.
'Not DEA?'
'No.'
'One of them was named Brian?'
'That's right, Brian Wilcox. A real charmer. You know him?'
'Maybe. You want to go to breakfast?'
'After looking at what's inside that house?'
'The sheriff was a violent man. He dealt the play a long time ago.'
'Where the fuck do you get your ideas? Pardon my language. Violent man? That's your contribution? Thanks for coming out, Billy Bob. I don't think my morning would have been complete without it.'
I drove up a sandy, red road that twisted and dipped through hardwoods and old log skids and pipeline right- of-ways that were now choked with second growth.
Up ahead, a dark, polished car with tinted windows and a radio antenna came out of an intersecting road and stopped in front of me.
The man whom Mary Beth called Brian got out first, followed by two others who also wore aviator's sunglasses and the same opaque expression. But one man, who had rolled down a back window part way, did not get out. Instead, Felix Ringo, the Mexican drug agent, lit a cigarette in a gold holder and let the smoke curl above the window's edge.
'Step out of your car,' Brian said.
'I don't think so,' I said.
The man next to him opened my door.
'Don't be shy,' he said.
I turned off the ignition and stepped out among them. The air was motionless between the trees and smelled of pines and the rainwater in the road's depressions. Brian raised his finger in my face. It stayed there, uncertainly, as though he were on the brink of doing something much more serious and precipitous.
'I don't have the right words. Maybe it's enough to simply say I don't like you,' he said.
'You're over the line, bud,' I said.
'You're not a police officer anymore, you're not an assistant US attorney, you're a meddlesome civilian. That fact seems to elude you.'
'You going to move your car now?'
'No.' His finger was stiff, the nail thin and sharp and trembling below my eye. 'Stay away from crime scenes that don't concern you, stay away from the lady… You got anything clever to say?'
'Not really. Except if you put your finger in my face again, I'm going to break your jaw. Now, get your fucking car out of my way.'
I went back home and weeded the vegetable garden. I curried out Beau and cleaned his stall and set out catfish lines in the tank and shoveled out the chicken run and worked buckets of manure into my compost pile with a pitchfork, my calluses squeezing tighter and tighter on the smooth wood of the handle, until I finally gave it all up and flung the pitchfork into a hay bale and went inside.
The palms of my hands rang as though they had been stung by bees, as though they ached to close on an object that was hard and round and cool against the skin and flanged with a knurled hammer that cocked back with a loud snap under the thumb.
Moon had said some people are made different in the womb. Was he just describing himself, or did the group extend to people like me and Great-grandpa Sam?
Or Darl Vanzandt?
Through my open front windows I heard the deep, throaty rumble of the Hollywood mufflers on his '32 Ford, then a cacophony of straight pipes and overpowered engines and chopped-down Harleys behind him.
He turned into the drive, alone, the exposed chrome engine so fine-tuned a silver dollar would balance on the air cleaners. His friends pulled onto the shoulder of the road, on my grass, their tires crumpling the border of my flower beds. They cut their engines and lit cigarettes and lounged against their cars and trucks and vans and motorcycles, as though their physical connection to a public road gave them moral license to behave in any fashion they wished.
Darl swung a dead cat by its tail, whipping it faster and faster through the air, and thudded it against the screen door.
I went out on the porch with my cordless phone in my hand.
'I already put in a 911 on you, Darl. Time to head for the barn,' I said.
'I'm gonna kick your ass. Don't believe me, you chicken-shit lying motherfucker? Come out here and see what happens next,' he said.
I walked toward him. His wide-set green eyes seemed to shift in and out of focus, as though different objects were approaching him at the same time. His upper lip was beaded with perspiration, his nostrils dilated and pale. The skin of his face drew back against the bone. I could smell beer and fried meat and onions on his breath.
'I mean you no harm. I never have. Neither does Lucas. Go on home,' I said.
'You're in my face every day. You're spreading lies all over town.'
'You and your friends killed somebody's cat? That's what y'all do to show everybody you're big shit?'
'I ain't afraid of you.'
I stepped between him and the road, with my back to his friends, cutting off his view of them.
'Bunny Vogel's not here to bail you out. You're stoned and you're frightened. If you force me to, I'll show everyone here how frightened you are,' I said.
'If I was scared, I wouldn't be here.'
'You're afraid of what you are, Darl. Your folks know it. In their guts, those guys out there do, too. You elicit pity.'
He opened his mouth to speak. It made a phlegmy, clicking sound but no words came out. His resolve, all the martial energy he had been able to muster while driving down the road with his Greek chorus surrounding him, seemed to fade in his eyes like snowflakes drifting onto a woodstove.
'Talk to your dad. Get some help. Don't do something like this again,' I said.
'I been sick. I had flu all week. I don't have to listen to anything you-' he said.
I cupped my hand around his upper arm. It felt flaccid, without tone or texture, as though the downers in his system had melted the muscle into warm tallow. I opened his car door for him, put him inside, and closed the door. His eyes were filled with water, his cheeks flushed with pale red arrowpoints.
'You want a cop to drive you home?' I asked.
He didn't answer. When I went back inside it was quiet for a long time, then I heard his engine start up and his tires crunch on the gravel and back out on the road. Some of the others followed, looking at one another, unsure, and some turned back toward town, all of them like people trying to create their own reality, from moment to moment, inside a vacuum.
The country club had been all-white since its inception in the early 1940s, first by the legal exclusivity the law allowed at the time, then by custom and defiance and contempt. It had remained an island of wealth and serenity in an era that had produced cities scrawled with graffiti and streets populated by the homeless and deranged.
The groundskeepers adjusted the amounts of water and liquid nitrogen fed into the grass to ensure the fairways were emerald green year-round, no matter how dry or cold the season. The swimming pool was constructed in the shape of a shamrock, and those who stepped down into its turquoise sun-bladed surface seem to glow with a health and radiance that perhaps validated the old literary saw that the very rich are very different from you and me.
The main building was an immaculate, blinding white, with a circular drive and a columned porch and a glassed-in restaurant with a terrace shaded by potted palm and banana trees that were moved into a solarium during the cold months. A hedge as impenetrable as a limestone wall protected the club on one side, the bluffs and the lazy green expanse of the river on the other. Recessions and wars might come and go, but Deaf Smith's country
