something you're really ashamed of, maybe something related to her death.'
'I guess I just ain't smart enough to figure all them things out, Mr Holland.'
'The Mexican kid called you a pimp?'
'If that's what somebody told you.'
'That's when you swung on him?'
'Wouldn't you?' He cocked his arm to throw another football, then dropped it back into the orange crate. 'I got to go to work. Anything else on your mind?'
'Yeah, what kind of game is Darl Vanzandt trying to run on Lucas Smothers?'
'What them two do ain't my business.'
'What is?'
'Sir?'
'Cleaning up after a moral retard for the Vanzandt family?'
'People don't talk to me like that.'
'I just did. Watch your back, Bunny. Before it's over, I think Darl will kick a two-by-four up your ass,' I said, and walked back to my car.
I looked through the windshield at him before I backed out. His hands were propped on his hips, his mouth a tight seam, his disfigured profile pointed at the ground. Then he drove his cleated shoe into the slats of the orange crate and showered footballs over the yard. chapter nineteen
Pete's mother waited tables in a diner out by the slaughterhouse. Sometimes the men she met in bars beat her up, stole her money, and got her fired from her jobs. Last year she was found wandering behind a motel in her slip and was put in a detox center for three days. After she got out, a choleric judge who reeked of cigars and self- righteousness lectured her in front of morning court and sentenced her to pick up trash on the highways for six weekends with a group of high school delinquents.
I sat in her living room and explained why Pete needed to stay at Temple Carrol's house for a while. She listened without expression, in her waitress uniform, her knees close together, her hands folded in her lap, as though I held some legitimate legal power over her life. There were circles under her eyes, and her hair was lank and colorless on each side of her narrow face.
'Cain't y'all just go arrest the guy wrote you that letter?' she asked.
'There weren't any fingerprints on it. We don't know who sent it.'
'The social worker wants him here when she makes her home call. Y'all ain't gonna keep him real long, are you? I cain't get in no more trouble with Social Services.'
Late Friday afternoon I looked down from my office window and saw Darl Vanzandt's cherry-red '32 Ford turn into the square. The roof was 'chopped'-vertical sections had been cut out of the body so that the top was lowered several inches and the windows looked like slits in a machine-gun bunker-and I had a hard time telling who sat in the passenger's seat, one gnarled arm hooked on the outside panel. Then the car turned out of the evening glare into the shade and I saw the profile of Garland T. Moon.
They parked off the square in front of the Mexican grocery and went inside. Then Moon came out alone, leaned against the car, and began eating ice cream with a plastic spoon from a paper cup.
I walked across the square through the shadows and stopped in front of him. He wore pleated, beltless khakis high up on his hips and a ribbed sleeveless undershirt that looked stitched to his skin.
'What are you doing with the kid?' I said.
He licked the ice cream off his spoon. A shaft of sunlight fell like a dagger across his face, and his receded eye watered in the glare.
'He likes Mexican girls. I introduced him to a lady friend of mine got a house across the border,' he said.
'You ought to stick to your own kind. The Vanzandts are out of your league.'
'Y'all all in my league, boy. Me and him got us an arrangement.' He winked at me.
Inside the grocery, by the small soda fountain in back, I could see Darl talking to a group of kids three or fours years younger than he. The girls had earrings through their noses, even their eyebrows.
'You dealing, Moon?' I said.
'Me? I don't have nothing to do with drugs. I won't even go into a drugstore. That's a fact,' he replied. He spooned the ice cream into his mouth. His lips dripped with whiteness when he smiled.
I drove over to Lucas Smothers's house and found him in the backyard, working on the Indian motorcycle. He had rolled the dents out of the fenders and repainted them and mounted a new sheepskin seat on the frame. The wind was still warm and I could smell the water that had just been released from the irrigation ditch into the vegetable rows beyond the barn.
'You know Darl's hanging with Garland Moon now?' I asked.
He set down a wrench on a rag that he had spread on the ground.
'With Moon?' he said.
'That's right.'
He looked into space, then picked up the wrench and went back to work.
'Where can I find the Mexican biker Bunny Vogel got into it with?' I asked.
'Guy picked up Roseanne at work sometimes?'
'That's the one.'
'He's supposed to be a Purple Heart. They used to be a Los Angeles gang. Some Mexicans in San Antone use their name now.'
'Can you put me with this guy?'
'I never had nothing to do with gangs, Mr Holland. I always went my own way. It didn't do no good, though.'
'Why would he call Bunny a pimp?'
'That don't make sense to me. Bunny's stand-up.'
'Stand-up? He does grunt work for the Vanzandts because he's afraid to start over again. What do you call that?'
'Everybody don't get to choose what they want to be,' he said. Then he paused in his work and looked me directly in the face. 'Or what last name they got, either.'
That night Mary Beth and I went to a movie at the Rialto theater on the square. When we came back outside the air was warm and smelled of the few raindrops that tumbled out of an almost clear sky. The sidewalk was marbled with the green and pink neon on the marquee, and the tops of the live oaks on the courthouse lawn rustled in the wind and shaped and reshaped their silhouettes against the lighted clock tower. The street was filled with the same long line of cars and motorcycles that filled it every Friday and Saturday night, radios blaring with rap music, an occasional beer bottle or can arching onto the courthouse lawn.
They weren't all bad kids, not even the East Enders, who were incapable of understanding a world where people lived from paycheck to paycheck and, in the last heat wave, even died because they couldn't adequately cool their houses.
Maybe what bothered me most about them was the way they feigned profligacy as almost a deliberate insult to the very fates that had blessed them.
For some reason I remembered a scene years ago with L.Q. Navarro. We had picked up a prisoner in Denver, leg-chained him through a D-ring on the back floor, and were headed back to Texas when L.Q. saw a faded wood sign by the roadside north of Trinidad.
'I want to stop here,' he said.
'What is it?' I asked.
'I'll show you what guts was like back in 1914,' he said.
We drove west down a dirt road flanked with pinion trees and hardpan, the mountains purple and edged with fire in the sunset, and stopped at a wire-enclosed monument erected by the United Mine Workers in memory of the striking miners and their families who were shot or asphyxiated to death by state militia and Rockefeller gun thugs during the Ludlow Massacre. There was no US government or state memorial. The monument itself was a fairly simple one, a large block of inscribed stone adorned with statues next to a heavy trap door that opened on a flight of stairs and a basement with decayed plaster walls.
Inside that same enclosure eleven children and two women died when the tents above them were set on fire. The names on the monument were almost all those of Italian and Mexican immigrants.
