'The doctor says Moon's insides looked like they'd been chewed by rats. Did you know somebody poured a can of Drano down his mouth when he was a kid in Sugarland?' Marvin said.
'Moon was a snitch?'
'I doubt it. It was probably because he wouldn't come across. That's not what's causing his problems today, though. He's got cancer of the stomach.'
'That's why he's back, isn't it? This is his last show,' I said. 'I should have put it together.'
'I'm not with you.'
'He told me he didn't drink. Then he told me he had some old DWIs hanging over his head.'
'Next time leave him in the toilet stall.'
I don't know to what degree Garland T. Moon helped coordinate the events of the next night. The pettiness of mind, the vindictiveness, the level of cruelty involved were all part of his mark. But so were they characteristic of Darl Vanzandt. They had found each other, and I suspected neither of them doubted for a moment the intentions and designs of the other, in the same way the psychologically malformed in a prison population stare into hundreds of other faces and immediately recognize those whose eyes are like their own, window holes that give onto the Abyss.
I heard the story from the outside and the inside, from Mary Beth, whose cruiser was the first to arrive on the 911 at the country club, from Vernon Smothers, and from Bunny Vogel. It was the kind of account, as Great-grandpa Sam had said, that made you ashamed to be a member of the white race. Darl Vanzandt and Moon were aberrations. But how about the others who, with foreknowledge and joy of heart, went along with their scheme?
Lucas had worked with his father in the fields that day and had told him he was going to play with the band that evening before a baseball game out at the old Cardinals training camp. Vernon Smothers did not believe him, but he had long ago come to believe his son would never tell him the truth about anything, that lack of trust was the only permanent reality in their relationship, and so he said nothing at four o'clock when Lucas walked hot and dusty from the field, stripped to his shorts by the barn, and picked the wood ticks off his body in a sluice of water from the windmill.
Lucas went inside and showered and dressed in a new pair of slacks and shined yellow boots and a form- fitting western-cut sports coat. When he came out on the porch the wind was fresh and cool in his face, the late afternoon filled with promise. He sat on the steps with his twelve-string guitar and waited for Bunny Vogel to pick him up. Lucas's father was still hoeing in the field, his body like a piece of scorched tin silhouetted against the sun, his back knotted with anger, perhaps, or just the demands of his work.
There were girls in Bunny's car, girls Vernon Smothers hadn't seen before. They wore tiny gold rings threaded through their eyebrows and the rims of their nostrils; they were thin and immature and not sexually appealing but dressed and behaved as though they were, wearing no bras, their shirts partially unbuttoned, their voices urgent and wired, as though they were in the midst of a party that had no walls.
Vernon didn't understand them. But how could he, he thought, when he couldn't even define what was wrong in his own life. Maybe it was the whole country, he told himself. Everything had gone to hell back in the 1960s. It was that damn war and the people who didn't have to fight it.
For a few minutes, that thought seemed to bring him solace. He watched from the window as Bunny's car drove away with his son.
Bunny, Lucas, and the girls went first to a bar and restaurant owned by Bunny's cousin on top of a hill that overlooked a long green valley. They ate barbecue sandwiches on a roofed porch in back and drank vodka collins that were filled with shaved ice and cherries and orange slices. The day had cooled, and the meadows on the hillside were bright with flowers and spring grass. The cousin gave them double shots for the price of one, and Lucas began to feel a closeness to Bunny and the girls that made him see them all in a new light, as though they had always been fast friends, more alike than he had ever thought, and the perfection of the evening were an affirmation that the world was indeed a fine place.
'You were great at A amp;M, Bunny,' Lucas said. 'I mean, you could still make it in the pros, I bet.'
'Yesterday's ink, kid,' Bunny said.
'He's not a kid. He's a… He's a… I don't know what he is,' one of the girls said, and giggled. She took a drink from her collins glass, and her mouth looked red and cold, like a dark cherry that waits to burst on the teeth. 'You're the best musician in the county, Lucas. You should have gone to East High. My father knows Clint Black and George Strait.' Her eyes blinked, as though the effort of organizing her thoughts had left her breathless.
'He owns the studio where Clint Black started out,' another girl said.
'No kidding?' Lucas said.
'He did 'til a bunch of Jews took it over,' the first girl said. Her eyes were blue, her head covered with blonde curls, and the alcoholic flush on her face made her look vulnerable and beautiful in spite of the harshness of her words.
'Clint Black is good as they get. So is George Strait,' Lucas said.
Bunny looked off at the hills, his coppery hair glinting against the late red sun. He seemed lost in his own thoughts now. The girls were silent, as though waiting for something, and for just a moment Lucas knew they didn't care about the names of country musicians and that he bored the girls by wanting to talk about them. But then why did they bring up the subject?
'Ain't we supposed to go to the country club now?' he asked.
'We've got time,' the girl whose father had owned a recording studio said. She held up her glass to a Mexican waiter and handed it and a credit card pressed under her thumb to him. She didn't speak, and upon his return with the drinks, she signed the charge slip and let him pick it and the pen off the table without ever speaking to him.
Lucas kept staring at the clock on the wall, one with green neon tubing around the outside of the face. The hands said a quarter to seven; then, when he looked again, he was sure only moments later, the hands said 7:25. He went to the men's room and washed and dried his face and looked in the mirror. His eyes were clear, his skin slightly red from the day in the fields. He wet his comb and ran it through his hair and walked back through the bar area, his boots solid on the stone floor.
Outside, Bunny looked at his watch. 'I guess we ought to haul ass,' he said.
Lucas picked up the fresh collins in front of him and drank half of it. It was as sweet as lemonade, the vodka subtle and cold and unthreatening. The girls watched him while he drank.
'What's going on?' he asked.
They smiled at one another.
'We were saying you're cute,' the third girl said.
'I'm fixing to boogie. Y'all coming or not?' Bunny said.
'Darl can throw a shitfit if you keep him waiting,' the blonde girl said.
'Darl?' Lucas said.
'We're gonna meet him at the drive-in. If he's not too wiped out,' she replied.
'Y'all didn't say nothing about Darl,' Lucas said.
'He wants to come. What's the law against that?' the blonde girl said. She stood up. Her face seemed angry now, vexed. 'People can go where they want. He can't help it if he's rich.'
'I didn't say that he…' Lucas began. He rose from his chair and felt a rush, like a hit of high-grade speed, a white needle that probed places in his mind he had never seen before. 'I just meant…'
But he didn't know what he meant, and he followed Bunny through the bar and out into the parking lot, the gravel crunching under his boots now, the wind hot for some unexplainable reason, tinged with the smell of alkali.
Later, they backed into an empty slot at the drive-in restaurant, next to Darl's softly buffed '32 Ford, and ordered a round of long-neck Lone Stars. Lucas could see the back of Darl's neck, thick and oily, pocked with acne scars. Three other boys were in the car with him, their caps on backward, their upper bodies swollen from steroid injections and pumping iron. One of them flipped a cigarette at the waitress's butt when she walked by.
Lucas drank down the beer. It felt cold and bright in his throat.
But he was sweating now, his heart beating faster than it should.
'I got to get out,' he said from the backseat.
'What's wrong?' Bunny said.
