'I don't know. I got to get out. I cain't breathe good. It's hot in here.'
He opened the back door and stood in the breeze. The hills were flushed with a dark purple haze now, the strings of lights over the parking lot humming with a hot buzz like nests of electrified insects.
He walked to the men's room, but the door, which was metal and fire-engine-red, was bolted from the inside. He stared at the rows of parked cars, at the Mexican and black cooks through the kitchen window, the waitresses who carried metal trays loaded with food and frosted mugs of root beer. They all seemed to function with an orderly purpose from which he was excluded, that he witnessed as a clown staring through a glass wall. His face tingled and simultaneously felt dead to the touch. He hadn't felt this drunk, no, train-wrecked, since the night Roseanne Hazlitt was attacked. That thought made him break into a fresh sweat.
He gave up waiting for the person to come out of the locked rest room and walked back to Bunny's car, his eyes avoiding Darl and his friends. The engines in both the Chevy and Ford were idling, the Hollywood mufflers throbbing above the asphalt like a dull headache.
'Hey, what's happenin', man?' Darl said.
'Hi, Darl,' Lucas said.
'You want to ride out with us?'
'Bunny's taking me. Thanks, anyway.'
'Good-looking threads, man. They're gonna dig it,' Darl said. Somebody in the backseat laughed, then dropped his unfinished fish sandwich out the chopped-down slit of a window.
Darl grinned at Lucas as he drove the Ford out of the parking lot onto the highway, his boxed haircut and one-dimensional profile rippled with the glow of the overhead beer sign. When he gave the Ford the gas the rear end rocked back on the springs and wisps of smoke spun off the back tires.
Lucas started to open the back door of the Chevy. Bunny's head was-twisted around in the window, looking at him, the corner of his lip pinched down between his teeth.
'Kid, you ain't got to do this. Most of those country club people are dickheads. Maybe we ought to say fuck it,' Bunny said.
The girls sat expressionless, their gaze fastened on their cigarettes, waiting, as though caught between Bunny and a predesigned plan that was about to go astray.
'I'm all right. I'm gonna get some coffee out there. It's not a late gig, it's just one or two sets, anyway,' he said. He sat down on the rolled white leather and tried to wash a taste like pennies out of his mouth with the last swallows in a bottle of Lone Star that one of the girls handed him.
Bunny didn't seem to move for a long time, biting a piece of skin off the ball of his thumb. Then he shifted the Chevy into gear and turned out of the lighted parking lot into the darkness of the highway.
By the time they reached the country club, Lucas's hair was mushy with his own sweat; his tongue felt too large for his mouth; his hands had the coordination of skillets.
He saw the columned front porch of the country club go by the back window of Bunny's Chevy, then the swimming pool that was built in the shape of a shamrock. The voices around him were like cacophony in a cave. Up ahead, Darl Vanzandt's Ford and two other cars with kids inside them were parked in the shadows, under live-oak trees, just outside the flood lamps that lighted the terrace where people in formal dress were dancing to orchestra music. Bunny slowed the Chevy and turned in the seat and looked at Lucas.
'You gonna be sick?' he said.
But Lucas couldn't answer.
Bunny hit the steering wheel with the flat of his fist. 'Oh man, how'd I get in this?' he said.
Then Darl was at the window, his friends behind him. Their cigarettes sparked like fireflies in the darkness. One of them carried a lidded bucket by the bail.
'How much acid you give him?' the boy with the bucket said.
'I didn't give him nothing,' Bunny said.
'Pull him out,' Darl said.
'Let it slide, Darl. He's really fried,' Bunny said.
'Smothers is a geek. So he gets what geeks got coming,' Darl said.
'Come on, think about it. Your old man's gonna shit a bowling ball,' Bunny said.
'Here's twenty dollars. Go down to San Antone and get a blow job. You'll feel better,' Darl said. He was leaning on the window jamb now. He touched the stiffened edges of two ten-dollar bills against Bunny's jawbone.
Bunny pushed his hand away.
'I ain't gonna do this,' he said.
'Pretty fucking late, Bunny,' the boy with the bucket said. Then he dropped his voice into a deep range and said, 'I ain't gonna do this. I got my fucking standards.'
'You know what it's like to pull a two-by-four out of your ass?' Bunny said.
'So you don't have to help. Pop the trunk,' Darl said.
Two of Darl's friends lifted Lucas by his arms out of the back seat and held him between them like a crucified man. Bunny breathed loudly through his nose, then pulled a latch under the dash. Darl reached into the trunk, took out Lucas's twelve-string guitar and case by the handle, and slammed the lid.
'Thanks for hauling the freight. No hard feelings. You got no beef with him. I do,' Darl said.
Bunny started his car and began backing off the grass toward the drive. He had cut his headlights, but in silhouette he could see Darl and his friends pulling off Lucas's clothes, like medieval grave robbers stripping a corpse. The girl in the front seat with Bunny clicked on the radio, increased the volume, and began putting on fresh makeup.
'He buys you blow jobs? That's disgusting,' she said.
'Act like your brain stem ain't a stump,' he said, then in his frustration clenched the steering wheel so tightly his palms burned.
'Let's go back to the drive-in. I got to pee,' a girl in the backseat said.
Bunny wanted to floor the Chevy across the grass and hedges and flower beds onto the drive, but he stared dumbly at the scene taking place in front of him, wondering even then how he would deal with this later, wondering, perhaps, even who or what he was.
Lucas was shirtless, sitting on his buttocks now, his trousers pulled down around his feet, encircled by Darl and the three boys from the drive-in and the others who had gotten out of their cars. But Bunny's attention was diverted by another figure, an older man, one whose pale skin seemed to glisten with a dull sheen like glycerin. On the edge of the circle, his face softly shadowed by the branches of a long-leaf pine, was Garland T. Moon, a cigarette cupped in his hand, like a soldier smoking furtively on guard duty. The corner of his mouth was wrinkled in a smile.
Two boys with their caps on backward hiked Lucas up from the ground. Darl draped the guitar from its cloth strap around Lucas's neck while another boy tightened Lucas's belt around his ankles. Then they stretched wide the elastic on his Jockey undershorts and poured mud and straw and liquid excrement from a feeder lot down his buttocks and genitals and dragged him to the edge of the terrace.
Then the two boys holding Lucas stopped, unsure, wavering in the roar of brass and saxophones.
'No, no, it's show time, babies,' Darl said.
His words, his cynicism, his vague and encompassing contempt, seemed to animate the two boys, who for just a moment had probably themselves felt like moths hovering outside the radius of a flame. They carried Lucas into the space between the orchestra and dance area, his feet dragging on the flagstones, his head lolling on his shoulder, a befouled, bone-white man who looked as though his neurological system had melted.
When they dropped him and ran, he tried to push himself to his feet. But he tripped and fell, his guitar clattering on the stone. His skin was beaded with sweat and dirt and aura-ed with humidity in the glare of the flood lamps; his mouth was a stupefied slit across a roll of bread dough. He propped himself on his elbows and stared out at the dancers.
But the membership and management at Post Oaks Country Club were not made up of people who let the world intrude easily upon them. The band never faltered; the eyes of the dancers registered Lucas's presence for no more than a few seconds; and a security guard and waiter wrapped a tablecloth around him and removed him as they would a sack of garbage a prankster had thrown over the wall.
But later, inside the aluminum shed where Lucas sat on a bench among the club's garden tools, throwing up
