wire,' he replied.
He walked toward the doorway, his back to me, his hands on his hips, splaying his coat out. I raised my hand to speak, then he was gone into the hallway and I heard the wind fling open the front door and fill the house with a creaking of boards and wallpaper.
I parked my Avalon behind the tin shed where Garland T. Moon worked as a welder and entered through the back door. The heat inside was numbing. A propane-fed foundry roared in one corner, a cauldron of melted aluminum wedged in the flames. Moon wore sandals without socks and a pair of flesh-colored gym shorts that were molded against his loins. He was bent over a machinist's vise, cutting a chunk of angle iron in half with an acetylene torch, his back spiderwebbed with rivulets pf sweat.
He heard me behind him, screwed down the feed on the torch, and pulled off his black goggles with his thumb. Dirty strings of soot floated down on his head and shoulders. His eyes dropped to my belt. He pulled at his nose.
'You come here to gun me?' he said.
'What's your hold on these kids?'
'It ain't no mystery. Cooze and dope. The high school clinic already gives them the rubbers. I just introduce them to what you might call more mature Mexican women.'
'You're a genuinely evil man, sir.'
'You got to stick a gun down in your britches to tell me that?' He laughed to himself and wiped his hands with an oil rag. The muscles in his stomach looked as hard as corrugated metal. 'You got your ovaries stoked up 'cause them boys poured cow shit on your son?'
'They almost killed a deputy sheriff last night.'
He picked up a can of warm soda from the workbench and drank, his throat working smoothly, his gaze focused indifferently out the door on the river.
'The doctors said I was supposed to be dead eight years ago. Said I was plumb eat up with cancer. I smell death in my sleep. It comes to somebody else first, better them than me,' he said. He wiped his armpits with the rag and threw it on the floor.
I looked at his softly muted profile, his recessed, liquid blue eye, the ridged brow that was like a vestige of an earlier ancestor. My forearm rested on the butt of L.Q. Navarro's revolver. I lifted the revolver from my belt, my palm folded across the cylinder, and laid it on the workbench.
'Pick it up,' I said.
He lit a cigarette, picked a particle of tobacco off his lip and dropped it from between his fingers.
'I cain't be hurt, boy. I live in here,' he said, and pointed to the side of his head. 'I learned it when a three- hundred-pound nigger stuffed a sock in my mouth and taught me about love.'
I pulled a photograph from my shirt pocket and held it up in front of him.
'Is the boy in overalls you?' I asked.
He lifted it out of my hand and smiled while he studied it. He tossed it on top of the revolver and smoked his cigarette, a merry light in one eye.
'My father taught you how to weld, didn't he?' I said.
'He wasn't bad at it. I'm better, though.'
'I think a man like you must come out of a furnace.'
'That's the first thing you said today made any sense.'
I took a six-inch bone-handled game knife out of my pocket and pried open the single blade. Two days ago I had ground it on an emery wheel in the barn and stropped it on an old saddle flap, and the buffed ripples along the edge looked like the undulations in a stiletto.
I lay the photograph down on his workbench and sliced it in half.
'My father was a fine man. You're a piece of shit, Moon. You don't belong in his past anymore than you do in our present,' I said.
I pulled loose the severed image of the child who had become the man standing before me and dropped it into the foundry. It curled immediately into a film of ash and rose into the air like a black butterfly.
Then I hit him across the mouth with the back of my hand, my ring breaking his lip against his teeth.
Moon grinned and spit blood onto the molten rim of the foundry. He blotted his mouth with his palm before he spoke. 'A man got that much hate in him is a whole lot more like me than he thinks,' he said. chapter twenty- four
Virgil Morales, the San Antonio Purple Heart who liked to call other people 'spermbrain', sat in my office with his girlfriend from Austin, looking at his watch and waiting for me to get off the phone. The girlfriend was named Jamie Lake and she had winged dragons tattooed on both her sun-browned shoulders. She also smelled as if she had been smoking reefer inside a closed auto-mobile.
Temple Carrol leaned against a table behind them, her arms folded, looking at Jamie Lake as though Jamie had swum through a hole in the dimension.
I finished talking to my friend whom I had paid to run polygraphs on both of them.
'He says all indications are you're telling the truth,' I said to Virgil.
'So that's supposed to make me feel good?' he replied.
'The tests aren't always conclusive. Yours is,' I said.
'Glad to hear it. When you want us back?'
'We empanel the jury in ten days.'
'I been this route before. No disrespect, but I don't want to come up here every morning at seven-thirty and sit on a bench in a hallway and play with my Johnson till somebody remembers I'm a friend of the court,' he said.
'How about I send somebody for you? Will that be okay?' I asked.
He stretched out one leg and rubbed the inside of his thigh. 'Yeah, that's probably the best way to do it. Call first, though, okay?'
Jamie Lake chewed gum with her mouth open. Her hair was long and dark blonde and her face narrow, with a pinched light in it. 'Why do I get the feeling I'm anybody's fuck here?' she asked.
'My friend, the man who ran the polygraph on you, says he couldn't make a determination. It happens sometimes,' I said.
'Yeah? Well, I don't believe you. I think your friend was trying to see down my tank top,' she said.
'Maybe he was.'
'So get fucko back on the phone. I told him the truth. I didn't come all this way for y'all's bullshit.'
In the background, Temple cocked her head and looked at me.
'My friend thinks you might have had contact with a few pharmaceuticals before the test,' I said.
'You had us both UA-ed. You tell that asshole I have an IQ of one-sixty and I remember everything I see, like in a camera. Also tell him I think he's probably a needle dick.'
'I'll try to pass it on,' I replied.
'Do we get some expense money for gas and meals?' Virgil said.
'You bet. The secretary's got it. Y'all have been real helpful,' I said. I didn't look at Jamie Lake.
'Kiss my ass,' she said.
Just then, my secretary buzzed me on the intercom.
'Billy Bob, it's Lucas Smothers,' she said, and before I could respond, Lucas opened the inner office door and walked inside.
'I'm sorry. I didn't know you was in here with anybody,' he said.
'It's all right,' I said.
Jamie Lake's eyes seemed to peel Lucas's clothes off his skin. Then she turned her glare on me.
'Ask him what other time he had that shirt on,' she said.
'Excuse me?' I said.
'The night we saw him in the picnic ground. That's all he had on. His pants were around his knees and he was passed out, and he had that blue-white check shirt on, with the little gold horns on the shoulders. He was passed out, with his underwear down on his moon, and she was puking in the bushes,' she said.
Lucas's face turned dark red.
'Yeah, she's right. But I don't understand what's going on,' he said.
