Then she says, I bet the devil don't hate nothing worse than seeing his own money used against him.
I unrolled my blanket and covered our heads with it and put my arms inside her slicker, her face rubbing like a child's on my chest. I could feel her joined to me the way married folks is supposed to be and I knowed I didn't have to fight no more with all the voices and angry men that has lived inside me, and I saw the hailstones dancing in the fire and they was whiter than any snow, more pure than any words, and I heard the voice say Forgiven and I did not have to ask Who had spoken it.
The bailiff called from the courthouse. The jury was back in. chapter thirty-four
It wasn't a dramatic moment. It was a Friday night and the jury had asked the judge they be allowed to deliberate that evening, which meant they had no plans to return Saturday or Monday morning. The courtroom was almost deserted, the shadows of the oscillating fans shifting back and forth across the empty seats, the sounds of the late spring filtering through the high windows, as though the theater in our lives had already moved on and made spectators of us again.
Except for Lucas when the jury foreman read the verdict of not guilty. He shook hands with the jurors, the judge, with me and Vernon and Temple, with the bailiff, with the custodian mopping the hallway, with a soldier smoking a cigarette on the courthouse steps.
'That's it? There ain't no way it can be refiled, huh?' he said.
'That's it, bud,' I said.
His face was pink in the waving shadows of the trees. I could see words in his eyes, almost hear them in his throat. But Vernon stood next to him and whatever he wanted to say stayed caught in his face, like thoughts that wanted to eat their way out of his skin.
'Good night,' I said, and walked with Temple toward my car.
'Hold on. How much is the bill on all this?' Vernon said.
'There isn't one.'
'I ain't gonna take charity.'
'Well, I won't have you unhappy, Vernon. I'll send you the biggest bill I can.'
'Somebody's making obscene phone calls in the middle of the night. I think it's that little shit Darl Vanzandt.'
'Don't you or Lucas go near that kid.'
'What's Lucas supposed to do, live in a plastic bubble?… Hold on. I ain't finished. What you said when Lucas was on the stand, I mean, what you done to yourself to get him off, well… I guess it speaks for itself.'
His face looked flat, his hands awkward at his sides.
'Good night, Vernon.'
'Good night,' he said.
Pete came by early the next morning to go fishing in the tank. He was barefoot and wore a straw hat with a big St Louis Cardinals pin on it and a pair of faded jeans with dark blue iron-on patches on the knees.
'The water's pretty high after all that rain,' I said.
'What's a fish care long as you drop the worm in front of him?'
'You surely are smart.'
'I always know when you're gonna say something like that, Billy Bob. It don't do you no good.' He grinned at me, then looked out confidently at the world.
We picked up our cane poles in the barn and walked past the windmill down to the tank. The sun was soft and yellow on the horizon and patches of fog still hung on the water's surface. A bass flopped inside the flooded willows on the far bank, and a solitary moccasin swam across the center of the tank, its body coiling and uncoiling behind its triangular head. Pete trapped a grasshopper under his hat and threaded it on his hook, then swung his line and bobber out past the lily pads.
'There's a lady knocking on your back door, Billy Bob,' he said.
I turned and looked toward the house. She wore a white skirt and blouse and a wide hat with flowers on it, and even at a distance I could almost feel the electricity, in her movements, the anger in her balled fist as she continued, unrelentingly, to knock on the screen door.
'Is it that government lady who used to come out?' Pete asked.
'No, I'm afraid it's a walking neurosis by the name of Emma Vanzandt.'
He mouthed the words walking neurosis to himself.
Then Emma saw me and got in her car and drove around the barn and out to the tank. She stepped out of the car and stood at the bottom of the levee, her ankles and knees close together, her face strangely composed, like that of a person who lives with ferocious energies that she can call upon whenever necessary.
'I wanted to say something to you at your home, so you'd know my words weren't spoken to you as a result of a chance encounter,' she said.
'I've never underestimated your sense of purpose, Emma.'
'You've ruined my marriage and destroyed our family. I don't blame you for wanting to get your son off, but at heart you're a voyeur with the instincts of a garbage rat. The fact that we've had you in our home fills me with a level of disgust that's hard to express.'
'How about the dues other people have paid for you, Emma? Lucas and Roseanne Hazlitt and Bunny Vogel? Don't their lives mean anything?'
'Bunny Vogel is an overall-and-denim gigolo. I never met your son. And I gave Roseanne Hazlitt a job in our church's store. Does that answer your question?'
'Jack was in business with Sammy Mace. Y'all are friends of Felix Ringo. Why don't you check out this guy's record? I heard him tell a story about wiring up somebody to a telephone crank.'
'I have nothing else to say to you, sir. You're an ill-bred, disingenuous, violent man. You live in the West End where you can pretend you're otherwise. I just feel sorry for those who are taken in by you.'
Her eyes lingered on Pete with a look of both pity and disdain.
Then she got in her car and realized she had removed the keys from the ignition and had placed them either on the seat or the dashboard. She stuck her fingers down the cracks in the seat, searched along the back floor, felt over the top of the dashboard, stirred through the coins and litter inside the pocket of the console. Her fingers started to tremble and lines appeared in the caked makeup on her brow like string in wet clay and her breath speckled her lips with saliva.
I picked up the keys off the ground and handed them to her through the window.
'Garland Moon's off his chain. If y'all sicked him on Bunny or me through Felix Ringo, you'd better hire some private security,' I said.
She was hunched over the wheel, twisting the key in the ignition, her eyes manic with rage and humiliation.
'I'm going to have the skin peeled off your body in strips,' she said.
She dropped the car in reverse, knocked me aside with the open door, and gouged a huge divot out of the levee with the back bumper. Then she corrected the front wheels and pressed the accelerator to the floor and scoured mud and shredded grass into a green balloon behind her car.
I walked down the levee with my pole and stood above a cluster of lily pads and bounced a worm up and down on the bottom, my scalp tightening with the tangle of thoughts in my head.
'That lady didn't have the right to say them kind of things to you,' Pete said.
'When you're a cop, or sometimes a lawyer, you serve up people's lives on a dung fork, Pete. They usually deserve it, but it's never a good moment.'
'I wouldn't pay that lady no mind. You're the best friend I ever had, Billy Bob.'
'That man who came by y'all's house and looked in your mom's window?'
The expression went out of his face, as though he had remembered a bad dream that should not have been part of the waking day.
'I gave him a beating, then turned him loose on somebody else. Maybe on that woman who just left,' I said.
Pete looked at me, then averted his eyes. His mouth was parted, his cheeks gray.
'You done that?' he said.
The Conquistador Apartments were built of white stucco and blue tile on the highway that led to San Antonio. The gardens around the pool and the outside wall were overlaid with gravel and planted with Spanish daggers,
