'I ain't got no objection to that.' He stood up and removed a Mexican spur from a peg on the wall and spun the rowel with one finger. It was one of the spurs my friend L.Q. Navarro had worn the night he died down in Coahuila. 'I hear you been messing with the Purple Hearts,' he said.
'Who told you this?'
'I saw Jeff Deitrich at Val's Drive-in.'
'You know why his father would want to get mixed up with Mexican gangbangers?'
'I don't know about his old man. I know about Jeff, though.'
'Oh?'
'His reg'lar is a gal named Rita Summers. I said to him once, 'She's sure a nice girl. In fact, she's got it all, don't she?' He goes, 'So does vanilla ice cream, Lucas. That don't mean you cain't try chocolate.''
He spun the rowel on the spur, then hung the spur back on the peg.
We drove through the hills in the cooling shadows to Shorty's and ate dinner on a screen porch that rested on pilings above the river. The water was high and milky green, and it flowed around the edge of a hill and dropped over boulders into pools that were white with cottonwood seeds. The air was cool now and smelled of fern and wet stone, and when the sun set, Shorty, the owner, turned on the electric lights in the oak trees that shaded his picnic tables.
The country band on the dance floor was just warming up.
'Got me a job roughnecking this summer. Got a bluegrass gig in Fredericksburg, too,' Lucas said.
'You've done great, bud,' I said.
He smiled but his eyes were looking beyond me, through the screen, at the shadows of the trees on the cliff wall across the river.
'Be careful with Deitrich,' he said.
'I don't think Earl's a real big challenge.'
His fork paused in front of his mouth. Then he set it in his plate. 'I ain't talking about Earl,' he said. 'Jeff used to go down to Austin to roll homosexuals. Not for the money. Just to stomp the shit out of them. I always been too ashamed to tell anybody I seen it.'
His eyes were downcast when he picked up his fork again. His face looked curiously like a girl's.
Peggy Jean didn't have to flirt to attract men to her. Oddly, a show of fatigue in her face, a buried injury, an unshared problem, made you want to step into her life and walk with her into the private places of the heart. Her vulnerability wove webs that allowed you to enter them without shame or caution.
On Thursday morning I saw her by her pickup truck at a farm supply and tack store on the edge of town. A clerk was carrying a western saddle from inside the store to the back of the truck while she waited by the open tailgate, a platinum American Express card held loosely between two fingers.
'Oh, hello, Billy Bob,' she said when I walked up behind her. She wore tight riding pants and a checkered shirt and sunglasses, and she pushed her glasses more tightly against her face when she smiled.
'Beautiful saddle,' I said.
'It's for Jeff's birthday.' She kept one side of her face turned from me, as though she were waiting for someone else to emerge from inside the store.
'You already paid, Ms. Deitrich?' the clerk said, looking at the credit card in her hand.
'No, I'm sorry. I'll go inside and take care of it,' she replied.
'Let me have your card and I'll bring the charge slip out here for you to sign. It ain't no trouble at all,' the clerk said, and took the card from between her fingers before she could reply.
Peggy Jean looked away awkwardly at the loading platform. Her skin high up on one cheekbone was heavily made up with rouge and powder.
'Everything okay, Peggy Jean?' I said.
'Oh yes, just one of those days,' she said, then smiled, like an afterthought. 'It's so windy out here today.' She took a bandanna from her back pocket and tied it around her hair, knotting it under her chin.
'It's too bad about the accountant, that fellow named Greenbaum. He seemed like a nice man,' I said.
'What are you talking about?'
'He's dead. He was jumped by some gangbangers at Herman Park in Houston.'
' Max? When?'
'I'm sorry. I thought y'all knew.'
'No… I heard nothing… You're talking about Max Greenbaum?'
She seemed to look about her, as though the answer to her confusion were inside the wind.
I stepped closer to her, my fingers touching her elbows.
'I'll drive you home,' I said.
'No… Absolutely not… Billy Bob, please, just…'
She walked away from me and stood in the shade by the driver's door of her pickup, her arms folded in front of her, as though she were creating a sanctuary that I couldn't enter. The clerk came out of the store with her credit card and charge slip attached to a clipboard. Then he saw her expression and his face turned inward and he lowered his eyes.
'If you'll just sign this, ma'am, I'll take care of everything and you can be on your way,' he said.
'Peggy Jean-' I began.
'I'm sorry for my lack of composure. Max? No, there's a mistake about this,' she said, and got in her truck and scoured a cloud of pink dust out of the parking lot.
I sat in the half-light of my office and drank a cup of coffee. On the wall, encased in glass on a field of blue felt, were the. 36-caliber Navy Colt revolvers and octagon-barrel lever-action '73 Winchester rifle that had been carried by my great-grandpa Sam Morgan Holland when he was a drover on the Chisholm Trail. In his life he had also been in the Fourth Texas at Little Round Top, a violent drunkard who shot five or six men in gun duels, and finally a saddle preacher who took his ministry into the godless moonscape west of the Pecos.
The bluing on Sam's weapons had long ago been rubbed off by holster wear, and the steel now had the dull hue of an old nickel. In Sam's diary he described his encounters with John Wesley Hardin, Wild Bill Longley, and the Dalton-Doolin gang, all of whom he loathed as either psychopaths or white trash. But in his account of their depredations there is never an indication that the worst of them ever struck a woman.
In the historical South the physical abuse of a woman by a man was on a level with sodomy of animals. Such a man was considered a moral and physical coward and was merely horsewhipped if he was lucky.
But today a woman who did not flee the batterer or seek legal redress was usually consigned to her fate, even considered deserving of it.
I wondered what Great-Grandpa Sam would do in my situation.
I set my empty coffee cup in my saucer, opened my Rolodex to the 'D' section, and punched a number into my telephone.
'Earl?' I said.
'Yes?'
'Who hit your wife?'
'What?'
'You heard me. On the right side of her face.'
'You've got some damn nerve.'
'So it was you?'
'You keep your carping, self-righteous mouth off my family.'
'Touch her again and I'll catch you out in public. Everything you own or you can buy won't help you.'
He slammed down the phone. I sat for a long time in the pale light glowing through the blinds, the fingers of my right hand curling into the oil and moisture on my palm.
That evening a lacquered red biplane dropped out of an absolutely blue sky, circled once over the river, and landed in the pasture beyond the tank. I got into the Avalon and drove past the chicken run and barn and windmill and out through the tall grass that grew at the foot of the levee. When I came around the willows at the far end of the tank I saw the man named Bubba Grimes, who had claimed that Wilbur Pickett had tried to sell him bearer bonds; he was leaning against the fuselage of his plane, pouring from a dark bottle of Cold Duck into a paper cup.
'You tend to show up in a peculiar fashion, Mr. Grimes,' I said, getting out of the Avalon.
