He set down the bottle on the bottom wing of his plane and grinned at the corner of his mouth. His drooping left eye looked like gray rubber that had melted and cooled again.
'Got an offer for you. Wilbur Pickett is about to have some bad luck. Price is right, I can change all that,' he said.
'Wilbur's a poor man, Mr. Grimes. That means I'd have to give you money out of my own pocket. Now, why would I want to do that?'
'To bring down Earl Deitrich. The word is you topped his wife.'
'I think it's time for you to get back in your plane.'
He drank his paper cup empty and tossed it in the weeds. 'The man's weakness is gambling. You want my hep, here's my number. The two of us can mess him up proper,' he said, and shoved a penciled piece of notepad paper in my shirt pocket with two fingers.
'Get off my property,' I said.
He cut his head. 'I cain't blame you for not wanting to know your own mind. That woman's special. She's got a fragrance like roses. In Africa once, she'd been out working in the heat and she come in the tent, and the smell was like warm roses. It's too bad rich men always get the pick of the brooder house.'
In the red light his face was filled with a glow that was both saccharine and lustful. When he took off, he raised his bottle in salute; his plane clipped the top of a willow tree and scattered leaves behind him like green bird feathers.
Five days later Lucas Smothers came to my office and sat in the swayback deerhide chair in the corner and took off his hat and gazed out the window. He had been working in the fields with his stepfather, and I could smell an odor like grass and milk in his clothes. He had his mother's blue eyes, and the light seemed to enter and hold inside them as it would inside tinted crystal. His expression was deliberately innocuous, as it always was when he felt caught between his need to instruct and caution me and at the same time protect me from the knowledge of what his generation, with its rapacious addictions, was really like.
'A guy who runs around with Jeff? He told me this crazy story about him, about how Jeff ain't always in control like he pretends. It's a little off the wall, though,' he said.
'I'll try to handle it,' I said.
'That Mexican girl who got busted out on the highway, Esmeralda? It was Jeff called the cops on her. His friend says Jeff did a one-nighter with her. Except she won't go away and the truth is Jeff don't want her to, no matter what he tells himself and everybody else.'
I had to be in court in twenty minutes and I tried not to let my attention wander or my eyes drop to my wrist-watch.
'So a couple of nights ago Jeff drives his girlfriend, Rita Summers, down to this Mexican restaurant north of San Antone where Esmeralda works. Jeff's gonna show Esmeralda there's nothing between them and Rita is his reg'lar and he ain't afraid to get it all out in the open, if that's what it takes.
'All his buds are there, cranking down tequila sunrises and Carta Blanca, after they been smoking dope all the way from Deaf Smith. When Esmeralda walks by with a tray, some guy goes, 'I never thought I'd like to have sloppy seconds on a pepperbelly.'
'Jeff's face looked like he'd eaten a tack. Rita Summers don't say anything for a long time, then she calls Esmeralda over and goes, 'Excuse me, but this food tastes like dog turds.'
'Esmeralda looks back at her real serious and says, 'I know. That's why I don't eat here.''
'Pretty funny story,' I said.
He sat forward in his chair and folded his hands between his knees, his eyes staring at a place on the rug.
'Jeff can be a rough guy. But getting it on with Ronnie Cross's girl? Three white guys jumped Ronnie after a football game. He beat them up so bad one of them got down on his knees and begged,' he said.
'You worried about me?'
'Ronnie's girl was in your office. You had a run-in with Cholo. Something real bad's gonna come out of this. It's like the feeling I had when I was a kid. I'd wake up in the morning and there was a sick feeling around my heart, like a hand was squeezing it.'
'These kids don't have anything to do with my life, Lucas,' I said.
He looked out the window at the trees blowing in the wind, his skin puckered under one eye.
'Wilbur Pickett started all this. Now he's dragging you into his bullshit,' he said. 'You older people don't have no idea what goes on in this town. Y'all ain't never known.'
He stared down at the frayed bottoms of his jeans to hide the anger in his face.
That night it stormed and the house was cool and filled with wind and the smell of ozone. On nights like this I used to hear the tinkle of L.Q. Navarro's spurs, then he would be standing next to me in the library, the lightning flickering through the window on his grained skin and his lustrous black eyes.
L.Q. lived in my memory-in fact, was always present in some way in my life-but I didn't feel guilt about his death any longer and I seldom saw him during my waking hours. I kept his custom-made, blue-black. 45 revolver and his holster and cartridge belt in the top drawer of my desk, and sometimes I removed it from the leather and opened the loading gate and turned the cylinder one click at a time, peering through the whorls of light in each empty chamber, my palm wrapped around the yellowed ivory handles that seemed warm and sentient from his callused grip.
But L.Q. knew me better than I knew myself. On his visitations he would chide, ' Tell me it wasn't fun busting caps on them Mexican dope mules.'
And when I thought too long about our nocturnal raids into Old Mexico, I became like the untreated drunkard who has renounced whiskey, until in his denunciation he unconsciously begins to rub his lips with the flats of his fingers.
And just as I always did when these moments occurred, I drove to the small stucco church in a rural working-class neighborhood where I went to Mass and lighted a candle for L.Q. Navarro, for whom I converted to Catholicism after his death, as though somehow I could extend his life by taking on his faith.
Then I went next door to a clapboard cafe that served buffalo burgers and blueberry milk shakes and sat by the screen window and watched the lightning flicker on the pines in front of the church and listened to the thunder roll harmlessly away into the hills.
Lucas Smothers had tried to warn me about the youth culture, if one could call it that, of south-central Texas.
Why should he even have felt the need?
The answer was that Lucas, like L.Q. Navarro, knew me better than I knew myself.
I should have been able to walk away from the complexities surrounding the defense of Wilbur Pickett.
But the problem was a fragrance of roses. Bubba Grimes, the pilot with the drooping left eye, had said it. When Peggy Jean perspired she smelled like warm roses. She smelled like roses and bruised grass in an oak grove and skin that's sun-browned and cool and warm at the same time. All I had to do was close my eyes and I was back there in that heart-twisting moment with my face buried in her hair, unaware that she and I were creating a memory for which I would never find an adequate surrogate.
The next morning Hugo Roberts left a message on my office answering machine.
'We just made a second trip out to Wilbur Pickett's place. Guess what? That poor li'l peckerwood had a couple of them bonds hid in the panel of his wife's dresser. Thought I'd just keep you up to date. Have a good day.'
7
My son, Lucas, had told me that the older people of Deaf Smith had never known what really went on in our town. He was right. We talked about younger people as though they were no different from the generations of years past. Somehow the eye did not register the kids who were stoned by second period at the high school, the girls who had abortions, the kids infected with hepatitis and herpes and gonorrhea, or the ones who passed their backpacks through a window so they could get their guns past the school's metal detectors.
