'A pal? Oh yes,' she said, standing up. 'Always glad to be a pal. See you later, cowboy. Don't let your worries over the Purple Hearts screw up your day.'
I still hadn't eaten lunch and I walked over to the Langtry Hotel. It had been built of sandstone in the nineteenth century, with a wood colonnade over the elevated sidewalk that was still inset with tethering rings. Supposedly the Sundance Kid and his schoolteacher mistress, Etta Place, had stayed there, as well as the vaudevillians Eddie Foy and Will Rogers. The upstairs rooms were boarded up now, but the old bar, with its white, octagon-tile floor and stamped tin ceiling, was still open, as well as the dining room, which was paneled with carved mahogany and oak and hung with chandeliers that when lighted looked like yellow ice.
Diagonally parked in front of the entrance was Earl Deitrich's maroon Lincoln, its chrome wire wheels and immaculate white sidewalls blazing in the sunlight. The velvet curtains were open in the dining room and I could see Earl and Peggy Jean at a long, linen-covered table with some of the town's leading businesspeople. Peggy Jean, whom I had never seen drink, had an Old-Fashioned glass in her hand.
Don't go in. Leave them alone, I thought.
Then, with all the caution of a drunk careening down a sidewalk, I thought, Like hell I will.
I sat at a small table by the window, across the room from them, and ordered. Earl and his friends were in high spirits, garrulous and loud, Earl's laughter even more cacophonous than the others, as though it welled up from some irreverent and arrogant knowledge about the world that only he possessed.
I listened to it for five minutes, then could take it no longer. On the table next to me was an abandoned copy of the morning paper. I folded it in half and walked to Earl's table and set it by his elbow, so the headline about the fire in Houston could not escape his vision.
'Too bad about those four firemen who got burned to death on your property last night,' I said.
The mirth in his face died like air leaking from a balloon.
'Yes. It's a terrible thing. I've been keeping in touch by telephone,' he said.
'Hugo Roberts's trained cretins picked up Skyler Doolittle on a bogus beef. I think you know what I'm talking about,' I said.
'No, I don't,' he said.
'You cheated him at cards. He got in your face about it. So you had Hugo's Brownshirts roust him.'
Earl smiled tolerantly and shook his head. The other men at the table looked like they had been frame-frozen in a film, their hands poised on a napkin, a water glass, their eyes neutral.
'Go back to your table, sir,' the owner, a California entrepreneur, said behind me.
'No, no, he's invited here. You sit down with us, Billy Bob,' Peggy Jean said, her throat flushed, her mouth stiff and unnatural and cold-looking from the whiskey and iced cherries in her Old-Fashioned glass.
I put one hand on the table and leaned down toward Earl's face. His fine brown hair hung on his brow.
'You paid Hugo Roberts to plant evidence on Wilbur Pickett. Then you shamed and humiliated a handicapped man. I'm going to take what you've done and shove it up your sorry ass,' I said.
'You went to night school and earned a law degree and are to be admired for that. But you're still white trash at heart, Billy Bob. And that's the only reason I don't get up and knock you down,' he replied.
I turned and walked stiffly past my table, left a dollar for having used the place setting, and went up the stairs through the old darkened lobby, past the empty registration desk and pigeonholes for guest mail and room keys and the dust-covered telephone switchboard, into the shade under the colonnade and the wind that blew like a blowtorch across the asphalt.
I was a half block down the street when I heard Peggy Jean's voice behind me. 'Billy Bob, wait. I need to talk with you. Don't go away like this.'
She was on high heels, and when she started toward me she twisted one ankle and had to grab on to a wood post. Then Earl was on the sidewalk beside her, and the two of them began to argue with the attempted restraint of people whose lives are coming apart on a stage. I stood in the middle of the sidewalk, under a candy-striped barbershop awning, like a foolish and impotent spectator who cannot bring himself to either flee or participate in the fray.
'You're tight. Go sit in the lobby. I'll have some coffee sent out,' Earl said.
'You had that handicapped man arrested? Over a card game?' she asked incredulously.
'I didn't. He's demented. He's been in prison for killing schoolchildren, for God's sake.' Then Earl waved his hands in the air and slapped them against his hips in exasperation. 'I give up,' he said, and went back into the hotel.
But he didn't stay. He was right back out on the sidewalk. 'To hell with it. Just to hell with it. Go back inside and eat something. I'll send Fletcher with the limo,' he said, and got into his Lincoln and backed out into the street while Peggy Jean propped herself against the colonnade's post and pulled off her broken high-heel shoe.
'You want a glass of iced tea?' I said to her.
'Tea. Aspirin. Heroin. Anything. I feel like a train wreck,' she said.
'Why don't you sit down on the bench? I'll get my car.'
I told myself my gesture was an innocent one. Perhaps it was. You didn't abandon an impaired friend in a public place and leave her to swelter in the heat and her own embarrassment while she waited on the mercies of an irresponsible husband.
Yes, I'm absolutely sure I thought those thoughts.
We drove north of town toward her home, then she asked to stop at a steak house that was built on an escarpment overlooking a long valley. When she got out of the car she deliberately knocked the heel off her other shoe on an ornamental boulder by the restaurant door, then put her shoes back on as flats and went in the ladies' room and washed her face and put on fresh makeup and came back out and sat at a table with me by the back window.
The restaurant was cool and softly lit and deserted except for a bartender and a waiter. Clouds covered the sun now, and the valley below us was blanketed with shadow and the wind blew the grass and wildflowers in channels like the fingers of a river.
The jukebox was playing an old Floyd Tillman song. Her face seemed to go out of focus with a private thought or maybe with an after-rush from the Old-Fashioneds. Then she fixed her eyes on me as though I were walking toward her out of a dream.
'Dance with me,' she said.
'I'm not very good at it,' I said.
'Please, Billy Bob. Just one time.'
And that's what we did, on a small square of polished yellow hardwood floor, balloons of color rippling through the plastic casing of the jukebox. She placed her cheek against mine, and I could smell bourbon and can- died cherries and bitters and sweet syrup and sliced oranges on her breath, as though all the blended, chilled odors of what she had consumed had been refermented and heated inside her heart's blood and breathed out again against my skin.
Then her head brushed against my face and I smelled a fragrance of roses in her hair. Her loins, when they touched mine, were like points of fire against my body, and I knew I was entering a country where the rules that had always governed my life were about to be irrevocably set aside.
8
At sunset that evening I drove to Wilbur Pickett's place on the hardpan. The sun had dropped behind the hills in the west and the afterglow looked like fires were burning inside the trees on the hills' rim.
Wilbur and his wife, Kippy Jo, had moved their kitchen table out into the middle of the backyard and were eating ears of corn they had roasted on a barbecue pit. His pasture was dimpled with water and had turned emerald green from yesterday's storm, and his Appaloosa and two palominos were drinking out of the tank by his windmill, their tails switching across their hindquarters. Parked by the barn was an ancient snub-nosed flatbed truck loaded to the top of the slats with rattlesnake watermelons.
'I'm trying to put your trial off as long as I can. A guy like Earl Deitrich eventually sticks his hand in a porcupine hole,' I said.
