Listen to me now… Here, see how this feels,' Jeff said, and spun the man who called himself Mike back toward him and buried his fist in his stomach.
Mike fell to his knees, his mouth strangling for air. Jeff grabbed his hair in both hands and drove his head into a door panel, again and again, then wiped his hands on his shirt as though his skin glowed with an obscene presence.
The man named Mike was on his hands and knees now and accidentally touched the tip of Jeffs shoe. Jeff kicked him in the mouth, gashing his lips against his teeth, convulsing his face with shock.
Jeff's friends pushed and cajoled and held him, circling him so he couldn't get at the weeping man on the ground. Then he broke free from them, his arms flailing at the air.
'All right, all right! I'm cool! It's not me got the problem! This guy came on to me at the bar!' he said.
'Jeff, honey, you're right. Everybody saw that. But the cops are gonna be here. Come back inside. He's just a queer,' a girl said.
Jeff walked unsteadily toward the state road, his shirt pulled out of his slacks, his body etched with car lights as though it were razored out of scorched metal.
'Jeff, get away from the road!' someone yelled.
He stopped, as though finally accepting the cautionary words of his friends. But he wasn't thinking about his friends now, nor of the road or the trucks that roared by him in a suck of air brakes and a swirl of beer cups and diesel fumes. He stared stupidly at the maroon '49 Mercury, its hood and doors overpainted with rippling blue and red flames, the grille like chromed teeth, that had just pulled into the parking lot.
The sole occupant, Esmeralda Ramirez, cut the engine and got out and stared at him across the top of the roof. She wore an organdy dress and earrings and makeup, and the car's interior light seemed to bathe her cleavage with both shadow and the flesh tones of a painting.
'Why are you here?' Jeff said.
'I brought you a present. You look terrible. What have you done?' she said.
'Nothing. A guy tried to put moves on me. I never saw him before.'
'Get in the car.'
He remained motionless. She looked back down the road where the emergency lights of a sheriff's cruiser were coming around a bend.
'Did you hear me? Get in the car. Now,' she said.
He sat down in the passenger seat and closed the door and did not look back at his friends. His body seemed to press back into the leather seat, as though it were dead weight gathered into foam rubber, when Esmeralda fish-tailed the Mercury out onto the asphalt.
9
Sunday morning I shined my boots and put on a suit and saddled Beau and rode up a slope that was humped with blackberry bushes. Then I was inside the sun-spangled shade of pine trees, Beau's hooves thudding softly on the moist carpet of pine needles, and a moment later I came out into the hard-packed dirt backyard of a half-breed Mexican boy named Pete who went with me to Mass every week.
Pete was eleven years old and had a haircut like an inverted shoe brush. Even though he had an alcoholic mother and no father, he had already skipped one grade in school and could think circles around most adults. I leaned from the saddle and pulled him up on Beau's rump.
'I got a good one for you,' he said. 'An old man was playing checkers on the front porch of his store with a cocker spaniel. This California guy pulls in for gas and says, 'Mister, that must be the smartest dog that ever was born.'
'The old man says, 'I don't think he's so smart. I done beat him three games out of five.''
Pete howled at his own joke.
We rode along the crest of the slope that bordered my property. Our shadows flowed horizontally along the ground through the vertical shadows of the trees, then we came out on a dusty street, where the tile-roofed church and Catholic elementary school stood. Beyond the pines in the churchyard I could see the small white cafe where Pete and I always ate breakfast after Mass. Ronnie Cruise's sunburst T-Bird was parked in the lot, the front door open for the breeze. Ronnie had reclined the seat and was stretched back on it with his forearm across his eyes.
'Take Beau into the shade. I'll be along in a minute,' I said to Pete.
'You know that guy?' Pete asked.
'I'm afraid so.'
'He's a gangbanger, Billy Bob. He don't belong here.'
'He probably wants to go to confession,' I said, and winked.
But Pete saw no humor in my remark. He walked with Beau and the tethering weight into the pines, repeatedly looking back at me, as though somehow I had made an alliance with an enemy.
'You want to see me?' I said to Ronnie.
'Yeah, that lady you come to the shop with, she was jogging by your house. She said I'd find you here. Esmeralda didn't come home last night.'
'I'm supposed to know where she is?'
He scratched his face. 'Do you?' he asked.
'No.'
'I went out to Jeff Deitrich's place. Some guy named Fletcher stopped me at the gate. He said if I was interested in the gardening job, I could come back tomorrow. He said not to knock on the front door.'
He took his sunglasses off the dashboard and clicked the wire arms together.
'Anything else you want to tell me?' I said.
He gave me a quizzical look. 'You bent out of joint about something?' he asked.
'Four firemen were burned to death on Earl Deitrich's property. I think you came by my house the other night to cover your ass.'
He got out of the car and put on his shades.
'You calling me a bullshit guy, right?' he said.
'No, I'm saying it's Sunday morning and I'm not in the mood for somebody's grift. If that offends you, go fuck yourself.'
I walked out of the sunlight onto the church lawn, into the pine trees where Pete waited for me. I heard Ronnie start his car and back out onto the dirt street and head toward the state road. Then he slowed and made a U-turn through the portico of a deserted Pure station, the Hollywood mufflers reverberating off the cement. He stopped in front of the church and left the car running in the street. He jumped across the rain ditch onto the grass and caught my shirtsleeve with two fingers, oblivious to the stares of people going inside the church.
'I ain't burned no firemen, man. And nobody don't talk to me like that. That means nobody.'
When I got back to the house I walked Beau into the barn and unsaddled him and turned him out. As I walked toward the house I saw Temple Carrol jog past the front of the driveway, then pause in midstride and stare back at me, as though unsure of what she was going to do next.
She walked up the drive toward me, her hair tucked inside a baseball cap.
'You look like you've been pouring it on,' I said.
'I've got a problem. This friend of mine has his head up his butt. But I really don't know how to tell him that,' she replied. She wore a pair of faded pink shorts, and the tails of her shirt were knotted under her breasts. Her skin was glazed with sweat, her eyes blinking with the salt that ran into them. She blotted her face on her shirt.
'What is it, Temple?' I asked.
'If you want to be an idiot in your private life, that's your business. But I'm part of Wilbur Pickett's defense team. You don't have the right to do what you're doing.'
'Doing what, please?'
Her hands were in her back pockets, her face tilted up into mine now, the whites of her eyes shiny and pink. Her breasts rose and fell against her shirt.
