rest rooms, her chin tilted upward, the movement of her hips accentuated. But she could not hide the look in her eyes.
'If we weren't in this dining room, I'd kick your ass around the block,' Jeff said to Rita.
'Oh, I know you would. You're just so… studly,' Rita said, and made a feigned passionate noise and kissing motion with her mouth and rejoined her party. She leaned forward confidentially, telling a story to a half dozen others, all of whom were grinning.
'Get Esmeralda out of the can. We're going,' Jeff said.
'Me?' Lucas said.
'You're not a member here. Nobody cares what you do. Go get her.'
'Tell you what. I'll just walk out to the highway and hitch a ride. In the meantime, why don't you quit acting like your shit don't flush?'
'All right, I'm sorry. Sit down. I'll take care of it. God, why do I get myself into this stuff?' Jeff said. He finished his drink, then stood up, his face blanching slightly as the combination of whiskey and vodka on an empty stomach suddenly took effect.
He walked down the hallway to the ladies' room and went in without knocking. A moment later he and Esmeralda emerged in the hallway, his hand spread across the small of her back. Her cheeks were wet, her purse held tightly in both hands.
'She's a liar. She gave blow jobs to the whole back-field at SMU. She's treating you like a dumb peon,' he said to her.
The waiter had wheeled their dinner to their table and was placing schooners of draft beer to the right of each steak platter.
'Bag it up for the dishwashers, Andre. We're gonna boogie on over to the Dog 'n' Shake. That's where it's happening,' Jeff said, and signed the ticket on the serving cart.
Then he realized that Rita Summers and her friends were laughing, not abruptly, as they would have at a joke, but in a sustained, collective giggle that seemed to spread like a crinkling of cellophane at their table. He turned and saw their eyes fixed on Esmeralda's shoe and the long strand of wet toilet paper that was attached to the sole.
He gripped her upper arm, squeezing hard, and stepped with one foot on the toilet paper and tried to push her free of it. Instead, he only shredded the paper and matted it on his loafer. His rage boiled into his face and he stooped and tore Esmeralda's shoe off her foot and flung it under a table, then pulled her out the front door.
'All you had to do was just eat dinner. It was that simple. You people are a walking ad for the Ku Klux Klan. Stop making that sound,' he said, while she rested her forehead against one of the white columns on the porch and hid her face in her hands.
14
I knew it was wrong.
In the same way a reformed drunkard places himself on an innocuous mission to a saloon or an unrewarded hunter at twilight fires a round through the window of a deserted stone house and turns his back on the crashing sounds inside.
Peggy Jean said the picnic at the cottage on the Comal River was for children from an orphans home, that Pete would probably love shooting the rapids with the others in an inner tube.
She wasn't wrong about that part. As soon as I parked the Avalon among a stand of pine trees above the river, he wrestled his inner tube from the car trunk and ran down a clay path between boulders to a sandy beach that paralleled a long, undulating riffle created by a wood dam built halfway across the current. His ribs and the bones in his back were as taut as sticks against his skin.
Through the trees I saw him wade into the thick green coldness of the water.
'Don't worry about him. I hired two lifeguards to watch after them,' Peggy Jean said.
She stood next to the cottage in a flagstone, trellised arbor overgrown with climbing roses. The cottage was the color of chalk against the trees, the windows hung with ventilated blue shutters, the wind chimes on the porch twirling in the breeze. She flipped a checkered tablecloth over a plank table and began setting it with plastic forks and spoons and cups that were painted with the pink faces of smiling pigs. She had flown in from Padre Island that morning, and there was fresh sunburn on her forehead and neck.
'We can't stay too long. His mom wants him back by dark,' I said.
'Did you bring your trunks?' she asked.
'Sure.'
'I'm going to take a swim. You can change inside. I'll use the bathhouse in back,' she said. She watched my face. 'Is something wrong?'
'No.'
'You don't feel you should be here?'
'I don't study a lot on right and wrong these days,' I said.
She fixed a strand of hair on her forehead. 'Ernest Hemingway said if you feel bad about something the next morning, it's wrong and you should avoid doing it again. If you don't feel bad about it, you should take joy in the memory.'
When I didn't reply, she turned and walked to the small bathhouse in back with a rolled towel under her arm. She'd had her hair cut and it was thick and burnished with gold light on the back of her neck. The sun went behind a bank of rain clouds and suddenly the wind seemed cold and tannic through the pines. I looked at the firmness of her calves and the way her hips moved under her dress. An old iron water pump by the bathhouse was beaded with moisture that dripped off the pump handle into the dirt. I remained staring at the bathhouse door after she had closed it, my mouth dry, my face moist in the wind as though I had a fever.
I changed inside the cottage. Moments later she came back out of the bathhouse in straw sandals and a one-piece dark blue bathing suit.
'You still have your shirt on,' she said.
'It's turned right cool,' I replied.
'I'll fix you a drink.'
'You know me. I'm still nine-tenths Baptist.'
'Oh stop it,' she said, and circled my wrist with her forefinger and thumb and tugged me gently inside the back door of the cottage.
She fixed two vodka collins at the bar that divided the kitchen and the living room. The door to the bedroom was open, and the bed was made up with a tight white bedspread and fat, frilled pillows and a folded navy-blue blanket at the bed's foot. She put the collins glass in my palm, then drank from hers, her face only inches from mine.
'I never thought you were much of a drinker,' I said.
'With time, you learn to do all kinds of things,' she replied. Her breath smelled like ice and mint leaves and was warm against my skin at the same time. 'Do you want to sit outside?'
I didn't answer. Her hand lay on top of the bar and the ends of her fingers touched mine. She moved her fingers on top of my hand, then set down her glass and tilted her face up and held her eyes on mine. I kissed her on the mouth, then felt her body press against me, her weight rise on one foot, the muscles of her back flex under my hands.
Her hair smelled like salt wind and sunlight and I could feel her breath like a feather against my neck. Through the half-opened bedroom door the taut whiteness of the bedspread and the bloom of pillows at the headboard seemed the most lovely rectangle of light and symmetry and comfort in the world. She rubbed the top of her head against my mouth and pressed her stomach tightly against me, one hand slipping down the small of my back. In my mind's eye I felt already drawn inside the cradle of her thighs, inside the absolute glory and heat of her body, her mouth a throaty whisper against my ear.
Then I looked through the window and saw L.Q. Navarro in the front yard, leaning against a pine trunk, his arms folded, one boot cocked toe-down across the other, his face obscured by his hat.
