head. You tell me where it is!' Jeff said.
'You know how much you smoked already? Look at your eyes. They're full of blood clots. You stink like a street person.'
'I'll say it one more time, Esmeralda. Where's my stash?'
'I burned it.'
'Sure you did. That's why birds are dropping out of the sky.'
He began tearing her clothes off the hangers in a closet and throwing them through the front door. Then he walked out onto the steps with her storage trunk over his head and heaved it end over end into the yard. The top burst open, and he rooted in it like a badger digging in a hole, flinging her jewelry and shoes and scrapbooks and red and purple rayon undergarments into the air. His face was white and sweating, his jaws necked with stubble.
'You need to go to detox, Jeff. You're sick,' she said.
'What I'm sick of is salsa and onion breath and your brother Cholo's stupid face and the thought I've been coming in the same box as Ronnie Cruise. I want to scrub you off me with peroxide.'
' Maricon,' she said.
He straightened up slowly. 'You called me a queer? That's what you just said? A queer? Say it again and see what happens.'
' Maricon!' she said. ' Cabron! Cobarde! Maricon! Maricon! Maricon!'
'Your face looks funny like that. All out of shape. Funny and stupid,' he said, smiling strangely. 'I know a truck stop where I can get you on, doing hand jobs. I'll take a shower and drive you there. You can tell them about your credits at the Juco. They'll be impressed. For some reason, Esmeralda, I feel just great.'
Lucas told me this story early Saturday morning while I curried out Beau in the lot. We were in the shade of the barn and the morning was still cool and the wind off the river smelled of wet trees and wildflowers and the livestock in my neighbor's pasture.
'Jeff's gone?' I said.
'He burned rubber for thirty feet. He shot me the bone when he went by. What a guy,' he said.
'Where's Esmeralda?'
'Staying at the trailer,' he said.
I straightened up and paused in my work, my arms resting on the warm indentation of Beau's back. Lucas looked down at his foot and kicked at the dust. The brim of his straw hat was curled into a point on the front.
'She lost her restaurant job. She don't have no place to go,' he said.
'She has a family.'
'Just Cholo. He's crazy.'
'That's the point. Stay away from those people.'
'Which people is that?'
'Don't make a racial deal out of this. You know what I'm talking about,' I said.
'You want me to run her off? Treat her like Jeff done?'
I opened the gate in the lot and turned Beau out into the pasture.
'I guess life was a lot simpler when I was y'all's age,' I said.
'Yeah, I reckon that's how I got here,' he replied.
Sunday morning I got a call from the county jail. My harelip, flat-nosed, meltdown client, Wesley Rhodes, had been out of the bag three days, then had gotten busted at four o'clock that morning for possession, driving without a license, and indecent exposure.
I waited for the jailer, a sweating fat man whose khaki trousers hung below his crack, to open up Wesley's isolation cell in the top of the courthouse.
'Why isn't he in the tank, L.J.?' I asked.
'It's full up on Saturday nights. Federal judge is always on our ass about it,' he replied.
I sat down on a chain-hung iron bunk opposite Wesley. The sun had risen into the trees outside, and the light through the bars made lacy shadows on Wesley's face. He wore a dark blue see-through shirt and a studded dog collar around his neck and Cloroxed jeans belted tightly below his belly button. His wide-set green eyes stared at me with the angular concentration of a lizard's.
'What were you holding, Wesley?' I said.
'Blues. They been on the street a couple of days.'
'Dilaudid?'
'They wasn't for me. There's a man I get together with sometimes. He cooks them. They're safer than the tar that's coming up from the Valley.'
'What's the indecent-exposure charge?'
'I was taking a leak in the park.'
'You selling yourself, Wes?'
He dropped his eyes and gripped his bunk and rocked on his arms.
'He takes me out to dinner and buys me clothes sometimes, that's all. I got to get out of jail. They're scaring me.'
'In what way?'
'A couple of mop-heads, you know, dreadlocks, Jamaican guys, been unloading a lot of blues and rainbows. The word is they ripped them off Jeff Deitrich.'
'So?'
'I was cuffed in the cruiser with a friend while the deputy was tearing up my daddy's car. I was telling my friend about Jeff getting stiffed by these two guys. Then the deputy comes back to the cruiser and picks up a tape recorder off the front seat. He plays it back, listening to everything I said, all the time staring at me like I done something really bad.
'I go, 'That's an illegal wiretap.'
'He goes, 'You better stick to being some rich junky's hump, sperm-breath.' Then he wouldn't put me in the tank. Why they pissed off, Mr. Holland? Is it 'cause I told them they cain't use that tape?'
'You don't have expectation of privacy in the back of a police cruiser, Wesley. But that's not the problem. While you're in here, you don't talk about Jamaicans taking off Jeff Deitrich. You hearing me on this?'
Wesley stood up from his bunk and looked at the barred window above his head. An uneaten breakfast of powdered eggs and white bread and packaged jam lay on top of the toilet tank.
'My stomach's been sick. I ain't ever pissed them off before. Nothing don't feel right,' he said.
'Give me your belt and that dog collar,' I said.
'What?' he said.
Downstairs I dropped the collar and Wesley's wide leather belt and heavy metal buckle on the jailer's desk.
'Don't ever try to get away with something like this, L.J.,' I said.
He dipped his fingers in a leather pouch and loaded his jaw with chewing tobacco, his lidless eyes never leaving mine.
Later, after church, I stopped by a supermarket in town, then drove to Temple Carrol's house, which was just down the road from mine. I could hear her working out on the heavy bag in the backyard, thudding her gloves into it, spinning it on the chain that was hooked into a beam on her father's open-air welding shed.
She didn't see me behind her. She wore gray sweatpants and a workout halter and red tennis shoes, and she was leading into the bag with her left, hooking with her right, and following with a karate kick. Her skin was flushed, her shoulders and the baby fat on her sides slick with perspiration.
'Have a picnic with me,' I said.
She turned and lowered her gloves, chewing gum, her face without expression, the bag creaking on the chain behind her.
'You need a favor?' she asked.
'It's a nice day. I didn't want to spend it alone.'
She pulled off her gloves one at a time. They were dull red, thin-padded, with metal dowels inside that fitted across the palms.
'I don't like being somebody's safety pin, Billy Bob,' she said.
