pulled down on his face. Esmeralda and Cholo and Ronnie were now out in the dirt yard.
'I got a job in a restaurant here. I'm not going back to San Antone, Cholo,' Esmeralda said.
'I'm your brother. You're gonna do what I say,' Cholo said.
'These ain't our people up here. My mother says you can stay at her house. I ain't gonna bother you, Essie,' Ronnie said. He wore a red bandanna on his hair and the points lifted in the wind.
'Then respect what I tell you, Ronnie,' she said.
'You got something going with Smothers over there?' he asked.
'He was good to me. Leave him alone,' she said.
'What we got here is all kinds of people dumping on us,' Cholo said. 'Jeff's old man just got your marriage annulled. It don't exist. That means Jeff used you to glom his big-boy and threw you away like toilet paper,' Cholo said.
Lucas stepped farther out into the drive and said, 'You guys got the message. She don't want y'all here.' His hands were inserted flatly in his back pockets and the skin of his face was tight against the bone.
'I'll say this once. This is a private conversation,' Ronnie said.
'Fuck you, Ronnie. You're on my property,' Lucas said.
Ronnie breathed slowly through his nose and picked at his nails. He cut his head at Lucas, then at me.
'We came here to work something out that don't got nothing to do with you two. But you treat us like we're spit on the bottom of your shoe. No different than Mr. Deitrich. You think you can bing with us, man? You really think that?' he said.
'We're not part of your problem. You need to understand that,' I said.
Ronnie wiped at his nose, looking at nothing.
'Call me, Essie,' he said to Esmeralda.
'It's over, Ronnie,' she said.
He rubbed his thumb back and forth across his forehead and walked toward his car, his face lost in thought, suddenly oblivious to our presence.
Lucas and I watched the T-Bird disappear down the road.
'How do you read that?' Lucas asked.
'Don't ever humiliate a guy like Ronnie Cruise in front of his peers,' I said.
'Well, he ain't coming on my property and wiping his feet on people,' he said.
I looked at his profile against the early sun, the heat in his cheeks, the manly energy in his eyes, and felt my heart sink like a stone in a well.
It's strange how people bloom, even in poisonous soil, once they allow themselves to become what they've always been. Jeff Deitrich had rebelled against his father and married a Mexican girl and had tried to cut it on the floor of a drilling rig. But he quickly learned that yielding to the seduction of his father's world brought no penalty, instead only celebration of the returned prodigal, and that he had been foolish to compete with people who secretly coveted the opulence that was his by right.
At the end of the week I had to go out to Post Oaks Country Club and meet a client, an obese, self-deluded, thoroughly corrupt oilman who was about to enter Huntsville Penitentiary.
We sat in the cooling shadows on the terrace while, not far away, golfers on the driving range were hitting into an enormous white net. My client's face went soft and then nakedly lustful as he gazed over my shoulder.
'I'm born again, but an elegant woman like that can sure give a man thoughts,' he said.
I turned in my chair and saw Peggy Jean and Jeff Deitrich, side by side, dressed in tennis whites, hitting off the rubber tee into the net. Jeff's form was perfect, his skin tanned as dark as the polished wood in his club. Peggy Jean rested one hand on his shoulder, her head bending down with laughter as both of them shared a joke, more like confidants or even sweethearts than child and stepmother.
'It's too bad Earl don't spend more time at the fireside and not at the poker table. For a while I thought he was going to be selling his furniture out on the lawn. He must have hit a gusher,' my client said.
'Excuse me?' I said.
'Don't pay me no mind. If I was single, I'd probably drool a bucket full.'
'I was thinking about Jeff,' I said.
'Jeff? His mother should have thrown him back and raised the afterbirth. You mixed up with that little piss- pot? I thought you had some smarts. No wonder I'm headed for the pen.'
I said goodbye to my client and walked past Jeff and Peggy Jean toward my car. Then I stopped and looked at their backs until they both felt my eyes on them.
'Why, Billy Bob. Come have a drink with us,' Peggy Jean said. And she seemed to say it with genuine warmth.
'I'd like a word with Jeff,' I said.
The smile went out of her face. 'I beg your pardon?' she said.
'Would you step over here, please, Jeff?' I said.
He grinned good-naturedly, as though tolerating a harmless aberration, then came toward me, resting his club on his shoulder.
'What's up, Billy Bob?' he said.
'You exploited my son's friendship. You used his home, then dumped your wife there. Now Lucas is taking your weight with Ronnie Cruise,' I said.
'I can't control what others do. You sure you don't want to hit some balls or have a drink?'
'You're quite a guy,' I said.
He winked at me, his eyes full of ridicule, and went back to the tee. Peggy Jean had never moved, her face stamped with the insult of being rebuffed publicly in her own club.
She waited for me to speak or say goodbye. But I didn't. Behind me, I heard a suck of air as Jeff cut his club viciously into a golf ball.
On the way home I felt my stomach suddenly seize and constrict, as though the lining were being stapled by a machine. My breath went out of my mouth, and my chest hit the steering wheel. Up ahead, I saw Temple Carrol working in her yard, pulling weeds on her hands and knees out of a hydrangea bed and throwing them behind her on the grass. I turned into her drive and sat very still behind the wheel, my face sweating.
She glanced over her shoulder, then continued her work. I wiped my face on my sleeve and opened the door and got out. Then I had to sit down again.
Temple walked toward me, wiping her hands on her shorts, blowing her breath up into her face to remove a strand of hair from her eyes.
'You all right?' she said.
'I must have eaten the wrong tiling.'
She cupped her hand on my forehead.
'You're burning up. I'll drive you home,' she said.
'I'm fine.' I tried to smile. 'Saw Jeff Deitrich at the country club. He was born to it.'
'Earthshaking news.'
'You hear anything about Earl Deitrich having a big infusion of cash in his business?'
'Move over and quit worrying about the Deitrichs,' she said, and nudged me sideways into the passenger seat.
A few minutes later she walked me to my front door, one hand under my arm.
'Get in bed and I'll check on you in a couple of hours,' she said.
'What about my car?'
'I'll bring it back. Do what I say.'
I went up to my bedroom on the third floor and switched on the floor and ceiling fans and opened the windows wide and lay down on top of the sheets in my underwear. In minutes my pillow was soaked. Outside the window, in the setting of the sun, I could see the vast green rolling landscape to the west, as though I were looking into the vastness of the world itself, with all its shadows and mysteries and its alluring red-tinged precipices that fell away into darkness.
I went into the bath and showered and lay down again but found no relief. It was dark now, and in my mind I saw the flashes of gunfire in the arroyo where L.Q. Navarro died, relived the moments when bullets pierced my own body like hot pokers, floated once again in the warm water that Morpheus prepared for his friends.
