'The people at the state mental hospital thought they'd blow out his aggressions with electroshock. He bit through the rubber gag, then got a hand free and chewed a technician's finger off,' I said.
'My uncle used to hire Jessie Stump to clean gum off the seats at the Rialto. He got stuck in the chimney when he tried to rob the hardware store. The county jail in Llano wouldn't take him because he's not toilet trained. Good try, counselor,' Jeff said, and laughed, then drove back on the two-track road. But his passengers were silent, their expressions dull with either fatigue or reconsideration about the wisdom of hunting Jessie Stump.
The wind dented the grass and flowers in the glade and a drop of rain stung me in the eye like a BB.
'The guys they're looking for are living in our cave, ain't they?' Pete said.
'That'd be my guess.'
'Are those stories true about Jessie Stump?'
I wet my lips. 'I kind of made those up,' I said.
'I don't like to hear about stuff like that, Billy Bob. I don't want to come up here for a while. Don't lie to me about Jessie Stump, neither. It means you don't respect me.'
I turned around in the saddle and looked at him. But his eyes stared at the ground as it moved past us, as though our shadows knew each other in ways we did not. He removed his hands from my waist and rested them on the can tie.
22
I went to Marvin Pomroy's house early the next morning, before he left for work, and found him out on the patio behind his white gingerbread house, his newspaper propped against a glass of orange juice, a piece of toast held in his fingers while he read the box scores on the sports page.
His backyard was spacious and filled with trees and flowering bushes, and blue jays and mockingbirds flew in and out of the sunlight. His wife waved at me from the French doors that gave onto the dining room and held up a cup of coffee with a question in her face.
'No thanks, Gretchen,' I said, and sat down at Marvin's table without being asked.
'Can't it wait till I get to the office?' he said.
'Did you talk to the pathologist in San Antone?'
'Yeah, I did. He said Cholo Ramirez was sniffing model airplane glue before he died. There was a sock loaded with it on the seat beside him.'
'That's not what killed him.'
'Maybe not. But the pathologist isn't sure what did. Boxing gloves with poison on them? Sounds like Elizabethan theater.'
'Wake up, Marvin. Earl Deitrich is treating you like a bought-and-paid-for stooge.'
He folded up his newspaper and set it to the side of his plate. His shirt looked as smooth and white as new porcelain.
'As a public official I have to accept all kinds of abuse at the courthouse. That doesn't apply in my home,' he said.
'That Mexican kid had a chemical time bomb put in his head.'
'Not in this county he didn't.'
'There's nothing like seeing cartography used to compartmentalize evil,' I said.
Marvin rose from his chair and picked up his newspaper and glass of orange juice and went inside the house and closed the French doors gingerly with one foot.
The next day was Saturday. Lucas Smothers woke before dawn and drank coffee on the back steps of his rented house and watched the sun break across the fields and light on the trailer where Esmeralda Ramirez was still living. She had hand-washed her undergarments the night before and hung them on the clothesline in back, and now they moved in the breeze and he felt vaguely ashamed when he realized he was looking at them.
He had convinced himself he had no romantic interest in her, that he could no more ask her to leave than he could refuse to help an injured person on the highway. But when she had cleaned his house for him and hung curtains in his windows, he'd found himself following her from room to room, telling her about the bands he had played in, listening to her talk about her classes at the Juco, all the time watching her eyes and her mouth, embarrassed at the level of arousal they caused in him.
He wanted an excuse to touch her. She tied her hair up on her head while she worked, and when she stood on a chair and lifted a curtain into place, her back looked strong and muscular, her exposed hips tapering outward just below her belt line, the backs of her thighs hard, as though she were wearing heels. When the chair legs wobbled, he started to grip her waist, but she steadied herself against the wall with one hand and said, 'Don't worry. I'm not going to fall.'
When Cholo died, Lucas thought Esmeralda would turn to him. But she didn't. She returned from the funeral dry-eyed and withdrawn, like a person who has been in a subfreezing wind and sits alone by a stove with the memory of cold burned deep into the face. That evening he tapped on her screen, and when she appeared in the doorway, the overhead light breaking over her shoulders and reddish-brown hair like gold needles, he said, 'If you ain't eat yet, I'm fixing to put some food out on the table. Or I can bring some over. I mean, if you're hungry. Or maybe you just want to take a walk or something.' Then he took a breath and said, 'I ain't good at words. I'm sorry about your brother.'
'That's nice of you, Lucas. But I have to go to work,' she replied.
'Work? That tub of guts at the Dog 'n' Shake is making you come in the same day your brother was buried?'
'I'll see you later, Lucas,' she said, and eased the inside door closed in his face.
She didn't even ask him for a ride. Instead, she put on her pink uniform and waited out on the road for the county bus to pick her up and carry her out to the small drive-in not far from the Post Oaks Country Club.
Now he sat on his back steps in the early morning coolness, looking at her undergarments on the clothesline, wondering if he was prurient or simply a fool. No sound at all came from inside the trailer. The sun rose above the house in a red ball and he flung the coffee from his cup into the dust and laced on his steel-toed boots and drove his pickup truck out to the drilling rig where he had an eight-hour one-hundred-degree shift waiting for him on the derrick floor.
That evening, when she got off from work at the Dog 'n' Shake, Ronnie Cruise was waiting for her in the parking lot. He was dressed in slacks, polished loafers, and a new sports shirt, clothes he normally didn't wear, and his hair had been freshly barbered and his jaws glowed with aftershave lotion.
He leaned down in the T-Bird's passenger window so she could see his face.
'I'll take you home, Essie,' he said.
'I have a bus pass,' she replied.
His car was parked in the shadow of an oak tree, and the engine ticked with road heat.
'Come on, you been on your feet all day,' he said.
'Thanks, anyway, Ronnie. Really.'
She walked out to the edge of the road and stood where the bus would stop. She twisted her mouth into a button and stared at the entrance to the country club and the fairways along the river and the sun that had descended into a red cloud of dust and rain blowing on the horizon.
Ronnie sat behind the steering wheel of his car, his head on his hands. He started the engine and drove in circles around the Dog 'n' Shake, his tires squealing softly on the pavement, while children eating at the outdoor tables watched him with wide grins on their faces.
The bus stopped for Esmeralda, then the doors closed with a rush of air and the bus heaved out into the road again with Ronnie's T-Bird behind it. Esmeralda sat behind the driver's seat and tried to ignore Ronnie's behavior, but when she glanced into the wide-angle mirror on the driver's window she saw three cars come out of the country club driveway and fall into line behind Ronnie's.
She walked to the back of the bus and looked out the rear window. Ronnie grinned up at her through his windshield, giving her the thumbs-up sign, like an idiot, oblivious to the automobiles behind him.
Who was driving the car immediately behind Ronnie's? she asked herself. It was one of Jeffs friends, what's
