thin, blond kid with pipestem arms was drunk and had wandered out into the field by himself and had pried a loose board from a collapsed shed. The board was flanged with rusty nails on one end, and the boy was whipping it at the air, his face oily and heated with booze, his eyes dull with a resentment that had no source.
Lucas pulled past Chug's new lavender Cadillac, the one his father allowed him to borrow from the father's dealership, and cut the headlights and the engine.
'Stay here, Essie,' he said.
'I'm going with you.'
'If this deal goes south, I want you to get to the filling station and call Billy Bob Holland.'
'What are you going to do?'
He listened to the engine cooling and looked in the rearview mirror at the chrome grille and lavender surfaces of Chug's Cadillac and the circle around Ronnie Cruise and shook his head. 'You got me,' he said, and got out and slammed the door behind him, as though he could lock his fear inside the truck cab.
As he walked toward the group he heard Esmeralda open her door and step down on the gravel and follow him.
That woman is definitely not a listener, he thought.
Chug Rollins was in the center of the circle with Ronnie now, a white golf cap on his head, a blue silk shirt with red flowers on it plastered wetly against his skin. His white pants were hitched up like a sack with a black leather belt below his belly button. His back was an ax handle across, his upper arms swollen with the thick mass of pressurized fire hoses.
Lucas had seen Chug and his friends at work before. They targeted someone they didn't like and systematically quizzed and taunted him and made him admit behavior that was odious, that demonized him and made him unlike themselves. When it was established that he was deserving of no mercy, they tore him apart.
Homosexuals, Mexican and black gangbangers, an outside street dealer who tried to take over the local action, winos who wandered into the East End from the train tracks, they all got the same treatment. They didn't come back for seconds.
But Ronnie Cross was a different cut. He combed his hair while they insulted him, using both hands, his face composed, his cheeks sucked in. When he had finished and put his comb away, he leaned over and spit six inches from Chug's shoe.
'That's how greaseballs impress people? You show them you can spit?' Chug said.
'I don't see no greaseballs here,' Ronnie said, lifting his eyes patiently toward the sky. 'See, a greaseball is a guy who's mobbed-up. Now, if you're calling me a 'greaser,' like in 'spic,' I got to consider the source, which means it ain't worth worrying about. See, I don't think you got your shit together, or you wouldn't need a bunch of little fucks to follow you around and tell you, you don't got no weight problem. What I'm saying is, no offense meant, is a big guy like you shouldn't need to perform in front of windups, right?'
'That's cute,' Chug said.
'No, man, 'cute' is when you put on golf drag and drive around in your old man's Caddy trying to score black cooze that wouldn't sleep with you if they was blind.'
'Hey, Chug, how long you gonna take this?' somebody in the crowd said.
'You carry a shank, greaseball?' Chug said.
'You call it, man. Shanks, fist, feet, elbows, bottles, you want to go nines, that can happen, too.'
'Chug, the guy just came up to give a girl a ride home from work,' Lucas said from the rear of the circle. Suddenly he had become visible, and his voice stuck in his throat and his face felt tight and small and cold in the wind.
'What's with you, Smothers, you go off to A amp;M to major in dick-brain?' someone said.
But Chug raised his hand for the others to be silent.
'What are you doing with Jeffs ex, Lucas?' he asked.
'I just think it ain't right this many guys out here against one,' Lucas said.
'You're not a bad kid. But that's still Jeff's punch. You want sloppy seconds, you check it out with Jeff first. Now, you take yourself and the jumping bean out of here. This doesn't concern you,' Chug said.
Lucas scratched his eyebrow and looked at nothing. The headlights of a passing car swept over the group, seeming to light Ronnie's face as brightly as a candle. The afterglow of the sun had died on the horizon and the rain was falling softly out of a black sky. Lucas wiped his mouth with his hand and took Esmeralda by the arm and turned her toward his pickup truck with him.
'I thought Aggies only did it with sheep,' someone said.
Esmeralda tried to pull away from Lucas, but his hand bit into her arm.
'You're going to leave Ronnie on his own? I can't believe you,' she said.
'Get in the truck,' he said.
'You turn my stomach,' she said.
He didn't reply. He opened the passenger door and pushed her inside, then closed the door behind her and walked around the back toward the driver's side.
Lucas's stepfather had removed the factory bumper from the rear end of the truck and replaced it with two sections of six-inch steel pipe mounted and welded in a V-shape on a thick, cast-iron bib.
Esmeralda's face looked numb, beyond tears, freeze-dried with shame.
'Hitch up your seat belt,' Lucas said.
'You worry about seat belts? You take me to the filling station. I'm going to call the police,' she said.
'Same guys who molested you? Hang on!' he said.
He worked the transmission into reverse and floored the accelerator. The truck's tires spun gravel under the fenders and the rear end swayed back and forth as it raced toward the three parked cars. The V-shaped welded pipe, ragged on all the edges from the acetylene cut, tore first into the side of an Oldsmobile compact, peeling two long strips out of the paint and metal, then crashed into the rear fender of a Ford, blowing out the taillight and knocking the car's frame sideways. Then the pipe apex tore into the grille of Chug's Cadillac, gashing the radiator into a wet grin, crumpling the fenders up on the tires like broken ears.
Lucas dropped the transmission into low and spun away from the Cadillac, twisting the steering wheel to the right, heading straight for the circle of Ronnie's tormentors. At first they looked at him in disbelief, then scattered in front of his headlights, white-faced, running for either the road or the safety of the field and the trees. He hit the brakes long enough for Ronnie to jump into the cab beside Esmeralda, a cloud of tire dust and raindrops blowing across the dashboard. Then he floored the accelerator again and burned two long divots out of the dirt onto the asphalt, the rear end of the truck fishtailing on the wetness of the road.
Ronnie grabbed the windowsill of the passenger door with both hands and slammed it shut. His eyes were manic with energy, his skin shining with water. He leaned past Esmeralda so he could see Lucas's face.
'We don't got no white bread in the Purple Hearts, but sometimes we make an exception,' he said.
'Not in your dreams, Ronnie,' Esmeralda said.
A highway patrol car passed them in the opposite direction, its siren screaming, the rain whipping in a red and blue and silver vortex off its light bar.
Lucas waited for two hours at the house for the Texas Department of Public Safety or a group of Hugo Roberts's deputies to knock on his door. But no one did. He and Esmeralda drove Ronnie back to his T-Bird and helped him change his tire, passing the parking area that was now empty and pooled with rainwater and streaked with car tracks. Then he returned home and watched Esmeralda go inside the trailer and close the door and click on the lamp in her bedroom. He went into the house and tried to sleep, then gave it up and drank a cup of coffee in the kitchen by himself, the shadows and yellow light from the overhead bulb bladed on his bare shoulders, sure that he would be on his way to jail by midnight.
But no police came.
Were Chug and the others actually stand-up? he wondered.
No, they didn't want to admit they were taken down by a Mexican girl and a West Ender. They'd find a way to square it down the road. He had no doubt about that.
Why wasn't life simple? Why couldn't you simply go to work or attend college or play music in a band and be let alone? Why didn't time or age or the dues you paid buy you any wisdom?
How about Esmeralda? She hadn't even bothered to say thank you. In fact, after they dropped Ronnie off at his car, she had hardly spoken on the way back to the house. Go figure, he thought.
