He went back into the bedroom and turned on the electric fan and lay on top of the bedspread with his jeans still on and rested his arm across his forehead. The rain had stopped entirely now and the moon had risen over the hills in the distance. Through the screen he could see the glow of Esmeralda's reading lamp against the orange curtain that hung in the trailer's bedroom window. She read books by Ernest Hemingway and Joyce Carol Oates. He'd seen the As she had made on her English papers. She was one smart woman but he'd be switched if he knew what went on in her head.
Then her shadow moved across the curtain and she opened the front door and walked out in the yard in a robe and disappeared behind his house. A moment later he heard her knock lightly on the back screen.
He turned on the kitchen light and looked at her through the screen. Her robe was tied tightly around the waist so that her hips were accentuated against the cloth and on her feet she wore fluffy slippers that looked like rabbits.
'Anything wrong?' he said.
'I keep hearing noises. I know it's just the wind, but I couldn't sleep,' she replied.
'You want to come in?'
She made a face, as though she were arguing with herself. 'If you're still up,' she said.
'Sure. It's hot, ain't it? The rain don't cool things off that much this time of year,' he said, holding the screen open for her, wondering if the banality of his remarks hid the desire that reared inside him when her body passed close to his.
'Ronnie wanted to come pick me up tomorrow. I told him not to,' she said.
'It's better he don't have no more run-ins with Chug Rollins.'
'You're in trouble because of Ronnie and me. I'm sorry for what I said earlier.'
'I don't pay them East Enders no mind.'
She seemed smaller now, somehow vulnerable, the light shining on the red streaks in her hair, hollowing one cheek with shadow.
'When it rains I see Cholo in the ground. His casket was made of plywood and cheesecloth. I keep seeing it over and over in my mind,' she said.
'You all right, Essie?'
'No. I don't think I'll ever be all right. You didn't like Cholo. Not many people did. But he was brave in ways other people don't understand.'
Lucas started to speak, then paused and unconsciously wet his lips, realizing, for the first time, that no words he spoke to her would have any application in her life. The light from the overhead bulb seemed to reveal every imperfection and blemish in her person and his own and make no difference. He couldn't translate the thought into words, but for just a moment he knew that intimacy and acceptance had nothing to do with language. The linoleum felt cool under his bare feet, the warm, green smell of summer puffing on the wind through the screens. He put his arms around her and felt her press against him as though she were stepping inside an envelope. He rubbed his face in her hair and kissed the corner of her eye and moved his hand down her back. Her breasts and abdomen touched against him and he swallowed and closed his eyes.
'Maybe you ain't seeing things real good right now. Maybe it ain't a time to make no decisions,' he said.
Her hand left him for only a moment, brushing the wall switch downward, darkening the kitchen. Then she rose on the balls of her feet and kissed him hard on the mouth, squeezing herself tightly against him, her eyes wet on his chest for no reason that he understood.
Go figure, he thought.
23
Lucas told me all this the following morning, which was Sunday, while he swept the gallery and carried sacks of grass seed from the pickup bed into the shade. I sat on the railing with a glass of iced tea in my hand and watched him rake the dirt in the yard in preparation for seeding it.
'She told you Cholo was brave?' I said.
'He was her brother. What do you expect her to say?'
'His conscience was his bladder. He burned four firemen to death. The firemen were brave, not the guy who killed them.'
Lucas worked the rake hard into the soil, the muscles in his arms knotting like rocks. He breathed through his nose.
'Why'd you come out here, anyway? To stick needles in me?' he said.
'Chug and those others will come after you.'
'They ain't good at one-on-one.'
'They don't have to be,' I said.
He threw the rake down and split open a bag of seed with a banana knife and began scattering seed around the yard.
'You're down on Esmeralda 'cause of her race. It's bothered you from the get-go,' he said.
'Criminality is a mind-set. It doesn't have anything to do with race. She's been around criminals most of her life and she instinctively defends them. Don't buy into it.'
'I'm telling you to lay off her, Billy Bob.'
'L.Q. Navarro was a Mexican. He was the best friend I ever had, bud.'
He slung the rest of the seed around the yard, whipping the burlap empty, then stooped over to rip open another sack. When he did, he said something I couldn't hear, words that were lost in the shade and the muted echo off the house, words that I didn't want to ever recognize as having come from his throat.
'What did you say?' I asked.
He unhooked the knife from the split in the burlap and stood erect, his cheeks burning.
'I didn't mean it,' he replied.
'Don't hide from it. Just say it so I can hear it.'
'I said, 'Yeah, you killed him, too.''
I emptied my iced tea into the flower bed, watching the frosted white round cubes of ice bounce on the black soil he had turned and worked with a pitchfork. I set the glass on the railing and walked to my Avalon, my eyes fixed on the long green level of the horizon.
I started my car engine and put the transmission in reverse, then saw his face at the window. His eyes were shining.
'You don't ease up on me sometimes. You push me in a corner so's I cain't find the right words. I ain't got your brains,' he said.
'Don't ever say that about yourself. You have ten times any gift I do,' I said, and drove down the state road toward town.
I went five miles like that, past church buses loaded with kids and highway cafes that served Sunday dinners to farm families, all of it sweeping past me like one-dimensional images painted on cardboard that had no relation to my life. Then I turned around and floored the Avalon back to Lucas's. He had pulled a hose from behind the house and was watering down the seed in the front yard, spraying into the wind so that the drift blew back into his face.
'You going to the rodeo this afternoon?' I asked.
'I'm in the band. We open the show,' he replied, gathering his T-shirt in his hand and wiping his face with it, unsure as to whether he should smile or not.
The rodeo and livestock show didn't begin that afternoon until the sun had crossed the sky and settled in an orange ball behind the shed over the grandstand at the old county fairgrounds, then Lucas's bluegrass band walked into the center of the arena, squinting up at the thousands who filled the seats, and launched into 'Blue Moon of Kentucky.'
Temple Carrol and Pete and I walked down the midway through the carnival and food concession stands that had been set up behind the bucking chutes, eating snow cones, watching the buckets on the Ferris wheel dip out of a sky that had turned to brass layered with strips of crimson and purple cloud.
