The air smelled of hot dogs broiling in grease, candied apples, deep-fried Indian bread, the dust that lifted in a purple haze off the arena, popcorn cascading out of an electric pot, splayed saddles that reeked of horse sweat, cowboys with pomade in their hair and talcum coated on their palms, and watermelons that a black man hefted dripping and cold from a corrugated water tank and split open on a butcher block with a knife as big as a scimitar.
Then a bunch of 4-H kids on top of a bucking chute hollered down at a cowboy-hatted man in the crowd, their faces lit with smiles and admiration.
'Hey, Wilbur, we got one here can turn on a nickel and give you the change,' a kid said.
'You ain't got to tell me. One bounce out of the chute and that one don't live on the ground no more,' Wilbur Pickett replied, and all the boys grinned and spit Copenhagen and looked at each other pridefully in the knowledge that the bucking horse they might draw was esteemed by the man who had ridden Bodacious one second shy of the buzzer.
Wilbur and Kippy Jo walked past the plank tables pooled with watermelon juice and seeds in the eating area that had been set up under a striped awning that ruffled and popped in the breeze. They stopped by the corrugated water tank, and while Wilbur worked three dollars out of his blue jeans to pay the black man for two slices of melon, Kippy Jo cupped her hands lightly on the edge of the tank and tilted her head, her eyes hidden by sunglasses, staring at the crowd on the midway as though faces were detaching themselves from an indistinct black-and-white photograph and floating toward her out of the gloom and the electronic noise of the midway.
I followed her gaze into the crowd and saw Jeff and Earl and Peggy Jean Deitrich by the merry-go-round, the carved and painted horses mounted with children undulating behind them. Chug Rollins came back from the concession stand and joined them, handing each of them a hot dog wrapped in a greasy paper towel.
That's what I saw. Wilbur told me later what his wife saw.
The sky was white, the sun ringed with fire above an infinite, buff-colored plain, upon which columns of barefoot Negroes in loincloths were yoked by the neck on long poles. They trudged in the heat with no expectation of water or shade, their eyes like glass, their skins painted with dust and sweat, the inside of their mouths as red as paint. Then she realized that they were dead and their journey was not to a place but toward a man in safari dress, his face concealed from her, his head and body bathed in black light. Wherever he went, the Negroes followed, as though his back were the portal to his soul.
'Earl Deitrich,' she said to Wilbur.
'Yeah. I seen him. He's early for the shithog contest,' Wilbur said.
'No. The spirits of the Africans his ancestor killed are standing behind him. Their skulls were buried in anthills and eaten clean and used to line a flower bed.'
'Let's go on up in the stands. I don't need that stuff in my afternoon. Cain't that fellow just find a grave to fall into?' Wilbur said.
She lowered her hand into the water tank, felt the melted ice slip over her wrist and the coldness climb into her elbow. The water seemed to stir, the corrugated sides ping with metallic stress or a change in temperature. Two muskmelons which had floated and bobbed on the bottom drifted like yellow air bubbles to the surface.
But the water she now looked down upon was green and viscous, and when the melons broke through the surface they were black and rough-edged, abrasive as coconuts, braided with hair that looked like dusty snakes.
'How'd you make them melons come up, lady?' the black vendor said, grinning, looking at his own reflection in her sunglasses.
She walked out on the midway toward Jeff Deitrich.
Jeff lowered his hot dog from his mouth as she approached, then Earl and Peggy Jean and Chug Rollins stopped talking, glancing peculiarly at Jeff, then turning as a group toward Kippy Jo.
'The black men you drowned… They'll float up from the car. They'll follow you just like the Africans do your father,' she said.
'I think you got me mixed up with somebody else,' Jeff said, his eyes shifting sideways.
'They were alive a long time after the car sank. They breathed the air that was trapped against the roof. Touch my hands and you'll see them. They're unfastening the safety belts that hold them in the seats of the car.'
Jeff grinned stupidly, his mouth opening and closing without sound. He stepped back from her, as though he could pull an envelope of invisibility around himself, his face unable to find an acceptable expression, like a naked man on a public sidewalk.
It made good theater. But I suspected somebody would pay a price for it. I drove out to Wilbur's that night and tried to convince him of that in his front yard.
'Jeff Deitrich doesn't believe in your wife's psychic powers. He probably believes somebody informed on him,' I said.
'You're telling me he done it, he drowned a couple of black guys?'
'I'm telling you he's a dangerous kid. He takes out his grief on others. Usually innocent people.'
The windows in Wilbur's house were lighted behind him, his horses blowing and nickering out beyond the windmill.
'I ain't got no doubts about Earl Deitrich's family. You want to come in for a piece of pie?' he asked.
'I must speak a different language. You just don't hear me, do you?'
'I'm cutting you in for ten percent of my oil company.'
'No, you're not.'
'Son, anybody can be a lawyer or a rodeo bum. You ever see well pipe sweat moisture big as silver dollars? That's what happens when you punch into an oil sand. The air turns sour with gas and everything you put your hand on is dripping with money.'
'Leave me out of your oil dealings, Wilbur.'
'What you got is ten percent of nothing. That's probably the only fee you're ever gonna get.' He grinned broadly, his bladed face silhouetted in the light from his house, and sailed a rock out into the darkness. 'Don't worry about that Deitrich kid coming around here, either. His kind was put outside before the glue was dry.'
Hopeless.
I stopped at the IGA the other side of the intersection and called Wesley Rhodes at his house.
'Get out of town. Visit your relatives in Texline,' I said.
'They're in prison. Why you want me out of town?'
'Jeff Deitrich thinks somebody dimed him on the deal with the Jamaicans at the rock quarry.'
'Oh man,' he said, like someone who had not believed his luck could get any worse.
On the way back home I tried to sort out my thoughts and the reasons I felt anger at Wilbur and his wife, and even at my son, Lucas.
The truth was I had no legal solutions for the problems they brought to me. Wilbur had admitted to stealing the historical watch from Earl Deitrich's home office, and hence by implication the bearer bonds, and Kippy Jo had methodically drilled a pistol round in each of Bubba Grimes's eyes. Unless I could bring down Earl Deitrich, there was a good chance both Kippy Jo and Wilbur would go into the system.
Lucas had been stand-up when it counted and had succeeded in putting himself right between the gangbangers and the East Enders. How do you tell a kid that honor has its price and that his father had rather it not be paid?
I felt my palms tighten on the steering wheel. I wanted to hold L.Q. Navarro's heavy. 45 revolver in my hand. I wanted to feel the coolness of its surfaces against my skin and open the loading gate and rotate the cylinder inside the frame and watch the thick, round base of the brass cartridges tick by one at a time. I wanted to feel the knurled spur on the hammer under my thumb and hear the cylinder lock hard and stiffly into place.
L.Q. and I raided deep into Coahuila and killed drug transporters and set their huts ablaze and watched their tar, reefer, and coke flame like white gas against the sky. In that moment all the moral complexities disappeared. There was no paperwork to be done, no rage over our inability to reconcile feelings with legality. Sometimes we would find the dead several nights later, still unburied and exposed in the moonlight, their skin glowing like tallow that has melted and cooled again. I had no more feeling about them than I would have about bags of fertilizer.
The trade-off came later, when I fired blindly up an arroyo and watched sparks fly into the darkness and L.Q. Navarro fling his hands at the sky and tumble toward me.
