Brave people kept the fire in their belly out of their heads. Reckless and self-indulgent ones let someone else pay their dues.
The inside of the car seemed filled with a fragrance of roses. My thoughts bunched and writhed like snakes inside a black basket.
Lucas was sitting on the collapsed tailgate of his pickup in my driveway when I got home. He took off his straw hat and slapped the dust off the spot next to him. Every light in the downstairs of my house was on.
'My office is open. Have a seat,' he said.
'You look mighty confident this evening.'
'After the show Peggy Jean Deitrich told me to give you a message. I wrote it down. 'No matter how all this works out, I hold you in high regard.' She blows hot and cold, don't she?'
'You could say that.'
'She's a pretty thing, I tell you that,' he said.
I sat down on the tailgate next to him. 'Where we going with this?' I asked.
'You remember her the way she used to be, then you see her the way she is now. It's like you're caught between the woman who's there and the woman who ain't but should be.'
'Yes?'
'It's like living in two worlds. Puts a hatchet right in the middle of your head, don't it? In the meantime, you don't need to hear bad shit about people you care for.'
'Let me see if I can figure this out. You don't want me pestering you about Esmeralda again?'
'I wish I had your smarts.'
'Can you tell me why all the lights are on in my house?'
'Esmeralda is cooking up a monster-big Mexican dinner for us. Enchiladas, tacos, refried beans, chili con queso, she done put the whole garbage can in it.'
The moon was yellow over the hills, and in the softness of the light I could see his mother's looks in his face. I cupped my hand on the back of his neck and felt the close-cropped stiffness of his hair against my palm. I saw his embarrassment steal into his face and I took my hand away.
'I bet that's one fierce Mexican dinner. We'd better go eat it,' I said.
It rained in the middle of the night and my bedroom curtains napped and twisted in the wind and in the distance lightning forked into the long green velvet roll of the hills.
L.Q. Navarro sat in my stuffed burgundy chair by the bookshelf, his legs crossed, his Stetson resting on the tip of his boot. He was reading from a leather-bound, musty volume about the Texas Revolution, turning each page carefully with his full hand.
' How's it hangin', L.Q.?' I asked.
'You know how Sam Houston beat Santa Anna? He sent Deaf Smith behind Santa Anna's army and had him cut down Vince's Bridge with an ax. Once the battle started, there wasn't no way out for any of them.'
'I'm awful tired, L.Q.'
'Sometimes you got to be willing to lose it all. They'll see it in your eyes. It tends to give them a religious moment.'
'I'll beat Earl Deitrich in the courtroom.'
'His kind own the courts. You're a visitor there, Billy Bob. He fired a gun into the side of his head. You got to admit that was impressive.'
'How about taking the Brown Mule out of your mouth?'
'He took Peggy Jean Murphy from you. He durn near killed you with poison. He corrupts everything he touches. Rope-drag him, pop a cap on him, hang his lights on a cactus. I don't like to see what he's doing to you.'
'I don't live in that world anymore.'
He raised one eyebrow at me over his book, then closed the book in disgust and walked out of the room, the rowels of his spurs tinkling on the hardwood floor.
' L.Q.? ' I said.
24
Tuesday morning Temple Carrol came into my office and closed off the glare of sunlight through the blinds and sat down in front of my desk and opened a notepad on her crossed knee. There was a red abrasion at the corner of her left eye, and the eye kept leaking on her skin so that she had to dab at it with a Kleenex.
'What happened?' I asked.
'I found this ex-con boxer, Johnny Krause, at a pool hall in San Antone yesterday,' she replied. 'He stuck a pool cue in my eye.'
'You went there by yourself?'
'He said he was sorry. He was just nervous around class broads in pool rooms. You want to hear what I have or not?' she said.
She ran through the material in her notebook. Krause had been picked up and questioned in the death of Cholo Ramirez and let go. He drove a cement mixer on and off for a construction company, rented a farmhouse behind a water-bed motel on the outskirts of San Antonio, and spent most of his downtime in Mexico.
'Dope?' I said.
'He draws compo and drives a new Lincoln,' Temple said.
'Where's our pool shooter now?' I asked.
We crossed the border at Piedras Negras and drove down into the state of Coahuila. The sun was hazy and red on the horizon now, and the poplar trees planted along the road were dark green, almost blue, in the dusk. We continued south of Zaragoza and crossed a river dotted with islands that had willow trees on them, then we saw a long baked plain and hills in the distance and a whitewashed village that spilled down an incline to a brown lake. The water in the lake had receded from the banks and left the hollow-socketed skeletons of carp in the skin of dried mud that covered the flats.
A Mexican cop nicknamed Redfish by the Bexar County sheriff's department, for whom he was a drug informant, waited for us in the backseat of a taxi parked in the small plaza in the center of the village. He had jowls like a pig, narrow shoulders, wide hips, and sideburns that fanned out like greasepaint on his cheeks. He wore yellow shades and a mauve-colored flop-brim bush hat, probably to detract from his complexion, which was deeply pocked, as though insects had burrowed into the flesh and eaten holes in it.
'I had to hire my cousin to drive me 'cause we didn't have no official cars free today. He's gonna need twenty-five dollars for his time,' Redfish said.
'Yeah, I can see he probably gave up a lot of fares this afternoon. Tourists flying in for the water sports and that sort of thing,' Temple said.
'Your friend at the Bexar sheriff's office? He said you got a hard nose. We don't got no tourists now. But in winter we got gringos from Louisiana kill ducks all over that lake. They shoot three or four hundred in a morning. What you think of that?' Redfish said.
'We think we need to talk to Johnny Krause,' I said.
'You was a Texas Ranger?'
'That's right,' I said.
'One thing to remember here. He ain't been in no trouble in Mexico. He leaves a lot of money in the village. 'Cause he's a countryman don't mean he gets treated without respect.'
The wind shifted and Temple's face jerked as though it had been struck. 'What's in that lake?' she said.
'Everything from the houses runs downhill here. It don't stink after the rains. The gringos come here for the ducks after the rains. They're real proud, drinking wine in the cafe and eating all their ducks,' Redfish said.
Redfish got in the front seat of the Avalon with me, and Temple sat in back. The sun was an ember on the horizon when we drove deeper into the village and out onto a chiseled rock road above the lake. Caves or old mine shafts were cut back into the hill, and people were living in them. They washed their clothes in the lake and dried them on the rocks around the caves, and cooked their food in pots that gave off an odor like burning garbage. I saw
