bags,' he said.
'Is this what you want?' I said to Skyler.
'No, sir. I'd like to be let alone,' he replied.
I inverted the skillet and knocked it clean on the fire ring, then slipped a paper sack over it and dropped it in the rucksack and hung the rucksack on the pommel of Beau's saddle.
'You gonna turn us in?' Jessie said.
I put my left boot in the stirrup and swung up on the saddle. I felt Beau try to jerk his head up.
'I'm going to ask you just once, Jessie. Take your hand off his bridle,' I said.
'Then you answer me. You gonna turn us in or not?' Jessie said.
'He's a river-baptized man, Jessie. He's got the thumbprint of God on his soul. Let him pass, son,' Skyler said.
The sun had dropped behind the hills now and the air was moist and heavy and dense with mosquitoes and the bats that fed off them. I crossed the slough and rode back down the dirt street through the row of empty shacks that were encircled by the ugly scar of the oxbow off the river. I felt the thick weight of a bat thud against the crown of my hat, and I kept my face pointed down at Beau's withers until we were up on high ground again.
Peggy Jean knew Jessie Stump had tried to drive a barbed arrow through her husband's head, yet had warned him and Skyler Doolittle so they could avoid capture.
Why?
That's what I asked Temple Carrol two hours later while she smacked her gloves into the heavy bag behind her house. She wore a pair of khaki shorts and a gray workout halter and alpine lug boots with thick socks folded down on her ankles, and her thighs were tan and muscular and tight against her rolled shorts.
'Maybe Peggy Jean wants it all. Maybe that's always been her way,' she said.
'Pardon?' I said.
She hit the bag again, left, right, left, right, left, and hard right hook, twisting the bag on the chain, ignoring me.
'Will you give it a break?' I said.
'Her first soldier boy got killed in Vietnam. Then she tried a blue-collar kid like you. Then she found another soldier boy with money. Maybe she'd like to keep the money and that monstrosity of a house they live in and have another roll in the hay with you. Feel flattered?' she said.
'Pretty rough assessment.'
'Sorry. I'll go scrub out my mouth with Ajax,' she said.
She went back to work on the bag. The moon was big and yellow behind the pecan tree in her backyard. Out in the darkness I could hear the wind rattling in her neighbor's cornfield. Her invalid father was inside the house, and I could see his silhouette, in his wheelchair, against the lighted television screen in the front room.
'You mad at me?' I said.
'No, not really. You're what you are. I can't change it,' she answered.
I hooked my arm around the top of the bag.
'You've never let me down. They don't make them any better than you, Temple,' I said.
'You live with ghosts. I can't compete with them.'
'Don't talk like that.'
'You don't understand women, Billy Bob. At least you don't understand me.'
I put my hands on the tips of her shoulders, even while she was shaking her head.
'I'm hot and dirty,' she said.
I touched the pool of moisture in the hollow of her neck and slid my hands down her back and smelled the heat in her hair and felt the tone of her muscles and the taper of her hips against my palms. I let my lips brush against her cheek, and for the first time in our many years as intimate friends I consciously stepped over a line into Temple's life.
She raised on the balls of her feet, her stomach against my loins, as though she were going to kiss me, then her face broke and she walked hurriedly into the house, dropping her gloves randomly into the dust, and closed the door and locked it behind her.
26
Wesley Rhodes was standing on the corner of the square, across from the courthouse, in the cool of the evening, watching the junior high school girls go in and out of the Mexican grocery store that had a small soda fountain in back. They giggled and had braces on their teeth and attracted him in ways he didn't understand. Not in a bad way. It was like they were his age, or he was their age, except he knew a lot more about the world than they did and he could take care of and protect them.
He just never could get up the nerve to talk to them. Maybe tonight would be different. He sat up on top of the backrest of a wood bench under a live oak, his hair slicked back, his comb clipped inside his shirt pocket, drinking from a Dixie cup filled with Coca-Cola and crushed ice. The trees were dark green overhead and the face of the clock on the courthouse tower glowed in the sunset, and the streets were striped with shadows now and the girls in front of the grocery marbled with light from the owner's neon signs. Man, summertime was great. If he just had enough nerve to stroll across the street…
That's when Jeff Deitrich's yellow convertible, with the top up, pulled to the curb and Jeff said, 'Get in back, snarf.'
They chased him for two blocks before they blocked him in an alley and Chug and Hammie and Warren pulled him off a fire escape and threw him in the car.
Crushed between Hammie and Chug in the backseat, he saw the city limits sign speed past the window.
'What's going on?' he said.
'You're gonna become a deep-sea diver tonight, little buddy. You ever watch those Jacques Costeau shows on TV? A frog can do it, you can do it,' Hammie said. He took the comb out of Wesley's shirt pocket and scratched the purple and burnt-orange tattoo of a butterfly on the side of his throat with it.
'Frog? What's a frog got to do with anything?' Wesley asked.
Just after midnight the convertible turned on a dirt road and a few minutes later Wesley was able to see clearly out the window and recognize the rock quarry, just like someone had taken a bad dream from his life and forced him back inside it.
Wesley climbed out of the car with the others, his heart thundering, his armpits running with sweat. The wind had died and a layer of dust hung in the air and drifted over the mounds of yellow dirt that surrounded the crater.
'Tell them, Warren. I ain't never snitched nobody off. Even when the gunbulls put me in the hole,' Wesley said.
'That's what I've been telling them. You're a righteous, sharp little dude. That's why they're letting you prove yourself,' Warren said. He smiled good-naturedly, like the old Warren used to do, square-jawed, his eyes clear, handsome as a movie star.
'Why I got to prove anything? I ain't done nothing wrong,' Wesley said.
'Not a good attitude, Wes,' Warren said, his face taking on philosophic concern. 'You a good swimmer?'
Jeff popped the trunk.
'This is scuba gear, queeb. That's an underwater camera and strobe. You're going to dive that Mercedes and take pictures. The mop-heads had better be inside,' Jeff said.
'Why don't you do it yourself?' Wesley said.
Jeff had a rolled magazine in his back pocket. He removed it and used the hard-packed end to hit Wesley on the forehead, biting down on his lip, as though he were on the edge of far greater violence. 'Because I don't get in the same water with corpses, zit-face. Want to wise off some more or live out the night?' he said.
Wesley undressed down to his Jockey undershorts and sat on the sand and put flippers on his feet and slipped the canvas straps of the air tank over his shoulders and the mask on his face. Warren hung a rubber-
