high school football field, tearing holes in the enemy line like a tank through a hedgerow, his fists balled into hams, his furrowed brow tilted down like a battering ram.
A waitress came through the revolving door just before Chug reached it, spinning the thick, rounded edge of the glass directly in front of Chug's head.
He crashed into it with a sound like someone thumping a wood mallet on a watermelon, then rolled moaning between the partitions, his hands clasped to his forehead.
The waitress tried to free herself from being trapped by shoving against the push bar, slamming the door back into his face, mashing his nose against the glass like a pig's snout pressed against a window.
Finally Chug tumbled out on the sidewalk, his clothes spotted with expectorated Red Man and Copenhagen.
'Better put some ice on that bump. It looks like a couple of golf balls,' Lucas said.
Jeff helped Chug to his feet while he glared at both Esmeralda and Lucas.
'This is all your fault, Jeff. Don't blame it on anybody else,' she said.
'Your mouth's always running. You never shut up. Somebody's going to put something in it,' Jeff said.
'You couldn't cut it on the rig and you cain't cut it nowhere else, either. Stop taking out all your grief on other people,' Lucas said.
Lucas and Esmeralda walked across the parking lot toward Lucas's pickup truck. The clouds overhead were silver and black in the moonlight, like smoked pewter, the wind rattling the palm trees by the entrance to the drive- in. Jeffs fists curled and uncurled at his sides.
'Don't worry, Jeff. He's gonna be a stump when we get finished with him,' the ex-football player with his cap on backwards said.
'Smothers can wait. Esmeralda's asking for a train,' Jeff said, his eyes burning into her back.
'You got a sign-up sheet?' the ex-football player said.
Two days later Lucas sat on the top rail of Beau's lot, the heels of his boots hooked on the second rail for support, and tossed chinaberries at a bucket. The morning was still cool, the shadows long on the ground, and Beau wans drinking out of the tank by the windmill, switching his tail hard in the shade. I stopped shoveling manure into a wheelbarrow and leaned the shovel against the fence.
'Who heard him say this?' I asked.
'The waitress.'
'Maybe Esmeralda should go back to San Antone for a while.'
'She don't listen. What do you reckon I ought to do?'
If they try to rape that girl, you blow their damn heads off, I thought.
'Pardon?' Lucas said.
'Nothing. I didn't say anything.' I widened my eyes and looked at the clarity of the horizon against the sunrise. A flock of crows was descending into my neighbor's corn, like black ash drifting out of the sky.
I pulled the morning edition of the local newspaper out of my back pocket and flopped it open on the fence rail. At the bottom of the front page was a story about the bodies of two Jamaicans that had been found floating in a flooded quarry outside Waxahachie. 'Maybe it's time Jeff Deitrich had some of his own chickens come home to roost,' I said.
'He's mixed up with these dead guys?'
'Get her out of town. Let me work on a couple of things.'
He dropped down from the fence and scraped a pattern in the dust with his boot.
'The reason I come over is, I was wondering if you might loan me L.Q. Navarro's revolver,' he said.
I walked away from him toward the house, not answering him, shaking my head, wanting to flee his words as I would a dark and obscene thought.
27
That same morning I met Temple Carroll at the office. I hadn't spoken to her since my failed overture in her backyard when she had dropped her speedbag gloves in the dust and gone into the house and locked the door behind her like a slap in the face.
'What's shakin', Slim?' she said.
'You want a taco?'
'Why not?' she said.
We walked across the square to the Mexican grocery and sat at a table in back under a wood-bladed fan.
'Wesley Rhodes told me Warren Costen's father is involved in pornography in Houston. I'd like you to check it out,' I said.
'What for?'
'Skyler Doolittle had child porn pictures planted on him when he was arrested. I wonder if Hugo's deputies got the pictures from Warren Costen or Jeff Deitrich.'
'Where am I supposed to start?'
'Search me. The Costens are supposed to be an upstanding, pioneer family.'
'Yeah, they always let everybody know their shit didn't flush,' she said, and bit into her taco. She saw me watching her. She looked down at her clothes to see if something had fallen on them. ' What?' she said.
'Nothing.'
'Why are you staring at me?'
'I'm not. You look great, Temple.'
Her eyes fixed on mine, blinking uncertainly.
She called me long-distance two days later.
'I got a tip from a reporter at the Houston Chronicle who covers real estate and the zoning board. Costen and several partners run a couple of companies that manage slum rentals in the Third Ward. But during the oil recession in the eighties a lot of property on the west side was sold off to HUD. Costen and his friends bought low and expanded their slum rentals and put in video porn stores in what used to be middle-class and upscale neighborhoods.'
'What'd you find out about Costen and child pornography?'
'Nothing. But if video porn is there, so is the clientele for the rest of it. You want me to keep looking?'
'No, come on back up to God's country,' I said.
'Just out of curiosity, I went out to Rice University and talked to a history professor about Costen's ancestors. This professor belongs to a historical society that keeps track of all the documents from the Texas Revolution and the descendants of everybody who fought in it. Costen's family was the real thing, friends of Sam Houston and Jim Bowie and Stephen F. Austin.'
I felt myself yawning. 'You did a good job. Come on back home,' I said.
'Hear me out. I asked the professor to check out Skyler Doolittle. Doolittle was telling the truth. His ancestor died in the Alamo with Travis and Crockett and the others. His survivors were given a section of land after the war, which was the promise Sam Houston made to everyone who served with him to the end.'
'I'm not with you, Temple.'
'You remember describing to me the lunch out at the Deitrichs' place, when Earl Deitrich humiliated Wilbur Pickett at the table by taking that antique watch out of his hand, like Wilbur didn't have the right to be looking at it?'
'Yes.'
'You said Wilbur told a joke about his ancestor fighting in the Battle of San Jacinto, except the ancestor was a horse thief and sold horses to both sides.'
'Yeah, that's what he said.'
'It wasn't just a joke.' I could hear her turning pages on a notepad. 'Wilbur's ancestor was named Jefferson Pickett. I don't know if he was a horse thief or not, but he survived the Goliad Massacre and was with Houston when Santa Anna was captured on the San Jacinto.'
