Without the dope the drive-in theater would have been little different in ambiance from its predecessors of four decades ago. In fact, it still had its moments: the smell of foot-long hot dogs and mustard and chopped onions, the palm trees framed against sunsets that were probably the most glorious in the Western Hemisphere, the scrolled purple and pink neon on the concession stand, the strolling groups of short-hair, fundamentalist kids whose piney-woods innocence seemed to insulate them from all the societal changes taking place around them.
Esmeralda and Lucas parked their pickup truck on the second row, and Lucas went to the concession stand and brought back a large popcorn, two hot dogs, and two Pepsis. Lucas was adjusting the sound on the speaker when a skinny kid in horn-rimmed glasses and cowboy boots and a denim shirt with the tails pulled out of his belt and a wallet chain hanging out of his back pocket stopped five feet from the pickup's window and started making frantic gestures at him.
'What do you want, J.P.?' Lucas asked.
'Come over here, man,' J.P. said in a whisper, as though Esmeralda couldn't hear or see him.
'Stop acting like a moron. What is it?' Lucas said.
'Jeff's back there with Rita Summers. He was melting coke in a glass of Jack. The guy's out there on the edge, man. When you walked by he give you a look, like… Man, I don't want to even remember it. That dude's cruel, Lucas.'
'Yeah, thanks, J.P. Don't worry about it, okay?' Lucas said.
A few minutes later Esmeralda said she was going to the rest room.
'I'll come with you,' Lucas said.
'No,' she replied.
'You don't owe Jeff anything. Don't talk to him,' Lucas said.
She tilted her head and feigned a pout.
'He's scum, Essie,' Lucas said.
'I'll be right back. Now stop it,' she said.
She walked toward the concession, right past Jeff's yellow convertible. She wore a tight white dress with frill around the hem and neckline and scarlet ribbon threaded in and out of the frill. Rita Summers was behind the steering wheel, eating from a paper shell of french fries. Jeff held a tumbler full of bourbon and ice in his hand.
His eyes followed Esmeralda, the sway of her hips, the way her hair bounced on her shoulder blades.
He set the tumbler on the dashboard and got out of the car and followed her.
She heard the soles of his loafers crunch on the shale behind her. His face was dilated with booze, his pores grainy with perspiration and heat.
'Go home, Jeff. Get some rest,' she said.
'Dump Smothers. We can get it back together,' he said.
'You need help. Give therapy a try. What have you got to lose, hon? You'd learn a lot about yourself and see things different.'
'Better hear me, Essie. You and Smothers and Ronnie Cross have been sticking it in my face. In front of lots of people. A guy runs out of selections. That's the way it is. Even Ronnie knows that.'
'I think you're going to die if you don't get help.'
'We had a lot going at first. We can have it back. You want me to say it? I never had a girl like you.'
'That's the problem, Jeff. You collect girls. You don't love them. You can't, because you don't love yourself.'
His eyes were out of focus. He wiped his nose with his wrist. He seemed to lose balance momentarily, then right himself. 'I gave you a chance. But you're just not a listener. It's the beaner gene. Y'all are uneducable,' he said.
She turned and went into the women's room. A few minutes later she walked past the convertible again, her eyes focused on the movie screen, her white dress bathed in light. Jeff watched her while he drank from the bourbon tumbler with both hands.
'You're slurping like a pig. Maybe you and the south-of-the-border cutie should still be an item,' Rita said.
Jeff took the paper shell of french fries from her hands and ground it into her face, smearing her eyes and hair and blouse with catsup and salt and potato pulp while she struck blindly at him with her fists, her elbows blowing the horn in staccato.
Sunday morning Skyler Doolittle walked up a wooded slope and sat on a boulder that was webbed with lichen and read from a Gideon Bible. The pages of the Bible were water-stained, the thick cardboard cover bleached like ink diluted with milk. The sun was not over the hill yet, and the woods were smoky and wet, the air suffused with a cool green light that seemed to have its origins in the river down below rather than in the sky.
Jessie Stump, shirtless, his belt notched into his bony ribs, was shaving without soap, over a bowl outside a shack that had once been a deer stand. Jessie had packed a duffel bag with their pots, pans, blankets, road maps, clothes, and food. On his belt was a heavy, saw-toothed hunting knife, the edge honed so sharp it cut fine lines in the opening of the scabbard when he slipped it in and out of the leather.
Jessie wiped his face dry with his arm and squatted by a map and counted out their money on top of it. Thirty-two dollars and eleven cents were left over from the money Billy Bob Holland had given to Skyler. Jessie looked down at the map and the lines he had drawn in pencil along all the roadways that led to Matagorda Bay, over which he had written the words 'Cousin Tyson's shrimper,' as though somehow his hand could create the journey and escape by salt water before they actually took place.
He looked up the slope at Skyler, who seemed consumed by the Gideon he had found in a shack down by the oxbow. So what if Skyler spent his time with that stuff, Jessie thought. It didn't do no harm. Besides, Skyler'd sure been shortchanged in this world and maybe had something good coming in the next. In fact, Skyler was the only decent man he ever recalled meeting, except for maybe Cousin Tyson, who'd been in the pen four times and probably did a good turn for Jessie only because he hated cops on general principles.
Skyler wore a clean plaid shirt and suspenders and gray work pants they had gotten a black man to buy for them at the Wal-Mart. Skyler wet his thumb and forefinger each time he turned a page in his Bible, then he studied one passage for a long time and smiled down at Jessie.
The passage was about John the Baptizer, and John's words seemed to rise off the page for Skyler and re- create the forest around him. The smoky green canopy overhead became the roof of a granary, and wind was blowing through the slats and separating out the chaff and lifting the grain into the sunlight, so that it became as golden as bees' pollen.
Skyler lifted the Bible in front of him to reread the passage, sitting up higher on the boulder. In his mind's eye he was already inside a gilded dome, one in which all the imperfections of the world disappeared, and he did not see the circular glint of glass on top of the ridge.
The soft-nosed. 30-06 round tore through the book's cover and half the pages and pierced Skyler through the lungs before the report ever rolled down the hillside.
Jessie Stump ran toward Skyler, his face lunatical, his knife drawn like a foolish wand.
Skyler had slipped to the ground and was on his hands and knees, coughing red flowers on the stones that protruded from the soil. The torn pulp from his Bible floated down on his head like feathers from a white bird.
28
The shooting was reported over the phone an hour later by a weeping man who refused to give his name to the dispatcher.
Marvin Pomroy and I drove to the crime scene together. The paramedics zipped up a black bag over Skyler's face and loaded the body into an ambulance and drove away with it, and Hugo Roberts's deputies strung yellow crime scene tape through the trees that surrounded the lichen-painted rocks where Skyler had died.
'You got any fix on Jessie Stump?' Marvin asked Hugo.
'The 911 come in from a convenience store three miles down the highway. A car was stole out of a lady's driveway not far away about the same time,' Hugo said.
'Get a warrant on the Deitrich place,' I said.
