corner of his eye.
'We want half the drilling operation,' Peggy Jean said.
'Not an option,' I said.
'That land's worth a minimum of thirty-five hundred an acre, Mr. Deitrich. For a signature you make an immediate two-hundred-thousand-dollar profit, plus you get half of what may be a huge oil sand. I wouldn't take too long making up my mind,' Temple said.
Earl Deitrich looked at his wife, then at Clayton Spangler.
'Why don't y'all have a drink at the bar?' Clayton said to our side of the table.
Late that afternoon I took a half gallon of French vanilla ice cream out of the freezer and put it, a serving spoon, and two bowls and teaspoons in a paper bag and drove down to Temple Carrol's house.
She was wearing moccasins and lavender shorts and a beige T-shirt when she answered the door.
'Sit in the swing with me,' I said.
'Where'd you go after the Deitrichs took the deal?' she asked.
'I wanted to get ahold of a Houston homicide detective named Janet Valenzuela. She's working the arson of the savings and loan and the deaths of the four firemen. I told her Cholo Ramirez admitted to being at the fire and was working for Ronnie Cruise's uncle and Earl Deitrich in a take-down scam. I called the FBI, too. Maybe they can squeeze the uncle.'
'You left Ronnie's name out of it?'
'He's not a player. You want some ice cream?'
She slipped her palms in her back pockets. They were tight against the cloth and curved against the firmness of her rump. I could feel her eyes studying the side of my face.
The half gallon of ice cream had begun to soften in the warm air, but it was still round and cold in my hands when I set it on the railing of the gallery and filled two bowls. I handed one to her and sat down in the swing. She sat on the railing and ate without speaking. The cannas in her flower bed were stiff and hard-looking in the shade, the bloom at the head of the stalk sparkling with drops of water from the sprinkler.
'Why so quiet?' I asked.
'That deal today? You had everybody in the room absolutely convinced Wilbur was about to punch into a big dome. I don't think he could find oil in a filling station,' she said.
'Avaricious people make good listeners,' I said.
'What are you up to?'
'I'm just not that complex, Temple.'
She raised her eyebrows. I got up from the swing and sat next to her on the railing. Her shoulder and hip touched mine. Her spoon scraped quietly in her ice cream bowl while she continued to eat.
'You want to go to a show?' I asked.
She didn't answer.
'Is your father home?' I asked.
'Why?'
'I thought you might want to go to a show. I mean, if he'd be all right by himself.'
'He's at his sister's. They have dinner and watch late-night TV one night a week.' Her face turned up into mine.
'I see,' I said. I circled my fingers lightly around her wrist and touched her upper arm with my other hand. In the shadows her mouth looked red and vulnerable when it parted, like a four o'clock opening to the evening's coolness.
Then she dropped her eyes and tilted her head down.
'A movie sounds fine. I have to change, though. Can you wait for me out here a few minutes?' she said.
Rita Summers sat at a table by the window in the restaurant her father owned above the river. This was one of four that he owned in Texas and New Mexico, and she liked to come here sometimes by herself and have a drink in the lounge and watch the boats on the river and think about her day and the men, boys, really, who moved in and out of it without consequence and the protean nature of her relationships that in her mind's eye always ended in a blank place in her future.
There had been a time when she had believed the future was built incrementally, with absolute guarantees of success provided to those who did what was expected of them. You graduated from high school, with all the attendant ceremony, as though it actually marked an achievement, then enrolled at the university in Austin and lived in a sorority house and dated the right boys and kept the right attitudes and learned whom to avoid and whom to cultivate, and one day your father gave you away at your wedding and the pride and love you saw in his eyes confirmed that all the goodness the world could offer had indeed become yours.
But she didn't finish her second year at the university. Her professors were boring, the subject matter stupid, the fraternity boys she dated inane and immature. She began seeing an air force officer who came from old Boston money, even though she knew he had a wife, a Berkeley graduate, in Vermont. They began meeting weekends at the Ritz Carlton in Houston and the Four Seasons in Dallas. The hardness of his body inside her, the tendons in his back tightening under her fingers, filled her with a sense of excitement and power she had never experienced before. Her skin seemed to glow with it when she showered afterwards, and the glow and erotic confidence only intensified when she refused to answer her sorority sisters' questions about the affair she was obviously having.
Sometimes she wondered about the wife, the Berkeley graduate in Vermont. Then she would toss her head, as though dealing with a problem of conscience, but in reality she was secretly happy, in a way that almost disturbed her, at the sexual power she could exert over other people's lives.
But one month she missed her period. She told him this over Sunday breakfast in the hotel. He stopped returning her calls.
The following month, when her menstrual cycle resumed, she sat down at her desk in the sorority house and, using stationery from the Ritz Carlton Hotel, wrote a letter to her lover's commanding officer, detailing the affair, and making particular mention of the lover's statements about his contempt for his wife in Vermont, to whom he referred as 'Ho Chi Minh's answer to Minnie Mouse.' She mailed the letter to the air base and copies to the wife and to the wife's father, who was the mayor of the village in which they lived.
Rita drank from her gin fizz and was amused at the way her fingerprints stenciled themselves in the moisture on the glass. The gin was cold and warm inside her at the same time, just as the immediate environment around her was. The air-conditioning was set so low her breath fogged against the window, but, outside, the twilight was green, streaked with rain, a palm tree rattling in a balmy breeze. She drank again from the gin and bit down on the candied cherry in the ice, and thought how she was both inside a hermetically sealed air-conditioned world owned by her father and yet part of the greater world, although safe from its elements. In moments like these, in a setting like this, she felt the same sense of control she had enjoyed when she lay down on the bed in the Ritz Carlton and looked at the undisguised hunger in the air force officer's face.
But it was not his rejection of her that bothered her now. It was Jeff Deitrich. And Jeff Deitrich and Jeff Deitrich and Jeff Deitrich, and the fact that two men in a row had used and discarded her and the second one had rubbed food in her nose and hair and eyes while other people watched.
She drank the rest of her gin fizz and ordered another, her jawbone flexing like a tiny spur under the skin.
She heard the car before she saw it, the twin exhausts roaring off the asphalt, the transmission winding into a scream. Then it burst around a line of cars, across the center stripe, a customized Mercury she had seen before, coming hard out of the north, its maroon hood overpainted with a net of blue and red flame, a sheriffs cruiser right on its rear bumper.
A second cruiser came out of the south and slid sideways to a stop on the asphalt, sealing off the two-lane and blocking the Mercury's escape.
The driver of the Mercury shifted down, double-clutching, and turned abruptly into the restaurant's parking lot, flooring the accelerator again. But he spun out of control into a muddy field that sloped down toward the bluffs over the river, showering brown water across his windows, the wheels whining in gumbo up to the axle, mud and grass geysering off the back tires.
Then the engine killed and steam rose off the hood in the rain. The driver, who was shirtless, leaned his head on his folded arms and waited for the two deputies to pull him from his car.
