'She had to come by your house to do it?' She looked across the road at my neighbor's cattle bunched in the field.
'She was in the neighborhood,' I said.
'This broad always has a way of being in the neighborhood.'
'You want a cup of coffee?'
She pulled a bandanna out of her jeans pocket and tied up her hair. 'I can't sleep when I drink coffee. Or when I think your house is burning down,' she said.
She walked toward her car.
'Temple?' I said.
She didn't answer.
I was rinsing the dishes after breakfast the next morning when Vernon Smothers tapped on my back door. He wore a broken straw hat and had a matchstick in the corner of his mouth.
'What is it?' I said, opening the door part way, without inviting him in.
He rolled his wedding ring on his index finger and looked at the palm of his hand.
'I made a mistake about something. I need your advice,' he said. He blew air out of his nose, as though he had a cold, and looked away at the windmill behind the barn.
I widened the door for him. He sat down at the plank table on the porch. The heels of his cowboy boots were worn almost flat.
'Yesterday I hauled my car in to have the oil pan welded. To that shop next to the Green Parrot Motel?' he said.
He saw the recognition in my face.
'Yeah, that's right,' he said. 'The place where Garland Moon is working. Except I didn't know that and I didn't know what he looked like, either.'
'Oh man,' I said.
'He gets my car up on a jack and drains the oil and takes the pan off and welds it and sticks it back on, and I ask how much I owe him.
'"Hunnerd-twenty-five," he says.
'I go, "My ass. That job ain't worth one nickel more than seventy-five dollars."
'He says, "Then it looks like I got me a fishing car."
'I give him eighty dollars cash and take out my MasterCard for the rest of it. He looks at the name and says, "Vernon Smothers… Vernon Smothers… Is that little jailhouse bitch your son? Why, you're bird-dogging me, ain't you?"
'I told him I'd never laid eyes on him and didn't want to and didn't have no plan on seeing him again… He never said a word. He just smiled and wrote out my charge slip and handed it to me… I seen eyes like that on one other man in my life. He was a door gunner. If he caught them in a rice field or a hooch or coming out of a wedding party, it didn't make no difference.'
'Forget it,' I said.
'I think he's going to hurt my boy.'
'We won't let that happen, Vernon.' He cupped his fingers over his mouth. His skin made a dry, rasping sound against his fingers.
The social circle of Darl Vanzandt wasn't a difficult one to track. They were rich and lived in the East End; they had flunked out of the University of Texas or they commuted to a community college or they held token jobs in the businesses they would inherit. But it was a strange solipsistic attitude toward others that truly defined them. They were animated and loud and unseeing in public, indifferent to the injury their words might cause anyone outside their perimeter. They drove too fast, running stop signs and caution lights, never making a connection between their recklessness and the jeopardy they arbitrarily brought into the lives of others.
Their accents were regional, but they had skied in Colorado and surfed in California, and they played golf and tennis at a country club where blacks and Mexicans picked up their litter from the greens and their sweaty towels from the court, as though that was the natural function of the poor. Their insensitivity was almost a form of innocence. Had they ever been brought to task for their behavior, they probably would not have understood the complaint against them.
But one member of this group was an exception. Bunny Vogel came from a family of shiftless mill workers whose front yard was always decorated with rusted washing machines and automobile parts. But Bunny'd had a talent. As a high school running back he had crashed holes through the enemy line like a tank through a hedge row. Then he had played two years on a no-cut athletic scholarship at Texas A&M, with every expectation of graduating and going to the pros. That was before he got caught paying off a grader and fellow athlete to change an exam score for a freshman named Darl Vanzandt.
After he was expelled, he turned his motorcycle on its side and ground a strip of metal, leather, and bone a hundred feet long on the highway to Austin.