Cimarron Rose (Billy Bob Holland 1)

I picked up a brown egg from behind a tractor tire and dropped it in the basket. I didn't look at him. I could hear him breathing in the silence.

'But that's when I left. I didn't see Roseanne or Darl or none of the others after that. I ain't part of nothing that happened later that night,' he said.

'Who was?'

'God's truth, Mr Holland, I don't know.'

'You told me you weren't mixed up with Roseanne, Bunny.'

He kneaded his fists at his sides and the veins in his forearms swelled with blood. Then his face colored and his eyes glazed with shame.

'Damn, I knew this was gonna be a sonofabitch,' he said.

This is the story he told me.

He was a high school senior, on the varsity, with the kind of bone-breaking running power that left tacklers dazed and sometimes bloody in his wake, when he first noticed her watching him at practice from the empty stands.

He remembered the balmy gold afternoon that he walked over to her, his cleats crunching on the cinder-and-pea-gravel track, and tossed the football into her hands. He thought it was a clever thing to do, the kind of gesture that disarmed most girls, that made them feel vulnerable and a little foolish and gave them a chance to be coy and defenseless in his presence.

She flipped it back at him with both hands, so fast he had to duck to avoid being hit in the face. Then she opened her compact and put on lipstick as though he were not there.

'How old are you, anyway?' he asked.

'Fifteen. You got something against being fifteen?' She squeezed her knees together and wagged them back and forth.

He looked back over his shoulder at the practice field, at the second-string, whose attention was absorbed with thudding their pads against one another and running plays they would never be allowed to run in a game that counted.

'You want to go to a movie tonight?' he asked.

'The drive-in?'

'It don't have to be the drive-in.'

'I'll think about it.'

'You'll think about it?'

'I work at the Dairy Queen. I get off at six. I'll let you know then.'

He watched her walk down the empty concrete aisle, then across the worn grass to the bus stop in front of the school, her hips swaying under her plaid skirt. He kept glancing back at the practice field, as though someone were watching him, and his own thoughts confused and angered him.

He was at the Dairy Queen at five-thirty.

They did it a week later, amid a drone of cicadas, in the back of his uncle's old Plymouth, on cushions that smelled of dust and nicotine, and he realized immediately she had lied and that she was a virgin and he was hurting her even more deeply than the gasp, the clutch of pain in her throat, indicated. But he couldn't stop, nor did he know how to be gentle, nor could he admit that most of his sexual experience had been with Mexican prostitutes in San Antonio and the mill women his father brought home when he was drunk.

He was frightened when he saw how much she bled and he offered to drive her to a hospital in another county.

'You afraid to take me to one here?' she said.

'I don't want you in trouble with your folks, that's all,' he lied.

'I don't need a doctor, anyhow. Did you like me?' she said.

'Yeah, sure.'

'No, you didn't. But you will next time,' she said, and kissed him on the cheek.

Her hand found his. The trees that had gone dark outside the car made him think of stone pillars wrapped with the tracings of fireflies, but he did not know why.