'Yeah, I think that's what he said.' He shook his hair back on his shoulders and flung another football at the tire. This time it caromed off the rim.
'He's the same guy who picked up Roseanne at the Dairy Queen, isn't he? The one you took her away from?'
'Maybe.'
'Something bothers me, Bunny. Roseanne slapped you the night she was attacked. I think it was for something you're really ashamed of, maybe something related to her death.'
'I guess I just ain't smart enough to figure all them things out, Mr Holland.'
'The Mexican kid called you a pimp?'
'If that's what somebody told you.'
'That's when you swung on him?'
'Wouldn't you?' He cocked his arm to throw another football, then dropped it back into the orange crate. 'I got to go to work. Anything else on your mind?'
'Yeah, what kind of game is Darl Vanzandt trying to run on Lucas Smothers?'
'What them two do ain't my business.'
'What is?'
'Sir?'
'Cleaning up after a moral retard for the Vanzandt family?'
'People don't talk to me like that.'
'I just did. Watch your back, Bunny. Before it's over, I think Darl will kick a two-by-four up your ass,' I said, and walked back to my car.
I looked through the windshield at him before I backed out. His hands were propped on his hips, his mouth a tight seam, his disfigured profile pointed at the ground. Then he drove his cleated shoe into the slats of the orange crate and showered footballs over the yard.
* * *
chapter nineteen
Pete's mother waited tables in a diner out by the slaughterhouse. Sometimes the men she met in bars beat her up, stole her money, and got her fired from her jobs. Last year she was found wandering behind a motel in her slip and was put in a detox center for three days. After she got out, a choleric judge who reeked of cigars and self-righteousness lectured her in front of morning court and sentenced her to pick up trash on the highways for six weekends with a group of high school delinquents.
I sat in her living room and explained why Pete needed to stay at Temple Carrol's house for a while. She listened without expression, in her waitress uniform, her knees close together, her hands folded in her lap, as though I held some legitimate legal power over her life. There were circles under her eyes, and her hair was lank and colorless on each side of her narrow face.
'Cain't y'all just go arrest the guy wrote you that letter?' she asked.
'There weren't any fingerprints on it. We don't know who sent it.'
'The social worker wants him here when she makes her home call. Y'all ain't gonna keep him real long, are you? I cain't get in no more trouble with Social Services.'
Late Friday afternoon I looked down from my office window and saw Darl Vanzandt's cherry-red '32 Ford turn into the square. The roof was 'chopped'—vertical sections had been cut out of the body so that the top was lowered several inches and the windows looked like slits in a machine-gun bunker—and I had a hard time telling who sat in the passenger's seat, one gnarled arm hooked on the outside panel. Then the car turned out of the evening glare into the shade and I saw the profile of Garland T. Moon.
They parked off the square in front of the Mexican grocery and went inside. Then Moon came out alone, leaned against the car, and began eating ice cream with a plastic spoon from a paper cup.
I walked across the square through the shadows and stopped in front of him. He wore pleated, beltless khakis high up on his hips and a ribbed sleeveless undershirt that looked stitched to his skin.
'What are you doing with the kid?' I said.
He licked the ice cream off his spoon. A shaft of sunlight fell like a dagger across his face, and his receded eye watered in the glare.
'He likes Mexican girls. I introduced him to a lady friend of mine got a house across the border,' he said.