She went to the window and looked at the sunset.
'Is it for Moon?' she said.
'Sometimes a guy keeps a blank space in his mind.'
'Not a good answer.'
She walked back into the kitchen.
We went down to the tank and spread a checkered cloth on the grass and set out our sandwiches and deviled eggs on paper plates. Pete scooped night crawlers out of a coffee can and baited the hooks on three cane poles and swung the bobbers out on the flooded reeds. The sun dipped over the hills, and the dusk felt moist and heated from the water and dense with insects.
'You need to back off,' she said.
'From a guy like Moon?' I asked.
'From all of it. You're straying too deep into federal territory.'
She kept her gaze on the tank and never looked at me. She hooked her thumbs in the pockets of her riding pants.
I put my hand on her back. I could feel the heat in her skin through her shirt.
'These guys threatened Pete; they were going to take me down in pieces,' I said.
'You think that's lost on me?'
'We're seeing each other and I don't even know who you are,' I said.
She didn't reply.
'Mary Beth?' I said.
'Maybe you don't know who you are yourself, Billy Bob,' she said. She turned and looked me full in the face. Her throat was bladed with color. 'I know what y'all did in Mexico. The man you idolize was a self-appointed executioner. Is that what you want to be?'
'He was a brave man, Mary Beth. You shouldn't speak of him like that.'
She opened the top of the wicker basket and took out the tin cups for lemonade and started to fill them. Then she stopped and brushed a long curl out of her eye.
'I apologize for remarking on your friend. Say good night to Pete for me,' she said, and walked toward the house and her car.
I went to the health club at six-thirty the next morning and lay on the tile stoop at the rear of the steam room and began the series of exercises the doctor had recommended for my back. The room was empty, billowing with vapor, the temperature set at 130 degrees.
Then the door opened and closed and Sammy Mace and Felix Ringo entered and sat down naked on the stoop. They paid no attention to me. Felix Ringo was telling a story, pumping his hands as though he were rotating the inverted pedals on a bicycle.
'You get it going real fast, man. The wires are already clipped on the guy, and the guy starts jerking around and jittering and his words are popping on his lips like sparks. The faster you pump it, the faster his mouth is working,' Ringo said, giggling. 'This was the same guy says he ain't never going to give nobody up, spitting on people, acting like he don't care when we walk him into the basement. They got it coming, man, you seen some of the stuff they done.'
He continued his story, tilting forward on his arms, looking at Sammy Mace's profile for reaction. Sammy placed two fingers on Ringo's arm and looked in my direction. Then he wrapped his loins in a towel and moved down the stoop and sat next to me. His face was flushed, slick with sweat, heated by the room and the animus that drove his thoughts, like that of a man to whom lust, anger, and vindictiveness were interchangeable passions. His eyes took my inventory, dropped briefly to my genitalia, settled on- my mouth, then my eyes.
'You a lawyer here now, huh?' he said.
'You got it.'
'I like it here. It's clean. That biker kid Felix found help you out?'
'Too soon to tell, Sammy.'
His eyes were so dark they were almost black, the eyebrows silver. His stare held on mine, trying to read what I wanted, what lie did my words conceal.
'Jack Vanzandt was a pathfinder, a war hero. He ought to be governor of Texas. Why you trying to hurt his family?' Sammy said.