'You think you're conwise, but somebody's laughing at you, Moon, just like those gunbulls did when they draped you over a barrel and made a girl out of you,' I said.
He pushed his back up against the tree, wincing slightly, grinning at me. He started to speak, then cleared his mouth and spit in the grass and started over.
'This don't mean nothing. I done something to you won't ever change,' he said.
'The people who hired you are the same people who tried to run you out of town earlier.'
He grinned again and wiped his nose on his sleeve, but I saw my words catch in the corner of his eye.
'You and Jimmy Cole wandered into something you shouldn't out at the Hart Ranch. Then some guys tried to take you down with a baseball bat at your motel. The same guys jumped me behind my barn. One of them was a dude named Felix Ringo.'
He looked out into the rain, his brow knurled, his recessed eye bright, brimming with water.
'A Mexican narc works out of San Antone?' he asked.
'Guy's got a nasty record, Moon. He likes to hurt people. But unlike you, he's got juice with the government.'
'That don't change nothing between me and you.'
'The Big C has its own clock.'
'You still ain't caught on, have you? How come that pipe joint blowed out on your old man? 'Cause some kid lit a cigarette down in the hellhole?'
I stood up and straightened my back. I felt two long ribbons of pain slip down my spine and wrap around my thighs.
'Come on, boy. Ask me,' he said. His legs forked out straight in front of him, like sticks inserted inside his trousers. His flat-soled prison work shoes glistened with mud.
I picked up my hat and slapped the dirt off it on my coat. 'You come near Pete or his mother again, I'll shoot you through the lungs. It's a promise, Moon,' I said, and started to walk away.
'I went back into the pump station and turned on the gas. That pipe was loaded when his arc bit into it. You ever watch a cat chewing on an e
lectric cord? You ought to seen his face when it went,' Moon said.
He began to laugh, holding his ribs because they hurt him, his face convulsing like a pixie's. He pushed the mattock handle at me with one shoe, trying to say something, shaking his head impotently at the level of mirth bursting from his chest.
Moon had to reach into the past to injure me, but across town, at that moment, Darl Vanzandt was buying a length of steel cable and a set of U-bolts, perhaps to prove that no matter what happened to Garland T. Moon, his legacy would be passed on to another generation in Deaf Smith.
* * *
chapter thirty-two
'You followed Darl from the courthouse?' I said to Temple.
We sat on my back screen porch. Pete was in the house, watching television, and the yard was full of pools with islands of leaves floating in them.
'You rubbed his face in it, in front of his friends. A kid like that doesn't pray for his enemies,' she said.
'I'm sorry for the stupid remark I made to you yesterday.'
'I already forgot about it.' She picked up her coffee spoon from her napkin and set it in her saucer.
I waited, but her eyes were deliberately empty, the balls of her fingers motionless on the table, and I said, 'What's he want with a pair of U-bolts and twenty feet of steel cable?'
She shook her head, then said, 'For some reason, those words and the name of Darl Vanzandt make my stomach crawl… You really gonna strike a match on Bunny's soul?'
'It's going to get even worse later.'
She looked at me and then looked through the screen. Her face was quiet, full of the thoughts and connections that she seldom shared. Her shirt had pulled out of her jeans and her baby fat creased on her hips. 'You want to have dinner with me and Pete?' she asked.