“Yes?”
“Who hit your wife?”
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“What?”
“You heard me. On the right side of her face.”
“You’ve got some damn nerve.”
“So it was you?”
“You keep your carping, self-righteous mouth off my family.”
“Touch her again and I’ll catch you out in public. Everything you own or you can buy won’t help you.”
He slammed down the phone. I sat for a long time in the pale light glowing through the blinds, the fingers of my right hand curling into the oil and moisture on my palm.
That evening a lacquered red biplane dropped out of an absolutely blue sky, circled once over the river, and landed in the pasture beyond the tank. I got into the Avalon and drove past the chicken run and barn and windmill and out through the tall grass that grew at the foot of the levee. When I came around the willows at the far end of the tank I saw the man named Bubba Grimes, who had claimed that Wilbur Pickett had tried to sell him bearer bonds; he was leaning against the fuselage of his plane, pouring from a dark bottle of Cold Duck into a paper cup.
“You tend to show up in a peculiar fashion, Mr. Grimes,” I said, getting out of the Avalon.
He set down the bottle on the bottom wing of his plane and grinned at the corner of his mouth. His drooping left eye looked like gray rubber that had melted and cooled again.
“Got an offer for you. Wilbur Pickett is about to have some bad luck. Price is right, I can change all that,” he said.
“Wilbur’s a poor man, Mr. Grimes. That means I’d have to give you money out of my own pocket. Now, why would I want to do that?”
“To bring down Earl Deitrich. The word is you topped his wife.”
“I think it’s time for you to get back in your plane.”
He drank his paper cup empty and tossed it in the weeds. “The man’s weakness is gambling. You want my hep, here’s my number. The two of us can mess him up proper,” he said, and shoved a penciled piece of notepad paper in my shirt pocket with two fingers.
“Get off my property,” I said.
He cut his head. “I cain’t blame you for not wanting to know your own mind. That woman’s special. She’s got a fragrance like roses. In Africa once, she’d been out working in the heat and she come in the tent, and the smell was like warm roses. It’s too bad rich men always get the pick of the brooder house.”
In the red light his face was filled with a glow that was both saccharine and lustful. When he took off, he raised his bottle in salute; his plane clipped the top of a willow tree and scattered leaves behind him like green bird feathers.
• • •
Five days later Lucas Smothers came to my office and sat in the swayback deerhide chair in the corner and took off his hat and gazed out the window. He had been working in the fields with his stepfather, and I could smell an odor like grass and milk in his clothes. He had his mother’s blue eyes, and the light seemed to enter and hold inside them as it would inside tinted crystal. His expression was deliberately innocuous, as it always was when he felt caught between his need to instruct and caution me and at the same time protect me from the knowledge of what his generation, with its rapacious addictions, was really like.
“A guy who runs around with Jeff? He told me this crazy story about him, about how Jeff ain’t always in control like he pretends. It’s a little off the wall, though,” he said.
“I’ll try to handle it,” I said.
“That Mexican girl who got busted out on the highway, Esmeralda? It was Jeff called the cops on her. His friend says Jeff did a one-nighter with her. Except she won’t go away and the truth is Jeff don’t want her to, no matter what he tells himself and everybody else.”
I had to be in court in twenty minutes and I tried not to let my attention wander or my eyes drop to my wrist-watch.
“So a couple of nights ago Jeff drives his girlfriend, Rita Summers, down to this Mexican restaurant north of San Antone where Esmeralda works. Jeff’s gonna show Esmeralda there’s nothing between them and Rita is his reg’lar and he ain’t afraid to get it all out in the open, if that’s what it takes.
“All his buds are there, cranking down tequila sunrises and Carta Blanca, after they been smoking dope all the way from Deaf Smith. When Esmeralda walks by with a tray, some guy goes, ‘I never thought I’d like to have sloppy seconds on a pepperbelly.’
“Jeff’s face looked like he’d eaten a tack. Rita Summers don’t say anything for a long time, then she calls Esmeralda over and goes, ‘Excuse me, but this food tastes like dog turds.’