The waiter brought Jeff’s Coke and Jack Daniel’s on a tray, and Jeff drank the glass half empty, his eyes deepening in color, then swung a cherry back and forth by its stem and stared at it.
“You want to clarify that last remark?” Esmeralda said.
Rita smiled at Jeff, then bent down and whispered in Esmeralda’s ear, her eyes uplifted maliciously into Jeff’s. Esmeralda’s face grew pinched, puckering like an apple exposed to intense heat.
Rita straightened up and looked down at Esmeralda. “He used to go to Mexican cathouses for it. But finally the only place that would let him in was run by a black woman down in the Valley,” she said.
Esmeralda picked up her purse, one with spangles and pink fringe, and walked past the wedding party to the rest rooms, her chin tilted upward, the movement of her hips accentuated. But she could not hide the look in her eyes.
“If we weren’t in this dining room, I’d kick your ass around the block,” Jeff said to Rita.
“Oh, I know you would. You’re just so … studly,” Rita said, and made a feigned passionate noise and kissing motion with her mouth and rejoined her party. She leaned forward confidentially, telling a story to a half dozen others, all of whom were grinning.
“Get Esmeralda out of the can. We’re going,” Jeff said.
“Me?” Lucas said.
“You’re not a member here. Nobody cares what you do. Go get her.”
“Tell you what. I’ll just walk out to the highway and hitch a ride. In the meantime, why don’t you quit acting like your shit don’t flush?”
“All right, I’m sorry. Sit down. I’ll take care of it. God, why do I get myself into this stuff?” Jeff said. He finished his drink, then stood up, his face blanching slightly as the combination of whiskey and vodka on an empty stomach suddenly took effect.
He walked down the hallway to the ladies’ room and went in without knocking. A moment later he and Esmeralda emerged in the hallway, his hand spread across the small of her back. Her cheeks were wet, her purse held tightly in both hands.
“She’s a liar. She gave blow jobs to the whole backfield at SMU. She’s treating you like a dumb peon,” he said to her.
The waiter had wheeled their dinner to their table and was placing schooners of draft beer to the right of each steak platter.
“Bag it up for the dishwashers, Andre. We’re gonna boogie on over to the Dog ’n’ Shake. That’s where it’s happening,” Jeff said, and signed the ticket on the serving cart.
Then he realized that Rita Summers and her friends were laughing, not abruptly, as they would have at a joke, but in a sustained, collective giggle that seemed to spread like a crinkling of cellophane at their table. He turned and saw their eyes fixed on Esmeralda’s shoe and the long strand of wet toilet paper that was attached to the sole.
He gripped her upper arm, squeezing hard, and stepped with one foot on the toilet paper and tried to push her free of it. Instead, he only shredded the paper and matted it on his loafer. His rage boiled into his face and he stooped and tore Esmeralda’s shoe off her foot and flung it under a table, then pulled her out the front door.
“All you had to do was just eat dinner. It was that simple. You people are a walking ad for the Ku Klux Klan. Stop making that sound,” he said, while she rested her forehead against one of the white columns on the porch and hid her face in her hands.
14
I knew it was wrong.
In the same way a reformed drunkard places himself on an innocuous mission to a saloon or an unrewarded hunter at twilight fires a round through the window of a deserted stone house and turns his back on the crashing sounds inside.
Peggy Jean said the picnic at the cottage on the Comal River was for children from an orphans home, that Pete would probably love shooting the rapids with the others in an inner tube.
She wasn’t wrong about that part. As soon as I parked the Avalon among a stand of pine trees above the river, he wrestled his inner tube from the car trunk and ran Through the trees I saw him wade into the thick green coldness of the water.
“Don’t worry about him. I hired two lifeguards to watch after them,” Peggy Jean said.
She stood next to the cottage in a flagstone, trellised arbor overgrown with climbing roses. The cottage was the color of chalk against the trees, the windows hung with ventilated blue shutters, the wind chimes on the porch twirling in the breeze. She flipped a checkered tablecloth over a plank table and began setting it with plastic forks and spoons and cups that were painted with the pink faces of smiling pigs. She had flown in from Padre Island that morning, and there was fresh sunburn on her forehead and neck.
“We can’t stay too long. His mom wants him back by dark,” I said.
“Did you bring your trunks?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“I’m going to take a swim. You can change inside. I’ll use the bathhouse in back,” she said. She watched my face. “Is something wrong?”