“You going to let him get away with—”
He flipped his hat by the brim up on his head. “My mother was a long-suffering, Christian woman. I know that ’cause not a day passed without her telling me. She told my daddy that so often he used to walk around the house with wads of newspaper screwed in his ears. He even said she’d get up out of the grave to tell the rest of us how worthless we was.
“So that’s what I told Earl Deitrich. That woman has been a lifetime motivator. The best part of Earl Deitrich run down his daddy’s leg and there won’t be a beer joint left in Texas the day Kippy Jo and me cut him in on our oil site. Durn, if that boy didn’t slam down the phone, then pick it up and slam it down again.”
16
It seemed like nothing went easy for Jeff Deitrich. Or at least that’s what he told Lucas Smothers after he came back from seeing his father and being told he had one of two choices: lose Esmeralda Ramirez and her beaner relatives or get used to the lifestyle of oil field trash.
“He had my name taken off the membership list at the club. He canceled all my credit cards,” Jeff said.
“So flush the club,” Lucas said.
“Luke, my boy, black basketball players with orange hair and collard greens for brains make twenty million dollars in a season. Think about where you’re going to be on your current salary in ten years.”
Jeff had sailed yachts and deep-sea-fished since he was a child. He drove to Aransas Pass and tried to get on as a boat pilot ferrying supplies to offshore oil rigs. The owner of the boatyard listened attentively, chewing on a matchstick, and told Jeff to come back in the morning, that maybe they could work something out. Jeff and Esmeralda took a twenty-dollar room at a motel behind a truck stop, then Jeff went down to the boatyard at 5 A.M. The owner had left word with the foreman that Jeff could start his trial period right away, cleaning the grease trap behind the office and shoveling out the hold of a shrimper.
The foreman had to lock himself in a bathroom.
On the way back home Jeff stopped in San Antonio and scored four fat bags of rainbows and blues and a bag of Afghan skunk.
“Why you need all that dope?” Esmeralda said.
“Try to concentrate on what I’m saying. We don’t have any money,” he said, enunciating each of his words. “The way to get money is to buy something cheap, then sell it to dumb people for a lot more than it’s worth. It’s why Mexicans never get out of the barrio.”
But that night two Jamaican dealers from Dallas met Jeff in an abandoned picnic ground down the road from Shorty’s and, instead of handing him an envelope full of cash, pointed a .357 Magnum in his face and picked up the four Ziplocs of rainbows and blues from the car hood and dropped them in a shopping bag.
“I know where you guys live. Y’all are going to have some visitors,” Jeff said.
“Say, mon, why don’t we do it dis way? We just take your thumbs wit’ us and save you de gas money,” the man with the gun said.
Jeff watched the taillights of their car move away into the darkness, the dust from the tires drifting as palpably as grit into his hair.
The tin trailer was boiling with heat when Jeff woke in the morning, his face netted with hangover and inchoate rage at being ripped off by two calypso mop-heads his father wouldn’t allow to drink out of the garden hose. He came through the back door of Lucas’s house and made toll calls without permission, pacing up and down, barefoot, his breath bouncing sourly off the receiver.
“I’m going to stick their flippers in a vise,” he said. “Just pick up Hammie and two or three other guys and cover my back … No, I’m serious. I’m going to break their fingers, then their wrists. You want the word on the street we’re anybody’s fuck? They’re going to eat their next meal out of a dog bowl … We having a memory lapse, Warren? You remember that hit-and-run in Austin?”
Ten minutes later Lucas heard Jeff and Esmeralda fighting inside the trailer.
“Because I need it. Because I couldn’t sleep all night. Because you snore. Because I got barbed wire in my head. You tell me where it is!” Jeff said.
“You know how much you smoked already? Look at your eyes. They’re full of blood clots. You stink like a street person.”
“I’ll say it one more time, Esmeralda. Where’s my stash?”
“I burned it.”
“Sure you did. That’s why birds are dropping out of the sky.”
He began tearing her clothes off the hangers in a closet and throwing them through the front door. Then he walked out onto the steps with her storage trunk over his head and heaved it end over end into the yard. The top burst open, and he rooted in it like a badger digging in a hole, flinging her jewelry and shoes and scrapbooks and red and purple rayon undergarments into the air. His face was white and sweating, his jaws flecked with stubble.
“You need to go to detox, Jeff. You’re sick,” she said.
“What I’m sick of is salsa and onion breath and your brother Cholo’s stupid face and the thought I’ve been coming in the same box as Ronnie Cruise. I want to scrub you off me with peroxide.”
“Maricón,” she said.
He straightened up slowly. “You called me a queer? That’s what you just said? A queer? Say it again and see what happens.”