“What do I know?” Warren said.
“You guys are too much,” Jeff said, and walked to his yellow convertible and unscrewed the cap on his fuel tank and inserted the gas can hose inside.
A wind smelling of distant rain and watermelon fields seemed to blow out of nowhere. Hammie, Warren, Chug, and the other guy started talking and laughing at once, dipping their hands down into the cooler’s melted ice for another Budweiser.
The mop-head behind the wheel of the Mercedes said something to his friend, then both of them grinned, their teeth pink with blood in the starlight.
“Say again?” Jeff asked. He tilted the can up
ward, draining it, and set it on the ground.
“Hey, mon, you had a nice Mexican wife. Cholo’s sister, right? She just don’t like white bread.”
“So repeat what you said.”
“You got a thing for wearing her underwear. Dat’s what Cholo say. Not me, mon.”
Jeff stuck his hands in his back pockets and studied the ground for a long moment, brushing pebbles and dirt under the sole of one loafer. He combed his hair. He huffed an obstruction out of his nose. He sucked the saliva out of his cheeks and spit it into the darkness.
The mop-heads stared indifferently into space, occasionally shaking a mosquito out of their faces.
Jeff walked around the far side of the Mercedes and closed the back door, then returned to the driver’s side and closed that door, too.
“Jeff?” Hammie said.
But Jeff didn’t answer. The Mercedes was pointed downward on a slope that twisted between huge, grass-grown mounds of dirt and stone. Jeff used a beach towel to wipe down the Mercedes’s door handles, the steering wheel, and dashboard, then the ignition keys when he started the engine.
“Hey, we got a pair of big eyes here,” Warren said, nodding at Wesley. “Listen to me, man. I got a future. I don’t want to leave it here tonight.”
“Don’t put your hand on me again, Warren,” Jeff said, and dropped the Mercedes into gear.
The mop-heads craned their necks frantically, their bodies straining against the seat belts, like people involuntarily riding in the back of a taxi that had no destination. The Mercedes rolled down the slope toward the water, gathering speed, the front end suspension adjusting for the undulations in the slope. For a moment Wesley thought the car was about to high-center on a pile of rock and swerve into a small hill and stall out but it didn’t.
The mop-heads twisted their heads and looked at him through the back window just as the car bounced hard over a rise in the slope, springing the trunk in the air, and disappeared between two mounds of dirt and sand.
Then Wesley heard the engine hiss like a molten horseshoe dipped in a trough when the car’s front end dropped over the embankment into the water.
Jeff popped the emergency flare alight and walked up on a rise and held the flare aloft, bathing the crater and its yellow banks and the reeds in the shallows with a red glow. Thirty feet out, water was flowing and channeling like the currents in a river through the opened windows of the car, sliding over the roof now, the green silt obscuring the shapes that fought desperately inside the rear glass.
Then the car was gone from view and Wesley was running in the darkness, alone, away from the crater and the air ballooning to the water’s surface, filled, he was absolutely sure, with the voices of men who called out his name.
19
“What did you do next?” I asked Wesley.
“I run all the way back to the highway. Jeff Deitrich picked me up hitchhiking,” he answered. His face was gray, his hair soaked, like a man in mortal terror.
“We can do the right thing, Wes.”
“Like go across the street and tell your buddy Marvin Pomroy what I just told you?”
“We get the jump on it. Let the others fall in their own shit.”
“You’re old. You ain’t got to worry about guys like Jeff Deitrich and Chug Rollins. I hate this town. I hate being dumb and not having no money and not knowing when other people are making fun of me. I’m Jonesing real bad. I got to cop,” he said.
“No dope. Just for today. We’ll get you into detox.”
But he went out the door. The back of his shirt looked like someone had pressed a rolled, wet towel from his shoulder blades down to his wide leather belt.