“I can see this might piss you off.”
“Thank you,” I said.
She walked down the driveway toward her car. Then turned around and came back.
“You got some mint leaves to go with that lemonade?” she said.
Ten miles from town was a drive-in theater left over from the 1950s that opened only on Friday and Saturday nights. High school and college kids got crashed on warm beer and reefer and crystal and purple passion, rat-raced up and down the aisles, accidentally tore the speakers from the stanchions or the windows out of their cars when they burned rubber off the embankments, threw water bombs made from condoms into convertibles, fist-fought behind the cinder-block bathrooms, and stuck firecrackers up the tailpipes of cars in which great love affairs were blooming.
Without the dope the drive-in theater would have been little different in ambiance from its predecessors of four decades ago. In fact, it still had its moments: the smell of foot-long hot dogs and mustard and chopped onions, the palm trees framed against sunsets that were probably the most glorious in the Western Hemisphere, the scrolled purple and pink neon on the concession stand, the strolling groups of short-hair, fundamentalist kids whose piney-woods innocence seemed to insulate them from all the societal changes taking place around them.
Esmeralda and Lucas parked their pickup truck on the second row, and Lucas went to the concession stand and brought back a large popcorn, two hot dogs, and two Pepsis. Lucas was adjusting the sound on the speaker when a skinny kid in horn-rimmed glasses and cowboy boots and a denim shirt with the tails pulled out of his belt and a wallet chain hanging out of his back pocket stopped five feet from the pickup’s window and started making frantic gestures at him.
“What do you want, J.P.?” Lucas asked.
“Come over here, man,” J.P. said in a whisper, as though Esmeralda couldn’t hear or see him.
“Stop acting like a moron. What is it?” Lucas said.
“Jeff’s back there with Rita Summers. He was melting coke in a glass of Jack. The guy’s out there on the edge, man. When you walked by he give you a look, like … Man, I don’t want to even remember it. That dude’s cruel, Lucas.”
“Yeah, thanks, J.P. Don’t worry about it, okay?” Lucas said.
A few minutes later Esmeralda said she was going to the rest room.
“I’ll come with you,” Lucas said.
“No,” she replied.
“You don’t owe Jeff anything. Don’t talk to him,” Lucas said.
She tilted her head and feigned a pout.
“He’s scum, Essie,” Lucas said.
“I’ll be right back. Now stop it,” she said.
She walked toward the concession, right past Jeff’s yellow convertible. She wore a tight white dress with frill around the hem and neckline and scarlet ribbon threaded in and out of the frill. Rita Summers was behind the steering wheel, eating from a paper shell of french fries. Jeff held a tumbler full of bourbon and ice in his hand. His eyes followed Esmeralda, the sway of her hips, the way her hair bounced on her shoulder blades.
He set the tumbler on the dashboard and got out of the car and followed her.
She heard the soles of his loafers crunch on the shale behind her. His face was dilated with booze, his pores grainy with perspiration and heat.
“Go home, Jeff. Get some rest,” she said.
“Dump Smothers. We can get it back together,” he said.
“You need help. Give therapy a try. What have you got to lose, hon? You’d learn a lot about yourself and see things different.”
“Better hear me, Essie. You and Smothers and Ronnie Cross have been sticking it in my face. In front of lots of people. A guy runs out of selections. That’s the way it is. Even Ronnie knows that.”
“I think you’re going to die if you don’t get help.”
“We had a lot going at first. We can have it back. You want me to say it? I never had a girl like you.”
“That’s the problem, Jeff. You collect girls. You don’t love them. You can’t, because you don’t love yourself.”
His eyes were out of focus. He wiped his nose with his wrist. He seemed to lose balance momentarily, then right himself. “I gave you a chance. But you’re just not a listener. It’s the beaner gene. Y’all are uneducable,” he said.