“Beaners don’t take down River Oaks white boys. You’re not a bad kid. You’re just dumb,” Earl said, grinning.
Earl pulled back the hammer and placed the muzzle of the Smith & Wesson against his temple. He looked directly into Cholo’s eyes and smiled again, then squeezed the trigger.
There was no report, in fact, no sound at all, not even the metallic snap of the firing pin against a spent cartridge.
Earl felt a wall of heat from his house baking the clothes on his back. Then the hatted men approached him and took him by his arms and led him toward the truck. Through the muddy window in the cab, he thought he saw Jeff’s bloodless and terrified face staring back at him
from the rear seat, a bullet hole below one eye.
Early the next morning Temple Carrol and I followed Marvin Pomroy out to the crime scene. The sky was a cloudless blue, the air crisp, the trees turning color on the hills. The Deitrich home was half in shadow, the immense white walls speckled with frost. The chrysanthemums were brown and gold in the flower beds, and the zebra-striped canopy over the side terrace puffed with wind.
“His wife said he was hollering about a fire truck. With Cholo and Jeff and dead slavers on it. She came outside and he put a big one right through his head,” Marvin said.
“Fire truck?” I said.
“He told two of Hugo’s deputies the ravine was on fire. There was a fire way on up the river but none around here,” Marvin said.
“Where is Peggy Jean?” I asked.
“Sedated at the hospital. Did I tell you we got Stump?” Marvin said.
“No.”
“He fell and broke his leg up on the ridge … You bothered about something?”
“No, sir,” I replied.
“You dimed Peggy Jean with her husband, so you think you share some responsibility for Earl’s craziness?” Marvin asked.
“No, I don’t think anything, Marvin. I think we’re going to breakfast. You want to join us?”
“Today’s Pee-Wee football day,” he said.
I walked back to my Avalon. Temple was studying the ground on the far side.
“Look at this,” she said, and pointed at the imprints of heavy, cleated tires in the grass.
“There were a bunch of emergency vehicles in here,” I said.
“Not with this kind of weight. They don’t lead back to the road, either. They go up the hill,” she said.
“I think the story of the Deitrichs is over, Temple.”
“Not for me,” she said, and began walking across the lawn and up the hill.
We followed the tracks onto a rough road that wound up to the plateau and meadow above the house. The ground was heavy with dew and the grass was pressed flat and pale in two long stripes that led up a sharp slope to the edge of the ravine where Pete and I hunted for arrowheads.
“I don’t believe this,” Temple said.
We walked between the imprints to the top of the ravine. At the edge of the cliff the soil was cut all the way to the rock by a vehicle that had rolled out onto the air and had disappeared. Down below, the tops of the pines were deep in shadow, blue-green, the branches symmetrical and unbroken; mist rose like steam off the water and exposed stones in the creekbed.
“I think we’re looking down at the entrance to Hell, Temple. I think Cholo and Jeff came back for Earl Deitrich,” I said.
Temple chewed the skin on the ball of her thumb.
“I don’t want to remember seeing this. I don’t want to ever think about this again,” she said.
I studied her face, the earnestness and goodness in it, the redness of her mouth, the way her strands of chestnut hair blew on her forehead, and I wanted to hold her against me and for us both to be wrapped inside the wind and the frenzy of the trees whipping against the sky and the whirrings of the earth and the mystical green vortex of creation itself.