“What can I do for you, Rueben?” Mr. Lowry said.
Rueben Vickers was probably no more than five nine and had the wiry muscularity of a man for whom physical work was a religion. He wore sandals and a plain beige short-sleeve shirt and unironed brown slacks that flattened against his body in the wind, the kind of dress a self-made and socially indifferent man would wear every day of the week without remembering he’d put them on. His expression was a different matter. It was a lightning bolt, a permanent emotional disfiguration, the flag of a man who kept the wounds green unto the grave.
“A detective came to our ranch in the middle of dinner,” he said. “His name is Wade Benbow. Know him?”
“Seems familiar. What’d he do?” Mr. Lowry said.
“He said somebody here accused my son of attacking your workers,” Vickers replied.
I knew then that Jo Anne had given the name of Darrel Vickers to Detective Benbow, because I had not.
“Point out the liar who did that, Jude,” Vickers said.
I could hear the tree rustling above us. Cotton was sitting on a stump. He lit a hand-rolled cigarette and blew out the paper match and puffed on the cigarette. The smoke broke apart in the silence. Cotton spat between his legs.
“You have a mark on your face, Darrel,” Mr. Lowry said. “Did someone strike you?”
“That man right there, the one with the dead eye,” Darrel replied.
Cotton looked asleep, his cigarette hanging between two fingers.
“You, there,” Vickers said. “With the Bull Durham.”
Cotton cleared his throat and mumbled.
Vickers’s face twitched as though a fly had landed on it. “What did you say?”
Cotton shook his head as though distancing himself from his own words.
“I asked you a question, boy,” Vickers said.
“Go easy there, Rueben,” Mr. Lowry said.
Cotton field-stripped his cigarette and let the tobacco and paper blow away, then rose from the stump and looked at Vickers. “That’s your son, is he?”
“Who does he look like?” Vickers said. The disjointed glare in his eyes had frozen, as though he knew he had stepped across a line into unknown territory.
“Then you raised a goddamn liar,” Cotton said.
Darrel stepped forward. He was taller than his father, his body flaccid, love handles on his hips, his navel showing above his belt buckle. His father took hold of his arm. “Stay put, son. Are the other ones here?”
“This guy just called me a liar, Daddy.”
“We’ll make sure he regrets it. Do you see the others or not?”
“Those two by the water can,” Darrel said.
“I won’t allow this, Rueben,” Mr. Lowry said.
“My grandparents pioneered the land you’re standing on, Jude,” Vickers replied. “They were burned to death by the Comanche three miles from here. You will not lecture me, and you will not bring your unions and your politics into the lives of my employees.”
“It was the bumper sticker on my truck, wasn’t it?” Mr. Lowry said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Your son and his friends punished three innocent men for driving a truck that had a United Farm Workers sticker on it.”
“Don’t start what you can’t finish, Jude,” Vickers said.