chapter six
The next day, after work, I dug night crawlers and cane-fished with a little mixed-blood Mexican boy in the tank on the back of my property. His name was Pete, and he had blue eyes and pale streaks the color of weathered wood in his hair, which grew like a soft brush on his head. He grinned all the time and talked with an Anglo twang and was probably the smartest little boy I ever knew.
'That was the Chisholm Trail out yonder?' he asked.
'Part of it. There're wagon tracks still baked in the hardpan.'
He chewed his gum and studied on the implications.
'What's it good for?' he asked.
'Not much of anything, I guess.'
He grinned and chewed his gum furiously and skipped a stone across the water.
'Black people say you spit on your hook, you always catch fish. You believe that?' he said.
'Could be.'
'How come you don't marry Temple Carrol?'
'You have too many thoughts for a boy your age.'
'She sure spends a lot of time jogging past your house.'
'Why do you have Temple Carrol on the brain this evening, Pete?'
'Cause there she comes now.'
I looked over my shoulder and saw Temple's car drive past my garage and barn and chicken run and windmill, then follow the dirt track out to the levee that circled the tank. Pete thought that was hilarious.
Temple got out of her car and walked up the slope of the levee. Her face looked cool and pink in the twilight.
'He's out,' she said.
'Moon?'
'None other.'
'Excuse us, Pete.'
I leaned my cane pole in the fork of a redbud tree, and we walked down the levee. The late red sun looked like molten metal through the willows on the far bank.
'He was at your office,' she said.
'What?
'Sitting on your steps for maybe an hour. In a blue serge suit and a Hawaiian shirt that's like an assault on the eyeballs. I told him your office was closed. He just sat there, cleaning his fingernails.'
'Don't mess with him, Temple. Next time call the cops.'
'What do you think I did? A half hour later, this new deputy, Mary Beth Sweeney, shows up. I told her I was glad somebody from the sheriff's department could finally make the trip from across the street. Get this, nobody sent her. She just happened to be driving by. She told him to hoof it.'
Temple forked two fingers into the side pocket of her blue jeans.
'He left you a note,' she said.
It was written in pencil, on the inside of a flattened cigarette wrapper.