'Thirty yards from where he was passed out.' He started to drink out of his coffee cup, then set it back down. His silver snap-button cowboy shirt shimmered with light. 'Oh hell, you want to spend your Sunday morning with a kid cain't tell the difference between shit and bean dip, I'll call upstairs. You know where the elevator's at.'
When other boys in high school played baseball or ran track, Lucas Smothers played the guitar. Then the mandolin, banjo, and Dobro. He hung in black nightclubs, went to camp meetings just for the music, and ran away from home to hear Bill Monroe in Wichita, Kansas. He could tell you almost any detail about the careers of country musicians whose names belonged to a working-class era in America's musical history that had disappeared with five-cent Wurlitzer jukeboxes—Hank and Lefty, Kitty Wells, Bob Wills, the Light Crust Dough Boys, Rose Maddox, Patsy Montana, Moon Mullican, Texas Ruby.
His hands were a miracle to watch on a stringed instrument. But in his father's eyes, they, like Lucas himself, were not good for anything of value.
When he was sixteen Vernon caught him playing triple-neck steel in a beer joint in Lampasas and beat him so unmercifully with a razor strop in the front yard that a passing truck driver climbed out of his cab and pinned Vernon's arms to his sides until the boy could run next door.
Lucas sat shirtless in blue jeans and a pair of scuffed cowboy boots on the edge of a bunk in a narrow cell layered with jailhouse graffiti. His face was gray with hangover and fear, his reddish blond hair spongy with sweat. His snap-button western shirt lay at his feet. It had blue-and-white checks in it, and white cloth in the shoulders with tiny gold trumpets stitched in it. He had paid forty dollars for the shirt when he had first joined the band at Shorty's.
'How you feel?' I asked, after the turnkey locked the solid iron door behind me.
'Not too good.' His wrists were thick, his wide hands cupped on top of his knees. 'They tell you about the girl… I mean, like how's she doing?'
'She's in bad shape, Lucas. What happened?'
'I don't know. We left Shorty's, you know, that joint on the river. We was kind of making out in my truck… I remember taking off my britches, then I don't remember nothing else.'
I sat down next to him on the bunk. It was made of cast iron and suspended from the wall by chains. A thin mattress covered with brown and yellow stains fit inside the rectangular rim. I picked up his hands in mine and turned them over, then pressed my thumb along his finger joints, all the time watching for a flinch in his face.
'A lady's going to come here this afternoon to photograph your hands. In the meantime don't you do anything to bruise them,' I said. 'Who's the girl?'
'Her name's Roseanne. That's all she told me. She come in with a mess of other people. They run off and left her and then her and me got to knocking back shots. I wouldn't rape nobody, Mr Holland. I wouldn't beat up a girl, either,' he said.
'How do you know?'
'Sir?'
'You don't remember what you did, Lucas… Look at me. Don't sign anything, don't answer any of their questions, don't make a statement, no matter what they promise you. You with me?'
'My father got you to come down here?'
'Not exactly.'
His blue eyes lingered on mine. They were bloodshot and full of pain, but I could see them trying to reach inside my mind.
'You need a friend. We all do at one time or another,' I said.
'I ain't smart but I ain't stupid, either, Mr Holland. I know about you and my mother. I don't study on it. It ain't no big deal to me.'
I stood up from the bunk and looked out the window. Down the street people were coming out of a brick church with a white steeple, and seeds from cottonwood trees were blowing in the wind and I could smell chicken frying in the back of a restaurant.
'You want me to represent you?' I said.
'Yes, sir, I'd sure appreciate it.'
He stared emptily at the floor and didn't look up again.
I stopped at Harley's office downstairs.
'I'll be back for his arraignment,' I said.
'Why'd he have to beat the shit out of her?'
'He didn't.'
'I guess he didn't top her, either. She probably artificially inseminated herself.'
'Why don't you shut up, Harley?'