'Why you giving me this truck? You know the one question y'all ain't axed me? Who'd that po' girl leave with? It was Lucas Smothers. That's what I seen.' He pointed to the corner of his eye. 'Y'all always think you find the right nigger, you gonna get the answer you want.'
In the car, I felt Temple's eyes on the side of my face. She rubbed me on the arm with the back of her finger.
'Lucas didn't do it, Billy Bob,' she said.
On the way home, by chance and accident, Temple and I witnessed a peculiar event, one that would only add to the questions for which I had no answer.
It had stopped raining, but the sky was sealed with clouds that were as black as gun cotton and mist floated off the river and clung to the sides of the low hills along the two-lane road. A quarter mile ahead of us, a flatbed truck with a welding machine mounted behind the cab veered back and forth across the yellow stripe. A sheriff's cruiser that had been parked under an overpass, the trunk up to hide the emergency flasher on the roof, pulled the truck to the side of the road and two uniformed deputies got out, slipping their batons into the rings on their belts.
It should have been an easy roadside DWI arrest. It wasn't. The driver of the truck, his khakis and white T-shirt streaked with grease, his face dilated and red with alcohol, fell from the cab into the road, his hard hat rolling away like a tiddledywink. He got to his feet, his ankles spread wide for balance, and started swinging, his first blow snapping a deputy's jaw back against his shoulder.
The other deputy whipped his baton across the tendon behind the truck driver's knee and crumpled him to the asphalt.
It should have been over. It wasn't. We had passed the truck now, and the two deputies were into their own program.
'Uh-oh,' Temple said.
They lifted the drunk man by each arm and dragged him on his knees to the far side of the truck. Then we saw the humped silhouettes by the back tire and the balled fists and the batons rising and falling, like men trading off hammer strokes on a tent post.
I touched the brake, pulled to the shoulder, and began backing up in the weeds.
From under the overpass a second cruiser came hard down the road, its blue, white, and red emergency flasher on, water blowing in a vortex behind it. The driver cut to the shoulder, hit the high beams, and the airplane lights burned into the faces of the two deputies and the bloodied man huddled at their knees.
The driver of the second cruiser got out and stood just behind the glare that blinded the two deputies, a portable radio in her left hand, the other on the butt of her holstered nine-millimeter.
'Y'all got a problem here?' Mary Beth Sweeney said.
That night I fell asleep as an electrical storm moved across the drenched hills and disappeared in the west, filling the clouds with flickers of light like burning candles in a Mexican church that smelled of incense and stone and water.
Or like cartridges exploding in the chambers of L.Q. Navarro's blue-black, ivory-handled, custom-made .45 revolver.
It's night in the dream, and L.Q and I are across the river in Mexico, where we have no authority and quarter comes only with dawn. We're dismounted, and our horses keep spooking away from the two dead drug transporters who lie in a muddy slough, their mouths and eyes frozen open with disbelief.
L.Q. pulls a pack of playing cards emblazoned with the badge of the Texas Rangers from the side pocket of his suit coat, unsnaps two cards from under the rubber band, and flicks them at the corpses.
I pull their guns apart and fling the pieces in different directions.
'The tar is still up in one of them houses. You take the left side and don't silhouette on the hill,' L.Q. says.
'Burn the field and the tar will go with it, L.Q.,' I say:
'Wind's out of the south. I'd sure hate to lose a race with a grass fire,' be says.
The houses are spread out along a low ridge, roofless, made of dried mud, their windows like empty eye sockets. My horse is belly deep in a field of yellow grass, and he skitters each time the withered husk of a poppy jitters on the stem.
The rifle fire erupts from the windows simultaneously all across the ridge. My horse rears under my thighs, and I feel myself plummeting backward into darkness, into a crush of yellow grass while tracer rounds float into the sky.
But it's they who set fire to the field, who watch it spread behind a thirty-knot wind that feeds cold air like pure oxygen into the flames. I feel my left foot squish inside my boot, feel my knee collapsing as I try to run uphill and realize that this is the place where all my roads come together, now, in this moment, that the end I never foresaw will be inside an envelope of flame, just as if I had been tied to a medieval stake.
Then I see L.Q. bent low on his mare, pouring it on through the grass, his Stetson low over his eyes, his coat flapping back from his gunbelt, his right hand extended like a rodeo pickup rider's.
I lock my forearm in his, palm against tendon, and swing up on his horse's rump, then feel the surge of muscle and power between my legs as we thunder over the top of a ridge, my arms around L.Q's waist, my boot splaying blood into the darkness, my face buried in his manly smell.
Then, as in a dream, I hear the horse's hooves splash th
rough water and clop on stone and L.Q. holler out, 'Why, goodness gracious, it's Texas already, bud!'
* * *