'Maybe it's time your people pulled you out.'
'Subject closed. You like fried chicken?'
'You bet.'
We walked across the field to a grove of oaks on the bluff above the river. She spread a checkered cloth on the grass and set it with silverware, tiny salt and pepper shakers, turkey-and-cheese sandwiches, guacamole, taco chips, potato salad, and a thermos of lemonade. Her hair hung over her cheeks while she placed each item carefully on the paper plates.
'You're making me self-conscious,' she said.
'You're a great-looking lady, Mary Beth.'
Her eyes crinkled in the corners. I was standing by the edge of the checkered cloth now. When she rose to her feet her face was only inches away from mine. I touched her hair, then I put my mouth on hers. Her eyes were open, then they closed and she put her arms around my back and I felt her breasts against my chest and a moment later the heat of her cheek press against mine.
I was suddenly involved with the old male impossibility of making love with any degree of dignity while standing up. We sat on the grass, then I lay her back with her head on the edge of the checkered cloth and kissed her again. The wind was blowing from across the river, eddying through the grass above the bluff, and the clouds piled on the western horizon were purple and edged with fire. I looked down into her eyes.
Behind me I heard a horse's hooves moving through the dead oak leaves. I turned and saw Beau, my Morgan, coming through the shade, and a little boy with a haircut like a soft brush riding bareback atop him.
'Hi! What ch'all doin'?' he said, pushing a branch out of his face with his arm.
'Hey, Pete, what's goin' on?' I said, my voice coming back to me like a man bursting to the surface of a deep pool.
'We still going fishing?'
'Wouldn't miss it, bud. You want some chicken? This is Mary Beth.'
He grinned at her. He was barefoot and in overalls and looked like a small clothespin on Beau's spine.
'I already eat,' he said.
'We have some lemonade,' she said. She was sitting up now, one arm propped behind her.
'That's all right. I'm butting in.'
'I'd tell you, wouldn't I?' I said.
He grinned at nothing, flicking the reins across the back of his hand.
'I'm gonna take Beau back,' he said.
'Billy Bob told me a lot about you, Pete. I'd like it if you'd join us,' Mary Beth said.
His eyes shifted off her, his grin never fading, then he slipped off Beau's back onto the ground.
'This is the smartest little guy in Deaf Smith,' I said.
'I knew you was gonna say that,' he said.
That night I drove down the road to the convenience store to buy a carton of milk. The store was on the top of a rise, next to a cornfield, its bright white-and-red exterior and neon-scrolled windows and lighted gas pumps and wide cement parking area surrounded by rural darkness. It was also a hangout for East Enders dragging the main road through town.
Their cars were parked by the phone booth, their doors open to catch the breeze, the cement pad around their feet already littered with beer cans, dirty napkins, and the cigarette butts they had emptied from their ashtrays.
On the way back to my car Darl Vanzandt got up from the passenger seat of his cherry-red chopped-down 1932 Ford and came toward me, the pupils of his wide-set eyes like burnt cinders. He drank the foam out of a quart bottle of Pearl and flung it whistling into the darkness. When I tried to walk around him, he stepped into my path, his courage inflating now with the audience that had formed at his back.
'Whoa, there, bud,' I said.
'You bothered all my friends. Now you're bothering my step-mother,' he said.
'Wrong.'