I pulled a photograph from my shirt pocket and held it up in front of him.
'Is the boy in overalls you?' I asked.
He lifted it out of my hand and smiled while he studied it. He tossed it on top of the revolver and smoked his cigarette, a merry light in one eye.
'My father taught you how to weld, didn't he?' I said.
'He wasn't bad at it. I'm better, though.'
'I think a man like you must come out of a furnace.'
'That's the first thing you said today made any sense.'
I took a six-inch bone-handled game knife out of my pocket and pried open the single blade. Two days ago I had ground it on an emery wheel in the barn and stropped it on an old saddle flap, and the buffed ripples along the edge looked like the undulations in a stiletto.
I lay the photograph down on his workbench and sliced it in half.
'My father was a fine man. You're a piece of shit, Moon. You don't belong in his past anymore than you do in our present,' I said.
I pulled loose the severed image of the child who had become the man standing before me and dropped it into the foundry. It curled immediately into a film of ash and rose into the air like a black butterfly.
Then I hit him across the mouth with the back of my hand, my ring breaking his lip against his teeth.
Moon grinned and spit blood onto the molten rim of the foundry. He blotted his mouth with his palm before he spoke. 'A man got that much hate in him is a whole lot more like me than he thinks,' he said.
* * *
chapter twenty-four
Virgil Morales, the San Antonio Purple Heart who liked to call other people 'spermbrain', sat in my office with his girlfriend from Austin, looking at his watch and waiting for me to get off the phone. The girlfriend was named Jamie Lake and she had winged dragons tattooed on both her sun-browned shoulders. She also smelled as if she had been smoking reefer inside a closed auto-mobile.
Temple Carrol leaned against a table behind them, her arms folded, looking at Jamie Lake as though Jamie had swum through a hole in the dimension.
I finished talking to my friend whom I had paid to run polygraphs on both of them.
'He says all indications are you're telling the truth,' I said to Virgil.
'So that's supposed to make me feel good?' he replied.
'The tests aren't always conclusive. Yours is,' I said.
'Glad to hear it. When you want us back?'
'We empanel the jury in ten days.'
'I been this route before. No disrespect, but I don't want to come up here every morning at seven-thirty and sit on a bench in a hallway and play with my Johnson till somebody remembers I'm a friend of the court,' he said.
'How about I send somebody for you? Will that be okay?' I asked.
He stretched out one leg and rubbed the inside of his thigh. 'Yeah, that's probably the best way to do it. Call first, though, okay?'
Jamie Lake chewed gum with her mouth open. Her hair was long and dark blonde and her face narrow, with a pinched light in it. 'Why do I get the feeling I'm anybody's fuck here?' she asked.
'My friend, the man who ran the polygraph on you, says he couldn't make a determination. It happens sometimes,' I said.
'Yeah? Well, I don't believe you. I think your friend was trying to see down my tank top,' she said.
'Maybe he was.'