Bunny looked off at the hills, his coppery hair glinting against the late red sun. He seemed lost in his own thoughts now. The girls were silent, as though waiting for something, and for just a moment Lucas knew they didn't care about the names of country musicians and that he bored the girls by wanting to talk about them. But then why did they bring up the subject?
'Ain't we supposed to go to the country club now?' he asked.
'We've got time,' the girl whose father had owned a recording studio said. She held up her glass to a Mexican waiter and handed it and a credit card pressed under her thumb to him. She didn't speak, and upon his return with the drinks, she signed the charge slip and let him pick it and the pen off the table without ever speaking to him.
Lucas kept staring at the clock on the wall, one with green neon tubing around the outside of the face. The hands said a quarter to seven; then, when he looked again, he was sure only moments later, the hands said 7:25. He went to the men's room and washed and dried his face and looked in the mirror. His eyes were clear, his skin slightly red from the day in the fields. He wet his comb and ran it through his hair and walked back through the bar area, his boots solid on the stone floor.
Outside, Bunny looked at his watch. 'I guess we ought to haul ass,' he said.
Lucas picked up the fresh collins in front of him and drank half of it. It was as sweet as lemonade, the vodka subtle and cold and unthreatening. The girls watched him while he drank.
'What's going on?' he asked.
They smiled at one another.
'We were saying you're cute,' the third girl said.
'I'm fixing to boogie. Y'all coming or not?' Bunny said.
'Darl can throw a shitfit if you keep him waiting,' the blonde girl said.
'Darl?' Lucas said.
'We're gonna meet him at the drive-in. If he's not too wiped out,' she replied.
'Y'all didn't say nothing about Darl,' Lucas said.
'He wants to come. What's the law against that?' the blonde girl said. She stood up. Her face seemed angry now, vexed. 'People can go where they want. He can't help it if he's rich.'
'I didn't say that he…' Lucas began. He rose from his chair and felt a rush, like a hit of high-grade speed, a white needle that probed places in his mind he had never seen before. 'I just meant…'
But he didn't know what he meant, and he followed Bunny through the bar and out into the parking lot, the gravel crunching under his boots now, the wind hot for some unexplainable reason, tinged with the smell of alkali.
Later, they backed into an empty slot at the drive-in restaurant, next to Darl's softly buffed '32 Ford, and ordered a round of long-neck Lone Stars. Lucas could see the back of Darl's neck, thick and oily, pocked with acne scars. Three other boys were in the car with him, their caps on backward, their upper bodies swollen from steroid injections and pumping iron. One of them flipped a cigarette at the waitress's butt when she walked by.
Lucas drank down the beer. It felt cold and bright in his throat.
But he was sweating now, his heart beating faster than it should.
'I got to get out,' he said from the backseat.
'What's wrong?' Bunny said.
'I don't know. I got to get out. I cain't breathe good. It's hot in here.'
He opened the back door and stood in the breeze. The hills were flushed with a dark purple haze now, the strings of lights over the parking lot humming with a hot buzz like nests of electrified insects.
He walked to the men's room, but the door, which was metal and fire-engine-red, was bolted from the inside. He stared at the rows of parked cars, at the Mexican and black cooks through the kitchen window, the waitresses who carried metal trays loaded with food and frosted mugs of root beer. They all seemed to function with an orderly purpose from which he was excluded, that he witnessed as a clown staring through a glass wall. His face tingled and simultaneously felt dead to the touch. He hadn't felt this drunk, no, train-wrecked, since the night Roseanne Hazlitt was attacked. That thought made him break into a fresh sweat.
He gave up waiting for the person to come out of the locked rest room and walked back to Bunny's car, his eyes avoiding Darl and his friends. The engines in both the Chevy and Ford were idling, the Hollywood mufflers throbbing above the asphalt like a dull headache.
'Hey, what's happenin', man?' Darl said.
'Hi, Darl,' Lucas said.
'You want to ride out with us?'
'Bunny's taking me. Thanks, anyway.'
'Good-looking threads, man. They're gonna dig it,' Darl said. Somebody in the backseat laughed, then dropped his unfinished fish sandwich out the chopped-down slit of a window.
Darl grinned at Lucas as he drove the Ford out of the parking lot onto the highway, his boxed haircut and one-dimensional profile rippled with the glow of the overhead beer sign. When he gave the Ford the gas the rear end rocked back on the springs and wisps of smoke spun off the back tires.
Lucas started to open the back door of the Chevy. Bunny's head was-twisted around in the window, looking at him, the corner of his lip pinched down between his teeth.
'Kid, you ain't got to do this. Most of those country club people are dickheads. Maybe we ought to say fuck it,' Bunny said.
The girls sat expressionless, their gaze fastened on their cigarettes, waiting, as though caught between Bunny and a predesigned plan that was about to go astray.
'I'm all right. I'm gonna get some coffee out there. It's not a late gig, it's just one or two sets, anyway,' he said. He sat down on the rolled white leather and tried to wash a taste like pennies out of his mouth with the last swallows in a bottle of Lone Star that one of the girls handed him.
Bunny didn't seem to move for a long time, biting a piece of skin off the ball of his thumb. Then he shifted the Chevy into gear and turned out of the lighted parking lot into the darkness of the highway.
By the time they reached the country club, Lucas's hair was mushy with his own sweat; his tongue felt too large for his mouth; his hands had the coordination of skillets.
He saw the columned front porch of the country club go by the back window of Bunny's Chevy, then the swimming pool that was built in the shape of a shamrock. The voices around him were like cacophony in a cave. Up ahead, Darl Vanzandt's Ford and two other cars with kids inside them were parked in the shadows, under live-oak trees, just outside the flood lamps that lighted the terrace where people in formal dress were dancing to orchestra music. Bunny slowed the Chevy and turned in the seat and looked at Lucas.
'You gonna be sick?' he said.
But Lucas couldn't answer.
Bunny hit the steering wheel with the flat of his fist. 'Oh man, how'd I get in this?' he said.
Then Darl was at the window, his friends behind him. Their cigarettes sparked like fireflies in the darkness. One of them carried a lidded bucket by the bail.
'How much acid you give him?' the boy with the bucket said.
'I didn't give him nothing,' Bunny said.
'Pull him out,' Darl said.
'Let it slide, Darl. He's really fried,' Bunny said.
'Smothers is a geek. So he gets what geeks got coming,' Darl said.
'Come on, think about it. Your old man's gonna shit a bowling ball,' Bunny said.
'Here's twenty dollars. Go down to San Antone and get a blow job. You'll feel better,' Darl said. He was leaning on the window jamb now. He touched the stiffened edges of two ten-dollar bills against Bunny's jawbone.
Bunny pushed his hand away.
'I ain't gonna do this,' he said.
'Pretty fucking late, Bunny,' the boy with the bucket said. Then he dropped his voice into a deep range and said, 'I ain't gonna do this. I got my fucking standards.'
'You know what it's like to pull a two-by-four out of your ass?' Bunny said.
'So you don't have to help. Pop the trunk,' Darl said.
Two of Darl's friends lifted Lucas by his arms out of the back seat and held him between them like a crucified man. Bunny breathed loudly through his nose, then pulled a latch under the dash. Darl reached into the trunk, took out Lucas's twelve-string guitar and case by the handle, and slammed the lid.