'Thanks for hauling the freight. No hard feelings. You got no beef with him. I do,' Darl said.
Bunny started his car and began backing off the grass toward the drive. He had cut his headlights, but in silhouette he could see Darl and his friends pulling off Lucas's clothes, like medieval grave robbers stripping a corpse. The girl in the front seat with Bunny clicked on the radio, increased the volume, and began putting on fresh makeup.
'He buys you blow jobs? That's disgusting,' she said.
'Act like your brain stem ain't a stump,' he said, then in his frustration clenched the steering wheel so tightly his palms burned.
'Let's go back to the drive-in. I got to pee,' a girl in the backseat said.
Bunny wanted to floor the Chevy across the grass and hedges and flower beds onto the drive, but he stared dumbly at the scene taking place in front of him, wondering even then how he would deal with this later, wondering, perhaps, even who or what he was.
Lucas was shirtless, sitting on his buttocks now, his trousers pulled down around his feet, encircled by Darl and the three boys from the drive-in and the others who had gotten out of their cars. But Bunny's attention was diverted by another figure, an older man, one whose pale skin seemed to glisten with a dull sheen like glycerin. On the edge of the circle, his face softly shadowed by the branches of a long-leaf pine, was Garland T. Moon, a cigarette cupped in his hand, like a soldier smoking furtively on guard duty. The corner of his mouth was wrinkled in a smile.
Two boys with their caps on backward hiked Lucas up from the ground. Darl draped the guitar from its cloth strap around Lucas's neck while another boy tightened Lucas's belt around his ankles. Then they stretched wide the elastic on his Jockey undershorts and poured mud and straw and liquid excrement from a feeder lot down his buttocks and genitals and dragged him to the edge of the terrace.
Then the two boys holding Lucas stopped, unsure, wavering in the roar of brass and saxophones.
'No, no, it's show time, babies,' Darl said.
His words, his cynicism, his vague and encompassing contempt, seemed to animate the two boys, who for just a moment had probably themselves felt like moths hovering outside the radius of a flame. They carried Lucas into the space between the orchestra and dance area, his feet dragging on the flagstones, his head lolling on his shoulder, a befouled, bone-white man who looked as though his neurological system had melted.
When they dropped him and ran, he tried to push himself to his feet. But he tripped and fell, his guitar clattering on the stone. His skin was beaded with sweat and dirt and aura-ed with humidity in the glare of the flood lamps; his mouth was a stupefied slit across a roll of bread dough. He propped himself on his elbows and stared out at the dancers.
But the membership and management at Post Oaks Country Club were not made up of people who let the world intrude easily upon them. The band never faltered; the eyes of the dancers registered Lucas's presence for no more than a few seconds; and a security guard and waiter wrapped a tablecloth around him and removed him as they would a sack of garbage a prankster had thrown over the wall.
But later, inside the aluminum shed where Lucas sat on a bench among the club's garden tools, throwing up in a sack that had once contained weed killer, he got to see the less public side of the club's management. The manager was a thick-bodied bald man who wore dark trousers and a wine-colored sports jacket, and he was flanked on each side by a security guard.
'You're telling me Jack Vanzandt's son did this?' he said.
'Yes, sir, that's right. It was Darl set it up.'
The manager pointed his finger into Lucas's face. 'You listen to me, you nasty thing, you tell these lies to anybody else, I'll have you put in jail,' he said. 'Now, when the sheriff's car gets here, you go home, you never mention this to anyone, and don't you ever come near here again.'
'It was Darl. I'll say it to anybody I want. It was Darl, Darl, Darl. How you like that, sir?' Lucas's eyes went in and out of focus, and a vile-tasting fluid welled up in his throat.
'Get him out of here. And wash off that bench, too,' the manager said.
It was noon the next day, and I stood in Bunny's backyard and listened to the last of his account. He buffed the hood of his car while he talked, his triceps flexing, his voice flat and distant, as though somehow he were only a witness to events rather than a participant.
He finished talking. He rubbed the rag back and forth in the thin horsetails of dried wax on the hood. Finally he looked at me over his shoulder, his hair bunched in a thick S on his cheek.
'You ain't gonna say nothing?' he asked.
'He told me you were stand-up. I thought you might want to know that.'
'Who said that?'
'The kid you delivered up like a trussed hog.'
The color flared in his cheeks. I turned to walk away.
'Maybe I'm a Judas goat, but there's a question you didn't ask,' he said at my back.
'What might that be, sir?'
'How come he went out there to begin with. It's 'cause Darl got the girls to tell him you were gonna be there. So maybe I ain't the only one hepped pour cow shit on that boy.'
chapter twenty-one
I drove from Bunny's house to Jack Vanzandt's office. His secretary said he had already gone for the day. She went back to her work, concentrating her gaze on a computer printout as though I had already left.
'Where did he go?' I asked.
'To one of the lakes, I think.'
'The yacht basin?'
'I'm not sure.'
'Do you know if Darl is with him?' I asked.
She stared thoughtfully into space. 'I don't think he mentioned it,' she said.
'I'd really like to have a talk with them. Both of them. Would you get Jack on his cell phone?'
She removed her glasses, which were attached to a blue velvet cord around her neck.
'Please, Mr Holland. I'm just the secretary,' she said, her face softening to an entreaty.
'Sorry,' I said.
She smiled at me with her eyes.
The lake where Jack usually kept his sailboat was in a cup of wooded hills that sloped down to cliffs above the water's edge. The western cliffs were in shadow now, the stone dark with lichen, but out in the sunlight a solitary boat with enormous red sails was tacking in the wind, the hard-blue chop breaking like crystal needles across its bow.
Jack Vanzandt stood barechested behind the wheel, his skin golden with tan, his white slacks tight across his hips and the ridges of muscle in his abdomen.
I waited for him at the boat slip, where a black man was grilling steaks by a plank table under a shed. If Jack was uncomfortable with my presence, he didn't show it. In fact, he seemed to take little notice of me. He was talking to his two guests, who sat in chairs by the cabin with tropical drinks in their hands-the Mexican drug agent, Felix Ringo, and a man from Houston by the name of Sammy Mace.
Jack stepped off his boat, laced a rope around a cleat, and walked toward me. His eyes were flat, but they took my full measure and watched my hands and expression.
'You going to lose it here?' he asked.
'Can't ever tell,' I said.
'Don't.'
'Your kid's a coward and a sadist. But you probably already know that. I just wanted to tell you he's hooked up with Garland T. Moon now.'
'You want to eat, or insult me some more?'
Felix Ringo and the man named Sammy Mace were at the end of the dock, watching a yellow pontoon plane come in low over the hills and skim across the water.
'Sammy Mace is mobbed-up, Jack,' I said.
'Then why isn't he in Huntsville? Look, I don't feel good about some things Darl has done. So I've tried to help out.'
'Oh?'
'Felix Ringo is an old friend I knew at Benning. He's got a lot of ties in the Hispanic community. He found a kid who might clear Lucas.'