'Don't be shy,' he said.
I turned off the ignition and stepped out among them. The air was motionless between the trees and smelled of pines and the rainwater in the road's depressions. Brian raised his finger in my face. It stayed there, uncertainly, as though he were on the brink of doing something much more serious and precipitous.
'I don't have the right words. Maybe it's enough to simply say I don't like you,' he said.
'You're over the line, bud,' I said.
'You're not a police officer anymore, you're not an assistant US attorney, you're a meddlesome civilian. That fact seems to elude you.'
'You going to move your car now?'
'No.' His finger was stiff, the nail thin and sharp and trembling below my eye. 'Stay away from crime scenes that don't concern you, stay away from the lady… You got anything clever to say?'
'Not really. Except if you put your finger in my face again, I'm going to break your jaw. Now, get your fucking car out of my way.'
I went back home and weeded the vegetable garden. I curried out Beau and cleaned his stall and set out catfish lines in the tank and shoveled out the chicken run and worked buckets of manure into my compost pile with a pitchfork, my calluses squeezing tighter and tighter on the smooth wood of the handle, until I finally gave it all up and flung the pitchfork into a hay bale and went inside.
The palms of my hands rang as though they had been stung by bees, as though they ached to close on an object that was hard and round and cool against the skin and flanged with a knurled hammer that cocked back with a loud snap under the thumb.
Moon had said some people are made different in the womb. Was he just describing himself, or did the group extend to people like me and Great-grandpa Sam?
Or Darl Vanzandt?
Through my open front windows I heard the deep, throaty rumble of the Hollywood mufflers on his '32 Ford, then a cacophony of straight pipes and overpowered engines and chopped-down Harleys behind him.
He turned into the drive, alone, the exposed chrome engine so fine-tuned a silver dollar would balance on the air cleaners. His friends pulled onto the shoulder of the road, on my grass, their tires crumpling the border of my flower beds. They cut their engines and lit cigarettes and lounged against their cars and trucks and vans and motorcycles, as though their physical connection to a public road gave them moral license to behave in any fashion they wished.
Darl swung a dead cat by its tail, whipping it faster and faster through the air, and thudded it against the screen door.
I went out on the porch with my cordless phone in my hand.
'I already put in a 911 on you, Darl. Time to head for the barn,' I said.
'I'm gonna kick your ass. Don't believe me, you chicken-shit lying motherfucker? Come out here and see what happens next,' he said.
I walked toward him. His wide-set green eyes seemed to shift in and out of focus, as though different objects were approaching him at the same time. His upper lip was beaded with perspiration, his nostrils dilated and pale. The skin of his face drew back against the bone. I could smell beer and fried meat and onions on his breath.
'I mean you no harm. I never have. Neither does Lucas. Go on home,' I said.
'You're in my face every day. You're spreading lies all over town.'
'You and your friends killed somebody's cat? That's what y'all do to show everybody you're big shit?'
'I ain't afraid of you.'
I stepped between him and the road, with my back to his friends, cutting off his view of them.
'Bunny Vogel's not here to bail you out. You're stoned and you're frightened. If you force me to, I'll show everyone here how frightened you are,' I said.
'If I was scared, I wouldn't be here.'
'You're afraid of what you are, Darl. Your folks know it. In their guts, those guys out there do, too. You elicit pity.'
He opened his mouth to speak. It made a phlegmy, clicking sound but no words came out. His resolve, all the martial energy he had been able to muster while driving down the road with his Greek chorus surrounding him, seemed to fade in his eyes like snowflakes drifting onto a woodstove.
'Talk to your dad. Get some help. Don't do something like this again,' I said.
'I been sick. I had flu all week. I don't have to listen to anything you-' he said.
I cupped my hand around his upper arm. It felt flaccid, without tone or texture, as though the downers in his system had melted the muscle into warm tallow. I opened his car door for him, put him inside, and closed the door. His eyes were filled with water, his cheeks flushed with pale red arrowpoints.
'You want a cop to drive you home?' I asked.
He didn't answer. When I went back inside it was quiet for a long time, then I heard his engine start up and his tires crunch on the gravel and back out on the road. Some of the others followed, looking at one another, unsure, and some turned back toward town, all of them like people trying to create their own reality, from moment to moment, inside a vacuum.
The country club had been all-white since its inception in the early 1940s, first by the legal exclusivity the law allowed at the time, then by custom and defiance and contempt. It had remained an island of wealth and serenity in an era that had produced cities scrawled with graffiti and streets populated by the homeless and deranged.
The groundskeepers adjusted the amounts of water and liquid nitrogen fed into the grass to ensure the fairways were emerald green year-round, no matter how dry or cold the season. The swimming pool was constructed in the shape of a shamrock, and those who stepped down into its turquoise sun-bladed surface seem to glow with a health and radiance that perhaps validated the old literary saw that the very rich are very different from you and me.
The main building was an immaculate, blinding white, with a circular drive and a columned porch and a glassed-in restaurant with a terrace shaded by potted palm and banana trees that were moved into a solarium during the cold months. A hedge as impenetrable as a limestone wall protected the club on one side, the bluffs and the lazy green expanse of the river on the other. Recessions and wars might come and go, but Deaf Smith's country club would always be here, a refuge, its standards as unchanging as the European menu in its restaurant.
I had dressed for it, in my striped beige suit, polished cordovan boots, a soft blue shirt and candy-striped necktie. But dress alone did not always afford you a welcome at Post Oaks Country Club.
I stood by Jack and Emma Vanzandt's table, the maître d' standing nervously behind me, a menu in his hand. Jack and Emma were eating from big shrimp cocktail glasses that were deep-set in silver bowls of crushed ice.
'You want to go outside and talk?' I said to Jack.
He wiped his mouth with a napkin and looked through the French doors at several men putting on a practice green. 'It's all right, Andre,' he said to the maître d'.
Then he glanced at an empty chair across from him, which was the only invitation I received to sit down.
'Thanks, Jack,' I said.
In the gold and silver light that seemed to anoint the room, Emma's Indian-black hair looked lustrous and thick on her bare shoulders, her ruby necklace like drops of blood on the delicate bones of her throat.
'Your boy was out at my place today. He's a sick kid. Do something about him,' I said.
'You come to our dinner table to tell me something like this?' Jack said.
'Here's the street menu in Deaf Smith, Jack: purple hearts, black beauties, rainbows, screamers, yellow jackets, and China white if you want to get off crack. I hear Darl does it all. If you don't want to take a wake-up call, at least keep him away from my house.'