When we got back on the train I seen a dark smear on the floor by the woodstove, one that somebody had tried to scrub out of the grain with sand. I asked the conductor who had bled there. He said it was the wife of a railroad board member, and she had been shot to death when train robbers fired through the glass in the window three weeks ago.
Later Jennie asked me what I was studying on. I said, That collection of trash and lamebrains down the hillock from us has gone and killed an innocent woman.
She looked out the window, pouting, then said to me, The railroad stole the land from the Indians and I ain't a bit sorry for her. If this was the Lord pulling the veil from my eyes, the light has fairly withered an old man's heart.
A motorcycle turned into my drive, the engine popping and misfiring. I turned on the porch light and stepped outside. Lucas Smothers sat astride an old, low-slung Indian motorcycle with dented, purple fenders, his T-shirt and jeans streaked with grease. He cut the engine and grinned.
'You ever see one like this?' he asked.
'Sure, they're collector's items.'
'I'm gonna restore it. It's got a crack in the frame but I can braze it. The teacher at the high school body shop said I could use the equipment in the afternoon while they're still cleaning up.'
'Where'd you get it?'
'Darl Vanzandt.'
'Darl?'
Lucas's eyes went away from my face.
'He said he'd been going to church and trying to get right for the bad things he's done. What was I supposed to say, "I don't want to have nothing to do with you"?'
'I think he'll hurt you.'
'By giving me an old bike?'
'Jimmy Cole was murdered on the Hart Ranch. You were probably right the first time. Darl and his friends found him hiding out there and killed him.'
He pressed his palm on his forehead, smearing grease in his hair.
'Everything I do is fucked up. I feel worse every time I come over here,' he said, his eyes glistening.
'Leave the bike here. I'll call his father and have it picked up.'
'Yeah, 'cause the product of your broken rubber cain't take care of hisself. Thanks, anyway,' he said.
He started the motorcycle, fed it the gas until the misfires became a dirty roar, then fishtailed off the gravel onto the county road, his hair whipping in the wind, his T-shirt pooling with air.
Way to go, Holland, I thought.
Mary Beth Sweeney called the next morning, just as I was about to leave for the office.
'Bunny Vogel got into it last night with a Mexican biker at Shorty's,' she said.
'Which biker?'
'No name. He took off before I got there. But it looks like the fight had something to do with Roseanne Hazlitt.'
'How do you know?'
'A couple of witnesses said the Mexican kid called Bunny "spermbrain", then "Roseanne's pimp." That's when they went at it. They tore up most of the side porch.'
'Where's Bunny now?'
'I kept him downtown two hours, then kicked him loose. He's supposed to pay the owner half the damages.'
'You're a good cop, Mary Beth.'
'A good cop would take him to the Marine Corps recruiting station before he ends up in Huntsville. Have you ever been to California?'
'No, why?'
'These kids must go out there and take courses in how to screw up their lives.'
Bunny lived on the west end of the county, not far from a train siding, a shut-down cannery, and a string of abandoned and overgrown wood cottages that had been used by migrant workers during the 1940s. His house was sheathed in ancient grey Montgomery Ward brick and elevated on cinder blocks, but the floor had settled through the center, so that the outside covering had cracked like a dried husk, exposing the tar paper underneath. Bunny's '55 maroon Chevy, with the rolled white leather interior, was parked in the dirt yard, as incongruous as a color cutout pasted on a gray stage set, its green-tinted windows filled with reflections of clouds.
Bunny stood in the backyard, in a sleeveless red sweatshirt and running shorts and half-top cleats, flinging footballs through a rubber tire that hung on a rope from the limb of a hackberry tree.
'I heard you got put in the bag last night,' I said.
'Word gets around.' He picked up another football from an orange crate and fired a bullet pass through the tire. It landed on a grassy knoll and rolled toward the train tracks.
'Who was the biker?'
'Just a greaseball who wants to take down a swinging dick in Shorty's. I ain't a swinging dick. But that's what the greaseball wants to think.'
'He called you a spermbrain?'
'Yeah, I think that's what he said.' He shook his hair back on his shoulders and flung another football at the tire. This time it caromed off the rim.
'He's the same guy who picked up Roseanne at the Dairy Queen, isn't he? The one you took her away from?'
'Maybe.'
'Something bothers me, Bunny. Roseanne slapped you the night she was attacked. I think it was for something you're really ashamed of, maybe something related to her death.'
'I guess I just ain't smart enough to figure all them things out, Mr Holland.'
'The Mexican kid called you a pimp?'
'If that's what somebody told you.'
'That's when you swung on him?'
'Wouldn't you?' He cocked his arm to throw another football, then dropped it back into the orange crate. 'I got to go to work. Anything else on your mind?'
'Yeah, what kind of game is Darl Vanzandt trying to run on Lucas Smothers?'
'What them two do ain't my business.'
'What is?'
'Sir?'
'Cleaning up after a moral retard for the Vanzandt family?'
'People don't talk to me like that.'
'I just did. Watch your back, Bunny. Before it's over, I think Darl will kick a two-by-four up your ass,' I said, and walked back to my car.
I looked through the windshield at him before I backed out. His hands were propped on his hips, his mouth a tight seam, his disfigured profile pointed at the ground. Then he drove his cleated shoe into the slats of the orange crate and showered footballs over the yard.
chapter nineteen
Pete's mother waited tables in a diner out by the slaughterhouse. Sometimes the men she met in bars beat her up, stole her money, and got her fired from her jobs. Last year she was found wandering behind a motel in her slip and was put in a detox center for three days. After she got out, a choleric judge who reeked of cigars and self-righteousness lectured her in front of morning court and sentenced her to pick up trash on the highways for six weekends with a group of high school delinquents.
I sat in her living room and explained why Pete needed to stay at Temple Carrol's house for a while. She listened without expression, in her waitress uniform, her knees close together, her hands folded in her lap, as though I held some legitimate legal power over her life. There were circles under her eyes, and her hair was lank and colorless on each side of her narrow face.
'Cain't y'all just go arrest the guy wrote you that letter?' she asked.
'There weren't any fingerprints on it. We don't know who sent it.'
'The social worker wants him here when she makes her home call. Y'all ain't gonna keep him real long, are you? I cain't get in no more trouble with Social Services.'