They got pitched headlong into the dirt, trampled, stove in, flung against the boards, and sometimes hooked, the bull's horn piercing lung and kidney, tossing the rider in the air, trundling him across the arena like a cloth doll while clowns who wore football shoes tried to save the rider's life with a rubber barrel.
As L.Q. might say, you could find a worse bunch.
We were out on the midway when we saw a country band assembled on a stage by a grassy area flanked with booths that sold Indian jewelry. In the back of the band was Lucas Smothers, his sunburst twelve-string guitar slung around his neck on a cloth strap beaded with flowers.
It was the first time, to my knowledge, he had played anywhere since his arrest. The band kicked it off with 'The Orange Blossom Special' and 'Bringing in the Georgia Mail,' then bled right into Hank Snow's 'Golden Rocket.' Lucas stepped to the front of the group and held the sound hole of his guitar to a microphone on an abbreviated stand and went into an instrumental ride that was beautiful to hear and watch. His left hand corded up and down the frets, never pausing, never making a mistake, while the plectrum flashed across the strings over the sound hole, the double-strung octave notes resonating like both a bass guitar and a mandolin.
No one on the stage could approach his performance. But when he finished his solo, which also ended the song, the applause was broken, muted, like cellophane burning and then dying. I could see the emptiness in Lucas's face, his eyes blinking, one hand fiddling with his back pocket, as though he could hide his embarrassment there.
But the leader of the band, a decent man from Austin who well knew his audience, was not one to let a wrong go unchecked. He picked up the microphone and said, 'That boy can do it, cain't he? That was gooder than my mama's grits…' He extended his arm back toward the band. 'Lucas Smothers, ladies and gentlemen, Deaf Smith's own! How about giving him and the whole band a big hand?'
One of those loudest in his applause was Darl Vanzandt, who stood at the back of the crowd, a smear of cotton candy on his mouth. Three girls, slightly younger than he, were with him. When the band took a break, he touched one of the girls on the shoulder, and she and her two friends went to the stage and began talking excitedly to Lucas.
'What cha studying on?' Pete said.
'Oh, not much,' I said, and ran my palm over the soft top of his crewcut.
'Turn loose of it, Billy Bob. He'll be all right,' Mary Beth said.
'No, he won't,' I said.
She looked at my face, then followed my eyes to Garland T. Moon, who sat on top of a loading chute to the left of the stage, eating a snow cone, crunching the ice to the top by squeezing his fist tighter and tighter along the cone. Darl Vanzandt gave him the thumbs-up sign.
Later, I looked down from the stands and saw Moon wandering along the main aisle, smiling, staring up at the crowd with friendly approval, as though he were one of us, a member of the community enjoying a fine day. He bought a fresh strawberry snow cone from a vendor and bit into it like he was a starving man and it was wet fruit. He touched the pigtails on a little girl's head and brushed his loins against a woman, then stepped back with an elaborate apology on his face.
'I'll be back,' I said.
'Billy Bob?' Mary Beth said.
Moon went out the side exit of the stands to a long, flat cement building that served as a public shower and men's room during Indian powwows and rodeos and county fairs. A few kids stood at the urinals but no Garland T. Moon.
I walked along the duckboards, past the row of toilet stalls, until I saw a pair of plastic cowboy boots under a door and heard a man coughing deep in his throat. Next to the boots was a strawberry snow cone that had splattered on the duckboards.
I already saw the next moments in my mind's eye-the door of the stall flying back in his face, my fist nailing him across the bridge of the nose, my boots coming down on his head when he hit the floor.
But that wasn't the way it played out.
When I shoved the door open, I watched a man imploding inside, his head and chest bent over the toilet bowl, his hands wedged against the walls, while he tried to expel a stream of dark blood from his mouth and keep from strangling on it at the same time.
'Hold on, Moon. I'll get here with the medics,' I said.
I found the ambulance by the entrance to the arena and walked along beside it to the cement building and watched two paramedics load Moon on a gurney and wheel him back outside. A white towel was wrapped around his throat and chin. Each time he coughed the towel speckled with blood.
'You know this man?' one of the medics asked me.
'Not really,' I said.
'Yeah, he does. You might say I'm an old friend of the family,' Moon said.
'You're not a clever man, Moon,' I said.
The muscles in his face contorted; his hand came off the gurney and locked around my wrist like links in an iron chain.
'This don't change nothing. One day I'm gonna tell you something that'll turn you into a dog trying to pass broken glass,' he said.
chapter twenty
I talked to Marvin Pomroy on the telephone Monday morning. Across the street, the trees on the courthouse lawn were a hard green in the sunlight, and I could see an inmate in jailhouse whites smoking a cigarette behind a barred window on the top floor of the building.
'The doctor says Moon's insides looked like they'd been chewed by rats. Did you know somebody poured a can of Drano down his mouth when he was a kid in Sugarland?' Marvin said.
'Moon was a snitch?'
'I doubt it. It was probably because he wouldn't come across. That's not what's causing his problems today, though. He's got cancer of the stomach.'
'That's why he's back, isn't it? This is his last show,' I said. 'I should have put it together.'
'I'm not with you.'
'He told me he didn't drink. Then he told me he had some old DWIs hanging over his head.'
'Next time leave him in the toilet stall.'
I don't know to what degree Garland T. Moon helped coordinate the events of the next night. The pettiness of mind, the vindictiveness, the level of cruelty involved were all part of his mark. But so were they characteristic of Darl Vanzandt. They had found each other, and I suspected neither of them doubted for a moment the intentions and designs of the other, in the same way the psychologically malformed in a prison population stare into hundreds of other faces and immediately recognize those whose eyes are like their own, window holes that give onto the Abyss.
I heard the story from the outside and the inside, from Mary Beth, whose cruiser was the first to arrive on the 911 at the country club, from Vernon Smothers, and from Bunny Vogel. It was the kind of account, as Great-grandpa Sam had said, that made you ashamed to be a member of the white race. Darl Vanzandt and Moon were aberrations. But how about the others who, with foreknowledge and joy of heart, went along with their scheme?
Lucas had worked with his father in the fields that day and had told him he was going to play with the band that evening before a baseball game out at the old Cardinals training camp. Vernon Smothers did not believe him, but he had long ago come to believe his son would never tell him the truth about anything, that lack of trust was the only permanent reality in their relationship, and so he said nothing at four o'clock when Lucas walked hot and dusty from the field, stripped to his shorts by the barn, and picked the wood ticks off his body in a sluice of water from the windmill.