'Billy Bob, this gal is major off the wall.'
'Most of our clientele is. That's why they're in trouble all the time,' I said.
'Here's the rest of it. She had her nose really bent out of joint by this time. So she takes out her MasterCard and buys four hundred dollars' worth of clothes I couldn't afford.'
'It doesn't mean she's dirty.'
'Yeah, and Jack Vanzandt and this greaseball Felix Ringo brought her to us out of goodwill.'
I rubbed my forehead and looked at the soft orange glow of the sunset over the trees. Mockingbirds glided by the clock tower on the courthouse.
'Yeah, this guy Ringo doesn't fit. He's a friend of Jack, he was hanging around Sammy Mace, and he's hooked up with the G at the same time,' I said.
I felt the fatigue of the day catch up with me. I tried to think straight but I couldn't. I felt her eyes on my face.
'Go to supper with me,' she said.
'I'm going to put Darl Vanzandt on the stand,' I said.
That night there was still no call from Mary Beth. In the morning I drove to the office, then walked to the thrift store operated by the Baptist church, where Emma Vanzandt was a volunteer worker.
She was in back, sorting donated clothes on a long wood table. She wore tailored jeans and red pumps and a white silk blouse with red beads. She didn't bother to look up when I approached her.
'Jack and Felix Ringo gave me some witnesses that are almost too good to be true,' I said.
'Oh, how grand,' she said.
'I think Jack may have done it to get me off your son's back.'
She looked me in the face and silently formed the word stepson with her mouth.
'Excuse me, your stepson, Darl.'
'Why tell me, good sir?'
'Because Darl's going on the stand just the same.'
'Would you kindly take the okra out of your mouth and explain what you're talking about.'
'Darl was at Shorty's the night Roseanne Hazlitt was attacked. He's mentally defective and has a violent history. He's beaten women with his fists. He goes into rages with little provocation. You figure it out, Emma.'
'Ah, our conscience feels better now, doesn't it? You take Jack's favor, but to prove your integrity, you subpoena a walking basket case and fuck him cross-eyed in front of a jury of nigras and Mexicans.'
A woman paying for her purchase at the counter turned around with her mouth open.
'Tell Jack what I said.'
I walked back out the front door. Then I heard her behind me. In the sunlight her makeup looked like a white and pink mask stretched on her face, her black hair pulled tightly back on her forehead, her eyes aglitter with anger or uppers or whatever energy it was that drove her.
'You're a fool,' she said.
'Why?'
Her mouth was thick with lipstick, slightly opened, her eyes fastened on mine, as though she were on the edge of saying something that would forever make me party to a secret that she imparted to no one.
'Bunny Vogel,' she said.
'What?'
Then the moment went out of her eyes.
'I wish I were a man. I'd beat the shit out of you. I truly hate you, Billy Bob Holland,' she said.
My father was both a tack and hot-pass welder on pipelines for thirty years, but all his jobs came from the same company, one that contracted statewide out of Houston. I called their office and asked the lady in charge of payroll if their records would indicate whether my father ever worked around Waco in the late 1930s or early 1940s.
'My heavens, that's a long time ago,' she said.
'It's really important,' I said.
'A lot of our old records are on the computer now, but employees' names of fifty years ago, that's another matter-'
'I don't understand.'
'The company has to know where all its pipe is. But back during the Depression a lot of men were hired by the day and paid in cash. WPA boys, drifters off the highway, they came and they went.'
And the company didn't have to pay union wages or into the Social Security fund, either, I thought.
'Can you just determine if y'all lay any lines around Waco about 1940 or so?' I asked.
'That's a whole lot easier. Can I call you back when I have more time?' she said.
I gave her my office number and went home for lunch. The light on my telephone answering machine was flashing in the library. I pushed the 'play' button, trying not to be controlled by the expectation in my chest.
'It's me, Billy Bob. I'm sorry I left the way I did. I'm not even supposed to call you. I'll try to get back to you later,' Mary Beth's voice said.
The tape announced the time. I had missed her call by fifteen minutes.
I fixed a sandwich and some potato salad and a glass of iced tea and sat down to eat on the back porch. The fields were marbled with shadow and the breeze was warm and flecked with rain and I could smell cows watering at my neighbor's windmill. On the other side of the tank, beyond the line of willows that puffed with wind, was the network of baked wagon ruts and hoofprints where the Chisholm Trail had traversed my family's property. Sometimes I believed Great-grandpa Sam was still out there, in chaps and floppy hat, a bandanna tied across his face against the dust, trying to turn his cows away from the bluffs when dry lightning caused them to rumble across the prairie louder than the thunder itself.
I wished I had lived back in his time, when men like Garland T. Moon were bounced off cottonwood trees and federal agents didn't make you fall in love with them and then leave on airplanes at four in the morning with no explanation.
It was a self-pitying way to think, but I didn't care. I went into the library and got out Sam's journal and read it while I finished lunch.
August 28, 1891
Maybe burning out them four caves wasn't such a good idea. The gang has come back from Pearl Younger's whorehouse and now the Dalton brothers seem to think their leadership is on the line. To make matters worse, Emmett Dalton, the only one of them who probably has half a brain, told me my name has been put on a warrant by the U.S. court up in Wichita, because I am now considered a known associate of train robbers and murderers.
I understand the judge who done this is the same one who told the Colorado cannibal Albert Packer there was only seven good Democrats in the mountains where Packer got froze in for the winter and Packer had went and ate five of them. I now wish Packer had carried his knife and fork into the court and made it six.
The Cimarron is naught but ribbons of muddy water now and carrion birds perch on the ribs of the wild horses the Dalton-Doolins have shot and butchered down on the banks. The hills are orange and sear with drought all the way to Kansas, and dust and chickweed blows up in flumes that will sand the skin off your bones.
The poppy husks in the fields have hardened and dried and they rattle and hiss like snakes when I ride down to the river to draw water for our garden. When I see the fireflies in the trees and hear the cicadas in the evening, I wonder how I have strayed so far from the smell of rain and flowers on the Texas Gulf. It is the feeling I always had as a child, that everything was ending, that the world's sins was fixing to turn the sky to flames. I never could account for the notions I had as a child. But it is feelings like this that always made the word whiskey want to break like a bubble on the back of my tongue.
I know if I stay on the Cimarron, I will be gunned down for sure or forced once again to kill other men. Jennie woke me last night when she heard sounds by the outhouse. It was only hogs, but she commenced crying and said she has heard her relatives talking and she fears for my life. I have not knowed her to cry before.