Wesley Rhodes was standing on the corner of the square, across from the courthouse, in the cool of the evening, watching the junior high school girls go in and out of the Mexican grocery store that had a small soda fountain in back. They giggled and had braces on their teeth and attracted him in ways he didn't understand. Not in a bad way. It was like they were his age, or he was their age, except he knew a lot more about the world than they did and he could take care of and protect them.
He just never could get up the nerve to talk to them. Maybe tonight would be different. He sat up on top of the backrest of a wood bench under a live oak, his hair slicked back, his comb clipped inside his shirt pocket, drinking from a Dixie cup filled with Coca-Cola and crushed ice. The trees were dark green overhead and the face of the clock on the courthouse tower glowed in the sunset, and the streets were striped with shadows now and the girls in front of the grocery marbled with light from the owner's neon signs. Man, summertime was great. If he just had enough nerve to stroll across the street…
That's when Jeff Deitrich's yellow convertible, with the top up, pulled to the curb and Jeff said, "Get in back, snarf."
They chased him for two blocks before they blocked him in an alley and Chug and Hammie and Warren pulled him off a fire escape and threw him in the car.
Crushed between Hammie and Chug in the backseat, he saw the city limits sign speed past the window.
"What's going on?" he said.
"You're gonna become a deep-sea diver tonight, little buddy. You ever watch those Jacques Costeau shows on TV? A frog can do it, you can do it," Hammie said. He took the comb out of Wesley's shirt pocket and scratched the purple and burnt-orange tattoo of a butterfly on the side of his throat with it.
"Frog? What's a frog got to do with anything?" Wesley asked.
Just after midnight the convertible turned on a dirt road and a few minutes later Wesley was able to see clearly out the window and recognize the rock quarry, just like someone had taken a bad dream from his life and forced him back inside it.
Wesley climbed out of the car with the others, his heart thundering, his armpits running with sweat. The wind had died and a layer of dust hung in the air and drifted over the mounds of yellow dirt that surrounded the crater.
"Tell them, Warren. I ain't never snitched nobody off. Even when the gunbulls put me in the hole," Wesley said.
"That's what I've been telling them. You're a righteous, sharp little dude. That's why they're letting you prove yourself," Warren said. He smiled good-naturedly, like the old Warren used to do, square-jawed, his eyes clear, handsome as a movie star.
"Why I got to prove anything? I ain't done nothing wrong," Wesley said.
"Not a good attitude, Wes," Warren said, his face taking on philosophic concern. "You a good swimmer?"
Jeff popped the trunk.
"This is scuba gear, queeb. That's an underwater camera and strobe. You're going to dive that Mercedes and take pictures. The mop-heads had better be inside," Jeff said.
"Why don't you do it yourself?" Wesley said.
Jeff had a rolled magazine in his back pocket. He removed it and used the hard-packed end to hit Wesley on the forehead, biting down on his lip, as though he were on the edge of far greater violence. "Because I don't get in the same water with corpses, zit-face. Want to wise off some more or live out the night?" he said.
Wesley undressed down to his Jockey undershorts and sat on the sand and put flippers on his feet and slipped the canvas straps of the air tank over his shoulders and the mask on his face. Warren hung a rubber-encased light from his neck and placed the camera and strobe in his hands.
"You never had a tank on?" he asked.
"Yeah, he's a regular in the Bahamas, Warren," Hammie said.
"What if I cain't find the car?" Wesley said.
"Don't come up," Jeff said.
Wesley waded out into the water, the rocks cutting his feet, then stepped off a shelf and went under.
It was easier than he thought. The light around his neck turned the bottom of the quarry into a crusted, unthreatening slope that dipped down through the greenish-yellow haze to the Mercedes. Small bait fish and pieces of grass swam at his mask and flanked off on each side of him, and he breathed the air easily from the mouthpiece and even blew his mask clear as Warren had shown him.
Then his light lit up the inside of the Mercedes and he almost vomited into his mouthpiece.
The face of the man on the driver's side looked straight into Wesley's, his lidless eyes like gray marbles, while a fish eel ate his tongue.
Wes aimed through the camera's lens and clicked the shutter five times. Then, with his heart tripping against his ribs, he let the camera float loose on its wrist cord and did something he never thought he would have the courage to.
He prised the back door loose from where it had lodged in the silt, then he was inside the car with the two dead men, his air tank clanging against the roof, their bloated skin brushing against his. A dreadlock wrapped across his mask like a leech, a forehead tipped against his jaw. His hands trembled while he worked, his fingernails and knuckles dipping into what felt like wet cornmeal, then a bilious fluid surged out of his stomach into his throat and he gagged violently and lost his mouthpiece and swallowed water that locked inside his windpipe like cement.
His lungs were bursting, his eyes bulging out of his head when he broke the surface into moonlight and air.
He fell on the sand, gasping, his body shaking, his Jockey undershorts strung with dead weeds.
"You get the pictures?" Jeff said.
"Hang them over your fucking mantel," Wesley said. Jeff uncapped a bottle of sparkling water and drank it while Wesley stumbled toward the convertible.
It was Monday afternoon that Wesley told me all this in my office.
"Who's developing the pictures?" I asked.
"Warren's old man owns some porno places in Houston. Warren uses their darkroom."
"The Costens are in pornography?"
His ruined face, with its harelip and wide-set, reptilian-green eyes, looked into space, as though the question had nothing to do with his life and hence was not one that anyone would expect him to answer.
"What did you do inside the Mercedes?" I said.
"The black guys was mushy and swole up like garbage bags. Like they was full of gas and wanted to float. I unsnapped their seat belts and left both doors open."
A grin scissored across his face, his eyes seeming to separate on the dough pan of his face and dance with light.
Score one for the little guys, I thought.
What happened that night out at Val's Drive-In started over either Chug Rollins's sister or Jerry Lee Lewis's music, depending on whom you heard it from.
Background: Chug's sister had the same weight problem as her brother, compounded by a notorious reputation for profligate sexual behavior. Two months ago she had made national news when she was prosecuted for the statutory rape of one of her male students at a Fort Worth high school.
It was a fine evening when Lucas Smothers and Esmeralda Ramirez pulled into Val's. The sun had just set below the rim of the hills and the light was draining from the sky as the day cooled. The breeze came up and the neon signs overhead and in the restaurant's windows went on and rippled the cars and pavement in the parking area. Lucas and Esmeralda went inside and sat by the jukebox and ordered, then Lucas dropped four quarters in the slot and began punching in every Jerry Lee Lewis number he could find.
That's when Chug Rollins and Jeff Deitrich and his old girlfriend, Rita Summers, came in and sat down together two booths away. A moment later they were joined by three of Jeffs and Chug's friends, ex-football players from the University of Texas, two of whom had been expelled after a gang rape of a co-ed in a fraternity house. They ordered mugs of draft beer and Rita Summers lit a cigarette under the No Smoking sign. She balanced her cigarette on an ashtray and fixed a clasp on the back of her gold hair, her blue eyes filled with ridicule.
"Look when you have a chance. Lavender spiked heels with embroidered jeans. I think she uses chlorine gas for perfume," she said.
"That's Smothers's hair tonic," one of the ex-football players said. He wore a cap backwards on his head and a white T-shirt that was bursting on his torso.
In the background Jerry Lee sang "I Could Never Be Ashamed of You."
At first Jeff didn't look in Lucas's and Esmeralda's direction, then he seemed to become more and more agitated, his eyes flicking away from the conversation around him, pinning Lucas, then Esmeralda.
"Hey, Smothers, is that your stuff on there?" he asked.
"Yeah, why?" Lucas said.
"It's giving me a headache," Jeff said.
"Jerry Lee Lewis is the greatest white blues singer of our time," Lucas said.
"It's forty years old. It's also garbage. Unplug it," Jeff said.
"Anything else you want? Shoes shined? Car washed?" Lucas said.
Chug Rollins turned his massive weight around in the booth.
"I've still got a major beef to settle with you, fuckhead. Don't give me an excuse," he said.
Lucas dipped a french fry in catsup and ate it and raised his eyebrows innocuously.
"You want to make faces, don't let me see it," Chug said.
Lucas unfolded a paper napkin and draped it with one hand from his forehead and ate a french fry behind it.
"You are seriously pissing me off," Chug said. He got up from the booth and hit the side and top of the jukebox and shook it with both hands until he knocked all of Lucas's selections out of play. Then he dropped a quarter in the slot and punched in a white rap song and reached behind the box to turn up the volume.
"You got a problem with that?" he said.
"It don't bother me if people like to pour shit in their ears," Lucas said.
Chug leaned down on the table. His arms were enormous, his chest and massive stomach as wide as a wood-stove. Lucas could smell the talcum and aftershave lotion and deodorant on his skin, the onions and fried meat on his breath. Chug wadded up a napkin and bounced it off Lucas's chest.
"I see you in here again, you're gonna be taking your meals through a glass straw for six months," he said, then went to his booth.
"Don't say anything else, Lucas," Esmeralda whispered.
Lucas flipped the wadded-up napkin out on the floor by Chug's booth. "All right, let's get out of here," he said.
Lucas went to pay the check while Esmeralda waited, her back turned to Jeff, who sat with one leg out in the aisle, his face disjointed, his eyes on her figure, the rise of her breasts against her form-fitting V-necked shirt. Lucas came back from the cash register and saw Jeff's expression and put his arm around Esmeralda, as though he could shield her from the violation and lust and black radiance in Jeff's eyes.
"Don't be looking at us like that, Jeff," he said.
"What'd you say?" Jeff said.
Lucas and Esmeralda headed toward the revolving side door. Chug got up from the booth and hitched up his scrotum with one hand.
"My ten-inch in your pepperbelly's mouth, Smothers," he said.
"Give it to your sister. She needs it a lot worse than we do," Lucas said, and went through the revolving door.
Chug made a grinding noise deep in his throat and charged toward the door as though he were back on the high school football field, tearing holes in the enemy line like a tank through a hedgerow, his fists balled into hams, his furrowed brow tilted down like a battering ram.
A waitress came through the revolving door just before Chug reached it, spinning the thick, rounded edge of the glass directly in front of Chug's head.
He crashed into it with a sound like someone thumping a wood mallet on a watermelon, then rolled moaning between the partitions, his hands clasped to his forehead.
The waitress tried to free herself from being trapped by shoving against the push bar, slamming the door back into his face, mashing his nose against the glass like a pig's snout pressed against a window.
Finally Chug tumbled out on the sidewalk, his clothes spotted with expectorated Red Man and Copenhagen.
"Better put some ice on that bump. It looks like a couple of golf balls," Lucas said.
Jeff helped Chug to his feet while he glared at both Esmeralda and Lucas.
"This is all your fault, Jeff. Don't blame it on anybody else," she said.
"Your mouth's always running. You never shut up. Somebody's going to put something in it," Jeff said.
"You couldn't cut it on the rig and you cain't cut it nowhere else, either. Stop taking out all your grief on other people," Lucas said.
Lucas and Esmeralda walked across the parking lot toward Lucas's pickup truck. The clouds overhead were silver and black in the moonlight, like smoked pewter, the wind rattling the palm trees by the entrance to the drive-in. Jeffs fists curled and uncurled at his sides.
"Don't worry, Jeff. He's gonna be a stump when we get finished with him," the ex-football player with his cap on backwards said.
"Smothers can wait. Esmeralda's asking for a train," Jeff said, his eyes burning into her back.
"You got a sign-up sheet?" the ex-football player said.
Two days later Lucas sat on the top rail of Beau's lot, the heels of his boots hooked on the second rail for support, and tossed chinaberries at a bucket. The morning was still cool, the shadows long on the ground, and Beau wans drinking out of the tank by the windmill, switching his tail hard in the shade. I stopped shoveling manure into a wheelbarrow and leaned the shovel against the fence.
"Who heard him say this?" I asked.
"The waitress."
"Maybe Esmeralda should go back to San Antone for a while."
"She don't listen. What do you reckon I ought to do?"
If they try to rape that girl, you blow their damn heads off, I thought.
"Pardon?" Lucas said.
"Nothing. I didn't say anything." I widened my eyes and looked at the clarity of the horizon against the sunrise. A flock of crows was descending into my neighbor's corn, like black ash drifting out of the sky.
I pulled the morning edition of the local newspaper out of my back pocket and flopped it open on the fence rail. At the bottom of the front page was a story about the bodies of two Jamaicans that had been found floating in a flooded quarry outside Waxahachie. "Maybe it's time Jeff Deitrich had some of his own chickens come home to roost," I said.
"He's mixed up with these dead guys?"
"Get her out of town. Let me work on a couple of things."
He dropped down from the fence and scraped a pattern in the dust with his boot.
"The reason I come over is, I was wondering if you might loan me L.Q. Navarro's revolver," he said.
I walked away from him toward the house, not answering him, shaking my head, wanting to flee his words as I would a dark and obscene thought.