'Like how?'
'In metal shop, senior year, he was making Chinese stars in the foundry, these martial arts things you can sail at people and put out an eye with. Darl was hogging the sand molds, and this kid says, "I got to pour my mailbox hangers or I won't get my grade," and Darl goes, "You got an S for snarf. Get out of the way."
'The kid says, "What's a snarf?"
'Darl says, "You don't got a mirror at home?"
'After school Darl catches the kid out in front of everybody and says, "Hey, a snarf is a guy who gets off sniffing girls' bicycle seats. But I had you made wrong. You don't get an S. You get an F for frump. That's a guy cuts farts in the bathtub and bites the bubbles."'
Lucas's cheeks were blotched with color.
'Would Darl beat a girl with his fists, Lucas?'
'My father needs me back in the field,' he answered.
That evening I opened up all the windows in the third floor of my house and let the breeze fill the rooms with the smells of alfalfa and distant rain and ozone and dust blowing out of the fields.
The house se
emed to resonate with its own emptiness. I stood by the side of the hand-carved tester bed that had been my parents', my fingers resting on the phone, and looked out over the barn roof and windmill and the fields that led down to the clay bluffs over the river. Lightning with no sound quivered on a green hill in the west.
I punched in Mary Beth Sweeney's number.
'You mind my calling you?' I asked.
'I'm happy you did.'
The line hummed in the silence.
'I know a Mexican restaurant that serves food you only expect in the Elysian Fields,' I said.
'Let's talk about it tomorrow.'
'Sure,' I said.
'I'm sorry, I don't mean to be like this… That Mexican narc you were talking with? He's a bucket of shit. You watch your butt, cowboy.'
Watch your own. You're working for the G, Mary Beth, I said to myself as I put down the receiver.
That night I heard the doors on the near end of the barn slamming in the wind. I rolled over and went back to sleep, then remembered I had closed the doors on the near end and had slipped the cross planks into place to hold them secure. I put on a pair of khakis and took a flashlight from the back porch and walked through the yard, the electric beam angling ahead of me.
One door fluttered and squealed on its hinges, then sucked loudly against the jamb. I started to push the other door into place, then I looked down the length of stalls, out in the railed lot on the far side, and saw my Morgan trotting in a circle, wall-eyed with fear, spooking at bits of paper blowing in the moonlight.
'What's wrong, Beau? Weather usually doesn't bother you,' I said.
I got him into the barn and stroked his face, closed the door behind him, and unscrewed the cap on a jar of oats-and-molasses balls and poured a dozen into the trough at the head of his stall.
Then I saw the red, diagonal slash on his withers, as though he had been struck a downward blow by a metal-edged instrument.
His skin wrinkled and quivered under my hand when I placed it close to the wound.
'Who did this to you, Beau?' I said.
The electric lights in the barn were haloed with humidity, glowing with motes of dust in the silence.
At eight the next morning I drove to the edge of town, where Jack Vanzandt ran his business in a five-story building sheathed in black glass. His office was huge, the beige carpet as soft as a bear's fur, the furniture white and onyx black, the glass wall hung with air plants.
I sat in a stuffed leather chair, my legs crossed, the purpose of my visit like a piece of sharp tin in my throat.