And the Hart Ranch, where he had seen lights in the clouds he associated with UFOs.
I went back to the house, wrapped the belt around L.Q.'s holstered .45 revolver, and set it on the seat next to me in the Avalon.
But I didn't get far. Bunny Vogel pulled his '55 Chevy into my drive and got out with a sheet of lined notebook paper gripped in his hand. His Mexican girlfriend sat in the passenger's seat.
'What's wrong, Bunny?' I said.
'I went to Lucas's house. To tell him I'm sorry for my part in that cow-flop stuff out at the country club. There wasn't nobody home. That Indian motorcycle was gone, too. I found this note wadded up on the porch.'
I smoothed it out on Bunny's hood. The handwriting, in pencil, was like a child's.
Lucas,
We got a new name for you. Its Baby Shit. In case you dont know, baby shit is yellow. You got everybody to feel sorry for you at the trial because you dont have parents. You know what the truth is? You dont have parents because nobody ever wanted you. Baby shit gets wiped off. It doesnt get raised.
I gave you my collectors bike and you snitched me off. I thought you could hang out with us but you couldn't cut the initiation at the country club. You got one way out of your problem, Baby Shit. Maybe you can prove your not a spineless cunt. Bring my bike out to the Rim Rocks at 6. I'll be there by myself because I dont have to run to my old man to square a beef.
You thought Roseanne was a good girl? She was good, all right. Down past the part you couldnt get to.
It was unsigned.
'The Rim Rocks?' I said.
'There's a dirt road in the woods at the top of the cliffs, about two miles upriver from the Hart Ranch,' Bunny said.
'The steel cable,' I said.
'The what?' he asked, his head tilted pec
uliarly in the wind, as though the air held a secret that had eluded him.
I pulled into the drive of the Vanzandts' home. Bunny and his girlfriend parked by the curb and did not get out of their car. The sun had dipped behind the house, and the pine trees in the front yard were edged with fire, the trunks deep in shadow. Far up the slope, sitting in deck chairs on their wide, breezy front porch, were Jack and Emma, a drink tray set between them.
So that's how they would handle it, I thought. With booze and pills and assignment of blame to others. Why not? They lived in a world where use was a way of life and money and morality were synonymous. Perhaps they believed the burden of their son's errant ways absolved them of their own sins, or that indeed they had been made the scapegoats of the slothful and inept whose plight it was to loathe and envy the rich.
Jack rose from his chair as I approached the porch. He wore a canary-yellow sports shirt and white slacks and a western belt and polished cowboy boots, and his face looked as composed as that of a defeated warrior to whom victory was denied by only chance and accident.
'I'd invite you for a drink, Billy Bob, but I suspect you're here for other reasons,' he said.
Emma lit a cigarette with a gold lighter and smoked it as though I were not there, her red nails clicking slowly on the arm of the chair.
'Is Darl around?' I asked.
'No, he went to a show with friends,' Jack said.
'This morning he was melting screamers in red wine. But tonight he's eating popcorn at the theater?' I said.
'What in God's name are you talking about now?' Emma said.
'Screamers, leapers, uppers, black beauties, whatever you want to call them. They tie serious knots in people's brains,' I said.
'Maybe you'd better leave,' Jack said.
I handed him the note Darl had left on Lucas's porch. He straightened it between his hands and read, his feet spread slightly, pointed outward, like a man on a ship.
'This isn't even signed,' he said. But his voice faltered.
'Why would your boy buy twenty feet of steel cable at a building supply, Jack?' I asked.