“Maricón!” she said. “Cabrón! Cobarde! Maricón! Maricón! Maricón!”
“Your face looks funny like that. All out of shape. Funny and stupid,” he said, smiling strangely. “I know a truck stop where I can get you on, doing hand jobs. I’ll take a shower and drive you there. You can tell them about your credits at the Juco. They’ll be impressed. For some reason, Esmeralda, I feel just great.”
Lucas told me this story early Saturday morning while I curried out Beau in the lot. We were in the shade of the barn and the morning was still cool and the wind off the river smelled of wet trees and wildflowers and the livestock in my neighbor’s pasture.
“Jeff’s gone?” I said.
“He burned rubber for thirty feet. He shot me the bone when he went by. What a guy,” he said.
“Where’s Esmeralda?”
“Staying at the trailer,” he said.
I straightened up and paused in my work, my arms resting on the warm indentation of Beau’s back. Lucas looked down at his foot and kicked at the dust. The brim of his straw hat was curled into a point on the front.
“She lost her restaurant job. She don’t have no place to go,” he said.
“She has a family.”
“Just Cholo. He’s crazy.”
“That’s the point. Stay away from those people.”
“Which people is that?”
“Don’t make a racial deal out of this. You know what I’m talking about,” I said.
“You want me to run her off? Treat her like Jeff done?”
I opened the gate in the lot and turned Beau out into the pasture.
“I guess life was a lot simpler when I was y’all’s age,” I said.
“Yeah, I reckon that’s how I got here,” he replied.
Sunday morning I got a call from the county jail. My harelip, flat-nosed, meltdown client, Wesley Rhodes, had been out of the bag three days, then had gotten busted at four o’clock that morning for possession, driving without a license, and indecent exposure.
I waited for the jailer, a sweating fat man whose khaki trousers hung below his crack, to open up Wesley’s isolation cell in the top of the courthouse.
“Why isn’t he in the tank, L.J.?” I asked.
“It’s full up on Saturday nights. Federal judge is always on our ass about it,” he replied.
I sat down on a chain-hung iron bunk opposite Wesley. The sun had risen into the trees outside, and the light through the bars made lacy shadows on Wesley’s face. He wore a dark blue see-through shirt and a studded dog collar around his neck and Cloroxed jeans belted tightly below his belly button. His wide-set green eyes stared at me with the angular concentration of a lizard’s.
“What were you holding, Wesley?” I said.
“Blues. They been on the street a couple of days.”
“Dilaudid?”
“They wasn’t for me. There’s a man I get together with sometimes. He cooks them. They’re safer than the tar that’s coming up from the Valley.”
“What’s the indecent-exposure charge?”
“I was taking a leak in the park.”
“You selling yourself, Wes?”