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 Jeff’s 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.