Rita Summers sat at a table by the window in the restaurant her father owned above the river. This was one of four that he owned in Texas and New Mexico, and she liked to come here sometimes by herself and have a drink in the lounge and watch the boats on the river and think about her day and the men, boys, really, who moved in and out of it without consequence and the protean nature of her relationships that in her mind’s eye always ended in a blank place in her future.
There had been a time when she had believed the future was built incrementally, with absolute guarantees of success provided to those who did what was expected of them. You graduated from high school, with all the attendant ceremony, as though it actually marked an achievement, then enrolled at the university in Austin and lived in a sorority house and dated the right boys and kept the right attitudes and learned whom to avoid and whom to cultivate
, and one day your father gave you away at your wedding and the pride and love you saw in his eyes confirmed that all the goodness the world could offer had indeed become yours.
But she didn’t finish her second year at the university. Her professors were boring, the subject matter stupid, the fraternity boys she dated inane and immature. She began seeing an air force officer who came from old Boston money, even though she knew he had a wife, a Berkeley graduate, in Vermont. They began meeting weekends at the Ritz Carlton in Houston and the Four Seasons in Dallas. The hardness of his body inside her, the tendons in his back tightening under her fingers, filled her with a sense of excitement and power she had never experienced before. Her skin seemed to glow with it when she showered afterwards, and the glow and erotic confidence only intensified when she refused to answer her sorority sisters’ questions about the affair she was obviously having.
Sometimes she wondered about the wife, the Berkeley graduate in Vermont. Then she would toss her head, as though dealing with a problem of conscience, but in reality she was secretly happy, in a way that almost disturbed her, at the sexual power she could exert over other people’s lives.
But one month she missed her period. She told him this over Sunday breakfast in the hotel. He stopped returning her calls.
The following month, when her menstrual cycle resumed, she sat down at her desk in the sorority house and, using stationery from the Ritz Carlton Hotel, wrote a letter to her lover’s commanding officer, detailing the affair, and making particular mention of the lover’s statements about his contempt for his wife in Vermont, to whom he referred as “Ho Chi Minh’s answer to Minnie Mouse.” She mailed the letter to the air base and copies to the wife and to the wife’s father, who was the mayor of the village in which they lived.
Rita drank from her gin fizz and was amused at the way her fingerprints stenciled themselves in the moisture on the glass. The gin was cold and warm inside her at the same time, just as the immediate environment around her was. The air-conditioning was set so low her breath fogged against the window, but, outside, the twilight was green, streaked with rain, a palm tree rattling in a balmy breeze. She drank again from the gin and bit down on the candied cherry in the ice, and thought how she was both inside a hermetically sealed air-conditioned world owned by her father and yet part of the greater world, although safe from its elements. In moments like these, in a setting like this, she felt the same sense of control she had enjoyed when she lay down on the bed in the Ritz Carlton and looked at the undisguised hunger in the air force officer’s face.
But it was not his rejection of her that bothered her now. It was Jeff Deitrich. And Jeff Deitrich and Jeff Deitrich and Jeff Deitrich, and the fact that two men in a row had used and discarded her and the second one had rubbed food in her nose and hair and eyes while other people watched.
She drank the rest of her gin fizz and ordered another, her jawbone flexing like a tiny spur under the skin.
She heard the car before she saw it, the twin exhausts roaring off the asphalt, the transmission winding into a scream. Then it burst around a line of cars, across the center stripe, a customized Mercury she had seen before, coming hard out of the north, its maroon hood overpainted with a net of blue and red flame, a sheriffs cruiser right on its rear bumper.
A second cruiser came out of the south and slid sideways to a stop on the asphalt, sealing off the two-lane and blocking the Mercury’s escape.
The driver of the Mercury shifted down, double-clutching, and turned abruptly into the restaurant’s parking lot, flooring the accelerator again. But he spun out of control into a muddy field that sloped down toward the bluffs over the river, showering brown water across his windows, the wheels whining in gumbo up to the axle, mud and grass geysering off the back tires.
Then the engine killed and steam rose off the hood in the rain. The driver, who was shirtless, leaned his head on his folded arms and waited for the two deputies to pull him from his car.
Rita stood on the flagstone back porch of the restaurant, with her drink in her hand, and watched the deputies handcuff the driver of the Mercury and walk him up the slope to the open-air shed where her father’s cooks stacked cords of hickory and mesquite wood for the stone barbecue pit inside. The deputies’ hair and uniforms were soaked. The deputies tried to dry themselves under the shed, then gave it up and cuffed their prisoner to an iron U-bolt embedded in the side of a chopping block that was chained to the cement pad.
The deputies took off their hats when they addressed her.
“You mind if we clean up inside, Ms. Summers?” one said.
But she knew that was a secondary reason for going inside. They ate free whenever they stopped at the restaurant.
“What did he do?” she asked.
“Oh, he’s just a bad Mexican kid wants to give the Deitrich boy some trouble. Plus he’s got a half dozen moving violations against him in San Antone,” the deputy said.
Inside, the deputies gave their food order to a waiter and went into the men’s room. Rita covered her head with a newspaper and walked down to the shed. Someone turned on the flood lamps in the oak trees, and the mist looked like iridescent smoke blowing out of the leaves.
She leaned against the cedar post at the corner of the shed and drank from her gin glass.
“What’s your name?” she said.
“Ronnie,” the man cuffed by one wrist said. “You work here?”
“If I want to. My father owns it.”
“Impressive,” he replied.
So this was the famous Ronnie Cross, she thought. He sat on the cement pad, barefoot, one knee drawn up before him. He had wide shoulders and big arms, Indian-black hair cut short, lips a little like a classical Greek’s, and muscle tone and skin that made her think of smooth, tea-stained stone.
“What will they do to you?” she asked.
“Take me back to San Antone on a couple of bench warrants.”
His dark eyes never blinked. They were lidless and devoid of any emotion that she could see. But it was his mouth that bothered her. It stayed slightly parted, as though he looked upon the world as a giant, self-serving deception that only a fool would respect.