I was suddenly involved with the old male impossibility of making love with any degree of dignity while standing up. We sat on the grass, then I lay her back with her head on the edge of the checkered cloth and kissed her again. The wind was blowing from across the river, eddying through the grass above the bluff, and the clouds piled on the western horizon were purple and edged with fire. I looked down into her eyes.

Behind me I heard a horse's hooves moving through the dead oak leaves. I turned and saw Beau, my Morgan, coming through the shade, and a little boy with a haircut like a soft brush riding bareback atop him.

'Hi! What ch'all doin'?' he said, pushing a branch out of his face with his arm.

'Hey, Pete, what's goin' on?' I said, my voice coming back to me like a man bursting to the surface of a deep pool.

'We still going fishing?'

'Wouldn't miss it, bud. You want some chicken? This is Mary Beth.'

He grinned at her. He was barefoot and in overalls and looked like a small clothespin on Beau's spine.

'I already eat,' he said.

'We have some lemonade,' she said. She was sitting up now, one arm propped behind her.

'That's all right. I'm butting in.'

'I'd tell you, wouldn't I?' I said.

He grinned at nothing, flicking the reins across the back of his hand.

'I'm gonna take Beau back,' he said.

'Billy Bob told me a lot about you, Pete. I'd like it if you'd join us,' Mary Beth said.

His eyes shifted off her, his grin never fading, then he slipped off Beau's back onto the ground.

'This is the smartest little guy in Deaf Smith,' I said.

'I knew you was gonna say that,' he said.

That night I drove down the road to the convenience store to buy a carton of milk. The store was on the top of a rise, next to a cornfield, its bright white-and-red exterior and neon-scrolled windows and lighted gas pumps and wide cement parking area surrounded by rural darkness. It was also a hangout for East Enders dragging the main road through town.

Their cars were parked by the phone booth, their doors open to catch the breeze, the cement pad around their feet already littered with beer cans, dirty napkins, and the cigarette butts they had emptied from their ashtrays.

On the way back to my car Darl Vanzandt got up from the passenger seat of his cherry-red chopped-down 1932 Ford and came toward me, the pupils of his wide-set eyes like burnt cinders. He drank the foam out of a quart bottle of Pearl and flung it whistling into the darkness. When I tried to walk around him, he stepped into my path, his courage inflating now with the audience that had formed at his back.

'Whoa, there, bud,' I said.

'You bothered all my friends. Now you're bothering my step-mother,' he said.

'Wrong.'

'You're setting me up to go to jail. All because of that little fart Lucas Smothers,' he said.

'Good night,' I said.

But he stepped in front of me again. He pushed me in the breastbone with his fingers, then he did it again, grinding his teeth slightly, thumping hard against the bone.

'Don't do this, Darl,' I said.

The skin around his mouth was taut and gray, his nose tilted slightly upward, the fear and loathing in his eyes like a candle flame that didn't know which way to blow. I dropped my eyes, and a smile exposed his teeth.

He slapped the carton of milk from my hand. It exploded in a white star on the pavement.

I stepped backward, then walked in a wide circle toward my car.

I heard his feet running behind me. By the time I could turn he was almost upon me. I brought up my elbow and drove it into his nose.

He doubled over, his cupped hands smeared with blood as soon as they touched his face. Then Bunny Vogel was next to him, his arm around Darl's shoulders, holding a wadded T-shirt against Darl's nose.

'I'll get some ice, then we'll go home. It ain't broken. The blood's darker when it's broken,' Bunny said.

'You tell his dad what happened, Bunny,' I said.

'It ain't my job to tell on people.'

'You're sure loyal to a kid who cost you a career in the pros. I wonder why that is,' I said.

He led Darl back toward the parked cars of the East Enders. Then he glanced back at me, his eyes like those of a man who just realized his future will be no different from his past.

The next morning I ate breakfast on the kitchen table and read from Great-grandpa Sam's journal.

July 7, 1891

Today I cane-fished in the river for perch and shovel-mouth with Jennie, which is the Christian name of the Rose of Cimarron. The hills was covered with Indian paintbrush and sunflowers and we cooked our fish in a brush arbor with a spring that stays wet through the summer months.

It is country that begs for a church house, but it is infested with a collection of halfwits and white trash that calls themselves the Dalton-Doolin gang. They live in mud caves along the river and consider it the high life. A Chinaman brings them opium and squaws give them the clap. They rob trains because the smell on them is such they would get run out of a town before they could ever make it to the bank.

A little twerp named Blackface Charley Bryant threw a temper tantrum and commenced firing a rifle into the sky and using profane language in Jennie's and my presence. He come by his nickname when his own revolver blew up in his hand and turned half his face into an eggplant. I informed him I did not want to forget my ordination and cause him injury, but I would probably do so should I put a third eye in the middle of his forehead.

I am tempted to wrap Jennie in fence wire and carry her out of here across my pommel. But Judge Isaac Parker has had over fifty federal lawmen shot to death in these parts, and I think he would as lief hang a woman outlaw as a man, since people tell me he has already hung a highwayman's horse.

Romancing that woman is like chasing cows in dry lightning. It's a whole lot easier getting into the saddle than out of it. Such is the nature of pagan ways.

When I walked out to my car Lucas Smothers pulled into the driveway in his skinned-up truck.

'My father says I got to tell you something. Even though it's just stuff I heard,' he said.

'Go ahead.'

He got out of the truck and leaned against the fender. The shadow of a poplar tree seemed to cut his face in half. He bit a hangnail.

'About the firemen finding Jimmy Cole's body at the old Hart Ranch? Like, maybe Garland Moon killed him and tried to burn him up with some old tires? I mean, that's what the sheriff's thinking, ain't it?' he said.

'It's Moon's style.'

'Darl Vanzandt and some others used to get fried on acid and angel dust out there. Roseanne went there with them once. She said Darl got crazy when he was on dust.'

'What's Darl have to do with Jimmy Cole?'

'Six or seven months back, a hobo died in a fire by the railway tracks. The paper said he was heating a tar paper shack with a little tin stove and a can of kerosene. I heard maybe Darl and some others done it.'

He looked at the expression on my face, then looked away.

'Why would he kill a hobo?' I asked.

'There's kids that's cruel here. They don't need no reason. Roseanne said maybe Darl's a Satanist.'

'We're talking about murdering people.'

'I seen stuff maybe older folks don't want to know about. That's the way this town's always been.'

'Jimmy Cole wasn't killed on the Hart Ranch. His body was moved there.'

'It wasn't Darl?'

'I doubt it.'

He wiped his palms on his jeans. 'I got to get to work… Mr Holland?'

'Yes?'

He scraped at a piece of rust on the truck door with his thumbnail.

'You doing all this 'cause you figure you owe me?' he said.