Cimarron Rose

'He owns the studio where Clint Black started out,' another girl said.

'No kidding?' Lucas said.

'He did 'til a bunch of Jews took it over,' the first girl said. Her eyes were blue, her head covered with blonde curls, and the alcoholic flush on her face made her look vulnerable and beautiful in spite of the harshness of her words.

'Clint Black is good as they get. So is George Strait,' Lucas said.

Bu

'Ain't we supposed to go to the country club now?' he asked.

'We've got time,' the girl whose father had owned a recording studio said. She held up her glass to a Mexican waiter and handed it and a credit card pressed under her thumb to him. She didn't speak, and upon his return with the drinks, she signed the charge slip and let him pick it and the pen off the table without ever speaking to him.

Lucas kept staring at the clock on the wall, one with green neon tubing around the outside of the face. The hands said a quarter to seven; then, when he looked again, he was sure only moments later, the hands said 7:25. He went to the men's room and washed and dried his face and looked in the mirror. His eyes were clear, his skin slightly red from the day in the fields. He wet his comb and ran it through his hair and walked back through the bar area, his boots solid on the stone floor.

Outside, Bu

Lucas picked up the fresh collins in front of him and drank half of it. It was as sweet as lemonade, the vodka subtle and cold and unthreatening. The girls watched him while he drank.

'What's going on?' he asked.

They smiled at one another.

'We were saying you're cute,' the third girl said.

'I'm fixing to boogie. Y'all coming or not?' Bu

'Darl can throw a shitfit if you keep him waiting,' the blonde girl said.

'Darl?' Lucas said.

'We're go

'Y'all didn't say nothing about Darl,' Lucas said.

'He wants to come. What's the law against that?' the blonde girl said. She stood up. Her face seemed angry now, vexed. 'People can go where they want. He can't help it if he's rich.'

'I didn't say that he…' Lucas began. He rose from his chair and felt a rush, like a hit of high-grade speed, a white needle that probed places in his mind he had never seen before. 'I just meant…'

But he didn't know what he meant, and he followed Bu

Later, they backed into an empty slot at the drive-in restaurant, next to Darl's softly buffed '32 Ford, and ordered a round of long-neck Lone Stars. Lucas could see the back of Darl's neck, thick and oily, pocked with acne scars. Three other boys were in the car with him, their caps on backward, their upper bodies swollen from steroid injections and pumping iron. One of them flipped a cigarette at the waitress's butt when she walked by.

Lucas drank down the beer. It felt cold and bright in his throat.

But he was sweating now, his heart beating faster than it should.

'I got to get out,' he said from the backseat.

'What's wrong?' Bu

'I don't know. I got to get out. I cain't breathe good. It's hot in here.'

He opened the back door and stood in the breeze. The hills were flushed with a dark purple haze now, the strings of lights over the parking lot humming with a hot buzz like nests of electrified insects.

He walked to the men's room, but the door, which was metal and fire-engine-red, was bolted from the inside. He stared at the rows of parked cars, at the Mexican and black cooks through the kitchen window, the waitresses who carried metal trays loaded with food and frosted mugs of root beer. They all seemed to function with an orderly purpose from which he was excluded, that he witnessed as a clown staring through a glass wall. His face tingled and simultaneously felt dead to the touch. He hadn't felt this drunk, no, train-wrecked, since the night Rosea

He gave up waiting for the person to come out of the locked rest room and walked back to Bu

'Hey, what's happenin', man?' Darl said.

'Hi, Darl,' Lucas said.

'You want to ride out with us?'

'Bu

'Good-looking threads, man. They're go

Darl gri

Lucas started to open the back door of the Chevy. Bu

'Kid, you ain't got to do this. Most of those country club people are dickheads. Maybe we ought to say fuck it,' Bu

The girls sat expressionless, their gaze fastened on their cigarettes, waiting, as though caught between Bu

'I'm all right. I'm go

Bu

By the time they reached the country club, Lucas's hair was mushy with his own sweat; his tongue felt too large for his mouth; his hands had the coordination of skillets.

He saw the columned front porch of the country club go by the back window of Bu

'You go

But Lucas couldn't answer.

Bu

Then Darl was at the window, his friends behind him. Their cigarettes sparked like fireflies in the darkness. One of them carried a lidded bucket by the bail.

'How much acid you give him?' the boy with the bucket said.

'I didn't give him nothing,' Bu

'Pull him out,' Darl said.

'Let it slide, Darl. He's really fried,' Bu

'Smothers is a geek. So he gets what geeks got coming,' Darl said.

'Come on, think about it. Your old man's go

'Here's twenty dollars. Go down to San Antone and get a blow job. You'll feel better,' Darl said. He was leaning on the window jamb now. He touched the stiffened edges of two ten-dollar bills against Bu