This thing sat out on their lawn like a skyscraper, and Jones bragged about all the free air-conditioning he got out of it. The neighbors, almost to Harnell Creek, were a Cheyenne family, always working on their cars, whom Jones referred to as “dump bears.” After the Indians, the road kept going but in reduced condition until it was just a pair of ruts that turned to impassable gumbo at the first rain shower but finally led to an old ranch graveyard in a grove of straggling hackberry and box elder. Dulcie Jones came home to introduce her boyfriend to her father, who had trained her in the values of law and order and so understood her difficult and sometimes perilous work. She was twenty-four, a pretty dishwater blonde with a glum heart-shaped face and a distinctive V separating her upper incisors. She held a cigarette between the ends of the first two fingers of her right hand, the arm extended stiffly as though to keep the cigarette at bay. She wore gold earrings with a baseball hat.
