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hair was stiff with dirt and bits of twig and chaff, and when he rubbed the back of his skull he felt an unevenness there, as if some essential fluid--_blood,__ that is--had leaked out of him and coagulated in a bristling lump. He felt bad. Bad in every way. But most of all, he felt thirsty, and he saw himself rising up out of the sun-blasted weeds and staggering first to the hose on the back lawn and then to the pool, where the dried blood--and there seemed to be a rough granulated gash over his cheekbone too--would dissolve and boil up around him in a dull brown cloud of cellular material gone to waste.
    It must have been noon or maybe even later, because people were gathered round the lawn and the pool coping with metal plates of lunchtime mush in their hands, eyes shining, hair flowing, all the colors of their sarongs and T-shirts and burnished flesh aglow as if everybody was a lightbulb and they just kept shining and shining. A couple of people made comments--“Rough night, huh?”--and laughed and joshed him in a brotherly and sisterly way when he bent to the hose and let the silver liquid flow in and out of his mouth in a long glowing arc. He couldn't figure out what was wrong with him, or what was most wrong--hangover, drug depletion or blood loss, and had he been in a fight, was that it? He tried to focus, tried to bring up the image of that girl on the floor in the back house, but the only thing that came into his mind was a phrase he'd used a thousand times, two truncated monosyllabic words that did nobody or no thing justice at all: _Free Love.__
    Reba's kids were there, nice day, lunch outside, not enough seats in the meeting room–dining hall anyway, and they were chasing each other around the pool as if they'd never stopped, their cheeks distended with corn mush and cauliflower, their bodies naked and brown and stippled with cuts, contusions, poison oak, dirt. He dropped the hose and moved toward the water like a zombie. Then he was in, the green envelope, the cessation of sound, his limbs moving under command of the autonomous system, pump and release, pump and release, till he cracked his head on the far side of the pool and heaved himself streaming from the water.
    Somebody else was in now, cannonballing and shouting, the two yellow dogs barking at their heels, Lydia--was that Lydia?--and the greenish water lapped at his knees and he was feeling he ought to shake the water out of his hair and get himself a plate of mush just for the ballast, when he locked eyes with Alfredo across the lawn. Alfredo gave him a look, niggardly little eyes, his mouth like a wad of gum stuck up under a desk at school, and Ronnie gave him a look back. He wasn't going to take any shit. He had as much right as anybody to be here--LATWIDNO, right?--and he wasn't about to apologize to Alfredo or Norm Sender or anybody else. Then he felt a hand on his knee and it was Lydia, her breasts bobbing, the hair pressed flat to her head. “Where you been?” she said. “We looked all over for you last night.” The water lapped, dragonflies hovered. And then: “Did you hear what happened?”
    No, he hadn't heard.
    She blinked the water out of her eyes, snaked a hand up his leg, and he felt himself go hard against the rough wet folds of his cutoffs. “A girl got raped.”
    “Raped? What do you mean _raped?__”
    “I mean she was some runaway--fourteen, she was only fourteen--and Norm's freaked about the whole thing, running around the kitchen jabbering about the man--the man's coming, the man's coming--and hide the dope and all, and clean this shit up, and do this and do that, and Alfredo's right there with him. They want Lester out. And Sky Dog and the rest of them.”
    Ronnie considered this, the water lapping at his legs, Lydia's breasts bobbing at his ankles, her hand crawling up his thigh. His normal response would have been something like “Bummer” or “Heavy,” but the moment was huge and hovering and his head wasn't clear