Heartwood

  “The problem is not a stupid job on an oil derrick. You take me to lounges where it’s dark. We go to restaurants where nobody knows you. You don’t like being with me in the daylight,” Esmeralda shouted.

  Jeff burst through the door into the yard, with no shirt or shoes on, and got behind the wheel of his convertible. Then realized he had left his keys inside. He put his head down on his arms and started to weep. Esmeralda walked outside in a pair of blue-jean cutoffs and a halter, her face suddenly filled with pity, and stroked his hair and the back of his neck. Then the two of them went back into the trailer, their arms around each other’s waist, and stayed there until sunset.

  Lucas was off that night and had planned to go into town. But Jeff and Esmeralda came to his door, their faces glowing with the promise of the summer evening, as though none of the day’s events held claim on their lives. Jeff took the last toke off a roach, held the hit in his lungs, then let the smoke drift lazily off his lips into the wind. He was dressed in a tailored beige sports coat and dark blue slacks. She was wearing a pink organdy dress, hoop earrings, lavender pumps, and cherry-red lipstick. Jeff’s necktie dangled from his coat pocket, almost as though he wished to demonstrate his indifference to decorum.

  “You’re going to dinner with us at Post Oaks Country Club,” Jeff said.

  “I appreciate it, but that’s a little rich for my blood. Say, if y’all are holding, I got to ask you not to bring it on my property. I don’t mean no offense,” Lucas said.

  “That was the last of my stash, Lucas, my boy. Hey, you’re not going to hurt our feelings, are you?” Jeff said.

  To its members Deaf Smith’s country club wasn’t simply an oasis of wealth in the middle of south-central Texas; it was the architectural expression of a cultural ideal in an era given over to vulgarity, urban ruin, and eastern liberals who destroyed standards and enfranchised an underclass made up of modern Visigoths.

  The gardens and circular drive planted with oaks, the blinding-white columned entrance, the sun-bladed, turquoise pool shaped like a huge shamrock, the flagstone terrace dotted with potted palms, these were all lovely to look at but were only symbols of the club’s luxury and exclusivity; its uniqueness lay in its tradition, one that went back to the early 1940s, when dance orchestras played Glen Miller’s compositions on the terrace and worries over ration stamps and the war in Europe and the South Pacific were as unthreatening as the distant drone of a Flying Fortress on a training flight in a magenta sky.

  The late fall might fill the trees with the smells of autumnal gases, and the shamrock-shaped pool might be drained and scrubbed with bleach and covered with canvas in winter, but mutability and death seemed to hold no sway once one entered the geographical confines of the club, which extended from the impenetrable hedges by the road, across the fairways sprayed weekly with liquid nitrogen, to the bluffs that overlooked the lazy, green bend of the river. The balls, the graduation parties, the conviviality of the bar and card room on the ninth tee, the candlelight dinners on the terrace, were part of the world’s grandeur, given to those who had worked for and deserved them, and did not have to be defended. The red leaves blowing out of a hardwood tree in November were no more an indication of one’s mortality than the aging and transient nature of the staff who, when they disappeared, were quickly replaced by others whose similarity to their predecessors hardly signaled a transition had taken place.

  Lucas and Jeff and Esmeralda sat in the front seat of Jeff’s convertible, their hair blowing in the wind as they drove out of the western end of the county into green, sloping hills and evening shadows breaking across the road. But Jeff did not want to go straight to Post Oaks Country Club. He pulled into a blue-collar bar above the river, one with takeout windows and an open-air dance pavilion and a jukebox in back.

  “I don’t want to go here, Jeff,” Esmeralda said.

  “Why not?” he said.

  “We dressed up to go to a beer joint? I’m hungry. I don’t want to drink on an empty stomach,” she said.

  “You’re not dressed up,” he said.

  She looked at the side of his face. She placed one hand on top of his.

  “What’s wrong, hon?” she said.

  “Nothing. Will you stop pawing me while I’m driving?” Then he forced a grin on his mouth. “I just want to get a drink. I got fired from my job last night. The tables at the club are crowded till eight o’clock. We can get some nachos. Bight, Lucas?”

  But Lucas didn’t answer.

  They drank two rounds of vodka Collins, gazing at the river, the smoke from a barbecue pit attended by bikers and their girlfriends drifting across the table. Jeff kept pulling on his earlobe, biting his lip, glancing irritably at the bikers and their girls, almost as though he wanted to provoke them.

  “Okay, okay, we’re going. Give it a rest,” he said to Esmeralda, even though she had said nothing to him.

  When they pulled into the country club’s driveway and stopped in front of the columned porch, Jeff got out of the car and took the parking ticket from the valet as though he were in a trance. He walked through the glass doors ahead of Esmeralda and Lucas, letting the edge of the door slide off his fingertips behind him. It was almost nine o’clock and the dining room should have been empty, the waiters gathering up silverware and soiled tablecloths and dropping wilted flowers into plastic bags. But instead the chandeliers filled the room with gold fire; carnations and roses floated in crystal bowls on the tables; and a throng of forty people was in the midst of a wedding rehearsal dinner.

  One of the guests at the rehearsal dinner was Rita Summers, Jeff’s ex-girlfriend. Her hair was as gold as the chandelier above her head, her blue eyes as intense as a hawk’s. She took a cigarette without asking from an older woman’s case and lighted it and blew smoke at an upward angle out of the side of her mouth. Jeff led Esmeralda and Lucas to a table in the corner and seated himself so his back was to the wedding party.

  “This is a right nice place,” Lucas said.

  “Right nice? Yeah, that says it. That really says it. Right nice,” Jeff said, as if his statement held a cryptic profundity that no one else understood.

  “That girl over there, the one staring at us. She’s the one who told me her food tasted like dog turds,” Esmeralda said.

  “She’s nearsighted. She’s got a bug up her ass. Who cares what her problem is? Just don’t look at her,” Jeff said. “Did you hear me? Look at the menu.”

  “Jeff, this ain’t turning out too cool,” Lucas said.

  “Tell me about it,” Jeff said, and snapped his fingers at a waiter. “Andre, bring three T-bones out here, three schooners, three tossed salads. Shrimp cocktails for them, none for me. I’ll take a Jack and Coke now.”

  “Very good, Mr. Deitrich,” the waiter said, and bowed slightly without ever looking at Lucas or Esmeralda. Jeff pulled the menu out of Esmeralda’s hands and gave it to the waiter.

  “Wow, what a take-charge guy,” Esmeralda said.

  “At this time of night, in this particular club, you either order steak or you eat warmed-up leftovers. I know that, you don’t. So I was saving everybody time,” Jeff said.

  “I think I need to find the ladies’ room. You know, in case I have to throw up later,” Esmeralda said.

  “You want to explore? It’s a club. Can’t you just …”

  “What?” she said.

  “Quit turning everything into a problem. Let’s just eat dinner and get out of here. Oh, forget it,” Jeff said, and flipped a tiny silver spoon in the air and let it bounce on the tablecloth.

  But before Esmeralda could get up from her chair, Rita Summers walked across the carpet and stood by their table, smoking her cigarette.

  “Congratulations on your marriage, Jeff. I wish I’d had some preparation. I would have sent a gift. I really would,” she said. She had a peach complexion and shadows pooled in the folds of her blue satin dress and there was a shine on the tops of her breasts.

  “Yeah, thanks for dropping
by,” Jeff said, one arm hooked over the back of his chair, his eyes gazing out the French doors at the underwater lights glowing off the swimming pool’s surface.

  Rita took a puff off her cigarette and left lipstick on the tip. “I guess you’ve worked out all your little sexual problems. I’m so happy when the right people meet,” she said.

  The waiter brought Jeff’s Coke and Jack Daniel’s on a tray, and Jeff drank the glass half empty, his eyes deepening in color, then swung a cherry back and forth by its stem and stared at it.

  “You want to clarify that last remark?” Esmeralda said.

  Rita smiled at Jeff, then bent down and whispered in Esmeralda’s ear, her eyes uplifted maliciously into Jeff’s. Esmeralda’s face grew pinched, puckering like an apple exposed to intense heat.

  Rita straightened up and looked down at Esmeralda. “He used to go to Mexican cathouses for it. But finally the only place that would let him in was run by a black woman down in the Valley,” she said.

  Esmeralda picked up her purse, one with spangles and pink fringe, and walked past the wedding party to the rest rooms, her chin tilted upward, the movement of her hips accentuated. But she could not hide the look in her eyes.

  “If we weren’t in this dining room, I’d kick your ass around the block,” Jeff said to Rita.

  “Oh, I know you would. You’re just so … studly,” Rita said, and made a feigned passionate noise and kissing motion with her mouth and rejoined her party. She leaned forward confidentially, telling a story to a half dozen others, all of whom were grinning.

  “Get Esmeralda out of the can. We’re going,” Jeff said.

  “Me?” Lucas said.

  “You’re not a member here. Nobody cares what you do. Go get her.”

  “Tell you what. I’ll just walk out to the highway and hitch a ride. In the meantime, why don’t you quit acting like your shit don’t flush?”

  “All right, I’m sorry. Sit down. I’ll take care of it. God, why do I get myself into this stuff?” Jeff said. He finished his drink, then stood up, his face blanching slightly as the combination of whiskey and vodka on an empty stomach suddenly took effect.

  He walked down the hallway to the ladies’ room and went in without knocking. A moment later he and Esmeralda emerged in the hallway, his hand spread across the small of her back. Her cheeks were wet, her purse held tightly in both hands.

  “She’s a liar. She gave blow jobs to the whole backfield at SMU. She’s treating you like a dumb peon,” he said to her.

  The waiter had wheeled their dinner to their table and was placing schooners of draft beer to the right of each steak platter.

  “Bag it up for the dishwashers, Andre. We’re gonna boogie on over to the Dog ’n’ Shake. That’s where it’s happening,” Jeff said, and signed the ticket on the serving cart.

  Then he realized that Rita Summers and her friends were laughing, not abruptly, as they would have at a joke, but in a sustained, collective giggle that seemed to spread like a crinkling of cellophane at their table. He turned and saw their eyes fixed on Esmeralda’s shoe and the long strand of wet toilet paper that was attached to the sole.

  He gripped her upper arm, squeezing hard, and stepped with one foot on the toilet paper and tried to push her free of it. Instead, he only shredded the paper and matted it on his loafer. His rage boiled into his face and he stooped and tore Esmeralda’s shoe off her foot and flung it under a table, then pulled her out the front door.

  “All you had to do was just eat dinner. It was that simple. You people are a walking ad for the Ku Klux Klan. Stop making that sound,” he said, while she rested her forehead against one of the white columns on the porch and hid her face in her hands.

  14

  I knew it was wrong.

  In the same way a reformed drunkard places himself on an innocuous mission to a saloon or an unrewarded hunter at twilight fires a round through the window of a deserted stone house and turns his back on the crashing sounds inside.

  Peggy Jean said the picnic at the cottage on the Comal River was for children from an orphans home, that Pete would probably love shooting the rapids with the others in an inner tube.

  She wasn’t wrong about that part. As soon as I parked the Avalon among a stand of pine trees above the river, he wrestled his inner tube from the car trunk and ran Through the trees I saw him wade into the thick green coldness of the water.

  “Don’t worry about him. I hired two lifeguards to watch after them,” Peggy Jean said.

  She stood next to the cottage in a flagstone, trellised arbor overgrown with climbing roses. The cottage was the color of chalk against the trees, the windows hung with ventilated blue shutters, the wind chimes on the porch twirling in the breeze. She flipped a checkered tablecloth over a plank table and began setting it with plastic forks and spoons and cups that were painted with the pink faces of smiling pigs. She had flown in from Padre Island that morning, and there was fresh sunburn on her forehead and neck.

  “We can’t stay too long. His mom wants him back by dark,” I said.

  “Did you bring your trunks?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “I’m going to take a swim. You can change inside. I’ll use the bathhouse in back,” she said. She watched my face. “Is something wrong?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t feel you should be here?”

  “I don’t study a lot on right and wrong these days,” I said.

  She fixed a strand of hair on her forehead. “Ernest Hemingway said if you feel bad about something the next morning, it’s wrong and you should avoid doing it again. If you don’t feel bad about it, you should take joy in the memory.”

  When I didn’t reply, she turned and walked to the small bathhouse in back with a rolled towel under her arm. She’d had her hair cut and it was thick and burnished with gold light on the back of her neck. The sun went behind a bank of rain clouds and suddenly the wind seemed cold and tannic through the pines. I looked at the firmness of her calves and the way her hips moved under her dress. An old iron water pump by the bathhouse was beaded with moisture that dripped off the pump handle into the dirt. I remained staring at the bathhouse door after she had closed it, my mouth dry, my face moist in the wind as though I had a fever.

  I changed inside the cottage. Moments later she came back out of the bathhouse in straw sandals and a one-piece dark blue bathing suit.

  “You still have your shirt on,” she said.

  “It’s turned right cool,” I replied.

  “I’ll fix you a drink.”

  “You know me. I’m still nine-tenths Baptist.”

  “Oh stop it,” she said, and circled my wrist with her forefinger and thumb and tugged me gently inside the back door of the cottage.

  She fixed two vodka Collins at the bar that divided the kitchen and the living room. The door to the bedroom was open, and the bed was made up with a tight white bedspread and fat, frilled pillows and a folded navy-blue blanket at the bed’s foot. She put the Collins glass in my palm, then drank from hers, her face only inches from mine.

  “I never thought you were much of a drinker,” I said.

  “With time, you learn to do all kinds of things,” she replied. Her breath smelled like ice and mint leaves and was warm against my skin at the same time. “Do you want to sit outside?”

  I didn’t answer. Her hand lay on top of the bar and the ends of her fingers touched mine. She moved her fingers on top of my hand, then set down her glass and tilted her face up and held her eyes on mine. I kissed her on the mouth, then felt her body press against me, her weight rise on one foot, the muscles of her back flex under my hands.

  Her hair smelled like salt wind and sunlight and I could feel her breath like a feather against my neck. Through the half-opened bedroom door the taut whiteness of the bedspread and the bloom of pillows at the headboard seemed the most lovely rectangle of light and symmetry and comfort in the world. She rubbed the top of her head against my mouth and pressed her s
tomach tightly against me, one hand slipping down the small of my back. In my mind’s eye I felt already drawn inside the cradle of her thighs, inside the absolute glory and heat of her body, her mouth a throaty whisper against my ear.

  Then I looked through the window and saw L.Q. Navarro in the front yard, leaning against a pine trunk, his arms folded, one boot cocked toe-down across the other, his face obscured by his hat.

  “What the hell you doin’, son?” his voice said.

  I felt myself step away from Peggy Jean and the fullness of her breasts and the mystery of her eyes.

  “Why are you staring out the window?” she asked.

  “Because there’s no sound,” I replied.

  “There’s no—” she began.

  “The children were yelling in the rapids. Now it’s quiet. Why did they stop yelling?” I said.

  “What’s the matter with you, Billy Bob? Sometimes you act like you’re crazy,” she said.

  But I wasn’t listening now. I went into the front yard, into the wind that was colder than it should have been, into a smell that was like autumn woods and pine needles in shadow and the gases from dead flowers. From the edge of the promontory I could see the thick green surface of the river, the current bunching at the rapids, the braided foam that twisted and swelled in a long riffle over gray boulders, the evening shadows that seemed to transfix the bottom of the ravine with silence.

  The two hired lifeguards, their torsos swollen with the contours of weight lifters, stood on the bank, surrounded by children, scanning the water in both directions. One lifeguard began pushing nervously at his forehead with his fingers; the other walked up and down the bank, questioning the children, his face reddening with exasperation, as though they were deliberately denying him the solution to his problem.

  Then I saw Pete through the pines on the slope, forty yards down from the rapids, struggling in a whirlpool that had formed on the lee side of a huge boulder. His inner tube was on the outside of the vortex, only three or four feet from his grasp, but it might as well have been an ocean away.

  He flailed at the water, kicking hard for the bank, then his thin shoulders spun in the center of the whirlpool and he went under.