Heartwood

  Jeff had sailed yachts and deep-sea-fished since he was a child. He drove to Aransas Pass and tried to get on as a boat pilot ferrying supplies to offshore oil rigs. The owner of the boatyard listened attentively, chewing on a matchstick, and told Jeff to come back in the morning, that maybe they could work something out. Jeff and Esmeralda took a twenty-dollar room at a motel behind a truck stop, then Jeff went down to the boatyard at 5 A.M. The owner had left word with the foreman that Jeff could start his trial period right away, cleaning the grease trap behind the office and shoveling out the hold of a shrimper.

  The foreman had to lock himself in a bathroom.

  On the way back home Jeff stopped in San Antonio and scored four fat bags of rainbows and blues and a bag of Afghan skunk.

  “Why you need all that dope?” Esmeralda said.

  “Try to concentrate on what I’m saying. We don’t have any money,” he said, enunciating each of his words. “The way to get money is to buy something cheap, then sell it to dumb people for a lot more than it’s worth. It’s why Mexicans never get out of the barrio.”

  But that night two Jamaican dealers from Dallas met Jeff in an abandoned picnic ground down the road from Shorty’s and, instead of handing him an envelope full of cash, pointed a .357 Magnum in his face and picked up the four Ziplocs of rainbows and blues from the car hood and dropped them in a shopping bag.

  “I know where you guys live. Y’all are going to have some visitors,” Jeff said.

  “Say, mon, why don’t we do it dis way? We just take your thumbs wit’ us and save you de gas money,” the man with the gun said.

  Jeff watched the taillights of their car move away into the darkness, the dust from the tires drifting as palpably as grit into his hair.

  The tin trailer was boiling with heat when Jeff woke in the morning, his face netted with hangover and inchoate rage at being ripped off by two calypso mop-heads his father wouldn’t allow to drink out of the garden hose. He came through the back door of Lucas’s house and made toll calls without permission, pacing up and down, barefoot, his breath bouncing sourly off the receiver.

  “I’m going to stick their flippers in a vise,” he said. “Just pick up Hammie and two or three other guys and cover my back … No, I’m serious. I’m going to break their fingers, then their wrists. You want the word on the street we’re anybody’s fuck? They’re going to eat their next meal out of a dog bowl … We having a memory lapse, Warren? You remember that hit-and-run in Austin?”

  Ten minutes later Lucas heard Jeff and Esmeralda fighting inside the trailer.

  “Because I need it. Because I couldn’t sleep all night. Because you snore. Because I got barbed wire in my head. You tell me where it is!” Jeff said.

  “You know how much you smoked already? Look at your eyes. They’re full of blood clots. You stink like a street person.”

  “I’ll say it one more time, Esmeralda. Where’s my stash?”

  “I burned it.”

  “Sure you did. That’s why birds are dropping out of the sky.”

  He began tearing her clothes off the hangers in a closet and throwing them through the front door. Then he walked out onto the steps with her storage trunk over his head and heaved it end over end into the yard. The top burst open, and he rooted in it like a badger digging in a hole, flinging her jewelry and shoes and scrapbooks and red and purple rayon undergarments into the air. His face was white and sweating, his jaws flecked with stubble.

  “You need to go to detox, Jeff. You’re sick,” she said.

  “What I’m sick of is salsa and onion breath and your brother Cholo’s stupid face and the thought I’ve been coming in the same box as Ronnie Cruise. I want to scrub you off me with peroxide.”

  “Maricón,” she said.

  He straightened up slowly. “You called me a queer? That’s what you just said? A queer? Say it again and see what happens.”

  “Maricón!” she said. “Cabrón! Cobarde! Maricón! Maricón! Maricón!”

  “Your face looks funny like that. All out of shape. Funny and stupid,” he said, smiling strangely. “I know a truck stop where I can get you on, doing hand jobs. I’ll take a shower and drive you there. You can tell them about your credits at the Juco. They’ll be impressed. For some reason, Esmeralda, I feel just great.”

  Lucas told me this story early Saturday morning while I curried out Beau in the lot. We were in the shade of the barn and the morning was still cool and the wind off the river smelled of wet trees and wildflowers and the livestock in my neighbor’s pasture.

  “Jeff’s gone?” I said.

  “He burned rubber for thirty feet. He shot me the bone when he went by. What a guy,” he said.

  “Where’s Esmeralda?”

  “Staying at the trailer,” he said.

  I straightened up and paused in my work, my arms resting on the warm indentation of Beau’s back. Lucas looked down at his foot and kicked at the dust. The brim of his straw hat was curled into a point on the front.

  “She lost her restaurant job. She don’t have no place to go,” he said.

  “She has a family.”

  “Just Cholo. He’s crazy.”

  “That’s the point. Stay away from those people.”

  “Which people is that?”

  “Don’t make a racial deal out of this. You know what I’m talking about,” I said.

  “You want me to run her off? Treat her like Jeff done?”

  I opened the gate in the lot and turned Beau out into the pasture.

  “I guess life was a lot simpler when I was y’all’s age,” I said.

  “Yeah, I reckon that’s how I got here,” he replied.

  Sunday morning I got a call from the county jail. My harelip, flat-nosed, meltdown client, Wesley Rhodes, had been out of the bag three days, then had gotten busted at four o’clock that morning for possession, driving without a license, and indecent exposure.

  I waited for the jailer, a sweating fat man whose khaki trousers hung below his crack, to open up Wesley’s isolation cell in the top of the courthouse.

  “Why isn’t he in the tank, L.J.?” I asked.

  “It’s full up on Saturday nights. Federal judge is always on our ass about it,” he replied.

  I sat down on a chain-hung iron bunk opposite Wesley. The sun had risen into the trees outside, and the light through the bars made lacy shadows on Wesley’s face. He wore a dark blue see-through shirt and a studded dog collar around his neck and Cloroxed jeans belted tightly below his belly button. His wide-set green eyes stared at me with the angular concentration of a lizard’s.

  “What were you holding, Wesley?” I said.

  “Blues. They been on the street a couple of days.”

  “Dilaudid?”

  “They wasn’t for me. There’s a man I get together with sometimes. He cooks them. They’re safer than the tar that’s coming up from the Valley.”

  “What’s the indecent-exposure charge?”

  “I was taking a leak in the park.”

  “You selling yourself, Wes?”

  He dropped his eyes and gripped his bunk and rocked on his arms.

  “He takes me out to dinner and buys me clothes sometimes, that’s all. I got to get out of jail. They’re scaring me.”

  “In what way?”

  “A couple of mop-heads, you know, dreadlocks, Jamaican guys, been unloading a lot of blues and rainbows. The word is they ripped them off Jeff Deitrich.”

  “So?”

  “I was cuffed in the cruiser with a friend while the deputy was tearing up my daddy’s car. I was telling my friend about Jeff getting stiffed by these two guys. Then the deputy comes back to the cruiser and picks up a tape recorder off the front seat. He plays it back, listening to everything I said, all the time staring at me like I done something really bad.

  “I go, That’s an illegal wiretap.’

  “He goes, ‘You better stick to being some rich junky’s hump, sperm-breath.’ Then he wouldn’t put me in the tank. Wh
y they pissed off, Mr. Holland? Is it ’cause I told them they cain’t use that tape?”

  “You don’t have expectation of privacy in the back of a police cruiser, Wesley. But that’s not the problem. While you’re in here, you don’t talk about Jamaicans taking off Jeff Deitrich. You hearing me on this?”

  Wesley stood up from his bunk and looked at the barred window above his head. An uneaten breakfast of powdered eggs and white bread and packaged jam lay on top of the toilet tank.

  “My stomach’s been sick. I ain’t ever pissed them off before. Nothing don’t feel right,” he said.

  “Give me your belt and that dog collar,” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  Downstairs I dropped the collar and Wesley’s wide leather belt and heavy metal buckle on the jailer’s desk.

  “Don’t ever try to get away with something like this, L.J.,” I said.

  He dipped his fingers in a leather pouch and loaded his jaw with chewing tobacco, his lidless eyes never leaving mine.

  Later, after church, I stopped by a supermarket in town, then drove to Temple Carrol’s house, which was just down the road from mine. I could hear her working out on the heavy bag in the backyard, thudding her gloves into it, spinning it on the chain that was hooked into a beam on her father’s open-air welding shed.

  She didn’t see me behind her. She wore gray sweatpants and a workout halter and red tennis shoes, and she was leading into the bag with her left, hooking with her right, and following with a karate kick. Her skin was flushed, her shoulders and the baby fat on her sides slick with perspiration.

  “Have a picnic with me,” I said.

  She turned and lowered her gloves, chewing gum, her face without expression, the bag creaking on the chain behind her.

  “You need a favor?” she asked.

  “It’s a nice day. I didn’t want to spend it alone.”

  She pulled off her gloves one at a time. They were dull red, thin-padded, with metal dowels inside that fitted across the palms.

  “I don’t like being somebody’s safety pin, Billy Bob,” she said.

  “I had to try. No hard feelings. I’ll probably see you tomorrow.”

  “Were you in the sack with Peggy Jean?” she asked.

  “No.” I picked up a bottle cap off a spool table and flipped it with my thumbnail against the trunk of a pecan tree. “That doesn’t mean my behavior was acceptable.”

  She looked at me for a long moment, her chestnut hair damp on her cheeks. Then she tossed one of her gloves at my face.

  “I’ll take a shower. Wait out here,” she said.

  We drove through the field behind my house to the grove of cottonwoods that overlooked the river. The sky was gray with rain clouds, and leaves were blowing out of the grove onto the river’s surface. The grass was tall and green in the shade, and I spread a tablecloth on the ground and lay out the containers of cold chicken and pinto beans and fruit salad.

  “I saw you go past the house early this morning,” she said.

  “Wesley Rhodes implicated Jeff Deitrich in a drug deal on tape. The jailer put him in an isolation cell with his belt and a dog collar.”

  She rubbed at the back of her neck while I spoke, her hair blowing in the wind.

  “You think they might try to hang him from a pipe?” she said.

  “Could be.”

  “I’m supposed to check on him?”

  “Nope. I’m going back up there this afternoon. I’ll have him out on bond in the morning.”

  She nodded, her eyes moving curiously over my face. Then she squatted by the tablecloth and filled a paper plate with food and ate it standing up, looking out over the river.

  I cupped her elbow in one palm.

  “Sit down with me, Temple,” I said.

  “All right,” she said.

  I sat next to her and we ate in silence. Her hair kept getting in her eyes and I lifted one strand off her eyebrow and smoothed it back on her head. Her eyes settled on mine, then her face colored and she set her plate down and walked to the car and leaned against it, her expression hidden.

  When I placed my fingers on her arm she moved away from me as though she had been touched with ice. “I have to go back now. Thank you for the lunch. No, don’t say anything else, Billy Bob. You think I’m tough. You’re wrong. I can’t cut this shit,” she said.

  It stormed that night. I developed a fever and a lightheadedness that seemed to have no origin, and I fixed hot tea and lemon and drank it at my desk in the library while the rain swirled in the glow of the upstairs windows.

  The rain slackened and my eyes burned with fatigue and I felt myself slipping off to sleep. I woke at midnight to mariachi music that made no sense, the voice of my son, Lucas, singing, L.Q. Navarro speaking in words that I could see move like moths on his lips but could not hear, the sound of water dipping into a vortex that was about to close on a little boy’s head.

  Lightning flared in the clouds beyond the barn and I saw a figure run from the fields, through the horse lot, into the barn, and I was sure L.Q. Navarro had taken up residence in my dreams for the night.

  Then I saw the electric light go on by Beau’s stall.

  I took a flashlight out of a kitchen drawer and walked through the pools of rainwater in the backyard and pulled open the barn door. Suddenly I was staring into the face of Skyler Doolittle, his bald head crisscrossed with rivulets of sweat. He was dressed in a cheap, pale blue suit that was far too small for him, a candy-striped shirt with popped buttons, a twisted necktie, white athletic socks, and jail-issue shoes. His body exuded a raw odor like night damp and moist clay and ozone.

  “I got blood on my hands, Mr. Holland,” he said.

  “You killed Kyle Rose?” I said.

  “That deputy with the stinger? Somebody kilt him?”

  “With Rose’s bow and arrow.”

  Skyler’s face went out of shape, like white rubber, his eyes hot with thought.

  “You didn’t do it?” I said.

  “No, sir.”

  “Then it was Jessie Stump,” I said.

  “I been working with him. The boy can be saved. He’s had a terrible life.”

  “Why’d you come here, Mr. Doolittle?”

  “I’ve got to have hep. I just don’t know what kind. Now I got blood on my hands.”

  “Sir, you’re not making sense.”

  He wiped his palms on the front of his suit and I saw the dark streaks on the cloth.

  “A deputy sheriff tried to stop me at a crossroads. He was taking his gun out. I hit him till he didn’t get up no more.”

  I sat down on a spool table and felt my eyes go out of focus and my energies drain. My field of vision swam with weevil worms.

  “I can get you into federal custody,” I said.

  “Earl Deitrich come out of the Pit. I can smell Satan on a man the way you smell sulfur in a storm. You was made different the day the preacher laid you back in the river and let the water fill your eyes with sky and trees. I ain’t gonna be here to stop Deitrich. You got to do it.”

  “Mr. Doolittle, I’m not a theologian. I’m probably not even a very good attorney. But baptism was a simple ritual of the Essenes. It was just a way of welcoming a new person into the Christian community.”

  He rubbed the blood from his hands on his coat sleeves, his eyes as round as coins pushed into his face. Then, from a long way off, I could hear dogs barking, in a pack, the sound rising louder and louder on the wind.

  “Come back in the house with me. I won’t let them hurt you,” I said.

  “They’ll kill Jessie Stump for sure. You ain’t seen them at work.”

  I removed all the bills from my wallet, two hundred dollars, and put them in his hand.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Doolittle,” I said.

  “Goodbye, sir,” he replied.

  17

  The next day I rose early and showered and went out into the cool of the morning and put oats in Beau’s trough and picked up litter from the stor
m in the yard. The fever of the previous night seemed to have flowed out of my body like water. I started to call Marvin Pomroy and tell him about the visit of Skyler Doolittle and to ask about the fate of the deputy sheriff whom Skyler had beaten; but the day was just too nice to contend with the irrationalities of a legal system that was never intended to be anything other than a cosmetic one.

  Instead I drove to Lucas’s rented house forty miles west of town and got to watch another form of irrationality at work—my son’s.

  He and I were talking in the front yard when Ronnie Cruise’s 1961 sunburst T-Bird, with Ronnie behind the wheel and Cholo in the passenger seat, turned into the drive.

  “My sister back there?” Cholo said from the window.

  “What do y’all want?” Lucas said.

  “Figure it out. To see my sister, man,” Cholo said.

  The car drove past the side of the house and stopped in front of the trailer.

  I looked into Lucas’s face.

  “You keep your hand out of it,” I said.

  “It’s my damn house. What’s Ronnie Cross doing here? She eighty-sixed him a long time ago,” he replied.

  “Lucas—”

  He walked to the side of the house and stared at the trailer, his hands on both hips, his coned straw hat pulled down on his face. Esmeralda and Cholo and Ronnie were now out in the dirt yard.

  “I got a job in a restaurant here. I’m not going back to San Antone, Cholo,” Esmeralda said.

  “I’m your brother. You’re gonna do what I say,” Cholo said.

  “These ain’t our people up here. My mother says you can stay at her house. I ain’t gonna bother you, Essie,” Ronnie said. He wore a red bandanna on his hair and the points lifted in the wind.

  “Then respect what I tell you, Ronnie,” she said.

  “You got something going with Smothers over there?” he asked.

  “He was good to me. Leave him alone,” she said.

  “What we got here is all kinds of people dumping on us,” Cholo said. “Jeff’s old man just got your marriage annulled. It don’t exist. That means Jeff used you to glom his big-boy and threw you away like toilet paper,” Cholo said.

  Lucas stepped farther out into the drive and said, “You guys got the message. She don’t want y’all here.” His hands were inserted flatly in his back pockets and the skin of his face was tight against the bone.