Heartwood

  “Lady, you don’t have any business down here,” a man said. But the confidence in his voice drained before he had finished the sentence.

  She stepped inside the circle and touched the face of the man in the center, the wetness running out of his hair, the eye that trembled under her fingertips. She ran her hand down his shoulder and fitted it inside his upper arm.

  “You have to take me out to the road and stay with me until Wilbur comes back,” she said.

  She thought he would argue but he didn’t. They walked together toward the path, the crowd parting in front of her, looking into her sightless eyes as though the power they had feared all their lives lay hidden there. The wind gusted off the river, scattering pine needles across the clearing, then the sun that had blazed at the top of the sky died and the riverside went dark again and the only heat she felt was the brilliance of high-beam headlights that someone had shined across the water onto the cliffs.

  Kippy Jo and Cholo Ramirez stood by the front of the parking lot like two bronze statues welded at the seam until Wilbur’s pickup truck came skidding to a stop in a rooster tail of dust behind them. His eyes went past them to the crowd that was still standing in front of the screen porch.

  “What in the hell you doin’ with my wife, boy?” he said.

  • • •

  “She says I ain’t fair to him. I say he could have gotten her killed,” Wilbur said to me the next day in my office.

  “You don’t like him?”

  “I don’t like him coming around Kippy Jo. That boy’s a criminal, pure and simple. Besides, he looks like a toad frog somebody kept mashed down inside a Vaseline jar.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?” I asked.

  “Earl Deitrich ain’t the only one on his shit list. Is your son getting it on with a Mexican gal named Esmeralda?”

  That evening I sat on a wooden stool behind Lucas’s rented house and watched him can-water the tomato plants in the rocky plot of ground he called a vegetable garden. The air was hot and still and thick with birds, and out on the state road I heard a semitrailer roar by and saw a turkey buzzard rise from a piece of roadkill on the edge of the asphalt. While he sprinkled and dusted his plants, Lucas kept glancing up at the trailer where Esmeralda was living, as though she could hear his words.

  “I ain’t afraid of Cholo. I ain’t afraid of Ronnie Cross, either,” he said.

  “Foolish words, in my view,” I said.

  “Well, you ain’t me.”

  “L.Q. Navarro used to tell me there’re two kinds of friends you can have by the tote sack—the kind that find you when you’re in tall cotton and the kind that find you when they’re in trouble.”

  “Boy, I wish I was smart and had all them things figured out.”

  “You know what heartwood is?”

  “Sure … What is it?”

  “Some trees add a layer of new wood under their bark each year. The core of the tree grows stronger and stronger, until it’s almost like iron. Old-timers say they used to bust their axes on it.”

  “Yeah?” Lucas said, his eyes wandering away from me now. Esmeralda was hanging her wash on the clothesline, her hair wrapped in a towel. “What’s that have to do with what we’re talking about?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ll study on it and let you know,” I said.

  “You’re a mysterious man, Billy Bob.”

  I walked back to my car and did not reply.

  My father was a tack and hot-pass welder on pipelines all over Texas, and when I was nine years old he took my mother and me with him on the line into the Winding Stair Mountains of eastern Oklahoma. It was early fall and the canopy of the hardwood trees had already started to ruffle with red and gold all the way to the massive outlines of the Ozarks. My father wasn’t an overly religious man, but he made an effort to tithe and he wouldn’t normally drink except on Christmas and July 4. By chance the pipeline was shut down our last Sunday in the Winding Stairs and he took me with him to a camp meeting on the banks of a pebble-bottomed stream whose water was the color of light green Jell-O.

  The choir was a string band, the preacher a rail of a man who opened his Bible as though to read, then looked heavenward with his eyes squeezed tightly shut yet never misspoke a line. The congregation shook and trembled and spoke in tongues and in the next breath ate dinner on the ground and off the tailgates of farm trucks. But those were not the images that defined for me that seminal afternoon of my childhood.

  The banks of the stream had eroded sharply during a spring torrent, and the root systems of the overhanging trees trailed in the current like brown spiderweb. The trunk of each tree looked swollen and hard, the bark glistening and serrated, as though the root system had drawn the coldness of the water into the wood and filled it with a hardness that would blunt nails.

  The preacher stood waist-deep in the current and dipped a fat woman backwards, the current sliding across her closed eyes, her white dress tied around the knees with a blue slash so it wouldn’t float up from her thighs.

  “You up to it?” my father asked.

  “I ain’t afraid,” I said.

  “Don’t let your mother hear you using ‘ain’t.’ That water’s like ice, bud.”

  “I been in a lot worse.”

  I felt his large hand cup on the top of my head.

  A few minutes later I stood barefoot on the pebbles, the coldness of the water sucking around my thighs and genitals, my palm clutched in the preacher’s. He leaned me back in the water and a vast green light seemed to cover my face and steal the breath from my lungs and invade my clothes and burn my skin.

  Then, just as the preacher raised my face from the water, I opened my eyes and saw the trees arching overhead and the leafy green and yellow design they formed against the sky, and without knowing the words to circumscribe the idea, I knew I had entered a special and inviolate place, a private cathedral suffused with stained light that I would always return to in memory when I felt I was unworthy of the world.

  While my father dried me off by a fire and put his old army shirt on me, the one with the Indianhead Division patch and sergeant’s stripes on the sleeve, I glanced back at the stream and it looked ordinary now, apart from me, dotted with half-immersed people whom I did not know.

  “What kind of trees are those?” I asked.

  “Heartwood,” my father said. “They grow in layers, like the spirit does. That’s what Grandpa Sam used to say, anyway. You just got to keep the roots in a clear stream and not let nobody taint the water for you.”

  His jaw was filled with a ham sandwich, and it seemed to swell into the size of a softball when he grinned.

  20

  One night every summer the town held a celebration for itself in our small amusement park and beer garden on the river. At sunset a brass band composed of musicians in straw boaters and candy-striped jackets struck up “San Antonio Rose” and someone switched on the Japanese lanterns in the trees, and the hedges and pea-gravel paths and concession stands and carnival booths took on the bucolic and softly focused qualities of a late-nineteenth-century painting. The social distinctions of the town were put in abeyance, and working people, college students, farmers, the business community, the mayor and his family, even Hugo Roberts and his deputies, all mingled together as though the following day held the same promise and opportunity for each of them.

  Temple Carrol and Pete and I rode the Tilt-a-Whirl and the bumper cars and ate cotton candy and strolled out by the dance pavilion that overlooked the river. The three of us sat on a green-painted wood bench at the top of a slope that was terraced with cannas and hibiscus and rosebushes and a rock-bordered pond whose goldfish were molting into the albino discolorations of carp. It was Pete who first noticed Peggy Jean Deitrich out on the dance floor with her husband, Earl, and when he did, he waved at her.

  “There’s Ms. Deitrich, Billy Bob,” he said expectantly.

  “Yeah, it sure is,” I said, glancing over my shoulder.

  “Ain’t yo
u gonna wave back?”

  “She’s busy right now,” I said.

  He frowned and squinted into space. Then he waved again, as though he could make up for our not doing so.

  I turned on the bench and looked back at the dance pavilion. Peggy Jean was standing with her husband by the punch table now, but her gaze fell directly on my face. Her expression was disjointed, as though I had failed and wounded her without even having the grace to explain why. Her lips seemed to part in anticipation, forming words that she wished to draw from my mouth.

  I turned back toward the river and looked out through the electric haze over the gardens and the goldfish rising in the pond for the bread crumbs a child was throwing at them.

  “I think I’ll take Pete for a cold drink,” Temple said.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  “That’s all right. Why don’t you just take care of business here,” Temple said, and walked back up through the trees to the concession area.

  “Temple?” I said. But she and Pete had already disappeared up the path into the shadows.

  I pulled the last strand of cotton candy off the paper cone it was wrapped on and threw the cone into a trash barrel. I tried to scrub the stickiness off my hands with a paper napkin, then I gave it up and threw it in the trash, too.

  I heard light footsteps on the gravel behind me, then smelled Peggy Jean’s perfume.

  “Do you know what it feels like to have someone stare at you, then turn away when you try to wave at them?” Peggy Jean said.

  “How are you?” I said.

  “What gives you the right to snub me in public? Can you tell me what it is I’ve done to you?”

  “You’re married. I didn’t want to recognize that fact. The fault is mine.”

  “We shared a great deal when we were young.” Her eyes held mine. “I’m not talking about just one afternoon. We were true friends. Are you just going to step across a line and pretend we don’t know each other? That’s sick, if you ask me.”

  I leaned forward on my elbows and turned my hat in my hands and bounced the brim on the tip of my boot. Then the words I should not have spoken had their way.

  “What happened to you, Peggy Jean? You used to be one of us. Why’d you go off with a guy like Earl? Was it the money?” I said.

  In the corner of my eye I could see her hand clenching and unclenching against her organdy dress, hear the fractured breathing that was about to crest into tears.

  “I’m sorry I said that,” I said.

  But it was too late. She strode back toward the pavilion, her hair swinging on her shoulders. I don’t know what her face looked like, whether it was tear-streaked or angry or bloodless with humiliation or numb and distraught with personal loss, but Earl and Jeff Deitrich had disengaged from their friends and were both staring at her, then at me, their eyes blazing, like men who had witnessed another man commit a cowardly and brutal act against a woman or child.

  “You want to get Earl Deitrich before he gets you?” a voice next to me said.

  Cholo Ramirez wore gray slacks and a shiny black dress shirt with a pomegranate-red print tie. His left eye was taped over with a square of white gauze. Ronnie Cruise stood behind him in the shadows, a Popsicle stick in the corner of his mouth.

  “Ask him about killing himself in the Red Pine Lodge. Ask him what happened to his friends in that water-bed skeet club between Houston and Conroe,” Cholo said.

  “What’s he talking about?” I said to Ronnie.

  “You’re a religious guy, right, worrying about stuff like people wearing rosaries around their necks? Listen to Cholo, maybe discover how we dress ain’t the big problem in your town,” Ronnie replied. His dark eyes that seemed impervious to whatever degree of joy the world could offer him wandered over the strollers on the gravel paths and the aerial fireworks popping in pink and white showers above the river. “Does this shithole ever get tired of itself?” he said.

  Cholo’s skin was glazed with sweat when he came into my office at noon the next day. He hooked a finger over the neck of his T-shirt and pulled it out from his chest and smelled himself.

  “That sidewalk will burn through the bottom of your shoes,” I said.

  “I picked up a sheriff’s tail south of town. The guy stayed with me all the way to your office,” he said. He chewed on a hangnail.

  “They don’t see many cars like yours. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “This guy had that Fletcher fuck in the car, that ex-mercenary guy or whatever who does scut work for Deitrich.”

  “Why do you want to dime Earl now, Cholo?”

  “ ’cause Kippy Jo Pickett says I got to own up. She says maybe I’m gonna be on the Ghost Trail.” He hunched his shoulders forward and made a coughing sound, but his throat wouldn’t clear.

  “The what?” I asked.

  “When Indian people die, they disappear down a trail. Light goes through their bodies, and they get pale and gray, like bad milk, and finally you can’t see them no more. That’s what Kippy Jo said.”

  “You think you’re going to die?”

  “You got something cold to drink? I need a beer. Maybe a shot of rum. You got that?”

  “No.”

  He wiped his hair and his eyebrows with a handkerchief. Then he pressed both fists into the sides of his head and squeezed his eyes shut.

  “I can’t think good when it’s hot,” he said. “Ronnie’s uncle is connected up with some peckerwoods out of Houston. Ronnie didn’t have nothing to do with it, though. They was working a scam in Kerr County at a place called the Red Pine Lodge. A shill brought big oil guys in there to play ‘Hold ’em.’ We’d turn the game over, scare the shit out of the marks with shotguns, play like we was torturing and killing people down in the basement.”

  “This isn’t new information, Cholo. You told this to Temple Carrol when she picked you up for jumping bail.”

  “Yeah? The shill brought Earl Deitrich into the game. We came through the door with nylon stockings over our heads, knocking people on the floor, breaking glasses and whiskey bottles, throwing poker chips and playing cards in people’s faces, yelling at Deitrich, slapping his face, jamming the shotgun in his nuts.

  “Then we led everybody one by one downstairs. The screams that come up them stairs was so real they scared me. We fired off a bunch of twelve-gauge rounds in a barrel and threw chicken blood all over everybody. It looked great. Then this woman, the dealer, lies down in the middle of all those bodies. She’s got on a white blouse and skirt and it’s got chicken blood on it, too. This broad was in porno movies and she was real good at acting. She knew how to twitch, with her eyes closed, just like she was gonna bleed to death unless somebody got her to a hospital.

  “So we walk Earl Deitrich downstairs and we tell him, ‘Look, man, one guy got out of control down here. We still don’t know where the bank is at. You got a chance to live, man. What’s it gonna be?’

  “He thinks for a minute. Can you believe that? Bodies are all over the floor and he stands there thinking. Then he says, ‘There’s a safe under the duckboards behind the bar.’

  “One of our guys goes upstairs and comes back with handfuls of money, like it’s a big surprise. Then we tell Deitrich, ‘Look, man, we got nothing against you. But you saw too much here. The broad is still alive. Pump one into her and that puts us all on the same side.’

  “The guy saying this takes the magazine out of a Beretta nine-millimeter so Deitrich knows only one round’s in it and hands it to him and waits for him to pop the broad. Deitrich just stands there with the piece in his hand, thinking, a smile on his mouth.

  “Our guy goes, ‘You got a hearing problem?’

  “Deitrich says, ‘You know, you guys have brought my year to a head. It’s been a real pisser. How about all of you kiss my ass?’ And he shoots himself in the side of the head.

  “We can’t believe it. Neither can he. Smoke is rising from his hair and he’s smiling at us. He opens and closes his mouth like he’s go
nna be deaf a month and says, ‘A blank, huh? I got to admit, it’s a slick blackmail operation. But you’re amateurs.’ Then he pitches the piece back to the guy who give it to him and says, ‘Clean yourselves up, then I want to have a talk with you all.’ ”

  Cholo wiped the heat and grease from his eyes with the flats of his fingers and walked to the air conditioner and hit on it.

  “Why don’t you get some central air, man? This place is a kitchen,” he said. He looked through the blinds, down onto the sidewalk.

  “Go on with your story,” I said.

  “That deputy’s still down there, the one with the ex-mercenary fuck. You told somebody I was coming here today?”

  “Nope.”

  “Kippy Jo trusts you. But you ain’t earned no points with me.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Maybe you’re setting me up. You was a Texas Ranger. That means you still got a badge up your hole.”

  I could feel the anger rise in my chest and seize in my throat, but I kept my eyes focused on nothing. In the far corner of the room I thought I saw L.Q. Navarro leaning against the woodwork, his ash-gray Stetson tilted on the back of his head, his eyes filled with humor.

  “Get out of here,” I said to Cholo.

  “Wha—”

  “Go learn some respect for other people. I’m full up on bullshit and rudeness today.”

  “I don’t believe you, man.”

  “It looks like that’s an ongoing state with you, Cholo. Adios. No ethnic slur intended,” I said.

  After Cholo was gone, the door and glass still trembling from being flung back against the wall, L.Q. sat down in the deerhide swayback chair, took out his pack of playing cards, and began a game of solitaire on the bottom of an inverted leather wastebasket.

  “You done the right thing. He wasn’t going to give you the rest of it. That kid’s been in and out of Juvie since he was knee-high to a fireplug,” L.Q. said.

  “You think he’ll be back?”

  “It don’t matter. You got to make them wince inside. You know who said that? Wyatt Earp.”

  “I’m going to lunch.”