Heartwood

  “This is hard to take,” Temple said.

  “It’s all right to wait outside,” I said.

  “I’m talking about that right over there,” she replied.

  A dark-skinned girl not more than thirteen sat at a table with Johnny Krause. She wore a shift and a faded peasant dress that fit her hips like a sack. On her feet were blue cotton socks that had worked their way down on her ankles and old sandals whose straps were pulled sideways on the soles. Her cheeks were rouged, her mouth lipsticked, and she had braided her hair with glass beads. Her underarm hair looked like it had been touched there by a brush, her small teeth yellow-tinged with early decay. Johnny Krause put his hand on top of hers.

  He removed it when he saw us, but not out of embarrassment. His grin stayed in place, his concentration shifting only out of momentary necessity.

  “Remember us?” I said.

  “Why not? You keep showing up. How’s your eye, doll?”

  He had pulled his brilliantined hair into a small matador’s point in back and fixed it with a rubber band. He grinned at the girl and moved his eyes to the bar and gestured slightly with his head. After she was gone, he lifted a jigger of dark rum by the rim with two fingers and drank from it as though he were tilting a miniature bucket into his mouth. Then he drank from a bottle of Dos Equis and smiled pleasantly at us.

  “Her folks are gypsies. They run off on her,” he said.

  “You did Cholo Ramirez for Earl Deitrich. I suspect this ex-merc, Fletcher whatever, hired you. Earl’s going down, Johnny. When he does, the guy who’s first in line doesn’t have to do the chemical nap,” I said.

  “That’s too bad about that kid Ramirez. The cops talked to me about it. But he was a gluehead, a street mutt, a hype, and a genuine crazoid. If his brains run out his nose, it’s because he pulled the chewing gum out of his nostrils. I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”

  I sat down across from him. A box of kitchen matches was stuck in a ceramic holder in the middle of the table. He took one out and struck it on the striker and lit a cheroot cigar. The smoke was like wet leaves burning and maple syrup warming on a stove. The girl returned from the bar and lay her arm across his shoulders and let her thigh touch his arm, her face pouting. He whispered in her ear, then touched the small of her back with his fingers and nodded toward the bar. As she walked away his fingers trailed off lightly on the top of her rump.

  “You must have been poured out of your mother’s colostomy bag, Krause,” I said.

  He laughed. His skin was olive-toned and smooth, dry and cool as the surface of a clay pot, as though his glands were incapable of secretion. “You trying to get me to do scut work for you, like drop the dime on somebody, and you call me names? That’s why you come all the way down here?”

  “No,” I said.

  The derision in his eyes and grin went away. “Yeah?” he said, and made a rotating motion in the air with his upturned hand. “You got some personal hard-on? Like I know you from somewhere else?”

  “You put a pool cue in my investigator’s eye. Then you were a smart-ass about it. You feel like a smart-ass tonight?”

  He grinned again, then held up one finger at the girl, as though telling her he would be there in a moment. “You want to get fucked up, there’s lots of bars in Mexico. But I don’t step in nobody’s grief for free. You’re out of luck, Jack.”

  Temple squeezed me on the shoulder. “I can’t take the smell anymore, Billy Bob. Let’s go,” she said.

  “You’re talking about these people’s home. Show a little humility, lady,” Johnny Krause said.

  I stood up from the table and saw my shadow fall across his face. He looked up and waited for me to speak. When I didn’t, he sucked a tooth and drank from his bottle of Dos Equis and joined the gypsy girl at the bar. A fat prostitute in a black dress wobbled like a drunk bull out the back door and raised her skirt and urinated into the twilight.

  Redfish pushed open the cast-iron door and walked ahead of us toward the Avalon. The hillside where the gypsies lived in caves was speckled with fires. I looked back through the brothel entrance at the plank bar, where Johnny Krause had slipped his arm over the girl’s shoulders and was now walking with her toward the back door and the burlap-hung sheds in the yard.

  “I left my keys on the table,” I said.

  I walked past two Indian women at the bar, one of whom was unbuttoning an old man’s fly, and picked up a thick, square bottle of mescal, the neck stoppered tightly with a long brown cork, a pale greenish worm floating in the yellow haze at the bottom. The weight was like a short-handled sledge in my palm.

  Krause had stopped at the back door to talk to someone. The gypsy girl saw my face and shook his upper arm and cried out in Spanish. Just as Krause turned toward me I whipped the bottle by its neck across his mouth and heard his teeth clank like porcelain against the glass. He stumbled into the yard and bent double and cupped his palms to his mouth. Strings of blood blew in the wind between his fingers. I brought the bottle over my head, the mescal sloshing inside, and hit him again, this time across the ear. He went down in the dirt, where the woman had urinated, rolling out of the light that fell from the open doorway as though he could hide in the shadows.

  I kicked him when he tried to get up and swung at his head again and missed and hit his wrist. It was unwinding fast now and I knew I was going to kill Johnny Krause, just as you know upon the pull of a trigger that the hammer is on its way home and you no longer have to make decisions about an adversary’s fate.

  Then the bull-like woman in the black dress grabbed my hand and thrust a lighted oil lamp in it, saying “Quémalo. Burn him, gringo.”

  The lamp was made of glass and tin and was oily and hot in my hand. Its glow shone up into the woman’s porcine face. There were dirt rings in her neck and warts that protruded through the makeup on her chin. She punched me in the arm, hard, with the heel of her hand. “Go ahead, gringo. Burn this one good,” she said.

  I stepped back into the light from the doorway, my ears thundering with sound. Someone, Temple Carrol, I think, took the oil lamp and the bottle of mescal from my hands.

  Johnny Krause sat up in the dirt, blood dripping off his tongue. He grinned up at me like a carved pumpkin that someone had cracked on a rock. He tried to speak but had to open his mouth and let it drain first. “We’re just alike. I saw it in your eyes. You get high on it. We’re brothers-in-arms, motherfucker,” he said.

  25

  Late that night we stopped in a rest area south of Uvalde and lowered the leather seats back and slept until dawn. In my dream I saw L.Q. and me riding hard down a hill of yellow grass that was lined with flame across the crest. The sky was the texture and color of old bone, and smoke and dust were blowing out of the hills across a sun that gave no heat. Our horses came out of the grass just ahead of the fire, ash and cinders raining upon our heads, then we were on a baked, white flood-plain in which our horses’ hooves sculpted holes as big as buckets.

  But up ahead were a green river, shadowed with willow trees that had turned gold with the season, and in the distance rain falling on hills where red Angus grazed. L.Q.’s pinstripe suit was strung with horse saliva and sweat, his coat blowing back from the Ranger badge on his belt and the tied-down revolver on his thigh.

  “Use your spur, bud. They’ll cuff us to mesquite trees andcut off our toes and dance in the smoke while we burn,” he said.

  “He’s fixing to go lame, L.Q.”

  Then I felt my gelding heave sideways under me, slamming me into the soft, baked soil that cracked under my weight like cake icing and powdered my suit with alkali. L.Q. reined his mare and I hit her rump running, vaulting on two hands behind the cande. I felt her power surge up like a barrel between my thighs, and I locked both arms around L.Q.’s waist and we plunged into the river and down the shelf into deep water.

  I saw the alkali and ash and the blackened grass from the fields wash away in the current and felt the water’s warmth swell inside my clot
hes. But something was wrong. The hills on the far side of the river had caught fire, the autumnal gold of the willows now crinkling with flame. Inside the smoke, I could hear cattle stampeding, a roar so loud the surface of the river trembled.

  L.Q. had floated out of the saddle and was holding onto the pommel, water rilling off the brim of his hat.

  “I think this is the big one, L.Q.,” I said.

  “It’ll take better than them scumbags to do the likes of us,” he replied.

  “We put ourselves in it.”

  “In what?” he asked.

  “Hell. That’s what this is. We’ve been locating ourselves next to every evil sonofabitch in north Mexico.”

  “That’s the job description, bud. They commit the crime and we splatter their grits. It beats selling shoes, don’t it? Stop tasking your innards. The day you lose your humanity is the day you let Johnny Krause’s kind have their way.”

  When Temple shook me awake it was raining only two hundred yards away, like a wet curtain of spangled light that partitioned the land, and the live oaks overhead were green and softly focused against the primrose tint of the sunrise in the east. I could smell cattle in a livestock truck that was parked by the rest station, and the sand flats and the rain dimpling on the Nueces River down below.

  “You okay, Billy Bob?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “You always have dreams like that?”

  A trucker and his wife were eating their breakfast at a stone table under a shed, their faces serene and rested in the cool of the morning, and two little girls were playing on the grass with a big rubber ball. I widened my eyes and opened the car door and felt the flat, dry hardness of the cement under my boot, as though I were touching ground again after having been disconnected from the earth.

  “It looks like it’s going to be a right nice day,” I said.

  Temple hooked her elbow over the back of the passenger seat. Her eyes moved over my face with an undisguised affection in them, then she reached out with her fingertips and brushed a strand of hair out of my eye.

  That afternoon Wilbur Pickett put his hands on his hips and stared at Kippy Jo’s dresser and decided he had fixed the uneven drawers for the last time. They hung on the runners and jammed sideways and the threading on the knobs had stripped on the screws. Besides, the paneling on the left side that Hugo Roberts and his deputies had ripped loose searching for the stolen bearer bonds was split diagonally along the face like a long white crack in a mahogany tooth.

  So he asked permission first, then removed all the clothes from the drawers and folded them on the bed and hauled the dresser to the barn, where he dropped it upright and began chopping it apart for kindling. On the third blow of the ax the frame cleaved in half and sank in upon itself, and he hooked the ax on the left panel and prised the nails from the warped seam at the top. When he did, the panel cracked apart like a walnut shell, and between the lower portion of the splintered wood and a piece of scrap board that a previous owner had inserted next to the drawer space was the green-and-white-printed edge of a bearer bond.

  “They must have planted three of them instead of two,” Wilbur said over the phone.

  “Did you touch it?” I asked.

  “Not with a manure fork, son,” he replied.

  An hour later he was waiting for me on a wood chair in front of the barn when Marvin Pomroy and I and a fingerprint man from San Antonio and Hugo Roberts pulled into his drive in three different cars. Wilbur’s hair was wet and combed, and he had put on fresh blue jeans and a beige sports shirt and a pair of dress boots. He stood up from his chair and extended his hand to Marvin.

  “How you do, Mr. Pomroy?” he said.

  Marvin hesitated just a second, then reached out and took Wilbur’s hand. No one spoke and a bucket hanging on a nail inside the barn door tinked against the wood in the wind.

  “I don’t hold no personal grudge,” Wilbur said.

  “I understand you have a piece of evidence that bears looking at,” Marvin said.

  “It’s what them worthless deputies stuck in there and didn’t take back out,” Wilbur said.

  Hugo Roberts screwed a cigarette into his mouth and lit it with his lighter, blowing the smoke out in the sunset.

  “If this ain’t the silliest waste of time I can think of, I don’t know what is,” he said.

  “If you’re going to smoke, do it downwind from me, Hugo,” Marvin said.

  The independent fingerprint man from San Antonio picked up the bearer bond gingerly with a pair of tweezers and dropped it into a plastic bag.

  “Y’all put me in mind of somebody tweezering corn out of pig shit. What in the hell is this supposed to prove?” Hugo said.

  “I imagine all your deputies’ fingerprints are on file, as well as your own, Hugo. You’ll make those immediately available to us, won’t you?” I said.

  “I don’t have nothing else to do. Did your boy smash up a bunch of cars with his stepdaddy’s pickup truck?” he replied. He looked out at a freight train crossing a trestle in the hills and held his cigarette close to his lips with two fingers and puffed it uninterruptedly, the skin of his face the same nicotine shade as his fingers in the late sunlight.

  I had just hung up the phone after talking to Marvin Pomroy when Wilbur came through my office door at noon the next day. He continued to stand rather than take a chair, his teeth clamped down on the corner of his lip, his hat held with both hands in front of his belt buckle.

  “Hugo Roberts’s prints and Kyle Rose’s are on the bond. Yours aren’t,” I said.

  “Kyle Rose, the deputy somebody strung a deer arrow through?” Wilbur said.

  “That’s the guy. You didn’t steal those bonds. They were planted, Wilbur. Marvin Pomroy just said as much.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “I have some paperwork to do, then you’re going to be out of it.”

  He sat down in a chair and rubbed the back of his neck, his eyes burrowing into the carpet.

  “What about Kippy Jo?” he asked.

  “She’s still on the hook.”

  “One deal’s part of the other, ain’t it? If I hadn’t been set up, Bubba Grimes wouldn’t have been sent out there to kill me and Kippy Jo.”

  “I thought you’d be happy.”

  He got up from the chair, my words never registering in his face.

  “I can leave the state now, cain’t I?” he said. “Excuse me?”

  “Them boys investing in my pipeline deal down in Venezuela? I showed them that core sample from up in Wyoming. They’re ready to rock.”

  I propped my elbow on the arm of my swivel chair and rubbed the corner of my chin.

  “To drill a damn oil well you’d leave your wife by herself?” I said.

  “It’s money all this is about. She ain’t standing trial for killing Bubba Grimes. She’s standing trial ’cause her husband’s got something Earl Deitrich wants.”

  “You want to buy and sell him, don’t you?” I said.

  His skin was still slick with the heat and moisture from outside, and he wiped his throat and looked at the shine his sweat made on his calluses. He wiped his hand dry on his shirtfront and said, “I was one second from being a world champion. Lacking that one second makes me a guy who digs postholes for rich people. You think Ms. Deitrich’s a high-class woman. Maybe she is. But when I worked out at their place, she never give me a drink of water that wasn’t in a jelly glass. Kippy Jo Pickett is gonna have rubies on her fingers big as bird’s eggs, and there ain’t nobody in this county, particularly not no dadburn Deitrichs, gonna look down on us.”

  The next afternoon I loaded Beau in his trailer and we drove north of the river to the base of the ravine where Pete and I often hunted arrowheads and the flint chippings washed down from Tonkawa workmounds. I hung L.Q. Navarro’s holstered .45 and gun belt from one side of the pommel and my rucksack from the other and rode up the incline along the creekbed, Beau’s shoes raking dully on the stones along the bank.
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  The water in the creek was shallow and tea-colored, flowing over green and brown and white pebbles that were no bigger than my thumbnail. The western wall of the drainage was in shadow now, but the east side was of the soft gold texture that light makes when it collects inside a newly coopered pine barrel. The wind blew from the bottom of the ravine and I saw the scrub brush and redbud trees riffle and change tone in the sunlight against the cliff wall, and for just a moment I saw the dark opening of the cave where I believed Skyler Doolittle and Jessie Stump had been living.

  I got down from the saddle and lifted the strap of the rucksack off the pommel and looped it over my left shoulder and hung L.Q.’s gun belt from my right and began walking up the path that was barely visible in the pine needles that had been foot-pressed blackly into the soil between the trees.

  Just before I reached the cave I threw a pebble at the entrance and watched it bounce off the face of the cliff and roll down the incline. Then I threw a second, this time right through the hole in the rock.

  “You guys wouldn’t be upset if I visited you, would you?” I said.

  But there was no response.

  I closed the distance to the cave and squatted down under a redbud tree and took my flashlight out of the rucksack and shined it inside the rock, then stepped under the overhang and stood erect inside the cave itself.

  The sleeping bags and canned goods were gone. The vinyl garbage bags that had been flattened on the floor were now tangled and stenciled with silt from the soles of lug boots. The plank that had contained canned goods had been pulled out of the wall and thrown into the back of the cave and the one-gallon molasses can that had held drinking water had been crushed and scoured with scratches on the stone ring around the firepit.