Heartwood

  I stepped out of the cave’s coolness into the warmth of the afternoon and the breeze gusting up the drainage. The sunlight glimmered on the outcroppings that had been leached clean of soil by the springs flowing out of the hillside and had turned green with lichen. Were Jessie and Skyler buried somewhere along the creek? Had they been covered with rocks or perhaps rooted up and devoured by animals? I doubted it. Whoever had crushed the water can and prised the wood plank out of the wall had taken out his anger on the cave as a surrogate for his intended human victims.

  I walked back down the path and mounted Beau and rode over the plates of stone that scraped like slate under his hooves.

  I drove the truck, with Beau’s trailer wobbling behind it, down the dirt road onto the state highway, then followed the river to the northeast corner of the county, where an oxbow had formed in 1927, then had been dammed up and allowed to become a glistening yellowish-green sump filled with mosquitoes, dead trees webbed with river trash, and shacks knocked together from slat board, tar paper, and stovepipe.

  I rode down a dirt street between empty shacks, then crossed a slough and continued up a rise through trees and a break between two low-lying hills that gave onto a glade where a group of California hippies had tried to live in the late 1960s. They had hung tepees and built a longhouse of pine logs and sweat lodges of river stones, dug a water well and root cellars, and carpentered a marvelous cistern on top of boulders they rolled from the fields with hand-hewn poles.

  Twenty-five deputized vigilantes burned them out in 1968.

  I got down from Beau and lifted the rucksack and L.Q.’s gun belt off the pommel and walked to the foot of the hill on the far side of the glade. Pine trees grew up the slope toward the crest and crows were cawing deep in the shadows. I kicked a bare spot in the ground and made a fire ring from field stones, then gathered an armful of twigs and rotted branches among the trees and coned them up in the fire ring and lit them with a paper match.

  I squatted upwind from the smoke, removed a skillet from the rucksack and rubbed the bottom with butter and set the skillet on stones among the flames. When the butter had browned, I lay two large ham steaks inside and watched them fry, then cracked four raw eggs on the edge of the skillet and cooked them next to the ham.

  The smoke flattened in the wind and drifted back into the trees on the hillside. A man with a fused neck pushed aside the slat door on a root cellar and stepped out into the shadows. A second man followed him, his face cratered with scars that looked like popped bubbles on the surface of paint.

  L.Q.’s gun belt and holstered .45 still hung from my right shoulder. I ladled the eggs and meat onto two tin plates, then toasted four slices of bread in the ham fat and put them in the plates, too. I could see Jessie Stump’s tall, skinny frame out of the corner of my vision and feel his eyes watching me.

  “How’d you know where we was at?” he asked.

  “You grew up on the oxbow. It didn’t take a lot of figuring,” I said.

  “How come you brung a pistol?” he asked.

  “I’ve always taken you for a serious man,” I replied. I picked up the skillet with both hands and drained the last of the ham fat over the eggs and bread and didn’t look up.

  “Didn’t nobody else reckon it,” Skyler Doolittle said.

  “That’s because they searched here first. In the meantime, y’all were in a cave up above the Deitrich place,” I said.

  “Maybe you’re too damn smart for your own good, boy,” Jessie said.

  “Don’t be addressing Mr. Holland like that. He’s a decent man,” Skyler said.

  I stood up and handed Skyler a plate.

  “You want to eat, Jessie?” I said.

  “I ain’t against it,” he replied. His black, unwashed hair had the same liquid brightness as his eyes.

  “Somebody liked to nailed y’all in that cave,” I said.

  “You goddamn right they did. They’d a done it if it hadn’t been for Ms. Deitrich,” Jessie said.

  “Come again?” I said.

  “She was blackberrying up there. Had three or four quart jars full,” Skyler said. “I think she seen the smoke from our fire. Next day this note was stuck on a pine branch partway up the path.”

  He unfolded a sheet of blue stationery from his pocket and handed it to me. It read, “This isn’t a safe place for you. Leave before your hiding place is discovered. Those who will find you mean you great injury.”

  “It’s not signed,” I said.

  “Ain’t nobody else been up there. To my mind, she’s a great lady,” Skyler said.

  “Mr. Doolittle, I want y’all to surrender,” I said.

  “That ain’t gonna happen, boy,” Jessie said.

  “He’s right,” Skyler said.

  “They’ll kill both of y’all,” I said.

  Jessie wiped his plate clean with a piece of bread and ate it, then set the plate down on the grass and pulled his shirt out of his trousers. A bloody white sock was tied with a strip of cloth across his top rib.

  “That’s where some boys in a Jeep notched me with a deer rifle. Next time I’ll catch them in their sleeping bags,” he said.

  “Is this what you want?” I said to Skyler.

  “No, sir. I’d like to be let alone,” he replied.

  I inverted the skillet and knocked it clean on the fire ring, then slipped a paper sack over it and dropped it in the rucksack and hung the rucksack on the pommel of Beau’s saddle.

  “You gonna turn us in?” Jessie said.

  I put my left boot in the stirrup and swung up on the saddle. I felt Beau try to jerk his head up.

  “I’m going to ask you just once, Jessie. Take your hand off his bridle,” I said.

  “Then you answer me. You gonna turn us in or not?” Jessie said.

  “He’s a river-baptized man, Jessie. He’s got the thumbprint of God on his soul. Let him pass, son,” Skyler said.

  The sun had dropped behind the hills now and the air was moist and heavy and dense with mosquitoes and the bats that fed off them. I crossed the slough and rode back down the dirt street through the row of empty shacks that were encircled by the ugly scar of the oxbow off the river. I felt the thick weight of a bat thud against the crown of my hat, and I kept my face pointed down at Beau’s withers until we were up on high ground again.

  Peggy Jean knew Jessie Stump had tried to drive a barbed arrow through her husband’s head, yet had warned him and Skyler Doolittle so they could avoid capture.

  Why?

  That’s what I asked Temple Carrol two hours later while she smacked her gloves into the heavy bag behind her house. She wore a pair of khaki shorts and a gray workout halter and alpine lug boots with thick socks folded down on her ankles, and her thighs were tan and muscular and tight against her rolled shorts.

  “Maybe Peggy Jean wants it all. Maybe that’s always been her way,” she said.

  “Pardon?” I said.

  She hit the bag again, left, right, left, right, left, and hard right hook, twisting the bag on the chain, ignoring me.

  “Will you give it a break?” I said.

  “Her first soldier boy got killed in Vietnam. Then she tried a blue-collar kid like you. Then she found another soldier boy with money. Maybe she’d like to keep the money and that monstrosity of a house they live in and have another roll in the hay with you. Feel flattered?” she said.

  “Pretty rough assessment.”

  “Sorry. I’ll go scrub out my mouth with Ajax,” she said.

  She went back to work on the bag. The moon was big and yellow behind the pecan tree in her backyard. Out in the darkness I could hear the wind rattling in her neighbor’s cornfield. Her invalid father was inside the house, and I could see his silhouette, in his wheelchair, against the lighted television screen in the front room.

  “You mad at me?” I said.

  “No, not really. You’re what you are. I can’t change it,” she answered.

  I hooked my arm around the top of the bag.
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  “You’ve never let me down. They don’t make them any better than you, Temple,” I said.

  “You live with ghosts. I can’t compete with them.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “You don’t understand women, Billy Bob. At least you don’t understand me.”

  I put my hands on the tips of her shoulders, even while she was shaking her head.

  “I’m hot and dirty,” she said.

  I touched the pool of moisture in the hollow of her neck and slid my hands down her back and smelled the heat in her hair and felt the tone of her muscles and the taper of her hips against my palms. I let my lips brush against her cheek, and for the first time in our many years as intimate friends I consciously stepped over a line into Temple’s life.

  She raised on the balls of her feet, her stomach against my loins, as though she were going to kiss me, then her face broke and she walked hurriedly into the house, dropping her gloves randomly into the dust, and closed the door and locked it behind her.

  26

  Wesley Rhodes was standing on the corner of the square, across from the courthouse, in the cool of the evening, watching the junior high school girls go in and out of the Mexican grocery store that had a small soda fountain in back. They giggled and had braces on their teeth and attracted him in ways he didn’t understand. Not in a bad way. It was like they were his age, or he was their age, except he knew a lot more about the world than they did and he could take care of and protect them.

  He just never could get up the nerve to talk to them. Maybe tonight would be different. He sat up on top of the backrest of a wood bench under a live oak, his hair slicked back, his comb clipped inside his shirt pocket, drinking from a Dixie cup filled with Coca-Cola and crushed ice. The trees were dark green overhead and the face of the clock on the courthouse tower glowed in the sunset, and the streets were striped with shadows now and the girls in front of the grocery marbled with light from the owner’s neon signs. Man, summertime was great. If he just had enough nerve to stroll across the street …

  That’s when Jeff Deitrich’s yellow convertible, with the top up, pulled to the curb and Jeff said, “Get in back, snarf.”

  They chased him for two blocks before they blocked him in an alley and Chug and Hammie and Warren pulled him off a fire escape and threw him in the car.

  Crushed between Hammie and Chug in the backseat, he saw the city limits sign speed past the window.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “You’re gonna become a deep-sea diver tonight, little buddy. You ever watch those Jacques Costeau shows on TV? A frog can do it, you can do it,” Hammie said. He took the comb out of Wesley’s shirt pocket and scratched the purple and burnt-orange tattoo of a butterfly on the side of his throat with it.

  “Frog? What’s a frog got to do with anything?” Wesley asked.

  Just after midnight the convertible turned on a dirt road and a few minutes later Wesley was able to see clearly out the window and recognize the rock quarry, just like someone had taken a bad dream from his life and forced him back inside it.

  Wesley climbed out of the car with the others, his heart thundering, his armpits running with sweat. The wind had died and a layer of dust hung in the air and drifted over the mounds of yellow dirt that surrounded the crater.

  “Tell them, Warren. I ain’t never snitched nobody off. Even when the gunbulls put me in the hole,” Wesley said.

  “That’s what I’ve been telling them. You’re a righteous, sharp little dude. That’s why they’re letting you prove yourself,” Warren said. He smiled good-naturedly, like the old Warren used to do, square-jawed, his eyes clear, handsome as a movie star.

  “Why I got to prove anything? I ain’t done nothing wrong,” Wesley said.

  “Not a good attitude, Wes,” Warren said, his face taking on philosophic concern. “You a good swimmer?”

  Jeff popped the trunk.

  “This is scuba gear, queeb. That’s an underwater camera and strobe. You’re going to dive that Mercedes and take pictures. The mop-heads had better be inside,” Jeff said.

  “Why don’t you do it yourself?” Wesley said.

  Jeff had a rolled magazine in his back pocket. He removed it and used the hard-packed end to hit Wesley on the forehead, biting down on his lip, as though he were on the edge of far greater violence. “Because I don’t get in the same water with corpses, zit-face. Want to wise off some more or live out the night?” he said.

  Wesley undressed down to his Jockey undershorts and sat on the sand and put flippers on his feet and slipped the canvas straps of the air tank over his shoulders and the mask on his face. Warren hung a rubber-encased light from his neck and placed the camera and strobe in his hands.

  “You never had a tank on?” he asked.

  “Yeah, he’s a regular in the Bahamas, Warren,” Hammie said.

  “What if I cain’t find the car?” Wesley said.

  “Don’t come up,” Jeff said.

  Wesley waded out into the water, the rocks cutting his feet, then stepped off a shelf and went under.

  It was easier than he thought. The light around his neck turned the bottom of the quarry into a crusted, unthreatening slope that dipped down through the greenish-yellow haze to the Mercedes. Small bait fish and pieces of grass swam at his mask and flanked off on each side of him, and he breathed the air easily from the mouthpiece and even blew his mask clear as Warren had shown him.

  Then his light lit up the inside of the Mercedes and he almost vomited into his mouthpiece.

  The face of the man on the driver’s side looked straight into Wesley’s, his lidless eyes like gray marbles, while a fish eel ate his tongue.

  Wes aimed through the camera’s lens and clicked the shutter five times. Then, with his heart tripping against his ribs, he let the camera float loose on its wrist cord and did something he never thought he would have the courage to.

  He prised the back door loose from where it had lodged in the silt, then he was inside the car with the two dead men, his air tank clanging against the roof, their bloated skin brushing against his. A dreadlock wrapped across his mask like a leech, a forehead tipped against his jaw. His hands trembled while he worked, his fingernails and knuckles dipping into what felt like wet cornmeal, then a bilious fluid surged out of his stomach into his throat and he gagged violently and lost his mouthpiece and swallowed water that locked inside his windpipe like cement.

  His lungs were bursting, his eyes bulging out of his head when he broke the surface into moonlight and air.

  He fell on the sand, gasping, his body shaking, his Jockey undershorts strung with dead weeds.

  “You get the pictures?” Jeff said.

  “Hang them over your fucking mantel,” Wesley said.

  Jeff uncapped a bottle of sparkling water and drank it while Wesley stumbled toward the convertible.

  It was Monday afternoon that Wesley told me all this in my office.

  “Who’s developing the pictures?” I asked.

  “Warren’s old man owns some porno places in Houston. Warren uses their darkroom.”

  “The Costens are in pornography?”

  His ruined face, with its harelip and wide-set, reptilian-green eyes, looked into space, as though the question had nothing to do with his life and hence was not one that anyone would expect him to answer.

  “What did you do inside the Mercedes?” I said.

  “The black guys was mushy and swole up like garbage bags. Like they was full of gas and wanted to float. I unsnapped their seat belts and left both doors open.”

  A grin scissored across his face, his eyes seeming to separate on the dough pan of his face and dance with light.

  Score one for the little guys, I thought.

  What happened that night out at Val’s Drive-In started over either Chug Rollins’s sister or Jerry Lee Lewis’s music, depending on whom you heard it from.

  Background: Chug’s sister had the same weight problem as her brother, co
mpounded by a notorious reputation for profligate sexual behavior. Two months ago she had made national news when she was prosecuted for the statutory rape of one of her male students at a Fort Worth high school.

  It was a fine evening when Lucas Smothers and Esmeralda Ramirez pulled into Val’s. The sun had just set below the rim of the hills and the light was draining from the sky as the day cooled. The breeze came up and the neon signs overhead and in the restaurant’s windows went on and rippled the cars and pavement in the parking area. Lucas and Esmeralda went inside and sat by the jukebox and ordered, then Lucas dropped four quarters in the slot and began punching in every Jerry Lee Lewis number he could find.

  That’s when Chug Rollins and Jeff Deitrich and his old girlfriend, Rita Summers, came in and sat down together two booths away. A moment later they were joined by three of Jeff’s and Chug’s friends, ex–football players from the University of Texas, two of whom had been expelled after a gang rape of a co-ed in a fraternity house. They ordered mugs of draft beer and Rita Summers lit a cigarette under the No Smoking sign. She balanced her cigarette on an ashtray and fixed a clasp on the back of her gold hair, her blue eyes filled with ridicule.

  “Look when you have a chance. Lavender spiked heels with embroidered jeans. I think she uses chlorine gas for perfume,” she said.

  “That’s Smothers’s hair tonic,” one of the ex-football players said. He wore a cap backwards on his head and a white T-shirt that was bursting on his torso.

  In the background Jerry Lee sang “I Could Never Be Ashamed of You.”

  At first Jeff didn’t look in Lucas’s and Esmeralda’s direction, then he seemed to become more and more agitated, his eyes flicking away from the conversation around him, pinning Lucas, then Esmeralda.

  “Hey, Smothers, is that your stuff on there?” he asked.

  “Yeah, why?” Lucas said.

  “It’s giving me a headache,” Jeff said.