Heartwood

  “Jerry Lee Lewis is the greatest white blues singer of our time,” Lucas said.

  “It’s forty years old. It’s also garbage. Unplug it,” Jeff said.

  “Anything else you want? Shoes shined? Car washed?” Lucas said.

  Chug Rollins turned his massive weight around in the booth.

  “I’ve still got a major beef to settle with you, fuckhead. Don’t give me an excuse,” he said.

  Lucas dipped a french fry in catsup and ate it and raised his eyebrows innocuously.

  “You want to make faces, don’t let me see it,” Chug said.

  Lucas unfolded a paper napkin and draped it with one hand from his forehead and ate a french fry behind it.

  “You are seriously pissing me off,” Chug said. He got up from the booth and hit the side and top of the jukebox and shook it with both hands until he knocked all of Lucas’s selections out of play. Then he dropped a quarter in the slot and punched in a white rap song and reached behind the box to turn up the volume.

  “You got a problem with that?” he said.

  “It don’t bother me if people like to pour shit in their ears,” Lucas said.

  Chug leaned down on the table. His arms were enormous, his chest and massive stomach as wide as a wood-stove. Lucas could smell the talcum and aftershave lotion and deodorant on his skin, the onions and fried meat on his breath. Chug wadded up a napkin and bounced it off Lucas’s chest.

  “I see you in here again, you’re gonna be taking your meals through a glass straw for six months,” he said, then went to his booth.

  “Don’t say anything else, Lucas,” Esmeralda whispered.

  Lucas flipped the wadded-up napkin out on the floor by Chug’s booth. “All right, let’s get out of here,” he said.

  Lucas went to pay the check while Esmeralda waited, her back turned to Jeff, who sat with one leg out in the aisle, his face disjointed, his eyes on her figure, the rise of her breasts against her form-fitting V-necked shirt. Lucas came back from the cash register and saw Jeff’s expression and put his arm around Esmeralda, as though he could shield her from the violation and lust and black radiance in Jeff’s eyes.

  “Don’t be looking at us like that, Jeff,” he said.

  “What’d you say?” Jeff said.

  Lucas and Esmeralda headed toward the revolving side door. Chug got up from the booth and hitched up his scrotum with one hand.

  “My ten-inch in your pepperbelly’s mouth, Smothers,” he said.

  “Give it to your sister. She needs it a lot worse than we do,” Lucas said, and went through the revolving door.

  Chug made a grinding noise deep in his throat and charged toward the door as though he were back on the high school football field, tearing holes in the enemy line like a tank through a hedgerow, his fists balled into hams, his furrowed brow tilted down like a battering ram.

  A waitress came through the revolving door just before Chug reached it, spinning the thick, rounded edge of the glass directly in front of Chug’s head.

  He crashed into it with a sound like someone thumping a wood mallet on a watermelon, then rolled moaning between the partitions, his hands clasped to his forehead.

  The waitress tried to free herself from being trapped by shoving against the push bar, slamming the door back into his face, mashing his nose against the glass like a pig’s snout pressed against a window.

  Finally Chug tumbled out on the sidewalk, his clothes spotted with expectorated Red Man and Copenhagen.

  “Better put some ice on that bump. It looks like a couple of golf balls,” Lucas said.

  Jeff helped Chug to his feet while he glared at both Esmeralda and Lucas.

  “This is all your fault, Jeff. Don’t blame it on anybody else,” she said.

  “Your mouth’s always running. You never shut up. Somebody’s going to put something in it,” Jeff said.

  “You couldn’t cut it on the rig and you cain’t cut it nowhere else, either. Stop taking out all your grief on other people,” Lucas said.

  Lucas and Esmeralda walked across the parking lot toward Lucas’s pickup truck. The clouds overhead were silver and black in the moonlight, like smoked pewter, the wind rattling the palm trees by the entrance to the drive-in. Jeff’s fists curled and uncurled at his sides.

  “Don’t worry, Jeff. He’s gonna be a stump when we get finished with him,” the ex-football player with his cap on backwards said.

  “Smothers can wait. Esmeralda’s asking for a train,” Jeff said, his eyes burning into her back.

  “You got a sign-up sheet?” the ex-football player said.

  Two days later Lucas sat on the top rail of Beau’s lot, the heels of his boots hooked on the second rail for support, and tossed chinaberries at a bucket. The morning was still cool, the shadows long on the ground, and Beau was drinking out of the tank by the windmill, switching his tail hard in the shade. I stopped shoveling manure into a wheelbarrow and leaned the shovel against the fence.

  “Who heard him say this?” I asked.

  “The waitress.”

  “Maybe Esmeralda should go back to San Antone for a while.”

  “She don’t listen. What do you reckon I ought to do?”

  If they try to rape that girl, you blow their damn heads off, I thought.

  “Pardon?” Lucas said.

  “Nothing. I didn’t say anything.” I widened my eyes and looked at the clarity of the horizon against the sunrise. A flock of crows was descending into my neighbor’s corn, like black ash drifting out of the sky.

  I pulled the morning edition of the local newspaper out of my back pocket and flopped it open on the fence rail. At the bottom of the front page was a story about the bodies of two Jamaicans that had been found floating in a flooded quarry outside Waxahachie. “Maybe it’s time Jeff Deitrich had some of his own chickens come home to roost,” I said.

  “He’s mixed up with these dead guys?”

  “Get her out of town. Let me work on a couple of things.”

  He dropped down from the fence and scraped a pattern in the dust with his boot.

  “The reason I come over is, I was wondering if you might loan me L.Q. Navarro’s revolver,” he said.

  I walked away from him toward the house, not answering him, shaking my head, wanting to flee his words as I would a dark and obscene thought.

  27

  That same morning I met Temple Carroll at the office. I hadn’t spoken to her since my failed overture in her backyard when she had dropped her speedbag gloves in the dust and gone into the house and locked the door behind her like a slap in the face.

  “What’s shakin’, Slim?” she said.

  “You want a taco?”

  “Why not?” she said.

  We walked across the square to the Mexican grocery and sat at a table in back under a wood-bladed fan.

  “Wesley Rhodes told me Warren Costen’s father is involved in pornography in Houston. I’d like you to check it out,” I said.

  “What for?”

  “Skyler Doolittle had child porn pictures planted on him when he was arrested. I wonder if Hugo’s deputies got the pictures from Warren Costen or Jeff Deitrich.”

  “Where am I supposed to start?”

  “Search me. The Costens are supposed to be an upstanding, pioneer family.”

  “Yeah, they always let everybody know their shit didn’t flush,” she said, and bit into her taco. She saw me watching her. She looked down at her clothes to see if something had fallen on them. “What?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Why are you staring at me?”

  “I’m not. You look great, Temple.”

  Her eyes fixed on mine, blinking uncertainly.

  She called me long-distance two days later.

  “I got a tip from a reporter at the Houston Chronicle who covers real estate and the zoning board. Costen and several partners run a couple of companies that manage slum rentals in the Third Ward. But during the oil recession in the eighties a lot of p
roperty on the west side was sold off to HUD. Costen and his friends bought low and expanded their slum rentals and put in video porn stores in what used to be middle-class and upscale neighborhoods.”

  “What’d you find out about Costen and child pornography?”

  “Nothing. But if video porn is there, so is the clientele for the rest of it. You want me to keep looking?”

  “No, come on back up to God’s country,” I said.

  “Just out of curiosity, I went out to Rice University and talked to a history professor about Costen’s ancestors. This professor belongs to a historical society that keeps track of all the documents from the Texas Revolution and the descendants of everybody who fought in it. Costen’s family was the real thing, friends of Sam Houston and Jim Bowie and Stephen F. Austin.”

  I felt myself yawning. “You did a good job. Come on back home,” I said.

  “Hear me out. I asked the professor to check out Skyler Doolittle. Doolittle was telling the truth. His ancestor died in the Alamo with Travis and Crockett and the others. His survivors were given a section of land after the war, which was the promise Sam Houston made to everyone who served with him to the end.”

  “I’m not with you, Temple.”

  “You remember describing to me the lunch out at the Deitrichs’ place, when Earl Deitrich humiliated Wilbur Pickett at the table by taking that antique watch out of his hand, like Wilbur didn’t have the right to be looking at it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said Wilbur told a joke about his ancestor fighting in the Battle of San Jacinto, except the ancestor was a horse thief and sold horses to both sides.”

  “Yeah, that’s what he said.”

  “It wasn’t just a joke.” I could hear her turning pages on a notepad. “Wilbur’s ancestor was named Jefferson Pickett. I don’t know if he was a horse thief or not, but he survived the Goliad Massacre and was with Houston when Santa Anna was captured on the San Jacinto.”

  “He received a section of land, just like all the other Texas soldiers?”

  “You got it, kemo sabe.”

  “What happened to it?” I felt my hand tighten unconsciously on the receiver.

  “Most of it was sold off. Except for one hundred acres Wilbur’s great-grandfather owned outside Beaumont. I’m in the Beaumont public library right now. That one hundred acres was right by the Spindletop oil strike. Wilbur’s great-grandfather lost it in a civil suit filed by a Houston oil speculator named Deitrich. Wilbur’s great-grandfather hanged himself. This all happened about 1901. Guess which Deitrich family we’re talking about?”

  I had been standing up in my office, gazing out the window while I talked. Suddenly I felt light-headed, my face cold and filmed with perspiration at the same time. I sat down in my swivel chair.

  “You still there?” Temple said.

  Wilbur Pickett was inside his barn, grinding the center-cutter for a ditching machine on an emery wheel, the sparks gushing onto his boot tops, when I pulled up on the grass in the Avalon and got out and headed for him without even bothering to turn off my car engine.

  I threw my hat at his head. His mouth opened, then he saw my expression and the skin of his face grew so tight against the bone there were white lines, like tiny pieces of string, around his eyes.

  “You did it, you lying bastard,” I said.

  “You stand back from me, Billy Bob.”

  I started to speak, but I couldn’t get the words out. I shoved him in the breastbone.

  “Don’t do that,” he said.

  I shoved him again, with both hands, my teeth clenched together, then I pushed him out the back door into the horse lot. He became foot-tangled, off balance, flinching when I came at him again.

  “Go ahead, take a shot, Wilbur. See what happens,” I said.

  His face was the bright red of a trainman’s lantern.

  “I ain’t gonna fight you,” he said. He lowered his hands and turned his back to me and hung his arms over the top rail of the fence. His pulse jumped in his neck and he looked at me out of the corner of his eye like a frightened animal.

  “Why’d you steal? Why’d you lie all this time?” I said.

  “Deitrich rubbed my face in it in front of all them people. I went into his office to bust that watch on the fireplace. Then I seen them bonds in the safe. I started thinking about the oil land his family stole from mine and I looked at them bonds and before I knowed it I had the watch in my pocket and them bonds stuck down in my britches. It was like I was watching somebody else do it instead of me.”

  He glanced at me to see if his explanation had taken. He swallowed and looked away quickly. “I got greedy. Is that what you’re waiting on?” he said.

  “You sorry sonofabitch,” I said.

  “It wasn’t no three hundred thousand. It was fifty. Giving them back wasn’t gonna do no good. Earl Deitrich was gonna make money on the insurance claim and come after Kippy Jo’s and my oil sand at the same time.”

  “Does your wife know about this?”

  “No, sir, she don’t.”

  “What about the bonds that were in the side of the dresser?”

  “They were planted. That’s what I been trying to tell you. It didn’t matter what I done or didn’t do. Deitrich and Hugo Roberts was gonna put me in the pen.”

  He stared morosely at the windmill blades straining against the lock chain and at his horses out in the alfalfa and the dust and rain blowing out of the hills in the west.

  “What’d you do with the bonds you stole?” I asked.

  “I sold them down in Mexico. The money’s in the oil deal up in Wyoming now.”

  “You used us.”

  He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead.

  “I guess this world can be a mess of grief, cain’t it?” he said.

  “Just stay the hell away from me,” I said, and walked back to my Avalon.

  I saw Kippy Jo hanging wash on the clothesline. She stopped her work and lifted her head, her eyes focusing on the sky, as though the barometer had dropped dramatically and the environment around her was about to experience a change she had not foreseen.

  Late that night the phone in my library rang.

  “Jessie and me has got to get out of here, Mr. Holland,” the voice said.

  “Mr. Doolittle?”

  “I owe you mightily for what you’ve done. But I need money to get us down to the coast.”

  “I can’t do that. You’re an innocent man, but Jessie Stump belongs in a cage.”

  “Somebody up on the ridge seen us yesterday. He had field glasses.”

  “Let me surrender you, sir. I’ll see that you’re protected. You have my word.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like for a deformed man in the hands of hateful men. They ain’t gonna get me again. You cain’t hep me?”

  “Not the way you want.”

  I heard him take a breath through the receiver, as though resigning himself.

  “Jessie ain’t all bad. I made him give up revenge against Earl Deitrich. That’s a start, ain’t it?” Skyler said.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, sir,” I replied.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Holland. I reckon this is the last time I’ll be telling you that, too.”

  “Good luck, Mr. Doolittle,” I said.

  He hung up.

  The following afternoon, Saturday, Temple threw a pebble against my library window. I went to the back porch and opened the screen. But she didn’t come in.

  “This is good right here,” she said, and sat down on the scrolled iron bench under the chinaberry tree.

  “I’ve got some lemonade made.”

  “Another time. I talked with Wilbur Pickett. You’re too hard on him,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “It was there all the time, Billy Bob. You’ve said it yourself. People will do lots of things for money. Did it make sense that a man who would steal an antique watch would take nothing else with it?”

  “He lied.”
r />   “He was scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “You, his wife, the kids that look up to him. Come on, stop stoking your own furnace.”

  “Just dropping by to ladle out some moral insight?” I said.

  “No. I did some checking into Earl Deitrich’s finances. His place in Montana is up for sale and he’s been borrowing on his house here. That’s why he grabbed on to this insurance scam after Wilbur stole his bonds. He stands to gain a quarter of a million and he might still end up a partner in Wilbur’s oil deal. He probably sent Bubba Grimes to kill Wilbur and Kippy Jo so he could file civil suit against the estate and seize their property up in Wyoming.”

  “I’m still Kippy Jo’s defense attorney, and now I have to put Wilbur on the stand so he can tell the jury how he stole fifty thousand dollars in bonds and lied about it. Does that sound like a credible defense witness to you? You think that will make the jury a lot more sympathetic toward the Picketts? Or maybe I can suborn perjury.”

  “I can see this might piss you off.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She walked down the driveway toward her car. Then turned around and came back.

  “You got some mint leaves to go with that lemonade?” she said.

  Ten miles from town was a drive-in theater left over from the 1950s that opened only on Friday and Saturday nights. High school and college kids got crashed on warm beer and reefer and crystal and purple passion, rat-raced up and down the aisles, accidentally tore the speakers from the stanchions or the windows out of their cars when they burned rubber off the embankments, threw water bombs made from condoms into convertibles, fist-fought behind the cinder-block bathrooms, and stuck firecrackers up the tailpipes of cars in which great love affairs were blooming.

  Without the dope the drive-in theater would have been little different in ambiance from its predecessors of four decades ago. In fact, it still had its moments: the smell of foot-long hot dogs and mustard and chopped onions, the palm trees framed against sunsets that were probably the most glorious in the Western Hemisphere, the scrolled purple and pink neon on the concession stand, the strolling groups of short-hair, fundamentalist kids whose piney-woods innocence seemed to insulate them from all the societal changes taking place around them.