Heartwood

  I went inside and had just ordered when I saw Jeff Deitrich, Earl’s son, pull into the parking lot in a yellow convertible with a Mexican boy and girl next to him. They parked under the awning, and Jeff walked across the lot toward the entrance, his partially unbuttoned silk shirt filling with wind.

  We were told he was the child of Earl’s brief first marriage to a Cajun girl when he was stationed at Fort Polk in Louisiana. Jeff was larger, more handsome and athletic than his father, with dark brown hair that had natural waves in it and wide shoulders and long arms and big-knuckled hands. He was bright in a limited way and confident and always ingratiating and had done well for two years at the University of Texas, then had quit, either to learn his father’s business or just out of indifference toward what he saw as the necessary province of others.

  But I always had the sense that Jeff’s manners were the natural ones of his class and that he used them only as the situation required him to. Three years ago I had witnessed a scene in the same parking lot, one I had tried to forget. But I had never looked at Jeff quite the same afterwards.

  It was a lovely fall night after a football game, with a yellow moon as big as a planet hovering right over the hills. The lot was filled with convertibles, customized 1950s hot rods that glowed like hard candy under the neon, chromed Harleys, and Cherokees and Land-Rovers and roll-bar Jeeps. Then a beery oil field roughneck, in Cloroxed jeans and steel-toe boots and a T-shirt still spotted with drilling mud, got into it with Jeff Deitrich.

  They fought between cars, knocking serving trays onto the pavement, then went at it in an open area, both of them swinging hard, connecting with skin-tearing blows in the face that made the onlookers wince.

  They fought their way between two cars in the front row, then Jeff caught the roughneck hard above the eye and knocked him across the curb against the side of the building. The roughneck was down on one knee, his eyes glazed, the fight gone out of his face, a self-deprecating smile of defeat already tugging at the corner of his mouth. When he started to rise, propping his fingers against the pavement for support, Jeff drove his fist into the hinge on the man’s jaw and fractured the bone like pecan shell.

  The restaurant owner had to hold the roughneck’s jaw in place with a blood-soaked towel until the ambulance arrived.

  “How you doin’, Billy Bob?” Jeff said expansively as he passed my booth on the way to the men’s room, not waiting for an answer before he pushed the door open and went inside.

  Outside, the Mexican couple in his car were ordering from the waitress. The boy’s hair was as black as paint, cut short, oiled and combed back on his head. The girl’s skin was biscuit-colored, her hair a dark reddish color, as though it had been washed in iodine. She was smoking a cigarette, tipping the ashes over the side of the door, her eyes lingering suspiciously on the people in other cars. She and the boy next to her sat apart from each other, not talking.

  Jeff came back out of the men’s room and sat down in my booth.

  “You curious about the cuties in my car?” he said.

  “They look like gangbangers,” I said.

  “The guy is. That’s Ronnie Cruise. Sometimes they call him Ronnie Cross. Leader of the Purple Hearts. His squeeze is Esmeralda Ramirez.”

  “What are you doing with them?”

  “My dad’s funding a youth program in San Antone and Houston,” he said, and smiled at me with his eyes, as though we were both privy to a private joke.

  “You know where I could find an accountant named Greenbaum? He’s a friend of your folks,” I said.

  “Max? Sure. I put him on a plane to Houston this morning. What’s up?”

  “Nothing important.”

  “It’s funny how they run of a type.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The Tribe. It’s like somebody writes a script for them. Guys like Max must read the material and walk right into the role.”

  I set down my fork and looked at him. His grin never wavered. His confidence in the health and good looks that seemed to have been given him along with his family’s wealth was such that my stare at his bigotry and callousness had no more meaning to him than the fact a waitress was standing by his elbow, ready to take his order, reluctant to interrupt him in midsentence.

  “We’re all right here,” I said to her.

  “You want to meet Ronnie Cross? Two guys tried to pop him on a rooftop. Both of them took the fast way down. Six floors into the concrete.”

  “I’ll pass. He’s wearing a rosary around his neck. Tell him for me that’s an act of disrespect,” I said.

  “Tell him yourself. It’s my father who wants to send these guys to Taco U. I just drive them around once in a while, like Operation Outreach or something.” He winked at me, just as his father had. “Gotta boogie. See you around.”

  Later, they drove out of the lot past my window. The boy named Ronnie Cruise passed a quart bottle of Lone Star to Jeff. The girl named Esmeralda, who sat by the passenger window, looked straight ahead, an angry light in her face.

  I got up early Monday morning and brushed out Beau, my Morgan, in the lot, put some oats and molasses balls in his trough, watered the flowers in the yard, then went upstairs and showered. Through the window I could see the long, gentle roll of the green land, seagulls that had been blown inland, plots of new corn in a hillside, oak trees planted along a winding two-lane highway that had once been part of the Chisholm Trail.

  The phone rang. I wrapped a towel around myself and picked up the receiver in the bedroom.

  “I guess this is foolish to ask, but can we take you to lunch after Wilbur’s arraignment?” Peggy Jean said.

  “Y’all are going to be there?” I said.

  “Earl’s upset. But that doesn’t mean our friendship has to be impaired.”

  “Another time, Peggy Jean.”

  “I thought I’d ask.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  After I replaced the receiver in the cradle I felt a strange sense of loss that didn’t seem warranted by the conversation.

  In the closet mirror I saw the welted bullet scars on my left foot and right arm and another one high up on my chest. Loss was when they put you in a box, I told myself.

  But the feeling wouldn’t go away. I looked at the framed picture on my dresser of my mother and father and me as a child. In the picture I had my father’s jaw and reddish-blond hair, just as my illegitimate son, Lucas Smothers, did. Next to my family picture was one of L.Q. Navarro, in his pinstripe suit and ash-gray Stetson, a bottle of Mexican beer in his hand, his Texas Ranger badge on his belt, a dead volcano at his back. L.Q. Navarro, the most loyal and handsome and brave man I ever knew, whom I accidentally killed on a vigilante raid into Coahuila.

  I blew out my breath and rubbed the bath towel in my face and dressed by the window, concentrating on the blueness of the sky and the dark, steel-colored rain clouds that were massed on the hills in the distance.

  At ten o’clock Wilbur Pickett was arraigned and released on five thousand dollars’ bail. Earl and Peggy Jean had been sitting in the back of the courtroom. Earl got up from his seat and banged loudly on the doors.

  When I walked outside he was standing by his maroon Lincoln, in the shade of the oak trees, his anger replaced by an easy smile. Peggy Jean sat inside the car, her elbow propped on the windowsill, her fingertips rubbing one temple.

  “Marvin Pomroy owe you favors?” Earl said.

  “On the bail? It doesn’t work that way, Earl,” I replied.

  “That boy steals a historical relic and three hundred grand and gets released on a five-dime bond? You telling me y’all aren’t working together?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m telling you. Wilbur’s not going anywhere, either,” I said.

  “Did I say he was?” He reached out and pinched me in the ribs.

  “Excuse me, but don’t do that again,” I said.

  “Whoa,” he said, grinning broadly.

  “Earl, I recommend you stop clowning around and gi
ve some serious thought to what you’re doing,” I said.

  “Clowning? Trying to recover a six-figure theft?” he said.

  “A man named Skyler Doolittle says you cheated him out of that watch in a bouree game. If we go to trial, he’s going to be a witness for the defense. Your accountant, Max Greenbaum, is too.”

  “Greenbaum? What’s he got to do with anything?” Earl said.

  “Run your bullshit on someone else,” I said.

  I walked across the street toward my office. When I looked back, Earl and Peggy Jean were arguing across the top of their car.

  Temple Carrol was waiting inside my office.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. She wore a pair of jeans and a silver belt and a yellow cotton pullover.

  “We need to find out more about Earl Deitrich’s finances. See if he’s filed an insurance claim,” I said.

  “The Deitrichs stoke you up out there?”

  “No.”

  “Is it true you and Peggy Jean were an item?” She straightened her shoulders, her hands in her back pockets, her eyes not quite focusing on mine.

  “I thought we were. I didn’t know a whole lot back then,” I replied.

  “Don’t let a prissy buttwipe like Deitrich get to you.”

  “He doesn’t.”

  “Oh, I can see that,” she said.

  “I told him the witnesses I’d use against him. Not too cool,” I said.

  She kept her expression flat and let her eyes slip off my face.

  “Why would he try to involve me in his real estate and tax problems down in Houston?” I said.

  “He wants to buy your good name.” When I didn’t reply, she said, “He hangs heads on walls. You were in the saddle with his wife. Stop thinking like a tree stump.”

  Two days later the sheriff, Hugo Roberts, telephoned the office and asked me to walk across the street. “What for?” I asked.

  “Got a man in here tells quite a story. Maybe you ought to hear it, counselor,” he said.

  “I’m busy, Hugo,” I said.

  “You gonna be a lot less busy when this ole boy blows your defense for Wilbur Pickett out the water.” He was still laughing, wheezing with pleasure, when he hung up the phone.

  The sheriff’s office was behind the courthouse in the original sandstone and log jail that had been built when Deaf Smith was a frontier village in the 1870s. Hugo Roberts had not been elected but promoted into the office after his predecessor was murdered with an ax last year. He was pear-shaped, potbellied, and smoked constantly, even though one of his lungs had already been surgically removed. When I entered his office, the air was layered with smoke, the light through the windows a sickly yellow. Hugo sat behind a huge oak desk; the log walls were festooned with antique guns and the black-and-white photos of convicts our county had sent to Huntsville for electrocution or death by injection.

  Hugo leaned back in his swivel chair, one booted leg on his desk, and aimed a finger at a tall, rawboned man with sideburns and a drooping left eyelid who sat in a straight-back chair with a straw hat hooked on one finger.

  “This here is Bubba Grimes,” Hugo said. He sucked on his cigarette and blew a plume of smoke into the air. “Picked up Bubba for smashing beer bottles against the side of Shorty’s last night. Why would you do something like that, Bubba?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Seemed kind of dull. The music on the jukebox would make a corpse stop up his ears,” the man named Grimes said. His skin was grained and coarse and it creased like a lizard’s when he grinned.

  “Tell Billy Bob what you told us,” Hugo said, and rested his eyes on me with anticipation.

  “Ain’t much to it. Last Thursday I got a call from Wilbur Pickett. He said he had a mess of bearer bonds he wanted to get rid of. Said he was calling from the IGA pay phone by his house,” Grimes said.

  “Why would he call you in particular?” I asked.

  “I do a few investments for folks, mostly for working people don’t trust banks or brokerages. Not the kind of transaction Pickett had in mind, though. That’s what I told him, too—to take his business somewheres else,” Grimes said.

  “We already checked with the phone company. There was a call made Thursday afternoon from the IGA to Mr. Grimes’s home in Austin,” Hugo said.

  Grimes wore alligator boots, western-cut, striped slacks, and a dark blue shirt with roses sewn on it. The skin around his drooping left eye looked dead, like a synthetic graft, and I couldn’t tell if the eye had vision in it or not.

  “I know your name from somewhere,” I said.

  “I’m a pilot. Out of the country most of the time. I doubt we’ve met,” he replied.

  “It’ll come to me,” I said.

  “Billy Bob was a Texas Ranger and an assistant U.S. attorney. Got a memory like flypaper,” Hugo said. A column of dirty sunlight fell on his desk. His hand, which was round and small and the color of a cured tobacco leaf on the blotter, cupped a cigarette whose smoke leaked through his fingers. He grinned at me, his lips purple in the gloom, his eyes full of gloat.

  I pulled open the door and stepped back out into the afternoon breeze and dappled shade and closed the door behind me and heard the metal tongue on the latch fall into place. The breeze felt wonderful in my face. Then I remembered the name. I pushed the door open again. The glare fell like a dagger across Grimes’s face.

  “You were mixed up with a televangelist preacher and the Contras down in Nicaragua. You were shot down dropping supplies to them,” I said to Grimes.

  “I told you, boy’s an encyclopedia of worthless information,” Hugo said.

  “Then you made the news again. Flying for the same preacher in Zaire. Except you were diverting mercy flights to his diamond mines,” I said.

  “I bet a local jury will get on this like stink on shit,”Hugo said.

  “They sure will. That’s where all Earl Deitrich’s money comes from,” I said.

  Hugo’s cigarette paused halfway to his mouth, the smoke curling upward like a white snake.

  Early the next morning the air was unseasonably cold and a milk-white fog blew off the river and hung as thick as wet cotton on the two-acre tank behind my barn. As I walked along the levee I could hear bass flopping out in the fog. I stood in the weeds and cast a Rapala between two flooded willow trees, heard it hit the water, then began retrieving it toward me. The sun looked like a glowing red spark behind the gray silhouette of the barn.

  I felt a hard, throbbing hit on the lure. I jerked the rod up to set the treble hook, but the lure rattled loose from the bass’s mouth, sailed through the air, and clinked on the water’s surface. Behind me I heard someone tapping loudly on my back door, then a truck engine grinding past the barn and through the field toward me.

  Wilbur Pickett got out and walked up the levee in a pair of khakis and cowboy boots and a denim jacket cut off at the armpits.

  “They’re flopping out there, ain’t they?” he said.

  “There’s a pole and a coffee can of worms by that willow,” I said.

  “Lordy, this is a nice place. I aim to have one like it someday,” he said, squatting down to thread a night crawler on his hook.

  “You doing all right?” I said.

  He swung the cork and weighted line out into the fog.

  “My wife sees pictures in her head. It scares me sometimes. She says you got dead people following you around,” he said.

  “I don’t see any.”

  “She said these are people you killed down in Old Mexico. I told her I never heard no such thing.” He looked straight ahead, a nervous flicker in the corner of his eye.

  I reeled in my line and rested my rod against the trunk of a redbud tree. I watched a cottonmouth moccasin swimming through the shallows, its body forming and re-forming itself like an S-shaped spring.

  “Billy Bob?” Wilbur said.

  “They were heroin mules. They got what they deserved,” I said.

  “That don’t sound like you.”

  “I??
?ve got to get to work,” I said.

  He rubbed his palm on his forehead, and his eyes searched in the fog, as though looking for words that weren’t part of his vocabulary. I saw his throat swallow. “She says you’re a giver of death. She says it’s gonna happen again.”

  “What will happen again?”

  “She says there’s spirits that want revenge. It’s got to do with human heads in a garden in Africa. It don’t make no sense. I ain’t up to this. I ain’t never hurt nobody. I don’t want to have nothing to do with this kind of stuff,” he said.

  He dropped the cane pole across a willow branch and got into his paint-skinned truck and began grinding the starter.

  “Wilbur, get down here and talk,” I said.

  His engine caught and he twisted his head back toward me as he turned the wheel with both hands.

  “You killed people and you ain’t sorry? That ain’t the Billy Bob Holland I always knowed. Why’d you tell me that?” he said, his eyes wet.

  He roared through the field, the tall grass whipping under his front bumper, trash blowing from the bed of his truck.

  4

  Late the next afternoon I received a phone call from Kippy Jo Pickett, Wilbur’s wife.

  “They tore up our house. They ripped the floor out of the barn,” she said.

  “Who did?” I said.

  “The sheriff and his men.”

  “Did he have a search warrant?”

  “He said he did. He kept rattling a paper in front of me. He smelled like liquor,” she said.

  “Where’s Wilbur?” I asked.

  “They drove him out to the hills. When they brought him back, he wouldn’t come in the house,” she replied.

  A half hour later I parked in Wilbur’s dirt drive and walked around the side of the house to the back, where he was burning trash in an oil barrel. His shirt hung on a fence post and his skin looked like warm tallow in the yellow and red light of the fire. The kitchen window was at my back. I turned and looked through the screen into the sightless eyes of Kippy Jo.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t see you there,” I said, regaining my breath.

  She walked away from the sink without answering.