Heartwood

  “We were just passing by, Jeff. I guess birthday congratulations are in order,” Leland said.

  “In three minutes you and the queen better be the fuck out the door,” Jeff said.

  The middle-aged man pursed his lips and said, “Aren’t we the excitable one?”

  Leland’s hand immediately touched his friend’s wrist.

  But Jeff let the remark pass and walked toward the men’s room. He stopped at the end of the bar, as though seeing Lucas for the first time.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Lucas?” he asked.

  “I work here. I’m taking a break. What’s it to you, Jeff?”

  Jeff grinned, his face oily in the reflected glow of the bar’s lacquered pine paneling, the curly brown locks on the back of his neck stirring in the breeze from the electric fan. “It’s nothing to me. Come on back to the table. We still have champagne and cake left,” he said.

  Three minutes later Leland and his friend were gone from the bar.

  But not far enough.

  Jeff had gone back out on the screen porch and rejoined his party. Then his attention strayed. He stood at the screen, his hands on his hips, watching Leland and his friend walk between the parked cars toward their yellow convertible. Jeff rubbed the sweat off his chest on the flat of his hand, his fingers kneading it idly in his palm. A lump of cartilage flexed in his jaw.

  He followed the two men into the gravel parking lot. He hooked one finger under the middle-aged man’s arm and turned him in a slow pirouette toward him.

  “I called you a queen in there, sir. I shouldn’t have done that,” Jeff said.

  “I’ve answered to worse,” the man replied, unconsciously feeling the wet spot on his sleeve where Jeff had touched him.

  “What’s your name, sir?”

  “Mike.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mike. You like cake, Mike?”

  “I’m on a diet. You eat it for me.”

  “How about the icing? I mean, when you eat it with ice cream, what do you think about when you stick it in your mouth with a spoon?”

  “I was in the navy, kid. I’ve heard it all. So have a happy birthday.”

  “I’ve really tried to go the extra mile, but I think you’re laughing at me, Mike. I really do.”

  “Not on your life, kid. You got a hard-on you could break walnuts with. I hope you get rid of it for your birthday. But it’s not gonna happen on me.”

  “See, you’re talking down to people. You pick up young guys to go down on you, then you insult people you don’t know. You probably pissed on the toilet seat, too. Don’t walk away from me. I’m talking to you … Mike?… Listen to me now … Here, see how this feels,” Jeff said, and spun the man who called himself Mike back toward him and buried his fist in his stomach.

  Mike fell to his knees, his mouth strangling for air. Jeff grabbed his hair in both hands and drove his head into a door panel, again and again, then wiped his hands on his shirt as though his skin glowed with an obscene presence.

  The man named Mike was on his hands and knees now and accidentally touched the tip of Jeff’s shoe. Jeff kicked him in the mouth, gashing his lips against his teeth, convulsing his face with shock.

  Jeff’s friends pushed and cajoled and held him, circling him so he couldn’t get at the weeping man on the ground. Then he broke free from them, his arms flailing at the air.

  “All right, all right! I’m cool! It’s not me got the problem! This guy came on to me at the bar!” he said.

  “Jeff, honey, you’re right. Everybody saw that. But the cops are gonna be here. Come back inside. He’s just a queer,” a girl said.

  Jeff walked unsteadily toward the state road, his shirt pulled out of his slacks, his body etched with car lights as though it were razored out of scorched metal.

  “Jeff, get away from the road!” someone yelled.

  He stopped, as though finally accepting the cautionary words of his friends. But he wasn’t thinking about his friends now, nor of the road or the trucks that roared by him in a suck of air brakes and a swirl of beer cups and diesel fumes. He stared stupidly at the maroon ’49 Mercury, its hood and doors overpainted with rippling blue and red flames, the grille like chromed teeth, that had just pulled into the parking lot.

  The sole occupant, Esmeralda Ramirez, cut the engine and got out and stared at him across the top of the roof. She wore an organdy dress and earrings and makeup, and the car’s interior light seemed to bathe her cleavage with both shadow and the flesh tones of a painting.

  “Why are you here?” Jeff said.

  “I brought you a present. You look terrible. What have you done?” she said.

  “Nothing. A guy tried to put moves on me. I never saw him before.”

  “Get in the car.”

  He remained motionless. She looked back down the road where the emergency lights of a sheriffs cruiser were coming around a bend.

  “Did you hear me? Get in the car. Now,” she said.

  He sat down in the passenger seat and closed the door and did not look back at his friends. His body seemed to press back into the leather seat, as though it were dead weight gathered into foam rubber, when Esmeralda fish-tailed the Mercury out onto the asphalt.

  9

  Sunday morning I shined my boots and put on a suit and saddled Beau and rode up a slope that was humped with blackberry bushes. Then I was inside the sun-spangled shade of pine trees, Beau’s hooves thudding softly on the moist carpet of pine needles, and a moment later I came out into the hard-packed dirt backyard of a half-breed Mexican boy named Pete who went with me to Mass every week.

  Pete was eleven years old and had a haircut like an inverted shoe brush. Even though he had an alcoholic mother and no father, he had already skipped one grade in school and could think circles around most adults. I leaned from the saddle and pulled him up on Beau’s rump.

  “I got a good one for you,” he said. “An old man was playing checkers on the front porch of his store with a cocker spaniel. This California guy pulls in for gas and says, ‘Mister, that must be the smartest dog that ever was born.’

  “The old man says, ‘I don’t think he’s so smart. I done beat him three games out of five.’ ”

  Pete howled at his own joke.

  We rode along the crest of the slope that bordered my property. Our shadows flowed horizontally along the ground through the vertical shadows of the trees, then we came out on a dusty street, where the tile-roofed church and Catholic elementary school stood. Beyond the pines in the churchyard I could see the small white cafe where Pete and I always ate breakfast after Mass. Ronnie Cruise’s sunburst T-Bird was parked in the lot, the front door open for the breeze. Ronnie had reclined the seat and was stretched back on it with his forearm across his eyes.

  “Take Beau into the shade. I’ll be along in a minute,” I said to Pete.

  “You know that guy?” Pete asked.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “He’s a gangbanger, Billy Bob. He don’t belong here.”

  “He probably wants to go to confession,” I said, and winked.

  But Pete saw no humor in my remark. He walked with Beau and the tethering weight into the pines, repeatedly looking back at me, as though somehow I had made an alliance with an enemy.

  “You want to see me?” I said to Ronnie.

  “Yeah, that lady you come to the shop with, she was jogging by your house. She said I’d find you here. Esmeralda didn’t come home last night.”

  “I’m supposed to know where she is?”

  He scratched his face. “Do you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I went out to Jeff Deitrich’s place. Some guy named Fletcher stopped me at the gate. He said if I was interested in the gardening job, I could come back tomorrow. He said not to knock on the front door.”

  He took his sunglasses off the dashboard and clicked the wire arms together.

  “Anything else you want to tell me?” I said.

  He gave
me a quizzical look. “You bent out of joint about something?” he asked.

  “Four firemen were burned to death on Earl Deitrich’s property. I think you came by my house the other night to cover your ass.”

  He got out of the car and put on his shades.

  “You calling me a bullshit guy, right?” he said.

  “No, I’m saying it’s Sunday morning and I’m not in the mood for somebody’s grift. If that offends you, go fuck yourself.”

  I walked out of the sunlight onto the church lawn, into the pine trees where Pete waited for me. I heard Ronnie start his car and back out onto the dirt street and head toward the state road. Then he slowed and made a U-turn through the portico of a deserted Pure station, the Hollywood mufflers reverberating off the cement. He stopped in front of the church and left the car running in the street. He jumped across the rain ditch onto the grass and caught my shirtsleeve with two fingers, oblivious to the stares of people going inside the church.

  “I ain’t burned no firemen, man. And nobody don’t talk to me like that. That means nobody.”

  When I got back to the house I walked Beau into the barn and unsaddled him and turned him out. As I walked toward the house I saw Temple Carrol jog past the front of the driveway, then pause in midstride and stare back at me, as though unsure of what she was going to do next.

  She walked up the drive toward me, her hair tucked inside a baseball cap.

  “You look like you’ve been pouring it on,” I said.

  “I’ve got a problem. This friend of mine has his head up his butt. But I really don’t know how to tell him that,” she replied. She wore a pair of faded pink shorts, and the tails of her shirt were knotted under her breasts. Her skin was glazed with sweat, her eyes blinking with the salt that ran into them. She blotted her face on her shirt.

  “What is it, Temple?” I asked.

  “If you want to be an idiot in your private life, that’s your business. But I’m part of Wilbur Pickett’s defense team. You don’t have the right to do what you’re doing.”

  “Doing what, please?”

  Her hands were in her back pockets, her face tilted up into mine now, the whites of her eyes shiny and pink. Her breasts rose and fell against her shirt.

  “It’s a small town. Peggy Jean had a fight with her husband in front of the Langtry Hotel. Then the two of you boogied on down the road,” she said.

  “She twisted her ankle. I took her home.”

  “Well, twist this. You’ve managed to publicly involve yourself with the wife of the man who’s brought charges against your client. You piss me off so bad I want to beat the shit out of you.” She shoved me in the breastbone with her hand. Then she shoved me again, her face heating, her eyes watering now.

  “Nothing happened, Temple. I promise.”

  She turned and walked away from me, then ripped the baseball cap off her head and shook out her hair. The faded rump of her shorts was flecked with dirt.

  “Come on back, Temple,” I said.

  But she didn’t.

  I went inside the house and turned on the television to fill the rooms with as much noise as I could to drown out Temple’s words.

  A Houston televangelist was sitting on a stage with his two co-hosts, a middle-aged blonde woman and a white-haired black man who looked like a minstrel performer rather than a real person of color. The three of them had joined hands and were supposedly receiving telepathic pleas for help from their electronic congregation. Their eyes were squeezed shut, their faces furrowed with strain as though they were constipated.

  I stared in disbelief as the pilot Bubba Grimes took a seat among the latticework of plastic flowers. He talked of mercy flights to Rwandan refugees, or missionaries who risked their lives in jungles that swarmed with wild animals and tropical disease. Grimes’s face broke into thousands of fine wrinkles when he grinned, like the lines in a tobacco leaf. The televangelist was bent forward in his chair, his unctuous voice modifying and directing Grimes’s peckerwood depiction of Western humanity at work in Central Africa.

  The blonde woman and the black man, whose skin looked like greasepaint and whose hair was as white as new snow, nodded their heads reverentially.

  Grimes poured into a glass from a pitcher filled with ice and Kool-Aid and drank until the glass was empty.

  “Bubba loves his Kool-Aid,” the televangelist said.

  Grimes grinned at the camera, his lips as red as a wet strawberry.

  It was sickening to watch.

  I went to my desk in the library and punched in Earl Deitrich’s number on the telephone.

  “What is it now?” he said when he recognized my voice.

  “I drove your wife home the other day because you left her on the sidewalk with a sprained ankle. That was the extent of it. I hope we’re clear on that.”

  “Oh yeah. That’s why y’all were dancing in a bar the same afternoon … You there? No smart-ass remarks to make?”

  I looked stupidly out the window at the blades of my windmill ginning beyond the barn roof.

  “Your wife didn’t do anything wrong, Earl. If there’s any blame involved, it’s mine,” I said.

  “You got that right.”

  I started to ease the receiver down, to let go of pride and anger and all the vituperative energy that had clung to me like a net since I had run into Ronnie Cruise by the church. But for some reason I kept seeing Bubba Grimes’s red smile on the television screen.

  “That sociopathic pilot, the guy you paid to lie about Wilbur Pickett? He landed his plane on my pasture. He wanted to hang you from a meat hook. I’d hire a better class of lowlife, Earl,” I said, then hung up.

  I walked down to the bluffs above the river and threw rocks at a beached, worm-scrolled cottonwood until my arm throbbed.

  Jeff Deitrich didn’t return home that morning or even by that afternoon. Hugo Roberts and his deputies began searching the county for Cholo Ramirez’s 1949 Mercury, questioning truck stop and filling station and motel operators, cruising through Val’s Drive-in and camp-grounds and the wooded promontory high above the river, called the Cliffs, where teenage kids smoked dope and made out.

  Hugo Roberts and his deputies were obviously grunts for Earl Deitrich and would exercise damage control for him, but unfortunately for Earl the Texas Department of Public Safety would not. When the homosexual whom Jeff beat at Shorty’s filed charges against Jeff, the highway patrol picked up the description and license number of Cholo’s car.

  At dusk on that same Sunday Jeff was asleep in the passenger seat of the Mercury when a highway patrolman parked in a roadside picnic area saw Esmeralda roar past him on the two-lane. The patrolman hit his flasher and siren and chased the Mercury for five miles through hills and a one-red-light town, the two of them sweeping onto the shoulder to pass a poultry truck, careening around a wide gravel turnout on the river’s edge, showering rocks like bird shot into the water.

  She crossed a narrow concrete bridge at ninety, the backdraft blowing bait cups and fish-blood-stained newspaper into the air like confetti. Then the road straightened along the river and Esmeralda got serious. The Mercury’s engine roared with a new life and pushed the car’s body back on the springs. Rocks from her tires broke car windows on the opposite side of the road and rang like tack hammers on metal road signs.

  The highway patrol cruiser slowed behind her but not out of defeat.

  Up ahead, just inside the county line, Hugo Roberts and his deputies had set up a roadblock.

  Around a bend, behind bushes and a signboard, so that a driver approaching it at high speed from the south could not see it until the driver was right up on it.

  Esmeralda swerved onto the shoulder and was air-borne going across the irrigation ditch into a tomato field. The Mercury slid sideways for a hundred feet, scouring clouds of cinnamon-colored dust into the air, trenching a path through the tomato vines like the tail of a tornado.

  The engine killed and the hood crackled with heat. As soon as Esmeralda ope
ned the car door Hugo’s deputies were on her like flies, pinning her across the hood, pressing her cheek into the hot metal, running their hands like spiders down her sides and hips and thighs.

  One of the deputies leaned his mouth close to her ear. “You just wrote our names on your ass,” he said.

  None of them had paid attention to Jeff Deitrich.

  Not until he came around the hood of the car and tore into them with both fists, hooking one deputy in the eye, knocking another to the ground with a bloody nose.

  Hugo’s deputies, joined by two highway patrolmen, wrestled him against the grille, kicked his ankles out from under him, and jerked his chin up with a baton.

  “You spoiled fart, we’re trying to help you. This woman damned near killed people,” Hugo said.

  “That’s my wife. One of you put your hand on her again and my old man will have you cleaning litter boxes at the animal shelter,” Jeff said.

  “Your wife?” Hugo said.

  “We got married in Mexico.”

  Hugo Roberts laughed and lit a cigarette. He removed a piece of tobacco from his tongue and looked at it and started laughing again.

  “Let him up and see if you can get his daddy on the radio. Tell me this job ain’t a toe-curlin’ sidesplitter,” he said.

  10

  Just before noon on Monday morning Ronnie Cruise and Cholo Ramirez came through my office door. Ronnie threw a white envelope wrapped with a rubber band on my desk. “What’s that?” I said.

  “A down payment, a retainer. Whatever it’s called. A thousand dollars. We want you to represent Esmeralda,” Ronnie said.

  “Yesterday you were threatening me in front of a church,” I said, and threw the envelope into his chest.

  “This ain’t about me. Jeff Deitrich got her wired on leapers and married her in a chicken yard down in Piedras Negras,” Ronnie said.

  “That’s not how she told it to me,” I said.

  The skin on Ronnie’s face flexed against the bone. “You already talked to her? She says she wanted to marry Jeff?” he asked, his mouth slack.

  “I went to see her because I think she’s getting a bad deal, Ronnie. Here’s the card of a bondsman across the square. I’ll be at her arraignment this afternoon. Use that money to work out something on the bail,” I said.