Heartwood

  “Why you looking out for Esmeralda?” Cholo asked.

  “Because she’s stand-up,” I said.

  His eyes narrowed, as though there were a trick in my words. He wore a white undershirt and his shoulders and upper arms had the swollen proportions of a steroid addict. He stood in front of the glass wall case that contained the revolvers and Winchester rifle of my great-grandfather without seeming to have ever noticed it. His reflection wobbled between the glass and blue felt background like a man trapped under lake ice.

  I waited for him to speak but he didn’t.

  “A pilot named Bubba Grimes told me Earl Deitrich has a weakness for gambling. I hear you told Temple Carrol a story about turning over card games. Is there a connection there, Cholo?” I said.

  “No.”

  But Ronnie was looking at the side of Cholo’s face now.

  “I said no,” Cholo repeated.

  “You two guys build cars that belong on magazine covers. Why do you waste your energies with gangbangers?” I said.

  Ronnie Cruise pointed the index and little fingers of his right hand at me, like devil’s horns. “Man, you’re a Heart only once. You got a tattoo on your throat like Cholo’s, you got shit in your blood and everybody on the street knows it. You were a Texas Ranger?” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Then you should understand.”

  After they left I called Temple and asked her to visit the women’s section of the jail to ensure that nothing untoward was happening to Esmeralda Ramirez.

  “I thought you already went over there,” she said.

  “It doesn’t hurt to err on the side of caution,” I said.

  “Is that the reason you called?”

  “No. Have dinner with me.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she said, and hung up.

  I walked to the window and looked out on the square, at the blinding white reflection of sunlight on the cement and the deep green of the oaks moving in a hot wind. I tried to keep my thoughts straight in my head but I couldn’t. I kept thinking of both Temple and Peggy Jean Deitrich and wondered at how it was possible to feel trepidation, guilt, and attraction whenever the name of either one came into my mind. I heard the secretary’s voice, then the door of my office ease open on the rug.

  Ronnie Cruise stood in the doorway, the envelope full of money stuck down in his belt.

  “She told you she got married ’cause she wanted to? She wasn’t fried when she done it?” he said.

  “I’m not her priest, Ronnie.”

  “I was just clearing it up, that’s all. I’ll be at the arraignment. I got no beef,” he said.

  I bet, I thought.

  Esmeralda was released on bail at four that afternoon. Her brother, Cholo, and Temple Carrol and I walked with her toward Cholo’s car, which was webbed with dried mud from the tomato field she had plowed through. The late sun was like a yellow flame in the trees and she shielded her eyes and kept looking at the row of cars parked up and down the street.

  “Ronnie’s waiting in the car. He wasn’t sure you wanted him inside,” Cholo said.

  “Why’d you bring him? It’s not his business. Stay out of my life, Cholo,” she said.

  “Don’t treat us like that, Esmeralda. We’re your people. It’s you who don’t have no business up here,” Cholo said. Then his face clouded and his metabolism seemed to kick into a higher register. “I don’t understand nothing that’s going on here.”

  But she wasn’t listening to him. Her eyes swept the street once more. She pirouetted on the sidewalk and stared into my face.

  “Is Jeff in jail? Because of the gay guy at Shorty’s?” she said.

  “The guy Jeff beat up had a change of heart. He dropped the charges and decided to vacation in Cancún,” I said.

  But the inference about the way Jeff’s father handled business did not show in her face. “Then where’s Jeff?” she said.

  A steel-gray limo with tinted windows pulled into a yellow zone next to Cholo’s car and Earl Deitrich got out of the back door, dressed in dark blue jeans and soft boots and a snap-button shirt. Peggy Jean stayed far back in the interior of the limo, her face veiled with shadow, her white dress glowing in a ray of sunlight. The chauffeur, a peculiar man named Fletcher, who seemed to have no past or origins, stood on the opposite side of the limo, his arms propped on the roof, a fixed smile on his mouth.

  Earl’s face was warm with sympathy, his hands open, as though he were about to console a survivor at a funeral.

  “Thank the Lord I caught you,” he said to Esmeralda.

  “My attorney is going to contact you tomorrow. We’ll get everything worked out. Believe me, Jeff wants to do the right thing. In the meantime, you call me with any problem you have.”

  “What are you talking about?” she said.

  “Young people act hastily sometimes. That doesn’t mean they have to ruin their lives over it. We’re here to help. We’re in this thing together,” he said.

  “Where’s Jeff?” she asked.

  “He’s got some things to work out. But he’s going to have to do it by himself. It’s important for us to understand that, Esmeralda,” Earl said.

  “He marries my sister but he’s got things to do by himself? She don’t have no more to say. You send the lawyer around, he talks to me first,” Cholo said.

  Earl’s chauffeur walked around the grille of the limo and stood inches from Cholo’s back, smiling at nothing, the black hair that was combed on the sides of his bald pate ruffling slightly in the breeze. He wore black slacks and shined shoes and an open-necked long-sleeve white shirt with cuff links that had red stones in them.

  Earl’s eyes looked directly into the chauffeur’s. The chauffeur’s gaze shifted to a spot across the street and he stepped backwards as though an invisible hand had touched his chest.

  “You’re right, Cholo,” Earl said. “Everybody needs to be included in on this, informed about everything that’s happening. Absolutely.”

  “You think I married your son so I can take your money? You’re pitiful, Mr. Deitrich,” Esmeralda said.

  “I don’t blame you for having bad feelings. I just want to—” Earl began.

  Ronnie Cruise, who sat behind the Mercury’s steering wheel, lifted his eyes into Earl’s face. Ronnie’s eyes were absolutely black, without luster, dead, devoid of all moral sense.

  “Like Cholo says, we got nothing else to talk about here. No disrespect, but tell your man there, what’s his face, Fletcher, to get his fucking hand off Cholo’s paint job,” Ronnie said.

  A few minutes later Temple Carrol and I watched the limo and the customized Mercury drive in different directions through the cooling streets of Deaf Smith. Peggy Jean had never spoken. Not to me, not on behalf of decency or fairness or in some token way to show a bit of kindness toward a Mexican girl who was about to discover you didn’t leave the rural slums of San Antonio because a drunk white boy married you in Piedras Negras.

  “How do you read all that?” Temple asked, lifting her shirt off her moist skin and shaking the cloth.

  I couldn’t answer. I kept thinking about Peggy Jean and the net of shadow and light on her skin and white dress and her silent participation in her husband’s evil.

  “You still on the planet?” Temple said.

  “What do I think?” I said. “I think Jeff Deitrich is a sexual nightmare. I think he’s violent and dangerous and has racist instincts. I hope Esmeralda gets as far from the Deitrich family as possible.”

  “Who lit your fuse?” Temple said.

  That night the sky was blue-black, veined with dry lightning, and brushfires burned in the hills west of Wilbur Pickett’s place out on the hardpan. Deer broke down the wire fence on the back of Wilbur’s pasture, and his Appaloosa and two palominos wandered out into the darkness.

  Kippy Jo stood at the kitchen window, the breeze in her face, and listened to Wilbur hitch the horse trailer on his pickup truck and rattle past the barn out into the fi
elds. Then she fixed coffee for herself and drank it at the kitchen table. When he didn’t return in an hour, as he had promised, she went into the backyard and looked in the direction of the hills and listened to the wind, her black hair whirling on her neck.

  She heard horses nickering in an arroyo, the locked windmill blades buffeting against the wind, the water from the horse tank leaking over the rim into the dirt. Inside her mind, she saw an alfalfa field that bloomed with a fecund, green odor when lightning leaped in the sky; a train crossing a trestle in the hills, and in its aftermath pieces of flame coiling like snakes around the greasewood. She could hear the clicking of the train wheels on the sides of the hills, then the echo of the whistle blowing back over the tops of the cars.

  When the train was gone she should have heard only wind again, and the wet, coursing sound it made across the alfalfa when Wilbur had opened the irrigation locks and flooded the pasture. But she heard a different sound now, first an engine, then wind flapping across a moving surface, and she knew the winged man had arrived.

  She turned out all the lights in the house and walked out to the barn and felt the lightbulb inside the door for heat. She pulled the beaded chain on it and heard it click off and stood with one hand on the edge of a stall, listening. A washtub Wilbur shelled corn in oscillated in the wind on a wood peg against a post. She walked to the opposite end of the barn and looked out at the darkness and the sky that flared with dry lightning and heard the thunder rolling across the hardpan like apples tumbling down a wood chute into a cider press.

  Horses labored out of the arroyo, their chests heaving, their hooves thudding on the sod, spooking walleyed from a presence that moved out of the darkness toward the house.

  Kippy Jo retreated backwards, touching the screen with her hand, pulling it open, and stepping inside the kitchen, her blind eyes lighted by the sky. She latched the screen, bumped against the table, and felt her heart seize in her chest at the squeak the wood legs made against the linoleum.

  She heard the winged man unchain the lock on the windmill and the blades clatter with life and the well water sluice cold and bright out of the pipe that extended over the horse tank. His hair flowed off his head like feathers, and he cupped his hand under the pipe and rubbed water on his face and through his hair, then wiped his skin and hair dry with his coat sleeve and drank from a heavy bottle that he carried in one hand.

  When he stepped away from the tank his feet made cleft-shaped tracks in the mud.

  Kippy Jo breathed hard through her mouth. The landscape in her mind had changed, and she saw the winged man in a foreign place, one of rain and heat where fish heads were strewn on a dirt road that wound between cinder-block huts with tin roofs, and the winged man and soldiers in uniform with steel helmets were pushing Indians backwards into a ditch.

  The winged man was right outside the screen door now, one foot poised on the bottom step. The wind straightened the curtains, flapping the tips, and puffed open the front door. Kippy Jo felt her way along the wall to the bedroom and touched one prong of the antler gun rack that Wilbur had nailed above the dresser.

  What had he said about the gun? She couldn’t remember clearly. There ain’t no such thing as an unloaded firearm in this house, Kippy Jo. A person remembers that, he don’t ever have an accident.

  Was that it?

  She wasn’t sure.

  She lifted the .308 Savage lever-action off the antler prongs, then opened the drawer of the nightstand and removed a .22 Magnum revolver that was inserted in a holster that had no cartridge belt. She sat on the bed and waited, the lever-action rifle across her lap.

  The winged man sliced the screen with a knife blade and popped the latch free with one finger and stepped inside the kitchen. He hesitated, listening to the darkness, touching the warmth of the coffeepot on the stove.

  Then he pushed open the screen door and let it fall back against the jamb, but she knew he was still inside the house. She fitted her hand inside the lever that would feed a round into the rifle’s chamber, but she didn’t know if there were bullets in the magazine or if in fact a round wasn’t already seated in the chamber.

  There ain’t no such thing as an unloaded firearm in this house.

  What had he meant?

  She remained motionless on the bed and left the lever in place. Then she felt the safety and clicked it off and hooked her index finger around the trigger.

  The winged man’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness now and he didn’t need to turn on the light when he entered the bedroom. In her mind the room was filled with moonglow and the winged man stood above her, his eyes fixed on the rifle, unsure whether the next sound his feet made would offer her a target.

  She raised the rifle toward his chest and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing.

  The winged man exhaled his breath in a fetid plume of alcoholic air that touched her skin like damp wool.

  “Darlin’, you aged me ten years,” he said, and gently pulled the rifle from her hands and sat next to her on the bed. He set his bottle on the floor by his feet and pulled the lever loose from the stock of the rifle.

  “Magazine’s full. You could have boiled my cabbage,” he said. When she didn’t reply, he moved closer to her and fitted his arm around her waist. “Wilbur due back directly?”

  She looked straight ahead, her right hand resting under a pillow.

  “I ain’t a bad man, darlin’. I always go the extra mile to work things out. Anybody knows me will tell you that. I ain’t that fond of Earl Deitrich myself,” he said.

  He leaned toward her, his eyes shut, and pressed his lips against her cheek, his forearm gathering her waist closer against him, his tongue quivering slightly against her skin.

  Her fingers closed on the wood grips of the revolver. She slipped it from the holster under the pillow, cocking the hammer back with her thumb, locking the cylinder into place. When she pulled the trigger, the barrel was two inches from the winged man’s right eye.

  His weight tumbled to the floor. But he was still alive, one hand cupped on the angular wound that had torn away the edge of the socket. His metal-sheathed, pointed boots kicked at the bed frame and his other hand tried to lock around her ankle.

  She stood above him and cocked the revolver and fired a second time. She heard his weight flatten into the floor and one boot vibrate briefly like a woodpecker’s beak against the wall.

  Then she sat down on the bed again and waited.

  An hour later, when Wilbur burst into the house, turning on lights in every room, shouting, “Kippy Jo, what’s going on? There’s a plane out in the field … Oh Lord, what’s happened here? What’d this guy try to do?,” she was still sitting on the bed, the revolver on top of the pillow, her white cloth slippers patinated with blood.

  Wilbur sat beside her and held her against his chest. It seemed a long time before he spoke.

  “He hurt you?” Wilbur said.

  “No.”

  “It’s that guy Bubba Grimes,” he said.

  “I know,” she said.

  Wilbur took a deep breath, like a man who accepts the fact that the world is indeed beyond him.

  “His coat’s got buckskin fringe on the arms. His teeth look like they was soaked in Cold Duck. He’s the guy with wings, ain’t he?” Wilbur said.

  “Yes.”

  “You shot both his eyes out, Kippy Jo. That’s what Indians do when they don’t want somebody’s spirit to find the Ghost Trail. They’re gonna say you murdered him.”

  She put one hand in his, then drew her bare feet under her so they would not have to touch the floor.

  11

  The next morning I sat in Marvin Pomroy’s office. He was reading the homicide report filed by one of Hugo Roberts’s crime scene investigators. He was reading it for the third time, his elbows propped on his desk blotter, his forehead resting on his fingers.

  He blew out his breath and tapped a pencil on the blotter.

  “Hugo’s calling it homicide, Billy Bob. H
is work’s sloppy, but I can’t argue with him on this one,” Marvin said.

  “She’s blind. He broke in her house. He had a .38 on him. He was probably going to rape her, then kill both her and her husband.”

  “Why would Grimes want to kill them?”

  “Because Wilbur won’t cop a plea and let Earl Deitrich collect from his insurance company,” I said.

  “Kippy Jo blew out both the victim’s eyes. You think that might show deliberation?” Marvin said.

  “I’ll say it again. She’s blind. From birth.”

  “You told me she sees things inside her head,” he said.

  “You’re going to tell a jury that?”I said.

  “When they shoot once, maybe it’s self-defense. A second shot, point-blank in the head, is an execution.”

  “How’d you like to have Grimes in your wife’s bedroom with a .38 revolver?” I asked.

  “Just get out of here, will you?” he said.

  I walked down the corridor to the concession stand by the stairs, drank a root beer, and used the pay phone, then went back into Marvin’s office. He was talking angrily on the phone, the overhead light shining on his close-cropped scalp, his face bright with a pink glaze.

  “Who was that on the phone?” I asked after he hung up.

  “Hugo Roberts, who else? What do you want?” he said.

  “I called the FBI and a homicide cop in Houston. I thought they ought to know another associate of Earl Deitrich has shown up dead, this time while breaking into the house of a man Earl accuses of stealing from him.”

  “You did that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Those dope transporters y’all went up against down in Coahuila? You ever take any of them prisoner?”

  “Everybody kept the lines simple, Marvin. The winners got to see the sunrise.”

  I thought he was going to make a point, but he didn’t. Instead, he leaned back in his chair, his chin propped on his fingers, and looked at me reflectively.

  “We’re cutting a warrant for Kippy Jo Pickett’s arrest,” he said.