Heartwood

by James Lee Burke

  In the red light his face was filled with a glow that was both saccharine and lustful. When he took off, he raised his bottle in salute; his plane clipped the top of a willow tree and scattered leaves behind him like green bird feathers.

  • • •

  Five days later Lucas Smothers came to my office and sat in the swayback deerhide chair in the corner and took off his hat and gazed out the window. He had been working in the fields with his stepfather, and I could smell an odor like grass and milk in his clothes. He had his mother’s blue eyes, and the light seemed to enter and hold inside them as it would inside tinted crystal. His expression was deliberately innocuous, as it always was when he felt caught between his need to instruct and caution me and at the same time protect me from the knowledge of what his generation, with its rapacious addictions, was really like.

  “A guy who runs around with Jeff? He told me this crazy story about him, about how Jeff ain’t always in control like he pretends. It’s a little off the wall, though,” he said.

  “I’ll try to handle it,” I said.

  “That Mexican girl who got busted out on the highway, Esmeralda? It was Jeff called the cops on her. His friend says Jeff did a one-nighter with her. Except she won’t go away and the truth is Jeff don’t want her to, no matter what he tells himself and everybody else.”

  I had to be in court in twenty minutes and I tried not to let my attention wander or my eyes drop to my wrist-watch.

  “So a couple of nights ago Jeff drives his girlfriend, Rita Summers, down to this Mexican restaurant north of San Antone where Esmeralda works. Jeff’s gonna show Esmeralda there’s nothing between them and Rita is his reg’lar and he ain’t afraid to get it all out in the open, if that’s what it takes.

  “All his buds are there, cranking down tequila sunrises and Carta Blanca, after they been smoking dope all the way from Deaf Smith. When Esmeralda walks by with a tray, some guy goes, ‘I never thought I’d like to have sloppy seconds on a pepperbelly.’

  “Jeff’s face looked like he’d eaten a tack. Rita Summers don’t say anything for a long time, then she calls Esmeralda over and goes, ‘Excuse me, but this food tastes like dog turds.’

  “Esmeralda looks back at her real serious and says, ‘I know. That’s why I don’t eat here.’ ”

  “Pretty funny story,” I said.

  He sat forward in his chair and folded his hands between his knees, his eyes staring at a place on the rug.

  “Jeff can be a rough guy. But getting it on with Ronnie Cross’s girl? Three white guys jumped Ronnie after a football game. He beat them up so bad one of them got down on his knees and begged,” he said.

  “You worried about me?”

  “Ronnie’s girl was in your office. You had a run-in with Cholo. Something real bad’s gonna come out of this. It’s like the feeling I had when I was a kid. I’d wake up in the morning and there was a sick feeling around my heart, like a hand was squeezing it.”

  “These kids don’t have anything to do with my life, Lucas,” I said.

  He looked out the window at the trees blowing in the wind, his skin puckered under one eye.

  “Wilbur Pickett started all this. Now he’s dragging you into his bullshit,” he said. “You older people don’t have no idea what goes on in this town. Y’all ain’t never known.”

  He stared down at the frayed bottoms of his jeans to hide the anger in his face.

  That night it stormed and the house was cool and filled with wind and the smell of ozone. On nights like this I used to hear the tinkle of L.Q. Navarro’s spurs, then he would be standing next to me in the library, the lightning flickering through the window on his grained skin and his lustrous black eyes.

  L.Q. lived in my memory—in fact, was always present in some way in my life—but I didn’t feel guilt about his death any longer and I seldom saw him during my waking hours. I kept his custom-made, blue-black .45 revolver and his holster and cartridge belt in the top drawer of my desk, and sometimes I removed it from the leather and opened the loading gate and turned the cylinder one click at a time, peering through the whorls of light in each empty chamber, my palm wrapped around the yellowed ivory handles that seemed warm and sentient from his callused grip.

  But L.Q. knew me better than I knew myself. On his visitations he would chide, “Tell me it wasn’t fun busting caps on them Mexican dope mules.”

  And when I thought too long about our nocturnal raids into Old Mexico, I became like the untreated drunkard who has renounced whiskey, until in his denunciation he unconsciously begins to rub his lips with the flats of his fingers.

  And just as I always did when these moments occurred, I drove to the small stucco church in a rural working-class neighborhood where I went to Mass and lighted a candle for L.Q. Navarro, for whom I converted to Catholicism after his death, as though somehow I could extend his life by taking on his faith.

  Then I went next door to a clapboard cafe that served buffalo burgers and blueberry milk shakes and sat by the screen window and watched the lightning flicker on the pines in front of the church and listened to the thunder roll harmlessly away into the hills.

  Lucas Smothers had tried to warn me about the youth culture, if one could call it that, of south-central Texas.

  Why should he even have felt the need?

  The answer was that Lucas, like L.Q. Navarro, knew me better than I knew myself.

  I should have been able to walk away from the complexities surrounding the defense of Wilbur Pickett.

  But the problem was a fragrance of roses. Bubba Grimes, the pilot with the drooping left eye, had said it. When Peggy Jean perspired she smelled like warm roses. She smelled like roses and bruised grass in an oak grove and skin that’s sun-browned and cool and warm at the same time. All I had to do was close my eyes and I was back there in that heart-twisting moment with my face buried in her hair, unaware that she and I were creating a memory for which I would never find an adequate surrogate.

  The next morning Hugo Roberts left a message on my office answering machine.

  “We just made a second trip out to Wilbur Pickett’s place. Guess what? That poor li’l peckerwood had a couple of them bonds hid in the panel of his wife’s dresser. Thought I’d just keep you up to date. Have a good day.”

  7

  My son, Lucas, had told me that the older people of Deaf Smith had never known what really went on in our town. He was right. We talked about younger people as though they were no different from the generations of years past. Somehow the eye did not register the kids who were stoned by second period at the high school, the girls who had abortions, the kids infected with hepatitis and herpes and gonorrhea, or the ones who passed their backpacks through a window so they could get their guns past the school’s metal detectors.

  A kid upon his knees in front of a toilet bowl, strings of blood hanging from his broken lips, the jean-clad legs of his tormentors surrounding him like bars, is a sad sight to witness. The fact that the teachers know better than to intervene is even sadder.

  But if we saw younger people as they were, we’d have to examine ourselves as well. We’d have to ask ourselves why we allowed people like Hugo Roberts to dwell in our midst.

  By the time I had listened to his voice on the message machine and walked over to his office, he had another revelation to make. The only light in his blockhouse of an office came from the desk lamp; the upward glow from the shaded bulb made his face look like a wrinkled tan balloon floating in the gloom.

  “We picked up that ole boy Skyler Doolittle. He says he’s your client,” he said.

  “Not exactly. What’d he do?”

  “Hanging around the playground at the elementary, trying to give them kids candy bars.”

  “We have an ordinance about giving away candy bars?”

  “You can be cute, Billy Bob. But I’ve dug children out of leaf piles and garbage dumps. Y’all do that in the Rangers?”

  “I came over here for only one reason, Hugo. You planted
those bonds in Wilbur Pickett’s house. You’ll wish you didn’t.”

  He grinned and picked up a pen from his blotter and popped off the cap. He worked the head of the pen in and out of the cap.

  “You seen that Mexican girl lately, what’s her name, Esmeralda something?” he said.

  I walked across the lawn to the main courthouse, where Skyler Doolittle was sitting on a wood bench inside a holding cage between the jailer’s office and the back elevator. In his long-sleeve white shirt and wide red tie, his bald head and fused neck looked exactly like the domed top of a partially repainted fire hydrant.

  “I’ll have you out of here in about a half hour. But I think it’s a good idea you not go around the school yard again,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t harm them kids,” he said.

  “I know you wouldn’t,” I said. His eyes that were between gray and colorless seemed to take on a measure of reassurance. “By the way, my investigator checked around and didn’t find any indication Earl Deitrich is trying to put you in an asylum. So maybe you were worried unduly on that score, Mr. Doolittle.”

  “Those sheriffs deputies called me a sex pervert. They said they’d had their eye on me. They said the state’s got a special place for my kind.”

  I laced my fingers in the wire mesh of the cage. He looked like the most isolated and socially and physically rejected human being I had ever seen.

  “Some Mexican gangbangers made mention of you to me, Mr. Doolittle. Maybe they’re the same kids who caused the death of a Jewish man in Houston. I think you’re a decent and good man, sir. I suspect your word is your bond. In that spirit I ask you to leave Earl Deitrich alone,” I said.

  He seemed to study my words inside his head, his mouth flexing at the corners.

  “If you ask it of me. Yes, sir, I won’t give him no more trouble,” he said.

  When I walked past the elevator, one that looked like a jail cell on cables, two uniformed deputies were struggling with a waist-chained black inmate in county whites. The inmate’s left eye was cut and white foam issued from his mouth.

  “What are you staring at? Sonofabitch drank out of a fire extinguisher,” one deputy said.

  The second deputy looked at me with recognition, his arm locking simultaneously around the black man’s struggling head.

  “Hey, your client, the freak in the cage? We pick him up again on the same beef, he’s going out of here a steer,” he said.

  That evening a tornado destroyed an entire community south of us and killed over thirty people. I rode Beau, my Morgan, out into the fields and watched the dust blowing on the southern horizon and the rain clouds moving like oil smoke across the sun. I turned Beau back toward the house just as the rain began to march across the fields and dimple the river.

  The sky turned black and the temperature must have dropped twenty degrees. I turned on the lights in the barn and tied on a leather apron and pried a loose shoe off Beau’s back left hoof. A car turned off the highway into my drive, paused for a moment by the side of the porch, then rolled slowly to the front of the barn.

  Its headlights were on high beam and shone directly into my eyes.

  I picked up a hammer off the anvil and stood just inside the opened doors of the barn. The headlights went off and I saw a chopped, sunburst 1961 T-Bird, with chrome wire wheels and an oxblood leather interior, full of Mexican kids. Ronnie Cruise cut the engine and walked through the rain into the barn.

  He wore baggy black trousers and a form-fitting ribbed undershirt and a rosary with purple glass beads around his neck; his shoulders looked tan and hard and were beaded with water.

  “That’s quite a car,” I said.

  “Me and Cholo built it. I done a lot of custom work for people around here,” he said. His eyes dropped momentarily to the hammer in my hand. “You think we’re here to ’jack your Avalon, man?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I didn’t mean to dis you at the garage. But see—” He held his fingers up in the air and looked at them as he spoke, as though they held the words he needed. “See, I heard what the lady said when my back was turned, about two guys going off a roof. Like, that’s the story somebody told you. But you didn’t have the respect to ask me about it. I don’t think that’s too cool, man.”

  “So maybe it’s none of our business.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll clear it up for you. A couple of Viscounts put their hands all over a girl in a theater. Then when they had to explain theirselves they got scared and like the punks they were they pulled a nine. Maybe the guy they pulled it on got it away from them and chased them across a couple of roofs. So the two Counts decided they were gonna jump to a fire escape. They almost made it. But the guy didn’t throw nobody off a roof …” His eyes searched my face. “Why you keep looking at me like that?”

  “Because I don’t have any idea why you’re here.”

  He cut his eyes sideways and exhaled through his nose.

  “There’s a tornado out there and I couldn’t get back home,” he said.

  “Y’all want some coffee?”

  He pawed at his cheek with three fingers. “Yeah, I think that’d be nice,” he said.

  I went into the house and brought back a pot of coffee and a paper sack full of tin cups. His friends, two girls and two boys, all of them wearing caps backwards on their heads, sat on hay bales or walked idly through the stalls, touching saddles, coils of polyrope, rakes, hoes, mattocks, bridles, a pair of chaps, axes, and fire tongs as though they were historical artifacts.

  I rasped Beau’s hoof smooth and reshoed it, then led him toward his stall. Ronnie Cruise stepped behind him to get to the coffeepot, and Beau’s back hooves slashed into the air like jackhammers. Ronnie grabbed his shinbone, his face white with pain, his shirtfront drenched with coffee. I grabbed him by one arm and eased him down on a hay bale.

  “You all right?” I said.

  “Oh yeah. I always like getting my spokes broken.” He rocked forward, squeezing his shin with both hands.

  “Let me show you something. You can work behind a horse all you want as long as you let him know what you’re doing,” I said.

  I ran my hand and arm along Beau’s spine and rump and let my body brush close into his when I moved across his hindquarters. “An animal is just like a human being. He fears what he doesn’t understand. Here, step up beside me,” I said.

  Ronnie Cruise rose to his feet, then hesitated, his tongue wetting his bottom lip. I picked up his hand by the wrist and set it on Beau’s rump, then pulled Ronnie toward me. Beau twisted his head once so he could see us, then blew out his breath and shifted his weight on the plank floor.

  “See?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Your leg okay?”

  “Yeah, no problem.” His face was inches from mine now.

  “Do me a favor, will you?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t wear a rosary as a piece of jewelry.”

  Raindrops as big as marbles clattered on the tin roof. He stared back at me, his mouth cone-shaped with incomprehension.

  In the morning the San Antonio and Austin and local newspapers were filled with news about the tornado that had scoured an entire town out of the earth. But they also carried a wire story about a fire that had burned down half a city block in Houston later the same day.

  Before I could finish reading the newspaper’s account of the fire, the phone next to my kitchen table rang. It was the Houston homicide detective whose name was Janet Valenzuela.

  “Why is it people from Deaf Smith keep showing up in my caseload?” she said.

  “You’ve lost me,” I said.

  “It’s not a good story,” she said.

  The fire had started in the bottom of an empty office building that had once housed a savings and loan company. The rooms had been filled with stacked office furniture, rolled carpets stripped from the floors, jars of paint thinner, and paper packing cases left behind by the movers. The fire rippled across the ex
posed dry wood in the floors, snaked up the walls, flattening temporarily against the ceiling, then blew glass onto the sidewalks and curled outside onto the brick facade.

  Five minutes later the ceiling collapsed and the second- and third-story windows were filled with a yellow-red brilliance like the marbled colors inside a foundry.

  A fireman inside the fourth-floor stairwell used his radio to report what he swore was the voice of a child. Three other firemen went into the building, and together they worked their way from room to room on the fourth floor, ripping open doors with their axes, their heavy coats and the inside of their face shields starting to superheat from the flames crawling up the walls.

  Then a fireman yelled into his radio: “It’s a doll. A talking doll. Oh God, the tiger’s got us … Tell my wife I …”

  The fire, fed by a sudden rush of cold air, turned the brick shell of the building into a chimney swirling with flame. The roof exploded into the night sky like a Roman candle.

  “The doll was one of these battery-operated jobs. We think a homeless woman left it in there and the heat set it off,” Janet Valenzuela said.

  “How’d the fire start?”

  “Winos and street people live in there. Somebody saw some Hispanic kids hanging around earlier. The place was filled with accelerants. Take your choice.”

  “Why are you calling me?”

  “The building belonged to a savings and loan company before it went bankrupt and was seized by the government. But the land it stood on is owned by a man named Earl Deitrich. That’s the guy Max Greenbaum was an accountant for. Funny coincidence, huh?”

  “Come up and see us sometime. Widen your horizons,” I said.

  “If it’s arson and homicide on federal property, you’ll get to meet us as well as the FBI. Say, does this guy Deitrich know any Houston gang members?”

  “You ever hear of a bunch called the Purple Hearts in San Antone?” I asked.

  “Say again?”

  At lunchtime I walked from my office to our town’s one health club and sat in the steam room with my back against the tiles. The bruises from the baton blows I had taken in Hugo Roberts’s office looked like purple and yellow carrots under my skin. I dipped a sponge in a bucket of water and squeezed it over my head, then lay on my back and stretched my muscles by pulling my knees toward my chest.