Heartwood

by James Lee Burke

  He walked away from her toward the house, his head twisted back toward her, his close-set eyes like those of a wolf circling a steel trap. He stepped inside the kitchen door and pressed the heel of each hand hard into his temples, opening and closing his mouth until the whirring of blood ceased in his ears. The interior of the kitchen was painted with fire from the glow of sun through the west windows. He struck the heels of his hands repeatedly against the sides of his skull but his head would not clear. For a moment he felt he was deep under the earth, inside a box of flame that had been created especially for him and that he would never escape.

  • • •

  Rain was falling across the sunset when Pete and I entered the stucco Catholic church where he and I attended Mass. It was cool from the electric fans that oscillated on the walls and the air smelled of stone and the water in the rain ditch outside. I lighted a candle for L.Q. Navarro in the rack of burning candle vases in front of a statue of Jesus’ mother, then entered the confessional.

  The priest was ten years younger than I, a thin, Mexican Franciscan named Father Paul who had once been a labor organizer for the United Farm Workers. He listened while I told him of my behavior at Peggy Jean Deitrich’s cottage, the self-delusion that had put me there, the possible compromise of my clients’ interest.

  Then I relived the moment that had burned inside me like a hot coal. “A little boy I should have been watching almost drowned. In another minute he would have been gone,” I said.

  “I see,” the priest said. Through the screen I could see his profile, his jaw propped on two fingers, his eyes staring into the gloom. “Is there more?”

  “No.”

  “I have the sense there’s something you haven’t mentioned. I think it has to do with anger.”

  “I don’t see the connection, Father.”

  “You don’t have to answer this question if you don’t want to. But do you regret the injury done the third party, the husband?”

  I could hear the rain running off the tile roof outside the confessional, the sound of someone kneeling in a pew, a car passing on the wetness of the street.

  “He’s an evil man,” I said.

  Father Paul’s profile turned toward me for just a moment, then he looked straight ahead again, as though resigning himself to an old knowledge about human behavior.

  “By whatever power is vested in me, I absolve you of your sins. The peace of the Lord be with you, Billy Bob,” he said.

  The light in the sky was green when Pete and I walked outside and the rain was dripping into the shadows under the pines on the lawn. Pete wore his straw hat low over his eyes and breathed in the dampness of the air as though he were taking the world’s measure.

  “We still gonna get them buffalo burger steaks?” he asked.

  “You bet,” I said.

  “That’s Temple Carrol’s car in front of the cafe,” he said.

  “It sure is.”

  “Why you stopping?”

  “No reason.”

  “You sure tell a mess of fibs, Billy Bob. Soon as I figure out one angle of yours, you come up with another.”

  “Do me a favor, Pete.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Stay out of my head.”

  “I knew you was gonna say that.”

  The inside of the cafe was brightly lit, the front window beaded with rainwater, the fans ruffling the oilcloths on the tables. I hadn’t seen Temple since the incident at Peggy Jean’s cottage on the Comal and my voice felt thick in my throat when we sat down at her table. The side of her face was pink from the sunset and rippled with the shadows of raindrops running down the window. She kept looking inquisitively into my eyes.

  “Y’all go to church on weeknights?” she said.

  “Billy Bob went to confession,” Pete said.

  “Oh? Did we do something we shouldn’t?” she said, looking at me strangely.

  “I got pulled in a whirlpool. Billy Bob saved my life. But he blames himself ’cause I was in the whirlpool. That ain’t no reason to go to confession,” Pete said, and began chewing on a breadstick.

  “You were in the river? It’s pretty high this time of year for swimming, Pete,” she said.

  “We was at Ms. Deitrich’s place in New Braunfels. That’s what I was saying. Billy Bob and Ms. Deitrich was up changing at the cottage when I got pulled into the whirlpool,” Pete said.

  “Oh, at Ms. Deitrich’s. South Texas’s angel of charity. I should have known. Did you have a good time, Billy Bob?” Temple said, her eyes peeling the skin off my face.

  “It wasn’t a good day. It was also the last one I’ll have like it,” I said.

  “Why is it I don’t believe you? Why is that, please tell me?” she said. She set down her coffee cup in the saucer, picked up her check, and rose from the table.

  “What ch’all talking about?” Pete asked, his face filled with confusion.

  Early Wednesday morning I got the milk delivery off the porch and picked up a half dozen eggs around the chicken run and under the tractor and put them in an apple basket and began beating an omelette in the kitchen. Beau was drinking out of an aluminum tank just inside the rails of the horse lot and I saw his head lift at the sound of a car in my drive.

  Marvin Pomroy came around back and tapped on the screen door to the porch. He wore a seersucker suit and narrow brown suspenders with his white shirt. I thought he had come to the house to apologize for threatening to break my jaw. Wrong. He sat down at the kitchen table without being invited and began smacking one fist erratically into his palm.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “I think Wilbur and Kippy Jo Pickett and Skyler Doolittle are all guilty of various crimes. I think guilty people come to you as a matter of course, primarily because you’re a sucker for daytime TV watchers who model their lives on soap operas. So my being here has nothing to do with a change of attitude about your clients,” he said.

  “Thanks for the feedback on that, Marvin.”

  “But because your clients are dirty doesn’t mean that Earl Deitrich isn’t.”

  “You’ve got a problem of conscience?” I asked.

  “No. What I’ve got is this character Fletcher Grinnel, Deitrich’s chauffeur. A week ago he was staring at me in the courthouse with this smirk on his face. I said, ‘Can I help you with something?’

  “He says, ‘I was just admiring your suspenders. I served with a man, an ex-banker, actually, who always wore suspenders like that when we were on leave. He was a ferocious fighter. You’d never believe it from his appearance.’

  “So I said, ‘You were in the military?’

  “He goes, ‘Here and there. Mostly with a private group. Ex-Legionnaires, South African mercs, guys who were drummed out of the British army, that sort of thing. But we saved a lot of Europeans from the wogs and the bush bunnies.’ ”

  Marvin paused, his eyes blinking.

  “What does this have to do with my clients?” I asked.

  “Several political pissants in Austin keep calling me up about Wilbur and Kippy Jo Pickett, like somehow I’m not fully committed to the situation. Then I have this encounter with Fletcher Grinnel, who seems to think he can use racist language with me as though we’re in the same white brotherhood. So I called in a favor from a federal agent in Washington and had him run this guy.

  “Grinnel is a naturalized U.S. citizen from New Zealand. He’s also worked for some very nasty people in South Africa and the Belgian Congo. He thinks cutting off body parts is quite a joke.”

  “That’s on his sheet?”

  “No. Grinnel told me his friend, the ex-banker who wore suspenders like mine, made necklaces of human ears and fingers that he traded for ivory and rhino horn. Grinnel said his friend put a burning tire around a man and made his family watch.”

  Marvin sat very still in the chair, his face bemused at the strangeness of his own words, one strand of hair hanging in the middle of his glasses.

  “I think once in a while we’re allo
wed to look into someone’s eyes, somebody who a moment earlier seemed perfectly normal, and see right to the bottom of the Abyss,” he said. “But maybe that’s just my fundamentalist upbringing.”

  His eyes lifted earnestly into mine, as though waiting for an opinion.

  That evening Wilbur Pickett drove a flatbed pipe truck into my backyard and stepped down from the cab with a half pint of whiskey in his hand. His skin was filmed with dust, his washed-out denim shirt unbuttoned on his chest, his battered hat streaked with grease.

  “You’re listing hard to port, bud,” I said.

  “I got run off two jobs in one day. The driller cut me loose at the rig and the water well boss said he felt ashamed at hiring a rodeo man to do nigra work. Told me he was firing me out of respect. How about them pineapples?” he said.

  “Were you drunk?”

  “No. But I’m working on it.”

  “Why’d they run you off?”

  He tipped the half-pint bottle to his lips and drank gingerly, perhaps no more than a capful, the whiskey lighting in the glass against the sun.

  “Somebody got to them. Somebody with the name Earl Deitrich, I expect,” he said.

  “We can do something about that,” I said.

  “No, you cain’t. He’s the man with the money and the power. I thought folks here’bouts would stand behind one of their own. That’s the thinking of a fool, son.”

  “Come inside.”

  “Nope. I’m throwing it in. Cut a deal with that fellow Pomroy.”

  “What?”

  “I’m letting Earl Deitrich in on our drill site up in Wyoming. Neither me or Kippy Jo is going to jail.”

  He tried to hold his eyes on mine, then his stare broke and he drank from the bottle again.

  “I don’t care what Deitrich or his people have told you. Marvin Pomroy won’t have anything to do with something like this. Frankly I won’t, either,” I said.

  “Then I’ll get me another lawyer.”

  “That’s your choice, sir.”

  “I ain’t no ‘sir.’ I ain’t nothing. But at least I ain’t been sleeping with the wife of the man trying to put my friends in jail.”

  His face was sullen, embarrassed, and accusatory, like a child’s, all at the same time. I turned and walked back inside the house. I heard him fling his uncapped whiskey bottle whistling into the twilight, then start his truck and back out into the street, tearing a swatch out of a poplar tree.

  What could I do about Wilbur? The answer was nothing. I drove out to his house on the hardpan in the morning. As I approached the house a ’49 Mercury roared past me in the opposite direction.

  Kippy Jo Pickett was on the front steps, in the shade, snapping beans in a pan, when I walked into the yard.

  “That was Cholo Ramirez’s car,” I said.

  “Yes, he just left.”

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “Visiting. Telling me about his life, his cars, things he worries about.”

  “That kid has brain damage. If I were you, I’d leave him alone.”

  “His mother’s boyfriend broke his skull when he was a baby. Do we also throw away the part of him that wasn’t damaged? Is that what you mean?”

  I looked off in the distance, across the hot shimmer of the fields, and watched Cholo run a stop sign, then swerve full-bore around an oil truck.

  “Where’s Wilbur?” I asked.

  “He went down to the state employment office.”

  “Earl Deitrich’s trying to jerk y’all around. If you’re jammed up for money, I can lend you some. Don’t give in to this man.”

  Her eyes fixed on my face and stayed there. A brown and white beagle lay in a shallow depression by the side of the gallery, its tail flopping in the silence.

  “You’d do that?” she asked.

  “Pay me back when y’all punch into your first oil sand.”

  “Wilbur’s scared. He sits by himself in the kitchen in the middle of the night. He thinks I’m going to prison.”

  “Listen, Kippy Jo, men like Earl Deitrich steal people’s dreams. They have no creative vision of their own, no love, and no courage. They envy people like you and Wilbur. That’s why they have to destroy you.”

  She was quiet a long time. The sun was hot and bright in the sky, and the pools of rainwater in the alfalfa glimmered like quicksilver. Kippy Jo set down the tin pan of snapbeans and kneaded the thick folds of skin on top of the beagle’s neck. The wind blew her hair in a black skein across her eyes.

  “He won’t listen,” she said.

  Earl Deitrich was one of those who believed that when force, control, and arrogance did not get you your way, you simply applied more of the same.

  That night the moon was down, and rain clouds sealed the sky and heat lightning flickered over the hills in the west. Wilbur and Kippy Jo slept under an electric fan, the drone of the motor and the tinny vibration of the wire basket over the blades threading in and out of their sleep as the fan head oscillated on its axis. At 2 A.M. Wilbur heard a crunching sound, like car tires rolling slowly across pea gravel. He rose from the bed in his underwear and lifted the .308 Savage lever-action from the rack and walked barefoot into the living room. He looked out into the drive and at the road in front and saw nothing. He leaned down on the windowsill, the curtains blowing against his skin. He stared into the darkness until his eyes burned and he imagined shapes that he knew were not there.

  He walked into the kitchen and took a quart of milk from the icebox and drank from it. Then he heard car tires crunching on the gravel again, rolling faster this time, and he realized the sounds had come from the back of the house, not the front.

  He opened the screen door and stepped into the yard just as three men pushed his pickup truck out onto the road, turned over the engine, and jumped inside. He ran to the side of the house, threw his rifle to his shoulder, and levered a round into the chamber.

  He moved the iron sights just ahead of the driver’s window, saw the man silhouetted against a light on a neighbor’s barn, and felt his finger tighten on the trigger. Then he blew out his breath and lifted the barrel into the air, resting the stock in the cradle of his left arm. He watched the truck disappear down the road toward the hills in the west.

  He heard Kippy Jo behind him.

  “I’ll call 911,” she said.

  “It won’t do no good. It’ll just bring Hugo Roberts and them thugs of his back out here.”

  “Come back in the house,” she said, tugging at his arm.

  “No. They turned off the road into the hills. They’re stopping for something. I’m going after them sons of bucks.”

  “That’s what they want you to do.”

  “Then they should have thought twicet about what they prayed for. That’s a Wilbur T. Pickett guarantee.”

  Wilbur put on a cotton shirt and jeans and a pair of boots and hung a flashlight on a lanyard around his neck and bridled one of his palominos and rode it bareback out to the hills, the lever-action Savage propped across the horse’s withers. He rode through arroyos and a sandy wash dimpled with pools of red water. He rode up a steep incline into mesquite and blackjack that had been scorched black from brushfires, into stands of green trees, across rocky ground, and onto a plateau that looked out on the railroad trestle.

  Heat lightning leaped between the clouds and he saw his truck parked down below, under the stanchions of the trestle.

  He brought his boot heels into the ribs of the palomino, leaning his weight back toward the rump, his rifle held vertically in his right arm, and rode down the slope into the ravine.

  The wind shifted and an odor struck his face that was like a green chemical, like the smell of a river that has receded from flood stage and exposed the remains of drowned livestock.

  Both of the truck doors were open and Wilbur could hear blowflies droning in the darkness. He unhooped the flashlight from his neck and slipped from the horse’s back and walked around to the front of the truck.

  A figure sa
t stiffly behind the steering wheel, the hands resting motionlessly on each side of the horn button. Strands of gray hair lifted in the hot wind around a face that seemed to have no features, that was as black as leather that had molded in the ground.

  When he flicked on the flashlight he saw his mother in her burial clothes, now stained by groundwater, her chin and the corners of her mouth puckered tightly against the bone in an eternal scold, her slitted eyes staring at him as brightly as fish scale.

  • • •

  The following morning Wilbur recounted all the above in my office, spinning his hat on his index fìnger.

  “They dug up your mother’s grave?” I said incredulously.

  “They sure did. My bet would be on that Fletcher fellow. Anyway, I already called Earl Deitrich,” he replied.

  “You going to let him get away with—”

  He flipped his hat by the brim up on his head. “My mother was a long-suffering, Christian woman. I know that ’cause not a day passed without her telling me. She told my daddy that so often he used to walk around the house with wads of newspaper screwed in his ears. He even said she’d get up out of the grave to tell the rest of us how worthless we was.

  “So that’s what I told Earl Deitrich. That woman has been a lifetime motivator. The best part of Earl Deitrich run down his daddy’s leg and there won’t be a beer joint left in Texas the day Kippy Jo and me cut him in on our oil site. Durn, if that boy didn’t slam down the phone, then pick it up and slam it down again.”

  16

  It seemed like nothing went easy for Jeff Deitrich. Or at least that’s what he told Lucas Smothers after he came back from seeing his father and being told he had one of two choices: lose Esmeralda Ramirez and her beaner relatives or get used to the lifestyle of oil field trash.

  “He had my name taken off the membership list at the club. He canceled all my credit cards,” Jeff said.

  “So flush the club,” Lucas said.

  “Luke, my boy, black basketball players with orange hair and collard greens for brains make twenty million dollars in a season. Think about where you’re going to be on your current salary in ten years.”