Heartwood

by James Lee Burke

  “I’ll say this once. This is a private conversation,” Ronnie said.

  “Fuck you, Ronnie. You’re on my property,” Lucas said.

  Ronnie breathed slowly through his nose and picked at his nails. He cut his head at Lucas, then at me.

  “We came here to work something out that don’t got nothing to do with you two. But you treat us like we’re spit on the bottom of your shoe. No different than Mr. Deitrich. You think you can bing with us, man? You really think that?” he said.

  “We’re not part of your problem. You need to understand that,” I said.

  Ronnie wiped at his nose, looking at nothing.

  “Call me, Essie,” he said to Esmeralda.

  “It’s over, Ronnie,” she said.

  He rubbed his thumb back and forth across his forehead and walked toward his car, his face lost in thought, suddenly oblivious to our presence.

  Lucas and I watched the T-Bird disappear down the road.

  “How do you read that?” Lucas asked.

  “Don’t ever humiliate a guy like Ronnie Cruise in front of his peers,” I said.

  “Well, he ain’t coming on my property and wiping his feet on people,” he said.

  I looked at his profile against the early sun, the heat in his cheeks, the manly energy in his eyes, and felt my heart sink like a stone in a well.

  It’s strange how people bloom, even in poisonous soil, once they allow themselves to become what they’ve always been.

  Jeff Deitrich had rebelled against his father and married a Mexican girl and had tried to cut it on the floor of a drilling rig. But he quickly learned that yielding to the seduction of his father’s world brought no penalty, instead only celebration of the returned prodigal, and that he had been foolish to compete with people who secretly coveted the opulence that was his by right.

  At the end of the week I had to go out to Post Oaks Country Club and meet a client, an obese, self-deluded, thoroughly corrupt oilman who was about to enter Huntsville Penitentiary.

  We sat in the cooling shadows on the terrace while, not far away, golfers on the driving range were hitting into an enormous white net. My client’s face went soft and then nakedly lustful as he gazed over my shoulder.

  “I’m born again, but an elegant woman like that can sure give a man thoughts,” he said.

  I turned in my chair and saw Peggy Jean and Jeff Deitrich, side by side, dressed in tennis whites, hitting off the rubber tee into the net. Jeff’s form was perfect, his skin tanned as dark as the polished wood in his club. Peggy Jean rested one hand on his shoulder, her head bending down with laughter as both of them shared a joke, more like confidants or even sweethearts than child and stepmother.

  “It’s too bad Earl don’t spend more time at the fireside and not at the poker table. For a while I thought he was going to be selling his furniture out on the lawn. He must have hit a gusher,” my client said.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Don’t pay me no mind. If I was single, I’d probably drool a bucket full.”

  “I was thinking about Jeff,” I said.

  “Jeff? His mother should have thrown him back and raised the afterbirth. You mixed up with that little piss-pot? I thought you had some smarts. No wonder I’m headed for the pen.”

  I said goodbye to my client and walked past Jeff and Peggy Jean toward my car. Then I stopped and looked at their backs until they both felt my eyes on them.

  “Why, Billy Bob. Come have a drink with us,” Peggy Jean said. And she seemed to say it with genuine warmth.

  “I’d like a word with Jeff,” I said.

  The smile went out of her face. “I beg your pardon?” she said.

  “Would you step over here, please, Jeff?” I said.

  He grinned good-naturedly, as though tolerating a harmless aberration, then came toward me, resting his club on his shoulder.

  “What’s up, Billy Bob?” he said.

  “You exploited my son’s friendship. You used his home, then dumped your wife there. Now Lucas is taking your weight with Ronnie Cruise,” I said.

  “I can’t control what others do. You sure you don’t want to hit some balls or have a drink?”

  “You’re quite a guy,” I said.

  He winked at me, his eyes full of ridicule, and went back to the tee. Peggy Jean had never moved, her face stamped with the insult of being rebuffed publicly in her own club.

  She waited for me to speak or say goodbye. But I didn’t. Behind me, I heard a suck of air as Jeff cut his club viciously into a golf ball.

  On the way home I felt my stomach suddenly seize and constrict, as though the lining were being stapled by a machine. My breath went out of my mouth, and my chest hit the steering wheel. Up ahead, I saw Temple Carrol working in her yard, pulling weeds on her hands and knees out of a hydrangea bed and throwing them behind her on the grass. I turned into her drive and sat very still behind the wheel, my face sweating.

  She glanced over her shoulder, then continued her work. I wiped my face on my sleeve and opened the door and got out. Then I had to sit down again.

  Temple walked toward me, wiping her hands on her shorts, blowing her breath up into her face to remove a strand of hair from her eyes.

  “You all right?” she said.

  “I must have eaten the wrong thing.”

  She cupped her hand on my forehead.

  “You’re burning up. I’ll drive you home,” she said.

  “I’m fine.” I tried to smile. “Saw Jeff Deitrich at the country club. He was born to it.”

  “Earthshaking news.”

  “You hear anything about Earl Deitrich having a big infusion of cash in his business?”

  “Move over and quit worrying about the Deitrichs,” she said, and nudged me sideways into the passenger seat.

  A few minutes later she walked me to my front door, one hand under my arm.

  “Get in bed and I’ll check on you in a couple of hours,” she said.

  “What about my car?”

  “I’ll bring it back. Do what I say.”

  I went up to my bedroom on the third floor and switched on the floor and ceiling fans and opened the windows wide and lay down on top of the sheets in my underwear. In minutes my pillow was soaked. Outside the window, in the setting of the sun, I could see the vast green rolling landscape to the west, as though I were looking into the vastness of the world itself, with all its shadows and mysteries and its alluring red-tinged precipices that fell away into darkness.

  I went into the bath and showered and lay down again but found no relief. It was dark now, and in my mind I saw the flashes of gunfire in the arroyo where L.Q. Navarro died, relived the moments when bullets pierced my own body like hot pokers, floated once again in the warm water that Morpheus prepared for his friends.

  Kippy Jo Pickett had called me a giver of death. Her words were like spittle in the face, and I could not dismiss or forget them. L.Q. and I killed Mexican drug mules on the pretext they would otherwise never be made accountable for their crimes; but the truth was we killed them because we personally loathed what they were and what they did and we took enormous satisfaction in leaving them where they fell, a card twisted in the mouth, for their friends to find.

  Then I saw L.Q. standing at the foot of my tester bed, his hat and pinstripe suit streaked with dust, his white shirt glowing radiantly in the dark. He inserted a gold toothpick in the corner of his mouth.

  “Get rid of them thoughts. It was me got us down there, bud,” he said.

  “I got something bad in me, L.Q. It’s just like the time I caught one in the chest.”

  “The trip across ain’t bad. It’s just like you and me splashing hell for breakfast through the Rio Grande. You blink and there’s ole red-eye coming up in the east.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “You ain’t got to be. It’ll happen for you. It’s the one moment you ain’t got to plan,” he said, then turned, as though distracted by something behind him, a gleam of light r
eflecting on his gold toothpick.

  Temple Carrol came through the door and walked right through him and out the other side, so that his presence was now a black-purple silhouette around her body.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and took both my hands in hers and looked into my face.

  “I shouldn’t have left you,” she said.

  I wanted to answer but I couldn’t. I could hear my teeth rattling in my jaws. She wiped my brow with her hand and touched my cheek with the back of her wrist.

  “I’m going to get some water and some damp towels,” she said, and started to rise from the bed.

  But I held both of her hands tightly in mine, and like a child I pulled her toward me, put my face in her breasts, slipped my arms around her sides, felt her hesitate momentarily, then lie down against me and place her hands on the back of my head and neck, one knee pointed across my thigh.

  I could hear a cacophony of huge, thick-bodied birds outside the window and the flapping of wings that spread as wide as a man’s arms.

  The whirring sounds in Temple’s chest were like those inside a seashell, like wind and salt tide blowing onto a beach. I held her against me while carrion birds drifted in a red sky behind my eyelids.

  18

  I awoke in the hospital the next afternoon. A hard yellow light filled the room and seemed to enamel the walls and furniture with a severity and coldness that was unrelated to the season. The inside of my throat was raw, as though it had been scraped by a metal tool, and my head reeled when I went into the bathroom.

  I got back into bed and held a pillow across my eyes and tried to sleep but couldn’t. A half hour later a tall physician in greens by the name of Tobin Voss came in and sat on the foot of my bed. His jaws were unshaved, his thick graying hair uncombed. He had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam but never spoke except in an oblique way of his experience there.

  “You feel like somebody hit all over you with an ice mallet?” he asked.

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Tainted food maybe. We pumped your stomach out. You don’t remember it?”

  “No.”

  “We were a little worried about you for a while. Your girlfriend, the one who brought you in? She’s quite a gal.”

  “She’s a private investigator who works for me.”

  “I’ve got it. At two in the morning your P.I. is at your house. Sorry I had things confused,” he said. “Is anybody mad at you?”

  “What are you telling me, Doc?”

  “I’ve seen Third World peasants eat rice from storage dumps we poisoned. You brought back some memories.”

  He stood up from the bed and looked out the window at the trees below. The backs of his arms were covered with salt-and-pepper hair. When he turned back from the window he was smiling.

  “Your private investigator? She pushed your gurney into the E.R. and put the fear of God in a couple of people. She’s not looking for a job in midlevel management, is she?” he said.

  I got home late that evening, light-headed and dehydrated, the inside of my eyelids like sandpaper. I went out to the barn and removed two vinyl sacks of garbage from the garbage cans and emptied them on a large piece of plywood and used a garden rake to separate out packaged and canned food from any that might have been tampered with.

  Mixed in with the takeout food from a half dozen restaurants and stores were the remains of watermelon, cantaloupes, strawberries, and bananas I had bought at roadside stands. But local merchants and tailgate fruit vendors didn’t lie in wait to poison their customers. Maybe Doc Voss just had too many shadows left in his mind from Vietnam, I thought.

  Temple Carrol’s car came up the drive and stopped. I raked all the decaying food I had bought in supermarkets into a pile and rebagged it, then leaned over and picked up an empty half-gallon milk carton.

  “I went to the hospital this afternoon and you were asleep. When I came back you were checked out,” Temple said.

  “I hear you shook them up in the E.R.,” I said, and sat down on the scrolled-iron, white-painted bench under the chinaberry tree, my head dizzy from bending over.

  She wore a pair of soft boots and rust-colored jeans and a checkered tan shirt. Her eyes fixed on mine while she slipped a stick of gum in her mouth.

  “You remember a lot?” she asked.

  “Big blank.”

  She nodded, her jaws chewing slowly.

  “The doc says maybe you saved my life,” I said.

  “Dull night. A girl has to do something for kicks.”

  The sky was lavender and streaked with fire behind her head. She put her hands in her back pockets and lifted her chin slightly.

  “I guess I remember pieces of things,” I said.

  “Pieces? Wonderful choice,” she said.

  I looked away from her stare. My face was cold and moist in the breeze. I could feel blood veins tightening in my head, my vision slip in and out of focus. “You were there for me. That’s what I remember, Temple,” I said.

  “There for you? Wow,” she said, her face heating.

  I couldn’t think of an adequate response. I ran one hand through my hair and stared at the tops of my boots.

  “What are you doing with that milk carton?” she said irritably.

  I rubbed my thumb over a tiny burr on the side, then splayed open the top for Temple to look inside.

  “I have the milk delivered. There’s a puncture in it. Like the kind a hypodermic needle would make,” I said.

  On Monday morning I met Tobin Voss in his office out by the four-lane. A half dozen books were opened on his desktop. On a glass-covered bookcase behind his chair was a framed color photograph of him and his flight crew in front of a Huey helicopter.

  “Here’s a copy of the paperwork from the lab. You ever hear of a World War II Japanese group called Unit 731?” he said.

  “No.”

  “They conducted experiments on Chinese prisoners in Manchuria. The subject probably doesn’t come up often in our trade negotiations with Tokyo. Traces from your specimens show similarities to a couple of toxins they developed.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Put it this way. I can’t tell you with certainty the toxic element that was in your system. But I can tell what it’s not. So that creates an area of speculation. The best I can come up with is this historical stuff.” Then he smiled and asked, “You haven’t been to Africa lately, have you?”

  “Why?”

  “According to my nifty book here on political intrigue and assassination, Unit 731’s gift to biological warfare has been used to murder several democratic leaders in Africa, primarily because its symptoms are like a number of fatal viruses carried by diseased animals.”

  “How about Central Africa, the old Belgian Congo?”

  His eyes dropped to an open page in his book, then looked at me again.

  His humorous cynicism was gone. “How’d you know?” he said.

  Tuesday Wesley Rhodes was in my office, wired, shaking, and wrapped so tight his eyes were bulging out of his head. In spite of the temperature outside, he wore two long-sleeve shirts to give his body dimension, and motorcycle boots with two inches of platform glued on the bottoms.

  “You’re speeding, Wes,” I said.

  “Coke won’t hammer out the kinks no more,” he said, grabbing one wrist, then the other, raking his cupped palm over the back of the opposite hand as though he were trying to wipe rainwater off it. “Everything’s coming apart. I boosted a few places. I peddled my ass. I creeped a funeral home. I never done no real harm.”

  “You always took your own fall, too. That’s stand-up, bud. How about kicking it into neutral?”

  So he told me about his weekend with the East Enders.

  Hammie Wocheck, Jeff Deitrich’s buddy from the University of Texas, cruised by Wesley’s paint-peeling, termite-eaten house and sat in his pickup truck with the engine idling until Wesley got up off the porch and walked out to the swale. Hammie’s blond hair was wet wit
h gel, his face sunburned, the side of his thick neck still scabbed with the purple and burnt-orange tattoo of a butterfly. His huge upper body seemed to fill up the window of the truck, the way an elephant might look inside a phone booth.

  “Wes, my man, we need you to go with us to Big Dee, call up a couple of mop-heads on their beeper. I’m talking about the Jamaicans who took down Jeff Deitrich. This your house, huh?” Hammie said.

  “I ain’t lost nothing in Dallas.”

  “Point of honor, Wes. We got spear chuckers tracking monkey shit into our town, selling bad dope to people, messing up little kids. Problem two is you dropped Jeff’s name into the bowl. Believe me, that did not float. You need to square it, little buddy. Give your old man this six-pack. Tell him you’re doing a righteous deed for the town. He’ll relate to it.”

  They drove to Val’s and met Jeff Deitrich and Warren Costen and two others, one of whom was a fat guy named Chug Rollins, who must have gotten his signals wrong because he was dressed up like queer bait. Then they convoyed in three cars to a little town south of Fort Worth. Wesley had never liked Chug; he was like most big, fat guys—he had a mean dude hiding inside all that blubber, one that liked to push around little guys. But Warren was another matter. Except for his long torso, he looked like a surfer or a movie star, with his big arms and flat-plated chest and sandy hair. Warren kept cracking open Budweisers from the cooler and passing them to Wes, offering him a smoke, even telling him they should shitcan this mop-head gig. But what are you going to tell a guy like Jeff when he’s got a telephone pole up his ass?

  “I thought we was going to Dallas,” Wesley said.

  “Jeff’s got a special place he wants to ’front these dudes. When you get them on the line, read them the directions on this piece of paper,” Warren said.

  “To a rock quarry? They ain’t gonna come,” Wesley said.

  “Hope they do, Wes. Jeff is in a bad mood. I hate to get in his way when he’s like that,” Warren said. He shook his head profoundly.