Heartwood

by James Lee Burke

  “Eat a second helping for me,” he said. He remained concentrated on his card game and didn’t look up.

  I ran into Temple on the courthouse walk the next morning and told her about Cholo’s visit.

  “You threw him out?” she said.

  “He was confessing to stuff there’s no record of. He wants me to bring down Earl Deitrich without implicating himself. I think Cholo burned that savings and loan for Earl and killed those firemen down in Houston. Maybe he was responsible for the accountant’s heart attack, too.”

  “Earl Deitrich fired a gun into the side of his head?”

  “You admire that?”

  “I didn’t think he had that kind of guts,” she said.

  I shook my head and walked into the courthouse. Two hours later Temple called me at the office.

  “I just got a call from Cholo. He says you dissed him. He says he’ll unload his whole story if I’ll meet him at a gym in San Antone. He says he was at the fire in Houston.”

  “Make him come to you.”

  “I’m meeting him at ten in the morning,” she said.

  “Do you ever listen to me about anything?”

  “Not really,” she said. “What’s the name of the gym?” I asked.

  It was located in a dirty white two-story cinder-block building on the edge of a warehouse district. The rooms were air-conditioned, but the smell of sweat and testosterone and soiled jerseys and socks left to dry on floor fans was overpowering. Temple and I walked through a basketball court filled with slum kids, through a free-weight room, into an annex that contained speed- and heavy bags and a boxing ring. The noise of the speedbags thudding on the rebound boards was deafening.

  Cholo was dressed out in black Everlast trunks and a sweatshirt cut off at the armpits, pounding both gloved fists into a heavy bag. The sweat whipped from his hair with each blow.

  He saw us and held the bag stationary and looked past Temple at me. He had removed the dressing from his left eye, and the white of the eye was clotted with broken purple veins.

  “What’s he doing here?” he said.

  “We’re on a tight schedule, Cholo. You want to fling more bean dip around, we’re gone,” I said.

  “I don’t like you, man,” he replied.

  “Hold the bag for me,” Temple said.

  “Do what?” he said.

  She spun and hit the bag dead-center with a karate kick.

  “You can do that?” he said.

  “What’s the deal on Earl Deitrich and the skeet club?” she said.

  “I’ll take a shower and we’ll go somewhere,” he said. “But first there’s this guy been pinning me. I gotta straighten him out.”

  “Which guy?” she said.

  “Don’t worry about it. Have a seat. This kind of guy is, what d’you call it, predictable,” he said.

  We watched from a bench against the wall while Cholo continued hitting the bag. It didn’t take long to see the scenario at work. A blond man, with brilliantine in his hair, was skipping rope by the ring, crossing his wrists, slapping the floor hard under his flat-soled shoes, an indolent grin on his mouth as he stared straight into Cholo’s face.

  “You make that guy?” I said to Temple.

  “Used to be a mule for Sammy Mace? Out of Houston, he did a vice snitch, I thought he was in Huntsville,” Temple said.

  “Johnny Krause.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. He beat the homicide beef on appeal. What’s he doing here?”

  The man named Johnny Krause stopped skipping rope and picked up a pair of sixteen-ounce sky-blue sparring gloves from the apron of the ring and walked toward Cholo. He paused no more than a foot from Cholo, pulling on his gloves, his abdominal muscles protruding slightly over his elastic waistband, indifferent to the possibility of being hit by Cholo’s elbows or the bag swinging back on its chain.

  “Go three with me. I’ll take it easy on you,” he said.

  “I want to go three, I’ll ask. Go fuck your ‘easy,’ too,” Cholo said.

  Krause made a casual face and turned his head to the side and looked into space. His blue, white-striped trunks reached almost to his knees and clung like moist Kleenex to his skin. “Suit yourself. You been staring at me all morning. I thought you wanted to go,” he said.

  “Me staring at you?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Sorry I bothered you, Paco,” Krause said, and rubbed the sweaty top of Cholo’s head with the palm of his glove.

  Cholo knocked his arm away.

  “Who you calling Paco, man?” he said.

  “That ain’t your name?” Krause kept smiling and tapped Cholo on the ear, winking, raising his guard now, his head ducking down behind his gloves as though he were about to be hit. “I been hearing you’re one badass mean motherfucker. Don’t hurt me, mean motherfucker,” he said.

  Cholo stepped away from the bag and swung at Krause, his glove ripping into empty space, pulling him off balance.

  “The wind almost knocked me down. I got to carry an anchor around. Get me out of here,” Krause said.

  Others had stopped their workout and were watching now, laughing, making remarks behind their gloves to one another.

  “Get a timekeeper. We don’t use no headgear, either,” Cholo said.

  Johnny Krause sprang into the ring, threw a combination left and right at the air, his lips pursed, his chin tucked into his chest. Then he leaned back into the turn-buckle, his arms spread on the ropes, and watched Cholo, down below, pulling on the other pair of blue gloves with his teeth.

  I stepped between Cholo and the apron of the ring. “I don’t know why, but he’s setting you up. Don’t do it,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” he replied, and climbed up into the ring, the tattoos of a knife dripping blood and a death’s head on his throat running with sweat.

  An old man with white, puckered skin and hair like meringue clicked a stopwatch and clanged the bell. Johnny Krause had either fought professionally or in prison, because he took complete control of his environment as soon as he moved to the center of the ring.

  He stepped sideways, bobbed, or jerked backwards so quickly that Cholo couldn’t touch him, all the time feigning restraint, as if Cholo were the aggressor in what should have been a sparring match.

  “Whoa! You trying to take my head off? This ain’t Mexico City. Hey, we got no cut man here. Maybe I’m a bleeder. Help!” Krause said, dancing, his sky-blue gloves at his sides.

  Cholo reminded me of old film clips of Two-Ton Tony Galento, wading forward with the plodding solidity of a hod carrier, throwing one wild overhand punch after another.

  Except Cholo’s fists could not find his opponent or the smile that mocked him.

  Krause jabbed Cholo around the eyes with his left, pow, pow, pow, that fast. Cholo’s face twitched, his eyes watering as though he had been Maced. Then Krause hooked him on the ear and caught him hard on the jaw with a right cross, knocking his mouthpiece through the ropes. When Cholo tried to clench him, Krause thumbed him in his bad eye and nailed him again, this time in the mouth.

  The timekeeper was jerking the rope on the bail, waving one hand in the air for Krause to stop.

  Krause set himself and drove his right fist straight into Cholo’s unprotected face, bouncing him off the ropes, spiderwebbing his nose and chin with blood. Cholo rolled on the canvas, disoriented, and fell off the apron onto the cement, turning over the spit bucket.

  “We don’t have no dirty fights in here. What’s wrong with you?” the timekeeper said.

  “You got it turned around. He was trying to scramble my eggs,” Krause said.

  He climbed through the ropes and dropped to the cement, avoiding the wetness from the spit bucket.

  “You all right, buddy? You were coming hard. You didn’t give me no choice,” Krause said.

  Cholo got to his feet, his eyes crossing, and pulled his gloves off one at a time by trapping them between his arm and his chest. He tossed them to the floor and hitched up his genitalia.
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  “I got your lunch hanging,” he said.

  “What can I say?” Krause said.

  Cholo walked unsteadily toward the dressing room, a towel crumpled against his mouth and nose.

  “You got crazy people in here. What kind of dump is this?” Krause said.

  Someone picked up Cholo’s gloves off the floor and started to put them in an equipment box under the ring.

  “Them are my gloves,” Krause said, popping open a paper bag for the man to drop them in.

  • • •

  But if Cholo Ramirez was indeed intended to embark on the Ghost Trail of his Indian ancestors, its entrance was not marked by cottonwood trees along a riverbank on a windswept green plain. The Ghost Trail for Cholo lay inside the incessant scream of a shorted-out car horn and the heated smell of car metal and exhaust fumes and asphalt only a block from the Alamo. That’s where the paramedics pried his hands off the steering wheel of his ’49 Merc and tried to abate the convulsions in his body and the hemorrhage that was taking place in his brain.

  While they strapped him down to a gurney, a frustrated policeman popped the Merc’s hood and tore the wiring from the horn like a severed snake.

  21

  Cholo’s funeral was held three days later in a white stucco church with a red tile roof and a small neat yard next to the elementary school he had once attended, the only well-maintained buildings in a neighborhood of dilapidated one-story, flat-roofed homes that could have been machine-gun bunkers. His fellow gangbangers tried to turn the funeral into a statement about themselves, dressing out in black cloaks with scarlet linings, posting somber-faced, narrowed-eyed lookouts in the church vestibule and parking lot. But basically it was a pathetic affair. The back pews were empty; the gangbangers sweated inside their cloaks and smelled themselves; obese women in black wept with such histrionics that the other mourners took deep breaths and raised their eyebrows wearily; and Cholo lay in a cheap wood casket, dressed in a shiny suit that looked like it had been rented for a graduation ceremony, a rose in the lapel, his hair stiff with grease against the rayon pillow, a rosary wrapped around fingers that still had dirt under the nails.

  If there were two people there who seemed genuinely saddened, it was Ronnie Cruise and Esmeralda Ramirez. They sat on opposite sides of the church. Neither looked at the other, nor at anyone around them.

  I caught Ronnie on the church steps after the service.

  “You’re the man,” I said.

  “You’re always talking in code. I don’t understand what you’re saying. I think you got shit for brains being here,” he replied.

  He got in his car and drove away. I followed him to the graveside service, then to the rural slum neighborhood where he lived. He turned into his dirt driveway, staring in the rearview mirror when I turned in behind him. But he went inside as though I were not there.

  The house had probably been built from a double-wide trailer and modified and added on to over the years. There was a picture window in front, a carport on the side, and the bottom portion of the walls was covered with a half-brick shell, to affect a suburban 1950s home. A solitary mimosa grew like a huge green fan in the dirt yard, and in back, beyond the carport, I could see banana trees bending in the wind along a drainage ditch.

  A woman with breasts like watermelons and black hair wrapped in a bun on her head opened the front door and looked at me with a neutral expression, then closed it again. A moment later Ronnie came from around back, barefoot now, in a pair of beltless jeans and a T-shirt, a bird dog pup trailing behind him.

  “Why’d you say I was the man?” he asked.

  “Cholo’s dead. That means you’re going on the stand.”

  “For what?”

  “To tell everyone about Earl Deitrich’s dealings with Cholo.”

  “That’s called hearsay. Even I know that much.”

  “It’s called a subpoena. You’ll be in court of your own accord or you’ll be there in handcuffs, Ronnie.”

  “I’ve heard it before. I’m gonna be picking up the soap in the county bag. It don’t flush.”

  “Cholo was murdered,” I said.

  “You mean the guy busted a vein in Cholo’s head?”

  “I’ve got a friend named Doc Voss. He’s buds with the pathologist who did the postmortem on Cholo. The pathologist thinks a toxic substance of some kind was rubbed in Cholo’s face. Something that acts like cyanide.”

  “Thinks?”

  “This ex-con, Johnny Krause, the guy who got Cholo into the ring? He loaded up a vice snitch with angle iron and put him in the San Jacinto River for Sammy Mace.”

  Ronnie pulled on an earlobe, then picked up a soft cloth off a workbench under the carport and rubbed it on the hood of his T-Bird.

  “Sammy Mace’s dead. He got blown away by a cop a year or so back,” he said.

  “I think Johnny Krause found a new employer. I’d like to ask him that, but nobody can find him. You have the same information on Earl Deitrich that Cholo did. Where’s that leave you, Ronnie? You want Johnny Krause looking you up?”

  He held up one palm and ticked at a callus with his thumb, staring at it as though it held special meaning for him. He hooked his thumbs inside the pockets of his jeans and looked at a spot six inches to the right of my head and sucked in his cheeks, then cleared his throat before he spoke.

  “Your boy, the one sleeping with Esmeralda? He don’t run scared. But you think I do. Is it ’cause I’m Mexican and you think I’m dumb or ’cause I got a sheet and I ain’t as good as other people and you can work my stick? I think you better go, Mr. Holland. I don’t want you coming around my mother’s house no more.”

  Later that afternoon I looked out my back porch and saw Pete sitting on the top rail of Beau’s fence. I picked up a glass of iced tea and took a can of Pepsi from the icebox and walked out to the lot. The breeze smelled of rain out in the hills and the windmill had turned north, its blades ginning furiously.

  “What you doing out here by yourself, bud?” I asked.

  “You said we was gonna look for arrowheads.” He ignored the can of Pepsi I balanced on the rail.

  “Sorry, I forgot. Let’s hitch the trailer on the truck and get Beau in.”

  But his face remained preoccupied. He kept squeezing a half dollar in his palm and looking at the red lines it made in his skin.

  “I seen Ms. Deitrich in town,” he said.

  “Oh yeah, Ms. Deitrich.”

  “She was coming out of the grocery. She had two big sacks in her arms. One was fixing to split. I tried to take it from her before the milk bottle broke on the cement.”

  He stopped and watched Beau walking from the pasture toward the lot.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “She said I was gonna make her drop it. She said, ‘You’re in the way. Take your hands off the bag.’ ”

  “She didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “You weren’t there. She was mad. The bag split all over her hood. She said, ‘See what you made me do?’ ”

  “I guess she was having a bad day, Pete.”

  “After she got her stuff in the car, she dug a half dollar out of her purse and said, ‘Go buy yourself some ice cream or something. Go on, now. Next time just let big people work out their problems. You’re a little too nosy sometimes.’ ”

  He climbed down from the fence and looked at the late sun as though it contained an insult.

  “I don’t want her durn money. I stopped to hep ’cause she was having trouble,” he said.

  “I don’t see her, Pete, so I don’t know what to tell you.”

  He ringed the edge of the half dollar with his index finger and flung it toward the tank. He watched it arch out of the light into the grass. His face was hot and dusty and there were moist lines that had dried on his cheeks.

  “Where you goin’?” I said.

  “Home.”

  “Beau’s going to be disappointed if we don’t take him out.”

  “How come she acted like that?
I thought she was nice. She ain’t no different from the people my mother hangs with up at the beer joint. They’re nice long as somebody is watching them.”

  The answer to his question was not one I wanted to think about.

  It was almost sunset when Pete and I rode up a creekbed between two steep-sided hills that were deep in shadow and moist with springs that leached out of the rocks. Beau’s hooves scraped on the flat plates of stone along the creekbank and I could feel Pete’s weight swaying back and forth behind the saddle.

  “You don’t think these was Apaches living along here?” he said.

  “Too far east,” I replied.

  “Maybe they was Comanches.”

  “Too far south.”

  “Then what was they?”

  “Probably Tonkawas.”

  “The ones that let the Texans run them up into Oklahoma?”

  “That’s the bunch.”

  “They don’t sound too interesting,” he said.

  We got down from Beau and I unhooked the strap of my rucksack from his pommel and we walked through heavy brush to a faint trail that angled up the hillside through pine trees and soft ground that was green from the moisture in the drainage. Scrub brush and redbud trees grew close into the cliff wall, and if you looked carefully you could see a ragged opening behind the foliage.

  “I heard some people in town say Wilbur Pickett’s wife is crazy,” he said.

  “You believe that?” I asked.

  “No. I feel sorry for her.”

  “Because she’s blind?”

  “No. ’Cause they’re scared of her. Scared people hurt you.”

  “You’re a smart kid, Pete.”

  “I wish we could stay up here all the time. It’s a perfect place. There ain’t nobody around but just us.”

  The trail leveled out on a bench and we walked between the scrub brush and the cliff wall to an opening in the rock, close to the ground, no more than three feet in diameter, that looked like it had been gouged out of prehistoric clay by a huge thumb. It was black inside and we could feel the coolness of the air puffing against our faces and smell the wetness of the stone and the odor of field mice that nested on the ledges where the cave’s ceiling rose much higher than the entrance.