Heartwood

by James Lee Burke

  The sun’s last rays were pink on the crests of the ravine and I could hear Beau blowing down below. I untied the rucksack and opened my pocketknife and began slicing a red onion and a roll of salami and a loaf of French bread on a rock. Pete pulled my flashlight out of the sack and played with the switch, clicking it off and on, then squatted down and shined the beam back into the cave.

  “Somebody’s living here, Billy Bob,” he said.

  I stooped down beside him and looked through the entrance. Vinyl garbage bags had been split open and spread on the silt floor of the cave and a large sheet of canvas flattened on top of them in what looked like a sleeping area. A firepit had been dug close to the entrance, and smoke had blackened one wall and part of the overhang. Venison bones protruded like teeth from the ash in the center of the pit and there was a glycerin shine from meat drippings on the firestones.

  Cans of Spam and sardines and Vienna sausage and boxes of cookies and crackers were stacked along a board shelf someone had wedged into the wall. A shiny gallon molasses can filled with water was covered with a piece of cheesecloth to keep out dust. Two sleeping bags were rolled and snugged tightly with clothesline cord, as though the owners lived in preparation for leaving hurriedly. Propped upside down with sticks against the wall was a pair of scuffed work shoes with leather strings and hook eyelets at the top of the tongues.

  “You reckon it’s some bums come up from the train track?” Pete asked.

  I picked up one of the work shoes and turned it over in my hands. “That’s jailhouse-issue, Pete. Let’s leave this be.”

  “You mean these guys might be escaped convicts?”

  “Could be.”

  “We gonna call the sheriff’s department?”

  “I don’t figure it’s our business.”

  “They’re in our cave. They’re messing it up. They probably go to the bathroom anyplace they feel like. I bet they got B.O.”

  “Pete?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t say any more. Let’s get Beau and leave quietly. Forget what we saw here.”

  He looked at me quizzically, one eye squinted partly shut.

  We rode Beau up the ravine, out of the shadows into the sun’s last yellow glow against the sky. Then we crossed a glade full of wildflowers and looked out on the valley owned by Peggy Jean and Earl Deitrich and, directly down below, their white home couched like a giant gold-streaked molar in the hillside.

  I heard the sound of an engine grinding down a two-track road from the pines above us. Then I saw the black roll-bar Jeep turn out of the road and head toward us through the glade, the grass and wildflowers pressing flat into the soil under the Jeep’s cleated tires.

  Four young men sat in the Jeep, wearing shades and T-shirts and camouflage pants, their arms and foreheads red with fresh sunburn, bolt-action scoped rifles propped next to them. I felt Pete’s hands tighten involuntarily on my waist.

  The driver, Jeff Deitrich, pulled the Jeep in front of us and put the transmission in neutral. He grinned lazily at me, his eyes hidden by his shades.

  “How you doin’, Billy Bob?” he said.

  “Not bad. Y’all aren’t hunting out of season, are you?” I said, smiling back at him.

  “The cops haven’t been able to find your friend Doolittle. We thought we’d help out,” he said.

  “Let’s see if I have your friends’ names right. You’re Hammie, you’re Warren, and you’re Chug,” I said, moving my finger from one to the next.

  “Pretty good,” Jeff said. “What are you doing on our property, Billy Bob?”

  “This isn’t yours. The state has an easement through here.”

  “Don’t argue with a lawyer,” he said.

  “Skyler Doolittle is for the most part a harmless man,” I said.

  “He’s gonna be a lot more harmless if we find him,” Chug said. He drank out of a quart bottle of milk, his face round and flushed with heat, his throat working steadily.

  I flipped the ends of Beau’s reins idly on the back of my wrist.

  “Jessie is another matter, though. He’s half white trash and half Comanche Indian. He’ll tie you down in your bed and put a sock in your mouth and skin you like a deer. Ask the sheriff, Chug,” I said.

  The three passengers in the Jeep looked at one another. The one named Warren stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth, then pulled it out and rolled the barrel of the cigarette back and forth between his fingers.

  “The people at the state mental hospital thought they’d blow out his aggressions with electroshock. He bit through the rubber gag, then got a hand free and chewed a technician’s finger off,” I said.

  “My uncle used to hire Jessie Stump to clean gum off the seats at the Rialto. He got stuck in the chimney when he tried to rob the hardware store. The county jail in Llano wouldn’t take him because he’s not toilet trained. Good try, counselor,” Jeff said, and laughed, then drove back on the two-track road. But his passengers were silent, their expressions dull with either fatigue or reconsideration about the wisdom of hunting Jessie Stump.

  The wind dented the grass and flowers in the glade and a drop of rain stung me in the eye like a BB.

  “The guys they’re looking for are living in our cave, ain’t they?” Pete said.

  “That’d be my guess.”

  “Are those stories true about Jessie Stump?”

  I wet my lips. “I kind of made those up,” I said.

  “I don’t like to hear about stuff like that, Billy Bob. I don’t want to come up here for a while. Don’t lie to me about Jessie Stump, neither. It means you don’t respect me.”

  I turned around in the saddle and looked at him. But his eyes stared at the ground as it moved past us, as though our shadows knew each other in ways we did not. He removed his hands from my waist and rested them on the cantle.

  22

  I went to Marvin Pomroy’s house early the next morning, before he left for work, and found him out on the patio behind his white gingerbread house, his newspaper propped against a glass of orange juice, a piece of toast held in his fingers while he read the box scores on the sports page.

  His backyard was spacious and filled with trees and flowering bushes, and blue jays and mockingbirds flew in and out of the sunlight. His wife waved at me from the French doors that gave onto the dining room and held up a cup of coffee with a question in her face.

  “No thanks, Gretchen,” I said, and sat down at Marvin’s table without being asked.

  “Can’t it wait till I get to the office?” he said.

  “Did you talk to the pathologist in San Antone?”

  “Yeah, I did. He said Cholo Ramirez was sniffing model airplane glue before he died. There was a sock loaded with it on the seat beside him.”

  “That’s not what killed him.”

  “Maybe not. But the pathologist isn’t sure what did. Boxing gloves with poison on them? Sounds like Elizabethan theater.”

  “Wake up, Marvin Earl Deitrich is treating you like a bought-and-paid-for stooge.”

  He folded up his newspaper and set it to the side of his plate. His shirt looked as smooth and white as new porcelain.

  “As a public official I have to accept all kinds of abuse at the courthouse. That doesn’t apply in my home,” he said.

  “That Mexican kid had a chemical time bomb put in his head.”

  “Not in this county he didn’t.”

  “There’s nothing like seeing cartography used to compartmentalize evil,” I said.

  Marvin rose from his chair and picked up his newspaper and glass of orange juice and went inside the house and closed the French doors gingerly with one foot.

  The next day was Saturday. Lucas Smothers woke before dawn and drank coffee on the back steps of his rented house and watched the sun break across the fields and light on the trailer where Esmeralda Ramirez was still living. She had hand-washed her undergarments the night before and hung them on the clothesline in back, and now they moved in the breeze and he felt v
aguely ashamed when he realized he was looking at them.

  He had convinced himself he had no romantic interest in her, that he could no more ask her to leave than he could refuse to help an injured person on the highway. But when she had cleaned his house for him and hung curtains in his windows, he’d found himself following her from room to room, telling her about the bands he had played in, listening to her talk about her classes at the Juco, all the time watching her eyes and her mouth, embarrassed at the level of arousal they caused in him.

  He wanted an excuse to touch her. She tied her hair up on her head while she worked, and when she stood on a chair and lifted a curtain into place, her back looked strong and muscular, her exposed hips tapering outward just below her belt line, the backs of her thighs hard, as though she were wearing heels. When the chair legs wobbled, he started to grip her waist, but she steadied herself against the wall with one hand and said, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to fall.”

  When Cholo died, Lucas thought Esmeralda would turn to him. But she didn’t. She returned from the funeral dry-eyed and withdrawn, like a person who has been in a subfreezing wind and sits alone by a stove with the memory of cold burned deep into the face. That evening he tapped on her screen, and when she appeared in the doorway, the overhead light breaking over her shoulders and reddish-brown hair like gold needles, he said, “If you ain’t eat yet, I’m fixing to put some food out on the table. Or I can bring some over. I mean, if you’re hungry. Or maybe you just want to take a walk or something.” Then he took a breath and said, “I ain’t good at words. I’m sorry about your brother.”

  “That’s nice of you, Lucas. But I have to go to work,” she replied.

  “Work? That tub of guts at the Dog ’n’ Shake is making you come in the same day your brother was buried?”

  “I’ll see you later, Lucas,” she said, and eased the inside door closed in his face.

  She didn’t even ask him for a ride. Instead, she put on her pink uniform and waited out on the road for the county bus to pick her up and carry her out to the small drive-in not far from the Post Oaks Country Club.

  Now he sat on his back steps in the early morning coolness, looking at her undergarments on the clothesline, wondering if he was prurient or simply a fool. No sound at all came from inside the trailer. The sun rose above the house in a red ball and he flung the coffee from his cup into the dust and laced on his steel-toed boots and drove his pickup truck out to the drilling rig where he had an eight-hour one-hundred-degree shift waiting for him on the derrick floor.

  That evening, when she got off from work at the Dog ’n’ Shake, Ronnie Cruise was waiting for her in the parking lot. He was dressed in slacks, polished loafers, and a new sports shirt, clothes he normally didn’t wear, and his hair had been freshly barbered and his jaws glowed with aftershave lotion.

  He leaned down in the T-Bird’s passenger window so she could see his face.

  “I’ll take you home, Essie,” he said.

  “I have a bus pass,” she replied.

  His car was parked in the shadow of an oak tree, and the engine ticked with road heat.

  “Come on, you been on your feet all day,” he said.

  “Thanks, anyway, Ronnie. Really.”

  She walked out to the edge of the road and stood where the bus would stop. She twisted her mouth into a button and stared at the entrance to the country club and the fairways along the river and the sun that had descended into a red cloud of dust and rain blowing on the horizon.

  Ronnie sat behind the steering wheel of his car, his head on his hands. He started the engine and drove in circles around the Dog ’n’ Shake, his tires squealing softly on the pavement, while children eating at the outdoor tables watched him with wide grins on their faces.

  The bus stopped for Esmeralda, then the doors closed with a rush of air and the bus heaved out into the road again with Ronnie’s T-Bird behind it. Esmeralda sat behind the driver’s seat and tried to ignore Ronnie’s behavior, but when she glanced into the wide-angle mirror on the driver’s window she saw three cars come out of the country club driveway and fall into line behind Ronnie’s.

  She walked to the back of the bus and looked out the rear window. Ronnie grinned up at her through his windshield, giving her the thumbs-up sign, like an idiot, oblivious to the automobiles behind him.

  Who was driving the car immediately behind Ronnie’s? she asked herself. It was one of Jeff’s friends, what’s his name, the one she disliked even more so than the others. He was big all over, layered with beer fat, his neck as thick as a pig’s. He was like most fat men she had known—he affected humor and detachment from the world, but he used his irreverence to hide his cruelty, his vulgarity to disguise his fear and hatred of women.

  Esmeralda waved her hand back and forth at Ronnie and pointed at the cars behind him. But he continued to grin mindlessly at her, pushing in his clutch and gunning his engine so his Hollywood mufflers rumbled off the asphalt.

  She would have gotten off the bus and ridden with him, but he swung over the center line and roared past the bus and two other cars in front before he crossed back over the line and reentered his lane.

  She returned to the front of the bus, swaying with her hand in a strap, and tried to see him through the front windshield. But instead of Ronnie’s T-Bird, she saw Jeff’s friend Chug Rollins, that was the name, pass the bus and cut back quickly into the flow of traffic, followed by the two other cars from the country club.

  The bus headed into the dying sun, dipped down through road depressions filled with shadow, took on more passengers, mostly Hispanics and black people who worked as maids and janitorial help. Their muscles were flaccid with fatigue, their faces tired, lined, indifferent to what others might think of their slack jaws and the emptiness in their eyes.

  She kept standing up in the aisle, searching the road for sign of Ronnie’s T-Bird. But the sky was turning purple above the hills now and most drivers had switched on their headlights and she couldn’t distinguish one car from the next. Maybe Ronnie had started back toward San Antone, she thought. Why was he so stubborn? Her brother was dead and one day Ronnie’s luck would run out the same way. For what? So they could wear gang colors and have the respect of sociopaths in the prison yard at Huntsville or Sugarland? She had told him it was over. She had deserted him, slept with another man and done things with the other man she didn’t even want to remember. Certain kinds of injuries don’t heal, she thought, not when you do them with forethought to yourself and those closest to you. Why couldn’t Ronnie understand that? He was as unteachable as Cholo.

  He had come to the trailer behind Lucas’s house, in khakis and a purple shirt open on his chest, the dry hint of reefer on his breath.

  “I love you, Essie. I want you back. I don’t care what you done,” he had told her.

  “Don’t degrade yourself. It’s embarrassing. When did you start smoking dope? God, I’m sick of this craziness,” she replied.

  Then she had seen something flicker and die in his face, and she bit down on her lip and watched him walk out of the trailer door and take his car keys from his pocket and look at them and put one wrong key after another into the ignition.

  Now, on the bus, she felt tears welling up in her eyes and she looked down in her lap so no one would see her face.

  Then she glanced out the window and saw Ronnie’s car by the side of the road, empty, the left rear tire off, the bare wheel pressed into the dirt next to a crumpled jack.

  She leaned close to the glass so she could see up the road. There he was, walking in the dusk toward a filling station and convenience store, the wind, now peppered with rain, blowing up clouds of dust around his legs.

  The bus went past Ronnie. She went back to the rear window again, ignoring the irritation of the people around her, and saw the three cars from the country club turning around on a side road and heading back toward Ronnie, the drivers at first circumspect, looking in both directions, then leaning forward eagerly, as though t
hey had just discovered a feared and wounded enemy caught in a steel trap and could not believe their luck.

  Esmeralda walked hurriedly up the aisle and held onto the vertical pole behind the driver’s chair.

  “Let me out,” she said.

  “I cain’t stop along here, lady. A truck will take the side of my bus off,” the driver said.

  “I have to get off.”

  “That’s your stop up yonder, ain’t it? Sit down before you fall and hurt yourself.”

  The bus pulled to the shoulder of the road a hundred yards from Lucas’s house. She stepped down from the vestibule and began running along the gravel toward Lucas’s house and the pickup truck that was parked in the front yard. The rocks were like flint through the bottoms of her slip-on shoes. The wind was full of grit that invaded her eyes and drops of rain as hard as marbles struck her face. A semitrailer roared past her, the backdraft blowing her sideways, filling her head with sound as though someone had clapped his hands on both her ears.

  Lucas had just showered and changed into a clean pair of Levi’s and a soft shirt and was picking out “The Wild Side of Life” on his Dobro, dragging the slide up and down the neck, listening to the notes rise from the resonator and hover in the air like metallic butterflies. He saw the bus go by the front of the house, its windows lighted, and he wondered if Esmeralda had been on it. But he had decided not to bother her anymore, not to intrude upon either her grief or the strange relationships she had with both Ronnie Cross and Jeff Deitrich.

  His skin still felt sunbaked from the hours on the drilling rig, the fat long since gone from his muscles, his big western belt bucket flat against the leanness of his stomach. By and large, roughnecks were a pretty interesting bunch, he thought. They rarely complained about the hard lives they’d led and were grateful to have whatever jobs came their way. Even though they worked together for years they usually didn’t know one another’s last names and didn’t consider it an important element in a friendship. They talked constantly of their sexual conquests but in reality considered women a biological mystery and openly admitted they were physically dependent upon them. They were irresponsible, out of sync with the world, and often grinned snaggletoothed at the calamities they visited upon themselves. A guy could do worse than hang with a bunch like that, Lucas thought. It was probably like being in the Foreign Legion. Not a bad way to think of yourself.