Heartwood

by James Lee Burke

  “You going to the rodeo this afternoon?” I asked.

  “I’m in the band. We open the show,” he replied, gathering his T-shirt in his hand and wiping his face with it, unsure as to whether he should smile or not.

  The rodeo and livestock show didn’t begin that afternoon until the sun had crossed the sky and settled in an orange ball behind the shed over the grandstand at the old county fairgrounds, then Lucas’s bluegrass band walked into the center of the arena, squinting up at the thousands who filled the seats, and launched into “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”

  Temple Carrol and Pete and I walked down the midway through the carnival and food concession stands that had been set up behind the bucking chutes, eating snow cones, watching the buckets on the Ferris wheel dip out of a sky that had turned to brass layered with strips of crimson and purple cloud.

  The air smelled of hot dogs broiling in grease, candied apples, deep-fried Indian bread, the dust that lifted in a purple haze off the arena, popcorn cascading out of an electric pot, splayed saddles that reeked of horse sweat, cowboys with pomade in their hair and talcum coated on their palms, and watermelons that a black man hefted dripping and cold from a corrugated water tank and split open on a butcher block with a knife as big as a scimitar.

  Then a bunch of 4-H kids on top of a bucking chute hollered down at a cowboy-hatted man in the crowd, their faces lit with smiles and admiration.

  “Hey, Wilbur, we got one here can turn on a nickel and give you the change,” a kid said.

  “You ain’t got to tell me. One bounce out of the chute and that one don’t live on the ground no more,” Wilbur Pickett replied, and all the boys grinned and spit Copenhagen and looked at each other pridefully in the knowledge that the bucking horse they might draw was esteemed by the man who had ridden Bodacious one second shy of the buzzer.

  Wilbur and Kippy Jo walked past the plank tables pooled with watermelon juice and seeds in the eating area that had been set up under a striped awning that ruffled and popped in the breeze. They stopped by the corrugated water tank, and while Wilbur worked three dollars out of his blue jeans to pay the black man for two slices of melon, Kippy Jo cupped her hands lightly on the edge of the tank and tilted her head, her eyes hidden by sunglasses, staring at the crowd on the midway as though faces were detaching themselves from an indistinct black-and-white photograph and floating toward her out of the gloom and the electronic noise of the midway.

  I followed her gaze into the crowd and saw Jeff and Earl and Peggy Jean Deitrich by the merry-go-round, the carved and painted horses mounted with children undulating behind them. Chug Rollins came back from the concession stand and joined them, handing each of them a hot dog wrapped in a greasy paper towel.

  That’s what I saw. Wilbur told me later what his wife saw.

  The sky was white, the sun ringed with fire above an infinite, buff-colored plain, upon which columns of barefoot Negroes in loincloths were yoked by the neck on long poles. They trudged in the heat with no expectation of water or shade, their eyes like glass, their skins painted with dust and sweat, the inside of their mouths as red as paint. Then she realized that they were dead and their journey was not to a place but toward a man in safari dress, his face concealed from her, his head and body bathed in black light. Wherever he went, the Negroes followed, as though his back were the portal to his soul.

  “Earl Deitrich,” she said to Wilbur.

  “Yeah. I seen him. He’s early for the shithog contest,” Wilbur said.

  “No. The spirits of the Africans his ancestor killed are standing behind him. Their skulls were buried in anthills and eaten clean and used to line a flower bed.”

  “Let’s go on up in the stands. I don’t need that stuff in my afternoon. Cain’t that fellow just find a grave to fall into?” Wilbur said.

  She lowered her hand into the water tank, felt the melted ice slip over her wrist and the coldness climb into her elbow. The water seemed to stir, the corrugated sides ping with metallic stress or a change in temperature. Two muskmelons which had floated and bobbed on the bottom drifted like yellow air bubbles to the surface.

  But the water she now looked down upon was green and viscous, and when the melons broke through the surface they were black and rough-edged, abrasive as coconuts, braided with hair that looked like dusty snakes.

  “How’d you make them melons come up, lady?” the black vendor said, grinning, looking at his own reflection in her sunglasses.

  She walked out on the midway toward Jeff Deitrich.

  Jeff lowered his hot dog from his mouth as she approached, then Earl and Peggy Jean and Chug Rollins stopped talking, glancing peculiarly at Jeff, then turning as a group toward Kippy Jo.

  “The black men you drowned … They’ll float up from the car. They’ll follow you just like the Africans do your father,” she said.

  “I think you got me mixed up with somebody else,” Jeff said, his eyes shifting sideways.

  “They were alive a long time after the car sank. They breathed the air that was trapped against the roof. Touch my hands and you’ll see them. They’re unfastening the safety belts that hold them in the seats of the car.”

  Jeff grinned stupidly, his mouth opening and closing without sound. He stepped back from her, as though he could pull an envelope of invisibility around himself, his face unable to find an acceptable expression, like a naked man on a public sidewalk.

  It made good theater. But I suspected somebody would pay a price for it. I drove out to Wilbur’s that night and tried to convince him of that in his front yard.

  “Jeff Deitrich doesn’t believe in your wife’s psychic powers. He probably believes somebody informed on him,” I said.

  “You’re telling me he done it, he drowned a couple of black guys?”

  “I’m telling you he’s a dangerous kid. He takes out his grief on others. Usually innocent people.”

  The windows in Wilbur’s house were lighted behind him, his horses blowing and nickering out beyond the windmill.

  “I ain’t got no doubts about Earl Deitrich’s family. You want to come in for a piece of pie?” he asked.

  “I must speak a different language. You just don’t hear me, do you?”

  “I’m cutting you in for ten percent of my oil company.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Son, anybody can be a lawyer or a rodeo bum. You ever see well pipe sweat moisture big as silver dollars? That’s what happens when you punch into an oil sand. The air turns sour with gas and everything you put your hand on is dripping with money.”

  “Leave me out of your oil dealings, Wilbur.”

  “What you got is ten percent of nothing. That’s probably the only fee you’re ever gonna get.” He grinned broadly, his bladed face silhouetted in the light from his house, and sailed a rock out into the darkness. “Don’t worry about that Deitrich kid coming around here, either. His kind was put outside before the glue was dry.”

  Hopeless.

  I stopped at the IGA the other side of the intersection and called Wesley Rhodes at his house.

  “Get out of town. Visit your relatives in Texline,” I said.

  “They’re in prison. Why you want me out of town?”

  “Jeff Deitrich thinks somebody dimed him on the deal with the Jamaicans at the rock quarry.”

  “Oh man,” he said, like someone who had not believed his luck could get any worse.

  On the way back home I tried to sort out my thoughts and the reasons I felt anger at Wilbur and his wife, and even at my son, Lucas.

  The truth was I had no legal solutions for the problems they brought to me. Wilbur had admitted to stealing the historical watch from Earl Deitrich’s home office, and hence by implication the bearer bonds, and Kippy Jo had methodically drilled a pistol round in each of Bubba Grimes’s eyes. Unless I could bring down Earl Deitrich, there was a good chance both Kippy Jo and Wilbur would go into the system.

  Lucas had been stand-up when it counted and had succeeded in putti
ng himself right between the gangbangers and the East Enders. How do you tell a kid that honor has its price and that his father had rather it not be paid?

  I felt my palms tighten on the steering wheel. I wanted to hold L.Q. Navarro’s heavy .45 revolver in my hand. I wanted to feel the coolness of its surfaces against my skin and open the loading gate and rotate the cylinder inside the frame and watch the thick, round base of the brass cartridges tick by one at a time. I wanted to feel the knurled spur on the hammer under my thumb and hear the cylinder lock hard and stiffly into place.

  L.Q. and I raided deep into Coahuila and killed drug transporters and set their huts ablaze and watched their tar, reefer, and coke flame like white gas against the sky. In that moment all the moral complexities disappeared. There was no paperwork to be done, no rage over our inability to reconcile feelings with legality. Sometimes we would find the dead several nights later, still unburied and exposed in the moonlight, their skin glowing like tallow that has melted and cooled again. I had no more feeling about them than I would have about bags of fertilizer.

  The trade-off came later, when I fired blindly up an arroyo and watched sparks fly into the darkness and L.Q. Navarro fling his hands at the sky and tumble toward me.

  Brave people kept the fire in their belly out of their heads. Reckless and self-indulgent ones let someone else pay their dues.

  The inside of the car seemed filled with a fragrance of roses. My thoughts bunched and writhed like snakes inside a black basket.

  Lucas was sitting on the collapsed tailgate of his pickup in my driveway when I got home. He took off his straw hat and slapped the dust off the spot next to him. Every light in the downstairs of my house was on.

  “My office is open. Have a seat,” he said.

  “You look mighty confident this evening.”

  “After the show Peggy Jean Deitrich told me to give you a message. I wrote it down. ‘No matter how all this works out, I hold you in high regard.’ She blows hot and cold, don’t she?”

  “You could say that.”

  “She’s a pretty thing, I tell you that,” he said.

  I sat down on the tailgate next to him. “Where we going with this?” I asked.

  “You remember her the way she used to be, then you see her the way she is now. It’s like you’re caught between the woman who’s there and the woman who ain’t but should be.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s like living in two worlds. Puts a hatchet right in the middle of your head, don’t it? In the meantime, you don’t need to hear bad shit about people you care for.”

  “Let me see if I can figure this out. You don’t want me pestering you about Esmeralda again?”

  “I wish I had your smarts.”

  “Can you tell me why all the lights are on in my house?”

  “Esmeralda is cooking up a monster-big Mexican dinner for us. Enchiladas, tacos, refried beans, chili con queso, she done put the whole garbage can in it.”

  The moon was yellow over the hills, and in the softness of the light I could see his mother’s looks in his face. I cupped my hand on the back of his neck and felt the close-cropped stiffness of his hair against my palm. I saw his embarrassment steal into his face and I took my hand away.

  “I bet that’s one fierce Mexican dinner. We’d better go eat it,” I said.

  It rained in the middle of the night and my bedroom curtains flapped and twisted in the wind and in the distance lightning forked into the long green velvet roll of the hills.

  L.Q. Navarro sat in my stuffed burgundy chair by the bookshelf, his legs crossed, his Stetson resting on the tip of his boot. He was reading from a leather-bound, musty volume about the Texas Revolution, turning each page carefully with his full hand.

  “How’s it hangin’, L.Q.?” I asked.

  “You know how Sam Houston beat Santa Anna? He sent Deaf Smith behind Santa Anna’s army and had him cut down Vince’s Bridge with an ax. Once the battle started, there wasn’t no way out for any of them.”

  “I’m awful tired, L.Q.”

  “Sometimes you got to be willing to lose it all. They’ll see it in your eyes. It tends to give them a religious moment.”

  “I’ll beat Earl Deitrich in the courtroom.”

  “His kind own the courts. You’re a visitor there, Billy Bob. He fired a gun into the side of his head. You got to admit that was impressive.”

  “How about taking the Brown Mule out of your mouth?”

  “He took Peggy Jean Murphy from you. He durn near killed you with poison. He corrupts everything he touches. Rope-drag him, pop a cap on him, hang his lights on a cactus. I don’t like to see what he’s doing to you.”

  “I don’t live in that world anymore.”

  He raised one eyebrow at me over his book, then closed the book in disgust and walked out of the room, the rowels of his spurs tinkling on the hardwood floor.

  “L.Q.?” I said.

  24

  Tuesday morning Temple Carrol came into my office and closed off the glare of sunlight through the blinds and sat down in front of my desk and opened a notepad on her crossed knee. There was a red abrasion at the corner of her left eye, and the eye kept leaking on her skin so that she had to dab at it with a Kleenex.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I found this ex-con boxer, Johnny Krause, at a pool hall in San Antone yesterday,” she replied. “He stuck a pool cue in my eye.”

  “You went there by yourself?”

  “He said he was sorry. He was just nervous around class broads in pool rooms. You want to hear what I have or not?” she said.

  She ran through the material in her notebook. Krause had been picked up and questioned in the death of Cholo Ramirez and let go. He drove a cement mixer on and off for a construction company, rented a farmhouse behind a water-bed motel on the outskirts of San Antonio, and spent most of his downtime in Mexico.

  “Dope?” I said.

  “He draws compo and drives a new Lincoln,” Temple said.

  “Where’s our pool shooter now?” I asked.

  We crossed the border at Piedras Negras and drove down into the state of Coahuila. The sun was hazy and red on the horizon now, and the poplar trees planted along the road were dark green, almost blue, in the dusk. We continued south of Zaragoza and crossed a river dotted with islands that had willow trees on them, then we saw a long baked plain and hills in the distance and a whitewashed village that spilled down an incline to a brown lake. The water in the lake had receded from the banks and left the hollow-socketed skeletons of carp in the skin of dried mud that covered the flats.

  A Mexican cop nicknamed Redfish by the Bexar County sheriff’s department, for whom he was a drug informant, waited for us in the backseat of a taxi parked in the small plaza in the center of the village. He had jowls like a pig, narrow shoulders, wide hips, and sideburns that fanned out like greasepaint on his cheeks. He wore yellow shades and a mauve-colored flop-brim bush hat, probably to detract from his complexion, which was deeply pocked, as though insects had burrowed into the flesh and eaten holes in it.

  “I had to hire my cousin to drive me ’cause we didn’t have no official cars free today. He’s gonna need twenty-five dollars for his time,” Redfish said.

  “Yeah, I can see he probably gave up a lot of fares this afternoon. Tourists flying in for the water sports and that sort of thing,” Temple said.

  “Your friend at the Bexar sheriff’s office? He said you got a hard nose. We don’t got no tourists now. But in winter we got gringos from Louisiana kill ducks all over that lake. They shoot three or four hundred in a morning. What you think of that?” Redfish said.

  “We think we need to talk to Johnny Krause,” I said.

  “You was a Texas Ranger?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “One thing to remember here. He ain’t been in no trouble in Mexico. He leaves a lot of money in the village. ’cause he’s a countryman don’t mean he gets treated without respect.”
/>   The wind shifted and Temple’s face jerked as though it had been struck. “What’s in that lake?” she said.

  “Everything from the houses runs downhill here. It don’t stink after the rains. The gringos come here for the ducks after the rains. They’re real proud, drinking wine in the cafe and eating all their ducks,” Redfish said.

  Redfish got in the front seat of the Avalon with me, and Temple sat in back. The sun was an ember on the horizon when we drove deeper into the village and out onto a chiseled rock road above the lake. Caves or old mine shafts were cut back into the hill, and people were living in them. They washed their clothes in the lake and dried them on the rocks around the caves, and cooked their food in pots that gave off an odor like burning garbage. I saw no men, only women and children, their faces smeared with soot, the color of their hair impossible to define.

  “They’re gitanos. They fix dishes with chicken guts. They steal them out of hog pens. You can’t do nothing for them,” Redfish said.

  “Where are the men?” Temple asked.

  “A bunch of them got in a fight with knives. The jefe got them out at his ranch for a while. Look, señorita, this is a house of puta. Maybe it ain’t good you go in there,” he said.

  “I’ll try not to have impure thoughts,” Temple said.

  “Johnny Krause ain’t grown up inside, know what I mean?” Redfish said to me.

  “No,” I said.

  “Neither do I,” Temple said, leaning forward on the seat.

  “All the gitanos ain’t just up in them caves or out at the jefes ranch,” he said, and looked out the window at the dusty surface of the lake.

  At the end of the road beveled out of the hill was a whitewashed building that had probably been a powder house for a mining company and possibly later a jail. The walls were stone, the windows inset with bars, the roof covered with wood poles and tin and mounds of dirt that had sprouted grass. The casement of the front door was steel, bolted into the stone, and the door itself, which hung partially open, was cast iron and painted red. The paint was incised with every possible lewd depiction of human genitalia.

  The bar and floor were made of rough-planed raw pine scorched by cigarette and cigar butts. The interior was bright with a greasy light from oil lamps, and the smoke on the ceiling was so thick it churned in gobs when someone walked under it. The faces of the customers were besotted and inflamed, their teeth rotted, their skin unnaturally lucent, like lemon rind. A child went in and out of the back door, emptying cuspidors and returning them to the bar and tables. Through the back windows and the open door I could see three pole sheds with burlap curtains hung from the roofs. Under the bottom of the curtains were slop jars and wash pans and the legs of either beds or cots.