Heartwood

by James Lee Burke

  Esmeralda and Lucas parked their pickup truck on the second row, and Lucas went to the concession stand and brought back a large popcorn, two hot dogs, and two Pepsis. Lucas was adjusting the sound on the speaker when a skinny kid in horn-rimmed glasses and cowboy boots and a denim shirt with the tails pulled out of his belt and a wallet chain hanging out of his back pocket stopped five feet from the pickup’s window and started making frantic gestures at him.

  “What do you want, J.P.?” Lucas asked.

  “Come over here, man,” J.P. said in a whisper, as though Esmeralda couldn’t hear or see him.

  “Stop acting like a moron. What is it?” Lucas said.

  “Jeff’s back there with Rita Summers. He was melting coke in a glass of Jack. The guy’s out there on the edge, man. When you walked by he give you a look, like … Man, I don’t want to even remember it. That dude’s cruel, Lucas.”

  “Yeah, thanks, J.P. Don’t worry about it, okay?” Lucas said.

  A few minutes later Esmeralda said she was going to the rest room.

  “I’ll come with you,” Lucas said.

  “No,” she replied.

  “You don’t owe Jeff anything. Don’t talk to him,” Lucas said.

  She tilted her head and feigned a pout.

  “He’s scum, Essie,” Lucas said.

  “I’ll be right back. Now stop it,” she said.

  She walked toward the concession, right past Jeff’s yellow convertible. She wore a tight white dress with frill around the hem and neckline and scarlet ribbon threaded in and out of the frill. Rita Summers was behind the steering wheel, eating from a paper shell of french fries. Jeff held a tumbler full of bourbon and ice in his hand. His eyes followed Esmeralda, the sway of her hips, the way her hair bounced on her shoulder blades.

  He set the tumbler on the dashboard and got out of the car and followed her.

  She heard the soles of his loafers crunch on the shale behind her. His face was dilated with booze, his pores grainy with perspiration and heat.

  “Go home, Jeff. Get some rest,” she said.

  “Dump Smothers. We can get it back together,” he said.

  “You need help. Give therapy a try. What have you got to lose, hon? You’d learn a lot about yourself and see things different.”

  “Better hear me, Essie. You and Smothers and Ronnie Cross have been sticking it in my face. In front of lots of people. A guy runs out of selections. That’s the way it is. Even Ronnie knows that.”

  “I think you’re going to die if you don’t get help.”

  “We had a lot going at first. We can have it back. You want me to say it? I never had a girl like you.”

  “That’s the problem, Jeff. You collect girls. You don’t love them. You can’t, because you don’t love yourself.”

  His eyes were out of focus. He wiped his nose with his wrist. He seemed to lose balance momentarily, then right himself. “I gave you a chance. But you’re just not a listener. It’s the beaner gene. Y’all are uneducable,” he said.

  She turned and went into the women’s room. A few minutes later she walked past the convertible again, her eyes focused on the movie screen, her white dress bathed in light. Jeff watched her while he drank from the bourbon tumbler with both hands.

  “You’re slurping like a pig. Maybe you and the south-of-the-border cutie should still be an item,” Rita said.

  Jeff took the paper shell of french fries from her hands and ground it into her face, smearing her eyes and hair and blouse with catsup and salt and potato pulp while she struck blindly at him with her fists, her elbows blowing the horn in staccato.

  Sunday morning Skyler Doolittle walked up a wooded slope and sat on a boulder that was webbed with lichen and read from a Gideon Bible. The pages of the Bible were water-stained, the thick cardboard cover bleached like ink diluted with milk. The sun was not over the hill yet, and the woods were smoky and wet, the air suffused with a cool green light that seemed to have its origins in the river down below rather than in the sky.

  Jessie Stump, shirtless, his belt notched into his bony ribs, was shaving without soap, over a bowl outside a shack that had once been a deer stand. Jessie had packed a duffel bag with their pots, pans, blankets, road maps, clothes, and food. On his belt was a heavy, saw-toothed hunting knife, the edge honed so sharp it cut fine lines in the opening of the scabbard when he slipped it in and out of the leather.

  Jessie wiped his face dry with his arm and squatted by a map and counted out their money on top of it. Thirty-two dollars and eleven cents were left over from the money Billy Bob Holland had given to Skyler. Jessie looked down at the map and the lines he had drawn in pencil along all the roadways that led to Matagorda Bay, over which he had written the words “Cousin Tyson’s shrimper,” as though somehow his hand could create the journey and escape by salt water before they actually took place.

  He looked up the slope at Skyler, who seemed consumed by the Gideon he had found in a shack down by the oxbow. So what if Skyler spent his time with that stuff, Jessie thought. It didn’t do no harm. Besides, Skyler’d sure been shortchanged in this world and maybe had something good coming in the next. In fact, Skyler was the only decent man he ever recalled meeting, except for maybe Cousin Tyson, who’d been in the pen four times and probably did a good turn for Jessie only because he hated cops on general principles.

  Skyler wore a clean plaid shirt and suspenders and gray work pants they had gotten a black man to buy for them at the Wal-Mart. Skyler wet his thumb and forefinger each time he turned a page in his Bible, then he studied one passage for a long time and smiled down at Jessie.

  The passage was about John the Baptizer, and John’s words seemed to rise off the page for Skyler and re-create the forest around him. The smoky green canopy overhead became the roof of a granary, and wind was blowing through the slats and separating out the chaff and lifting the grain into the sunlight, so that it became as golden as bees’ pollen.

  Skyler lifted the Bible in front of him to reread the passage, sitting up higher on the boulder. In his mind’s eye he was already inside a gilded dome, one in which all the imperfections of the world disappeared, and he did not see the circular glint of glass on top of the ridge.

  The soft-nosed .30-06 round tore through the book’s cover and half the pages and pierced Skyler through the lungs before the report ever rolled down the hillside.

  Jessie Stump ran toward Skyler, his face lunatical, his knife drawn like a foolish wand.

  Skyler had slipped to the ground and was on his hands and knees, coughing red flowers on the stones that protruded from the soil. The torn pulp from his Bible floated down on his head like feathers from a white bird.

  28

  The shooting was reported over the phone an hour later by a weeping man who refused to give his name to the dispatcher.

  Marvin Pomroy and I drove to the crime scene together. The paramedics zipped up a black bag over Skyler’s face and loaded the body into an ambulance and drove away with it, and Hugo Roberts’s deputies strung yellow crime scene tape through the trees that surrounded the lichen-painted rocks where Skyler had died.

  “You got any fix on Jessie Stump?” Marvin asked Hugo.

  “The 911 come in from a convenience store three miles down the highway. A car was stole out of a lady’s driveway not far away about the same time,” Hugo said. also run a powder-residue test on Jeff Deitrich and any of his friends who happen to be hanging around,” I said.

  “Right now the number one suspect is Jessie Stump,” Hugo said.

  “The entry wound was at the top of his chest. The exit wound was in his rib cage. What does that suggest to you, Hugo?” I said.

  “That a bullet goes in one place and out the other,” he replied, and pared a fingernail with a penknife.

  A young uniformed deputy, new to the department, walked down the hillside through the pine trees, holding a .30-06 shell on the tip of a pencil.

  “Found it on the crest up there. You can even see the sho
oter’s boot and knee prints in the pine needles. It looks like he fired from the right side of the trunk, which means he’s probably right-handed …” He paused. “I do something wrong?” he said, looking at Hugo’s face.

  That afternoon I drove down the long valley and across the cattleguard in front of the Deitrich home and walked up the huge slabs of black stone that formed the front steps. When no one answered the chimes I walked around the side of the house to the terrace, which was shaded by a black-and-white-striped canopy. Peggy Jean and Jeff and Earl sat at a glass-topped table, drinking daiquiris, while shish kebab smoked on a barbecue pit and young people I didn’t know swam in the pool.

  Fletcher Grinnel, the ex-mercenary, stepped out of the French doors with a drink tray, paused momentarily when he saw me, smiling either deferentially or to himself, then set down the tray and painted the shish kebab on the grill with a small brush.

  “Why don’t you invite yourself over?” Earl said.

  “Hugo Roberts wouldn’t get a warrant on your home. But I thought I should let you know what you’ve done,” I said.

  “Sit down with us, Billy Bob. It’s Sunday. Can’t we be friends for today?” Peggy Jean said.

  “Skyler Doolittle is dead. If I had to bet on the shooter, I’d put my money on either Fletcher over there, grimacing into the smoke, or Jeff and his friends wondering if they should go to a swimming party this afternoon or, say, gang-rape a Mexican girl,” I said.

  Jeff wore a Hawaiian shirt open on his chest. He slanted his head sideways and pushed the curls off his forehead with the tips of his fingers, studying my words with the idle concentration he might show a street beggar. Then he shook his head slowly as though he were bemused by a metaphysical absurdity and let his eyes wander out onto the swimming pool.

  “Fletcher, go inside and call the sheriff’s office and find out what this is about,” Earl said.

  “Should I show Mr. Holland to his car?” Fletcher asked.

  “That’s a possibility,” Earl said.

  “You know what you’ve let either this hired moron or your psychopath of a son do?” I said to Earl. “Skyler Doolittle had gotten Jessie Stump off your case. They were headed for Matagorda Bay, out of your life. But somebody murdered this harmless, gentle man with a .30-06 rifle while Jessie was shaving a few feet away. It looked like Jessie tried to stop the bleeding with his shirt. Skyler’s blood was smeared over everything in the area, which means Jessie probably tried to drag him out of the line of fire. That’s the man who’s probably up in your tree line now, Earl.”

  Fletcher Grinnel set down the barbecue brush on a white plate and wiped his fingers with a paper towel and approached me, his lips pursed whimsically.

  “No,” Peggy Jean said, and rose from her chair. She took me by the arm. “You walk with me, Billy Bob. This kind of thing is not going to happen at our house.”

  She held my arm tightly, almost in a romantic fashion. Her breast touched my arm and her hip brushed against mine as we walked toward the front of the house. When we were around the corner of the building I felt the tension go out of her grip and I stepped away from her.

  “You tried to warn Skyler. When this plays out in a courtroom, that’ll count for something,” I said.

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “You left him a note on a pine branch outside the cave he and Stump were hidden in.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “He saw you picking blackberries on the creek. Why do you deny a good deed?”

  “You listen, Billy Bob. My husband has gambled away or mismanaged or leveraged everything we own. After all the years I’ve spent on this marriage I’m not about to accept a life of genteel poverty in Deaf Smith. I’m bringing civil suit against Wilbur Pickett for the damage he’s done to us. Don’t you dare lie to me about the theft of those bonds, either. That man stole them and he’s going to pay for it.”

  “Skyler Doolittle was murdered this morning, probably by a member of your household, and you’re talking about a civil suit?”

  The blood climbed into her face.

  “Maybe I’m a victim here, too. Did that ever occur to you?” she said.

  “Yes, it did …”

  “Then why do you treat me the way you do?” She stepped close to me and hit me in the chest with the flat of her fist, then again, desperately, her jawbone flexing. “We could have made it work. Why weren’t you willing to try?”

  “Because you don’t love what we are, Peggy Jean. You’re in love with what we were.”

  Her face crinkled high up on one cheek, like a flower held too close to heat. Then she turned and went into the house, her elbows cupped tightly in her palms, her back shaking.

  Monday evening Ronnie Cruise turned off the road into my driveway and parked by the barn, out of view from the front. He was driving Cholo Ramirez’s ’49 Mercury, and an odor of burning rubber and oil rose from the tires and engine. Ronnie got out of the car and took off his shades and looked back down the drive at the road.

  “What are you doing with Cholo’s car?” I said.

  “I just got it out of the pound. Both our names were on the pink slip,” he said.

  “Somebody after you, Ronnie?”

  “I cruised Val’s. Some guys in a roll-bar rig followed me out. I got to sit down. I didn’t get no sleep last night.”

  “What can I do for you?” I asked.

  “I’m gonna save you a lot of time. My uncle, the guy who owns the auto shop where I work? He’s mobbed-up. Him and Cholo and some other guys, guys out of Galveston, were working the stick-up scam on Deitrich’s business friends. There’s this old skeet club between Conroe and Houston, except now it’s got water beds and chippies in it. Deitrich would steer his friends to the card game, then Cholo and the others would take it down. I got some guilt over this.”

  “You said you weren’t involved with it.”

  “You not understanding me. Yesterday I saw this dude Johnny Krause with my uncle. I asked my uncle, ‘Hey, what are you doing with this guy?’ He goes, ‘Johnny was one of the take-down artists on the last job at the skeet club.’ I go, ‘That’s the guy who killed Cholo.’

  “My uncle goes, ‘Cholo wasn’t in on that last one, so he didn’t know who Johnny was when he run into him at the boxing gym. Too bad it shakes out like that sometimes.’

  “Too bad? That’s my own uncle talking like Cholo was a sack of shit. I told my uncle to go fuck himself. I hope the cops nail his chop shop and jam a grease gun up his ass.”

  “You want to come inside?”

  “Yeah, I’d like that,” he said.

  In the kitchen he sat at the table and drank an RC Cola and ate a ham and lettuce sandwich with his face close to the plate. He wore a pair of wash-faded Levi’s without a belt and a purple T-shirt razored off below the nipples. His eyes kept studying mine, his lips seeming to form words that he rubbed away with the back of a finger before he completed them.

  “What eke did you come here to tell me, Ronnie?” I asked.

  “Some Purple Hearts got it that Jeff Deitrich wants to do Essie, make her pull a train. The word is he’s gonna use some bikers, meth-heads that don’t got boundaries. Then he’s gonna pop your boy.”

  “Say that again.”

  “They’re gonna kill Lucas after they get finished with Essie. What world you live in, Mr. Holland? You don’t think Jeff and his friends got it in them?”

  I was standing up when he said this, and I could feel the blood pounding in my wrists and temples, and for some reason I wanted to attack him with my fists.

  “Here’s what it is, Mr. Holland,” he said. “I ain’t gonna let Jeff get away with this. You remember the two Viscounts who put their hands all over Essie in a movie theater, the ones who took a real bad bounce off a roof? I didn’t throw them off, but the choices they had weren’t too good. They were either gonna grow new kneecaps or learn how to fly.

  “Since that day no Viscount has bothered a Purple Heart
or one of our girls. I’m telling you this because I heard about some stuff you done when you were a Texas Ranger, about dope mules that got a playing card stuck down their throats in Coahuila. I don’t got any playing cards with Purple Hearts on them, but maybe Jeff and his friends are gonna ask themselves how many funerals they want to go to.”

  I sat down at the table. The wood felt cold and hard against my forearms.

  “You’re going to take somebody out?” I said, my words catching in my throat.

  “You don’t want it to get done, or you don’t want to know about it? You rather your boy be killed? Which one you want, Mr. Holland?”

  That same night Wilbur Pickett appeared in the ESPN television broadcast booth high above an indoor arena in Mesquite, where a rodeo was in progress. Wilbur wore a new gray Stetson with a blue cord tied around the crown and a snap-button silver and blue cowboy shirt that rang like ice water on his shoulders. Kippy Jo sat next to him, wearing dark glasses, her forearm touching Wilbur’s.

  The broadcaster was a short, wiry, lantern-jawed, ex–bull rider himself, with recessed buckshot eyes and a high-pitched East Texas accent that was like tin being stripped off a roof. His teeth were as rectangular as tombstones when he grinned and pushed the microphone in front of Wilbur.

  “It’s good to see you, boy. The last time you was here you was coming out of chute number 6 on a bull named Bad Whiskey. That was the only bull on the circuit besides Bodacious could run the clowns up the boards, turn around in midair, and give you a view from El Paso to Texarkana, all in one hop,” the announcer said.

  “I appreciate being here, W.D. It’s a real opportunity for me …”

  “It’s a treat having you drop by to do color for us again,” the announcer interrupted. “We’re gonna take a break in a minute, then I want your opinion on a bulldogging buddy of yours out of Quanah …”

  Wilbur sat rigidly in the chair, his right hand clenched around his left wrist. He leaned toward the microphone, the brim of his hat partly shadowing his face, as though he were creating a private space in which he was about to confide a secret to a solitary individual.