“It’s probably a state forester. I think dry lightning started a fire in the ravine,” Earl said.
The two deputies looked at each other.
“We didn’t hear nothing about a fire in the ravine,” one said.
“There’s surely one burning. You don’t smell it?” Earl said.
“A fire was burning six or seven miles up the river. A lot of ash was blowing around in the wind, but there ain’t no fire in the ravine, sir,” the same deputy said.
“I’m sure someone’s taking care of it,” Earl said. He took them inside and fed them at the kitchen table, looking at his watch, feigning interest in the banality of their conversation. After they left he watched through the glass until their cars crossed the cattleguard and disappeared over a rise down the long two-lane road. He went into the library and removed his Smith & Wesson .38 revolver from his desk drawer, flipped the cylinder out of the frame, then snapped it into place again.
He walked into the kitchen, opened the circuit breaker box, and shut down all the floodlights on the grounds and the lights on the patio and terrace and in the swimming pool. The moon was veiled now and the hills that formed a cup around the back of his house rose up blackly into the stars. He threw open the French doors on the patio and smelled the gaslike odor of chrysanthemums and smoke on the wind.
He situated a heavy oak chair where the dining room hallway met the kitchen so he could look out onto the side terrace as well as the swimming pool, then he sat down and rested the Smith & Wesson on his thigh. Bankers and creditors could take his home and his cars, his thoroughbreds and his oil properties, even his fly-fishing equipment and rare gun and coin collections, but Earl Deitrich would leave behind a punctuation mark none of them would ever forget. Neither would his wife.
He had never killed anybody. He had been stationed in Germany and had missed Vietnam; as a consequence he had always competed with the soldier whom Peggy Murphy had truly loved and who had died at Chu Lai. She denied this, but he knew better. She closed her eyes throughout their lovemaking, her lips always averted, whatever degree of sexual pleasure he gave her always muted behind her skin.
He bit down on his molars, his hand clenching and unclenching on the pistol’s checkered grips. He was going to love blowing Jessie Stump’s liver out.
Then he heard the lock turn in her bedroom door. She stood at the head of the curved staircase, in a white nightgown, her hair brushed out on her shoulders, her bare feet enameled with moonlight.
In his hatred of her he had forgotten how beautiful she could look, even in her most unguarded moments. He started to speak, then he heard the footsteps by the swimming pool. He rose from the chair and looked up the staircase at Peggy Jean and put his finger to his lips, barely able to control the energy and excitement and gloat that surged in his chest.
The moon was behind a black cloud now, but Earl could make out a figure walking across the patio toward the back door. He cocked back the hammer on the Smith & Wesson, wetting his lips, aiming with two hands, trying to steady the trembling sight on the top of the sternum.
He pulled the trigger. It was a perfect shot, right through the throat; he was sure he even heard the hit, a thropping sound like a bullet coring through a watermelon.
Then Earl systematically blew his target apart: a round that hit an elbow, one in the upper thigh, another just above the groin, a final one through the face.
Earl lifted the revolver up at a right angle with both hands, his body canted sideways, his heart thundering with adrenaline. He had never experienced an exhilaration like this one, and he knew for the first time how men could come to love war.
Now Peggy Jean was standing behind him, her face small with fear, her eyes staring into the darkness. Her breath was sour and he stepped back from it.
“Billy Bob Holland ratted you out, Peggy Jean,” Earl said.
“What?” she said.
“I killed Stump. I blew him apart. By God, I did it,” he said.
He went to the circuit breaker box and began shoving banks of switches with the heel of his hand. When he walked back to the open door, his wife was out on the patio, her skin white in the flood lamps, her fingers pressed against her mouth.
Jeff Deitrich floated facedown in the pool, the blood from his wounds trailing like clouds of red smoke in the lighted water.
33
We would never be sure about the events that occurred next, not unless we accepted the explanation given to us later by Kippy Jo Pickett.
Earl wandered into his front yard, the Smith & Wesson hanging from his hand. The wind was blowing hard now, but his skin felt numb, dead to the touch, as though it were freezer-burned. To his left he saw the fire in the ravine glowing against the clouds and sparks fanning across the sky, drifting onto his roof.
There was no sound anywhere. He opened and closed his mouth to clear his ears and tried to rethink what he had just done. But it was like waking from an alcoholic blackout. The images and voices had become shards of glass that he couldn’t reassemble in his mind. Could he have killed his own son only moments ago?
The fire had climbed out of the ravine and was burning through the soft pad of dead grass in the woods, crawling up the trunks of trees into the canopy. The sky was red and yellow now, swirling with ash and smoke, and the heat was as bright and hot on his cheek as a candle flame.
Why hadn’t Peggy Jean called the county fire department?
He turned and stared at his house. It looked enveloped in heat, shrunken, the symmetrical lines distorted, smoke rising from the eaves. The black-and-white-striped canopy over the side patio burst into flame, snapping dryly in the wind; the flowers in the beds stiffened and their petals fell like confetti into the baked dirt.
Then he saw her at a downstairs window, talking urgently into a phone.
Finally she did something right, he thought.
The fire truck came hard up the road, sooner than he expected, almost out of nowhere.
He probably looked pretty foolish, standing in the front yard, with a revolver in his hand.
Well, to hell with them.
It was a pump truck, the windows filmed with mud, the running boards full of dark, hatted figures who clung to handrails. The driver pulled parallel to the house and left the engine running and got out and walked around the front of the truck and grinned at Earl.
“Cholo?” Earl said.
“The job’s got its moments. Hop on. There’s a space next to your son.”
“Jeff’s there?”
Cholo shrugged good-naturedly, but he didn’t speak. The other men on the truck were stepping down from the running boards. They wore slouch hats and bleached, nineteenth-century canvas dusters and laced boots and tightly belted, baggy khaki pants, and Earl realized they were not firemen at all but men who had worked in Africa with his great-grandfather and who carried braided leather whips folded around wood handles in their coat pockets.
“You thought you had me on that first take-down scam, remember?” Earl said. “You handed me a gun with a blank in it.”
“Yeah, man, you surprised us. It took cojones to stick it up to your head and snap it off.”
“I still don’t rattle, Cholo. Ready for this? Because I don’t know if I popped off six rounds or not.”
“Do what you gotta do, man.”
“Beaners don’t take down River Oaks white boys. You’re not a bad kid. You’re just dumb,” Earl said, grinning.
Earl pulled back the hammer and placed the muzzle of the Smith & Wesson against his temple. He looked directly into Cholo’s eyes and smiled again, then squeezed the trigger.
There was no report, in fact, no sound at all, not even the metallic snap of the firing pin against a spent cartridge.
Earl felt a wall of heat from his house baking the clothes on his back. Then the hatted men approached him and took him by his arms and led him toward the truck. Through the muddy window in the cab, he thought he saw Jeff’s bloodless and terrified face staring back at him
from the rear seat, a bullet hole below one eye.
Early the next morning Temple Carrol and I followed Marvin Pomroy out to the crime scene. The sky was a cloudless blue, the air crisp, the trees turning color on the hills. The Deitrich home was half in shadow, the immense white walls speckled with frost. The chrysanthemums were brown and gold in the flower beds, and the zebra-striped canopy over the side terrace puffed with wind.
“His wife said he was hollering about a fire truck. With Cholo and Jeff and dead slavers on it. She came outside and he put a big one right through his head,” Marvin said.
“Fire truck?” I said.
“He told two of Hugo’s deputies the ravine was on fire. There was a fire way on up the river but none around here,” Marvin said.
“Where is Peggy Jean?” I asked.
“Sedated at the hospital. Did I tell you we got Stump?” Marvin said.
“No.”
“He fell and broke his leg up on the ridge … You bothered about something?”
“No, sir,” I replied.
“You dimed Peggy Jean with her husband, so you think you share some responsibility for Earl’s craziness?” Marvin asked.
“No, I don’t think anything, Marvin. I think we’re going to breakfast. You want to join us?”
“Today’s Pee-Wee football day,” he said.
I walked back to my Avalon. Temple was studying the ground on the far side.
“Look at this,” she said, and pointed at the imprints of heavy, cleated tires in the grass.
“There were a bunch of emergency vehicles in here,” I said.
“Not with this kind of weight. They don’t lead back to the road, either. They go up the hill,” she said.
“I think the story of the Deitrichs is over, Temple.”
“Not for me,” she said, and began walking across the lawn and up the hill.
We followed the tracks onto a rough road that wound up to the plateau and meadow above the house. The ground was heavy with dew and the grass was pressed flat and pale in two long stripes that led up a sharp slope to the edge of the ravine where Pete and I hunted for arrowheads.
“I don’t believe this,” Temple said.
We walked between the imprints to the top of the ravine. At the edge of the cliff the soil was cut all the way to the rock by a vehicle that had rolled out onto the air and had disappeared. Down below, the tops of the pines were deep in shadow, blue-green, the branches symmetrical and unbroken; mist rose like steam off the water and exposed stones in the creekbed.
“I think we’re looking down at the entrance to Hell, Temple. I think Cholo and Jeff came back for Earl Deitrich,” I said.
Temple chewed the skin on the ball of her thumb.
“I don’t want to remember seeing this. I don’t want to ever think about this again,” she said.
I studied her face, the earnestness and goodness in it, the redness of her mouth, the way her strands of chestnut hair blew on her forehead, and I wanted to hold her against me and for us both to be wrapped inside the wind and the frenzy of the trees whipping against the sky and the whirrings of the earth and the mystical green vortex of creation itself.
I picked up a pinecone and slapped it out over the ravine, like a boy stroking an imaginary baseball.
“Let’s go out and watch Marvin’s kids play Pee-Wee League today,” I said, and rested my arm across her shoulders as we walked back toward the Deitrichs’ home.
EPILOGUE
Wilbur Pickett didn’t have trouble finding oil up in Wyoming; he just found it too soon. There was no blowout preventer on the wellhead when the drill bit punched into an early pay sand; the premature eruption of gas and oil and salt water ignited at the wellhead, and the pressurized torrent of flame incinerated the derrick like a tower of matchsticks.
Wilbur and his crew barely escaped with their lives.
After the well was capped, Wilbur squatted on his haunches amid the ruins of his derrick and surveyed the cliffs that rose above his and Kippy Jo’s land, the green river that meandered through it, the groves of cottonwoods on the banks, the wet sage on the hardpan, the antelope and white-tailed deer down in the arroyos.
That afternoon he and Kippy Jo drove to a bank in Sheridan and took out a building loan and started construction two weeks later on the dude ranch that he would name the Kippy Jo Double Bar.
For electric power he erected two wind turbines where his drilling rig had been. One morning he hooked his thumbs in his back pockets and gazed at the enormous metal blades turning soundlessly in the sunrise.
“This is a fine spot, Kippy Jo, but it ain’t diddly-squat on a rock when it comes to serious wind. Where’s the one place on earth it blows from four directions at once? I mean wind that’ll pick your cotton, sand the paint off your silo, and move your house to the next county, all free of charge,” he said.
Wilbur went in the house and called the Deitrichs’ lawyer, Clayton Spangler, who was rumored to own fifty thousand acres of the old XIT Ranch in the Texas Panhandle.
“Mr. Spangler, Kippy Jo and me would like to invite you trout fishing up at our ranch. I’m talking about rainbows fat as a fence post, sir. I flat got to knock ’em back in the water with a boat oar,” he said.
The Wilbur T. Pickett Natural Energy Company was on its way.
The next spring, during Easter break, Lucas and Temple and I drove to San Antonio and had supper at an outdoor cafe on the river, not far from the Alamo. The evening sky was turquoise, the air warm and fragrant with the smell of flowers. Lucas didn’t talk anymore about Esmeralda. If I mentioned her name, he always smiled and deliberately created a beam in his eyes that was not meant for anyone to read, lest the dues he had paid be taken from him.
The scene along the river was almost an idyllic one. The gondolas were filled with tourists; mariachi musicians in sombreros and dark suits scrolled with white piping played guitars in the cafes; the fronds of banana trees along the water’s edge rattled in the breeze. But I couldn’t concentrate on the conversation around me. I kept smelling a heavy fragrance of roses. When Temple and Lucas went into a shop to buy cactus candy for her father, I walked over to the Alamo. The facade was lighted with flood lamps and was pink and gray against the darkening sky, and I sat down on a stone bench and twirled my hat on my finger.
I could never look at the chapel and the adjacent barracks without chills going through me. One hundred and eighty-eight souls had held out for thirteen days against as many as six thousand of Santa Anna’s troops. They went down to the last man, except for five who were captured and tortured before they were executed. Their bodies were burned by Santa Anna like sacks of garbage.
But even as I dwelled on the deaths of those 188 men and boys, the smell of roses seemed to be all around me. Was I still enamored with the girl who used to be Peggy Jean Murphy?
Maybe. But that wasn’t bad. The girl I knew was worth remembering.
Behind me, I heard the throaty rumble of twin Hollywood mufflers off the pavement. I thought I saw a sunburst T-Bird turn up a darkened street toward the freeway, then I heard the driver double-clutching, shifting down, catching a lower gear, one shoulder bent low as he gripped the floor stick and listened for the exact second to pour on the gas and tack it up.
In my mind’s eye I saw Ronnie Cross and Esmeralda Ramirez flying down an empty six-lane highway through the countryside, the chromed engine roaring, the green dials on the walnut dashboard indicating levels of control and power that seemed to transcend the laws of mortality itself.
I thought of horsemen fleeing a grass fire in Old Mexico and civilian soldiers who waited with musket and powder horn at an adobe wall and a preacher who baptized by immersion and created a cathedral out of trees and water and sky. I smelled banks of roses and saw Ronnie Cross speed-shift his transmission and floor the accelerator, tacking up now, the rear end low on the road, the twin exhaust pipes thundering off the asphalt. Esmeralda twisted sideways in the oxblood leather seat and grinned at him, pumping her ar
ms to the beat from the stereo speakers, she and Ronnie disappearing down the highway, into the American mythos of gangbangers and youthful lovers and cars that pulsed with music, between hills that had been green and covered with sunlight only an hour ago.
To Margaret Pai and in memory of her husband,
Walter Pai
Also by James Lee Burke
HALF OF PARADISE
TO THE BRIGHT AND SHINING SUN
LAY DOWN MY SWORD AND SHIELD
TWO FOR TEXAS
THE CONVICT
THE LOST GET-BACK BOOGIE
THE NEON RAIN
HEAVEN’S PRISONERS
BLACK CHERRY BLUES
A MORNING FOR FLAMINGOS
A STAINED WHITE RADIANCE
IN THE ELECTRIC MIST WITH CONFEDERATE DEAD
DIXIE CITY JAM
BURNING ANGEL
CADILLAC JUKEBOX
CIMARRON ROSE
SUNSET LIMITED
Heartwood Page 32
