Heartwood bbh-2

by James Lee Burke

  "You cheated him at cards. He got in your face about it. So you had Hugo's Brownshirts roust him."

  Earl smiled tolerantly and shook his head. The other men at the table looked like they had been frame-frozen in a film, their hands poised on a napkin, a water glass, their eyes neutral.

  "Go back to your table, sir," the owner, a California entrepreneur, said behind me.

  "No, no, he's invited here. You sit down with us, Billy Bob," Peggy Jean said, her throat flushed, her mouth stiff and unnatural and cold-looking from the whiskey and iced cherries in her Old-Fashioned glass.

  I put one hand on the table and leaned down toward Earl's face. His fine brown hair hung on his brow.

  "You paid Hugo Roberts to plant evidence on Wilbur Pickett. Then you shamed and humiliated a handicapped man. I'm going to take what you've done and shove it up your sorry ass," I said.

  "You went to night school and earned a law degree and are to be admired for that. But you're still white trash at heart, Billy Bob. And that's the only reason I don't get up and knock you down," he replied.

  I turned and walked stiffly past my table, left a dollar for having used the place setting, and went up the stairs through the old darkened lobby, past the empty registration desk and pigeonholes for guest mail and room keys and the dust-covered telephone switchboard, into the shade under the colonnade and the wind that blew like a blowtorch across the asphalt.

  I was a half block down the street when I heard Peggy Jean's voice behind me. "Billy Bob, wait. I need to talk with you. Don't go away like this."

  She was on high heels, and when she started toward me she twisted one ankle and had to grab on to a wood post. Then Earl was on the sidewalk beside her, and the two of them began to argue with the attempted restraint of people whose lives are coming apart on a stage. I stood in the middle of the sidewalk, under a candy-striped barbershop awning, like a foolish and impotent spectator who cannot bring himself to either flee or participate in the fray.

  "You're tight. Go sit in the lobby. I'll have some coffee sent out," Earl said.

  "You had that handicapped man arrested? Over a card game?" she asked incredulously.

  "I didn't. He's demented. He's been in prison for killing schoolchildren, for God's sake." Then Earl waved his hands in the air and slapped them against his hips in exasperation. "I give up," he said, and went back into the hotel.

  But he didn't stay. He was right back out on the sidewalk. "To hell with it. Just to hell with it. Go back inside and eat something. I'll send Fletcher with the limo," he said, and got into his Lincoln and backed out into the street while Peggy Jean propped herself against the colonnade's post and pulled off her broken high-heel shoe.

  "You want a glass of iced tea?" I said to her.

  "Tea. Aspirin. Heroin. Anything. I feel like a train wreck," she said.

  "Why don't you sit down on the bench? I'll get my car."

  I told myself my gesture was an innocent one. Perhaps it was. You didn't abandon an impaired friend in a public place and leave her to swelter in the heat and her own embarrassment while she waited on the mercies of an irresponsible husband.

  Yes, I'm absolutely sure I thought those thoughts.

  We drove north of town toward her home, then she asked to stop at a steak house that was built on an escarpment overlooking a long valley. When she got out of the car she deliberately knocked the heel off her other shoe on an ornamental boulder by the restaurant door, then put her shoes back on as flats and went in the ladies' room and washed her face and put on fresh makeup and came back out and sat at a table with me by the back window.

  The restaurant was cool and softly lit and deserted except for a bartender and a waiter. Clouds covered the sun now, and the valley below us was blanketed with shadow and the wind blew the grass and wildflowers in channels like the fingers of a river.

  The jukebox was playing an old Floyd Tillman song. Her face seemed to go out of focus with a private thought or maybe with an after-rush from the Old-Fashioneds. Then she fixed her eyes on me as though I were walking toward her out of a dream.

  "Dance with me," she said.

  "I'm not very good at it," I said.

  "Please, Billy Bob. Just one time."

  And that's what we did, on a small square of polished yellow hardwood floor, balloons of color rippling through the plastic casing of the jukebox. She placed her cheek against mine, and I could smell bourbon and can-died cherries and bitters and sweet syrup and sliced oranges on her breath, as though all the blended, chilled odors of what she had consumed had been refermented and heated inside her heart's blood and breathed out again against my skin.

  Then her head brushed against my face and I smelled a fragrance of roses in her hair. Her loins, when they touched mine, were like points of fire against my body, and I knew I was entering a country where the rules that had always governed my life were about to be irrevocably set aside.

  8

  At sunset that evening I drove to Wilbur Pickett's place on the hardpan. The sun had dropped behind the hills in the west and the afterglow looked like fires were burning inside the trees on the hills' rim.

  Wilbur and his wife, Kippy Jo, had moved their kitchen table out into the middle of the backyard and were eating ears of corn they had roasted on a barbecue pit. His pasture was dimpled with water and had turned emerald green from yesterday's storm, and his Appaloosa and two palominos were drinking out of the tank by his windmill, their tails switching across their hindquarters. Parked by the barn was an ancient snub-nosed flatbed truck loaded to the top of the slats with rattlesnake watermelons.

  "I'm trying to put your trial off as long as I can. A guy like Earl Deitrich eventually sticks his hand in a porcupine hole," I said.

  "Don't matter to me. I got these ole boys down in Venezuela just about sold on this pipeline job. You still got time to get in on it."

  It was like talking to a child.

  "Good-looking melons," I said.

  "I went on down through Rio Grande City and got me a mess of them. I'm gonna flat clean up on that li'l deal," he replied.

  "You went to Mexico?"

  "Yeah, what's wrong with that?" he said.

  "You're on bail. You don't go to other countries when you're on bail," I said.

  "You want some corn?" he asked.

  "Wilbur, I think Earl Deitrich is into some very bad stuff. I'm not sure what it is, but you're his scapegoat. Stop playing his game," I said.

  He looked at me from under his shapeless cowboy hat with a private, ironic expression, then flung the coffee from his metal cup and wiped it clean with a napkin.

  "You were going to say something?" I asked.

  "Not me, son," he replied. After a moment, he said, "Kippy Jo, tell him what you been seeing in your dreams."

  She turned her blue, sightless white-flecked eyes on me. The wind was blowing at her back and it feathered her hair around her throat.

  "A winged man is coming. His teeth are red. He's killed Indian people in another place. I don't understand the dream. He's very evil," she said.

  I didn't respond. She turned her head slightly, as though the creak of the windmill or the horses snuffing and blowing at the water tank meant something. Then her eyes came back on me and her head tilted, her mouth parting silently, her cheeks slack with a thought that confused her.

  "But you already know him. How can you be around a man this evil without knowing it?" she said.

  "Don't that blow your head?" Wilbur said.

  When I walked out to my car with Wilbur I wished I hadn't come. I had wanted to caution him, but it did no good. Wilbur had been born in the wrong century. His kind became the tools of empires with glad hearts and an indefatigable optimism. When their usefulness ended, they were discarded.

  But he was not the only one who was naive.

  "You were fixing to tell me something back there," I said.

  He took off his hat and pressed the dents out of the crown. Against the fire in the western sky his
chiseled, surgically rebuilt profile looked like a Roman soldier's.

  "Me and Kippy Jo was selling our melons out on the state road today," he said. "I seen your Avalon coming hell for breakfast around a truck. I thought, Now, there's a man badly in need of melons."

  His eyes held mine. I could feel my face burning.

  "I ain't gonna tell a man of your background about milking through the fence, but if that wasn't Peggy Jean Deitrich in your car, then ole Bodacious head-butted me a lot worse than I thought," he said.

  That Saturday afternoon Lucas and his band played at Shorty's out on the river. Shorty's, with its screened porches and lack of air-conditioning, might have been a ramshackle nightclub and barbecue joint left over from another era, but either out of curiosity or need every class of person in our area came through its doors.

  They scored dope and on one another. Bikers got swacked on crystal; forlorn oil field wives went up the road to the Super 8 Motel with college boys; rednecks broke their knuckles on one another's faces out in the trees; and Hollywood film people from Fredericksburg took it all in like happy visitors at a zoo.

  Jeff Deitrich's birthday party had started at his house, then had moved in a caravan of Cherokees and roll-bar Jeeps and sports cars to Shorty's. Jeff and his friends occupied both the side and back screen porches. They drank daiquiris, Coronas with lime, and B-52s. As the evening wore on, the joints they toked on along the riverbank glowed like fireflies among the darkening trees.

  A yellow Porsche convertible pulled into the lot and two men, one young, the other middle-aged, went inside and sat at the bar. The younger man was too thin to be called handsome, but his delicate facial bones, bright eyes, and guileless manner gave him a boyish charm and vulnerability that drew older men to him.

  The middle-aged man with him wore cream-colored pleated slacks and white shoes and a navy-blue shirt. He had a dissolute face and thick, salt-and-pepper hair. His hips and lower stomach swelled over his belt slightly, and his soft buttocks splayed on the barstool when he sat down. He crossed his legs and smoked a gold-tipped cigarette with his wrist held in the air, surveying the dance floor, letting his smoke leak upward whimsically from his open mouth.

  When the band took a break Lucas went to the end of the bar for a cold drink. The younger man, whose name was Leland, kept twisting his head so he could see through the side door onto the screen porch where Jeff Deitrich, his shirt unbuttoned on his brown chest, was standing at his table, entertaining his guests, and downing a B-52, a jigger of whiskey dropped into a schooner of beer.

  Then Jeff caught Leland's stare. His dark eyes blazed and his throat and the gold chain and St. Christopher's metal that hung from it were ropy with sweat. He set the schooner down on the plank table and walked to the bar, standing three feet from Leland. He waved the bartender away, scooped a handful of peanuts out of a dish, and ate them with his fingers, one at a time, looking at the bottles on the bar. He breathed audibly through his nose.

  "I told you not to come around here again," he said.

  "We were just passing by, Jeff. I guess birthday congratulations are in order," Leland said.

  "In three minutes you and the queen better be the fuck out the door," Jeff said.

  The middle-aged man pursed his lips and said, "Aren't we the excitable one?"

  Leland's hand immediately touched his friend's wrist.

  But Jeff let the remark pass and walked toward the men's room. He stopped at the end of the bar, as though seeing Lucas for the first time.

  "What do you think you're doing, Lucas?" he asked.

  "I work here. I'm taking a break. What's it to you, Jeff?"

  Jeff grinned, his face oily in the reflected glow of the bar's lacquered pine paneling, the curly brown locks on the back of bis neck stirring in the breeze from the electric fan. "It's nothing to me. Come on back to the table. We still have champagne and cake left," he said.

  Three minutes later Leland and his friend were gone from the bar.

  But not far enough.

  Jeff had gone back out on the screen porch and rejoined his party. Then his attention strayed. He stood at the screen, his hands on his hips, watching Leland and his friend walk between the parked cars toward their yellow convertible. Jeff rubbed the sweat off his chest on the flat of his hand, his fingers kneading it idly in his palm. A lump of cartilage flexed in his jaw.

  He followed the two men into the gravel parking lot. He hooked one finger under the middle-aged man's arm and turned him in a slow pirouette toward him.

  "I called you a queen in there, sir. I shouldn't have done that," Jeff said.

  "I've answered to worse," the man replied, unconsciously feeling the wet spot on his sleeve where Jeff had touched him.

  "What's your name, sir?"

  "Mike."

  "It's a pleasure to meet you, Mike. You like cake, Mike?"

  "I'm on a diet. You eat it for me."

  "How about the icing? I mean, when you eat it with ice cream, what do you think about when you stick it in your mouth with a spoon?"

  "I was in the navy, kid. I've heard it all. So have a happy birthday."

  "I've really tried to go the extra mile, but I think you're laughing at me, Mike. I really do."

  "Not on your life, kid. You got a hard-on you could break walnuts with. I hope you get rid of it for your birthday. But it's not gonna happen on me."

  "See, you're talking down to people. You pick up young guys to go down on you, then you insult people you don't know. You probably pissed on the toilet seat, too. Don't walk away from me. I'm talking to you… Mike?… Listen to me now… Here, see how this feels," Jeff said, and spun the man who called himself Mike back toward him and buried his fist in his stomach.

  Mike fell to his knees, his mouth strangling for air. Jeff grabbed his hair in both hands and drove his head into a door panel, again and again, then wiped his hands on his shirt as though his skin glowed with an obscene presence.

  The man named Mike was on his hands and knees now and accidentally touched the tip of Jeffs shoe. Jeff kicked him in the mouth, gashing his lips against his teeth, convulsing his face with shock.

  Jeff's friends pushed and cajoled and held him, circling him so he couldn't get at the weeping man on the ground. Then he broke free from them, his arms flailing at the air.

  "All right, all right! I'm cool! It's not me got the problem! This guy came on to me at the bar!" he said.

  "Jeff, honey, you're right. Everybody saw that. But the cops are gonna be here. Come back inside. He's just a queer," a girl said.

  Jeff walked unsteadily toward the state road, his shirt pulled out of his slacks, his body etched with car lights as though it were razored out of scorched metal.

  "Jeff, get away from the road!" someone yelled.

  He stopped, as though finally accepting the cautionary words of his friends. But he wasn't thinking about his friends now, nor of the road or the trucks that roared by him in a suck of air brakes and a swirl of beer cups and diesel fumes. He stared stupidly at the maroon '49 Mercury, its hood and doors overpainted with rippling blue and red flames, the grille like chromed teeth, that had just pulled into the parking lot.

  The sole occupant, Esmeralda Ramirez, cut the engine and got out and stared at him across the top of the roof. She wore an organdy dress and earrings and makeup, and the car's interior light seemed to bathe her cleavage with both shadow and the flesh tones of a painting.

  "Why are you here?" Jeff said.

  "I brought you a present. You look terrible. What have you done?" she said.

  "Nothing. A guy tried to put moves on me. I never saw him before."

  "Get in the car."

  He remained motionless. She looked back down the road where the emergency lights of a sheriff's cruiser were coming around a bend.

  "Did you hear me? Get in the car. Now," she said.

  He sat down in the passenger seat and closed the door and did not look back at his friends. His body seemed to press back into the leat
her seat, as though it were dead weight gathered into foam rubber, when Esmeralda fish-tailed the Mercury out onto the asphalt.

  9

  Sunday morning I shined my boots and put on a suit and saddled Beau and rode up a slope that was humped with blackberry bushes. Then I was inside the sun-spangled shade of pine trees, Beau's hooves thudding softly on the moist carpet of pine needles, and a moment later I came out into the hard-packed dirt backyard of a half-breed Mexican boy named Pete who went with me to Mass every week.

  Pete was eleven years old and had a haircut like an inverted shoe brush. Even though he had an alcoholic mother and no father, he had already skipped one grade in school and could think circles around most adults. I leaned from the saddle and pulled him up on Beau's rump.

  "I got a good one for you," he said. "An old man was playing checkers on the front porch of his store with a cocker spaniel. This California guy pulls in for gas and says, 'Mister, that must be the smartest dog that ever was born.'

  "The old man says, 'I don't think he's so smart. I done beat him three games out of five.'"

  Pete howled at his own joke.

  We rode along the crest of the slope that bordered my property. Our shadows flowed horizontally along the ground through the vertical shadows of the trees, then we came out on a dusty street, where the tile-roofed church and Catholic elementary school stood. Beyond the pines in the churchyard I could see the small white cafe where Pete and I always ate breakfast after Mass. Ronnie Cruise's sunburst T-Bird was parked in the lot, the front door open for the breeze. Ronnie had reclined the seat and was stretched back on it with his forearm across his eyes.

  "Take Beau into the shade. I'll be along in a minute," I said to Pete.

  "You know that guy?" Pete asked.

  "I'm afraid so."

  "He's a gangbanger, Billy Bob. He don't belong here."

  "He probably wants to go to confession," I said, and winked.

  But Pete saw no humor in my remark. He walked with Beau and the tethering weight into the pines, repeatedly looking back at me, as though somehow I had made an alliance with an enemy.