Heartwood bbh-2

by James Lee Burke

  "You want to see me?" I said to Ronnie.

  "Yeah, that lady you come to the shop with, she was jogging by your house. She said I'd find you here. Esmeralda didn't come home last night."

  "I'm supposed to know where she is?"

  He scratched his face. "Do you?" he asked.

  "No."

  "I went out to Jeff Deitrich's place. Some guy named Fletcher stopped me at the gate. He said if I was interested in the gardening job, I could come back tomorrow. He said not to knock on the front door."

  He took his sunglasses off the dashboard and clicked the wire arms together.

  "Anything else you want to tell me?" I said.

  He gave me a quizzical look. "You bent out of joint about something?" he asked.

  "Four firemen were burned to death on Earl Deitrich's property. I think you came by my house the other night to cover your ass."

  He got out of the car and put on his shades.

  "You calling me a bullshit guy, right?" he said.

  "No, I'm saying it's Sunday morning and I'm not in the mood for somebody's grift. If that offends you, go fuck yourself."

  I walked out of the sunlight onto the church lawn, into the pine trees where Pete waited for me. I heard Ronnie start his car and back out onto the dirt street and head toward the state road. Then he slowed and made a U-turn through the portico of a deserted Pure station, the Hollywood mufflers reverberating off the cement. He stopped in front of the church and left the car running in the street. He jumped across the rain ditch onto the grass and caught my shirtsleeve with two fingers, oblivious to the stares of people going inside the church.

  "I ain't burned no firemen, man. And nobody don't talk to me like that. That means nobody."

  When I got back to the house I walked Beau into the barn and unsaddled him and turned him out. As I walked toward the house I saw Temple Carrol jog past the front of the driveway, then pause in midstride and stare back at me, as though unsure of what she was going to do next.

  She walked up the drive toward me, her hair tucked inside a baseball cap.

  "You look like you've been pouring it on," I said.

  "I've got a problem. This friend of mine has his head up his butt. But I really don't know how to tell him that," she replied. She wore a pair of faded pink shorts, and the tails of her shirt were knotted under her breasts. Her skin was glazed with sweat, her eyes blinking with the salt that ran into them. She blotted her face on her shirt.

  "What is it, Temple?" I asked.

  "If you want to be an idiot in your private life, that's your business. But I'm part of Wilbur Pickett's defense team. You don't have the right to do what you're doing."

  "Doing what, please?"

  Her hands were in her back pockets, her face tilted up into mine now, the whites of her eyes shiny and pink. Her breasts rose and fell against her shirt.

  "It's a small town. Peggy Jean had a fight with her husband in front of the Langtry Hotel. Then the two of you boogied on down the road," she said.

  "She twisted her ankle. I took her home."

  "Well, twist this. You've managed to publicly involve yourself with the wife of the man who's brought charges against your client. You piss me off so bad I want to beat the shit out of you." She shoved me in the breastbone with her hand. Then she shoved me again, her face heating, her eves watering now.

  "Nothing happened. Temple. I promise."

  She turned and walked away from me, then ripped the baseball cap off her head and shook out her hair. The faded rump of her shorts was flecked with dirt.

  "Come on back, Temple," I said.

  But she didn't.

  I went inside the house and turned on the television to fill the rooms with as much noise as I could to drown out Temple's words.

  A Houston televangelist was sitting on a stage with his two co-hosts, a middle-aged blonde woman and a white-haired black man who looked like a minstrel performer rather than a real person of color. The three of them had joined hands and were supposedly receiving telepathic pleas for help from their electronic congregation. Their eyes were squeezed shut, their faces furrowed with strain as though they were constipated.

  I stared in disbelief as the pilot Bubba Grimes took a seat among the latticework of plastic flowers. He talked of mercy flights to Rwandan refugees, or missionaries who risked their lives in jungles that swarmed with wild animals and tropical disease. Grimes's face broke into thousands of fine wrinkles when he grinned, like the lines in a tobacco leaf. The televangelist was bent forward in his chair, his unctuous voice modifying and directing Grimes's peckerwood depiction of Western humanity at work in Central Africa.

  The blonde woman and the black man, whose skin looked like greasepaint and whose hair was as white as new snow, nodded their heads reverentially.

  Grimes poured into a glass from a pitcher filled with ice and Kool-Aid and drank until the glass was empty.

  "Bubba loves his Kool-Aid," the televangelist said.

  Grimes grinned at the camera, his lips as red as a wet strawberry.

  It was sickening to watch.

  I went to my desk in the library and punched in Earl Deitrich's number on the telephone.

  "What is it now?" he said when he recognized my voice.

  "I drove your wife home the other day because you left her on the sidewalk with a sprained ankle. That was the extent of it. I hope we're clear on that."

  "Oh yeah. That's why y'all were dancing in a bar the same afternoon… You there? No smart-ass remarks to make?"

  I looked stupidly out the window at the blades of my windmill ginning beyond the barn roof.

  "Your wife didn't do anything wrong, Earl. If there's any blame involved, it's mine," I said.

  "You got that right."

  I started to ease the receiver down, to let go of pride and anger and all the vituperative energy that had clung to me like a net since I had run into Ronnie Cruise by the church. But for some reason I kept seeing Bubba Grimes's red smile on the television screen.

  "That sociopathic pilot, the guy you paid to lie about Wilbur Pickett? He landed his plane on my pasture. He wanted to hang you from a meat hook. I'd hire a better class of lowlife, Earl," I said, then hung up.

  I walked down to the bluffs above the river and threw rocks at a beached, worm-scrolled cottonwood until my arm throbbed.

  Jeff Deitrich didn't return home that morning or even by that afternoon. Hugo Roberts and his deputies began searching the county for Cholo Ramirez's 1949 Mercury, questioning truck stop and filling station and motel operators, cruising through Val's Drive-in and campgrounds and the wooded promontory high above the river, called the Cliffs, where teenage kids smoked dope and made out.

  Hugo Roberts and his deputies were obviously grunts for Earl Deitrich and would exercise damage control for him, but unfortunately for Earl the Texas Department of Public Safety would not. When the homosexual whom Jeff beat at Shorty's filed charges against Jeff, the highway patrol picked up the description and license number of Cholo's car.

  At dusk on that same Sunday Jeff was asleep in the passenger seat of the Mercury when a highway patrolman parked in a roadside picnic area saw Esmeralda roar past him on the two-lane. The patrolman hit his flasher and siren and chased the Mercury for five miles through hills and a one-red-light town, the two of them sweeping onto the shoulder to pass a poultry truck, careening around a wide gravel turnout on the river's edge, showering rocks like bird shot into the water.

  She crossed a narrow concrete bridge at ninety, the backdraft blowing bait cups and fish-blood-stained newspaper into the air like confetti. Then the road straightened along the river and Esmeralda got serious. The Mercury's engine roared with a new life and pushed the car's body back on the springs. Rocks from her tires broke car windows on the opposite side of the road and rang like tack hammers on metal road signs.

  The highway patrol cruiser slowed behind her but not out of defeat.

  Up ahead, just inside the county line, Hugo Roberts and hi
s deputies had set up a roadblock.

  Around a bend, behind bushes and a signboard, so that a driver approaching it at high speed from the south could not see it until the driver was right up on it.

  Esmeralda swerved onto the shoulder and was airborne going across the irrigation ditch into a tomato field. The Mercury slid sideways for a hundred feet, scouring clouds of cinnamon-colored dust into the air, trenching a path through the tomato vines like the tail of a tornado.

  The engine killed and the hood crackled with heat. As soon as Esmeralda opened the car door Hugo's deputies were on her like flies, pinning her across the hood, pressing her cheek into the hot metal, running their hands like spiders down her sides and hips and thighs.

  One of the deputies leaned his mouth close to her ear. "You just wrote our names on your ass," he said.

  None of them had paid attention to Jeff Deitrich.

  Not until he came around the hood of the car and tore into them with both fists, hooking one deputy in the eye. knocking another to the ground with a bloody nose.

  Hugo's deputies, joined by two highway patrolmen, wrestled him against the grille, kicked his ankles out from under him, and jerked his chin up with a baton.

  "You spoiled fart, we're trying to help you. This woman damned near killed people," Hugo said.

  "That's my wife. One of you put your hand on her again and my old man will have you cleaning litter boxes at the animal shelter," Jeff said.

  "Your wife?" Hugo said.

  "We got married in Mexico."

  Hugo Roberts laughed and lit a cigarette. He removed a piece of tobacco from his tongue and looked at it and started laughing again.

  "Let him up and see if you can get his daddy on the radio. Tell me this job ain't a toe-curlin' sidesplitter," he said.

  10

  Just before noon on Monday morning Ronnie Cruise and Cholo Ramirez came through my office door. Ronnie threw a white envelope wrapped with a rubber band on my desk.

  "What's that?" I said.

  "A down payment, a retainer. Whatever it's called. A thousand dollars. We want you to represent Esmeralda," Ronnie said.

  "Yesterday you were threatening me in front of a church," I said, and threw the envelope into his chest.

  "This ain't about me. Jeff Deitrich got her wired on leapers and married her in a chicken yard down in Piedras Negras," Ronnie said.

  "That's not how she told it to me," I said.

  The skin on Ronnie's face flexed against the bone. "You already talked to her? She says she wanted to marry Jeff?" he asked, his mouth slack.

  "I went to see her because I think she's getting a bad deal, Ronnie. Here's the card of a bondsman across the square. I'll be at her arraignment this afternoon. Use that money to work out something on the bail," I said.

  "Why you looking out for Esmeralda?" Cholo asked.

  "Because she's stand-up," I said.

  His eyes narrowed, as though there were a trick in my words. He wore a white undershirt and his shoulders and upper arms had the swollen proportions of a steroid addict. He stood in front of the glass wall case that contained the revolvers and Winchester rifle of my greatgrandfather without seeming to have ever noticed it. His reflection wobbled between the glass and blue felt background like a man trapped under lake ice.

  I waited for him to speak but he didn't.

  "A pilot named Bubba Grimes told me Earl Deitrich has a weakness for gambling. I hear you told Temple Carrol a story about turning over card games. Is there a connection there, Cholo?" I said.

  "No."

  But Ronnie was looking at the side of Cholo's face now.

  "I said no," Cholo repeated.

  "You two guys build cars that belong on magazine covers. Why do you waste your energies with gang-bangers?" I said.

  Ronnie Cruise pointed the index and little fingers of his right hand at me, like devil's horns. "Man, you're a Heart only once. You got a tattoo on your throat like Cholo's, you got shit in your blood and everybody on the street knows it. You were a Texas Ranger?" he said.

  "That's right."

  "Then you should understand."

  After they left I called Temple and asked her to visit the women's section of the jail to ensure that nothing untoward was happening to Esmeralda Ramirez.

  "I thought you already went over there," she said.

  "It doesn't hurt to err on the side of caution," I said.

  "Is that the reason you called?"

  "No. Have dinner with me."

  "I'll think about it," she said, and hung up.

  I walked to the window and looked out on the square, at the blinding white reflection of sunlight on the cement and the deep green of the oaks moving in a hot wind. I tried to keep my thoughts straight in my head but I couldn't. I kept thinking of both Temple and Peggy Jean Deitrich and wondered at how it was possible to feel trepidation, guilt, and attraction whenever the name of either one came into my mind. I heard the secretary's voice, then the door of my office ease open on the rug.

  Ronnie Cruise stood in the doorway, the envelope full of money stuck down in his belt.

  "She told you she got married 'cause she wanted to? She wasn't fried when she done it?" he said.

  "I'm not her priest, Ronnie."

  "I was just clearing it up, that's all. I'll be at the arraignment. I got no beef," he said.

  I bet, I thought.

  Esmeralda was released on bail at four that afternoon. Her brother, Cholo, and Temple Carrol and I walked with her toward Cholo's car, which was webbed with dried mud from the tomato field she had plowed through. The late sun was like a yellow flame in the trees and she shielded her eyes and kept looking at the row of cars parked up and down the street.

  "Ronnie's waiting in the car. He wasn't sure you wanted him inside," Cholo said.

  "Why'd you bring him? It's not his business. Stay out of my life, Cholo," she said.

  "Don't treat us like that, Esmeralda. We're your people. It's you who don't have no business up here," Cholo said. Then his face clouded and his metabolism seemed to kick into a higher register. "I don't understand nothing that's going on here."

  But she wasn't listening to him. Her eyes swept the street once more. She pirouetted on the sidewalk and stared into my face.

  "Is Jeff in jail? Because of the gay guy at Shorty's?" she said.

  "The guy Jeff beat up had a change of heart. He dropped the charges and decided to vacation in Cancun," I said.

  But the inference about the way Jeffs father handled business did not show in her face. "Then where's Jeff?" she said.

  A steel-gray limo with tinted windows pulled into a yellow zone next to Cholo's car and Earl Deitrich got out of the back door, dressed in dark blue jeans and soft boots and a snap-button shirt. Peggy Jean stayed far back in the interior of the limo, her face veiled with shadow, her white dress glowing in a ray of sunlight. The chauffeur, a peculiar man named Fletcher, who seemed to have no past or origins, stood on the opposite side of the limo, his arms propped on the roof, a fixed smile on his mouth.

  Earl's face was warm with sympathy, his hands open, as though he were about to console a survivor at a funeral.

  "Thank the Lord I caught you," he said to Esmeralda.

  "My attorney is going to contact you tomorrow. We'll get everything worked out. Believe me, Jeff wants to do the right thing. In the meantime, you call me with any problem you have."

  "What are you talking about?" she said.

  "Young people act hastily sometimes. That doesn't mean they have to ruin their lives over it. We're here to help. We're in this thing together," he said.

  "Where's Jeff?" she asked.

  "He's got some things to work out. But he's going to have to do it by himself. It's important for us to understand that, Esmeralda," Earl said.

  "He marries my sister but he's got things to do by himself? She don't have no more to say. You send the lawyer around, he talks to me first," Cholo said.

  Earl's chauffeur walked around the grille of
the limo and stood inches from Cholo's back, smiling at nothing, the black hair that was combed on the sides of his bald pate ruffling slightly in the breeze. He wore black slacks and shined shoes and an open-necked long-sleeve white shirt with cuff links that had red stones in them.

  Earl's eyes looked directly into the chauffeur's. The chauffeur's gaze shifted to a spot across the street and he stepped backwards as though an invisible hand had touched his chest.

  "You're right, Cholo," Earl said. "Everybody needs to be included in on this, informed about everything that's happening. Absolutely."

  "You think I married your son so I can take your money? You're pitiful, Mr. Deitrich," Esmeralda said.

  "I don't blame you for having bad feelings. I just want to-" Earl began.

  Ronnie Cruise, who sat behind the Mercury's steering wheel, lifted his eyes into Earl's face. Ronnie's eyes were absolutely black, without luster, dead, devoid of all moral sense.

  "Like Cholo says, we got nothing else to talk about here. No disrespect, but tell your man there, what's his face, Fletcher, to get his fucking hand off Cholo's paint job," Ronnie said.

  A few minutes later Temple Carrol and I watched the limo and the customized Mercury drive in different directions through the cooling streets of Deaf Smith. Peggy Jean had never spoken. Not to me, not on behalf of decency or fairness or in some token way to show a bit of kindness toward a Mexican girl who was about to discover you didn't leave the rural slums of San Antonio because a drunk white boy married you in Piedras Negras.

  "How do you read all that?" Temple asked, lifting her shirt off her moist skin and shaking the cloth.

  I couldn't answer. I kept thinking about Peggy Jean and the net of shadow and light on her skin and white dress and her silent participation in her husband's evil.

  "You still on the planet?" Temple said.

  "What do I think?" I said. "I think Jeff Deitrich is a sexual nightmare. I think he's violent and dangerous and has racist instincts. I hope Esmeralda gets as far from the Deitrich family as possible."

  "Who lit your fuse?" Temple said.

  That night the sky was blue-black, veined with dry lightning, and brushfires burned in the hills west of Wilbur Pickett's place out on the hardpan. Deer broke down the wire fence on the back of Wilbur's pasture, and his Appaloosa and two palominos wandered out into the darkness.