Heartwood bbh-2

by James Lee Burke

  "If we weren't in this dining room, I'd kick your ass around the block," Jeff said to Rita.

  "Oh, I know you would. You're just so… studly," Rita said, and made a feigned passionate noise and kissing motion with her mouth and rejoined her party. She leaned forward confidentially, telling a story to a half dozen others, all of whom were grinning.

  "Get Esmeralda out of the can. We're going," Jeff said.

  "Me?" Lucas said.

  "You're not a member here. Nobody cares what you do. Go get her."

  "Tell you what. I'll just walk out to the highway and hitch a ride. In the meantime, why don't you quit acting like your shit don't flush?"

  "All right, I'm sorry. Sit down. I'll take care of it. God, why do I get myself into this stuff?" Jeff said. He finished his drink, then stood up, his face blanching slightly as the combination of whiskey and vodka on an empty stomach suddenly took effect.

  He walked down the hallway to the ladies' room and went in without knocking. A moment later he and Esmeralda emerged in the hallway, his hand spread across the small of her back. Her cheeks were wet, her purse held tightly in both hands.

  "She's a liar. She gave blow jobs to the whole back-field at SMU. She's treating you like a dumb peon," he said to her.

  The waiter had wheeled their dinner to their table and was placing schooners of draft beer to the right of each steak platter.

  "Bag it up for the dishwashers, Andre. We're gonna boogie on over to the Dog 'n' Shake. That's where it's happening," Jeff said, and signed the ticket on the serving cart.

  Then he realized that Rita Summers and her friends were laughing, not abruptly, as they would have at a joke, but in a sustained, collective giggle that seemed to spread like a crinkling of cellophane at their table. He turned and saw their eyes fixed on Esmeralda's shoe and the long strand of wet toilet paper that was attached to the sole.

  He gripped her upper arm, squeezing hard, and stepped with one foot on the toilet paper and tried to push her free of it. Instead, he only shredded the paper and matted it on his loafer. His rage boiled into his face and he stooped and tore Esmeralda's shoe off her foot and flung it under a table, then pulled her out the front door.

  "All you had to do was just eat dinner. It was that simple. You people are a walking ad for the Ku Klux Klan. Stop making that sound," he said, while she rested her forehead against one of the white columns on the porch and hid her face in her hands.

  14

  I knew it was wrong.

  In the same way a reformed drunkard places himself on an innocuous mission to a saloon or an unrewarded hunter at twilight fires a round through the window of a deserted stone house and turns his back on the crashing sounds inside.

  Peggy Jean said the picnic at the cottage on the Comal River was for children from an orphans home, that Pete would probably love shooting the rapids with the others in an inner tube.

  She wasn't wrong about that part. As soon as I parked the Avalon among a stand of pine trees above the river, he wrestled his inner tube from the car trunk and ran down a clay path between boulders to a sandy beach that paralleled a long, undulating riffle created by a wood dam built halfway across the current. His ribs and the bones in his back were as taut as sticks against his skin.

  Through the trees I saw him wade into the thick green coldness of the water.

  "Don't worry about him. I hired two lifeguards to watch after them," Peggy Jean said.

  She stood next to the cottage in a flagstone, trellised arbor overgrown with climbing roses. The cottage was the color of chalk against the trees, the windows hung with ventilated blue shutters, the wind chimes on the porch twirling in the breeze. She flipped a checkered tablecloth over a plank table and began setting it with plastic forks and spoons and cups that were painted with the pink faces of smiling pigs. She had flown in from Padre Island that morning, and there was fresh sunburn on her forehead and neck.

  "We can't stay too long. His mom wants him back by dark," I said.

  "Did you bring your trunks?" she asked.

  "Sure."

  "I'm going to take a swim. You can change inside. I'll use the bathhouse in back," she said. She watched my face. "Is something wrong?"

  "No."

  "You don't feel you should be here?"

  "I don't study a lot on right and wrong these days," I said.

  She fixed a strand of hair on her forehead. "Ernest Hemingway said if you feel bad about something the next morning, it's wrong and you should avoid doing it again. If you don't feel bad about it, you should take joy in the memory."

  When I didn't reply, she turned and walked to the small bathhouse in back with a rolled towel under her arm. She'd had her hair cut and it was thick and burnished with gold light on the back of her neck. The sun went behind a bank of rain clouds and suddenly the wind seemed cold and tannic through the pines. I looked at the firmness of her calves and the way her hips moved under her dress. An old iron water pump by the bathhouse was beaded with moisture that dripped off the pump handle into the dirt. I remained staring at the bathhouse door after she had closed it, my mouth dry, my face moist in the wind as though I had a fever.

  I changed inside the cottage. Moments later she came back out of the bathhouse in straw sandals and a one-piece dark blue bathing suit.

  "You still have your shirt on," she said.

  "It's turned right cool," I replied.

  "I'll fix you a drink."

  "You know me. I'm still nine-tenths Baptist."

  "Oh stop it," she said, and circled my wrist with her forefinger and thumb and tugged me gently inside the back door of the cottage.

  She fixed two vodka collins at the bar that divided the kitchen and the living room. The door to the bedroom was open, and the bed was made up with a tight white bedspread and fat, frilled pillows and a folded navy-blue blanket at the bed's foot. She put the collins glass in my palm, then drank from hers, her face only inches from mine.

  "I never thought you were much of a drinker," I said.

  "With time, you learn to do all kinds of things," she replied. Her breath smelled like ice and mint leaves and was warm against my skin at the same time. "Do you want to sit outside?"

  I didn't answer. Her hand lay on top of the bar and the ends of her fingers touched mine. She moved her fingers on top of my hand, then set down her glass and tilted her face up and held her eyes on mine. I kissed her on the mouth, then felt her body press against me, her weight rise on one foot, the muscles of her back flex under my hands.

  Her hair smelled like salt wind and sunlight and I could feel her breath like a feather against my neck. Through the half-opened bedroom door the taut whiteness of the bedspread and the bloom of pillows at the headboard seemed the most lovely rectangle of light and symmetry and comfort in the world. She rubbed the top of her head against my mouth and pressed her stomach tightly against me, one hand slipping down the small of my back. In my mind's eye I felt already drawn inside the cradle of her thighs, inside the absolute glory and heat of her body, her mouth a throaty whisper against my ear.

  Then I looked through the window and saw L.Q. Navarro in the front yard, leaning against a pine trunk, his arms folded, one boot cocked toe-down across the other, his face obscured by his hat.

  " What the hell you doin', son?" his voice said.

  I felt myself step away from Peggy Jean and the fullness of her breasts and the mystery of her eyes.

  "Why are you staring out the window?" she asked.

  "Because there's no sound," I replied.

  "There's no-" she began.

  "The children were yelling in the rapids. Now it's quiet. Why did they stop yelling?" I said.

  "What's the matter with you, Billy Bob? Sometimes you act like you're crazy," she said.

  But I wasn't listening now. I went into the front yard, into the wind that was colder than it should have been, into a smell that was like autumn woods and pine needles in shadow and the gases from dead flowers. From the edge of the promontory I
could see the thick green surface of the river, the current bunching at the rapids, the braided foam that twisted and swelled in a long riffle over gray boulders, the evening shadows that seemed to transfix the bottom of the ravine with silence.

  The two hired lifeguards, their torsos swollen with the contours of weight lifters, stood on the bank, surrounded by children, scanning the water in both directions. One lifeguard began pushing nervously at his forehead with his fingers; the other walked up and down the bank, questioning the children, his face reddening with exasperation, as though they were deliberately denying him the solution to his problem.

  Then I saw Pete through the pines on the slope, forty yards down from the rapids, struggling in a whirlpool that had formed on the lee side of a huge boulder. His inner tube was on the outside of the vortex, only three or four feet from his grasp, but it might as well have been an ocean away.

  He flailed at the water, kicking hard for the bank, then his thin shoulders spun in the center of the whirlpool and he went under.

  I skidded barefoot down the slope over rocks and exposed tree roots and crashed through a nest of blackberry bushes onto the beach. On the far side of the stream I could see his face just under the surface, his eyes squinted shut, his hair floating from his scalp, his mouth pinched tight against the breath he wanted to draw from the water. I ran across a flat rock and dove headlong into the current, felt the cold strike like an anvil against the bone, then took two hard strokes and went under and grabbed him around the waist and brought him to the surface with me, throwing him as far as I could toward the bank.

  Then my feet touched the soap-rock bottom and I gathered Pete in my arms and lifted him against my chest and waded onto gravel and sand and the tall clumps of grass growing along the bank.

  I lay him down and stroked his head and rubbed his back and felt the warmth of his breath against my skin.

  His face was white from exhaustion, beaded with water, when he looked up at me.

  "I knew you was coming," he said.

  "Almost didn't make it, bud," I replied.

  "Cain't fool me, Billy Bob. I wasn't never afraid," he said.

  I gathered him up on my shoulder and climbed up the path to the top of the promontory. Peggy Jean stood openmouthed in the front yard of the cottage, her skin prickled in the wind.

  "The lifeguards were supposed to be watching. I gave them the exact number of children who'd be here. They could have no doubt about that," she said.

  "I'll get my things out of the cottage," I said.

  "I paid them to watch every one of those children, Billy Bob."

  "I know. The problem's not yours."

  "Then get that expression off your face."

  I went inside with Pete still on my shoulder, then came back out with my clothes and boots bunched under my left arm.

  "Ernest Hemingway is my favorite writer. I admired his great courage. But in the end he blew his head off with a shotgun. Goodbye, Peggy Jean," I said.

  Kyle Rose had a problem. All his life he had loved uniforms-the National Guard fatigues he wore to monthly meetings, the pressed, deputy sheriffs greenish-brown short-sleeve shirts and lead-striped trousers that looked like Marine Corps tropicals, even the bleached-white straw hat and shades and starched khaki pants he wore when he had been a migrant crew leader supervising stoop labor in bean fields.

  The buzzed haircut, the flex of cartilage in the jaw, the eyes that could make county inmates and street people look at their shoes, this was only part of the appearance he cultivated, that told people who and what he was. You also had to be squared away, booted and hatted, the tendons in your body forming a geometrically perfect network of power inside a tight-fitting uniform. The opaqueness of your face and the tight seam of your mouth had to make them swallow.

  But all of it had failed him, and he didn't know why or how to explain his feelings to anyone else.

  Jessie Stump and Skyler Doolittle were out on the ground, somewhere in the hills across the river from where they had broken out of the jail bus. But why should that bother him? Stump was white trash and a crankhead; electroshock had turned his brains into scorched grits. Doolittle was a killer of children, a deformed pervert who looked like a dildo and belonged inside a circus wagon. Kyle Rose had pulled blacks by their hair out of Nigger Town clubs while their friends did nothing. Once he climbed a water tower and clubbed a sniper unconscious with the butt of his shotgun. A mainline recidivist who had been brought in from Huntsville as a witness in a trial threw his food tray against the drunk tank wall and sent the trusties scurrying down the corridor. Kyle Rose made him clean it up with his shirt, then crawl under the deadline that was painted on the cement floor.

  Why did the thought of Skyler Doolittle and Jessie Stump out on the ground make words stick in his throat and cause him to unconsciously wipe his palms on his trousers?

  Because they were not afraid of him. Stump was too crazy and Doolittle… Kyle Rose couldn't describe what it was that made Doolittle different. It wasn't just the fused neck. Doolittle's eyes seemed to accept pain as though that were the only condition he had ever known, like a naked man who has spent a lifetime on a trail that wanders endlessly through thornbushes. There was no handle on a man like that.

  Kyle Rose bought a second handgun, a. 25-caliber hideaway that strapped comfortably on the ankle. But a wire was trembling inside him, and neither the hideaway nor the shots of tequila he drank at lunch nor his belligerent rhetoric in the deputies' bullpen gave him relief.

  "I think we ought to scour them cliffs above the river," he said to Hugo Roberts.

  "What for? They ain't hurt the guards on the bus. I don't see no great danger out there," Hugo said. He sat in the gloom behind his desk, the smoke from his cupped cigarette climbing into his face.

  "They're escaped prisoners. That's what for. One ought to be gelded, the other un stuffed back in his mother's womb," Kyle said.

  Hugo propped his elbows on the desk blotter and puffed on his cigarette and breathed the smoke out on his hands. He looked disinterestedly out the window.

  "Provided they ain't already in Mexico, they'll come out when they're hungry. In the meantime, find yourself a woman, Kyle. Or take up paddleball. Why'd you stoke up them boys with a stun gun, anyway? All we need is the Justice Department sending undercover agents in here again," Hugo said.

  Kyle Rose walked out of the sandstone blockhouse and slammed the door behind him with his foot. Hugo's other deputies kept their eyes fixed in a neutral space, the refrigerated odor of smoke and testosterone and expectorated Red Man wrapped on their bodies like cellophane on produce.

  "We got to start using civil service exams, establish better screening. I think the boy's got a serious nervous disorder. I do," Hugo said. He puffed on his cigarette, breathing the smoke philosophically over his hands.

  Kyle Rose took three days off without pay and went to the trailer he owned on the river. The lawn was neat, nubbed down by goats, the pine trees widely spaced so Kyle had full view of all his surroundings. But he took no chances. The first night there he ran trip wire strung with tin cans around the tree trunks in the yard and loaded his scoped deer rifle and leaned it inside the front door. Then he sat in a deck chair on the screen porch with a cold bottle of Carta Blanca and watched the boat lights on the river, the fire in his neighbor's barbecue pit flaring under a piece of meat, the evening star rising above the hills into a mauve-colored sky.

  He slept late and rose refreshed and had coffee with his neighbor, a retired enlisted man, then split firewood on a stump by the river's edge even though he would not need it until the fall.

  It was amazing what a good night's sleep could do. His worries about Skyler Doolittle and Jessie Stump now seemed childish and inconsequential. Besides, they had invited whatever troubles befell them. Sometimes you had to shave the dice a Utile bit or nobody went down. That's what Hugo said. Skyler Doolittle had killed children while DWI, then had been picked up next to a school yard. How many free passes do
es a guy like that get? So they put some child porn in his room. Big deal. Rather that than this guy wipe out another busload of kids. Right?

  Stump was another one who should have been fed into a tree shredder. The whole family had lived on a muddy, brush-tangled oxbow of the river for generations, inbreeding, shining deer, tapping into the county power line, stringing forest fires when the lumber mill wouldn't hire them, shooting holes in a Job Corps water tower.

  No, a tree shredder wouldn't do it, Kyle thought. It would take napalm. Bring in fighter jets and nape the entire sinkhole, sterilize the earth they had walked on so the virus couldn't infect the gene pool worse than it already had.

  In fact, as the day wore on, Kyle wished Doolittle or Stump would have a go at him. They all made noise about getting even once they were on the street. How they'd like to eat a toppling soft-nosed round from his scoped deer rifle? Whap. Just like blowing the back out of a watermelon.

  That evening he went outside with his bow and quiver of arrows and pinned a fresh paper target on the hay bales he had stacked against his toolshed. The paper was shiny and soft, like oilcloth, when Kyle rolled it out and flattened it against the bale, and the image of the white-tailed deer seemed to shimmer with life in the fading light. From thirty-five yards Kyle drove a half dozen arrows into the deer's neck and sides, the fletched shafts quivering solidly upon impact.

  It was a beautiful evening. The sky was purple above the hills, and the shadows seemed to drape the trees with a mosslike softness, like fir trees in a rain forest. He took a bottle of tequila out of an ice bucket on his shooting table and drank two fingers neat from a shot glass and chased it with Carta Blanca. This was the good life. It might even get a lot better after Hugo Roberts destroyed his remaining lung with cigarettes. Who was a better candidate for Hugo's replacement than Kyle Rose?

  He lay his bow on the shooting table and walked to the perforated paper target and began pulling the arrow shafts from the bales of hay. Rain was moving out of the south, dimming the fields in the distance, clicking now on the asphalt county road at the foot of his property. The air was dense and cool, like air from a cave, and the pine trees shook in the wind and scattered pine needles across the top of Kyle's trailer. For just a moment he thought he heard a tin can tinkle on a wire.