Heartwood bbh-2

by James Lee Burke

  "Thinks?"

  "This ex-con, Johnny Krause, the guy who got Cholo into the ring? He loaded up a vice snitch with angle iron and put him in the San Jacinto River for Sammy Mace."

  Ronnie pulled on an earlobe, then picked up a soft cloth off a workbench under the carport and rubbed it on the hood of his T-Bird.

  "Sammy Mace's dead. He got blown away by a cop a year or so back," he said.

  "I think Johnny Krause found a new employer. I'd like to ask him that, but nobody can find him. You have the same information on Earl Deitrich that Cholo did. Where's that leave you, Ronnie? You want Johnny Krause looking you up?"

  He held up one palm and ticked at a callus with his thumb, staring at it as though it held special meaning for him. He hooked his thumbs inside the pockets of his jeans and looked at a spot six inches to the right of my head and sucked in his cheeks, then cleared his throat before he spoke.

  "Your boy, the one sleeping with Esmeralda? He don't run scared. But you think I do. Is it 'cause I'm Mexican and you think I'm dumb or 'cause I got a sheet and I ain't as good as other people and you can work my stick? I think you better go, Mr. Holland. I don't want you coming around my mother's house no more."

  Later that afternoon I looked out my back porch and saw Pete sitting on the top rail of Beau's fence. I picked up a glass of iced tea and took a can of Pepsi from the icebox and walked out to the lot. The breeze smelled of rain out in the hills and the windmill had turned north, its blades ginning furiously.

  "What you doing out here by yourself, bud?" I asked.

  "You said we was gonna look for arrowheads." He ignored the can of Pepsi I balanced on the rail.

  "Sorry, I forgot. Let's hitch the trailer on the truck and get Beau in."

  But his face remained preoccupied. He kept squeezing a half dollar in his palm and looking at the red lines it made in his skin.

  "I seen Ms. Deitrich in town," he said.

  "Oh yeah, Ms. Deitrich."

  "She was coming out of the grocery. She had two big sacks in her arms. One was fixing to split. I tried to take it from her before the milk bottle broke on the cement."

  He stopped and watched Beau walking from the pasture toward the lot.

  "Go on," I said.

  "She said I was gonna make her drop it. She said, 'You're in the way. Take your hands off the bag.'"

  "She didn't mean anything by it."

  "You weren't there. She was mad. The bag split all over her hood. She said, 'See what you made me do?'"

  "I guess she was having a bad day, Pete."

  "After she got her stuff in the car, she dug a half dollar out of her purse and said, 'Go buy yourself some ice cream or something. Go on, now. Next time just let big people work out their problems. You're a little too nosy sometimes.'"

  He climbed down from the fence and looked at the late sun as though it contained an insult.

  "I don't want her durn money. I stopped to hep 'cause she was having trouble," he said.

  "I don't see her, Pete, so I don't know what to tell you."

  He ringed the edge of the half dollar with his index finger and flung it toward the tank. He watched it arch out of the light into the grass. His face was hot and dusty and there were moist lines that had dried on his cheeks.

  "Where you goin'?" I said.

  "Home."

  "Beau's going to be disappointed if we don't take him out."

  "How come she acted like that? I thought she was nice. She ain't no different from the people my mother hangs with up at the beer joint. They're nice long as somebody is watching them."

  The answer to his question was not one I wanted to think about.

  It was almost sunset when Pete and I rode up a creek-bed between two steep-sided hills that were deep in shadow and moist with springs that leached out of the rocks. Beau's hooves scraped on the flat plates of stone along the creekbank and I could feel Pete's weight swaying back and forth behind the saddle.

  "You don't think these was Apaches living along here?" he said.

  "Too far east," I replied.

  "Maybe they was Comanches."

  "Too far south."

  "Then what was they?"

  "Probably Tonkawas."

  "The ones that let the Texans run them up into Oklahoma?"

  "That's the bunch."

  "They don't sound too interesting," he said.

  We got down from Beau and I unhooked the strap of my rucksack from his pommel and we walked through heavy brush to a faint trail that angled up the hillside through pine trees and soft ground that was green from the moisture in the drainage. Scrub brush and redbud trees grew close into the cliff wall, and if you looked carefully you could see a ragged opening behind the foliage.

  "I heard some people in town say Wilbur Pickett's wife is crazy," he said.

  "You believe that?" I asked.

  "No. I feel sorry for her."

  "Because she's blind?"

  "No. 'Cause they're scared of her. Scared people hurt you."

  "You're a smart kid, Pete."

  "I wish we could stay up here all the time. It's a perfect place. There ain't nobody around but just us."

  The trail leveled out on a bench and we walked between the scrub brush and the cliff wall to an opening in the rock, close to the ground, no more than three feet in diameter, that looked like it had been gouged out of prehistoric clay by a huge thumb. It was black inside and we could feel the coolness of the air puffing against our faces and smell the wetness of the stone and the odor of field mice that nested on the ledges where the cave's ceiling rose much higher than the entrance.

  The sun's last rays were pink on the crests of the ravine and I could hear Beau blowing down below. I untied the rucksack and opened my pocketknife and began slicing a red onion and a roll of salami and a loaf of French bread on a rock. Pete pulled my flashlight out of the sack and played with the switch, clicking it off and on, then squatted down and shined the beam back into the cave.

  "Somebody's living here, Billy Bob," he said.

  I stooped down beside him and looked through the entrance. Vinyl garbage bags had been split open and spread on the silt floor of the cave and a large sheet of canvas flattened on top of them in what looked like a sleeping area. A firepit had been dug close to the entrance, and smoke had blackened one wall and part of the overhang. Venison bones protruded like teeth from the ash in the center of the pit and there was a glycerin shine from meat drippings on the firestones.

  Cans of Spam and sardines and Vienna sausage and boxes of cookies and crackers were stacked along a board shelf someone had wedged into the wall. A shiny gallon molasses can filled with water was covered with a piece of cheesecloth to keep out dust. Two sleeping bags were rolled and snugged tightly with clothesline cord, as though the owners lived in preparation for leaving hurriedly. Propped upside down with sticks against the wall was a pair of scuffed work shoes with leather strings and hook eyelets at the top of the tongues.

  "You reckon it's some bums come up from the train track?" Pete asked.

  I picked up one of the work shoes and turned it over in my hands. "That's jailhouse-issue, Pete. Let's leave this be."

  "You mean these guys might be escaped convicts?"

  "Could be."

  "We gonna call the sheriff's department?"

  "I don't figure it's our business."

  "They're in our cave. They're messing it up. They probably go to the bathroom anyplace they feel like. I bet they got B.O."

  "Pete?"

  "What?"

  "Don't say any more. Let's get Beau and leave quietly. Forget what we saw here."

  He looked at me quizzically, one eye squinted partly shut.

  We rode Beau up the ravine, out of the shadows into the sun's last yellow glow against the sky. Then we crossed a glade full of wildflowers and looked out on the valley owned by Peggy Jean and Earl Deitrich and, directly down below, their white home couched like a giant gold-streaked molar in the hillside.

  I
heard the sound of an engine grinding down a two-track road from the pines above us. Then I saw the black roll-bar Jeep turn out of the road and head toward us through the glade, the grass and wildflowers pressing flat into the soil under the Jeep's cleated tires.

  Four young men sat in the Jeep, wearing shades and T-shirts and camouflage pants, their arms and foreheads red with fresh sunburn, bolt-action scoped rifles propped next to them. I felt Pete's hands tighten involuntarily on my waist.

  The driver, Jeff Deitrich, pulled the Jeep in front of us and put the transmission in neutral. He grinned lazily at me, his eyes hidden by his shades.

  "How you doin', Billy Bob?" he said.

  "Not bad. Y'all aren't hunting out of season, are you?" I said, smiling back at him.

  "The cops haven't been able to find your friend Doolittle. We thought we'd help out," he said.

  "Let's see if I have your friends' names right. You're Hammie, you're Warren, and you're Chug," I said, moving my finger from one to the next.

  "Pretty good," Jeff said. "What are you doing on our property, Billy Bob?"

  "This isn't yours. The state has an easement through here."

  "Don't argue with a lawyer," he said.

  "Skyler Doolittle is for the most part a harmless man," I said.

  "He's gonna be a lot more harmless if we find him," Chug said. He drank out of a quart bottle of milk, his face round and flushed with heat, his throat working steadily.

  I flipped the ends of Beau's reins idly on the back of my wrist.

  "Jessie is another matter, though. He's half white trash and half Comanche Indian. He'll tie you down in your bed and put a sock in your mouth and skin you like a deer. Ask the sheriff, Chug," I said.

  The three passengers in the Jeep looked at one another. The one named Warren stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth, then pulled it out and rolled the barrel of the cigarette back and forth between his fingers.

  "The people at the state mental hospital thought they'd blow out his aggressions with electroshock. He bit through the rubber gag, then got a hand free and chewed a technician's finger off," I said.

  "My uncle used to hire Jessie Stump to clean gum off the seats at the Rialto. He got stuck in the chimney when he tried to rob the hardware store. The county jail in Llano wouldn't take him because he's not toilet trained. Good try, counselor," Jeff said, and laughed, then drove back on the two-track road. But his passengers were silent, their expressions dull with either fatigue or reconsideration about the wisdom of hunting Jessie Stump.

  The wind dented the grass and flowers in the glade and a drop of rain stung me in the eye like a BB.

  "The guys they're looking for are living in our cave, ain't they?" Pete said.

  "That'd be my guess."

  "Are those stories true about Jessie Stump?"

  I wet my lips. "I kind of made those up," I said.

  "I don't like to hear about stuff like that, Billy Bob. I don't want to come up here for a while. Don't lie to me about Jessie Stump, neither. It means you don't respect me."

  I turned around in the saddle and looked at him. But his eyes stared at the ground as it moved past us, as though our shadows knew each other in ways we did not. He removed his hands from my waist and rested them on the can tie.

  22

  I went to Marvin Pomroy's house early the next morning, before he left for work, and found him out on the patio behind his white gingerbread house, his newspaper propped against a glass of orange juice, a piece of toast held in his fingers while he read the box scores on the sports page.

  His backyard was spacious and filled with trees and flowering bushes, and blue jays and mockingbirds flew in and out of the sunlight. His wife waved at me from the French doors that gave onto the dining room and held up a cup of coffee with a question in her face.

  "No thanks, Gretchen," I said, and sat down at Marvin's table without being asked.

  "Can't it wait till I get to the office?" he said.

  "Did you talk to the pathologist in San Antone?"

  "Yeah, I did. He said Cholo Ramirez was sniffing model airplane glue before he died. There was a sock loaded with it on the seat beside him."

  "That's not what killed him."

  "Maybe not. But the pathologist isn't sure what did. Boxing gloves with poison on them? Sounds like Elizabethan theater."

  "Wake up, Marvin. Earl Deitrich is treating you like a bought-and-paid-for stooge."

  He folded up his newspaper and set it to the side of his plate. His shirt looked as smooth and white as new porcelain.

  "As a public official I have to accept all kinds of abuse at the courthouse. That doesn't apply in my home," he said.

  "That Mexican kid had a chemical time bomb put in his head."

  "Not in this county he didn't."

  "There's nothing like seeing cartography used to compartmentalize evil," I said.

  Marvin rose from his chair and picked up his newspaper and glass of orange juice and went inside the house and closed the French doors gingerly with one foot.

  The next day was Saturday. Lucas Smothers woke before dawn and drank coffee on the back steps of his rented house and watched the sun break across the fields and light on the trailer where Esmeralda Ramirez was still living. She had hand-washed her undergarments the night before and hung them on the clothesline in back, and now they moved in the breeze and he felt vaguely ashamed when he realized he was looking at them.

  He had convinced himself he had no romantic interest in her, that he could no more ask her to leave than he could refuse to help an injured person on the highway. But when she had cleaned his house for him and hung curtains in his windows, he'd found himself following her from room to room, telling her about the bands he had played in, listening to her talk about her classes at the Juco, all the time watching her eyes and her mouth, embarrassed at the level of arousal they caused in him.

  He wanted an excuse to touch her. She tied her hair up on her head while she worked, and when she stood on a chair and lifted a curtain into place, her back looked strong and muscular, her exposed hips tapering outward just below her belt line, the backs of her thighs hard, as though she were wearing heels. When the chair legs wobbled, he started to grip her waist, but she steadied herself against the wall with one hand and said, "Don't worry. I'm not going to fall."

  When Cholo died, Lucas thought Esmeralda would turn to him. But she didn't. She returned from the funeral dry-eyed and withdrawn, like a person who has been in a subfreezing wind and sits alone by a stove with the memory of cold burned deep into the face. That evening he tapped on her screen, and when she appeared in the doorway, the overhead light breaking over her shoulders and reddish-brown hair like gold needles, he said, "If you ain't eat yet, I'm fixing to put some food out on the table. Or I can bring some over. I mean, if you're hungry. Or maybe you just want to take a walk or something." Then he took a breath and said, "I ain't good at words. I'm sorry about your brother."

  "That's nice of you, Lucas. But I have to go to work," she replied.

  "Work? That tub of guts at the Dog 'n' Shake is making you come in the same day your brother was buried?"

  "I'll see you later, Lucas," she said, and eased the inside door closed in his face.

  She didn't even ask him for a ride. Instead, she put on her pink uniform and waited out on the road for the county bus to pick her up and carry her out to the small drive-in not far from the Post Oaks Country Club.

  Now he sat on his back steps in the early morning coolness, looking at her undergarments on the clothesline, wondering if he was prurient or simply a fool. No sound at all came from inside the trailer. The sun rose above the house in a red ball and he flung the coffee from his cup into the dust and laced on his steel-toed boots and drove his pickup truck out to the drilling rig where he had an eight-hour one-hundred-degree shift waiting for him on the derrick floor.

  That evening, when she got off from work at the Dog 'n' Shake, Ronnie Cruise was waiting for her in the parking lot. He
was dressed in slacks, polished loafers, and a new sports shirt, clothes he normally didn't wear, and his hair had been freshly barbered and his jaws glowed with aftershave lotion.

  He leaned down in the T-Bird's passenger window so she could see his face.

  "I'll take you home, Essie," he said.

  "I have a bus pass," she replied.

  His car was parked in the shadow of an oak tree, and the engine ticked with road heat.

  "Come on, you been on your feet all day," he said.

  "Thanks, anyway, Ronnie. Really."

  She walked out to the edge of the road and stood where the bus would stop. She twisted her mouth into a button and stared at the entrance to the country club and the fairways along the river and the sun that had descended into a red cloud of dust and rain blowing on the horizon.

  Ronnie sat behind the steering wheel of his car, his head on his hands. He started the engine and drove in circles around the Dog 'n' Shake, his tires squealing softly on the pavement, while children eating at the outdoor tables watched him with wide grins on their faces.

  The bus stopped for Esmeralda, then the doors closed with a rush of air and the bus heaved out into the road again with Ronnie's T-Bird behind it. Esmeralda sat behind the driver's seat and tried to ignore Ronnie's behavior, but when she glanced into the wide-angle mirror on the driver's window she saw three cars come out of the country club driveway and fall into line behind Ronnie's.

  She walked to the back of the bus and looked out the rear window. Ronnie grinned up at her through his windshield, giving her the thumbs-up sign, like an idiot, oblivious to the automobiles behind him.

  Who was driving the car immediately behind Ronnie's? she asked herself. It was one of Jeffs friends, what's his name, the one she disliked even more so than the others. He was big all over, layered with beer fat, his neck as thick as a pig's. He was like most fat men she had known-he affected humor and detachment from the world, but he used his irreverence to hide his cruelty, his vulgarity to disguise his fear and hatred of women.

  Esmeralda waved her hand back and forth at Ronnie and pointed at the cars behind him. But he continued to grin mindlessly at her, pushing in his clutch and gunning his engine so his Hollywood mufflers rumbled off the asphalt.