Heartwood (7 page)

“You already paid, Ms. Deitrich?” the clerk said, looking at the credit card in her hand.

“No, I’m sorry. I’ll go inside and take care of it,” she replied.

“Let me have your card and I’ll bring the charge slip out here for you to sign. It ain’t no trouble at all,” the clerk said, and took the card from between her fingers before she could reply.

Peggy Jean looked away awkwardly at the loading platform. Her skin high up on one cheekbone was heavily made up with rouge and powder.

“Everything okay, Peggy Jean?” I said.

“Oh yes, just one of those days,” she said, then smiled, like an afterthought. “It’s so windy out here today.” She took a bandanna from her back pocket and tied it around her hair, knotting it under her chin.

“It’s too bad about the accountant, that fellow named Greenbaum. He seemed like a nice man,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“He’s dead. He was jumped by some gangbangers at Herman Park in Houston.”

“Max? When?”

“I’m sorry. I thought y’all knew.”

“No … I heard nothing … You’re talking about Max Greenbaum?”

She seemed to look about her, as though the answer to her confusion were inside the wind.

I stepped closer to her, my fingers touching her elbows.

“I’ll drive you home,” I said.

“No … Absolutely not … Billy Bob, please, just …”

She walked away from me and stood in the shade by the driver’s door of her pickup, her arms folded in front of her, as though she were creating a sanctuary that I couldn’t enter. The clerk came out of the store with her
credit card and charge slip attached to a clipboard. Then he saw her expression and his face turned inward and he lowered his eyes.

“If you’ll just sign this, ma’am, I’ll take care of everything and you can be on your way,” he said.

“Peggy Jean—” I began.

“I’m sorry for my lack of composure.
Max?
No, there’s a mistake about this,” she said, and got in her truck and scoured a cloud of pink dust out of the parking lot.

I sat in the half-light of my office and drank a cup of coffee. On the wall, encased in glass on a field of blue felt, were the .36-caliber Navy Colt revolvers and octagon-barrel lever-action ’73 Winchester rifle that had been carried by my great-grandpa Sam Morgan Holland when he was a drover on the Chisholm Trail. In his life he had also been in the Fourth Texas at Little Round Top, a violent drunkard who shot five or six men in gun duels, and finally a saddle preacher who took his ministry into the godless moonscape west of the Pecos.

The bluing on Sam’s weapons had long ago been rubbed off by holster wear, and the steel now had the dull hue of an old nickel. In Sam’s diary he described his encounters with John Wesley Hardin, Wild Bill Longley, and the Dalton-Doolin gang, all of whom he loathed as either psychopaths or white trash. But in his account of their depredations there is never an indication that the worst of them ever struck a woman.

In the historical South the physical abuse of a woman by a man was on a level with sodomy of animals. Such a man was considered a moral and physical coward and was merely horsewhipped if he was lucky.

But today a woman who did not flee the batterer or
seek legal redress was usually consigned to her fate, even considered deserving of it.

I wondered what Great-Grandpa Sam would do in my situation.

I set my empty coffee cup in my saucer, opened my Rolodex to the “D” section, and punched a number into my telephone.

“Earl?” I said.

“Yes?”

“Who hit your wife?”

“What?”

“You heard me. On the right side of her face.”

“You’ve got some damn nerve.”

“So it was you?”

“You keep your carping, self-righteous mouth off my family.”

“Touch her again and I’ll catch you out in public. Everything you own or you can buy won’t help you.”

He slammed down the phone. I sat for a long time in the pale light glowing through the blinds, the fingers of my right hand curling into the oil and moisture on my palm.

That evening a lacquered red biplane dropped out of an absolutely blue sky, circled once over the river, and landed in the pasture beyond the tank. I got into the Avalon and drove past the chicken run and barn and windmill and out through the tall grass that grew at the foot of the levee. When I came around the willows at the far end of the tank I saw the man named Bubba Grimes, who had claimed that Wilbur Pickett had tried to sell him bearer bonds; he was leaning against the fuselage of his plane, pouring from a dark bottle of Cold Duck into a paper cup.

“You tend to show up in a peculiar fashion, Mr. Grimes,” I said, getting out of the Avalon.

He set down the bottle on the bottom wing of his plane and grinned at the corner of his mouth. His drooping left eye looked like gray rubber that had melted and cooled again.

“Got an offer for you. Wilbur Pickett is about to have some bad luck. Price is right, I can change all that,” he said.

“Wilbur’s a poor man, Mr. Grimes. That means I’d have to give you money out of my own pocket. Now, why would I want to do that?”

“To bring down Earl Deitrich. The word is you topped his wife.”

“I think it’s time for you to get back in your plane.”

He drank his paper cup empty and tossed it in the weeds. “The man’s weakness is gambling. You want my hep, here’s my number. The two of us can mess him up proper,” he said, and shoved a penciled piece of notepad paper in my shirt pocket with two fingers.

“Get off my property,” I said.

He cut his head. “I cain’t blame you for not wanting to know your own mind. That woman’s special. She’s got a fragrance like roses. In Africa once, she’d been out working in the heat and she come in the tent, and the smell was like warm roses. It’s too bad rich men always get the pick of the brooder house.”

In the red light his face was filled with a glow that was both saccharine and lustful. When he took off, he raised his bottle in salute; his plane clipped the top of a willow tree and scattered leaves behind him like green bird feathers.

•   •   •

Five days later Lucas Smothers came to my office and sat in the swayback deerhide chair in the corner and took off his hat and gazed out the window. He had been working in the fields with his stepfather, and I could smell an odor like grass and milk in his clothes. He had his mother’s blue eyes, and the light seemed to enter and hold inside them as it would inside tinted crystal. His expression was deliberately innocuous, as it always was when he felt caught between his need to instruct and caution me and at the same time protect me from the knowledge of what his generation, with its rapacious addictions, was really like.

“A guy who runs around with Jeff? He told me this crazy story about him, about how Jeff ain’t always in control like he pretends. It’s a little off the wall, though,” he said.

“I’ll try to handle it,” I said.

“That Mexican girl who got busted out on the highway, Esmeralda? It was Jeff called the cops on her. His friend says Jeff did a one-nighter with her. Except she won’t go away and the truth is Jeff don’t want her to, no matter what he tells himself and everybody else.”

I had to be in court in twenty minutes and I tried not to let my attention wander or my eyes drop to my wrist-watch.

“So a couple of nights ago Jeff drives his girlfriend, Rita Summers, down to this Mexican restaurant north of San Antone where Esmeralda works. Jeff’s gonna show Esmeralda there’s nothing between them and Rita is his reg’lar and he ain’t afraid to get it all out in the open, if that’s what it takes.

“All his buds are there, cranking down tequila sunrises and Carta Blanca, after they been smoking dope all the way from Deaf Smith. When Esmeralda walks by with a
tray, some guy goes, ‘I never thought I’d like to have sloppy seconds on a pepperbelly.’

“Jeff’s face looked like he’d eaten a tack. Rita Summers don’t say anything for a long time, then she calls Esmeralda over and goes, ‘Excuse me, but this food tastes like dog turds.’

“Esmeralda looks back at her real serious and says, ‘I know. That’s why I don’t eat here.’ ”

“Pretty funny story,” I said.

He sat forward in his chair and folded his hands between his knees, his eyes staring at a place on the rug.

“Jeff can be a rough guy. But getting it on with Ronnie Cross’s girl? Three white guys jumped Ronnie after a football game. He beat them up so bad one of them got down on his knees and begged,” he said.

“You worried about me?”

“Ronnie’s girl was in your office. You had a run-in with Cholo. Something real bad’s gonna come out of this. It’s like the feeling I had when I was a kid. I’d wake up in the morning and there was a sick feeling around my heart, like a hand was squeezing it.”

“These kids don’t have anything to do with my life, Lucas,” I said.

He looked out the window at the trees blowing in the wind, his skin puckered under one eye.

“Wilbur Pickett started all this. Now he’s dragging you into his bullshit,” he said. “You older people don’t have no idea what goes on in this town. Y’all ain’t never known.”

He stared down at the frayed bottoms of his jeans to hide the anger in his face.

That night it stormed and the house was cool and filled with wind and the smell of ozone. On nights like this I
used to hear the tinkle of L.Q. Navarro’s spurs, then he would be standing next to me in the library, the lightning flickering through the window on his grained skin and his lustrous black eyes.

L.Q. lived in my memory—in fact, was always present in some way in my life—but I didn’t feel guilt about his death any longer and I seldom saw him during my waking hours. I kept his custom-made, blue-black .45 revolver and his holster and cartridge belt in the top drawer of my desk, and sometimes I removed it from the leather and opened the loading gate and turned the cylinder one click at a time, peering through the whorls of light in each empty chamber, my palm wrapped around the yellowed ivory handles that seemed warm and sentient from his callused grip.

But L.Q. knew me better than I knew myself. On his visitations he would chide,
“Tell me it wasn’t fun busting caps on them Mexican dope mules.”

And when I thought too long about our nocturnal raids into Old Mexico, I became like the untreated drunkard who has renounced whiskey, until in his denunciation he unconsciously begins to rub his lips with the flats of his fingers.

And just as I always did when these moments occurred, I drove to the small stucco church in a rural working-class neighborhood where I went to Mass and lighted a candle for L.Q. Navarro, for whom I converted to Catholicism after his death, as though somehow I could extend his life by taking on his faith.

Then I went next door to a clapboard cafe that served buffalo burgers and blueberry milk shakes and sat by the screen window and watched the lightning flicker on the pines in front of the church and listened to the thunder roll harmlessly away into the hills.

Lucas Smothers had tried to warn me about the youth culture, if one could call it that, of south-central Texas.

Why should he even have felt the need?

The answer was that Lucas, like L.Q. Navarro, knew me better than I knew myself.

I should have been able to walk away from the complexities surrounding the defense of Wilbur Pickett.

But the problem was a fragrance of roses. Bubba Grimes, the pilot with the drooping left eye, had said it. When Peggy Jean perspired she smelled like warm roses. She smelled like roses and bruised grass in an oak grove and skin that’s sun-browned and cool and warm at the same time. All I had to do was close my eyes and I was back there in that heart-twisting moment with my face buried in her hair, unaware that she and I were creating a memory for which I would never find an adequate surrogate.

The next morning Hugo Roberts left a message on my office answering machine.

“We just made a second trip out to Wilbur Pickett’s place. Guess what? That poor li’l peckerwood had a couple of them bonds hid in the panel of his wife’s dresser. Thought I’d just keep you up to date. Have a good day.”

My son, Lucas, had told me that the older people of Deaf Smith had never known what really went on in our town. He was right. We talked about younger people as though they were no different from the generations of years past. Somehow the eye did not register the kids who were stoned by second period at the high school, the girls who had abortions, the kids infected with hepatitis and herpes and gonorrhea, or the ones who passed their backpacks through a window so they could get their guns past the school’s metal detectors.

A kid upon his knees in front of a toilet bowl, strings of blood hanging from his broken lips, the jean-clad legs of his tormentors surrounding him like bars, is a sad sight to witness. The fact that the teachers know better than to intervene is even sadder.

But if we saw younger people as they were, we’d have to examine ourselves as well. We’d have to ask ourselves
why we allowed people like Hugo Roberts to dwell in our midst.

By the time I had listened to his voice on the message machine and walked over to his office, he had another revelation to make. The only light in his blockhouse of an office came from the desk lamp; the upward glow from the shaded bulb made his face look like a wrinkled tan balloon floating in the gloom.

“We picked up that ole boy Skyler Doolittle. He says he’s your client,” he said.

“Not exactly. What’d he do?”

“Hanging around the playground at the elementary, trying to give them kids candy bars.”

“We have an ordinance about giving away candy bars?”

“You can be cute, Billy Bob. But I’ve dug children out of leaf piles and garbage dumps. Y’all do that in the Rangers?”

“I came over here for only one reason, Hugo. You planted those bonds in Wilbur Pickett’s house. You’ll wish you didn’t.”

He grinned and picked up a pen from his blotter and popped off the cap. He worked the head of the pen in and out of the cap.

“You seen that Mexican girl lately, what’s her name, Esmeralda something?” he said.

I walked across the lawn to the main courthouse, where Skyler Doolittle was sitting on a wood bench inside a holding cage between the jailer’s office and the back elevator. In his long-sleeve white shirt and wide red tie, his bald head and fused neck looked exactly like the domed top of a partially repainted fire hydrant.